Agree that this entire American Empire is illegitimate; collapse is inevitable and only from the ruins can something better emerge.

In public, I give no respect or legitimacy to the federal government; no flag flies at my house; my kids have all been taught from and early age that their government hates us and all we stand for; my sons will never serve in the military, draft or otherwise.

I will still pull the lever for Trump in private, simply because he is the chaos candidate and a second Trump term is most likely to accelerate the collapse. In truth, my hope is that he is elected while in a jail cell, and that he relocates the Executive and runs the federal government from Rikers Island, having converted it into an armed fortress like a true a warlord.

A general strike by tens of millions of right-minded people would bring this country to its knees within a week. It requires a leader, however.

A good reminder to be as skeptical of so-called conspiracy theories as of “official narratives.”

But Mr. Unz is surprisingly, and sadly, way off the mark when it comes to “COVID deaths” and the safety of the so-called vaccines.

Haven’t we seen enough evidence by now of how the books were cooked so that anyone who died “with” COVID (a highly transmissible coronavirus with a 99%+ survival rate) was counted as a “COVID death”?

Haven’t we seen the ludicrous failure of the so-called “vaccine” — the experimental, rushed-at-warp-speed Big Pharma concoction (complete with unprecedented legal immunity for Big Pharma) and the troubling evidence that the COVID vaccines do more harm than good for the majority of the population (especially children, who are are statistically zero risk from COVID)? How many more times does Joe Biden need to get COVID before the inanity and malicious zealotry of the forced-vaccination crowd can be grounds for questioning whether they truly are motivated to protect the health of Americans rather than by some other more nefarious goal, whether simple corporate greed, political division, or something more sinister?

myopia can be induced by the use of lenses. the length of the eyeball can change in response to stimuli. eg hyperoptic defocus and the aforementioned “lens induced myopia”. this can be exploited in reverse to bring the focal length of the eyeball back to health.

Jews gave us Marxism (Bolshevism/Communism/Socialism) and Germany rose to defend all of Europe and destroy its accursed ideology. If no for the brave German soldiers all of Europe would have been under the iron fist of Stalin and his Jewish handlers. The Zionists brought America into two fratricidal wars in Europe (even though both presidents of the time claimed they wanted to stay out of Europe’s “problems” and ran on that promise) and the Zionists made sure that we would destroy each other through their control of the mainstream media in the west.

Fast-forward to today. All of the Marxist propaganda rolled out in the late fifties and 1960’s has taken hold in America and Europe. Overpopulation, global-cooling/global-warming, diversity and multiculturalism, etc. It has led us down the road to self-destruction. They have brainwashed almost four generations of white children into hating who they are and loving people who want to take what they have and murder them. It is politically correct to call for the destruction of the white race in universities, news shows, and in the streets.

The Turner diaries have been prophetic in predicting the future. Black militants are assassinating police officers on live television. Tens of millions of illegal aliens roam our streets, given a free pass to murder Americans by the Marxist democrats. All of our jobs have been given to aliens and minorities and our manufacturing base has fled to China and South-east Asia. The European Union has carried out the same destructive, racist policies in the old world and Germany lost to the French due to a spiteful Italian football referee.

It’s time to send our multicultural friends back to where they came from and build walls to protect what is left of our civilization. The camp of the saints is under attack and it’s time we woke up and accepted the cold, hard, truth. No one will shed a tear when we are gone, not until the machines we built break down and grind to a deafening silence. Then we will be missed, but only then, only then.

True, but there were a lot of Polish and American pilots that fought in the Battle of Britain, it wasn’t just British pilots. Don’t forget, Hitler allowed your army to escape at Dunkirk. If he would have allowed his generals to wipe you guys out that would have been the end right there. The Russians are definitely no one to screw with but without the United States funding and supplies and without the U.S. and Great Britain creating multiple fronts the Russians would have lost.

What sunk the German army was bad leadership at the top. Hitler was a brilliant politician but had no business playing a Field Marshall.

Most of the Americans that I’ve spoken to either don’t care or are very ill informed. So many still believe in the illusion of American exceptionalism. The fight in the west during WWII wasn’t anything to snicker at (Battle of the Bulge) but you’re right, the meat and potatoes happened between the Soviets and the Germans. Remember though, the Russians had a huge amount of help from the United States through the Lend-Lease program, not to mention the very foolish decision of Hitler to launch operation Barbarossa, especially without proper intelligence of the real Soviet strength (The Germans were totally shocked that the Russians had so many tanks, and good ones at that!).

On the other side of the coin, if the Germans hadn’t fought the Soviets then all of Europe would have collapsed under Soviet Power. A strange thing, that if not for the Germans all of Europe would have been lost to communism.

But we’re acting as if what is going on today stems from American power. It doesn’t. You got it half-right. The Zionists (The same Bolshevik Jews that slaughtered tens of millions of Christian Russians and Ukrainians) have been captain of the ship since before WWI. There is a multitude of historical data that proves this beyond any doubt. America, just like the rest of the western nations, are firmly under the thumb of the International Banking cabal, i.e., Elite Jewry. Why is everyone so afraid of telling it like it is?

The biggest mistake Europe ever made was to allow Jews the same rights and privileges of true European natives. Every head of state since the turn of the tenth century has had plenty to say about the Jews as a people. And since the 18th century their elite have been slowly pounding us into the dirt, all through the control of money. Sure, there are Anglos, eastern Europeans, Russians, etc. that have partaken of the feast (European royalty, the Black nobility, the Vatican) but the Jewish Elite are at the top of the pyramid.

They created fractional reserve banking, they created the BIS and the World Bank. They run the central bank of America, own it lock, stick, and barrel. They own the central banks of Europe and any other country western militaries have conquered. It seems like the only nations that are a supposed threat to the United States don’t have a Jewish central bank (Libya, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Russia?).

Qaddafi was doing a lot of good things for his people, like the great man-made water project (they used to have to buy their water from Europe) and state banks in which there was no usury (no interest). Qaddafi then decided to create a United North African Union, with the gold dinar at the heart of it all. Soon thereafter his nation was bombed into the stone age and he was executed, brutally and without mercy, most likely filmed on a Japanese handicam. Then it was off to Syria to topple the next country that refused to be ruled by the family of eight.

Not only do they control the money, they control the airwaves, the mainstream media, hence all of the gross lies about the savage Palestinian terrorists and the big, bad Russians. But how did it all come to be? How did such a pitiful people manage to outsmart our best and brightest, not to mention our richest? It can’t be done to greed alone, something deeper and darker keeps their unholy union together.

It all stems from the mystery religions. Freemasonry was born out of Jewish mysticism (or rather Babylonian mysticism), along with other secretive societies, is the organizational structure the Elite Jews use to force their will on their goyim minions. Oh yeah, they apparently control the extensive power of the Vatican, if you believe it. Personally, it is enough for me to know that they favor the mega-rich, regardless of race or creed. Apparently it’s all being prepared for their false Messiah.

We shall see, we shall see!

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Dwarves and their magic swords.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEWIuyeNp2k

Agree the assortative thing may be a factor – the sort of people I grew up with were like that – they were less attracted to people dumber than their niche but *also* people smarter than their niche.

Okay, I truly understand but I have a major mental blockage due to this : quote
“First, drop the “diversity-is-our strength” crap. It is a lie, and virtually everybody knows it is bogus and the evidence is indisputable. ”

Diversity absolutely IS strength – in ALL matters. But it only works where there are consequences for non-performance. A few simple thought experiments will prove this out.
1) take two islands large enough to support sustainable populations of predators. Now introduce these predators – in the case of this example dogs, Island A gets 500 randomly selected mutts (fertile), Island B gets 500 purebred poodles of the same size class(fertile). In 500 years which one still has dogs? Obviously, Island A – the mutts will have the diversity to handle the changing environment, those that cant will die off, those that can will survive and breed. Island B will have at best an inbred low fertility waning population.
2) take two towns in the same environment with same resources. Town M is inhabited by menonites, Town R is inhabited by technocrats. Both get cut off from the rest of our global society. Which one is more likely to survive? What if instead of being cut off from global society they instead get invaded by aliens? which one is more likely to survive now?
3) take 3 companies performing the same sort of advertising- One makes a premium product at a premium price, Two makes a lousy product at a very low price, and number Three makes a pretty decent product at a fairly low price. In an economy where there are massive sales taxes based on the sale price of item, and low incomes in the customer base, which product would you buy? Company number Three would probably not need to be replaced where company Two would, and company One is too expensive after taxes to afford, so most people will go for company number Three (all else being equal of course).

So diversity IS strength – in a free competition where results are allowed to cause their effects. It is only when results do not count (or are not allowed to count) that diversity becomes weakness.
In the diversity of Global Cultures, Western (European) culture has proven to be among the best – at least in part because it steals ideas and traits that gives it the best competitive advantage from the diversity of other cultures. Japan, China, and India, have borrowed some of the same traits from western culture to integrate into their own, and by doing so have gained strength in the realm of global commerce and culture.

It is removing the consequences of competition that makes ‘diversity’ of liberal thought so damaging.
Just like welfare, they don’t want any of the protected classes to suffer for under/non-performance.

“One can think of this process as cultural ‘selective sweeps’”

Yes, the world makes a lot more sense viewed that way.

A thought I had, kinda related. In a culture where nepotism is the norm a viable long-term democratic model must be designed around consensus.

The western “winner takes all” democratic model can’t work if the winner will literally take all and divide it up among his family and allies. It’s just a recipe for trouble.

“If you look at European history…More a historical difference than an East-West difference, in other words.”

or a north European plain vs everybody else difference?

“Intuitively it seems obvious that Germany shares more ecologically with Poland than it does with Spain.”

It may not be relevant to this but generally I wonder if there’s an eco-border somewhere around Poland and Germany related to the effect of the Gulf stream i.e. a line where the effect tapers off and it becomes full continental.

It’s “mostly” if Asians don’t exist. What’s odd is I don’t think it’s conscious as the data is right there in front of them. It’s like the data creates so much cognitive dissonance it gets blanked out.

I’ve seen this before in a sociology book. The text said a much higher percentage of white women were in professional jobs than other ethnicities while the graph used to illustrate this showed the exact opposite.

The other thing is if these places were called “istans” (or the equivalent) i.e. if they were historic entities they’d divide more neatly than they are likely to – now that dividing them seems to be the new plan.

If British IQ has declined and IQ elsewhere is normed off British IQ (i read this somewhere but not sure if true) then wouldn't that make everyone else's measured IQ go up?

I think the blank slate ideology and the academic climate needed to enforce it has probably had a hugely negative effect on innovation – or maybe not if innovation would have been in decline anyway for other reasons – but then again without the blank slate maybe some of those other reasons would have been put right already.

I also agree with the financialization point above and i'd say it's effect has been a lot worse than just the total and complete waste of brains inside finance itself but also numerous knock-on effects for example easier hostile takeovers pushed companies into prioritizing short-term profits to keep stock price high as a protection form corporate raiders which cut into more long-term aims like research.

"who have reported a correlation of − .746 between lowest winter temperatures and national IQs for 143 countries."

Would the correlations be even better if you split the populations between coastal, near inland and far inland categories and calculated for each category?

#

I think the likely components are

1) cold weather adaptation
2) civilization bonus (through cognitive competition)
3) coastal bonus (environmental, iodine etc)

So to me cold weather adaptation would simply provide the baseline IQ. A population at the tropics might be able to get by with an average of 70 and a population that has to cope with -30 winters might only need an average of 90 with diminishing returns beyond that.

On top of this baseline, civilization – where possible (and the possibility would include both base IQ and local environment) – would add to this base through people competing for the most favored positions in a more complex society.

So maybe Kazakhs represent the baseline IQ needed for that level of cold weather adaptation?

However that doesn't explain the difference between them and the Mongols.

Which leads to the 3rd category, environmental e.g. good sources of necessary IQ ingredients in diet, especially early diet e.g. iodine in fish or dairy.

Did being forced to settle down change the nomadic Kazakh diet in some way which didn't change for the Mongols e.g. milk?

I wonder if the Soviets did any IQ tests on Kazakhs when they were being forced to change lifestyle and if their IQ was different then?

Although I accept the general point, an army with smart officers, smart NCOs and average soldiers will run rings round an army with smart officers, average NCOs and dumb soldiers and has done many times.

In a competition between two populations, a 5% who think they are all that is required and are not concerned about the average of the other 95% will lose to a 5% who work to maintain a high average among the other 95%.

imo

“The relatively temperate, fertile south west of WA which was more densely populated”

Did they have more of a warrior culture than the average?

@Davidski

“Well, Mal’ta boy’s people had Lake Baikal. That is basically a sea. I’m not sure how many fish are left there now, but back in the day it was probably teeming with life.”

Fair point.

“For me the question of why WHG and ANE are apparently so different isn’t a mystery. As far as I can see, it’s because of distance across space and time.”

Yeah I agree one explanation is simply the physical/time distance between Mal’ta and WHG samples and an ANE sample from further west and closer in time might show a straightforward clinal difference.

Another possibility is they originally came from the same root but were distinct branches e.g. one branch heading west into Europe and the other first north and then both east and west from there meeting up again in Eastern Europe.

I just wonder about a third possibility that humans in some regions were partially tied to the coasts / saltwater fish (at least as population sources) until they developed adaptations for moving inland.

And the thing about cultural adaptations is how fast they could potentially be.

Artificial selection pressures created by culture seems to be how traits that benefit a group but not the individual concerned can be made to be adaptive to the individual – at least in theory.

(or at least conformity as a catch all if not the actual traits)

On the question of a cline (or not) between WHG and ANE how plausible is it that WHG were coastal and the split between them and ANE involved necessary adaptations to an inland continental environment – basically the lack of seafood – so the gap between them is more of an invisible geographical barrier than a cline but not the more impervious kind of geographical barrier like mountain ranges or oceans.

“I’m also getting sick of reading/discussing genetics of race, and so is my daughter.”

I think the breaking of the wall over race as (mostly) a geographical construct will eventually lead to massive improvements in medical treatment.

I think in the future the idea that testing meds on people from one geographical population and then prescribing them for a different population will be seen as crazy (both at the race scale and lots of lower regional scales also).

Given that the timing doesn’t seem to agree we come to the second option which is particular groups in particular times generating advantages e.g. aquatic insanity, that allow them to spread dramatically including back migrations over the top of previous expansions so the idea of a single firework model bursting out of Africa doesn’t make sense to me whereas a firework display model where a series of “Out of X” events starting in Africa burst out of each other in a sequence makes a lot more sense.

“What we actually care about in groups of human beings most importantly is precisely how they fare on socially important traits.”

What if average relatedness and patterns of relatedness are socially important?

“But I wonder where that leaves us at the end of history?”

good side
The existence and discovery of those group cultural adaptations which – if everyone followed them without free-riders – would have the most benign outcome.

bad side
recognition of the viability and potential power of cultural warfare.

“A lack of all sanity and rationality when it came to venturing across great expanses of water.”

You’d think the best time for safest maritime expansion would be when the sea level was lowest and that the strongest rational impetus to take crazy long-distance risks would be when some glacial era “islands” or Doggerlands were sinking under interglacial waves but the timing doesn’t seem to agree.

@Nerms

“As I understood it, there were 3 populations that are the main components of modern Europeans.”

Populations at this time were already mostly varying mixtures of those components. If I’ve read it right one of the two Thracian samples is more a mix of farmer and western hunter gatherer while the other is more a mix of western hunter gatherer and north Eurasian hunter gatherer turned scary steppe dude.

“They set sail and skip island to island? There are enough islands to enable that to happen? I’d be too scared to do that.”

People will do all kinds of crazy dangerous stuff if they’re being chased. I think a lot of this stuff will have been driven by the losing side in a conflict trying to get away.

Just to be clear – i'm not saying iodine fully explains the drop but if it is **part** of the drop then it might refute the "too fast" argument.

"They better look again at their samples, because such a rapid decrease is not possible:"

"such a rapid decline is simply far too large to be plausible"

What would be the result of a dramatic drop in the consumption of iodine due to a dramatic decrease in the consumption of dairy products (and salt in the countries that add iodine to salt)?

@Davidski

“I’m still confused why anyone would claim that South Asians lack the so called Basal Eurasian influence. Is it because of the lack of Y-HG E in India? That’s just a paternal marker.”

No idea. Your comment made me think what if the first farmers were the segment of WHG who lived in the fertile crescent who spread in a first wave and the “EEF” were a later result of a Sumer-Akkad type situation followed by a second wave of Afroasiatic admixed farmers. It was just me thinking aloud really.

@commentator
“I guess what really differentiates living West Eurasians from ENA is “Basal Eurasian” admixture.”

Sumer and Akkad might be an example of WHG/SHG first farmers being over-run by Afroasiatic peoples. (And possibly the first of many examples of early farmers getting conquered by the herders they themselves created on their borders.) The newly combined EEF farmer population spreading out in various directions might then constitute a common thread over a wide area although I wouldn’t call it basal personally – but some word that sums up a very wide diaspora. So that would mean

EEF = WHG/SHG first farmers (from the fertile crescent or thereabouts) + Afroasiatic imo

with the SSA admixture having a dramatic weighting effect on admixture plots.

nb I also wonder if the SSA population in the north-east has changed a lot since the Bantu expansion and that might be complicating matters.

@Davidski

“What makes you think there’s none of the so called Basal Eurasian admixture in South Asia? There has to be, because there’s plenty of Near Eastern admixture in South Asia. You can’t have that without the Basal Eurasian.”

Well if the above point is correct – that the first farmers were a segment of WHG/SHG in the fertile crescent (or thereabouts) who were later conquered by and mixed with an Afroasiatic population out of Arabia – then some of those first farmers may have traveled to India before this event happened.

“Substituting the ancestral allelic variant at this loci tends to make these individuals darker (that is, through mixed marriage with non-Europeans).”

So if there was de-pigmentation associated with MC1R and/or IRF4 that is disguised by the fixation of derived SLC genes then mixed children who ended up with the MC1R from one parent and the ancestral SLC from the other ought to be lighter (on average) than those who got the ancestral SLC genes but without MC1R?

“But the LBK was the nearest neolithic cultural complex to Sweden, and as likely an origin for the first farmers of this region as anywhere else.”

Megalithism was adjacent

LBK was much further south

““Admixture” assumes that there were isolated populations to begin with.”

It only requires different average frequencies of some trait or other.

“1) modelling mental states in con-specifics is highly adaptive
2) modelling external stimuli as agents is also highly adaptive”

yes

“don’t presume all phenotypes are adaptive”

Yeah. Another of my (very casual) thoughts on this was brains developing the ability to conceive abstractions might at the same time have created the feeling of a kind of vacuum that some people felt the need to fill.

Another might be that the thing itself was just an accident or side-effect but it created a tool that could be used for adaptive (or not) purposes later.

I think religiosity is a very big deal and so it would be interesting to see people look at it from an evolutionary point of view rather than just the yah boo stuff.

“What my study of religion suggested to me is that the fixation upon religion as a intellectual system totally misses the primary reasons that religion exists, and why it has existed for all of human history and has had adherents across most of humanity.”

If necessity is the mother of evolution then that implies religion / religiosity must have been necessary at some point (or points) for some reason (or reasons).

One of the possibilities being a method for larger social groups to transfer paternal/parental authority to a group leader.

“That still doesn’t explain why some areas were so refractory to the second waves – like Papua, as shown in your graph.”

More extreme environments providing a bigger home team advantage?

People will travel a long way for gold.

I’m picturing the process curing personality defects as well so the clone / parent can’t stand each other.

@Karl Zimmerman
“But I’m still suspicious that this isn’t far enough geographically to act as such a big population break.”

Would near the gold fields fit?

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/gold/hd_gold.htm

“Basically, what is it about the Bantu genome that would make a geneticist prefer to focus more on pygmies and Khoisan?”

Apart from anything else Bantu-descended populations aren’t likely to disappear.

If you liked ancient history as a kid and were frustrated at not knowing the bits that happened just beforehand – this is a very cool time.

Freckles?

I’m thinking why would the red hair allele have spread and one possibility – if there is a latitude advantage at play – is a quick and dirty quasi-albinism without some of the negative consequences of full albinism. If so might not IRF4 be similar but dark hair, light eyes and freckles instead of red hair, light eyes and freckles? If you take the near eastern skin lightening alleles out of Irish people would they get darker all over or would a mass of freckles appear?

"Border Security is a bull. Illegals will always be able to get across the border even with a wall since they get smugglers."

Border security is good for all sorts of reasons – including peace of mind.

You are right that the only form of border security that will work *fully* in regards to illegal working is targeting the employers and making the cost vs benefit of employing illegals negative.

If there's no demand for illegal workers the supply will dry up.

twisted151

"What if this scenario is the course of every species with interstellar potential? It certainly appears to be the inevitable path for humanity."

I think that's what game theory would suggest if it was applied to this – that there's only a few likely outcomes for a social species who develop technology past a certain point and the most likely outcomes are both bad and fatal.

I think there are probably billions of dead civilizations out there or civilizations that ate the ladder on the way up and then collapsed below the level where they could build a new ladder.

Where is everybody?

Bankstas creating cyclic deflationary spirals and subsequent wars keep most of them down in the mud.

I think the only ones likely to make it into space will either have evolved an understanding of their own nature which makes the Star Trek "watch and wait" prime directive paradigm very likely or they'll be some kind of genocidal hive-mind type species and if they'd found us first we'd be long extinct.

"Supporting a $15-an-hour minimum wage could be suicide for politicians in Seattle. It’s too low.

Ed Murray, who’s running for mayor, vows to phase in that minimum for many jobs if he’s elected tomorrow. Incumbent Mike McGinn has declared he may not necessarily stop at $15."

This is related to the velocity of money idea. If driving wages down with mass immigration shifts spending from high velocity categories to lower velocity categories then it creates a deflationary effect.

(Obviously doing it on its own in the context of open borders will just increase the number of illegal workers so it's no use without border security.)

Mass immigration causes a hidden deflationary spiral through reducing the velocity of money.

America is on a runaway train and the only thing that could possibly save it – and even then only a slim chance – is the military throwing Wall St. into the ocean.

If the Chinese want to survive the eventual crash then they ought to take down the dollar as soon as possible and – a little later when the western governments have got their hands full dealing with the consequences – nationalize all western the western-owned assets in China and then resell them to their own citizens.

"All lending not based on the time value of money, is either charity – or is lending based on the time value of money – with smoke and mirrors to disguise it."

The profit from money lent for production (investment) e.g. buying stock in a company, derives from greater economic efficiency i.e. successful investment creates more stuff which the lender (investor) gets a share of. So not the time-value of money but a share in the value of increasing the amount of stuff.

Lending for consumption on the other hand simply involves getting someone to pay more for some stuff than it is worth e.g. a borrower agreeing to pay $8000 over a long time for a car currently worth $4000, with the lender pocketing the difference while at the same time insulating themselves from any risk. It doesn't increase anything. It creates the illusion of increased prosperity in the short term while in reality reducing it over the long-term.

Lending for consumption is inherently parasitic.

If lending for consumption is taken to its limit i.e. consumers spending all their discretionary income on paying back past loans, it must neccessarily lead to debt saturation and economic stagnation.

(That's assuming the maximum limit wasn't overshot in the process creating a credit boom followed by a deflationary bust instead.)

So lending for consumption taken to its logical limit = stagnation (or deflation).

So personally although i would say that the fractional reserve banking version of usury is always a bubble waiting to pop i wouldn't say all usury was a bubble waiting to pop depending on how you define usury with lending for investment being fundamentally different from lending for consumption.

(As your example of a cement mixer illustrates.)

"First, why, if minority lending was the cause, was the housing bubble global, not just American?"

Minority lending wasn't the direct cause.

The direct cause was the usual one of the bankstas wanting to create a credit boom.

The *form* this took in the USA was minority lending. This was because after the last time the bankstas wrecked the global economy in the 1920s (with the resulting depression, world war and scores of millions dead) the US put a lot of legal obstacles in the way of it happening again.

Using accusations of racism to help break down those obstacles just made sense politically because of PC hegemony.

Minority lending was the Trojan horse used to set the bankstas free to trash the world economy again.

"It was pretty much the opposite of usury: low rates and few consequences for failing to pay."

It was usury based on a belief they had figured out a way to insure against default – hence the very low rates and low consequences for default.

After the crash the bailouts put all that risk on the taxpayers after the fact.

So it was usury – just a weird kind of time-delayed version.

Completely off-topic but you might be interested.

How the western banking system has killed millions (by accident).

http://bankstastuff.blogspot.co.uk/

(and before anyone starts…

"nb It doesn't matter who is running the banksta system. If the same system is copied by the Chinese or Ugandans or Buddhist monks the outcome will always be the same because the internal logic is based on universal principles: 1) people operate on cost vs benefit and 2) people have an average lifespan."

)

yeah i wasn’t thinking admixture (at that level) so much as

Stage 1) Cavalry army, 100% population A invade terriotory of 100% population B and say for the sake of argument the end result is 40/60 (not admixed yet, stratified).
Stage 2) Army now 40/60 (A cavalry and B peasantry) invade second population B further south with end result say 20/80 (stratified at the top).
Stage 3) Army now 20/80 (A cavalry and B peasantry) invade third population B further south with end result say 10/90 (stratified at the top).
etc

Or looking at it another way as an army of
– officers
– ncos
– grunts

With class-based assortative mating generally the admixture would either be at the same level i.e. grunt-grunt, nco-nco, officer-officer or (generally male-mediated) downward i.e. officer-nco, officer-grunt, nco-grunt so if population A becomes the whole officer class then there is no assortative admixture with population B at that level, only downward.

Say initially you have
– A senior officers
– A junior officers
– A ncos
– A grunts

After stage 1 you might have
– A senior officers
– A junior officers
– A NCOs
– AB grunts

After stage 2
– A senior officers
– A junior officers
– AB NCOs
– ABB grunts

After stage 3
– A senior officers
– AB junior officers
– ABB NCOs
– ABBB grunts

(Basically i think admixture models might vary between conquest and infiltration scenarios – for want of a better word to describe farmers hopping from defendable site to defendable site among a sea of HGs – with the first event in your model being an infiltration scenario and the second a step-wise conquest scenario.)

I imagine the first farmers initially expanding either on foot with mostly flocks or on boats with mostly seeds (generally speaking) interjecting themselves among HG populations on limited sites which were both good defensively and where their agricultural package was viable (and along coasts even where it wasn’t viable alone).

The spread of a cavalry culture would have to come after cavalry-sized and numbered horses became available at some later time being particularly significant in places where everyone using horses would increase their net food-getting capacity as opposed to those places where keeping horses specifically for cavalry literally ate into their net food-getting.

The places where everyone used horses would then have a significant latent military advantage any time the people in those places united in one gang – at least within the logistical range where large cavalry armies and all their spare horses could be supported at the time (protecting western europe and southern india a bit maybe?)

In terms of your model i’d see the first farmer types spreading out from Anatolia down through Iran and/or fertile crescent (i personally wonder if they were blocked by the locals at the Indus valley and mostly spread around them via the coast) or Indus valley plus the coast. Either way the south would become coastal farmer / fisher settlements with a native HG interior that mix over time.

(Time is the critical element imo. If the first farmers could have spread all over without any blockage i think they would have and almost everyone would be descended from them.)

Then later you get the scary horse guys arriving in North India and smashing things up giving the second mix. Later again kingdoms containing a significant proportion of scary horse guys push south in a step-wise fashion with the proportion diminishing with each step south giving the third mix.

“A model I propose is that the reason that ‘behavioral modernity’ exhibited such a long lag behind ‘anatomical modernity’ is that the first conscious human kept killing themselves.”

I think there’s a lot of scope in that idea but i think they’d more likely be killed or driven out on the basis of being weird and therefore potentially dangerous to the group – at least the “nice” version of that type. A sociopathic version might hide the difference better.

“That one thing”

Yup

“Also, I’m not sure if the responses to ‘desired children’ that were really large (one was 80, the other 100) were from trolls, or guys who are REALLY concerned with leaving descendants.”

I’m just so pleased with how my two turned out i wish i’d had more – 40 copies of each basically.

“We tend to imagine our species as having arisen in a singular manner”

Given all the distinct environments in Africa i’d have thought there might be lots of early branches each adapted slightly differently for their particular environment and the initially most successful (in terms of surface area or numbers) and the eventual winner aren’t neccessarily the same. For example i wonder how much the Bantu expansion may have over-written what was there before.

@22
I’m not sure either. I’d like it to be true for one of my pet theories but currently it’s just a thought.

@19
“or lower yourself by bending your legs so that you are the same height they are when you take the photo”

good point, yes but i hadn’t noticed myself doing it.

(i should mention the relevance, if there is any, is the potential influence of this optical effect on opposite male-female sexual selection on height.)

@15
Something i’m not quite sure of but does the mutation rate depend on assumptions of average paternal age?

@1
Replying to myself i remember where i got the idea from now. The “making of” dvd for Lord of the Rings where they talk about creating illusions of tallness and shortness by lowering and raising the camera angle.

Something i wonder but not sure how to prove (or disprove) and maybe somehow who knows about perspective could say – is the effect of a taller person looking down on a shorter person a variation on foreshortening

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)

and vice versa i.e. does a shorter person look shorter than they actually are to a taller person and does a taller person look taller than they actually are to a shorter person?

The significance would be if both the tall and short person had the same value for some height-width ratio e.g. 0.8, that ratio might *appear* to be closer to 0.7 or 0.9 depending on height difference and who is viewing who.

“there is no evidence of personality differences between racial groups”

http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/10/we-agree-its-weird-but-is-it-weird-enough/

“and I’m unsure (if we’re talking about broad continental groups, and not individual nations, which is a different thing), how you’d even begin to suggest such things would be initiated and maintained on a continental-wide basis by selection”

A race, even if it gets very fuzzy around the edges, is a population that share a certain amount of evolutionary history in common. They share that history mostly as a product of physical geography. Some of that evolutionary history and i’d say the dominant part since agriculture is cultural. For example the Chinese develop a relatively very wealthy nation and have a culture that includes an exam-based promotion system. The countries surrounding China note the wealth and copy a version of the exam culture through the long-range version of elite emulation and that exam culture produces the selection pressure.

Although it’s cultural selection it’s still passed on through genetics because if passing the exams give the parents a reproductive advantage then the traits that help the parents pass the exams get passed on to their kids.

So yes the correlation won’t be by race exactly it will be by nations / regions who adopted a particular cultural selection pressure who in pre-modern times will have a tendency to be in the same geographic region as their race – who are their race because they’re in the same geographic region.

Or put another way, until modern times the same physical geographic “bowls” that created races / nations / tribes greatly influenced the spread of cultural ideas also.

Some thoughts on the questions

I find it difficult to answer environment vs genes questions as i think it’s mostly genes but i also think a lot of the genetics is determined over generations by an (at least potentially) very plastic cultural environment e.g. marriage system, so environment effecting things through genes rather than environment effecting things directly. I think this is important because i think a lot of people’s reaction to the genes answer is because they see genes as something fixed and unfixable so they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist.

I left the two abortion questions unanswered. My initial reaction was to put “no” but in reality i don’t know what i’d have done in those two situations.

I didn’t know what Gattica was but guessed it was Brave New World-ish. I’m in favor of decreasing variance without reducing the average i.e. lifting the bottom. I’m not in favor of the elite increasing the gap for their own benefit so i think i put yes but the real answer would be “it depends.”

I’m thinking as agriculture spread to particular spots where it was most suited (at least after a bit of adaptation e.g. irrigation) and could produce the highest population densities e.g. Yellow river etc – those spots turned into massive population pumps.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

The thing about that though is free speech in practical terms is proportional to access to mass media. If ten people in a room nominally have free speech but one guy has a megaphone and the rest don’t is that really free speech in practical terms?

I know a lot of people think attitudes in the middle east are solely to do with foreign policy – and no doubt a lot of it is – but i think it’s equally to do with “Will and Grace” and MTV and the American media having such a disproportionately sized megaphone.

@26
Exactly. Practical reasons. I expect there’d be a lot of similar examples in European colonial empires as well.

“I thought it was generally accepted as a fact by historians that the Muslims in Moorish Spain were very tolerant”

You need to bear numbers in mind. A small conquering elite have to choose between being very tolerant or very massacre-orientated which as well as killing off productive peasants will spark greater resistance. As the balance of numbers shifts over time through elite emulation the need for tolerance gradually decreases and pressure to conform to the elite’s religion can be increased.

“I was trying to make a point that anger and even violence in reaction to actions which offend are actually comprehensible as the modal human response.”

Ironically, shown by the reaction to making the point.

@4 Yes, that could be quite a big deal if there were separate selective pressures applying to legs, torso, skull.

@1
Marrying cousins might make retaining a family look easier.

Which might imply face morpholgy could be more related to ROH than individual genes?

@2
“wonder whether part of the problem with height”

I’m wondering if height might not be less the result of a random jumble of genes and more a jumble of genes doing specific but contradictory things e.g.

1) one set resulting from long-term selection which, all else being equal, would determine the average height of a population.
2) one set that specifically effects male or female height in opposite directions
3) one set that increases or decreases height according to nutrition levels
4) a combined set formed from any of the above with “dents” i.e. the genetic load idea

The reasoning behind this is nutrition seems to have different effects on different populations e.g. the Dutch, which makes me wonder if populations have tall, short or average genes from past selection which can be suppressed by nutrition and maybe genetic load so when the suppression is lifted one population may shoot up a foot in height while another population it’s only 6″.

Also does assuming height is beneficial or deleterious change expected outcomes as maybe it can be either depending on circumstances.

Random thought

Say for the sake of argument your premises are

1) Where possible it’s more adaptive if as many people as possible in a human group are non-violent (defined as finding it hard to kill)
2) Human groups have always needed a percentage of the group to be warriors (defined as people who don’t find it as hard to kill)with the percentage varying according to need
3) psychopathy along a spectrum is one of the traits somehow connected to (2)
4) psychopathy is part-regulated by childhood trauma

Then human groups could vary the percentage of warriors / psychopaths within their group by varying how much they traumatize their children.

(apols if the sea of grass thread was closed for reasons other than testiness)

@100 Barti Cox
“I am seriously trying to learn and understand.”

Bear in mind that the genetic side of this is still relatively new and that theories from the past not based on genetic data may turn out to be completely wrong.

“he eventually settled into farming, 6,000BC, in so doing levelled areas of forest”

Only in the south. The north european forest wasn’t levelled till the middle ages. It’s maybe why steppe invasions into Western Europe were more restricted than elsewhere (and why it may have been a good place to escape if you’d been bounced off the steppe).

I think that giant forest and the related late arrival of high density agriculture to northern Europe will turn out to be a big factor in a lot of ways.

@89
“what gave rise to these people”

a giant forest covering most of europe imo

“”We have this image…”

I think a more likely image is forest hunter gatherers living in a giant forest like the huron, iroquois etc in last of the mohicans – but white (i assume). The guys on the horses came later imo.

@20
“I’m sorry, but what you’re saying has no basis in reality. The oldest traditional criminal justice method execution or no penalty at all, given prison wasn’t really feasible. Even up until a few centuries ago”

Yes, i should have specified i meant the system that developed in western countries up until the post-60s cultural shift. As you say you need the money for the prisons before it becomes viable.

##
@29

“is that to the extent we can tell, large industrialized countries seem to have higher psychopathy rates. For example, there were problems applying the Hare checklist to Ireland & Scotland because of their lower apparent rates…Reputational effects are powerful in small societies…was a con artist who just moved from church to church, changing identities and ripping off members, until he was finally caught.”

I think you may find psychopaths from smaller communities / countries move to larger communities / countries because it’s easier to hide.

It’s a shame Kabyles being partly descended from Vandals seems to be an internet myth as Kabyles having North Asian admixture would be pretty entertaining.

@21 “In support of the evil tyrant model of fitness enhancement from low frequencies of psychopaths in a community”

Normal people find killing someone quite difficult so i think the driver is the need for warriors/soldiers: too many and your society can’t function, too few and some other group will come and take your land. As a society specializes i think fewer people of that type are needed and “too many” becomes a lower percentage so societies start filtering them out through a criminal justice system. This will filter most strongly on those who are impulsive as well so i think you eventually get to a point where most of the people with a high capacity for violence are very self-controlled as well (when sober).

It’s easy to imagine both good and bad consequences of this process as people who might once have been head-hunters and cannibals no longer have a niche and end up as investment bankers instead.

“Rape is actually apropos to your point, because sociobiologists have argued that rape could have been a valid historical reproductive strategy by some men (presumably psychopaths) in the past”

I wouldn’t suggest anyone actually do this because it is pretty unpleasant to say the least but if you read up on the Congo and places nearby e.g.

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-1

you’ll find both
a) a very casual attitude to rape among a lot of the men (a large minority would be my guess as you can’t have any kind of society at all if there are too many)
and
b) lots of women with *3+ children* from multiple rapes.

I think rape is an r-type behavior that gradually becomes abnormal if a population becames more K-type.

(modified by men along the r/K spectrum behaving in a more r-type way with out-groups? this might actually fit elite behavior within a culture as well?)

I think this shows the basic culturally evolved wisdom of the earlier version of the traditional criminal justice system (in countries that could afford lots of prisons). If you lock people up for lengths of time proportional to the harm of the crime and increase it with multiple offences you’re effectively filtering the population’s reproduction time on the basis of harmful behaviors. Over time this has an effect in proportion to the genetic component – high imo – but at the same time it allows for those people on the cusp to step over the line and then back in again – so slow flexible eugenics based on actual behavior not pre-judgement because the thing is, for example, although violent traits might seem to be an entirely bad thing, people with violent traits *alongside* other traits that control it are the people most likely to drag you out of a burning building.

The big problem with the thing that shall not be named and why people get so (rightly imo) hysterical about it is the average sentencing doesn’t remotely fit the harm of the crime i guess because up till 30-ish years ago it was almost universally covered up.

Three strikes and you’re out for that == awesomeness.

(This is also why the idea of conjugal visits in prison is the single mst stupid thing ever.)

@68
“and then burn the entire area towards the late summer/ early fall dry season. This removes all the wood, creates enough heat to kill new sprouts and most humid-climate weed seeds, and fertilizes the ground).

All of this also demonstrates why low-tech pastoralism is a losing proposition in these humid, old-growth forest areas of Europe.”

Ah, i thought i read somewhere the northern tribes used semi-nomadic slash and burn techniques in the forests because the resulting new growth provided the woodland equivalent of pasture to feed their herds of boar. maybe that’s wrong.

(i’m not talking about the danube here. i mean further north where crops had a bigger dissadvantage).

@69
“The bottom line is…”

I was being a bit facetious but i think the general point stands. If you have a raider-space raiding females from a surrounding settled space then a bit counter-intuitively whoever is the top dog in the raider space will over time gradually become more like the people they’re raiding.

The second question then is if the quantity is enough to make a dramatic difference and if the figure of 75% slaves in the Crimea is true i’d say that was an indication towards yes.

The reason i think this fits better is if if you look at it in terms of population pumps then the early adopters have the initial advantage. If the Tocharian types were the early adopters and spread east (and south east) until they were blocked by something or other and they had a raiding culture then you’d expect them to gradually become more like the people they raided. At the same time if they passed agriculture on to the people they were adjacent to* then you could see the creation of new population pumps in say Iran or China. If those new population pumps were on a giant flood plain e.g. the Wei valley, then i think that would eventually create a much stronger population pump and the direction of flow would reverse (including counter-intuitively increasing the western mtdna in those populations who were already admixed).

If the above is correct then i’d expect the Tocharian types to have spread east as far as they could go before they were blocked either by geography or population density*, become more east asian over time through raiding, and then eventually get pushed back west over time after the Yellow Emperor (or his duller but probably more historical equivalent) figured out flood-defences and irrigation along the Yellow river and reversed the flow.

*pots and/or people. i think it’s pots *and* people when there’s potential population density differential and pots when there isn’t i.e. if/when farmers/pastoralists hit a region with a high enough forager population density to equalize the numbers advantage the agriculturalists are blocked and pots have a chance to flow across the equilibrium line.

I think relatively high density forager places are likely to include deltas and flood-plains (which before irrigation i assume were wetlands) so i’d picture the advance of the first farmers (and first pastoralists) possibly being population blocked at places like the Nile delta, Red Sea delta, Wei valley etc.

###

I think most of this testable in theory if these genetic signals can be teased out separately

1) If there’s a subarctic east-west gene flow and a steppe gene flow then the Finnish signal and the “Goth” signal might be different.
2) Once-Tocharian type tribes that were bounced into Europe earlier might have a “Hun1” signal but not a “Hun2” signal.
3) The once-steppe signal should map onto the places where the Goths, Vandals etc settled.
4) The historical examples e.g. Goths, may represent later versions of things that happened at earlier times also e.g. the celts who came over the alps and burned Rome c400 BC may been bounced by earlier steppe movements in the same way the later Goths were or Caesar saying the Belgae were originally from much further east.
5) If the western part of early Tocharian mtdna was mostly from around the Transcaucasus area but later mtdna was more north european.

etc etc

probably easier said than done though.

@66
“My point is, even prior to the Turkic expansion, East Turkestan was surrounded by East Eurasian populations in three cardinal directions.”

They were? east yes, but south is the Himalayas and north? If the equilibrium line had been skewed to the east for a long time before getting pushed back west then the people to the north might have originally been like the Tarim people so a mixture. Either way i think raiding can at least potentially explain an increase in western mtdna in the Tarim (if that is even the argument as i’m not entirely sure).

If you imagine the steppe as a space and the raiding flow going from the settled areas around the space into the space than counter-intuitively whoever is the current top dog in the raider space will be physically changing over time to become more like the people they are raiding. So if the top dogs at one time were western/iranian then they would gradually become more north asian and vice versa (i think that’s right).

If so the high north asian signal might make perfect sense. I don’t recall reading any ancient writers physically describing the Goths, Vandals, Alans etc but if they were similar to the Tarim people in this regard a 20% north asian signal might not actually be as surprising as it first seemed if it maps onto where the Goths and Alans and Vandals etc ended up.

@60 “That doesn’t address the issue of proportions…That shift in proportions would create a shift in mobility and range.”

Another variation on the same basic idea of viable range is maybe illustrated from a link posted in the other thread

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehrgarh

“The earliest farming in the area was developed by semi-nomadic people using plants such as wheat and barley and animals such as sheep, goats and cattle.”

similar to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture

“was dominated by animal husbandry of sheep, cattle, pigs and goats, but there was also hunting and fishing. Primitive wheat and barley was grown on small patches that were fast depleted, due to which the population frequently moved small distances.”

So if the first farmers didn’t rotate their crops (and i assume someone had to have the idea before they did) then agriculturalists would be forced to be at least slightly semi-nomadic unless they were living on land you could grow food on year after year without it ever getting depleted.

The only type of land you can grow food on year after year without it ever getting depleted are flood-plains (because you’re effectively getting new soil delivered to your doorstep) but flood-plains have their own problems hinted at by the name so it seems to me the optimal and possibly the only(?) suitable places (early on) for fully sedentary agriculture might have been right on the edge of a flood-plain – close enough but not too close.

@12
Yes i see what you mean. I was thinking earlier, pre-farming, and wondering what environments would have had the highest forager population densities and if the Gedrosia component might somehow be related to that.

(I was thinking forager pumps might be deltas / wetlands / floodplains hence why the Indus delta would be a contender but it’s just a thought.)

@9
“Out of all the components that Dienekes regularly finds, Gederosia confuses me the most.”

Same.

The general model i have in my head is of population density as a kind of pump which pushes people out in all directions (modified by path of least resistance) with a force proportional to the potential difference between the population densities in adjacent regions with equilibrium lines where multiple pumps cancelled out – so almost like a map of electrical or magnetic potential difference.

The gedrosia element makes me wonder if at some point pre-farming there was a major forager pump somewhere in the world i.e. a place where the local foragers had a high population density relative to adjacent regions, so the foragers in that region spread out like a more diffuse and slower acting version of the farming pump.

@60 “There is zero archaeological evidence for pastoralism, but 100% evidence for agriculture.”

That doesn’t address the issue of proportions. If there was a latitudinal cline in effectiveness of crops in early agriculture that could (would imo) result in a latitudinal cline in the proportion of crops vs animals (or fishing and foraging) in a successful agricultural package in a particular region to substitute for the relative weakness of their crop package. That shift in proportions would create a shift in mobility and range.

(Over time the crops would be improved and the proportions would shift back to crops.)

.
@61
“There were of course ways to raid into West Eurasian areas, and traders from Central Asia would come into the area.”

Well 75% slaves in the Crimea (according to Wiki anyway) implies it happened quite a lot and again (according to wiki) slave raids into Russia from the steppe were going until quite late. I think that covers potential quantity.

“However, there were East Eurasians to the East”

Unless i’ve misunderstood something isn’t that the point? I may be mixed up here but i thought the argument was over originally the western mtdna among the Tocharians was the minority so how did it later became more 50/50?

If the steppe’s east-west equilibrium line was exactly in the middle with equal raiding potential on either side you’d expect the mtdna among raiders in the middle to be 50/50 also. If the equilbrium line was skewed to the east you’d expect the mtdna to be skewed to the east. If the equilibrium line was skewed to the west the mtdna would be skewed to the west.

So it seems plausible to me that originally it was skewed to the east – as a secondary effect of the first farmers – with for example smaller but more mobile groups in the Tarim basin raiding into places like the Wei valley (thus giving an eastern skew to their mtdna) then if later in history one of the Hun incarnations pushed the steppe’s east-west equilibrium line back more towards the midpoint and then raided in both directions the mtdna would gradually move to 50/50.

However i may have misunderstood the point you and Onur were debating about so in that case ignore.

(If the above is a reasonable approximation then i think mtdna on the steppe could have gone back and forth a few times: skewed to the east early on by the IE, then pushed back towards 50/50 by the hsiong-nu, then skewed to the west by the mongols and then back towards 50/50 again by the russian expansion.)

@53
“Not that I am denying the veracity of the studies you cited. I just don’t see any way, given the isolated position of the region, that there would have been major fresh infusions of West/South Eurasian past the Bronze Age.”

That’s the thing. The Tarim basin was on one of the silk routes. In fact it’s the route that leads into the Wei valley (which interestingly is apparently one of the places where agriculture started in China*).

.
“Thus the question must be asked how could the maternal lineages from West Eurasia have been retained – or even enriched – if in the times of earliest settlement they were in the distinct minority?”

Slave-raids?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Russia

“In 1382 the Golden Horde under Khan Tokhtamysh sacked Moscow, burning the city and carrying off thousands of inhabitants as slaves…blah blah……In Crimea, about 75% of the population consisted of slaves.”

A bit like the middle-east but in reverse.

.
*As an aside looking at these movements mostly from the point of view of physical geography and with two rules 1) crop-dominated package limited latitudinally and 2) path of least resistance, and then looking at a relief map

On the surface the easiest route from eastern Anatolia to India looks pretty clear
– fertile crescent
— Persian coast
— Indus
but if you then add on the route from there to the Yellow and/or Yangtze valleys it looks to me like the overall easiest path from eastern Anatolia to the yellow river at least might have been via the Tarim *if* the people taking that route were less constrained by the latitude limits i.e. if they were more pastoralist-weighted.

@53
“Outside influences during putative IE entry (Globular Amphora, Corded Ware) clearly were agriculturalists.”

I confused the issue by calling them pastoralists.

Say for the sake of example you have a farming package invented in a valley in eastern Anatolia which is 70% crops, 30% sheep. Now say in an adjacent mountainous area to the north-east that package doesn’t work because the crops don’t produce as much *but* by switching the proportions to say 50% crops, 50% sheep the package does work. It might provide a lower population density than the farmers in the valley but if it’s higher than foraging then it has a reason to expand.

I think the second more pastoralist package would have had a larger range – at least in the early days of farming – than the crop-dominated package. In terms of total population the former might have the edge but in terms of physical space i think the latter would.

The point that flows from this is the people who had a need to adapt the package are the ones most likely to have done so therefore people in relatively marginal land adjacent to the first farmers but not suitable for the original farming package would seem to fit the bill and following on from that the people who first developed that wider range package would have had a very big space to expand into (hence why i think those people would be more likely to be the ones who turned up at the mouth of the Danube).

Following on further if the 50% crops, 50% sheep package didn’t work further north then a 30% crops, 70% sheep package could extend the range further to the north up to a line where the resulting population density had no advantage over foraging.

So when i say first pastoralists in contrast to the first farmers in this context i really mean *more* pastoralist as a proportion (ranging up to actual pastoralist at the edge of their range).

(This is just an attempt to explain the (seemingly) non-IE speaking agriculturalists who (seemingly) settled the med islands and coasts (and the fertile crescent) early on and who were (seemingly) over-run by IE (or Semitic) speaking peoples later. Some or all of those seeminglys may be in dispute of course.)

“But there are many other ancient DNA studies of the Tarim basin”

I can see three possibilities.

1) General long-term slow admixture through proximity in the far northern latitude band simply because the distances are relatively much smaller that far north. This seems very plausible for the far north but not sure how it fits with Italy.

2) Same as (1) but it gradually diffused throughout Europe. I think this would mean the process would have to be really old and there should be a reasonably clear NE to SW cline and i can’t see a time or a reason why that would happen – except out of America! (joking) – but who knows.

3) Most plausible to me: Yuezhi, Tocharians etc. Just reading up on all those groups hanging around the NW and northern borders of China for apparently a very long time who were eventually pushed west by the Hsiong-Nu etc. If those originally more western tribes had eventually become say up to 50%+ admixed in the vicinity of NW China and were then pushed back west in various pulses over time by various incarnations of Huns then as they were pushed back into less admixed tribes further west they might gradually reduce the admixture level until they ended up at whatever it turns out to be.

However if this idea is correct then i think that implies the north asian signal should pretty much mirror the germanic/slav signal i.e. if you assume various admixed yuezhi type tribes were pushed west over time who in turn then pushed into and admixed with germanics/slavs who then in turn pushed further west and south (including the various invasions over the Alps into northern Italy) then i think that means the two signals should be paired? That could fit northern Italy but for France i guess you’d need to know where the sample was from.

Also, assuming (1) is separately true but more limited to the northern latitude band then i think that also implies the north asian signal in Finns might be different to the one elsewhere i.e. the Finnish one would be nore subarctic HG and the elsewhere one would be more steppe nomad? That would depend on whether there was a noticeable enough difference between the sub-arctic HG tribes and the nomadic steppe tribes?

(Actually if there are known genetic differences between the historical Mongols and the earlier top dogs e.g. Hsiong-nu, Huns, or whoever at earlier stages in history then you might be able to separate out the signals like tree rings i.e. the strongest signal among the population who are furthest north and east i.e. Russia, might be the most recent i.e. Mongol but the strongest signal further south and west might be from earlier. I’m not sure that makes sense. Put another way if a tribe was pushed south early they might carry a Hun signal but not a mongol one.)

If it’s not a result of possibly multiple ripples of admixed steppe tribes being pushed back into less admixed tribes further west in a domino effect i personally can’t see an earlier time when it could have happened because unless i’m missing something it would have to be pre-farming.

(When i say Hsiong-nu, Hun, Yuezhi etc i don’t mean them specifically as i assume this westward push process would have happened (if it did) in multiple stages.)

@40 Ty – those upper bounds are quite high then.
@39 Yes i see what you mean. I was mainly quibbling the “at least 20%” bit.

@37 Ah, i took the 5-18% from the opening post rather than the paper, so 9%-19% rather than 5%-18% with the far north around 19% and the French/Italian/Tuscan latitudes hovering around 10%?

“Ganges” in the earlier post was meant to be “Indus”.

.
@35
“Coupling the two posts, if “pure” North Europeans were at least 20% Asian-like”

The paper says 5-18% and just looking at the physical geography there’s an awful lot of barriers in the way *except* at the far north so i think the percentage could be dramatically skewed either way depending on how far north or south you sampled: 18% at the northern tip of Finnland down to 5% at the southern tip of Germany, averaging around 10% seems more plausible to me (depending on when it happened).

“and they are almost certainly a composite, from which some of the population is actually farmer-descended, the real aboriginal European population could have been very Asian shifted indeed.”

Would that be the case if the farmer-shift was on a south to north cline and the north asian shift was on a north to south cline?

Partial correlation with the central wedge height distribution from a while back – although of course that could be either cause or effect or both or neither.

@29
“South Asians are an interesting riddle in this context. Unlike in Africa and Europe, Neolithic “Southern”-like populations apparently did not expand into South Asia, where the “West Asian” component is instead much more significant.”

(Again, just guessing from looking at maps)

If you look at a world map

and draw a polygon from Eastern Anatolia to the Nile valley to the Ganges to the Yangtze and back to Eastern Anatolia then i wonder if you would be far off if you imagined that polygon roughly describing the latitude range limit of *early* agriculture (with large unsuitable holes within that range limit for other reasons also).

If so most of India would be outside that range so i wonder if that had something to do with it? If cowboys from further west/north knocked out the Ganges culture everything south of that (exception coastal cultures?) might have mostly still been HG.

The (possible) exception to this (possible) general latitudinal rule in Europe may have been fishing as a substitute for crops along the Atlantic coast. I don’t know if something similar happened in India with the Ganges level culture spreading around the coasts while the interior remained HG?