Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to philosopher of science Nathan Cofnas, whose specialty is biology and ethics. An American, Cofnas is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia University, and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. His Substack is here.

First, they discuss Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, which is outlined in his three-book series, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Cofnas reviews his own critiques of MacDonald’s theory, and the reception they received professionally and from MacDonald’s large cohort of online fans. He also discusses the impossibility in obtaining a hearing for MacDonald’s response to Cofnas’ arguments in academia given anxieties today about so much as “platforming” offensive ideas. Razib brings up the evolutionary biological aspects of MacDonald's theory, and why there are reasons to be skeptical due to the unrealistic parameters of mathematical models required by MacDonald’s theories.

They then turn to attempts to cancel Cofnas over his hereditarian views. Cofnas articulates his perspective that actually a woke-Left egalitarian perspective is probably the most rational position if you utterly reject hereditarianism, especially as regards group differences. Cofnas believes conservative arguments about the importance of culture in shaping outcomes have run their course. Finally, Razib presses Cofnas on the actual career prospects for a heterodox academic in the 21st century, and possible alternate routes to become a public intellectual.

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Your time is finite. Your phone and the internet stand ready to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Anthropology sometimes gets a bad rap from non-anthropologists in the US because postmodernist, post-scientific cultural theorists dominate the field’s public image. But genuinely interesting work is still out there if you know where to look.

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Marvin Harris was a Marxist anthropologist who died nearly 25 years ago, but his work theorizing about the rise and fall of cultures remains a fascinating read. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture examines how culture responds and adapts to ecological and economic pressures. As a Marxist, Harris analyzes scarcity, subsistence strategies, and class conflict, and how they shape and guide beliefs. The book makes the case that culture is not primarily driven by ideology, but by a society’s material needs. Religion, norms, and rituals emerge from the process of solving actual problems of protein supply, labor allocation, or social control, their centrality then fading or shifting when underlying conditions change. Harris’ Marxist monomania on economics and ecology may be overly ambitious, drafted to explain everything to a point that can become forced or unpersuasive, but considering material conditions’ essential role in shaping human cultural variation remains a fruitful exercise.

While Jared Diamond may be most famous for Guns, Germs and Steel, his earlier The Third Chimpanzee: the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal established his reputation, and presents a darker picture of humans and our world. While Guns, Germs and Steel is singularly focused on differences between human societies, The Third Chimpanzee places us in a broader zoological context, contrasting us with our cousins, the chimpanzees, who remain restricted to their narrow ancestral homeland from which we have long since burst forth. The Third Chimpanzee presents a dark Malthusian world that served as the crucible for so many human cultures. Diamond’s gloomier, more pessimistic world-view is partly a reflection of the book, published in 1991, still being in the shadow of 1970s environmental catastrophism. He also argues that Carl Sagan’s optimistic theories about the positive benefits of contact with aliens were wrongheaded; Diamond asserts that advanced species would treat a more primitive group harshly, just like in our own human history. The Third Chimpanzee suggests it is best we not make contact at all, because the universe itself is likely dangerous and Malthusian.

To understand present cultures, past cultures are still essential background, and archaeologist Steven Mithen’s After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC focuses specifically on the recent past of prehistory, as the ice sheets began retreating after the Last Glacial Maximum’s peak, but before the rise of the great literate civilizations. For many, the period of the “Ice Age” is a vague blanket term that covers the whole period before 11,500 years ago, the Pleistocene before our Holocene. But the vast span of the Pleistocene ran a broad gamut of variation, from the Eemian interglacial with temperatures warmer than our epoch, 130,000 to 150,000 years ago, to the Last Glacial Maximum, when the ice sheets’ geographical coverage peaked. After the Ice documents the period of ferment after the world began to slowly warm, and human cultures expanded from their refugia to adapt to newly habitable lands, until the sharp discontinuity in temperatures 11,500 years ago that defines the Ice Age’s end. Mithen’s narrative illustrates how cultural diversity emerged even among foragers as they expanded into new territories the retreating ice sheets exposed, but also the shifts triggered as a subset of foragers switched to sedentary farming.

One of the major phenomena that shapes culture, and allows us to measure variation, is religion. Anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained synthesizes ethnography, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to show the deep roots of this cultural package, and how it varies across societies. Boyer’s field work in Africa in particular injects a critical dimension that sets Religion Explained apart from other evolutionary treatments; for example African shamanism in the modern world is shown to have its own logic and rational basis. Boyer shows how religion emerged in a multi-step process from simple cognitive instincts, and how it might interact with the environment in a functional sense to produce local adaptations. While other anthropologists may attempt to interpret the religious beliefs of indigenous peoples on the people’s own terms, Boyer explains the origins of their beliefs.

Religion plays a big role in Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, but fundamentally the book is a work that shows the role of historically contingent events and how they shaped cultural norms. While other works survey many cultures, Henrich’s narrative aims to explain unique aspects of Western culture, in particular individualism, focus on abstract values and high social trust, and the deep historical roots of all three. While Harris in Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches focuses on proximate ecological adaptations, like partible inheritance becoming dominant among nomadic pastoralists, who divide the herd when the paterfamilias dies, The WEIRDest People in the World shows how arbitrary random events when experienced in sequence can shift a culture’s entire trajectory. Henrich focuses in particular on the Western Christian Church’s regulation of family life that reduced the role of kinship among Europeans as an organizing principle of society, and the cultural knock-on effects of that single variable being altered.

The Ethical Minefield of Testing Infants for Incurable Diseases. These pieces are predicated on hand wringing. A few decades into the information age we have the data; it’s not a question of if, but when.

It’s Waymo’s World. We’re All Just Riding in It. Waymo already has more rides than Lyft in San Francisco. I think with the imminent competition between Waymo and Tesla, 2025 will be seen as the robotaxi inflection point.

Real talk about FDR: Big progressive change has always involved massive compromise. This is something you would know from any serious reading of history; FDR had to compromise significantly with segregationists to get the New Deal. But many don’t trouble themselves with such “ancient” history so they find it plausible that FDR was as woke for his time as Bernie Sanders is today.

Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory. Overlapping with some of the interests of this Substack, the piece gets into how modern ancient DNA is reviving disgraced archaeological ideas.

Ghost populations in human origins. As a paleoanthropologist, John Hawks makes a point of reminding us that what someone like me looks at as statistical “ghost” populations are also actually real concrete populations in the fossil record.

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. Humans make science, so it’s not surprising that human drama interjects itself into the field. Luckily this does not seem to be a major issue in areas like human genomics where data abounds. But in others like paleoanthropology, where there are only a few fossils to go around, scarcity seems to bring out the worst in people.

Prehistoric genomes from Yunnan reveal ancestry related to Tibetans and Austroasiatic speakers. The key is that they seem to have found a “ghost” population genome that explains a lot of deeply diverged variation in East Asia, including the first modern human people in Tibet. (One of my proposed Journal Club candidates)

Faroese Whole Genomes Provide Insight into Ancestry and Recent Selection. 40 genomes. Just a decade ago, they were talking about sequencing the whole population. A good reminder that despite its rapid pace of advancement, there remain limits to how fast genomics can actually advance in Western nations given the general appetite for regulation and paternalistic oversight.

Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus. DNA degrades faster than protein, even if it offers tantalizingly more variation and fine-grained detail. These results are from 2-million-year-old samples, earlier than Homo. You will see more of this in the future. (another Journal Club candidate.)

Mutation-selection-drift balance models of complex diseases. This attempts to show how diseases can emerge in the context of conventional evolutionary parameters that are continuously introducing and reducing variation.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. My most recent deep dives have been on Carthaginians’ surprisingly European genetic profile and Sami indigeneity or lack thereof.

From The Punic Paradox: Genetically, Rome's great African rival was startlingly European:

And now, paleogenetics has revealed a new twist to this cultural resilience: it emerges that the Carthaginians who fought Rome for over a century in their extended cycle of pan-Mediterranean wars were overwhelmingly not actually descended from the original Levantine settlers who had emigrated from old Phoenicia. Instead, even the pre-Roman-era people of Carthage were predominantly of the same stock as southern Italians and Greeks (with a reasonable leavening of North African Berber stock, given Carthage’s geographical location west of Egypt). Though they spoke a Canaanite Semitic language related to Hebrew (and more distantly to Arabic), and worshipped pagan Semitic gods, the Carthaginians who spent five generations skillfully resisting and retaliating against the waxing belligerence of an ascendant Rome overwhelmingly prove to have been solely cultural heirs to the Phoenicians, not actually their biological descendants.

We know that voyages embarked out of the late-Bronze-Age Levant, when trade networks linked the western and eastern Mediterranean in the centuries before 1000 BC. The cities of the maritime Levant in the shadow of the Lebanon mountains seeded their identity, their understanding of the gods and the languages spoken along shores of the Mediterranean, among their far-flung Punic colonies. But their legacy of blood diminished over the generations until it was the faintest trickle by the time of Imperial Carthage. Carthage, and the Punic culture that was Phoenicia's legacy, embody cultural imperialism in its purest form, and its adopters wholly subsumed themselves into their newfound identity, overwriting their own ancestral traditions, a fact that would only be uncovered millennia later with ancient DNA.

And from the exploration of what it means to be indigenous in Europe, Nomads to natives: how Bronze-Age Sami newcomers became eternally Nordic:

The European Union recognizes exactly one European people as indigenous: the Sami, hardy inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Finland’s northern reaches. These northernmost Europeans are the picture of culturally unique: nomadic reindeer herders who speak Finno-Ugric languages very different even from the Finnish, to whose speakers they are related (you may recall Finnish speakers call their nation Suomi, the term Finland (like Lapland) is just an exonym care of their Swedish neighbors). The Sami were Europe’s last pagan people. Forcibly converted to Lutheranism only in the 1700’s, their shamanic practices left them open to accusations of blasphemy which occasionally ended with them being burned at the stake.

Today, about 100,000 Sami remain, half in Norway (mostly in the northern region of Finnmark), the next largest group in Sweden, then about 10,000 in Finland, with finally a small residual in Russia and scattered across the global diaspora (the actress Renee Zellweger has a Norwegian, partially Sami, mother). Though now largely restricted to the Arctic regions of the Nordic nations, historically the Sami were present much further south. Their status as indigenous peoples plainly rests on their statelessness, marginality, and a historical record which attests that settlers of ethnic Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritage pressed them ever further northward over the last millennium, in step with the emergence and consolidation of the modern nation-state. Stateless and marginalized for certain, but are the Sami indigenous under any meaningful definition of the term? Are they even Europe’s most indigenous people?

A new feature for paying subscribers this year, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club briskly reviews notable new papers or preprints. At the end of each edition, I invite subscribers to vote on papers/preprints for future editions. The fifth Journal Club just came out, so you are still in time to vote for next edition’s paper.

From Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry:

Fundamentally, this is the actionable reason we need to know about mutations in the human genome. Yes, they are the source of the variation that enables those of us interested in evolution, populations and their histories to use them as markers for tracing histories and understanding genetic processes, from recombination rates to natural selection in evolution, but first and foremost on the individual scale, they are the root mechanism unleashing thousands of dread diseases. The vast majority of mutations, the origin of genetic variants, are obviously inherited from parents. But a small number appear unpredictably, as new and original as the individual carrying them, in other words: de novo. Population geneticists are interested in mutation as a parameter in their models; they are satisfied to stipulate that the human mutation rate is 1.2✕10-8 per generation per base. But genomically informed medicine requires more precision and detail, and this is where extremely deep sequencing of known pedigrees as performed in this paper comes in, with basic science translating directly to diagnosis.

The first four editions:

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no

exception

Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

All my podcasts go ungated two weeks after their Substack release. So I encourage subscribers on the free plan who’d like to automatically get them to subscribe to that podcast stream (Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:

• David Gress: Plato and NATO 25 years later

• Ethan Strauss: sports and the end of the culture wars

• Manvir Singh: the shamanic roots of all religion

• Noah Carl and Bo Winegard: probing the intellectual darker web

• Tim Lee: 2025 and the driverless car revolution

• Bonus monologue: Finland as Germania

My own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com, including links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, and my more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, Quillette and Nautilus.

Comments are open to all for this post, so if you have more reading/listening suggestions or tips on who I should be talking to or what you’ve been waiting to read about, put them here.

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For 2025, I’m trying out a new occasional feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club: I’ll offer a brisk review and consideration of an interesting paper in human population genomics.

In the spirit of a conventional journal club, at the end of each post, interested subscribers can vote on next papers to review. I’m open both to covering the latest papers/preprints and reflecting back on seminal publications from across these first decades of the genomic era.

If your lab has work we might like or you otherwise want to suggest a paper for me to cover, feel free to respond to this email or comment on this post.

The first four editions are here:.

Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest

Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no exception

Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught

Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago

Free subscribers can get a sense of the format from my ungated coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:

The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination

We were selected: tracing what humans were made for

In last month’s journal club poll, the top vote getter was Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago (2025). But upon digging into the paper, I realized its strong archaeological focus (stratigraphy upon stratigraphy!) meant that my expertise didn’t really contribute much to unraveling it. So while I look into a conversation with someone equipped to shed more light, I instead bring you last month’s second most requested paper: Human de novo mutation rates from a four-generation pedigree reference (2025). It comes out of Evan Eichler’s group at the University of Washington, and appeared in Nature on April 23rd, 2025. The first author is David Porubsky.

The paper leverages both the gift of a complete multi-generational pedigree (the culmination of an international, decades-long human genetics collaboration going back decades, that produced the first extensive maps of the human genome starting in 1987), with the now ubiquitous power of deep whole-genome sequencing, to answer what in the end is a very simple question: what is our species’ de novo mutation rate? That is, how many unique new mutations emerge every generation per individual (i.e., mutations that differentiate you from your parents). Before we dive in, let’s review where mutations come from and why they are important.

The human genome consists of three billion bases, A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s. Of these bases, a large number in any individual vary from those carried by most other humans; around 4.5 million positions (often this is approximated as every thousandth base in your genome differing from the reference genome). These divergent bases are single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. But they are not the only genetic variants that matter, whether for functional variation or diseases. Further, in any given human, over 500,000 sections of the genome are impacted by indels, small deletions or insertions 50 bases or shorter. And finally, a class of variants qualifies as “structural,” by spanning more than 50 bases. These longer variants can still be both deletions and insertions, but at this scale they also include copy number variations, where a single gene gets copied on repeat, like a record getting stuck. Though only some tens of thousands of structural variants at most, appear in the genome, as versus millions of total SNPs, given that many structural variants number hundreds of bases in total length, you can see how their appearance has a more outsized impact on the genome than a simple headcount might suggest. Structural variants are less than 1% of the total variants in any given human’s genome, but they account for more than 50% of the DNA sequence in the genome that diverges from the reference.

Ultimately, such changes in the genome derive from mutations, and these matter for several reasons. In contexts where we call them “markers,” their utility to us is clearly as genealogical tracers allowing us to track the process of Mendelian transmission over the scale of generations and genetic evolution over millions of years. The concept of genetic markers emerged more than a century ago, when researchers began to track the inheritance of physical mutations in model organisms like Drosophila. Of course, each of the mutations in Drosophila, whether red eyes or droopy wings, was underpinned by a change in underlying genes. But in 1920, there were no sequencing machines, and geneticists did not yet even know that DNA was the specific molecular mode of information transmission genetics uses. They were simply looking at the correlation of inheritance between mutant characteristics, and from those values creating abstract genetic maps. Because recombination, the swapping of DNA segments across two copies of the genome in diploid organisms, continually breaks apart associations between genes, the more distant two underlying genes that cause the mutations, the more likely the telltale characteristics were to become decoupled as they were passed down through pedigrees.

Today population genomics takes the logic of harnessing genes as markers for other underlying phenomena to its logical conclusion. Using sequencing technology, researchers explore pedigrees and populations at hundreds of thousands of markers per individual, allowing them to infer population histories, population structure, as well as the genomic impact of evolutionary forces like natural selection. The more mutations that evade the body’s DNA-repair mechanisms, the more variation there is for these algorithms to examine. Early 21st-century molecular evolutionary studies have been blessed with an absolute surfeit of data compared to their late 20th-century predecessors because of the transformative impact of genomics. Before genome-wide technologies, most projects involving phylogenetic analyses of populations were limited to focusing on structural variants called “single tandem repeats,” or STRs. In an era where you would be lucky to get a few dozen markers, the reality that most SNPs are not all that variable (e.g., at a given position, the majority allele, A, might be at 92% frequency and the minority allele, T, at 8%), and only have four possible variable alleles, A, C, G and T, in the first place, was an additional severe limitation. In contrast, STRs record much more variation, providing more bang for the buck. An STR might consist of four bases (e.g., TTCT) repeated over and over, but the number of repeats could range between 1-30, due to structural variants’ order-of-magnitude higher mutation rate than SNPs. This means this hypothetical STR position would offer 30 potential variants, each stepwise increment in copy number marking a new variant.

Because most of the genome is not functional, like our famously vast realms of “junk DNA,” most STRs only reflect demographic forces, rather than natural selection. They are optimal DNA tracers of a population’s history, as the patterns found in these regions solely reflect drift and gene flow, or lack thereof, between populations, as well as different rates of migration and fluctuating population sizes over time.

But the STRs also appear in regions of the genome that code for protein. These are variations within genes that yield important downstream molecular consequences: the DNA is the first link in a causal chain that is translated into biochemistry (proteins and enzymes), sometimes morphology (e.g., nose shape) and even behavior (e.g., whether fish school or not). One of the best known cases of STRs causing functional change is Huntington’s disease, a fatal adult-onset neurodegenerative disease that spells loss of motor function in the space of a few years. Huntington’s is caused by a trinucleotide repeat, strings of CAG injecting themselves in the regular progression of DNA bases, their intrusion changing the value of other amino acids in the protein sequence. These repeats appear in exon 1 of the gene that codes for the huntingtin protein, which expresses in the brain. Exons are units within a gene where transcribed RNA is eventually translated into protein. This is in contrast to other parts of the gene, introns, where the transcribed RNA does not direct the making of protein. Each exon is further broken down into codons defined by sets of three bases that together each direct the synthesis of one of 61 amino acids. For biophysical reasons, the CAG repeat in the huntingtin protein gene goes rogue, proliferating at an unusually high rate, resulting in a lot of malformed protein, whose structure and folding dynamics are nonfunctional in their normal biochemical pathway. The mechanistic way the protein breaks is that the CAG codon corresponds to the amino acid glutamine. Large numbers of CAG repeats at the beginning of the gene mean that when huntingtin is translated into protein it ends up weighed down with an inordinate number of glutamine amino acids, literally slicking the normal protein with sticky “glutamine sheets” that render it non-functional.

Today Razib talks to repeat guest Steve Hsu about China, a topic with so many currently relevant dimensions gIven the PRC’s clear emergence as an economic, military and political rival to the US. Hsu is a Caltech‑trained theoretical physicist who migrated from black holes to big data, co‑invented privacy tech at SafeWeb, helped found the biotech company Genomic Prediction, all while remaining a prominent public voice on genetics, intelligence and the future of human enhancement. He is also a professor of physics at Michigan State, and from 2012-2020 was vice president for research and graduate studies there.

Razib and Hsu discuss whether China is innovating and how meanwhile American regulation and culture are stifling its domestic creativity. A proud Iowan, Hsu rebuts the notion that he is pro-China, seeing himself simply as a realist convinced that it is important to face the PRC head on and assess its strengths candidly. He and Razib talk about China’s demographic headwinds. Hsu points out the reality of demographic inertia. The generation already born in the 21st century is an abundant young workforce who will power the nation’s rise for the next 30-40 years; that disastrously plummeting fertility making headlines today is a concern post-dated for at least a generation down the road. They also discuss the quality of Chinese higher education, and the reality that the population today is far more educated than it was 25 years ago. Hsu also talks about possible cultural and biobehavioral differences between East Asians and Europeans, and addresses why South Asians seem to be better adapted to succeed in American corporate culture.

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Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam, "Furthermore, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.” This was the parting phrase with which Cato the Elder consistently concluded his speeches to the Roman Senate in the mid-2nd-century BC lead-up to the Third Punic War. Five decades after the Second Punic War, during which Hannibal had ravaged Italy, only to fall short of conquering it, instead sealing the Carthaginian Empire’s ultimate doom, the city of Carthage itself had nevertheless revived as a vibrant mercantile entrepôt. Its imperial pretensions of previous centuries, when Carthage’s colonies encircled the entire western Mediterranean’s shores, were long gone. But if the Romans were great at war, the Carthaginians’ commercial spirit remained unrivaled. Once intolerant of any military rival in its orbit, Rome now grew jealous of Carthage’s glittering wealth, which continued to wax even in the persistent shadow of the ascendent Roman Republic.

In fact though, Carthage’s greatness long predated that late 2nd-century Indian summer in Rome’s shadow; but since the Punic people did not birth a successor civilization, its genuinely deserved reputation among the ancients can only be pieced together from others’ stray observations. For example, buried in Greek archives lies a 101-line translated record of a 5th-century BC voyage originally authored by a Carthaginian navigator named Hanno, scion of the city-state’s most prominent family ‌of that day. The text bears testimony to Carthaginian maritime audacity in the centuries before their Mediterranean-wide conflict with Rome, as their fleets flew past the frontiers of the known world.

With a flotilla of 60 ships, Hanno voyaged beyond the Pillars of Hercules, founding several cities along the coast of today’s Morocco. Eventually the fleet encountered “Ethiopians,” which almost certainly means that Hanno reached sub-Saharan Africa, pushing southward along the Atlantic coast. Finally, the passage references journeying into lands with volcanic mountains and gorillas whom they identified as “hairy men.” The Carthaginians killed some of these latter, taking their hairy pelts back to Carthage, where they remained on public display until the city’s destruction in 146 BC.

The scholarly consensus seems to be that Hanno and his fleet pushed at least to modern day Senegal, though many argue that the description of a volcanic mountain more closely fits Mt. Cameroon, while gorillas only range much further eastward in Africa, beyond modern Nigeria as the coast begins to steer south toward the Congo river. While Hanno’s fleet dramatically reset the limit of the southern frontiers known to Mediterranean peoples, Himilco the Navigator led other Carthaginian ships northward, likely establishing contact with the peoples of Britain four centuries before Julius Caesar would, first securing consistent trade routes to bring precious Cornish tin to the Mediterranean market.

Hanno and Himilco’s voyages occurred at the beginning of the Carthaginian Age in the western Mediterranean, more than two centuries before the First Punic War. In 535 BC, Carthage’s navy defeated forces marshalled by the Greek colony of Massalia (modern Marseille) near Corsica, while a subsequent 509 BC treaty with newly republican Rome ceded to the Punic power the seas of the western Mediterranean beyond Italy’s shores. In the next century, Carthage’s armies repeatedly crossed over from North Africa into Sicily, conquering the western half of the island, subjugating its numerous Greek-speaking cities. By the early 3rd century BC, Carthage held sway over the North African coast to its west, and had established colonies and possessions across the Mediterranean in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and all along Iberia’s eastern coast, as well as establishing hegemony eastward along the North African coast toward the edges of Egyptian domains.

Carthage’s appellation at this time was “ruler of the sea,” and its trading empire extended both to the farthest western limits of the ancients’ known world, beyond civilization’s edge, and back eastward, as its magnificent “silver fleet” routinely arrived to disgorge wares in Egyptian ports, in the Phoenician motherland, as well as in Greek trading hubs like the southern Italian port of Taranto. Poised at the junction between the western and eastern Mediterranean, in 300 BC, the city of Carthage possessed both an empire and a stranglehold on any commerce that traversed the network of sea lanes. Its prestige was such that the storied Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s most successful generals and fated to only end with glamorous Cleopatra’s ascendence, even chose to feature the Phoenician horse symbol associated with the Punic power upon its own coinage. In the decades before the first hostilities between Rome and Carthage, the latter city was the populous one, with half a million inhabitants, a cosmopolitan nexus of trade brimming with more humanity at its peak than Athens, Syracuse or even Alexandria.

Up until the Third Punic War began, long past Carthage’s apogee, the city remained a bustling nexus of trade. This dynamism was completely obliterated, and with it was swept away any memory or record of probably additional centuries' worth of audacious voyages into the barbarian realms to the north and south. While Rome’s advances were accomplished piecemeal, methodically, their Carthaginian antagonists seem more to have proceeded by the seat of their pants, stitching together a far-flung empire via risk-taking commercial forays, streaking across the seas, the society’s progress driven by profit-minded merchants rather than an ambitious general’s quest for bloody glory.

Hannibal’s defeat two generations prior, in the Second Punic War, ended Carthage’s imperial dreams, as a triumphant Rome stripped it of all its colonies, absorbing them into its own burgeoning portfolio. What was an extensive Punic commonwealth that had ringed half the Mediterranean was reduced to a rump, just Carthage and its near hinterland. But within a few decades, even this proved too much for Rome, which concocted a casus belli, and then crushed the token Carthaginian resistance. The citizens of the merchant-city were killed, scattered or enslaved. The once dazzling Carthagian capital of great defensive walls and magnificent public buildings was utterly erased, preserved only in the memories of its Roman enemies.

Though Carthage would reemerge as an urban center again more than five decades after its obliteration in the Third Punic War, one last time rising as a great city of western Mediterranean antiquity, that late incarnation was a new city built atop the ruins of the old. And yet, though the political power and military glory of the old Carthaginians faded to faint historical memory, a matter for annalists and a morality tale for rhetoricians, the Carthaginian cultural legacy continued on in language, religion and folkways. Septimius Severus, a Punic-descended Libyan born in the colonial Carthaginian city of Leptis Magna near modern Tripoli, became Roman Emperor in AD 193. And St. Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century AD, more than 550 years after Carthage's destruction, records the presence of Punic speakers in the North African countryside.

Much of what actual precise detail we know of Carthage we glean from the extensive works of contemporary 2nd-century BC historian Polybius, who chronicled the wars between the North African city-state and Rome from 264 to 146 BC. For the Romans, Carthage’s rise and fall served mostly as a testament to their republican virtues, a foil for their fortitude in the face of repeated wars, a vivid proof of their ability to overcome oriental avarice and opportunism. But however little recorded, the city-state’s legacy is far richer, and extended long after its jealous rival’s ultimate victory.

Carthage and its culture shaped Mediterranean history for 1,500 years, from the city’s 9th-century BC founding to North Africa’s last centuries under the Roman Empire as the forces of Islam closed in. Rome ultimately won and wrote the histories, but before its defeat, Carthage had already left an indelible imprint as one of the Mediterranean’s preeminent powers, a juggernaut of undeniable political, military and mercantile achievement centuries before Rome’s consolidation of Italy. Even after the Carthaginian homeland’s absorption into the Roman system, the Punic language had already sunk deep enough roots in North Africa to persist as a rural tongue, with Christian priests still preaching in Punic under St. Augustine several centuries after they had abandoned their old pagan religion.

And now, paleogenetics has revealed a new twist to this cultural resilience: it emerges that the Carthaginians who fought Rome for over a century in their extended cycle of pan-Mediterranean wars were overwhelmingly not actually descended from the original Levantine settlers who had emigrated from old Phoenicia. Instead, even the pre-Roman-era people of Carthage were predominantly of the same stock as southern Italians and Greeks (with a reasonable leavening of North African Berber stock, given Carthage’s geographical location west of Egypt). Though they spoke a Canaanite Semitic language related to Hebrew (and more distantly to Arabic), and worshipped pagan Semitic gods, the Carthaginians who spent five generations skillfully resisting and retaliating against the waxing belligerence of an ascendant Rome overwhelmingly prove to have been solely cultural heirs to the Phoenicians, not actually their biological descendants.

We know that voyages embarked out of the late-Bronze-Age Levant, when trade networks linked the western and eastern Mediterranean in the centuries before 1000 BC. The cities of the maritime Levant in the shadow of the Lebanon mountains seeded their identity, their understanding of the gods and the languages spoken along shores of the Mediterranean, among their far-flung Punic colonies. But their legacy of blood diminished over the generations until it was the faintest trickle by the time of Imperial Carthage. Carthage, and the Punic culture that was Phoenicia's legacy, embody cultural imperialism in its purest form, and its adopters wholly subsumed themselves into their newfound identity, overwriting their own ancestral traditions, a fact that would only be uncovered millennia later with ancient DNA.

Carthage’s origin story as recorded by Greek authors has Queen Dido founding the city in 814 BC, with the name Carthage coming from Qart-hadasht, or “New City” in Phoenician. Dido was fleeing political turmoil in her home city of Tyre, which lies in modern-day coastal Lebanon. Though Dido’s tale clearly belongs to a topos of fictional founding myths, key actors within the narrative seem to correspond to real historical figures. Dido’s grandfather, Balazero, is likely Baa‘li-maanzer, a king of Tyre, historically recorded as paying tribute to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III in 841 BC. Whatever the legend’s actual veracity, the earliest evidence of Phoenician archaeological items in the environs of Carthage dates to the 9th century BC, in line with the ancient authors’ dates for Dido leading a migration out of Tyre.

But this emigration was part of a centuries-long process that saw Phoenicia rise as an independent power in the Near East. At the height of the Late Bronze Age, before 1200 BC, Phoenicia and the city-states of the Levant were catspaws in the Egyptian, Hittite and Assyrian Empires’ geopolitical machinations. They served as centers for trade and diplomacy, their hinterlands’ cedar forests meanwhile feeding shipbuilding and construction’s appetite for lumber, particularly in wealthy Egypt. But with the great states’ collapse after 1200 BC, the key cities of the coastal Levant, Tyre, Sidon and Byblos chief among them, became independent mercantile powers. Collaborating with the United Kingdom of Israel, the region’s paramount land power, Phoenicia's coastal cities drove an early Iron-Age economic renaissance powered by voyages of exploration in search of wealth. The Bible, describing King Solomon’s reign, relates that:

For the king’s ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Hiram. Once every three years the merchant ships came, bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and monkeys.

Tarshish here refers to the kingdom of Tartessos in southwest Spain, inland from the Straits of Gibraltar, and Hiram was a 10th-century ruler of Tyre. This underscores that in the century before Carthage’s founding, Phoenician trade networks already extended to the Pillars of Hercules. And the importance of faroff Cornwall’s tin mines for the smelting of bronze reflects how long bustling trade networks had already stretched from the great cities of the Near East, up the Atlantic seaboard.

With the end of the Bronze Age imperial order, a chaotic collection of entrepreneurial city-states sent traders and colonies outward, to the Mediterranean’s very limits. Their frenetic decentralized forays replaced a previous regime of staid royal-sponsored interchange conceived more as gift exchanges to nourish diplomacy between potentates than the grubby hustle of trading houses. Even a casual reader of historians like Herodotus and Thucydides will know that ancient Iron-Age Greece colonized Sicily, southern Italy and southern France. Sicily and southern Italy were Magna Graecia, and Athens’ attempted invasion of Syracuse illustrates that this western extension of the Greek world was always seen as an integral part of Hellenic geopolitics. But the Greeks were latecomers, their primary period of colonization dating to 750 BC and after. The Phoenicians, from whom we have far scantier records, seem to have begun their explorations centuries prior, expanding not just in North Africa, but to Spain and Sicily as well. Cádiz, Palermo and Malta all retain Phoenician roots.

But Carthage, near modern-day Tunis, was the greatest of antiquity’s colonies, even going on to seed its own urban progeny, like Cartagena in Spain and Marsala in Sicily. It was the jewel in the crown of Phoenicia's expansive cultural empire, which had become a veritable Punic forest towering over the modest original grove of Levantine cities, Byblos, Sidon and Tyre, which lay in a string just 100 kilometers long. And yet new genetic evidence suggests that while Carthage’s cultural roots were indisputably Levantine, at its imperial apogee, from 400 BC, when it had already dispatched both Greeks and Etruscans, all the way through the storied long century of Punic Wars that roiled the Mediterranean until 146 BC, its Near Eastern demographic foundation was already buried so deep beneath a new genetic superstructure that the signal was almost entirely lost.

Today Razib talks to David  Gress, a Danish historian. The son of an American literary scholar and a Danish writer, he grew up in Denmark, read Classics at Cambridge, and then earned a Ph.D. in medieval history from Bryn Mawr College in the US in 1981. During a fellowship form 1982-1992 at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he published on Cold‑War strategy, German political culture, and Nordic security. He has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs, an assistant professor of Classics at Aarhus University, and professor of the history of civilization at Boston University. He co‑directed the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and remains a senior fellow of the Danish free‑market think tank CEPOS while writing a regular column for Jyllands‑Posten. His breakthrough book, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998), argues that Western success sprang from a hard‑edged fusion of Roman order, Germanic liberty, Christian morality, and Smithian economics, rather than being a single disgraceful arc from Greco‑Roman‐paganism to secular Enlightenment that bypassed the Middle Ages.

Razib asks Gress how he would have written Plato to NATO today, more than 25 years later, and he says he would have emphasized Christianity’s role in creating a unified Western culture out of Greco-Roman and Germanic diversity more. Gress also reiterates that he does not deny the Greek foundation of Western Civilization, but rather, his work was a corrective to a very thin and excessively motivated and partisan narrative that stripped out vast periods of European history. They also discuss Gress’ own own peculiar identity, the son of an American, born to a Danish mother, raised in Denmark who converted to Catholicism as an adult, and how that all fits into a broader European identity. They also discuss the impact of mass immigration on the national identities of Europe in the last generation, and Gress’ opinions as to the European future. Razib also asks Gress about the role that evolutionary ideas may have in shaping human history, and how his own views may have changed since From Plato to NATO. They also discuss when it is plausible to say that the West was a coherent idea, and whether the Protestant Reformation was the beginning of the end for the unitary civilization that was Latin Christendom.

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On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib welcomes back Ethan Strauss, a writer who has covered sports and culture for the past decade, including in the book The Victory Machine: The Making and Unmaking of the Warriors Dynasty. More recently his writing is to be found at his Substack, House of Strauss, which is notable for offering a candid take on the cross-pollination between broader culture and athletics, notably in the piece Nike's End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike.

Strauss and Razib first discuss professional sports and the different representation of various nationalities. Strauss recounts the generational attempt by the NBA to get Chinese representation to gin up a lucrative rivalry, and how it sputtered due to the reality that 1.4 billion Han Chinese seem to have less basketball talent than small nations like Croatia. Razib also asks about how and why baseball is popular in parts of Latin America and East Asia, and why there are so many more Dominicans in MLB than Mexicans. Strauss says differences between populations are so obvious in sports there’s no need for complex social explanations.

Then they explore the role of DEI in professional sports, and especially the NBA, and how it might be impacting decisions in the league. They recall the years around 2020, when a drive for minority representation, and in particular of blacks, was prevalent across the corporate world, and how thatimpacted professional sports. Strauss then offers his theory for why the Dallas Mavericks inexplicably traded away a potentially generational talent, Luka Dončić, and Mark Cuban’s role in the choice. Finally, he highlights the racism that Jeremy Lin, one of the few Asian American stars in the 2010’s, faced from fellow players.

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Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about shamanism, religion and anthropology. Singh is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. An artist and essayist, he is also now a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His academic interests lie in explaining why most human societies, from preliterate foragers to urbanites, develop cultural phenomena like “witchcraft, origin myths, property rights, sharing norms, lullabies, dance music, and gods.” He just came out with his first book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.

First Razib asks what Singh exactly means by shamanism, and whether it is a religion or not. Singh argues that shamanism is religion, that in some ways it is the primal religion. While many would contrast institutional religions like Christianity with shamanism, Singh points out that even Christianity includes shamanic practices, as in the Acts of the Apostles, or in some of the Pentecostal sects of Protestantism. He also discusses how his theoretical understanding of religion was complemented by field-work among the Mentawai tribe of Indonesia, who have a rich shamanic tradition. Razib then foregrounds the question of whether shamanism was invented in a particular place and time, like Siberia as argued by some 20th-century scholars, or whether it is universal in our psychology. Singh argues for the latter position, illustrating the fact that many cultures seem to lose shamanism when the number of adherents falls low enough, but that they seem to regain it once their popularity bounces back. Humanity’s shamanic impulse is always there, at the ready. Razib and Singh also discuss the ubiquity of shamanic practices across East Asia, especially in Korea and Japan. In the latter society, shamanism forms the foundation of one of the people’s two major religions, Shinto. Finally, they address the role of psychedelic drugs in the emergence of shamanism cross-culturally.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Bo Winegard and Noah Carl, the editors behind the online publication Aporia Magazine, founded in 2022. Winegard and Carl are both former academics. Winegard has a social psychology Ph.D. from Florida State University, and was an assistant professor at Marietta College. He was an editor at Quillette before moving to Aporia. Carl earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Oxford University. He was a research fellow at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, before becoming a contributor to The Daily Skeptic and UnHerd, and a managing editor at Aporia.

First, Razib asks Winegard and Carl about their respective cancellations, and the recent attacks on Aporia from the British media in particular. Winegard observes that many of the criticisms were muddled, as journalists struggled to get basic facts straight about who did what, as well as mixing up present associations among various editors with past ones. The two also address the change in the culture over the last few years, as cancellations seem to have lost some of their bite. Then Razib asks Winegard about the perception that Aporia is fixated on the third-rail of American culture: race and IQ, and its relevance to social policy and politics. Winegard talks about how he has long since said everything he has to say on the topic, but he still finds that the public conversation fails to address the possibility of cognitive differences between populations, and so keeps finding himself wading back in, to fill a gap in the discourse. Razib also asks the editors about their view of “cold winters theory,” which attempts to explain the higher IQs of temperate zone populations versus tropical ones.

Then they discuss the disappointments of the MAGA movement, and its appeal to populist emotion. Winegard had hoped that despite its inchoate nature, it might have been able to pare back the radical excesses of the progressive cultural changes of the 2010’s, but now he worries that overreach may up the chances that woke policies make a comeback with the inevitable political backlash in the next few years. Winegard also addresses his personal souring on reflexive anti-wokism, and Carl shares his own views from across the Atlantic, where Britain appears to follow in the US’ footsteps, even if from an entirely different social-historical context. Winegard discusses the difficulties of maintaining a consistent heterodoxy in the face of tribalistic demands for conformity. Finally, they discuss the path forward for publications like Aporia that do not toe any particular party line.

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The European Union recognizes exactly one European people as indigenous: the Sami, hardy inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Finland’s northern reaches. These northernmost Europeans are the picture of culturally unique: nomadic reindeer herders who speak Finno-Ugric languages very different even from the Finnish, to whose speakers they are related (you may recall Finnish speakers call their nation Suomi, the term Finland (like Lapland) is just an exonym care of their Swedish neighbors). The Sami were Europe’s last pagan people. Forcibly converted to Lutheranism only in the 1700’s, their shamanic practices left them open to accusations of blasphemy which occasionally ended with them being burned at the stake.

Today, about 100,000 Sami remain, half in Norway (mostly in the northern region of Finnmark), the next largest group in Sweden, then about 10,000 in Finland, with finally a small residual in Russia and scattered across the global diaspora (the actress Renee Zellweger has a Norwegian, partially Sami, mother). Though now largely restricted to the Arctic regions of the Nordic nations, historically the Sami were present much further south. Their status as indigenous peoples plainly rests on their statelessness, marginality, and a historical record which attests that settlers of ethnic Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritage pressed them ever further northward over the last millennium, in step with the emergence and consolidation of the modern nation-state. Stateless and marginalized for certain, but are the Sami indigenous under any meaningful definition of the term? Are they even Europe’s most indigenous people?

Well, it’s complicated. They are and they aren’t. And that stark divide between some of Europe’s genuinely most indigenous, rooted ancestry and some of its most recent, barely prehistoric genetic inputs runs a variegated course through nearly every Sami genome. Sami average some 60% deeply indigenous European heritage and some 40% genuinely exotic ancestry inputs from interlopers who reached Europe’s most remote corner just some three millennia ago, a hybrid of Siberians and the remote foragers who ranged between the Baltic and the Urals.

To pick apart the recipe of this distinctive heritage, let’s start by rewinding beyond the past millennium of the Sami’s undisputed marginalization. The combined evidence from archaeology, linguistics, and now genetics concurs that the Sami presence as we know it today in Scandinavia and Finland was not primal. The first people of the domains they now inhabit bore no cultural resemblance to today’s natives. The people we know as Sami, culturally and linguistically, would only arise around 3,000 years ago. Upon arrival, the largely Siberian men assimilated local women from Europe’s northernmost indigenous hunter-gatherer populations, the resulting hybrid people eventually expanding inexorably southward, displacing the Germanic-speaking ancestors of Norwegians and Swedes as they went.

Today’s Sami, Finnic-speakers whose native cultural toolkit remains firmly Uralic, are not some window onto Nordic Europe’s deep indigenous past. If anything, the Sami culturally, and in large part genetically, are arrivistes. The most interesting twist in their story might actually be an almost exact inversion of the EU party line; Sami interlopers helped themselves to Europe’s most unforgiving territories, being uniquely empowered to strip those domains from their previous inhabitants, given their uncannily apt cultural toolkit honed thousands of miles away in another inhospitable stretch of Arctic Eurasia. That culture left them so ecologically well equipped to thrive in Europe’s northernmost climes that modern Europeans have a hard time imagining they were not always there. Perhaps we can see a small parallel in the alacrity with which plains tribes wholesale adopted horse culture upon the animal’s arrival in North America. Anything but culturally indigenous, the Sami have thrived in their adopted homeland because they happen to have arrived there perfectly provisioned for such conditions.

Just on a superficial level, many Sami have a vaguely Asiatic mien. Today, drawing on advances in the field of ancient DNA, genetics has established the indisputable reality of their Siberian connections. A 2018 paper, Ancient Fennoscandian genomes reveal origin and spread of Siberian ancestry in Europe, probes the roots of the Finnic peoples in the context of contemporary and ancient European genetic variation. In addition to contemporary populations, this paper compared several prehistoric and historic samples. Three individuals above, whose identifying labels begin with “JK,” are from Levänluhta near Vaasa on Finland’s west coast, far south of the modern Sami homeland of Lapland that hugs the shores of the Arctic. Though the regions are firmly Finnish-speaking today, toponymic clues across central and even southern Finland indicate the earlier presence of Sami speakers. The three Levänluhta individuals’ archaeological context dates to the first millennium, between 300 and 800 AD. The other two batches of samples, with codes starting “CHV” and “BO”, are from northwest Russia’s Kola peninsula, hard upon the shores of the Arctic. The two “CHV” samples were retrieved from a 19th-century Sami burial ground, while the six that begin “BO” date to 1500 BC and hail from Bolshoy Oleni island, another Arctic site whose name translates as Great Reindeer Island, and which was clearly another locale hospitable to Sami forebears.

The remaining samples, a mix of contemporary and ancient, span most of Europe. Here, as Lazaridis et. al. demonstrated in 2014, we see that most European populations can be well modeled with variable ratios of three ancestral population streams. First, an ancestral component associated with the European foragers who expanded across the continent after the end of the last Ice Age 11,700 years ago. Second, another from Anatolian farmers who brought agriculture to the continent from the southeast, 9,000 years ago. And finally, the last element via Indo-European-speaking pastoralists from the Pontic steppe who arrived beginning 5,000 years ago. Like many peoples, the Indo-Europeans were in turn themselves a recent mix, with Caucasus-sourced southern heritage melded to another stream from points east via Paleo-Siberians who had mixed with European foragers.

The admixture plot, which breaks down individual genomes into distinct ancestral components, largely tracks this model. Green correlates with steppe ancestry, and is absent in both non-Indo-European speaking Basques and in the only recently linguistically Indo-Europeanized Sardinians. Blue appears in steppe people, but is also associated with Western European hunter-gatherers, and appears at somewhat higher levels in Northern than Southern Europeans. Finally, the orange correlates with Neolithic farmers, and here Southern Europeans have more than Northern populations.

But neither Finnic peoples nor Russians are exhaustively explained by this three-population model. They require an additional appreciable (purple) component maximized in the Nganasan tribe of Samoyeds who range over the Taymyr peninsula, a Norway-sized central Siberian region nearly 3000 km distant as the crow flies (a 9000-km trip by land today) that gives onto the Arctic ocean. A trace yellow component maximized among Native Americans also appears in some Sami samples, as well as in the Bolshoy Oleni individuals, and even among earlier foragers from northeastern Europe, like those of the Comb Ceramic Culture that dominated Finland and northern Russia before 2000 BC.

The Sami connection (and that of their more southerly Finnic relations) with far-off Nganasans is not surprising, because linguistically all speak Uralic languages. But why do so many Russians share this heritage? Simply because before 1000 AD, Finnic-speaking tribes dominated the whole zone between the Baltic and the Urals, haunting the vast boreal forests that stretched south from the Arctic; these people would mostly be linguistically and culturally Russified in subsequent centuries. Scratch enough Russians and find a bit of Finn?

The 2018 paper from which the figure above is adapted focused on their results’ temporal aspect: the Bolshoy Oleni individuals show that discernible Siberian ancestry was present within Europe’s northeastern edge as early as 1500 BC. Later work indicates that this Siberian heritage derives from an expansion with an original locus in far eastern Siberia, along the shores of the Lena river in Yakutia. Siberian foragers’ adoption of metal-working 4,000 years ago accelerated their expansion westward, all the way to the shores of the Baltic. Significant circumstantial evidence points to Finnic-speakers having roots among the Seima-Turbino culture of the central Urals which extended east and west along a broad band between 2200 and 1900 BC.