Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to Ed West, a British journalist and author. He has served as deputy editor of UnHerd and The Catholic Herald, and has written columns for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He runs the Substack newsletter Wrong Side of History, where he explores culture, politics, and the longue durée of Western history. West is the author of books including Small Men on the Wrong Side of History and The Diversity Illusion, as well as popular-history titles such as 1066 and Before All That.

A previous podcast guest, West and Razib revisit the topic of British decline three years on. They discuss Britain’s economic transformation, from one of the standout economies of Europe a generation ago, to a laggard. Razib probes why the British seem so attached to their welfare state, and why the state has embraced anti-growth policies along with high migration rates. They also discuss the tensions within Britain’s large Muslim minority, and the cultural environment that allowed for mass migrant inflows despite their political unpopularity.

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Today Razib talks to Noah Smith, an American economist-turned-blogger known for his commentary on economics and public policy. His blog, Noahpinion, is one of the most popular on Substack. He earned a PhD in economics at University of Michigan and served as an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook  University before leaving academia to become a full-time writer. He wrote a column for Bloomberg until 2021, when he turned his focus entirely to independent writing and his Substack newsletter. Smith is based out of San Francisco but spends part of the year in Japan. An enthusiast for Japanese culture, he is also one of the central nodes in English-speaking rabbit-twitter.

First, Razib and Smith talk about the current cultural and political situation in Japan. In particular, how did Japan transform itself from a country with non immigration to one with a non-trivial number of migrants? Additionally, Razib asks Smith about the new Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, the first woman in that role. Smith elucidates her relationship to the politics of two of her most prominent predecessors, Shinzo Abe and Junichiro Koizumi. Razib also asks, is she as far right as some people are saying? Then Smith and Razib discuss the “vibe shift” in American culture over the last five years, from the peak period of wokeness around 2020, to the current political ascendancy of MAGA and how Democrats are reconfiguring their politics.

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Today, Razib talks to Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist, horror entertainment producer, and author, whose work centers on the psychological and evolutionary roots of our fascination with darkness, horror, and true crime. He is affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. Scrivner also serves as the executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and founded the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. He has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, TIME Magazine, National Geographic, Scientific American and Forbes. He is the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away, where he explores how our fascination with horror functions as a survival-oriented, yet deeply human, impulse.

Though working in psychology and behavior, Scrivner’s original training is in biological the sciences, and Razib first probes him on the possible evolutionary origins of our persistent interest in horror, and why we might actually be attracted to the phenomenon in the first place. Scrivner also explains how the horror genre differs from other narrative forms, in particular, the power imbalance that makes heroic action and tension much more difficult. Horror, in fact, primarily leverages our intuitions about how predator and prey interact, more than a battle between peers. Scriver also discusses the relationship between fear and our dreams, and the various psychological and evolutionary theories for why we might have so many nightmares.

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Cerberus, pencil drawing, O. Khan, age 8.

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.

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.

In the USA, the month of October culminates in Halloween, a binge of packaged candy and costumed children trudging along sidewalks that rarely see that much foot traffic in a month. In the past, Halloween celebrated life’s macabre dimension, and children were widely welcomed to dress up as the monsters and demons that might otherwise haunt their nightmares. Indeed the holiday’s cultural origins run far deeper than its current sanitized incarnation; it was on this day that people believed the barriers between the spirit and material worlds were at their annual low. Even though American Halloween’s proximate origins lie in the pagan Celtic festival of Samhain or the Christian All Hallows’ Eve, the holiday’s genesis is more primal. In Mexico, Samhain’s equivalent is Día de Muertos, the multi-day ritual that drove the plot of the 2017 film Coco. And such celebrations are not exclusive to ‌the broader historical lineage of the West. Think of China’s Hungry Ghost Festival, when the spirits rise from the lower realm. Almost all human societies share a widespread belief that at times and places the spirit world draws closer to our own material reality.

In Shamanism: The Timeless Religion, UC Davis anthropology professor Manvir Singh takes the commonalities across these cultural traditions as evidence of deep cognitive instincts fashioned by our evolutionary history. These intuitions, which reliably form the foundation of culture and folkways, reflect a preexistent universal shamanic mind. Singh argues that shamanism is present in all societies, even if we conventionally differentiate it from the “higher religions,” especially Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, SIngh argues that this earlier religious sensibility suffuses the monotheistic faiths as well.

Shamans are classically associated with small tribal societies scattered across Siberia, with their origins going back to the Pleistocene. So what does an Ice-Age soothsayer have to do with the God of Abraham? Perhaps more than you think. The Hebrew Bible is not just a religious text; it is also an ethnographic record of a tribal people. In the first centuries after their arrival in the Holy Land, the Bible records that the Israelites were led and advised by prophets and judges whose powers went beyond pure persuasion. First, in the Book of Samuel, the obscure witch of Endor calls back the spirit of the prophet Samuel to the world of the living to advise Saul, first king of the Israelites. Angered at being called back to the world of the living, the spirit prophesies doom upon Saul and his army. Later, in the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah’s prayers bring a dead boy back to life, the first instance of bodily resurrection in the Bible. And of course, in the Gospels of the New Testament, Jesus’ miracles testify to powers that in other contexts would be those of a magician, with his greatest wizardry being his own resurrection from death.

So perhaps the matrix of cognitive intuitions that seem to come preloaded in humans makes the widespread emergence of holidays like Halloween inevitable. The world of magic will at some point intersect with the world of matter. But this was not necessarily something to be welcomed, even if pre-modern people felt that it was inevitable. One original aspect of Halloween obscured by its modern consumerist incarnation is a sense of foreboding, fear, and the ever-present potential of horror. Coltan Scrivner’s Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away examines horror the way Singh inspected religion: why do we seek scenarios where our sense of fear is triggered, and why do some even actively enjoy it? Rather than cultural anthropology or ethnography, Scrivener’s explanation rests upon a foundation of evolutionary biology. In the ancient evolutionary environment, humans were both predator and prey, so phenomena that would otherwise horrify us in our prey guise retain a certain fascination. The fearless live a carefree, but short life, given their inattention to the dangers of their environment. Horror, a deep awareness of danger’s ubiquity, would have kept us alert in an Ice-Age world of real-life monsters, from cave bears to menacing mammoths. A relict fascination with horror is a key part of our psychology because our hunter-gatherer ancestors truly lived in a universe of endless dangers and threats far beyond their powers to control or tame.

But ultimately, folkways must build, extend and elaborate on our most innate intuitions about the nature of the universe and psychological reflexes rooted in emotions like fear. The diversity of human cultures attests to our creativity, taking base instincts and overlaying them with stories, traditions and rites. The persistence of beliefs and traditions which served as Halloween’s basis attests that despite the religious homogeneity Christianity’s spread implies, Europe long retained many of its primitive folk beliefs; they persisted as superstitions long after the old religions’ official suppression. Calvinist scholar Aton Wessels in Europe Was It Ever Really Christian? argues that the dismissal of peasant folk superstitions as beneath consideration papers over the reality of de facto paganism among the continent’s peasantry until the Reformation, and perhaps later. Wessels makes the case that the rural population was poorly catechized, theologically ignorant, and regularly practiced clearly pagan rituals like praying to the moon at sacred sites well into early modernity. Wessels, a convinced Protestant, implies that this owed to the Roman Catholic Church’s inattention to proper indoctrination, with Christianization only pushing past the surface level once Protestant traditions like universal Bible study took root.

Jumping a few centuries beyond the end of Wessels’ narrative, in the late 19th century, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology documents the attempts of modern political movements to leverage Europe’s folk beliefs toward political and social ends. The Occult Roots of Nazism is a deep exploration of intellectual genealogy and the influence of Ariosophy, the “wisdom of the Aryans.” This proto-Nazi occultism integrated bits of European folklore with the new anthropological and historical sciences and strains of spiritualist movements stimulated by ‌ideas from India. Goodrick-Clarke’s monograph exposes the fundamentally creative aspects of the reconstructionist neo-pagan enterprise. After Lithuania’s conversion in the 14th century, formal paganism with its priestly class disappeared from Europe, leaving nationalist thinkers to invent sacred rites and formulate new traditions, albeit building upon folk beliefs that survived Christianization. This supports Wessels’ thesis that a substrate of pagan belief and practice really remained submerged beneath Europe’s Christian superstructure. Even if the SS rituals were ‌what we might dismiss as “live-action role playing,” with their neo-pagan events bearing little resemblance to the traditions of Germany’s pre-Christian tribes, the underlying intuitions about an immanent divine, and the necessity of balancing light and dark forces, harken back to Singh’s arguments in Shamanism, that any new religion must rest upon the foundation of our primal faith. Hitler’s followers were inventing a new form of Germanic shamanism.

Finally, Heather Pringle in Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust explores the synthesis of the occult, archaeology and racial ideology during the apogee of Hitler’s Third Reich. Though the Nazi leadership was not traditionally religious in the sense of being devout Christians, many were extremely superstitious. Adolf Hitler himself made recourse to astrologers, but as head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler was a deeply convinced believer in Ariosophy and the power of magic and the supernatural. Pringle reviews the textual evidence that the Reich’s archaeological program was explicitly driven by the search for magical technologies which might rival the “wonder weapons” that their scientists were producing. She relates these quixotic endeavors to Himmler and his inner circle’s bizarre beliefs about the European race’s past, and illustrates how credulous and naive they were in underwriting the quest for Finnish wizards or prehistoric Aryan talismans. Master Plan makes it clear that Himmler and the Nazi leadership were motivated by both horror and fear, in particular of both Jews and their putative Communist confederates. Their irrational and unwarranted fear was so powerful they felt no compunction in undertaking the horrors of the Holocaust and the extermination of “enemy races.” The Nazi project was in a sense the stripping away of modernity and the scientific outlook, to leave little more than the most primitive mind’s raw fears, emotions and reactions. Albeit, hitched to the full destructive might of a modern nation-state’s industrial capacity and war machine

Bigger is often better: Competition is good, smallness isn’t. Economies of scale matter in the modern world; “mom and pop” airlines wouldn’t really work. A few large firms competing is often the optimum. When those firms have structural impediments to innovation, like Google sitting on their AI-technology for years, start-ups emerge to challenge them.

The Superintendent’s Bio Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was. An illegal immigrant with a frankly fake doctorate (his dissertation literally revolved around administering a nine-question survey to fifteen respondents at a single school) becomes superintendent of Des Moines school district. Even though delving deeper makes clear that DEI significantly influenced his hiring, the evidence also suggests that he was, in reality, a reasonably active and capable educator. He didn’t need a fake doctorate for anything but signaling.

Who Is Nick Land? He has been the most important name in Silicon Valley you’ve never heard of. But now the influential ‘father of accelerationism’ is finally in the spotlight. A beautifully written profile of a very obscure yet influential figure, the philosopher Nick Land. Land regularly linked from his old website, Xenosystems, to my long-time weblog Gene Expression, so our intellectual journeys in the 21st century have intersected periodically. His exposition of a system of belief that is both technophilic but anti-liberal has strongly shaped the thinking of many figures in the right-wing tech scene.

How the boomers crippled France. As far as we know, France is the first nation to hit the demographic transition; I do wonder if France will be the first European nation that engages in serious structural reforms to its welfare state. According to current reports, the median French pensioner has a slightly higher income than the median French worker.

Why Republican Normies Will Bend the Knee to Groypers: The “I just want to grill” crowd will not save conservatism. Richard Hanania thinks that the future belongs to the energetic radical youth. I am not so sure, but it seems more likely than it did a few years ago, with Candace Owens still being a major figure despite her shift toward traditionally anti-Semitic positions.

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job: It’s the shut up and grind era, tech workers said, as Apple, Google, Meta and other giants age into large bureaucracies. Don’t feel sorry for people who can get paid $250,000 per year while barely doing any work, and much more if they actually produce. The boom times of the late 2010s were underwritten by financial conditions, with very low interest rates allowing tech companies to flood the market with cash. With massive financial resources, they heedlessly loaded up on employees by the truckload. What we are seeing today is simply a correction for those excesses.

Identifying the Levant as a potential contact and interbreeding zone for Neanderthals and modern humans. The authors used paleoclimate modeling to fix on the geographical region we’ve conventionally estimated via genomics alone.. Since “Basal Eurasians” didn’t have Neanderthal admixture that means they were likely in Arabia to the south, or, I suspect more likely, in northeast Africa.

Beyond years of schooling: Shifting genetic influences across educational milestones in two Norwegian cohorts. The extreme cases show less heritability. Why? Well, once you have an undergrad degree, getting further education tends to be very discretionary and conditional on what your values are, not your abilities.

Comprehensive gene heritability estimation reveals the genetic architecture of rare coding variants underlying complex traits. Rare variants probably explain some of the “missing heritability” in genomic studies. That means big sample sizes and whole genome sequencing will resolve many mysteries.

Largest-Scale Genomic Resource Reconstructing the Genetic Origin, Population Structure, and Biological Adaptations of the Hui People. Looks like Chinese Muslims have diverse origins. Northern Hui are part Central Asia, while southern Hui are entirely East Asian. So Islam arrived via the Silk Road, but also through maritime trade. Finally, the skin-lightening variant for SLC24A5 is selected for in Hui even after admixture with Han. This leaves the motive for selection mysterious and rules out skin color, since northern Han are the same complexion as the Hui.

Ancient DNA connects large-scale migration with the spread of Slavs. The Slavic migration into the Balkans is historically attested, but these data imply that they’re newcomers in much of Central Europe as well, with origins in modern western Russia.

Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene. Early humans clearly were very enterprising when it came to maritime voyages. Southeast Asia seems to have received many of these early human groups, who get to islands and become isolated, some arriving over 1 million years ago.

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall.

A recent series was this two-part examination of the Austronesian diaspora:

Part 1, Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats:

The attested voyages between Polynesia, maritime Southeast Asia and Madagascar that created a human cultural diaspora are all undeniably epic long hauls. But they are likely just the tip of the iceberg. At some point, it seems probable that Austronesians explored the entire Indian and Pacific ocean basins, save for the most prohibitively frigid zones. Outside of Southeast Asia, whenever there were already entrenched human populations, like the Aboriginals in Australia and Amerindians in South America, the newcomers did not tend to settle or establish cultural outposts. But when they encountered virgin land, as in Hawaii, New Zealand and Madagascar, they flourished, established new cultures, always innovating furiously to adapt to novel local conditions.

Part 2, From Formosa to the Four Corners of the Earth: the Austronesian expansion’s long arc:

Genetics, archaeology and linguistics all roughly converge on the reality that some 4,000 years ago, during the late Neolithic, a group of rice farmers out of Taiwan crossed over into the Philippines, and from there fatefully radiated out along numerous long-distance trajectories, waves of humanity rippling across sea lanes between 3,500 and 3,000 years ago, westward into Southeast Asia, and east all across Oceania, with pushes still as late as 700 years ago to New Zealand and Hawaii. Their furthest outriders both reached the New World, and settled Madagascar, exotic outposts at the antipodes of the world from one another.

And we follow a recent ancient DNA find back to a favorite people, with A Nile shadow 4,500 years long:

Ancient DNA allows us to examine exactly how continuous a people are with their forebears, but the way ancient Egyptians preserved their elites’ remains with chemical processes has left paleogenetics a relative dearth of material. Ironically, the very mummification that brings us so eerily close to the human faces of antiquity, guarantees their DNA’s destruction. Nevertheless, a 2017 paper reported genome-wide data on three ancient Egyptians, with the authors finding substantial continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians. After their conquest by Arab tribes Egyptians were subsequently Islamicized and Arabicized, but their genetic origins remained predominantly among the native peasantry. However, a major lacuna in this work is that the oldest whole genomes (as opposed to just mtDNA) date to the 8th century BC, after the New Kingdom’s fall, at the very end of dynastic Egypt proper. Though this was still the Egypt of the pharaohs, these last centuries of native rule marked a great civilization’s twilight, and outside influences, from Libya in the west, Nubia to the south, as well as the Levant and Iran, loomed large.

And, finally, whichever side of paywall you’re on, I welcome you to read my recent How the West was wrought:

When intellectual historians trace the lineage of Western civilization to the Greeks, they mean the Greeks of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, a cosmopolitan city that drew intellectuals and entrepreneurs from the entire Greek-speaking world of that day. They do not mean the Greeks of 1200 BC, who constructed vast fortified citadels, raided their neighbors across the Near East and employed literacy primarily as an accounting tool. Something special occurred with the Iron-Age Greeks that connected them to a tradition destined to endure another 2,500 years and counting; they were different, but not entirely alien. You have only to read the Athenian historian Thucydides recalling the conflict between Melos and Athens, where the latter issue the former an ultimatum that includes the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” to appreciate that while this people may lack a modern sense of justice, they were fully in possession of a modern sense of tragedy. The critical-rationalist perspective, an analytic frame of mind tinged with skepticism but confident in reason’s ability to see to the heart of things, is at the core of the West’s modern self-conception, the germ that would blossom into the Enlightenment. This may not reflect the preponderance of who the Classical Greeks were, but it is nevertheless the fertile seed of what would come to define the West’s unique self-conception millennia later..

A 2025 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, Re-writing the human family tree one skull at a time.

Lucy, Turkana Boy, Java Man and Ardi. These are just a few of the seminal fossils widely known by name for their role in shaping and re-shaping our understanding of human evolution over the last century. They have been instrumental in how scholars construct the human family tree, predating DNA evidence by decades. Fossils, the mineralized remains of bones and teeth, offer a concrete solidity DNA data cannot. Simply beholding a single Neanderthal skull brings home how profoundly different they were from us given their robustness and unique morphology. It was fossil evidence from Africa, in the first half of the 20th century, that finally convinced physical anthropologists Homo’s origin was on that continent, rather than Eurasia (on this, Charles Darwin was correct, though his argument had been based more on biogeography, as our nearest relatives live in Africa).

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:

• Nate Soares: we are doomed (probably)

• Alexander Cortes: broscience, health science and fertility

• Kat Rosenfield: after the vibe shift

• Eric Kaufmann: a cultural revolution in winter

• Ryan P. Williams: the Claremont Institute standing athwart history

• Chad Orzel: the state of physics and academia in 2025

• Jonathan Anomaly and James Lee: is eugenics in our future?

• Jason Richwine: immigration moratorium now

• Alex Nowrasteh: an immigration libertarian in Trump’s America

• John Hawks: varieties of humankind all mixed up

• Noah Millman: from finance to the culture industry

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

• Jack Despain Zhou: in defense of tracking

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.

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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 billions of years, life’s replenishment has proceeded with a certain leaden regularity. Genetic code is incessantly copied (nearly) verbatim, line by line, word for word, letter for letter. Lineages might be unceremoniously snuffed out, and cataclysms might coldly erase millennia of progress, of evolution, of adaptation. But those are private tragedies, superficial outcomes. Across the eons, across the vast kingdoms of life, the mechanisms fine-tuned to roll out generation upon generation of progeny trundle on, unmoved by fad or fashion. In the animal kingdom, sexual reproduction regularly reshuffles a given species’ extant set of options and mutation occasionally injects a genuine wild card capable of shaking up a whole stolid lineage.

But the mechanism itself? It chugs along unchanged and unchangeable, a wonder of clockwork reliability. Universal and eternal. DNA across the vast plant and animal kingdoms is predictably recombined, transcribed and read according to one basic set of procedures. And it matters not whether the particular copy of a genome comes tidily packed in the seed of a just picked apple, whether it has spent a century and a half bobbing along deep in the ovary of sea turtle, or whether it was just produced Sunday afternoon in a man snoring on his sofa. Or, for that matter, in an ankylosaurus who died 67 million years ago. DNA is DNA. This level of life knows no version of humanity’s Tower of Babel. Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” chart infinite different life courses, but the secret of their operating instructions has only ever been breathed in one simple four-letter code.

In this, the natural world could hardly be less like the manmade products of our restlessly mimetic species, with our protean languages and dialects that morph daily, our unchecked appetites for borrowing, neologisms and our constantly evolving script conventions. Languages blink out of existence incessantly, and robust language families can chart splits on the scale of centuries, with the Middle English of the Middle Ages scarcely decipherable to English speakers today. Little wonder then that we require a stroke of luck like rediscovering the trilingual Rosetta stone to even begin to decrypt entire long-ago languages, no matter how copiously they might be preserved. And to this day, all too often whole bodies of indelibly inscribed language remain as mute prisoners staring back at us, in plain sight, but utterly incomprehensible, like the Minoans’ Cretan hieroglyphics or Linear A.

In science’s most recent generations of frenetic activity and progress, some of the keenest minds of our species have been proceeding stepwise towards a complete grasp of this universal code. Between identifying DNA’s double-helix structure in 1953 and now routinely reading out entire genomes letter for letter, they have come at it from every angle, the intervening decades marked by countless small steps and great leaps forward in our understanding. In this century the field has both converged on methods to extract DNA from ever more ancient samples and continued refining methods to read out billions upon billions of base pairs.

Compared to ancient inscriptions carved in stone, ancient DNA is fiendishly hard to recover. But once extracted, with today’s technologies, it has the power to spill untold secrets. The genome of a single anonymous Egyptian man who lived and died some 5,000 years ago plainly shows us how genetically like their storied Old Kingdom ancestors Egyptian citizens remain today. And just as discerning his same ancestral mix in contemporary Egyptians reveals millennia of continuity along the Nile, decomposing his genetic makeup also sheds light back millennia before his lifetime. Unraveling his ancestry composition yields clues about the peoples of prehistory who made ancient Egypt what it was at its height. And all it took was a single human genome. That and the clarity of a changeless code transmitted in just four symbols since time immemorial.

In the West’s self-conception, Egypt plays a special role, the root of the tree that eventually became civilization, spreading north to Europe, and eventually westward. To the ancient Greeks, Egypt was the font of ultimate knowledge, a world already aged even in antiquity, a fossil from a bygone time as the Greeks were rising in the middle of the first millennium before Christ. It is a miracle that we know so much about the Egypt of cities, temples and pyramids that arose along the Nile so long ago, but this is as the Egyptians themselves intended; they left an impact out of all proportion to their population. Hundreds of generations later, we see and read their works in stone across the landscape and at their still-standing monuments. Narmer, the first ruler of a united Egypt, lived 2,750 years before Plato; the same vast span of time separating us from Rome’s 753 BC founding today. About four centuries after this first historical pharaoh, Egypt’s Old Kingdom was born in 2686 BC, marking the beginning of the dynastic cycle that defines later Egyptian civilization. This early period, when copper was more common than bronze, set the foundation of the polity that the Persians would eventually conquer a final time in 343 BC, 2,343 years later, concluding the long chapter of Egyptian independence. But the shadow of Egyptian culture persisted far longer than the last native pharaohs. The religion first institutionalized in the Old Kingdom continued down to 537 AD, when Justinian the Great ordered the great temple complex at Philae closed. The indigenous Egyptian language persisted even longer. Coptic, its modern descendant, remained a living language in isolated pockets of Upper Egypt into the 20th century, and is still the ritual language of over ten million Coptic Orthodox Christians today.

The fact that the Egyptian people live on today millennia after their Sumerian contemporaries in Mesopotamia were but faint memories is a key reason their ancestors remain so vivid to us today, not flat sketches in history books. Even now we know Imhotep’s name and the lineaments of his life as a vizier, priest, architect and scribe. Born in 2670 BC, he was instrumental in the design and building of Djoser’s step pyramid. He is arguably the first historically attested professional whose name and biographical details we have in the entire history of the human race.

The lucky fact of such troves of ancient Egyptians’ writing being preserved in imperishable stone inscriptions in an arid climate furthers our extensive knowledge of ancient Egypt. These records tell us that the Egyptians created an incredibly robust culture, maintaining continuity down to the Greco-Roman period. Even under Roman rule in Egypt, Imhotep remained a worshipped culture hero; and what’s more, if the ancient architect had time-traveled to Augustus’ time, he would have found the Egypt of that day easily comprehensible. This continuity delivered the key that unlocks direct access to the Egyptian past for us so far into the future. Hieroglyphics, Demotic (a late form of Egyptian script), and Greek were the languages inscribed on the famous Rosetta Stone, a Ptolemaic-era tablet inscription dating to 196 BC. For commoners, Egypt, though then ruled by the Macedonian Ptolemies, remained little changed from the nation that had built the pyramids 2,500 years prior. So it was necessary to set proclamations in the language and script of the country’s majority, as well as that of their Greek-speaking rulers. Two thousand years later, 19th-century scholars, whose Christian culture stemmed directly from the Greeks’, could decrypt the hieroglyphs via this classical inheritance.

Through archaeology and history, ancient Egypt remains vivid in the present; its symbols and monuments exert a magnetic attraction even in a distracted age of smartphones and self-driving cars. But what about the people? Today, Egypt is the world’s most populous Arabic-speaking nation. Until the petro-dollar fueled rise of the Gulf Arabs in the late 20th century, for most of the past eight centuries since Baghdad fell to the Mongols, Egypt had been the cultural nerve center of Arabic literature and Sunni Islamic orthodoxy. Imhotep may have been able to make himself understood to Egyptian peasants in 500 AD, and even recognized the rituals and deities in rural shrines and temples of Late Antiquity, more than 3,000 years after his death. But within a century of Rome’s fall, the native religion would have almost fully vanished, and in another five, after 1100 AD, the Egyptian language would be mostly replaced by Arabic. Memes are not as stubborn as genes. Just as a people can accept Islam, so can they abandon their old languages for the new.

Ancient DNA allows us to examine exactly how continuous a people are with their forebears, but the way ancient Egyptians preserved their elites’ remains with chemical processes has left paleogenetics a relative dearth of material. Ironically, the very mummification that brings us so eerily close to the human faces of antiquity, guarantees their DNA’s destruction. Nevertheless, a 2017 paper reported genome-wide data on three ancient Egyptians, with the authors finding substantial continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians. After their conquest by Arab tribes Egyptians were subsequently Islamicized and Arabicized, but their genetic origins remained predominantly among the native peasantry. However, a major lacuna in this work is that the oldest whole genomes (as opposed to just mtDNA) date to the 8th century BC, after the New Kingdom’s fall, at the very end of dynastic Egypt proper. Though this was still the Egypt of the pharaohs, these last centuries of native rule marked a great civilization’s twilight, and outside influences, from Libya in the west, Nubia to the south, as well as the Levant and Iran, loomed large.

Now, a Nature paper reports the analysis of an entire genome from the Old Kingdom, approximately 1,850 years before those previous oldest genome-wide samples in our data. Going back to the very root and foundation of Egyptian civilization, this individual gives us a clear window onto Egypt’s genetic and demographic landscape at the very beginning of history.

The new sample was recently recovered from the remains of a man who died at Nuwayrat, some 150 miles south of Cairo. Using carbon-dating, the 95.4% confidence interval puts the individual’s death between 2855 and 2570 BC and the authors favor the recent end of that span. Though the paper has the Old Kingdom in its title, it is quite possible that a Nuwayrat man died during the last decades of the early-dynastic era, which ended in 2686 BC, but again, the authors seem to lean toward the tail end of the distribution. The shift that differentiates the Old Kingdom from the early-dynastic period is subtle, rather than something culturally or politically abrupt, more a matter of chronological convenience than substance. The creation of large-scale stone-construction pyramids that so defines the Old Kingdom in our imagination reflected a newly solidified state capacity, but hieroglyphs, divine rulers, and distinctive Egyptian artistic styles all were already commonplace in the preceding early-dynastic period. The difference then is more of degree than quality, and the transition is to a great extent a matter of retrospective semantics. For all practical purposes, it is irrelevant whether the Nuwayrat individual died in the last decades of the early-dynastic period, or the first century of the Old Kingdom.

His burial in a large pottery vessel within a rock-cut tomb suggests a high social status for that period. The man was likely about 60 when he died, and had heavily worn teeth and age-related osteoarthritis. Though the burial indicated elite status by the end of his days, his skeletal remains also reflected a high level of stress from hard labor throughout his life. The particular patterns of stress and wear on his bones are consistent with the possibility that he was a potter. Isotope analysis of dental enamel and collagen point to an omnivorous diet, with the plant component being wheat and barley. The chemical signatures are also consistent with growing up in a hot, dry climate. All of this bolsters the case that the man buried at Nuwayrat was a native Egyptian of his time, albeit one who enjoyed some upward social mobility later in life.

For labeling purposes in the analysis, the researchers called the genome NUE001, and sequenced it to 2.02× coverage. This means they read and recorded any given position on Nuwayrat man’s whole genome about twice. Not sufficient if Nuwayrat man needed medical diagnosis, but a good start for population genomic analyses. Researchers compared Nuwayrat man to thousands of modern and ancient genomes, using anywhere between 71,202 and 593,124 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), depending on the type of analysis. This number of markers is more than sufficient for both principal component analysis (PCA), which maps individuals along independent dimensions correlating with genetic variation, and for admixture-modeling, which breaks down individual genomes into discrete ancestry components.

The PCA and admixture analyses indicate that NUE001 had parents with predominantly North African ancestry, and minority ties to West Asia, specifically the Caucasus and Iran. Interestingly, a shift occurred millennia later during the period of the New Kingdom; even before the Roman conquest, Egyptians seem to have seen an influx of particularly Levantine ancestry during the early to middle Bronze Age, long after the Nuwayrat man’s death. Finally, note how the modern Egyptian samples from the “Human Origins” (HO) dataset reveal continued predominance of the khaki-toned North African cluster, but at reduced levels compared to antiquity. Modern Egyptians have Sub-Saharan African ancestry, both Nilotic ancestry, with a presumably Nubian provenance, and Bantu-like heritage reflecting the wide reach of the Islamic slave trade. Pontic-steppe genetic influx is also present, likely from Mameluke slaves who were imported from among the Turkic peoples north of the Black Sea.

The PCA plot above aligns with the admixture analysis. NUE001 is near the North African cluster, but shifted toward ancient Levantines. The purple points representing modern Egyptians are even further shifted, yet still nearby. It is notable here that Arabians and modern Levantines remain distinct from modern Egyptians, refuting the notion that Arabic-speaking Egyptian Muslims descended from newcomers from the east, with the Copts being the only indigenes.

To get clarity on the proportion of Old Kingdom Egyptian ancestry remaining in modern Egyptians the authors used a more explicit and formal method that modeled NUE001 as a hypothetical donor population, along with a slate of other groups derived from ancient DNA samples (reading left to right, Morocco Middle Neolithic, Bronze Age Caucasus, Minoan Greece, early Bantu-era Congo, Nuwayrat man as NUE001, Bronze Age Levant, Bronze Age Iran and prehistoric Ethiopia). It is quite plausible that the Morocco Middle Neolithic component is simply ancient Egyptian ancestry being mis-categorized because Nuwayrat man was himself mostly North African. Assuming that the Moroccan Middle Neolithic is also tagging in ancient ancestry from the Old Kingdom, modern Egyptians average a bit more than half ancient Egyptian. Because Sub-Saharan African ancestry is so easily detected given its immense internal diversity and distinctiveness, we have already known for a couple of decades that about 10-15% of modern Egyptian ancestry derives from the Islamic-era slave trade. But that still leaves a substantial minority, which seems to be the product of gene flow out of West Asia probably occurring in waves between the Bronze Age, about 4,000 years ago, until after the Arab invasions of the 7th century AD. Finally, the number of individuals showing Caucasian ancestry tracks the southbound trade in military slaves that persisted for 500 years along routes through the Black Sea. Between AD 1300 and 1800, Egypt’s ruling elite were Mamelukes, who were usually ethnically Turkic or Circassian (and remain overrepresented among the nation’s ruling class, though they are now fully Arabized).

Today Razib talks to Nate Soares the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He joined MIRI in 2014 and has since authored many of its core technical agendas, including foundational documents like Agent Foundations for Aligning Superintelligence with Human Interests. Prior to his work in AI research, Soares worked as a software engineer at Google. He holds a B.S. in computer science and economics from George Washington University.

On this episode they discuss his new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, co-authored with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Soares and Yudkowsky make the stark case that the race to build superintelligent AI is a “suicide race” for humanity. Razib and Soares discuss how AI systems are “grown” rather than deliberately engineered, making them fundamentally opaque and uncontrollable. They explore a concrete extinction scenario, explain why even minimally misaligned goals could lead to human annihilation. Soares urges immediate cooperative action to prevent such a worst-case outcome.

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This year I’ve introduced an occasional feature for paying subscribers, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club where I offer a brisk review and consideration of an interesting paper in human population genomics.

In the spirit of a conventional journal club, after each post, interested subscribers can vote on papers for future editions. 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.

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

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 paper in Science which challenges established narratives of human evolutionary relationships: The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans (2025). It comes out of Xijun Ni’s group at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. The other senior researcher is Chris Stringer at the Centre for Human Evolution Research, Natural History Museum, London, The first author is Xiaobo Feng, School of History and Culture, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China.

Lucy, Turkana Boy, Java Man and Ardi. These are just a few of the seminal fossils widely known by name for their role in shaping and re-shaping our understanding of human evolution over the last century. They have been instrumental in how scholars construct the human family tree, predating DNA evidence by decades. Fossils, the mineralized remains of bones and teeth, offer a concrete solidity DNA data cannot. Simply beholding a single Neanderthal skull brings home how profoundly different they were from us given their robustness and unique morphology. It was fossil evidence from Africa, in the first half of the 20th century, that finally convinced physical anthropologists Homo’s origin was on that continent, rather than Eurasia (on this, Charles Darwin was correct, though his argument had been based more on biogeography, as our nearest relatives live in Africa).

The individual fossils above exemplify new lineages, and sometimes even represent new species. Lucy (circa 3.4 million years BP) was the type specimen for Australopithecus afarensis, while Turkana Boy (circa 1.5 million years BP) is the most complete Homo erectus to date. The 2009 publication of Ardipithecus ramidus, dated to 4.4 million years ago, was the lynchpin in establishing the “missing” link between Miocene apes and later hominins, with the new species exhibiting both arboreal and terrestrial adaptations, and thus defining a critical waypoint in the transition to full bipedalism.

It is notable how much of our understanding of human evolution has been gleaned from truly fragmentary evidence. The stories we tell ourselves of millions of years of human evolutionary history rest on a few thousand fossil elements. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has quipped that a large room might be sufficient to house all the world’s pre-modern hominin remains. Turkana Boy, an 80% complete set of fossilized human remains, is the exception. The vast majority of fossil specimens are much more fragmentary; sometimes as little as a jawbone or a femur.

The very informative power of a single fossil, and the scarcity of remains, has often generated human drama in the field. Berkeley anthropologist Tim D. White took 16 years to finally publish his team’s analyses of Ardi after its 1994 discovery. Toumaï, the name for the human-chimp-gorilla common ancestor discovered in Chad in 2002, has already engendered a couple decades of controversy with disputes over who should be allowed to analyze the remains. The scarcity of high-quality fossils owes both to the small number of hominins alive at any given time before agriculture, and to the fragility of our skeletons. But this scarcity means that human fossils are a precious commodity whose control and distribution can make or break careers; the re-possession of the original “Hobbit” remains in Flores by Indonesian researchers from its Australian discoverers was initially nearly as big a story as the diminutive humans themselves.

But today fossil-informed paleoanthropology is itself evolving into a different type of science, less fixated on individual remains, and more focused on a synoptic understanding of a specimen in the context of the broader array of samples. Lee Berger and John Hawks, lead scientists at the fertile Homo naledi site, the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa, have both pushed for the fossils recovered to be released rapidly into the public domain, rather than held closely for decades by a few research groups. The team Berger led has the luxury to be generous because the Homo naledi remains in South Africa are so numerous, with at least 15 skeletons and more than 1,000 smaller specimens, from skulls, teeth, ribs, hand and feet bones down to inner ear bones. The influx of fossil data driven by an “open science” paradigm coupled with emerging new computer-assisted analytic techniques, together allow researchers to extract much more information from any single fossil.

The phylogenetic position of the Yunxian cranium elucidates the origin of Homo longi and the Denisovans illustrates the fruitful synthesis of methods old and new. In the past, the cranium of the Yunxian 2 specimen would have been unusable for analysis, but researchers turned to computational methods to project it back to its original state. This enabled analysis in the context of the much larger number of fossils already extant in the literature. Yunxian 2 has a very early and precise date and its completeness makes it an excellent addition to the fossil record. Its insertion into our current data forces a reinterpretation of the human phylogenetic tree both in overall structure and branch length. However, as is so often the case in this field, Yunxian 2 likely prefigures pending analysis of another specimen from the site, Yunxian 3, which researchers have yet to discuss, in keeping with the older practice of researchers hoarding findings until publication, even though insiders presumably know the general conclusions. These territorial practices artificially delay dissemination of scientific knowledge, and are what Berger and Hawks have been fighting against.

On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Alexander Cortes. Cortes is a trainer, fitness influencer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of Ferta, a company that aims to “optimize your reproductive health and conceive naturally.” Born and raised in California, Cortes began his career in the fitness industry as a personal trainer in 2010. Over the next few years he expanded his efforts online, writing about fitness and nutrition from a science-informed perspective. Cortes developed a following by offering practical advice on strength training, muscle building, and the psychological aspects of fitness to the interested general public, translating the wisdom-of-the-gym for the person on the street.

In the first part of the podcast, Razib and Cortes talk about “broscience,” and how it differs from “quantified self” and other movements geared toward self-optimization. They discuss how “bros” arrived on the importance and utility of peptides long before the ozempic revolution, and how the iterative and experimental methods of gym-addicted amateurs predated and anticipated what would later become conventional wisdom. Razib also explores how Cortes’ particular style of broscience differs from that of others, with its stronger empirical basis and analytical orientation (and aversion to fads like “raw food”). They discuss the “peptide revolution” and how online fitness and health influencers discovered it earlier, the utility of the macromolecules in health and wellness, and what the online community discovered already that is likely to come down the clinical pipeline.

In the second part of the discussion, Cortes introduces his new company, Ferta, and its situates its position in the fertility space. He explains the origin of his firm as he and his wife began to attempt to conceive in their 30s, and how difficult or easy the process was conditional on the optimizations they engaged in. Cortes explains many people struggle because they do things wrong, and don’t maximize their chances by being healthy and fertile.

Note: This episode also features a bonus segment from Dinesh D’Souza, where he talks about his career as a public intellectual in the 1990s, and his origins as a conservative intellectual.

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In 2012, economic historian Niall Ferguson wrote The West and the Rest. This was the tail end of the decade-long “war on terror,” when the “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islamic radicalism dominated our view of global geopolitics. An overview of the book on Amazon asserts that “Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries.” This is a defensible claim, and Ferguson’s narrative was only the latest in a well-established genre exemplified by William H. McNeill’s 1963 The Rise of the West. The dominance of the West today, and its earlier explosion across the world after 1600, demand explanation.‌

But let’s make sure we’re all on the same page: what even is the West in the first place? From the vantage point of 2025, most would agree that France and Britain are part of the West. Germany and the Nordic countries, certainly. And Spain and Italy as well. But beyond that, toward points east and south, we enter disputed territory.

Cultural critic Rod Dreher, who lives in Budapest, Hungary, recently wrote a blog post: Janos Hunyadi: What We In The West Don’t Appreciate About Eastern Europeans. His entry hinged on the enduring relevance of the Hungarian nobleman who defeated the Ottomans and was for a generation his nation’s preeminent statesman. As the subtitle makes plain, Dreher implicitly files Hungary as part of the East, as in Eastern Europe, or the Eastern Bloc. The latter term arose in the second half of the 20th century, when Hungary was part of the Warsaw Pact, an appendage of the Soviet Union’s empire-in-all-but-name. For a Gen-X American like Dreher, it remains hard to think of Hungary as anything but Eastern European, and therefore not entirely of the West. But 50 years of Soviet hegemony, already over three decades in the past, shouldn’t blind us to the entire previous millennium of history.

Today, most Hungarians are Roman Catholic. But President Viktor Orban is a Protestant, and more precisely, a Calvinist. This deep-rooted religious connection to Reformed Protestant Christianity explains Hungarian students’ presence as seminarians at Oxford in the 17th century; and harkens back to a time 400 years ago when Hungary was a predominantly Reformed domain. It was centuries of Austrian Habsburg royal patronage and encouragement of Roman Catholicism that brought most Hungarians back into the fold, though in the Ottoman-ruled eastern provinces, Protestants remained beyond the reach of the Counter-Reformation, allowing them to maintain their religious traditions down to the present. But whether Catholic or Calvinist, modern Hungarians’ Christianity goes back to the conversion just before 1000 AD of the pagan Magyar warlord Vajk, known to hagiographers as St. Stephen. His Bavarian German wife likely influenced his decision to embrace the new faith. But perhaps more compelling was that conversion would allow him to enter the good graces of a budding European commonwealth of princes and kings united under a shared religious identity; Christian monarchs who looked to the Roman Pope as their spiritual leader. In 1000 AD, Pope Sylvester II recognized Hungary as a Christian kingdom, making Stephen’s belonging official with a crown. Despite the Soviet interlude from after World War II into the early 1990s, Hungary and the Hungarians were for a millennium the eastern beachhead of the West, not the western face of the East.

The lineaments of Europe’s religious divisions today are key to understanding this reality of what the West is, even without making recourse to the esoterica of medieval Central European history. Before the West, there was Christendom, and more precisely, Latin Christendom. After the Western Empire ended in 476 AD, the Roman Church slowly diverged into two variants, one eastern, one western, each rooted in the dominant language of that half of the Empire, Greek or Latin. Western Christianity, the Latin Church, became what we call the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism, a religious revolution triggered by an obstinate Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, was purely a phenomenon of the Western Church. No Protestants rebelled against the Orthodox Church; the East recorded no Reformation. The Christians who looked to Byzantium and Greek Christianity had a history that had long since forked off onto a different path from the West’s.

The geographical outline of the West, the civilization that gave us the modern world, is fundamentally delimited by the frontiers between Latin Christianity, progenitor of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and the world of Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy. This fault-line was clear by the late medieval period. In 1386 Jogaila, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, underwent baptism in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, took the name Wladyslaw, and became the King of Poland. Jogaila’s entrance into the Latin Church resulted in the mass influx of the Lithuanian nobility into the Western Church, ending two centuries of the pagan Duchy’s equipoise between the Roman-aligned kingdoms to the west and the Byzantine-rite Christian principalities to the east. Though he was raised pagan, Jogaila’s own mother was a Russian princess who practiced the Orthodox faith. And Lithuanian nobles who ruled over peasants practicing Eastern Christianity in the Duchy’s territories to the south and east had already largely adopted their subjects’ religion by the time Jogaila converted to Roman Catholicism. Jogaila’s new confession, and his new crown as Poland’s ruler, established that the Lithuanians would embrace a Western identity. His embrace of the western Roman rite was a massive geopolitical event that would drive the borders of the medieval Occident much further eastward, grinding it against the vast northern flank of Eastern Christianity.

But even though the boundaries are clear, the two-dimensional rendering that displays frontiers between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is just the most recent act in a much longer saga begun millennia ago. The West did not emerge fully formed from the ashes of the Roman Empire. It evolved in an ongoing process of self-conception, and the West’s roots reach far deeper back into history than even Roman times, stretching back into the most ancient genealogy of the human race itself. You can draw lines on a map, or generate plots that visualize survey data into alternative clusters, but there is no hope of grasping our current moment without rolling the narrative all the way back to the West’s roots, back to its germination.

One irony of the West’s foundations is that even while a broad consensus holds that the West began with the Greeks and the Jews, with Athens and Jerusalem, later history of these two peoples left both outside of the ambit of the West. The historical headwaters of Western civilization diverged into separate branches, with radically different histories shaping unique and disparate worldviews. After the Greeks and Jews were absorbed into a unified Rome 2,000 years ago, that world shattered into disparate fragments. The East Roman world became Byzantium, a related civilization, but distinct from the Western Roman world. It is from the latter that the West, the Occident in its mature form, evolved. While the nation-states of Western Europe were coalescing after 1500, before their independence in the 19th century, the Greeks lived as dhimmis, second-class citizens, under Turco-Muslim domination, a sad denouement for the heirs of Byzantium. Meanwhile, though the Jews of Europe are indisputably Western today, until the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century, Jews and Jewish culture were in the West, but distinctly not of it. Their cultural and religious traditions were tolerated, but for centuries they moved on a parallel and separate track. Only the cultural innovation of European secularism in the centuries after the 17th-century Wars of Religion allowed European Jews to integrate as Jews into Western society, and thus begin making the outsized contributions that loom so large in modern life.

And yet it is also true that we cannot understand, or even conceive of the West without looking to the ancient Greeks and Jews. Beowulf, an Anglo-Saxon poem set in 500s Scandinavia, whose composition seems to date to a liminal Christian society of 7th-century England, opens by noting that the monster Grendel and his mother are descendants of Cain, an explicit reference to the Hebrew Bible. Meanwhile, the Historia Brittonum, a 9th-century work by a Welsh monk, traces the origins of the native British people to the Trojans, illustrating how fully a newly Christianized Northern Europe still took such classical history for granted. If the West is an organic development out of the Latin Christian society that arose amid the Roman Empire’s western provinces, which were destined to next be ruled by barbarian tribes, at the most fundamental level of its self-conception, it is the traditions, history and thought of the Greeks and Jews that enduringly shaped that world.

The early 20th-century English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead asserted that “the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Or, perhaps more precisely Western philosophy has been a conversation between Plato and his critics, including the tradition emanating from his pupil, Aristotle. It is difficult to deny that the Greeks laid the foundations for much of later Western thought, and therefore the modern world. Those of us who grew up on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos television series cannot forget that these early Iron-Age people produced the world’s first systematic proto-science, constructing mechanistic models for the universe including heliocentrism, the spherical earth, and celestial models for the movement of stars and planets that served as handmaids to ancient astrologers and astronomers alike. Many of the Greeks’ specific speculations proved wrong, but their method of inquiry remains familiar to the modern mind. Greek mathematical knowledge was advanced enough that even today some tradition-minded universities continue to use Euclid’s Elements as a textbook for university-level mathematical instruction, 2,300 years after its initial compilation. The broad thematic outlines of plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, which come down to us via Byzantine-era copyists, feel entirely familiar 2,500 years after their writing. The Greek moral-philosophical systems, from the virtue ethics Aristotle promulgated and Stoics like the emperor Marcus Aurelius practiced, to the proto-utilitarianism of Epicurean materialists like Lucretius, also continue to affect the modern world, and were critically in dialogue with early Christianity, both as influences and foils.

But where did the Greeks come from? The earliest Greek writing dates to the 8th century BC, and the Greeks composed poems like the Iliad and Odyssey early enough to give a sense of the Bronze-Age period that preceded Classical Greece. One common myth, turned into a play by Euripides, is that Artemis demanded a human sacrifice in exchange for the winds favoring the Greeks on their journey to Troy. The wrathful goddess demands the life of Iphigenia, the high-king Agamemnon’s eldest daughter. The king wavers, torn between his love for his daughter, and his duty to avenge his brother, Menleaus against Paris of Troy. Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra pleads on behalf of their daughter, but in vain. Though Iphigenia agrees to her fate, willingly offering herself as a sacrifice, her mother’s rage at her father sows the seeds for a later cycle of vengeance triggered by Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband upon his triumphant return from Troy. In the Classical period, beginning in the 5th century, one version of the story has Artemis taking pity on Iphigenia, and replacing the girl with a deer at the last moment. But it is almost certainly the case that the more brutal ending was the myth’s original form, and that its cultural presuppositions are those of the Greeks’ Bronze-Age ancestors. Archeologists have discovered tombs with apparent human sacrifice victims dating to the Bronze Age in the ancient city of Pylos, in southwestern Greece, along with ancient texts that seem to allude to females being given as a gift to the god Poseidon.

When intellectual historians trace the lineage of Western civilization to the Greeks, they mean the Greeks of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, a cosmopolitan city that drew intellectuals and entrepreneurs from the entire Greek-speaking world of that day. They do not mean the Greeks of 1200 BC, who constructed vast fortified citadels, raided their neighbors across the Near East and employed literacy primarily as an accounting tool. Something special occurred with the Iron-Age Greeks that connected them to a tradition destined to endure another 2,500 years and counting; they were different, but not entirely alien. You have only to read the Athenian historian Thucydides recalling the conflict between Melos and Athens, where the latter issue the former an ultimatum that includes the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” to appreciate that while this people may lack a modern sense of justice, they were fully in possession of a modern sense of tragedy. The critical-rationalist perspective, an analytic frame of mind tinged with skepticism but confident in reason’s ability to see to the heart of things, is at the core of the West’s modern self-conception, the germ that would blossom into the Enlightenment. This may not reflect the preponderance of who the Classical Greeks were, but it is nevertheless the fertile seed of what would come to define the West’s unique self-conception millennia later.

If the Greeks, Indo-European-speakers on Europe’s southeastern fringe, and during the Bronze Age at best bit-players in the Near-Eastern geopolitical system, are in hindsight a surprising cultural foundation for the West, the Jews are arguably even more improbable. While the Greeks, or Achaeans as Bronze-Age observers knew them at the time, were a marginal people in the firmament of the Late Bronze Age world, the Jews, known then as Hebrews or Israelites, were entirely beneath notice, one of the many Levantine tribes under the aegis of imperial New-Kingdom Egypt. Though scholars hotly debate the historicity of the Bible’s early books, and in particular the Book of Genesis, we can see clearly that an ethnic and political entity whom we would define as Hebrews, and that was organized into two states, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, existed in the 9th century BC.

In 722 BC, the Assyrian Empire conquered the much larger and wealthier kingdom of Israel, which comprised ten of the twelve Hebrew tribes, scattering and assimilating its populace. These ten tribes were “lost” to history, their fate a mystery, though no doubt they simply melted into the other peoples of Assyria. In contrast, Judah maintained a tenuous existence on the margin of the larger Near Eastern empires until 586 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire defeated the small kingdom and drove its people into exile, resettling them in Babylon. But whereas the Israelites had dissolved into broader Assyria, the Judaeans maintained, refined and even expanded their identity in Mesopotamia. When the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonians, he freed the Jews to return to their homeland, where they could reestablish themselves in the Levant. For nearly 400 years, the Jews existed as a subject people there, under the rule of the Persians, and later under Alexander and his heirs, the Ptolemies and Seleucids. But between 167 and 160 BC they became independent again after a successful revolt led by the Hasmonean family against their Greek overlords, and remained so for another century, ruling over a territory now called Judea. After Pompey the Great conquered the Jews, the process of Hellenization that the Hasmoneans had halted in the 160s resumed apace, but despite two rebellions against the Romans, Jews were never again under threat of cultural extinction in antiquity; their traditions were part of the great discourse of the ancient world.

A vast body of scholarship attempts to understand the Jews’ origins, the development of their monotheistic religion and the historicity of their scriptures. But their persistence and survival is perhaps even more intriguing. Something transformative must have occurred between 722 BC, when the Israelite tribes passed from history, and 586 BC, when a similar exile of the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin resulted not in their extinction, but a revived flourishing in Babylon and a wholesale reconstruction of their religious tradition. The Jewish God had been a tribal god, jealous and fierce. Some even interpret his title, the “lord of hosts,” as the “god of battles.” The exiles could have turned their backs on their god, for he had failed them on the battlefield. They were a conquered and scattered people. But the early Jews refused to accept this; instead they interpreted their defeat by the armies of Babylon as punishment from their god. God had not failed them, they had failed him. In Babylon, the Jews reinvented their god, transforming him from a tribal deity haunting the uplands of the southern Levant, to the god of all gods, watching over them in their journeys. The Jewish attachment to their particular cult was strong enough that the Greek attempt to syncretize it with their own traditions in the 2nd century BC prompted a violent Jewish rebellion against Seleucid rule. The newly radicalized Jews then undertook their own program of cultural imperialism, forcibly converting to Judaism neighboring peoples like the Edomites from whom Herod the Great descended.

The idea of a transcendent supernatural force, beyond time and place, was not entirely original to the Jews. The ancient Greeks’ religion was operationally polytheistic, but philosophers like Plato believed that undergirding the universe was an ultimate divine entity or creative principle. Likewise, in India and China, the early Iron-Age civilizations suggested that the mind of Brahma or the will of Heaven respectively formed the basis of order and the universe. Jewish uniqueness lies in the way their god transcended his old parochial limitations, he continued to exhibit a personal nature. The Jewish god worked through history, not myth, revealing himself to prophets, and continuing to reiterate his special relationship to the Jewish people.

Although people often see Roman Christianity as the true revolution, fusing Greek and Jewish thought into a universalist religion, it’s worth noting that the Jews were already quite notable and distinctive before Rome’s rise. The Hebrew Bible, known to the Christians as the Old Testament, runs to over 1,000 pages in English. During the time of Persian rule, the Jews assembled and organized the oldest books, while the latest books to be written document historical events occurring in the 2nd century BC. Though intellectual and physical conflict between Greeks and Jews are recurrent themes in antiquity, the two peoples genuinely admired one another. The first book of the Maccabees records diplomatic exchanges between the Judaean high priest and the Spartan king Areus, and it mentions that commentators of the period supposed kinship between them for the way both adhered to laws handed down by their respective founding figures, Moses and Lycurgus.

If in the Greeks the West discerns the germ of the Enlightenment, an early surge of the scientific spirit, it is from the Jews that the West receives an unshakable belief in its uniqueness and special faith under the watch of divine providence, a humanitarian spirit that today we see as normative. Notably, among the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, only the Jews and Egyptians did not condone infanticide, with the earliest books of the Bible explicitly warning against the practice. The idea of a divine spark within all humans was not unique to the Jews, but they articulated it with a vigor that sped their faith’s viral spread from a core of fervent believers in Judea to transplanted communities across the Empire in Rome’s early centuries, resulting in widespread Jewish presence across the Mediterranean. The singular Jewish god nevertheless sanctioned ethnic and political particularity in the ancient world, and this template served the pluralistic West of the medieval period, with each king ruling in his own domain but sanctioned by a common divine authority.

Of the ancient peoples who flourished in and around the Mediterranean 3,000 years ago, only the Greeks and the Jews remain with us today. Their particular genius was fundamentally in the realm of ideas; and unlike the Yamnaya pastoralists or European colonialists, their enduring legacy can be measured in memes more than in genes. We cannot understand the ideological superstructure that has always defined the West without a knowledge of the Greeks and Jews. But the West does not run on ideas alone; a particular history fatefully shaped it long after the Greeks and Jews had left their decisive mark

Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization relates that pollution in British pond samples seems not to have returned to 3rd-century AD levels again until the 1700s To economists, pollution is a canonical “negative externality;” the unfortunate side effect of intensive industry. One model of economic history runs that until massive gains to productivity in the last few centuries, humans have always been poor, with any increase in efficiency that increased individual wealth‌ being almost instantly gobbled up by population growth (excepting the tiny aristocratic minority, who skimmed surplus from their vassals by force). This is the condition of human existence that Thomas Malthus described in the early 19th century. Unfortunately for Malthus’ reputation, his theorizing occurred on the precipice of a revolution in human living standards driven by epochal increases in the rate of technological innovation, boosting productivity, and occurring simultaneously with a demographic transition that dampened population growth. The number of humans had always grown unchecked, until it didn’t. Today the poor remain with us, but they are fat and fecund.

Ward-Perkins’ narrative, and those of other historians like Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire, add a nuanced twist: it seems that the Pax Romana wrought an increase in economic coordination and activity on a scale to generate qualitative change in the lives of the wide swath of the citizenry. Mining and industry sullied Britain’s pristine ponds, but bore testament to an imperial economy by then mass-producing pottery, tools and jewelry for even the urban proletariat. The citizens of the Empire were not wealthy in our terms, but their lives were relatively tranquil and filled with amenities that would have been the envy of their recent ancestors. Rome’s desertion of Britain in the 5th century ushered in an era of greater want and poverty. The 5th century AD was the beginning of a “dark age” on the island, as the economic world shrank, and for most, the horizons of life and bare subsistence requirements collapsed down to only what was found within their villages or manor.

But some dissent from this stark narrative of decline and fall. Classicist Peter Brown, beginning in 1971’s The World of Late Antiquity, has for decades marshalled evidence that the 6th century was a time of transitions, and that the Roman world developed into something new, and quite creative; more continuation than ending. Brown’s argument, though, has to be conditioned on two debatable choices: he focuses often on the cultural creativity of the elites, especially in the realm of religion, and smuggles the vast domains of the East Roman Empire into his story in a way that mitigates overall narratives of collapse. If you agree to take the Arab Caliphates as a post-Roman state, then nobody could truly see the co-dominion of Byzantium and Islam in the east to have marked a collapse. But in terms of the history of the West, curtains for the Pax Romana meant a cultural rupture that correlated with the breakdown of trade and economic production.

The Empire’s end saw an entire way of life disappear in Western Europe. Opulent public baths, gracious villas and large cities crumbled, replaced by primitive fortifications. Even Rome, which at its imperial height boasted a population one million strong, became a large town squatting inside the shell of a vanished metropole, its citizenry down to a few tens of thousands by AD 700, their humble dwellings clustered around the pontiff’s offices. Central authority fell apart and was shattered in the Western world between AD 410, when the legions left Britain, and AD 554, when the Byzantines reconquered a war-devastated Italy from ‌the Ostrogoths. Britain, Gaul, Iberia and Italy all reverted to a more primitive state of political and social organization. Historian Chris Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that a key differentiator between the Roman state, and the kingdoms of the medieval period, is that the former had an efficient money-based taxation system, while the latter relied on tribute in kind or service. The military levies Charlemagne scared up in the 700s to assail his enemies and accumulate a vast imperial domain stretching from the Ebro in Spain to the Danube in Hungary totaled barely 10% of the numbers of the Roman legions five centuries prior. Charlemagne’s world was one of flimsier states resting upon taxation of poorer peasants than Rome four centuries earlier had had, when a single strong state was underwritten by a wealthier citizenry.

Though Christian theologians may have viewed their faith’s spread in Europe in the wake of Rome’s fall as part of God’s plan, paving the way to better things and the promise of salvation, it is impossible to deny that in the post-Roman West material living standards plummeted, cultural complexity was sharply reduced and state capacity diminished. But for historians like Jared Rubin in Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not, evolutionary anthropologists like Joe Henrich in The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous and classicists like Walter Sheidel in Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Western Europe’s fragmented cultural, political and social landscape between 500 and 1000 AD was an essential precondition for shaping of the West as a unique, distinctive and preeminently dynamic civilization.

Rubin, in Rulers, Religion, and Riches, argues that the Roman Catholic Church’s weaker role in legitimizing the rule of post-Roman warlords who became kings allowed for more flexible evolution of economic institutions. These would go on to serve as the foundation for Western dynamism, leading to the legal and corporate frameworks that leverage capital more efficiently and at greater scale. At first blush, Henrich’s thesis seems to be somewhat in tension with Rubin’s; Heinrich argues that the Church played a necessary and seminal role in breaking apart the power of elite kindreds and extended noble lineages in Western Europe, replacing them with the nuclear family unit. This societal structure stands in contrast to the Roman Empire or other Eurasian civilizations, and was essential to the emergence of powerful non-kin institutions that could serve as the basis for a revolution in psychological orientation that would in turn lead to greater economic cooperation.

How these two narratives can dovetail is that the church in Western Europe was fundamentally different in its power base than those in Byzantium or the Near Eastern Islamic ulema, in that it was an institution independent from the political order with deeper roots than the arriviste dynasts. In the early medieval period, the Christian Church was actually essential in legitimating the barbarian rulers who lacked their Roman predecessors’ pedigree. Instead of co-evolving with the Christian religion as in Byzantium, or emerging out of a new political order as with Islam, Christianity was for the Germanic peoples a preexistent institution with which they had to reckon. But as a holdover institution from the Roman Empire, the Church also remained at a distance from the new political regimes, with a healthy tension that would be structurally impossible in Byzantium and the Arab Caliphates, where the smoother transition from antiquity ensured a tight and seamless integration between religious and temporal power.

In the near term, the Western Roman Church’s unique position as the only institution with direct continuity to antiquity meant its negotiating position with the new kings had no equivalent in the Islamic or Eastern Christian worlds. The reordering of marriage patterns in the West, by banning marital alliances between cousins that might fortify a family lineage, could only occur when church and state remained at some tension. Western Christianity’s separation from political power, which initially allowed the Church to rein in temporal rulers, would come back to haunt both Catholics and Protestants. When the state became powerful once more in the West, it had both the will and power to drive faith out of public life. In Byzantium or Islam, religion was not fundamentally ever seen as separate, and driving it from the public domain would be more akin to amputating a limb of the state.

While Rubin and Henrich focus on civilization-wide changes that leave a mark on individual, family and small-scale institutions, Sheidel in Escape from Rome argues that cultural innovation and flexibility could only reach its full potential as a civilizationally creative force under conditions of political diversity. Whereas Han China, contemporaneous with the Roman Empire, was the first of many equivalent dynasties, Rome never truly reconstituted itself for any appreciable period. Sheidel’s thesis is that China stranded itself up on a local optimum, perfecting a precise system that arose during the Han dynasty. In contrast, the West was free to eventually transcend the restrictions of the Roman model because that model never truly rose again. The shattering of the political order, the collapse of the interlocking economic system and the social disorder that was unleashed with the Pax Romana’s end, disaggregated a finely tuned machine, but step by step, cultural evolution via competition and interaction in the post-Roman landscape created a set of societies that prized innovation and dynamism in a way the Empire never would have. Though they differ on the details, Rubin and Henrich would seem to agree that without Rome’s fall, the West was unlikely to have taken the path it did. Rome’s fall was indeed the end of one civilization, but it was the birth of another. If Athens and Jerusalem were the starting point, Rome and its aftermath was a requisite way station. The true birth of the West only occurred when the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores went their own way, evolving into Eastern Christendom and Islam; meantime, the Roman West melted down, the better, as it turned out, to be reconstituted as something entirely new

The American diplomat Michael McFaul recounts that in a 2011 meeting between then Vice President Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader said ““You look at us and you see our skin and then assume we think like you. But we don’t.” Save for those with substantial Tatar ancestry, it is entirely correct that biologically, Russians are indisputably European. In fact, the genetic distance between ethnic Russians and the English is significantly smaller than that between the English and either Spaniards or Italians. And yet, it is the Italians and Spaniards, not the Russians who are part of the same broad cultural tradition as the English, that of the West. This is the outcome of history, some of it constructive, but much of it destructive. The West as we understand it is incomprehensible without Greek logos and Jewish thumos, reason and spirit. But it was also shaped by the collective historical trauma of the fall of Rome, the eternal city, whose 410 sack prompted St. Augustine of Hippo to write his apologia for Christianity, City of God.

All civilizations are dynamic on some level, evolving and shifting with the times, adapting and mutating. But the modern West in particular has put transformation, innovation and the grasping for a brighter future, at the heart of its identity over the last few centuries, since the end of the Wars of Religion in the 17th century and the rise of science. The “quarrel of the ancients vs. the moderns” that troubled the European republic of letters around 1700 was decided in favor of the moderns. Unlike the Greeks and Jews, modern Westerners see a potential golden age in the future, an Eden of technological plenty and promise. Putin’s fixation on 1,000-year-old disputes in many ways reflects a common non-Western mentality (e.g., Hindus angry over the 13th-century Islamic conquest of the subcontinent or Muslims bemoaning the Spanish Reconquista), preoccupied with the past and its glories, rather than tantalized by the possibilities of the future. Instead of questing to recapture the glories of a lost world, Western society tends to fantasize about a future to outshine the glories of the past, a shining city of the future rather than a golden utopia of the past.

To know “who we are” it pays to know where we came from. To predict where we might yet go, likewise. History’s finer details deliver no final answers, but the arc of the narrative illustrates essential events, choices and arbitrary traumas via which the particular character of our civilization emerged. Rome’s ashes and the attendant birth of the West were the ultimate act of creative destruction. It may be that the present age, of smartphones and artificial intelligence, will spell the death of much that we still hold to be dear and true, but if any of the world’s civilizations can prove a match for the rising tides that threaten to engulf us, my money is on the West, ever protean, ever innovating and ever adaptable.

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars marks humanity’s first known attempts to dispassionately record historical events, in this case, a portion of the complicated tableau of maritime conquests, skirmishes and the shifting leagues and alliances that for decades embroiled naval powers all across the Mediterranean. Covering events in the final decades of the 400s BC, Thucydides’ seminal account delves into maritime and military technologies, examines the nature of power, the temptations of empire and considers the root causes of both wars of conquest and human groups’ expansionary impulse.

Athens’ and Sparta’s fight for hegemony over the limits of the known navigable world ranged across domains that included the islands dotting the Aegean Sea, a basin the ancient Greeks called Archipelago, our origin of the modern term, as well as such regions as the Dodecanese and Peloponnese itself. In these latter two storied locales, we discern the Greek root nésos, for island. But while the ancient Greek polities jockeyed for dominance over the isles and coastlines of their known world, another extraordinary population of human beings was already a millennium into its own maritime exploits, and on a scale beyond the Greeks’ imagining. For the Austronesians, the confines of the Greeks’ protected little Mediterranean backwater, with its single diminutive archipelago would have been as a placid bath tub is to a churning Olympic pool.

For four thousand years, Austronesian adventurers maintained a fearlessly voyaging culture that ferried entire family units from one newly discovered foothold to another on the coastlines of every continent save for the Greeks’ and Antarctica. But the Austronesians proceeded without any Thucydides to record their exploits, and indeed accomplished the most audacious of them before any human society had stepped into the historical age. By the time of truly global exchange, Greek naval preeminence was ancient history, but ancient Greek linguistic roots retained primacy among Europeans conjuring new words to describe novel peoples and locales. So in the general imagination, the most extraordinary seafarers of our species, masters of immense realms at the far ends of the earth from Greece carry Greek-tinged names. The vast archipelagos they discovered and settled are all familiar to us with that ancient Greek root nésos.

In their plurality, the people are genetically Austronesian. This includes all the peoples who settled the far flung archipelagos of maritime Southeast Asia, all the way across the Pacific from Easter Island at South America’s doorstep to Madagascar at Africa’s. The language family too is Austronesian. Europeans first thought of Indonesia in the 19th century as an archipelago of Indian isles. Then there is Melanesia, a label that arrived via the French for the collection of islands with darker complected Austronesian peoples; this includes New Guinea and storied islands just to its east like Fiji. North of these lies an arc of islands we call Micronesia, which includes such tiny locales as the Marianas, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati. And of course, we have Polynesia bracketing the vast expanse of the Pacific further eastward, everything between Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, a zone that remained uninhabited until Austronesian speakers arrived after AD 1200.

Even though the greatest seafaring exploits of our species went wholly unchronicled as they unfolded in a prehistoric age, today the mounting power of genomics and especially ancient DNA allow us to trace an increasingly detailed outline of those millennia of astonishing accomplishments across a travelogue of exotic locales including the most isolated archipelagos on our water-logged planet.

In 1933, an unsuspecting expedition of Australian geographers and mineral prospectors entering the Wahgi Valley in highland New Guinea stumbled upon an entire world of over 100,000 humans totally unknown to the rest of humanity. This was one of the last “first contacts” with a society still living in blissful ignorance of the “outside world.” The existence of an entire isolated cultural universe was an incredible discovery for early 20th century scholars, who had posited that New Guinea’s interior was nearly uninhabited. In fact, with mild temperatures rarely deviating beyond the band between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to its high elevation, these regions were actually much more densely populated than the tropical island’s malarial coasts.

But this was not their primal state. Barely two centuries prior, the sweet potato revolution transformed New Guinea’s agricultural systems, whose staple had heretofore been indigenous taro. Sweet potato cultivation yields about double the calories per hectare of taro, but more importantly, introduced sweet potato flourishes at up to 3,000 meters, whereas indigenous taro proves an unreliable crop above 2,000 meters. The interior, which had previously only been marginally habitable, much as those 1930s prospectors and geographers had erroneously extrapolated on the basis of its coastal zones, which remained the realm of populations more reliant on fishing, trade and low-intensity farming, turned out to be prime sweet potato country. As a bonus, the more palatable sweet potato was also far better pig feed, a turn of events which then also spawned a more complex agricultural system and diets with a healthier macronutrient balance.

But where did this great revolution come from? Ultimately, the people of New Guinea owe the delivery of the sweet potato cultivar, which was domesticated in South America’s northern reaches about five millennia ago, to one of humanity’s most inexplicable and audacious demographic explosions. The sweet potato transforming New Guinea’s human geography is but a side-plot late in the grander epic of the Austronesians’ still largely mysterious journeys, maritime adventures that took them everywhere from South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to the distant shores of South America. Genetics can indeed demonstrate that the sweet potato cultivated in the New Guinean highlands nests within the pedigree of South America varietals, but this simply confirms and renders precise what a close listen already tells you: in the Andean languages of Quechua and Aymara, sweet potato is k’umar(a), while in Maori New Zealand it is kumara. A connection is unmistakable here between South American and Polynesian forms. But the sweet potato and its nomenclature spread yet further; in coastal New Guinea, where the natives, though genetically Papuan, and thus related to Australian Aboriginals, speak Austronesian languages, it is kumala It was in the New Guinea highlands, thousands of miles from its homeland, that the term for sweet potato seems to have morphed into its current form, kaukau. Somehow in the 19th century, the pidgin languages of the highlands settled on kaukau, Samoan for “flank or chunk of food.”

That startled first contact between white Australians and New Guineans in 1933 was but one of countless knock-on effects from the first contact between Polynesians and South Americans a millennium ago, which triggered not just the westward movement of crops, but, we can now confirm, also of people, back across the breadth of the Pacific. And at the same time that the Polynesians were pushing east, crossing the world’s largest ocean, the theretofore empty Pacific, some of their Austronesian cousins were venturing westward, probing the teeming shores of the Indian ocean, with ports of call from the island of Borneo to East Africa, and ultimately settlements as far west as uninhabited Madagascar.

The seed of this globetrotting began on the island of Taiwan, during the prehistoric Neolithic, at the historical moment when the Egypt and Sumerian civilizations were in their infancy, and China was not yet even ethnically Chinese. While the intrepid peoples of almost all of what L. L. Cavalli-Sforza termed the “great human diasporas” tramped through the forests and grasslands of God’s green earth, the Austronesians turned their back on the land, plunging out to sea as decisively as if they were taking a freeway on-ramp; to this people alone, the planet’s vast oceans were anything but daunting barriers; they were prehistoric byways to far shores.

Today only about 600,000 of Taiwan’s population are what the government labels indigenous, some 2% of the island’s 23 million citizens. But across the world, over 300 million people speak related Austronesian languages, descendants of those intrepid seagoers who ultimately staked out far-flung holdings across the globe, all starting 5,000 years ago from one small island off mainland China’s coast. They crossed the Pacific to the New World, bursting through an unmarked barrier that for 42,000 years had held back modern humans, who never ventured beyond the final frontier of islands just east of New Guinea. It was the Austronesians who pioneered Madagascar’s settlement, spearheading human adaptation to an island just off Africa’s eastern coast that had preserved its own unique fauna undisturbed for nearly 90 million years. With the Austronesian arrival, Madagascar became the westernmost outpost of Southeast-Asian rice agriculture, its highlands now more reminiscent of distant Bali than nearby Mozambique. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, in Chile’s Easter Island, the most far-flung settlement of Polynesia, 2,000 miles west of South America, thousands of natives today continue to speak the Austronesian Rapanui language.

Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 voyage from coastal Peru to French Polynesia on a balsa wood raft established his daredevil reputation, though his real goal was to bolster his unorthodox diffusionist theories about cultural evolution and mass migration. Heyerdahl wanted to demonstrate the feasibility of the Pacific having been settled from the New World, not from eastern Eurasia, the prevailing model then as now. The famous Kon-Tiki voyage, named for his raft, did not convince the scientific world, but the 5,000-mile voyage solidified Heyerdahl’s reputation as a scholar willing to put his extreme theories to the test. Unlike many heterodox thinkers, Heyerdahl had a conventional academic background, in his case, in zoology. The Kon-Tiki voyage was the culmination of a long-standing interest in Polynesian archaeology and anthropology dating back to undergraduate years spent studying private collections of artifacts. His argument for contact with the New World was multidisciplinary, based on the direction of currents, purported linguistic similarities between Amerindian and Polynesian languages, and a distinctive tradition of monumental statuary common to both Easter Island and Peru. Nevertheless, his bewildering and vividly detailed contention that bearded, red-haired, white-skinned sun-worshippers from the South American mainland but with distant Mediterranean roots (a legend with echoes in Peruvian mythology) were Polynesia’s first settlers struck even otherwise sympathetic mid-20th-century observers as unhinged, and as a throwback to out-of-fashion theories about lost white races more in line with 1847 than 1947.