RKUL: Time Well Spent 04/05/2024

April Showers Edition

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

Books, what else?

This month I will post a podcast with Eric Cline, the author of 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, about his new book, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations. Though it’s trite to say that After 1177 BC is a sequel to 1177 BC, it does fit the periodization well. After 1177 BC is Cline’s attempt to describe in narrative terms what happened after the end of the great Bronze Age world that peaked in the 13th century BC, and how that post-fall civilization set the stage for the birth of Iron-Age societies like Greece and Persia. Cline is an archaeologist by training, and he gets to draw heavily on his background in After 1177 BC since literacy vanished across much of the Near East after from this point forward. While conventional historians rely on text, that is simply not feasible for any part of the world before 3000 BC, and for most of the world before the Common Era. It is up to archaeologists, who account for and analyze material remains, to then construct narratives without the aid of text.

Such a task is not easy. Kristian Kristiansen, himself an archaeologist, admitted in a recent podcast that when it came to the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, the historical linguists were more correct than the archaeologists. Nevertheless, Kristiansen, along with David Anthony and many other archaeologists have now pivoted, applying their copious knowledge of the details of the past to theories of human migration and interaction now informed by ancient DNA and isotope analyses. The key to remember about archaeological data is that the details are usually correct, the problem is imposing an interpretative frame in a non-textual context. After 1177 BC is lucky because Cline actually has some texts here and there, mostly in Egypt and Mesopotamia, to guide him. 

Steven Mithen, an evolutionary anthropologist and archeologist best known for Prehistory of the Mind, attempts to sketch out the world of the late forager in After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC. After the Ice focuses on the last cultures in a world where hunting and gathering was the exclusive or dominant mode of production. Written before the findings at Göbekli Tepe were well known, After the Ice, which I reread in the last year, is to my mind much richer as a text now that we know so much more about prehistory than we did at the time of its writing twenty years ago. Today we view the whole period before 11,700 years ago, the Pleistocene, as the “before time,” but the reality is that there was a great deal of variation across it, from for example the extremely warm Eemian Interglacial 130,000-115,000 years ago, to the peak of glaciation 20,000 years ago. Mithen outlines how various human societies that were left standing at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum expanded, innovated and spread out across the world, laying the foundations for the Holocene that we see as so qualitatively different.

While Mithen focuses on the late Pleistocene, Brian Fagan in The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization pivots to the Holocene, our current epoch. This work is one of the first to survey the impact of climate change and variation across the last 15,000 years, from the mini-Ice Age of the Younger Dryas that began 12,900 years ago, to the Medieval Climatic Optimum that saw Europe’s massive population growth prior to the Black Death. But Fagan doesn’t just present a model whereby humans are exogenously impacted by climatic factors, though that is a fair part of the narrative. He also considers the thesis that human terraforming of the planet, burning grasslands and forests and replacing them with pastures and fields of grain, changed the parameters that might determine how long this current Interglacial will run. The Long Summer presents the possibility that the warmer climatic regime of the Holocene was partly self-reinforcing, as human activity changed the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere and altered surface reflectance of the sun’s radiation.

While the above books used archaeology’s toolkit on prehistoric and semi-prehistoric periods, where that profession reigns supreme, Bryan Ward-Perkins brings material analysis to the fore in his revisionist take on one of the most historically rich and well-covered topics, the Roman Empire. In The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, he argues that late 20th-century historians who have revised Edward Gibbon’s catastrophist narrative from his multi-volume work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire are actually incorrect, and that earlier thinkers and observers were closer to the mark. Ward-Perkins makes his case not through reinterpretation of text, but through an accounting of such things as coin hoards, manufactured pottery and industrial pollution. The Fall of Rome makes the clear case that the material output of complex and economically advanced civilizations reflected regression and even collapse in various parts of the post-Roman world after 500 AD. No subtle reading of Greek or Latin sources is needed for this analysis, because it’s a sampling of the detritus of ancient Rome with no filter.

Finally, there is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann’s incredibly impactful book from a generation ago. When Mann was writing he was relaying the work of researchers within the field, but at the time some of his revelations were still contentious and uncertain. No more. The early reporting about more complex societies in the Amazon, a region we tend to view as pristine, seem to have been fully validated by contemporary archaeologists using new techniques. Perhaps because he is a journalist and not an academic, Mann’s 1491 reports the facts rather than weaving an extensive and encumbered meta-narrative. The strength of the archaeological sciences has been in its attention to detail, and that is what Mann devotes the book to, rather than letting it be weighed down with theories forever at risk of being falsified by isotope or ancient DNA analysis a decade later.

Thought

U.S. Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High of 94%. This is conformity bias, yes, but when I was a kid in the 1980’s the fact that my white librarian in upstate New York had a black husband was a big deal. Today very few people care. The Left that worries about race relations ignores the reality that things have never been better. The Far Right that fantasizes about race war has to confront the reality that a much smaller proportion of the population is even habituated to even de facto segregation than just a generation ago.

The new politics of abortion rights - Pro-choice positions have become more popular; can they be made more salient? I’m a little shocked that abortion is getting that much more popular, but that’s what people say:

Why Do Men Dominate Chess? This is a very long piece, and well worth reading in full, but to cut to the chase, the determining parameter seems to be that males are very competitive and have a “killer instinct” in many games.

The Cystic-Fibrosis Breakthrough That Changed Everything. The majority of CF sufferers are now going to live out a normal lifespan! It’s not even gene-editing, which will come soon. We do live in the age of miracles.

Dating apps have gotten so bad that speed dating is in again. Humans and human societies evolve. What happened is a minority of people learned how to “game” the apps, and others imitated them, and that ruined the whole framework for everyone. It’s a classic coordination problem.

Data

A geographic history of human genetic ancestry. No summary of population-history is perfect because it’s repackaging the combined genealogies of thousands of genes. So the more methods, the better, at least so far. The different methods give you a different window on how to organize and arrange the past.

Genomic Insights into the Population History of the Resande or Swedish Travelers. I had no idea that this group existed! While the Irish Travelers seem to be 100% Irish, this paper makes it clear that Swedish Travelers are derived from a Roma population.

Archaeogenetic analysis revealed East Eurasian paternal origin to the Aba royal family of Hungary. The data here implies assimilation of Mongolic and Turkic people into the Ugric Magyars very early on. Known, but it confirms that the Magyars were multiethnic early on (related: Hungarians as the ghost of the Magyar confederacy).

Breaking the rule: An exceptional Y chromosome introgression between deeply divergent primate species. A 6,000,000-year divergence, but then successful hybridization, between groups of Old World monkey species. There are 6,000,000 years between us and chimpanzees, so this is pretty astonishing. Rules in biology are meant to be broken.

Faster inference of complex demographic models from large allele frequency spectra. This is an amazing speedup: “these improvements lead to speedups of as much as 1000× over existing state-of-the-art methods such as ∂a∂i, moments, and momi2.”

My Two Cents

There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. I’ve posted on Irish genetics recently:

Beyond the Pale: Irish cultural uniqueness past Rome's reach - How ancient history set Ireland on an alternate route despite genetic unity in the Isles:

The Irish are different because of history. Unlike the Finns or the Basques, their cultural distinctiveness has no corresponding imprint on their genes. They are shoots off the same Bronze-Age root as all other Northern European peoples. But unlike others, they retain ownership of their own deep lore, having entered the light of literacy with their cultural confidence and pride intact. They accepted the Christian religion freely, a faith from the Romans, but not a Roman religion. They preserved the heirlooms of their cultural past without apology. When the fragments of what would become the English were a motley assortment of German and Scandinavian tribes, the Irish were already people with a unique purpose, sending missionaries to the European continent. When the rest of the West was in chrysalis, bathed in darkness, Ireland was a golden beacon of learning and a redoubt of the Christian faith, sending clerics, scholars and merchants to a barbarized mainland. But whereas the Roman-Germanic synthesis was capacious, the nascent Hibernian civilization was parochial. After the Viking Age, it stood alone against the resurgent West, and over time the peculiar people became catspaws in the games of other nations. The image of the Irish as erudite clerics who could shine a light on the mysteries of Greek was overwritten by that of barely Christian peasants, dispossessed of an elite culture, marginally European and ruled by an alien people. The image of St. Patrick’s Golden Age Ireland is a dearly held souvenir, but not truly the father of Ireland’s future, which was born in bloody rebellion and cold ressentiment.

Discussion

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 my guests (and monologue topics) since the last Time Well Spent:

• Murtaza Hussain: Gaza and the global left

• Steve Hsu: IQ, artificial intelligence and academia

• Samo Burja: Palladium Magazine, China, Russia and the future of Eurasia

• Kristian Kristiansen: DNA and European prehistory

• Colin Wright: in the trenches of the gender wars

ICYMI

Some of you follow me on my newsletter, blog, or Twitter. But my own domain also has all my links and updates: https://www.razib.com

There you’ll find links to the few different podcasts I’ve contributed to or run, my total RSS feed, links to more mainstream or print articles when I remember to post them, my Twitter, the occasional guest appearance, etc.

• DM me

• Facebook message me

• My total feed of content

• My long-time blog, GNXP

• A group blog, Secular Right, vintage at this point, but worthwhile for Heather Mac Donald’s prescience

• My Indian/South Asian-focused blog, Brown Pundits

• Some of my past pieces for UnHerd, National Review, The Manhattan Institute, Quillette, and The New York Times 

• My old podcast, The Insight

• This podcast, Unsupervised Learning

Over to you

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 hope I’ll write about, lay it on us.