Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

On this episode, Razib talks about:

• Why sex is evolutionarily deep and persists

• Why males and females exist

• Cultural norms of patriarchy

• The feminist revolution and its connection to the rise of modern liberalism

• Male-female differences in biology (size, strength and anatomy)

• Male-female differences in psychology

• How psychological differences impact individual performance and social norms

• Why hyper-patriarchal societies cannot transition to a modern consumer society

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Your time is finite. The world is awash in slop to help you squander it. Here are my latest picks for spending it well instead. Feel free to add more in the comments.

With the turn of a new year, many find themselves seized by the need to commit to some ambitious plan or another. And as any year-round gym-goer knows, these resolutions have a way of being decidedly front-loaded for the majority of their makers. Which, is perhaps all the more argument for either keeping them modest or starting straight in on the best of them. Either way, if it’s reading material or edification you’re after, I’ve got you. You can sprint through the following books while the New Year spirit is still upon you and know you’ve spent the first days of the dawning year well. Or read one every couple months and you’ll have guaranteed yourself some excellent company all year long. These titles have stood up to repeat reading for me, but if none are new (or calling to you again), perhaps you will prefer a previous New Year’s post where I recommended an entire year’s reading list if you were to commit to precisely 20 pages a day for 365 days.

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.

First, a fitting book for this Substack: at the intersection of science, history and politics, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond. This work grew out of Ullica Segerstråle’s dissertation, and it is at once a very broad and fine-grained description and analysis of the debate around sociobiology that began in the early 1970s and continued through the 1980s. The central players are E. O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, but the bit players read like a who’s who in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields; John Maynard Smith, W. D. Hamilton, Richard Dawkins, George Price and Noam Chomsky all make appearances. Segerstråle, a sociologist by training, employs an ethnographic method, sitting in on meetings of the two camps, the pro-sociobiologists led by Wilson and the anti-sociobiologists led by Lewontin and Gould. The events recounted in Defenders of the Truth date back about 50 years now. Many of the principals have died. But, you can’t help but discern very similar dynamics to those currently seen in academia’s “woke” period, when groups of activist students with the cooperation of some faculty targeted thinkers and movements that they accused of being “problematic.” Carole Hooven’s recent cancellation saga at Harvard could have been in Defenders of the Truth, though a further shift to the Left in academia since the 1970s makes it hard to imagine a modern-day “sociobiology controversy” even seeing the light of day in the 2020s. Though written accessibly, Segerstrale’s narrative rewards repeat reading, because it is so dense with historical detail that remains relevant today.

It’s not for nothing that ancient Rome, both at its height and in its fall, continues to haunt people’s thoughts over 1500 years later. The rise, apogee, decline and fall of the first Europe-based multi-ethnic empire has served as a warning over the last two centuries of Western imperialism. Recurring thoughts of ancient Rome have practically become a pop-culture cliché. But if there is one book I would recommend on that civilization’s collapse, it would be Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. The genius of this work is its interdisciplinary scope. Since Ward-Perkins is an archaeologist, he actually examines the material basis when evaluating the nature and vigor of Roman civilization. Instead of looking at ancient texts where contemporary commentators complain about economic stress, The Fall of Rome reports such ingenious and memorable measures as the increase in coin hoards after 400 AD, which signalled that people were saving in anticipation of impending lean times. Ward-Perkins also shows how economic activity in the Empire correlated strongly with pollution recorded in the layers of sediment in British ponds. The Fall of Rome makes it clear exactly how and when the Roman Empire went into decline based on graphs reporting widely varied data, rather than arguments based on narrow archival analysis. Again, like Defenders of the Truth, Ward-Perkins’ book is long on data, sparing the reader tendentious arguments and speculation.

Joe Henrich’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter also sits at a nexus of various disciplines. A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd). Henrich combines the density of data from anthropology, which allows for so much description, with the analytic power of formal evolutionary genetics. While evolutionary psychologists discuss the impact of our cognitive hardware on our culture, cultural evolutionists like Henrich treat our memes like protean units of evolutionary analysis. Though Henrich acknowledges the reality of gene-culture co-evolution, the focus in The Secret of our Success is how evolutionary forces like drift, memetic exchange and natural selection might actually shape the cultural variation we see around us. While an evolutionary psychologist observes the universals across all societies, like the existence of religion, a cultural evolutionist might ask why religions vary between societies.

Not that that takes away from the genuine pleasure of detailed description in histories of culture, like Jaques Barzun’s 912-page From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Although Barzun (1907-2012) penned the work while still in his 80s, it’s worth pausing to consider that the author himself personally lived through a full 20% of the time period he chronicles in this, his magnum opus. Born to an elite family in France who moved in European literary circles, Barzun came to the US in 1920, eventually enrolling as a student at Columbia and becoming a professor there in the 1930s, before doing a stint at Cambridge. From Dawn to Decadence reflects the fruits of a massively erudite mind after a long career or scholarship, but as it moves into the 20th century, it further benefits from the author’s personal familiarity with many prominent figures in literature and the arts, like W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Marcel Duchamp. Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.

After Barzun’s nearly 1000-page tome, my friend Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, is a brisk, punchy read that grants you a good sense of the latest work in one of the most robust and replicated social sciences we have, all in well under 200 pages. Despite what you might hear about intelligence testing being statistically unsound from the likes of Nassim Taleb, Ritchie’s work will make it clear how useful and important the concept remains to understanding sociological patterns around us. He explains the “general intelligence factor” without excessive mathematics and tackles the major questions directly and concisely (for example, “are intelligence tests biased?”). Ritchie’s book fulfills the promise of the series’ formula (and to be clear, far from an intelligence-specific provocation, All That Matters is the title of a 44-volume series, although… perhaps readers of other volumes, like Muhammad: All that Matters, will be open to construing it otherwise.) Read Intelligence, and there’s a good chance you may never need another work of psychometrics to be up to speed.

Thus far, I’ve resisted the temptation to recommend abstruse texts. But if you’ve already plowed through the previous five, I’d like to invite you to tackle a genuinely academic text this year. This is the lone recommendation here I’ve only read once: Daniel Hartl’s A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics. And the only reason I haven’t circled back to this worthy work, is, as long-time readers will know, because I had already read Principles of Population Genetics many times. That 2010 work, referred to as “Hartl and Clark” in the field, after its co-authors, served my purposes in work and research.

But Principles is a very dense work, suitable perhaps for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, while Primer is much more accessible for laypeople, and less than half the length. And, being published a decade later, in 2020, it is more up-to-date on the latest in genomics. A book like A Primer of Population Genetics and Genomics pays long-term dividends, allowing you to understand dynamics observable everywhere in the world, and to make sense of patterns and trends that otherwise might mystify. When people are tempted to opine about the operation of dynamics like genetic drift, bottlenecks or natural selection, this book will have equipped you with the analytical tools to assess and construct models off the top of your head.

An Apology for Philology, Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz survey the impact of political radicalization on classics as a field, and in particular, Latin and Greek philology as the backbone of Classics degrees. In 2021, Princeton’s Classics department notoriously eliminated the requirement to learn ancient Greek or Latin as a condition of earning a Classics degree. The value of Classicists being steeped in Latin and ancient Greek seems self-evident to me, so of more interest was their examination of what is happening in their chosen fields. Woke may be past high tide in the broader culture, but its warping effect on academia remains substantial. Critics of language requirements say they exclude people, but the search for excellence will always exclude. Anti-racists criticize problematic views of past practitioners in order to reject philological methods. They question even the possibility of impartiality. And when you then have scholarly journals publishing articles with such insights as, “Through a combination of Audre Lorde’s Black queer lens and Paul Preciado’s trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced,” it’s tempting to throw up your hands and just remind yourself that this is not your circus. And yet, this is hardly the only field where past human practitioners were problematic. Surely the enterprise of scholarship is robust enough to accept that the measure of a scholar’s value is in the utility of their insights or methods, not the merit of their personal views. Statisticians (to say nothing of every researcher publishing statistical data analysis across most rigorous academic disciplines) still use regression and correlation daily, even though Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, who were unabashed eugenicists, first developed those tools.

Among Savage Tribes: Napoleon Chagnon meticulously documented the customs of a tribe where violence was sexually rewarded. Some of his academic colleagues never forgave him for it. This profile of the life and times of the late Napoleon Chagnon is a flashback to controversies in evolutionary psychology 25 years ago. In short, an embittered journalist slandered Chagnon, permanently damaging his reputation. Many anthropologists agreed at the time that the criticisms were baseless, but they could not bring themselves to support someone perceived as regressive. Nothing too surprising, but well written, and if you don’t know about the controversy surrounding the book The Darkness in El Dorado, where prominent scientists including Chagnon were accused of human rights violations and possibly even genocide, while colleagues and professional societies stood by, this article is worth a read.

Companies Are Outlining Plans for 2026. Hiring Isn’t One of Them. The title says it all, and the cause is to a large extent firms are holding back while they are trying to get a read on the impact of AI.

Religion Holds Steady in America - Recent polling shows no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults. The great secularization of the last generation in the US seems to have halted, but there is no aggregate increase in religion, just the maintenance of the status quo.

India Is on a Himalayan Building Spree to Prepare for a Clash With China. India’s neglect of its northern border with China is bizarre given that there have been multiple conflicts, the Sino-India War of 1962, and the border clashes of 1967, 1975 and 2020, where both sides have suffered casualties. Additionally, most of India’s population lives just south of it (in contrast to China, for whom the Indian border lies very distant from major population centers).

Humans killed millions of vultures. We’re now living with the consequences. Vulture numbers in India went from 4 million to 32,000 in a generation because of the use of painkillers for dying cattle, which ended up destroying the kidneys of the avian scavengers. Now the painkillers are banned, but in the meantime, feral dogs have taken the vulture’s role in the scavenging ecosystem, resulting in a new equilibrium. And unlike vultures, dogs also bite and spread rabies, resulting in many human deaths, often children, from the disease. Millionth installment in the tragic annals of unintended consequences.

Genetic history of Rus’. No big surprise, but shows just how extensive the admixture of Finnic people into northeastern Russians has been over the centuries. Also, there was almost no Scandinavian ancestry in early Rus, suggesting that the impact of the Varangian Swedes was genetically minimal.

Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians. Using ancient DNA, this paper detects differences today that date to the diversification of populations 45,000 years ago. Populations like “Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers” (CHG) seem to have roots in their home regions this early, as opposed to differentiating later.

Insights into human history and complex traits from the genomes of African populations. This paper looks at the extremely diverse populations of Africa across its varied environments and shows how adaptation (along with admixture) shaped each regional group.

Invasion of new adaptive zones retains telltale signs of directional selection at macroevolutionary scales in mammals. Essentially, the authors discovered that environmental transitions shaped changes in skull morphology across numerous lineages. Exactly what you would expect, basically, but nice to confirm it with data and subject the hypothesis to statistical tests.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Most recently, I covered where we stand on Indo-Europeans and Indians when it comes to genetics and history.

First, Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past:

Ironically, the improbable connection between literary cultures half Eurasia’s breadth apart, from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s vast and varied Bengali oeuvre (which includes both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems) to the lyrical language of Shakespeare’s timeless corpus, all owes to cultural transformations wrought by those first pre-literate nomadic barbarians. They poured forth out of Eurasia’s great grasslands, tall, dark and violent, plague speeding their emphatic arrival, burning down old civilizations and rewriting the continent’s genetic legacy overnight. How astonishing that such humble horsemen’s intervention would spawn globe-spanning cultural empires destined to leave their mark on the whole species, not just in our genes and the practices of patriarchy, but in millennia of myths and some of our most exalted, eternal, written works.

Then, The Waiting Game: Past, Present and Future of Indian Genomics:

The findings of 50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation may be as far as we can go with modern samples towards understanding the structure of the South Asian past. Nearly three thousand whole genomes from dozens of ethnic groups push the frontier of our understanding of the past appreciably, but thirty thousand whole genomes from hundreds of ethnicities would push it only marginally further. We’re well into the territory of diminishing returns at this point. There are only so many stories to be wrung from modern data alone. At some point, you just keep confirming and refining what you already knew. Again and again, geneticists have confirmed very high levels of Indian endogamy (and attendant low levels of within ethnic group genetic diversity) within a broader context of extremely high aggregate South Asian diversity. First, with the early genomic age’s coarse methods from just a few informative markers, and now with the fine-grained, data-rich methods possible since 2010 that scan the whole DNA sequence. Two facts remain indisputable: Indians have more overall genetic diversity than Europeans and East Asians, but greater inbreeding is also clearly written in their genomes. Global diversity, local homogeneity. More samples will simply reiterate this reality.

A periodic feature for paying subscribers, 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.

Most recently, Antiquity’s miracle skin whitening method: migrate to Sweden, wait millennia:

Details remain to be worked out regarding descriptive aspects of these traits, but this PNAS paper really totally confirms the overall pattern that scientists have been describing for more than a decade. Europeans got lighter very recently, and the selection is persistent and continuous. Why? A lot of work in earlier decades hypothesized reasons, whether Peter Frost’s sexual selection theories, or Nina Jablonski’s hypotheses about vitamin D. But now we are in a genomic age, and can see the trajectory and geography of selection. We know it occurred. We see changes in gene frequencies. But the fact remains that we don’t know why. That’s a harder question to answer, but at least we have the preliminary piece, the description, out of the way.

Previous 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

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

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test

• Rewriting the Family Tree one skull at a time

• Ghost Population in the Machine: AI finds Out-of-Africa plot twists in Papuan DNA

• Immigrants of Imperial Rome: Pompeii’s genetic census of the doomed

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

• 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 and Spotify). If you want to listen on YouTube, please subscribe.

Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:

• Monologue: year-end review of Proto-Indo-European origins and humanity’s deep evolution and diversity

• Francis Young: Baltic paganism in modern times

• Eric Cline: Love, War and Diplomacy, international relations in the Bronze Age

My 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.

On this episode of Unsuperivsed Learning Razib reviews two big stories he has followed and written about on this Substack in 2025, Indo-European origins and how genomics has illuminated human evolution.

• Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past

• The cave where it happened: Denisova cavern’s congress of ancient peoples

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• John Hawks and Chris Stringer: Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans, oh my!

• Re-writing the human family tree one skull at a time

• John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed-up

• Cesar Fortes-Lima: the Fulani out of the Green Sahara

• Lost Green Saharans: ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude

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

• Bonus monologue: man the hybrid monster

• Bonus monologue: ancient North Africans and the Green Sahara

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On this episode, Razib talks to returning guest, Francis Young, a historian who teaches at Oxford. Young specialises in the history of religion and belief from ancient times to the present day, and provides expert indexes for academic books and translates medieval and early modern Latin. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University and is the author, editor or co-author of over 20 books. On his last visit to the podcast, he discussed his book Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic, an account of the practices and persistence of Baltic paganism down to the 16th-century, the age of the Renaissance and Reformation. Today he discusses his new book, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples.

Razib and Young first discuss what it means to be “pagan” in a European context, first during Classical Antiquity, but more recently in Northern Europe down to the early modern period. Young discusses how it is difficult to understand and define paganism without reference to Christianity, which was a major force in shaping the nature of pagan religion in Northern Europe. Razib asks about the specific nature of northeast Baltic paganism, and in particular, the late survivals of pre-Christian religion among Lithuanians and Estonians, and the differences between the two groups. Young explains his understanding of different religious practices and the various forms of non-Christian practice that persisted among different groups, including mixed “creole” identities. Razib also inquires about the Mari El, a Finnic group in the Urals that might be the only continuously officially pagan people in Europe, as well as evidence Young reports that Estonian peasants were never truly fully Christianized.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib again talks to George Washington University archaeologist Eric Cline. The author of 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed and After 1177 B.C. - The Survival of Civilizations, Cline has a new book out, Love, War, and Diplomacy: The Discovery of the Amarna Letters and the Bronze Age World They Revealed. While 1177 B.C. closed with the end of the first global civilization, that of the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, and After 1177 B.C. tells the story of those who picked up the pieces, Love, War, and Diplomacy puts the spotlight on the Late Bronze Age at its peak.

Razib and Cline discuss the two major threads in Love, War, and Diplomacy: the decipherment of cuneiform and the emergence of the field of Assyriology, and the diplomatic world of Bronze Age Great Powers. Cline addresses the reality that 19th-century archaeology was not an idealized enterprise, and scholars had to compete with treasure hunters, and negotiate difficult nationalist sensitivities. He also explains how they deciphered cuneiform decades after hieroglyphs, providing an alternative view of the earliest antiquity. The discussion then focuses on the intricate and tense relationship between Egypt, Assyria, the Hittites, and the Mitanni. Cline also highlights the reality that the Amarna Letters also shed light on the bickering between the petty states of the Levant and their relationship to their hegemon, Egypt.

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Welcome back to the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club, an occasional feature for paying subscribers where I review interesting papers in human population genomics. In the spirit of a conventional journal club, after each post, interested subscribers can vote on papers for future 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

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

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test

• Re-writing the human family tree one skull at a time

• Ghost Population in the Machine: AI finds Out-of-Africa plot twists in Papuan DNA

• Immigrants of Imperial Rome: Pompeii’s genetic census of the doomed

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

Today we’re reviewing a PNAS paper, Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihoods (2025). The authors use paleogenetics and the latest in genomic inference to shine new light on the evolution of pigmentation in Eurasia, and particularly in Europe. It comes out of Guido Barbujani’s lab in the Department of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Universitá degli studi di Ferrara, Ferrara. The first author is Silivia Perretti, at the same university.

“Of the Ethiopians above Egypt [Nubia] and of the Arabians the commander, I say, was Arsames; but the Ethiopians from the direction of the sunrising (for the Ethiopians were in two bodies [Nubians and Indian]) had been appointed to serve with the Indians, being in no way different from the other Ethiopians [Nubians and Indians serving together], but in their language and in the nature of their hair only; for the Ethiopians from the East are straight-haired [India], but those of Libya have hair more thick and woolly than that of any other men [Nubians].”

— Herodotus, The Histories (Book 7, Chapter 70), circa 440 BC

Skin is our largest organ. It’s one of our most faithful indices of age and health. A potential mate’s complexion is critical information in an evolutionary context, signalling both fitness in spite of environmental stress, and underlying genetics. But not everything is about age and health. Perhaps one of the most important aspects of skin, its color or shade (something to which humans have paid immense attention for all of recorded history) is to discern race and identity. The ancient Egyptians perceived the people of the Levant to have been “yellow,” while already calling the Nubians to their south “black.”

Herodotus, arguably both the first historian and anthropologist, illustrates the centrality of coloration in identifying and classifying human populations. In The Histories, he mentions both the people of the Indian subcontinent and those of Sub-Saharan Africa as “Ethiopians,” from the Greek word aithíops, meaning literally “burnt face” or, in practical terms, red-brown. Part of this conflation of Africans and Indians is some early Greeks’ confusion over whether India and Africa were somehow geographically connected via a land bridge far to the south. But clearly a major reason that Herodotus made the connection is that these were the two darkest populations the Greeks knew in that time period.

This fixation on skin color almost alone to make identifications seems universal, whether the population are of a darker range of complexion or one on the paler side; Frank Dikötter, in The Discourse of Race in Modern China, notes that before the 20th century, the Han Chinese referred to themselves as “white,” in contrast to “black” peoples, like those of Cambodia. Upon encountering Europeans, they observed that this new people was somehow like them in color, white, while also unlike them in a host of other characteristics (e.g., eye color and shape, full beards and nose shapes). Only in the 20th century, with new ideas of scientific racialism, did the Chinese shift to thinking of themselves as “yellow,” in contrast to white Europeans.

The origin of the variation in human complexion remains of deep scientific interest. In The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond argued that variation in pigmentation across human races was driven by sexual selection, extending on Charles Darwin’s assessment in The Descent of Man. Darwin rejected the idea that adaptation through natural selection caused the differences across the spectrum of skin colors. He noted that the people of the Amazon were far lighter than those of Africa, while indigenous Tasmanians, despite living at the same latitude south of the equator as Spain is north of it, had black skin.

Darwin believed that skin color was primarily an aesthetically driven trait, with people of different regions preferring different complexions in their mates. Nevertheless, the majority view today is roughly in line with the ancient Greeks’: excessive radiation at lower latitudes drove selection for darker skin, while reduced sun exposure at higher latitudes drove lighter skin’s development in order to better synthesize vitamin D (Peter Frost’s Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice is probably the most extensive contemporary articulation of the alternative sexual selection theory).

Though skin color has interested biologists and anthropologists for over a century, only after the year 2000 has genetics truly begun to understand its heritable basis with granularity. In his 2005 book Mutants, Armand Leroi could still write an epilogue lamenting that we didn’t yet know the biological basis of variation in traits like skin color. But within a year, Trends in Genetics had published a review paper “A golden age of human pigmentation genetics,” reporting on numerous new and exciting findings associating particular genes, like SLC24A5 and OCA2, with lighter skin and blue eyes, respectively. Within a few years this led to the emergence of algorithms like HirisPlex, which looks at 41 markers to predict eye, hair and skin color. Forensic genomics of this sort is all fun and games when you see your phenotype correctly predicted on 23andMe, but advances in the field are in fact largely driven by crime scene investigation, where the authorities need to reconstruct the physical appearance of perpetrators from DNA left behind.

Of course, phenotypic predictions can offer a utility beyond closing cold cases. Paleogeneticists too need to reconstruct the faces of the past, as we attempt to understand how and why our appearance changed as we expanded out of Africa to Europe, Asia and Oceania. But ancient DNA is often hobbled by quality far lower than that of crime scene samples; cold cases might be, at most, decades old, whereas ancient DNA can have had some 10,000 years to degrade. Better techniques of extraction innovated by biologists at the bench have resolved some of this, but statistical genomics has also played a role. Instead of limiting themselves to “calling” only genotypes that can be deduced from high confidence positions, researchers today also have available probabilistic Bayesian methods developed for low-coverage genomic sequencing; in short, they can also infer phenotype from a large number of lower confidence marker positions. Old data, it turns out, can be taught new tricks.

Human genomics emerged as a field after 2000, upon the release of the draft human genome. But it remained squarely “blue sky” science in the early aughts. Whole-genome sequencing was a theoretical possibility, but still largely beyond the reach of even well-funded research labs until the year 2010. Then sequencing costs finally dipped below $10,000 per sample, and it became conceivable that insurance might reimburse the costs of tests done for medical diagnostic purposes. The move from super-expensive proof-of-concept science to mass-market technology drove the development of a convention to ensure quality control.

This was essential given that the emerging sequencing technologies as the 21st century dawned still had significant baked-in error rates. In 2010, the HiSeq 2000, Illumina’s workhorse machine, had an error rate of about 1 in every 200 calls, or 0.5%, meaning that every single assignment of A, C, G or T to a particular base in the three billion positions of the human genome, would be wrong 0.5% of the time. If you take a test in school, 99.5% is excellent; you know the material. But the “material” in a whole genome sequence is...vast; “knowing” 99.5% of three billion bases means you’re reporting some 15 million positions wrong. We already knew that the average human being differs from the reference genome at some 5 million positions‌. Meaning that if you accept that error rate as unavoidable, most of the “variation” you supposedly detect is just going to be you getting a wrong read (you’ll mistakenly differ from the reference genome three times for every meaningful difference detected). In medical testing, a 1 in 200 error rate is too high, especially for rare conditions; too many “positive” results will actually just be errors. Even for a single patient, a medically actionable test with a 0.5% error rate is unacceptable. Scientists’ and clinicians’ 2010 solution (and the standard ever since)? Repetition. Just sequence the same sample, over and over.

In genomics, the term “coverage depth,” roughly refers to the number of times a base is called by a sequencing machine (if you want to get into the precise details, it actually refers to the number of short sequence reads piled up in each region of the genome). The “gold standard” for coverage depth was 30x, so the machine would read every base roughly 30 times. If the error-calling rate is independent, an outlier call at a given base will be easily identified as aberrant. In a pile of 30 reads, there is a 15% probability of ‌outlier miscalls. But those are easily identified. On the other hand, if you have a genuine polymorphism, where the particular sequence differs from the reference, then the vast majority of the 30 calls will differ from the reference, allowing you to confidently conclude that you have found a true variant.

For a medical doctor, getting 30x coverage has just become standard practice; yes, it costs more for the sequencing machine to return so many reads, but the alternative of high misdiagnosis rates necessitates it, so insurance will reimburse. Forensics and ancient DNA face a different set of problems: the genetic material is often severely degraded, contaminated or in very limited supply. Many ancient DNA studies only have data with very low coverage, often lower than 1 (meaning many bases don’t get called at all, and you are just subsampling the genome). This can actually be adequate data for many population-genomic purposes. A typical human genome has about 4.5 million polymorphisms, but you can perform a reasonable principal component analysis (PCA) with some 1,000 of them. Where low coverage breaks down is in prediction of individual phenotypes. HirisPlex has 41 markers; and you really require all of them to make good predictions. Ideally, you would have high-quality data and could make confident predictions with a very large number of high quality genotypes. But ancient DNA rarely approximates an ideal world.

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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. Add more in the comments.

Given my lifelong appetites for densely delivered facts and overarching trends, I have, in my reading, tended to give biography a wide berth. Today I’m reflecting on some historical biographies that convinced even me to consider the specifics of a particular human life as more than secondary. Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars brings back a lost world in a way that compendiums from archaeology can never hope to; the Bronze Age Greeks had writing, so we have copious records of their Linear B tablets. But bureaucratic records of trade and taxation don’t really bring a time alive. We know the mechanics of their state, but not the tenor of their citizens’ daily lives. To truly understand who the lords of Mycenae, Sparta and Pylos might have been, we require recourse to narrative texts like The Iliad, which render characters in the full flower of their passions. Though Homer’s epic dates to many centuries later, it preserves customs and names already visible on Bronze Age tablets, attesting to its historical fidelity. Those names come to evoke figures with agency and human interests we ourselves share. Vivid Agamemon, Alexandros and Hector, rather than simply entries in a ledger-book. To delve into a period, the surest route is often riding along with a single figure who lived it.

Even though this edition of Johannes Fried’s Charlemagne is a translation from the German, the magisterial work retains a conversational style that cuts through some of the potential turgidity of the underlying material (the only distracting choice is to render pagan Norse as “Normans,” which we conventionally reserve for the Christianized Danes who ruled Normandy). Fried admits candidly in the book’s preface that aspects of the narrative make recourse to imagination; Charlemagne was no Marcus Aurelius and we do not have access to the diaries of the king of the Franks. Instead, the author creates a composite character out of the extant historical materials available. Charlemagne was a man of his time, a Germanic warlord whose behavior and comportment would serve as the template for future Christian rulers, but nevertheless also a man of deep faith whose religion was sometimes at sharp variance with his actions. Living between 748 and 814 AD, Charlemagne is a liminal figure. Clearly no longer of Late Antiquity, he is also not quite medieval. In fact, Charlemagne and his world set the terms for what medieval was to become. His world was coarser and bloodier. The Germanic ruling elite of Western Europe after the fall of Rome emphasized martial values and skills more than their Roman predecessors, who might show their breeding and status through mastery of literature and the arts displayed in symposia; and yet the barbarous Frankish king deserves credit for accumulating a cadre of scholars at his court whose output would be crucial in preserving the learning of antiquity down to the present. In 800 AD, we see a new world beginning to take form, as the last filaments of Antiquity finally vanish into the ether.

Charlemagne’s choices and the empire he built, all left their mark over the centuries. Later German rulers looked to him as precedent, down to the Habsburgs who held the reins of the Holy Roman Empire into the 19th century. In contrast, John Brown, the violent American abolitionist whose raid on Harper’s Ferry was one of the last major events leading up to the Civil War, made an impact that played out, not over centuries, but over a handful of momentous years. David Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights was criticized when it was published in 2005, for portraying its subject too favorably. But judging by the mores that became the norm in academia after 2010, and especially leading up to 2020, had it been more recent, I can imagine reviewers complaining that it was too even-handed.

Brown was a stark figure, a terrorist of his age whose violence was vindicated by the course of the Civil War. Before his execution, he asserted that he was “quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” And so it was. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of John Brown, Abolitionist, is that a man who was sometimes asserted to be the last of the Puritans was in many ways part of a counter-cultural movement; the group that raided Harper’s Ferry included many freethinkers. If Charlemagne’s life was the beginning of a long fuse that led the Latin West toward the High Middle Ages, John Brown’s explosion onto the national scene in the 1850s, a radical tribune of Northern abolitionism, foretold broader social revolutions that would transform America in the 1860s.

Brown was a modest man whose revolutionary deeds of martyrdom made such an impact that he still enjoys name recognition even in our amnesiac age. Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great: King of Prussia, on the other hand, spotlights a ruler less well known today, but who was a towering figure in his time. Frederick Hohenzollern, to become Frederick II, is probably unfairly eclipsed because his 46-year reign came just before the rise of an even more pivotal figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. But arguably the French republic’s rise, with its mobilization of the entire society to fight its wars, cannot be understood without recognizing what Prussia, the forerunner of what became Germany, had accomplished in the decades before the French Revolution. Though Napoleon’s military genius is well known, Frederick the Great’s Prussian state battled Austria, France, Russia, Sweden and the Holy Roman Empire during the Seven Years War, ultimately securing Prussia’s place as a great power in Europe.

A homosexual with a disdain for religion, Frederick was an aesthete whose court was suffused with the arts and music, all while he presided over one of the most militaristic of Europe’s states. Prussia in some ways reflects Europe in the 18th century: rationalistic, militaristic and culturally incredibly vibrant. Perhaps one of the realities that lingers most powerfully from Blanning’s narrative is that the equipoise between culture and martial valor evident in Frederick’s Francophilic court was broken by the Napoleonic Wars, and Bismarck’s “Iron Kingdom” of the 19th century would notably lack that previous Prussian aspiration toward refinement.

By coincidence, another monarch of refinement also reigned for a 46-year span, albeit nearly three centuries before Frederick: Suleiman the Magnificent, under whose aegis the Ottoman Empire reached its apogee. Andre Clot’s brisk 400-page treatment in Suleiman the Magnificent remains one of the more accessible English-language surveys of this potentate’s achievements. On diplomatic fronts, Suleiman continued his ancestors’ conquests in Europe, capturing Belgrade and leading his forces to the gates of Vienna, while it was under his direction that the Ottomans became a significant power in Asia more broadly, with fleets stationed as far afield as Sumatra. Under Suleiman, the Ottoman Empire was like a colossus astride three continents, Europe, Africa and Asia, but it was also to be the beginning of the end; the New World’s discovery had already begun turning civilization’s focus away from its Mediterranean core. Ottoman success up to the 16th century and Suleiman’s age had been predicated on their adoption of new military technologies, like firearms, but by the end of his reign, the Turkic state’s nimbleness was just a memory. The creeping torpor that would characterize the Ottomans in the next few centuries was the consequence of the reality that no ruler or general was going to match Suleiman, who cut a figure at once cruel and calculating and genuinely cultured. Like a black hole at the center of the galaxy, the Ottoman Empire’s existence is something that we all know of, but far too often fail to appreciate on its own terms. as a cultural, social and political reality that shaped life in western Islam for five centuries.

If Suleiman was born to the purple, so to speak, Paolo Cesaretti’s Theodora: Empress of Byzantium examines a figure who came from below and held her own for decades at the very heart of Late Roman society. Theodora, wife of Justinian the Great, who was known as the “last of the Romans,” had a colorful past as an actress and consort to various figures. Her relationship with Justinian began long before the latter’s uncle was elevated to become Emperor, clearing the path for his nephew to eventually ascend. Cesaretti depicts a woman who was in many ways firmer in how she wielded power than her husband; the histories generally depict Theodora as more stalwart in guarding the prerogatives of imperial power than her husband. Indeed, after her death, Justinian’s reign was seen to be more feckless, perhaps a reflection on the essential ballast that his wife has provided him in terms of advice. Although Western historians have traditionally painted an ambivalent portrait of the Empress, it is notable that Oriental Orthodox Churches, like that of Armenia, consider her a saint for her theological alignment with their position.

John Noble Wilford, Times Reporter Who Covered the Moon Landing, Dies at 92. I remember reading his articles in The New York Times and being shocked at how old he was. I highly recommend anyone with subscription access to The Times archives to (re)discover his old pieces; they’re a joy to read.

American higher education is adrift: From accommodations to admissions to grade inflation, colleges lack a sense of mission and purpose. Higher education currently has a major problem: it has become a “consumer product.” It shouldn’t really have been hard to foresee that while offering students easy courses and lots of amenities attracts “customers” in the short-term, it devalues degrees in the long-term. At some point, the faculty need to realize that with stewardship like this, they aren’t even going to be indefinitely guaranteed to be able to just “focus on their research.”

Rural America relies on foreign doctors. Trump’s visa fee shuts them out. One way to address this problem is to allow rural areas to “hollow out.” The reality is it is not clear that much of rural America, which was once demographically the bastion of family farms, is economically viable.

Two is already too many: Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate. Korean hyper-meritocracy wastes so much of everyone’s time competing in mass positional games that only a minority can ever win. And the rat-race doesn’t end with school; they continue to compete intensely at work to prove they are hard workers, regardless of the sector,, resulting in almost no semblance of a family life being feasible for working women in particular. South Koreans focus so much on winning in life that they disqualify themselves from even having time to perpetuate it.

Let That Skin In: Ancient DNA and the Evolution of Human Skin Colour: How migration and genetics shaped human pigmentation. David Piffer’s Substack has a lot of good content on ancient polygenic variation. This post shows that pigmentation is impacted both by ancestry and geography, and that Europeans have been getting paler over time.

How the Amber Trade Transformed Bronze Age Europe. A Dan Davis video about trade in Northern Europe 4,000 years ago. The late Bronze Age world of international trade that Eric Cline writes about in 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed also extended into Northern Europe.

Revisiting the lineages of the Cohanim using data from next-generation sequencing. This preprint seems to confirm work from 25 years ago that the Cohen priestly lineages, passed through the male lineage, do share common ancestry 3,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens-specific evolution unveiled by ancient southern African genomes. The researchers sequenced 28 ancient genomes, with the oldest one dated to 10,200 years ago. They confirm that worldwide migration has even affected the San Bushmen in the last 1,000 years, and these Khoisan people have long had a sizable population in southern Africa on the order of tens of thousands, not much smaller than their current population of about 150,000.

Kinship-based social inequality in Bronze Age Europe. Early Indo-Europeans were patrilineal and highly stratified. We knew this from their mythology, but here they find DNA evidence of related males being buried near each other, and the persistence of certain high status lineages across the generations.

Ancient genomes give insight into 160,000 years of East Asian population dynamics and biological adaptation. This paper is a baby step towards understanding the trajectory of East Asian evolution in the same way we understand European evolution. Basically, to really probe a lot of questions you need many samples. It’s a numbers game.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. Most recently, I wrote about where we stand on Indo-Europeans and Indians when it comes to genetics and history.

First, Two Steppes forward, one step back: parsing our Indo-European past:

Ironically, the improbable connection between literary cultures half Eurasia’s breadth apart, from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s vast and varied Bengali oeuvre (which includes both India and Bangladesh’s national anthems) to the lyrical language of Shakespeare’s timeless corpus, all owes to cultural transformations wrought by those first pre-literate nomadic barbarians. They poured forth out of Eurasia’s great grasslands, tall, dark and violent, plague speeding their emphatic arrival, burning down old civilizations and rewriting the continent’s genetic legacy overnight. How astonishing that such humble horsemen’s intervention would spawn globe-spanning cultural empires destined to leave their mark on the whole species, not just in our genes and the practices of patriarchy, but in millennia of myths and some of our most exalted, eternal, written works.

Then, The Waiting Game: Past, Present and Future of Indian Genomics:

The findings of 50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation may be as far as we can go with modern samples towards understanding the structure of the South Asian past. Nearly three thousand whole genomes from dozens of ethnic groups push the frontier of our understanding of the past appreciably, but thirty thousand whole genomes from hundreds of ethnicities would push it only marginally further. We’re well into the territory of diminishing returns at this point. There are only so many stories to be wrung from modern data alone. At some point, you just keep confirming and refining what you already knew. Again and again, geneticists have confirmed very high levels of Indian endogamy (and attendant low levels of within ethnic group genetic diversity) within a broader context of extremely high aggregate South Asian diversity. First, with the early genomic age’s coarse methods from just a few informative markers, and now with the fine-grained, data-rich methods possible since 2010 that scan the whole DNA sequence. Two facts remain indisputable: Indians have more overall genetic diversity than Europeans and East Asians, but greater inbreeding is also clearly written in their genomes. Global diversity, local homogeneity. More samples will simply reiterate this reality.

A periodic feature for paying subscribers, 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.

Most recently, Immigrants of Imperial Rome: Pompeii’s genetic census of the doomed:

Pompeii and Herculaneum’s destruction vividly preserved certain evocative aspects of a moment in the life of the early, vigorous, cosmopolitan Roman Empire. The pyroclastic surges preserved details of Herculaneum’s economic activity, carbonizing freshly baked bread, but also preserving things like an entire private library of fragile papyrus scrolls and sets of ornate chairs. That latter fact attests to an artisan class in a united empire producing highly specialized goods that cargo vessels would ferry around the “Roman sea.”

Meanwhile, this arbitrary genetic sample of citizens reveals that many Pompeiians were newcomers on a historical time scale of centuries, while their style of dress indicates that they were well integrated. The empire of our snapshot emerges as culturally assimilative, just as the texts would have us believe. The citizens who died that day in Pompeii leaving precious genetic traces for us to study appear to largely descend from newcomers to the Italian peninsula, whether highborn or low. A notable legacy of the Roman Empire’s fall is that this genetic and cultural matrix seems to have faded with urban areas’ collapse, so that modern Italians living in Mt. Vesuvius’ shadow today actually share stronger genetic connections to prehistoric Italians than to those citizens of the high Empire whose frozen final moments speak to us with such human immediacy across the ages.

Previous 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

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

• The wandering Fulani: children of the Green Sahara

• Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde and an 842-year-old paternity test

• Rewriting the Family Tree one skull at a time

• Ghost Population in the Machine: AI finds Out-of-Africa plot twists in Papuan DNA

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

• 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:

• Shadi Hamid: American power and the post-woke age

• Vishal Ganesan and Anang Mittal: American Hinduism out of Indian Hinduism

• John Hawks and Chris Stringer: Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans, oh my!

My 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.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks again with Washington Post columnist and repeat guest Shadi Hamid (listen to previous episodes). A native Pennsylvanian of Egyptian ethnic background and Islamic faith, Hamid completed his Ph.D. in politics at Oxford University. He is co-host of the Wisdom of Crowds podcast and website with Damir Marusic, and now the author of his own Substack and a recent book, The Case For American Power. Hamid is also the author of The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. , Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East and Rethinking Political Islam.

Before moving the discussion to The Case For American Power, Razib asks Hamid about his current positioning on the American political landscape with the emergence of the hard-right during the second Trump administration. Hamid admits that during the “woke era” he wasn’t sure about his place on the Left as a progressive due to his misgivings with racial identarianism, but with the rise of white nationalism on the Right and the executive decisions of the Trump administration Hamid finds himself more comfortable saying he is a progressive. Racism and the passions unleashed by the Israel-Palestine conflict since 10/7 have made Hamid reevaluate the virtues of some level of wokeness.

Pivoting to foreign policy, Razib and Hamid discuss his new book, and its positioning within a political landscape that ranges from neconservatism, liberal internationalism and isolationism of all sorts. Despite Hamid’s misgivings of some aspects of American culture and the nation’s past political sins, he asserts (unlike the far Left) that overall America is a force for good, and that it should exercise its power to spread its vision of morality across the world. The Case For American Power is an attempt to articulate a liberal and progressive internationalist vision for 2025, decades after the failed Iraqi intervention. Hamid also addresses the sea-change on the progressive side of American politics when it comes to Israel, admitting he feels much freer to express skepticism or critiques of Israeli policy than he had in previous eras.

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Some 25% of humanity lives in the Indian subcontinent; neither quite of the Occident, nor of the Orient. This region has played critical roles in the development of human culture. It was from India that Buddhism, the world’s first missionary religion emerged, over two millennia ago. With the Near East and Europe on its left flank and the forbidding Himalayas bounding its northern border, it has remained a well trod byway for the streams of humanity trekking ever eastward toward the planet’s most populous realms, everywhere from East Asia down the Pacific Rim to Australia. In the Age of Augustus, it was in the teeming marketplaces of India’s port cities that merchants from Rome met those from southern China.

But more than just an accident of geography seals South Asia’s global centrality. The nearly two billion modern South Asians are heirs to prolific forebears. In 450 BC, Herodotus noted that the Indians were “by far the most numerous” of the world’s nations. Today, with India having surpassed China in population size, that is again true, though since 1947’s partition between a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan (which, would in turn further calve off Bangladesh), the core nation’s population is far less than if the subcontinent had remained unified (an India with its pre-partition borders today would ring in at 1.975 billion people, versus the PRC’s 1.41 billion). In human prehistory, India’s centrality was a matter of location, and the likelihood that it lies near the nexus of Eurasian humans’ momentous diversification in all directions, at an early step out of Africa.

But in more recent human history, India has played a different role. Its southern location likely made it a refugium for hominins during the cold, dry Pleistocene. And over the last three millennia India has been both a land of wealth coveted by conquerors and a font of cultural wisdom continually reshaping its neighboring civilizations. Indian philosophy influenced thinkers from Athens to Kyoto, everywhere from the abstract monistic philosophies that helped frame Neo-Platonism in third century Alexandria to the Buddhist metaphysics that took root in eighth-century Fujiwara Japan. Meanwhile, India’s wealth repeatedly lured those eager to plunder or tax, from Darius’ Persian armies in the 6th century BC and Alexander the Great in the 4th, down to the Muslim Turks who streamed into the subcontinent after 1000 AD, for gold, greatness and the glory of their god.

For anthropologists, literal scholars of humanity, India stands apart as an absolute goldmine of human diversity, an inexhaustible feast for fieldwork, home to a panoply of richly variegated customs and traditions, where each of thousands of communities maintain their own unique folkways. While China has one official language, the Republic of India recognizes 24 official state languages. In the subcontinent, 25 languages have over 10 million speakers. Hindi alone clocks in at 600 million habitual users with various degrees of fluency, a cool 150 million more humans than can be found on the entire continent of South America. Notably, the subcontinent’s two dominant language families, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, have extremely distinct profiles, being entirely unrelated genealogically. Though after millennia of proximity, today Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages of course share both features like common vocabulary and phonological quirks like retroflex constants, their syntactical structure and the deepest layers of their lexicons reflect wholly unrelated origins. While Indo-Aryan languages are the easternmost of the Indo-European language family, which dominates Western Europe, and includes the extremely closely related Iranian languages just to the west, the Dravidian languages are entirely unrelated to any languages outside of the subcontinent.

India’s religion and its people recapitulate these tendencies towards complexity and richness already evident linguistically: external entanglement is juxtaposed against deep indigenous particularity. While the subcontinent’s Muslim minority is well known, the Christian minority in broader India number some 38 million, more than in the entire UK. Both these religions are global in scope and universal in ambition, and they of course share the subcontinent with Hinduism, whose Indian connection is, in contrast, constitutive rather than coincidental.

To some extent, India and Indians are Hinduism, and Hinduism is India and Indians. The term Hinduism comes from people indigenous to the land, rather than elevating a great founder or reformer of its beliefs and practices like Christianity or Zoroastrianism (and, rather like Judaism, it is both a religion and a nationality). Before 1772, when East India Company Governor-General Warren Hastings made an explicit linguistic distinction between followers of Islam whatever their ethnicity and adherents of local religions, referring to the latter alone as “Hindus,” the term had generally just applied to anyone of Indian extraction and culture (in other words, Hindus, as opposed to say Turks, Europeans or Persians). We can still readily see how “Hindu” was long a stock ethnic term in North American newspapers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, where mentions of immigrant “Hindoos,” often ‌upon further investigation actually meant South Asian adherents of Islam or Sikhism. Unlike Islam or Christianity, a unified creed did not define Hinduism. Hinduism itself was, and is, a riotous and diverse array of regional cults and Brahmanical philosophies, all threaded together by an unmistakable civilizational scaffold.

So it comes as little surprise that India’s riotous linguistic and religious diversity also mirrors deep biological diversity. And not just in the biogeographic reality that the northwestern fringe is part of the West Asian climatic and ecological sphere, while most of the rest of the subcontinent is part of the tropics. In the very genetic diversity of its people, India is bewilderingly complex. Iranian-speaking people, whose languages are closer to Persian and Ossetian, occupy the subcontinent’s northwestern edge, abutting the Indo-Aryan dialect zones to their east. Physically, these Iranian-speakers, Pashtuns and Baloch people, resemble West and Central Asians, Kurds, Tajiks, etc. Meanwhile, the subcontinent’s northeastern corner harbors populations who speak Tibeto-Burman, Tai and Austro-Asiatic languages, reflecting deep origins in the lands to the north and east, beyond the mountain escarpments that ring the subcontinent there. But at the core of all this peripheral diversity, runs a broad vein of more formulaic genetic complexity; the vast majority of the subcontinent’s population occupies the “India-cline,” ranging from the Northwest’s Punjabis, dominant in Pakistan and in wheat fields west of New Delhi, all the way to the Tamils of the southeast, busy today erecting gleaming electronics manufacturing plants on what were rice paddies mere decades ago. In keeping with the subcontinent’s diversity, these extremes are very distinct populations, visibility different, but all recognizably South Asian, antipodes of the India-cline.

But what exactly is the India-cline? Over 15 years ago, a scientific research group led by David Reich and Nick Patterson identified this India-cline with then newly-emerging genomic methods. They showed that most Indian populations could be modeled as a mixture between one population (related to Europeans and West Asians), a second, Ancestral North Indians (ANI), and a third, indigenous to the subcontinent, Ancestral South Indians (ASI), very distantly related to Andaman Island natives. Again, biology, like linguistics and religion, reflected both external connections and indigenous roots, with Indians descending from both people related to Eurasians who migrated in during the Holocene, after the Ice Age, and a deeply rooted indigenous component of first people who arrived some 45-50,000 years ago out of Africa.

In further papers published in 2013 and 2019, Reich and Patterson’s group continued refining those models, with the latter paper dropping in time to finally exploit the full force of paleogenetics. In 2019, Vagheesh Narasimhan, while still in Reich and Patterson’s lab, used ancient DNA to demonstrate that ANI ancestry had two components. The major one relates to the lost Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), an advanced early human civilization whose geographical extent was vastly broader than that of either of its fellow groundbreaking contemporaries, Egypt and Sumer. And a minority one comes from steppe pastoralists with ultimate origins on the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea, though the subgroup who arrived in India did so after a sojourn in the forests and marshlands south of the Baltic Sea, where they genetically absorbed the remnants of the region’s last Neolithic people, the Globular Amphora, until it composed 30% of their ancestry.

The ASI too, appear to have been a genetic compound, combining a major component (related to the Andamanese, today an exceptionally isolated population scattered across the Andaman Islands) that has been variously christened “Ancient Ancestral South Indian” (AASI), “Andamanese Hunter-Gatherer” (AHG) or “South Asian Hunter-Gatherer” (SAHG), depending on your paper of preference. Narasimhan’s reading in broad strokes was that between 5000 and 3000 BC, farmers with roots ultimately in northeastern Iran and southern Central Asia moved into the plains of the Indus River Valley, and then later, both southeast into Gujarat and eastward to the limits of the Gangetic plain. These people became the dominant population that eventually gave rise to the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Here, between the Indus and Ganges, they absorbed a secondary admixture related to the SAHG. Then, after 1800 BC, with the IVC terminally declining in the face of climatic shocks begun across Eurasia four centuries prior, a wave of pastoralists from the steppe, the Indo-Aryans, arrived. These people further transformed Indian genetics, but especially Indian culture in terms of language and ritual. Indian mythological memory Āryāvarta, the “abode of the Aryans,” was reshaped by these intrusive pastoralists, who in the process wrote their Indus Valley Civilization city-building predecessors out of the narrative.

This was the state of knowledge I wrote about early in 2021, (a first deep-dive post for this substack!) in a two part series. In genomics and paleogenetics today, four years is practically eons; the span between 2017 and 2021 saw orders-of-magnitude gains in our understanding of, for example, Pleistocene Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. After 2020, it was on to other regions; China stepped up, driving their tally of ancient DNA results from 100-200 up into the thousands. The Near East saw the first deep paleogenetic explorations of the Bronze Age. India, meanwhile, saw no progress. In 2021, we had a single 2600-BC genome from Rakhigarhi, an IVC site in Indian Punjab, 38 individuals from Roopkund lake in the Himalayas, dated to two periods, 800 and 1800 AD, and dozens of samples in northeast Pakistan’s Swat Valley dating across 17 centuries, from 1200 BC to 500 AD. And Narasimhan’s 2019 paper included 11 individuals from sites in Central Asia who appeared to bear all or partial subcontinental heritage, probably migrants and traders. He labeled these “Indus Valley Periphery” (IVP).

And now in 2025? Same. Exactly nothing new. The tap has run so dry that China literally releases more ancient Indian DNA than India does itself; a Fudan University lab recently published a study about a 6th-century AD Indian-origin man buried in north-central China. Cremation’s ubiquity across much of Indian history overall has surely hobbled DNA retrieval, but this is not the whole story. Note that multiple Indian labs have teased imminent publication of ancient DNA for years, and then somehow none of these ever materialize.

Cyber week deals continue. Lock in a lifetime subscription rate 25% off. Annual subscriptions now at $59/year (a $20 savings). This is my only yearly sale. Thanks for reading and thanks for subscribing!

On this episode, Razib talks to Vishal Ganesan and Anang Mittal, two Indian-American Hindus who have been thinking about the role of their faith in the present, and past, of the American social landscape. Ganesan is a California-based attorney and writer who focuses on the history, identity, and representation of the Hindu diaspora in the United States. He is best known for his project “Hindoo History” and his writing on the “Frontier Dharma” platform, which attempts to conceptualize what an American, as opposed to Indian, “Hinduism” might look like. Anang Mittal is a DC-based political communications professional who recently worked for Senator Mitch McConnell. Mittal grew up in India before moving to the US at a young age about 25 years ago. Ganesan, in contrast, was born to an earlier generation of Indian immigrants to the US. He grew up north of Austin, TX. Though their perspectives differ, they both believe that Hinduism and Indian-American identity cannot simply be ported over with no changes into the American cultural landscape.

The conversation is centered on two essays, Ganesan’s The Meaning and Limits of “Hinduphobia” Discourse in the Diaspora and Mittal’s What Hindu Americans Must Build. While Ganesan explores and articulates what it means to be Indian-American and Hindu today in America, and what might mean in the future, Mittal’s argument is framed by a deep understanding of American history and how Hindus fit into the bigger arc of history. Razib, Ganesan and Mittal discuss the past, present, and potential future of Hindus and Indians, two separate categories, in America over the course of two hours. Their discussion was triggered by the online controversy over the fact that Vice President J. D. Vance’s wife is a Hindu, and he has encouraged her to convert to his Roman Catholic religion (in which their children are being raised). But the discussion extends far beyond matters of contemporary politics, probing what it means to be American, and what it could mean to be a Hindu.

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