RKUL: Time Well Spent 05/16/2025
School’s out for summer edition
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?
Anthropology sometimes gets a bad rap from non-anthropologists in the US because postmodernist, post-scientific cultural theorists dominate the field’s public image. But genuinely interesting work is still out there if you know where to look.
Marvin Harris was a Marxist anthropologist who died nearly 25 years ago, but his work theorizing about the rise and fall of cultures remains a fascinating read. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture examines how culture responds and adapts to ecological and economic pressures. As a Marxist, Harris analyzes scarcity, subsistence strategies, and class conflict, and how they shape and guide beliefs. The book makes the case that culture is not primarily driven by ideology, but by a society’s material needs. Religion, norms, and rituals emerge from the process of solving actual problems of protein supply, labor allocation, or social control, their centrality then fading or shifting when underlying conditions change. Harris’ Marxist monomania on economics and ecology may be overly ambitious, drafted to explain everything to a point that can become forced or unpersuasive, but considering material conditions’ essential role in shaping human cultural variation remains a fruitful exercise.
While Jared Diamond may be most famous for Guns, Germs and Steel, his earlier The Third Chimpanzee: the Evolution and Future of the Human Animal established his reputation, and presents a darker picture of humans and our world. While Guns, Germs and Steel is singularly focused on differences between human societies, The Third Chimpanzee places us in a broader zoological context, contrasting us with our cousins, the chimpanzees, who remain restricted to their narrow ancestral homeland from which we have long since burst forth. The Third Chimpanzee presents a dark Malthusian world that served as the crucible for so many human cultures. Diamond’s gloomier, more pessimistic world-view is partly a reflection of the book, published in 1991, still being in the shadow of 1970s environmental catastrophism. He also argues that Carl Sagan’s optimistic theories about the positive benefits of contact with aliens were wrongheaded; Diamond asserts that advanced species would treat a more primitive group harshly, just like in our own human history. The Third Chimpanzee suggests it is best we not make contact at all, because the universe itself is likely dangerous and Malthusian.
To understand present cultures, past cultures are still essential background, and archaeologist Steven Mithen’s After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC focuses specifically on the recent past of prehistory, as the ice sheets began retreating after the Last Glacial Maximum’s peak, but before the rise of the great literate civilizations. For many, the period of the “Ice Age” is a vague blanket term that covers the whole period before 11,500 years ago, the Pleistocene before our Holocene. But the vast span of the Pleistocene ran a broad gamut of variation, from the Eemian interglacial with temperatures warmer than our epoch, 130,000 to 150,000 years ago, to the Last Glacial Maximum, when the ice sheets’ geographical coverage peaked. After the Ice documents the period of ferment after the world began to slowly warm, and human cultures expanded from their refugia to adapt to newly habitable lands, until the sharp discontinuity in temperatures 11,500 years ago that defines the Ice Age’s end. Mithen’s narrative illustrates how cultural diversity emerged even among foragers as they expanded into new territories the retreating ice sheets exposed, but also the shifts triggered as a subset of foragers switched to sedentary farming.
One of the major phenomena that shapes culture, and allows us to measure variation, is religion. Anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained synthesizes ethnography, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, to show the deep roots of this cultural package, and how it varies across societies. Boyer’s field work in Africa in particular injects a critical dimension that sets Religion Explained apart from other evolutionary treatments; for example African shamanism in the modern world is shown to have its own logic and rational basis. Boyer shows how religion emerged in a multi-step process from simple cognitive instincts, and how it might interact with the environment in a functional sense to produce local adaptations. While other anthropologists may attempt to interpret the religious beliefs of indigenous peoples on the people’s own terms, Boyer explains the origins of their beliefs.
Religion plays a big role in Joe Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, but fundamentally the book is a work that shows the role of historically contingent events and how they shaped cultural norms. While other works survey many cultures, Henrich’s narrative aims to explain unique aspects of Western culture, in particular individualism, focus on abstract values and high social trust, and the deep historical roots of all three. While Harris in Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches focuses on proximate ecological adaptations, like partible inheritance becoming dominant among nomadic pastoralists, who divide the herd when the paterfamilias dies, The WEIRDest People in the World shows how arbitrary random events when experienced in sequence can shift a culture’s entire trajectory. Henrich focuses in particular on the Western Christian Church’s regulation of family life that reduced the role of kinship among Europeans as an organizing principle of society, and the cultural knock-on effects of that single variable being altered.
Thought
The Ethical Minefield of Testing Infants for Incurable Diseases. These pieces are predicated on hand wringing. A few decades into the information age we have the data; it’s not a question of if, but when.
It’s Waymo’s World. We’re All Just Riding in It. Waymo already has more rides than Lyft in San Francisco. I think with the imminent competition between Waymo and Tesla, 2025 will be seen as the robotaxi inflection point.
Real talk about FDR: Big progressive change has always involved massive compromise. This is something you would know from any serious reading of history; FDR had to compromise significantly with segregationists to get the New Deal. But many don’t trouble themselves with such “ancient” history so they find it plausible that FDR was as woke for his time as Bernie Sanders is today.
Ancient DNA and the Return of a Disgraced Theory. Overlapping with some of the interests of this Substack, the piece gets into how modern ancient DNA is reviving disgraced archaeological ideas.
Ghost populations in human origins. As a paleoanthropologist, John Hawks makes a point of reminding us that what someone like me looks at as statistical “ghost” populations are also actually real concrete populations in the fossil record.
The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins. Humans make science, so it’s not surprising that human drama interjects itself into the field. Luckily this does not seem to be a major issue in areas like human genomics where data abounds. But in others like paleoanthropology, where there are only a few fossils to go around, scarcity seems to bring out the worst in people.
Data
Prehistoric genomes from Yunnan reveal ancestry related to Tibetans and Austroasiatic speakers. The key is that they seem to have found a “ghost” population genome that explains a lot of deeply diverged variation in East Asia, including the first modern human people in Tibet. (One of my proposed Journal Club candidates)
Faroese Whole Genomes Provide Insight into Ancestry and Recent Selection. 40 genomes. Just a decade ago, they were talking about sequencing the whole population. A good reminder that despite its rapid pace of advancement, there remain limits to how fast genomics can actually advance in Western nations given the general appetite for regulation and paternalistic oversight.
Enamel proteins reveal biological sex and genetic variability in southern African Paranthropus. DNA degrades faster than protein, even if it offers tantalizingly more variation and fine-grained detail. These results are from 2-million-year-old samples, earlier than Homo. You will see more of this in the future. (another Journal Club candidate.)
Mutation-selection-drift balance models of complex diseases. This attempts to show how diseases can emerge in the context of conventional evolutionary parameters that are continuously introducing and reducing variation.
My Two Cents
There’s still no free lunch, free subscribers; my most in-depth pieces for this Substack remain beyond the paywall. My most recent deep dives have been on Carthaginians’ surprisingly European genetic profile and Sami indigeneity or lack thereof.
From The Punic Paradox: Genetically, Rome's great African rival was startlingly European:
And now, paleogenetics has revealed a new twist to this cultural resilience: it emerges that the Carthaginians who fought Rome for over a century in their extended cycle of pan-Mediterranean wars were overwhelmingly not actually descended from the original Levantine settlers who had emigrated from old Phoenicia. Instead, even the pre-Roman-era people of Carthage were predominantly of the same stock as southern Italians and Greeks (with a reasonable leavening of North African Berber stock, given Carthage’s geographical location west of Egypt). Though they spoke a Canaanite Semitic language related to Hebrew (and more distantly to Arabic), and worshipped pagan Semitic gods, the Carthaginians who spent five generations skillfully resisting and retaliating against the waxing belligerence of an ascendant Rome overwhelmingly prove to have been solely cultural heirs to the Phoenicians, not actually their biological descendants.
We know that voyages embarked out of the late-Bronze-Age Levant, when trade networks linked the western and eastern Mediterranean in the centuries before 1000 BC. The cities of the maritime Levant in the shadow of the Lebanon mountains seeded their identity, their understanding of the gods and the languages spoken along shores of the Mediterranean, among their far-flung Punic colonies. But their legacy of blood diminished over the generations until it was the faintest trickle by the time of Imperial Carthage. Carthage, and the Punic culture that was Phoenicia's legacy, embody cultural imperialism in its purest form, and its adopters wholly subsumed themselves into their newfound identity, overwriting their own ancestral traditions, a fact that would only be uncovered millennia later with ancient DNA.
And from the exploration of what it means to be indigenous in Europe, Nomads to natives: how Bronze-Age Sami newcomers became eternally Nordic:
The European Union recognizes exactly one European people as indigenous: the Sami, hardy inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Finland’s northern reaches. These northernmost Europeans are the picture of culturally unique: nomadic reindeer herders who speak Finno-Ugric languages very different even from the Finnish, to whose speakers they are related (you may recall Finnish speakers call their nation Suomi, the term Finland (like Lapland) is just an exonym care of their Swedish neighbors). The Sami were Europe’s last pagan people. Forcibly converted to Lutheranism only in the 1700’s, their shamanic practices left them open to accusations of blasphemy which occasionally ended with them being burned at the stake.
Today, about 100,000 Sami remain, half in Norway (mostly in the northern region of Finnmark), the next largest group in Sweden, then about 10,000 in Finland, with finally a small residual in Russia and scattered across the global diaspora (the actress Renee Zellweger has a Norwegian, partially Sami, mother). Though now largely restricted to the Arctic regions of the Nordic nations, historically the Sami were present much further south. Their status as indigenous peoples plainly rests on their statelessness, marginality, and a historical record which attests that settlers of ethnic Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish heritage pressed them ever further northward over the last millennium, in step with the emergence and consolidation of the modern nation-state. Stateless and marginalized for certain, but are the Sami indigenous under any meaningful definition of the term? Are they even Europe’s most indigenous people?
Unsupervised Learning Journal Club
A new feature for paying subscribers this year, the Unsupervised Learning Journal Club briskly reviews notable new papers or preprints. At the end of each edition, I invite subscribers to vote on papers/preprints for future editions. The fifth Journal Club just came out, so you are still in time to vote for next edition’s paper.
From Brave new human: counting up the de novo mutations you alone carry:
Fundamentally, this is the actionable reason we need to know about mutations in the human genome. Yes, they are the source of the variation that enables those of us interested in evolution, populations and their histories to use them as markers for tracing histories and understanding genetic processes, from recombination rates to natural selection in evolution, but first and foremost on the individual scale, they are the root mechanism unleashing thousands of dread diseases. The vast majority of mutations, the origin of genetic variants, are obviously inherited from parents. But a small number appear unpredictably, as new and original as the individual carrying them, in other words: de novo. Population geneticists are interested in mutation as a parameter in their models; they are satisfied to stipulate that the human mutation rate is 1.2✕10-8 per generation per base. But genomically informed medicine requires more precision and detail, and this is where extremely deep sequencing of known pedigrees as performed in this paper comes in, with basic science translating directly to diagnosis.
The first four editions:
Wealth, war and worse: plague’s ubiquity across millennia of human conquest
Where Queens Ruled: ancient DNA confirms legendary Matrilineal Celts were no
Eternally Illyrian: How Albanians resisted Rome and outlasted a Slavic onslaught
Homo with a side of sapiens: the brainy silent partner we co-opted 300,000 years ago
For free subscribers: a sense of the format from my coverage of two favorite 2024 papers:
The other man: Neanderthal findings test our power of imagination
We were selected: tracing what humans were made for
Discussion
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Here are podcasts since the last Time Well Spent:
ICYMI
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Some of my past pieces for Palladium Magazine, The New York Times, Slate, Quillette and Nautilus.
Over to you
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