Deep Research Theology 🧵
For each topic, a TL;DR summary and a link to the full document.
Not a substitute for your own research, but an interesting exercise nonetheless. (1) Christian denominations inquiry
chatgpt.com/s/dr_681ebf779…

In the first screenshot see an attempt (by a commenter) to define "white" genetically. In the second (done by me), see how an ancient CLV population (BPgroup) has many of its closest PCA relatives (based on population Fst) outside the reader's "white" triangle. 1/
In two other screenshots (by X users), see the never-ending debate (in online platforms, at least) whether Jews are white or not. The same West Eurasian PCA, different arbitrary definitions of "white" or "non-white" 2/

Here are some visualizations of Fst between key steppe populations involved in PIA/PIE origins and diverse present-day West Eurasians genotyped on the Human Origins array.

First, the BPgroup (the Lower Volga end of the CLV cline).

1/ Next the Maikop (the North Caucasus end of the CLV cline; the South Caucasus end at Aknashen in Armenia can't be plotted as it is a single individual).

2/

Our papers, out today in @nature, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/ "The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans" describes our solution: a Caucasus-Lower Volga homeland of Proto-Indo-Anatolian speakers and a North Pontic (or Dnipro-Don) homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans which we identify as the Yamnaya. 2/

nature.com/articles/s4158…

In our new preprint we propose that the likely route connecting Anatolian speakers with the Yamnaya (and thus with the speakers of Indo-European languages) is from the east. This thread summarizes different arguments for this hypothesis, as well as the alternative (from the west) This hypothesis agrees (partly) with both two hypotheses of the Southern Arc paper. Recall that Hypothesis A is a steppe origin with massive dilution and Hypothesis B is an eastern origin from the broad area denoted by the Proto-Indo-Anatolian circle of that paper.

There is much misunderstanding about Roman history and genetics, so the rather disdainful post below is a good opportunity to discuss the topic.
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https://twitter.com/Tom_Rowsell/status/1767140767334539427

The population of the Roman Republic was not simply "native Italians" but had already received migrants from the east -in accord with the writings of ancient Greek and Roman historians. This can be seen, e.g., in Fig. 3A,C below:

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Some thoughts on the recent controversy.
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science.org/content/articl… Any single figure visualization of global genetic diversity is likely to mislead. Below, I show a familiar V-shaped PCA I recently did, which shows a couple of ~31kya North Siberians (Sikora, Pitulko, et al. 2019) in the context of world genetic variation.

Our paper on ancient DNA from likely combatants from both the 480BC and 409BC Battles of Himera (and other ancients from Sicily) is now out (led by @AlMittnik)

pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… There are many interesting findings, but I will highlight a few:

First, many of the 5th c. BC Greek combatants were genetically very similar to Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks (a thousand years earlier).

It is a remarkable accident of history that Anatolian speakers lasted long enough to leave their writings in cuneiform and later alphabetic writing. If the Anatolian speakers had lived anywhere else we would have no clue they even existed as a sister group of IE The same for Tocharian speakers: they presumably lasted for >3000 years, long enough to record their languages, even briefly, in medieval times, before their languages went extinct. It's an accident of history that we have evidence for them at all.

The Southern Arc papers are now published in @ScienceMagazine

The study was originally conceived as the joint genetic history of the neighboring regions of West Asia and Southeastern Europe but there were just too many interesting findings to fit in one paper, so we have three! The central paper develops the joint analysis framework of the entire dataset, and focuses on the ~5000-1000 BCE period and our theory of a West Asian Indo-Anatolian homeland out of which came both Anatolian speakers and steppe Proto-Indo-Europeans

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@EranElhaik It is not very surprising that the placement of samples on the first two PCs depends on the set of samples used and that PCA allocates a PC e.g., to Chinese-European differentiation when one includes Chinese in this set and omits it otherwise. @EranElhaik The dependence of the placement of samples on PCA on the dataset used was dealt with in SI10 of my 2014 paper in which the reviewer questioned why our PCA did not match his expectation of "Map of Europe" and we showed how this changed when we included/not non-Europeans

210,000-year old modern human from the Apidima cave in the Peloponnese (Greece)

"These results suggest that two late Middle Pleistocene human groups were present at this site—an early Homo sapiens population, followed by a Neanderthal population."

nature.com/articles/s4158… The importance of this paper cannot be understated. Previously, it was thought that modern humans may have only made occasional forays Out-of-Africa in the >100,000 year time frame into the Levant, in sites such as Shkul/Qafzeh and as early as ~180,000 years ago in Misliya