since ppl keep asking me about mesolithic european foragers, ima do a tweet thread on it...i've followed this lit pretty closely, and also the pigmentation literature since the mid-2000s when it was pretty clear that it was gonna be one of the first successes of human genomics
the pic is my attempt to get kind of close. possibly browner. probably even more 'robust' featured. european hunter-gatherers they didn't eat gruel every day. their jaws were big due to intense mastication.

one of the features of farming societies is gracility.

over the last nearly 5 years of my substack i've written a lot about the eurasian steppe. the posts below... Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test razibkhan.com/p/genghis-khan… In 1697, Peter the Great became the first Tsar in a century to leave Russia. He traveled incognito to Western Europe to see how the more advanced continental nations ran their affairs. Since the Tsar was 6 foot 8 (over 2 meters), his identity was an open secret in the nations where he traveled. The “Grand Embassy,” as the mission was called, is more important as an historical marker than an actual fact-finding foray for the way it illustrates the new Tsar’s desire to reorient Russia towards the west. Thus began the centuries-long internal debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles about whether their nation should orient itself toward the West or continue to identify as the core of a separate civilization, the two wolves within the Russian soul that continue to grapple to this day.

For most, Peter the Great is an exemplar of the handful of famous Russian rulers who demanded that their subjects join the community of European nations, as opposed to viewing themselves as a civilization apart, liminal between the East and West. The Tsar reputedly even demanded that his nation’s cartographers include European Russia in any maps nominally of the European continent. But ‌in his own genealogy he exemplified the Russian people’s complex antecedents, and in particular its ruling class. As a Romanov, on his paternal line, Peter descended from conventional Russian nobility. But the Tsar’s mother, on the other hand, had a more exotic background; Natalya Naryshkina was from a family of nobles descended from a 15th-century Crimean Tatar named Mordko Kurbat Naryshko. His descendants, the House of Naryshkin, accepted Orthodox Christianity, and so were fully integrated into the Russian aristocracy. The old Western European quip that Russians were just Tatars if you scratched the surface was not entirely wrong about its ruling class, even for most Western-oriented members like Peter.

To begin to wrap your mind around Russia, it helps to go back to Kievan Rus, and Vladimir the Great’s 988 AD conversion to Christianity, which marked the heretofore backward and tribal peoples of Europe’s far eastern fringe’s entrée into civilization. Kievan Rus became Christian Europe’s bulwark against the various Turkic people menacing the continent, the last outpost of the civilization that saw itself as heir to Rome. But Peter’s Russia was not purely a product of Kievan Rus, whose rulers intermarried with the reigning dynasties of early medieval England, Norway and France.

But to really understand its history, culture and even its elite, recall that for centuries the Russian principalities were extensions of the empires of the steppe, subject to the powers that ruled the lands Westerners called Tatary. Though the term Tsar of all the Russians has Classical roots in the title Caesar, the Russian rulers only took up that mantle in 1547, centuries after the formative experience of the Grand Princes of Moscow, as vassals to rulers of the Golden Horde, the territory ruled by the descendents of Genghis Khan’s eldest son, Jochi. What the Russians term the “Tatar Yoke,” the period between the mid-13th and mid-15th centuries during which their rulers were subordinate to and paid tribute to Jochi’s descendants, transformed Russia from a state on Europe’s eastern edge, to a civilization intent on spanning Eurasia from the Baltic to Siberia.

more red = fewer cross-sex friendships
more blue = more cross-sex friendships the pattern in india, like elsewhere, can be explained by islam, but not totally. islam exacerbates the NW pattern, but the area across the border in india has very few muslims, but similar patriarchal punjabi and rajasthani cultures

the nytimes piece by @sapinker brings up a lot of good points. most academics are harvard are not ideologues; they didn't get to harvard that way

BUT, ~2020 happened. there was a broad agreement among many that @HdxAcademy was a failure. persuasion didn't work... existential threat that trump admin is throwing at the academy has clarified A LOT. ppl now are speaking up. they now know that the whole institution might go down with the ideologue ship.

reality is most academics need to feel skin in the game. they are now

ppl keep asking me about this stuff. tbh on the scientific stuff there is not much daylight on the specific details btwn me and @Tom_Rowsell but let me elucidate my own 'stance' on some issues

the branch of R1a (z93 mutation) associated with indo-iranians emerged 3500 BC or so

https://twitter.com/Tom_Rowsell/status/1881983326959157720

non-z93 branch of corded ware went west into europe proper, the z-93 fatyanovo-balanovo ppl went east. the structure may date to the yamnaya period, or may come from EHG idk. but it's old

z93 started where? vistula? maybe a bit east? but it's in europe geographically. europeans

i should say something since 10/7, and the israel-palestine thing after TNC vs. cbs guy exploded

personally do lean to the israel side, but it is not a high intensity issue for me. but, it does 10/8 broke the woke cartel by peeling off a lot of lefty jews. this is good.

but... there has been cancel culture directed at the pro-palestine side. some of this is OK in my opinion. if you are an adjunct professor who is praising the revolutionary acts of hamas on 10/7 with a lot of jewish students i don't know what i can do or say...

i grew up in a town of 12,000 in northeast oregon. county of 25,000

4 hours from portland and spokane and 2.5 hours from boise (drive)

now live in austin (1 million city limits). lived in bay area, portland, seattle before

visit oregon now and then... i saw some thing about @JDVance wanting to revive small towns

and @charlesmurray has talked about the benefits of high IQ types remaining in places like iowa

going to miami and LA you see the HOT ppl move there

going to SF and NYC you see the SMART ppl move there

working on a post (2 part, ~7k words) on indian americans. not a labor of love. ppl want me to write about brown stuff cuz i know a lot about it and i'm not retarded...

...and i understand i think more viscerally the racism and dislike a lot of americans now feel toward brownz looking usha vance c.v. i had a moment of "WTF." yale, yale law, and she clerked for two supreme court justices. jesus christ. and now she's married to the possible VP of the USA

who the fuck does she think she is? her parents arrived here in the 1980s

i know i'm going to be asked about this because NNT is a big account. NO, THERE IS NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE OF MAJOR KHAZAR INPUT* (they were turkic, it have been obvious). depending on your best models 10-50% of ashkenazi ancestry is classical east mediterranean levantine * it is plausible that some lines of eastern ashkenzi geneology from the jews of moravia that assimilated into the medieval ashkenazim have roots that go back to the khazars, but this is a small %; we know that ashkenazi mtDNA lineage goes back to a woman in sichuan so who knows

the "go home" thing is pretty common now. i've seen more normal young MAGA ppl i know tweet it. i've been rightwing longer than these kids have been alive, but it seems they want to turn me and my kids into democrats. we have to get violent if they're serious. no choice

https://twitter.com/OursIsTheFury90/status/1764816012694687818

(i tend to brush off nonwhites worrying about online meme-racism, but we all got our lines...alls fun and games until you turn into a permanent minority because everyone hates you)

for my whole adult life it has been a common refrain from conservatives that the roman empire fell because of debauchery and sexual license; often this is tied together with modern cultural, political and social concerns

the problem is conservatives don't have a strong case we don't know what the sexual mores of a given period were that well because we don't have a RGSS (roman general social survey). but, from the textual evidence we can see changes over time.

the biggest was the spread of christian morals with the christianization of the empire

we're seeing the likely ephemeral @VivekGRamaswamy boomlet before the air pops...will be some talk about his religion, therefore, caste...

a substantial minority of indian americans were born or raised in this country like @VivekGRamaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy ppl who grew up in the 80s and 90s, now xennials coming into public prominence and positions of influence and power. gen-xers like rho khanna and nikki haley and older millennials like vivek. they experienced america's conflict with iran, gulf war 1, then 9/11 and gulf war 2

my new followers, a thread on my steppe series...

Steppe 1.0, Going Nomad The early Indo-Europeans' great leap forward


Today 3.5 billion humans speak Indo-European languages, which dominate Eurasia from Spain to the Indian subcontinent. This is the legacy of the pastoralists who roamed the Pontic steppe north of the Black sea 5,000 years ago. They were the original Indo-Europeans. They pioneered the nomadic lifestyle, leaving behind hard toil at the plow and thankless foraging in cold Siberian forests. They chose instead to wander the open grasslands in search of fresh pastures for their herds. They were the first to unleash young warriors raised as roving nomads upon the world, predatory packs marching the breadth of a continent in a few centuries. We don’t know what they called themselves. We don’t know the names of those who led them. But their cultural innovations and the choices they made transformed our world and made us who we are today. These nameless people left no monuments or seminal texts. Instead, we live with their language, their gods and their genes.

These early Indo-Europeans did not rush into virgin lands. They first bowled over others who were similarly textless. So we have no written testimony of this scarcely human phenomenon steamrolling the settlements of stolid farmers whose ancestors had tilled the land for millennia. The nomads’ inexorable progress onward, onward, outward in concentric arcs, mowing down or swallowing up all who stood in their way, was marked by neither enduring architectural monuments nor ambitious infrastructure projects like Rome left those they subjugated. They came, they took, they surely slaughtered, and they clearly fathered. But with neither written words, nor enduring walls, how do we know them?

Like a black hole, they warped even the distant future of every adjacent nation they touched. And so, like astrophysicists studying a black hole, we grope our way to a picture of the prehistoric Indo-European nomads, not directly, but through the vast arc of Eurasian geography that curls around the windswept steppe to its west, south and east. These barbarian, nomadic Indo-Europeans gave rise to civilized, urban Indo-European societies as far apart as Italy, Iran, and India. The history, culture, mythology and linguistic patrimony of most of Eurasia, particularly its most dominant empires, bear unmistakable if begrudging testimony to violent brushes with the nomad peoples of the steppe. We must only be patient and creative enough to tease out these common threads, field by complementary field. Threads which in the end bind us all. Millennia later, we still bear the scars the invaders left on our ancestors, share their age-old obsessions and journey on their conveyances.

The nomads picked fights they thought they could win. The only way to survive a conquering force as relentless as the steppe raiders was to emulate it, as fully and as quickly as possible. Steppe genes were forced on our foremothers. And in a rushed bid for survival, the societies which resisted and eventually flourished in the face of nomadic predations absorbed as many superior steppe innovations as they could, both the tools and the cultural baggage. If you can’t beat them, you could do worse than to selectively join them. The medieval knight and the Manchu cavalry are but warped refractions of the roving Hun.

Today, we can trace back those shared threads in myths, mores and mother tongues that span most of the breadth of Eurasia. Archaeology brings us a wealth of circumstantial source materials to interrogate. And the past two decades have been delivering an ever greater granularity of detail in the DNA record of modern humanity’s near-universal steppe ancestry.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-10-go… Steppe 1.1a: A nowhere man's world Heraclitus held that “all is change”, contra his great rival Parmenides, who argued for a fixed eternity. Human history comes down on Heraclitus’ side, but given the pace of human affairs before the modern era, a lifetime might not be long enough to feel it for yourself. For the ancients, the torpor of the present always dominated, because their world changed imperceptibly. Pharaonic Egypt spanned more centuries than lie between Julius Caesar and us. But even a universe defined by eternal truths, like the power of god-kings on earth, can be upended overnight, leaving mortals to confront a startling new landscape of possibilities.

From the steppe, the frontier of opportunities unfurled endlessly to west and east. Nomads traversed the breadth of Eurasia in a matter of years, forever chasing the next conquest. A steppe warrior born in a tent on the open plains might die in a sumptuous palace overlooking a teeming city. We’ve seen epochal change in the blink of an eye in our own lifetimes. Remember the payphone? Quick, where’s your nearest one? Even the name of the 2002 film Phonebooth would bewilder most children today. Maroon 5’s 2012 Payphone video was already on the cusp of being nonsensical when it was made. Less than a decade later, my child of the twenty-teens stares just as uncomprehendingly at the video’s flimsy little flip phone as at the hulking phone you feed quarters. Mobile technology in just a few years rendered obsolete what had been a ubiquitous urban fixture for generations, churning through each sequential successor in short fractions of decades.

5,000 years ago, the Pontic steppe witnessed such a wholesale overnight transformation. The region’s Yamnaya culture metamorphosed to such an extent that its descendants could dominate Eurasia from one end to the other within just four generations. The Yamnaya rolled up their tents (quite literally), abandoned their settlements and guided their ox-drawn wagons over the horizon to parts unknown. The adoption of a revolutionary technology, specifically the wheel, and more generally a Yamnaya openness to novelty, produced a massive historical inflection point. They adapted, they assimilated and they expanded over the face of the earth until 45% of the world today speak first languages descended from theirs.razibkhan.com/p/steppe-11a-a…

in the *hidden tribes* survey only progressive activists don't think there are issues with free speech hiddentribes.us/media/qfpekz4g…

i think it's cuz they run major speech-generating institutional organs of society progressive activists have the highest incomes (probably matched by devoted conservatives). basically the ideologues are well-off

since i was a kid in the 1980s the gov. with the help of the dominant media have portrayed us as the 'good guys' and those we opposed as 'bad guys.'

i do think we're often good...but...most of our actions are dictated by self-interest (not all!) during the 1980s in the iran-iraq war the iranians were the 'bad guys' and the iraqis were the 'good guys.' then the war ended, iraq invaded kuwait, and the iraqis were 'bad guys.' so we made up some stuff about kuwaiti babies being killed to reinforce that...

kind of negative sometimes on the 'conservative movement' is what massive cowards young right-of-center people are in talking about their views. fucking cowards with zero courage and honor running around with racist anons and they/them pronouns in their real name accounts the examples are legion and it's pretty constant. so don't worry if you think i'm pointing a finger at you. i probably am, but you're in "good company." your whole fucking generations is damned

(not make your racist replies to me with your anon accounts fucking animals)

kindle deals this month (OK, ones i bought :)

Alexander the Great: A New Life of Alexander amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS… Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS…

some ppl r taking the below comment to mean i'm 100% without hope or arguing we should just concede and walk away from fighting for what we believe

of course not. what do u think i do? i don't give a shit how many online mobs come screaming at me like mean girls. over and over

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1652022379558649858

unlike most ppl i know who r disquieted by current trends who are "waiting until tenure" or "waiting until associate professor" or "waiting until the big grant" i have seen the march of the generations. the future is stocked with cadres who care more about revolution that truth

i'm in multiple chats/channels where academcs, americans and non-american, believe that the DEI pushes are basically stacking the deck against foreign candidates/ppl with immigrant backgrounds. some ppl r reporting pretty open anti-asian/immigrant sentiment i figure i should tweet it out since i hear about this so much it's a boring observation...but perhaps not to others, idk

A Tiny Number of Shoplifters Commit Thousands of New York City Thefts nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyr… pareto principle on steroids. obv driven by shoplifting rings that are selling stuff on craigslist etc. that a leftwing influencer her says is fake news

also, this is bad for the poor the same leftwing influencer (michael hobbes) says this is a victimless crime. setting aside the kulak-i mean, small business owners, even large corporations notice theft. they eventually close down their stores in poor/underserved areas

who does this hurt? the poor.

for those of you who aren't virgins, sanderson is a very nice mormon guy who writes a lot of fantasy and has a lot of money. the author of the piece is a sneering asshole

but just remember that almost all "profiles" are creative fiction, not reportage wired.com/story/brandon-… if the author/publication likes you, it will be a puff piece. if the author/publication does not, it will be a hit piece. but > 500 words, it's filled with lies and misrepresentations and is basically fiction

every time you read a profile of someone you know this is 100% clear