#razib khan

[arcticdementor]

On June 25–26th of 1876, at Little Bighorn in Montana, a coalition of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse defeated General George Custer. The outcome shocked the world; the Plains tribes stared down the might of the modern world and then ably dispatched it. But theirs was a Pyrrhic victory. The US government just raised more troops, and all that elan and courage was eventually no match for raw numbers. Across the cold windswept plains of the Dakotas, the Sioux and their allies had denied the American armies outright victory from the 1850’s into the 1870’s. Meanwhile, to the south, in Texas, the Comanche “Empire of the Summer Moon” had been the bane of the Spaniards, and later the Mexicans, for over a century. They first battled the Spanish Empire to a draw in the 1700’s, and continued to periodically pillage Mexico after independence in the 1820’s. Only after the region’s annexation by the US in the 1840’s did the Comanche meet their match, as they were finally defeated in 1870 by American forces. If Americans today remember the Battle of Little Bighorn and the subjugation of the Comanche, it tends to be as the denouement of decades of warfare across the vast North American prairie. But if you zoom out a little, it also marks the end of a 5,000-year saga: the rise and fall of America’s steppe nomads, for that is what all those fearsome tribes of the Plains Indians had become.

Today Americans view these wars with ambivalence, as the expansionist US, seeking its “Manifest Destiny,” conquered the doomed underdog natives of the continent with wanton brutality. But the Plains Indians were themselves a people of conquest, hardened and cruel, and would have bridled at the mantle of the underdog. They espoused an ethos exemplified by their warrior braves who wasted no pity on their enemies and expected none in return. In S.C. Gwynne’s book, Empire of the Summer Moon, he notes that during Comanche raids all “the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.” Comanche brutality was not total; young boys and girls were captured and enslaved during these raids, but could eventually be adopted into the tribe if they survived a trial by fire: showing courage and toughness even in the face of ill-treatment as slaves. Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanche, was the son of a white woman who had been kidnapped when she was nine.

These tribes were warlike because the mobilization of cadres of violent young men was instrumental to the organization of their societies. They were all patrilineal and patriarchal, for though women were not chattel, tribal identity passed from the father to the son. A Sioux or Comanche was by definition the offspring of a Sioux or Comanche father. The birth of a Comanche boy warranted special congratulations for the father, reflecting the importance of sons genealogically for the line to continue. It was the sons who would grow up to feed the tribe through mass-scale horseback buffalo hunts. It was the sons who undertook daring raids and came home draped in plunder. The religion of these warriors was victory, and they stoically accepted that defeat meant death.

…

That this final chapter in the history of the planet’s mounted nomads played out in the full light of American history allows us to vividly imagine the lives of their prehistoric cultural forebears. Just as the Sioux and the Comanche were ruled by the passions of their fearless braves, who were driven to seek glory and everlasting fame on the battlefield, so bands of youth out of the great grassland between Hungary and Mongolia had long ago wreaked havoc on Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and the tundra to the Indian ocean. These feral werewolves of the steppe resculpted the cultural topography of the known world three to five thousand years ago. Their ethos was an eagerly grasping pursuit not of what was theirs by right, but of anything they could grab by might. Where the Sioux and Commanche were crushed by the organized might of a future world power, their reign soon consigned to a historical footnote, the warriors of yore marched from victory to conquest. They remade the world in their brutal image, inadvertently laying the seedbeds for gentler ages to come, when roving bands of youth were recast as the barbarian enemy beyond the gates, when peace and tranquility, not a glorious death in battle, became the highest good.

…

Within a few generations, these people, known as the Yamnaya to archaeologists, were both grazing their cattle in the heart of Europe and driving their sheep up to the higher pastures of the Mongolian Altai uplands. This 5,000-mile distance (8,000 km) was spanned in just a few generations by the former farmers. Mobility was the first result of the switch to nomadism, as fleets of wagons began to roll across the steppe, like swarms of lumbering migratory villages, eternally bound for greener pastures. But far beyond a simple shift in aggregate economic production, many later knock-on effects were to reshape the culture of Eurasian societies, some of which continue to impact us down to the present.

Foremostly, the status and power of males rose within these cultures, in tandem with the shift to nomadism. Almost all contemporary nomadic pastoralists are patrilineal and patriarchal, so identity and wealth are passed from father to son, just as with the Plains Indians. Men occupy all of the de jure political leadership positions, if not all de facto ones. This is in contrast to rooted farming cultures, which exhibit more diversity in social arrangements, from the patriarchal Eurasian river-valley civilizations to the matrilineal horticultural societies of tropical Africa and Asia. Even within India, the cultures of the wheat-based northern plains were strongly patrilineal, with wives being totally unrelated to their husbands, and always moving to the households of the men they were to marry. In contrast, in tropical Kerala far to the south many groups cultivating rice, bananas and coconuts were matrilineal, with husbands moving to the villages of their wives, and the primary male figure in some boys’ lives even routinely being their maternal uncle.

For nomads though, the switch to livestock as the primary source of wealth and status increased male clout and importance to universally high levels. Whether they are Asian Mongols or African Maasai, herder societies are dominated by male kindreds that control the movable wealth in the form of livestock, and it is their role to on the one hand protect the herds and drive them to more fertile pastures, and on the other steal animals from neighbors. In nomadic societies, paternal kin groups provided exclusively for their women and children. It was senior men in these groups that accumulated wealth and status they could pass on to sons, resulting in a very strong concern over paternity, so as to avoid investing in the offspring of men outside of their lineage. After all, these men strived for wealth and status in the first place to produce sons who would continue their legacy. And just as they were fixated on their sons, nomadic societies were also punctilious in revering the memories of their forefathers. The Bible’s older books are littered with “begats” a dozen deep, Norse sagas begin with a recitation of half a dozen steps of descent from father to son, and the earliest Indian texts are fixated on royal genealogies.

These ancient nomadic obsessions continue down to the present. The kingdom of Jordan is still ruled today by a direct paternal descendent of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, Muhammad’s great-grandfather and the progenitor of the Ban Hashim clan to which he belonged, 1,525 years after he died. The lineage of Bodonchar Munkhag, Genghis Khan's ancestor who founded the world conqueror’s clan two centuries before his conquests, still ruled Mongolia as late as 1920, nearly 700 years after Munkhag’s time.

…

It is unlikely that this male-focused society was the result of an ideological revolution, as occurred in many Greek city-states before 500 BC, where legendary lawgivers like Solon in Athens and Lycurgus in Sparta imposed new rational systems of government upon a barbaric people. Rather, the most violent and impulsive cohort of humans, males in their teens and early twenties, simply became central to the dynamism and strength of pastoralist societies. They were indispensable labor in the herding economy, and as they rose through the ranks of the tribe’s status hierarchy, taking on leadership roles and settling down to raise families, these men relied on the bonds that they had forged as youths to collectively dictate the cultural direction of their societies and its moral tenor. The primacy of livestock as the economic currency of pastoralists meant that they controlled the productive engine of their societies. It is no surprise then that the early Indo-Europeans seem to have developed a caste system in response to these changing dynamics where males engaged in artisanal or service labor were rendered socially inferior. In their youth, as ruthless packs of raiders and brigands, the warriors were the sharp cutting edge of the nomadic way of life, the motive force behind the expansion of Indo-Europeans across all of Eurasia. As they matured and became chieftains, they set the terms for a reformation of morals and values that valorized war, conquest and expansion.

This facility for organized violence did not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, the newly freeing nomadic lifestyle found a unique outlet for the innate impulses and passions of these young men that had stood their forager ancestors in good stead for millions of years, from the African savanna to the Siberian tundra. Brutality had been bred into them by the natural history of our species, red in tooth and claw. Ancient instincts that had been restrained were now cultivated anew, nurtured and channeled into striking and often cruel new forms. The Paleolithic foragers who had survived the brutal cold of the Ice Age had to balance their instinct for cooperation with hard, calculating competitiveness. They could also kill without remorse; we know that hunter-gatherers raided and slaughtered each other long before the emergence of agriculture. Though the farming societies that succeeded the hunter-gatherers were not peaceful idylls, the rhythms of the season and the limitations of settled village life served as a check on the instinct to wreak havoc on one’s enemies, narrowing the horizons of brutality in both time and space. Nomadism freed Neolithic humans from these constraints, giving free rein to the well-honed ancient instincts of young men who were emerging into the fullness of their strength and ferocity.

…

Though most human cultures are not polygamous, in almost every society, more females in a given generation reproduce than males. Even in the US, with norms of monogamy that mean most adults are married at some point (two-thirds of American adults are married or cohabitating with a partner at any given moment), 18% of men over 55 do not have children, as opposed to 15% of women at that age. If variation in reproductive success in males is due to genetic differences, then one major pressure on natural selection will be driven by this sex imbalance.

…

But human culture is diverse and varied, and the past history of a society can be as critical as the current environmental conditions in determining its character. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the originally Jewish sect of Christianity adopted the pagan Greco-Roman norm of obligate legal monogamy even for high-status men. Julius Caesar’s son by Cleopatra, Caesarion, was illegitimate, so Caesar had to adopt his grandnephew, Octavian, as his son and heir. This constraint on powerful men continues down to the present in Western societies. Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is seen as prolific, with six sons and one daughter, but his fertility is lower than that of the median woman in Massachusetts in the late 1600’s. At that time family sizes of over ten children were common in New England. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who combined have more wealth than the poorest half of Americans combined, only have three children each.

Over five thousand years ago, a few simple changes in the role of domestic animals in Eurasian societies resulted in the emergence of nomadism on the Pontic steppe and triggered a cultural and social revolution across the supercontinent. In the millennia since, our cultural mores, values and religions have changed immensely. It can be hard to comprehend the ramifications of the nomadic revolution from our vantage point because it colors so many background conditions in our civilizations. Bill Gates's net worth is on the order of one million times that of the average American man, while his advantage in numbers of offspring is only 50% greater. While Gates deploys his wealth to acquire a $127 million house and transform American education, the newfound livestock moguls of the Pontic steppe had different values and different options. In a world before advanced technology and the status symbol of a palatial estate (nomads were, literally, homeless), the men of the steppe invested their wealth and power in their descendants. They raised massive broods that would eventually overflow the steppe and wash across the civilized world, transforming human society as they went.

#razib khan #substack #read the whole thing #part 1 of 2 #yamnaya

[iteratedextras]

We'll see an intellectually-inclined 'man of color' with a white wife (or ex-wife) and 'mixed' children, like Wesley Yang, support post-racial liberal norms. (Also Razib Khan. Or from the opposite direction, Rufo's wife is asian, their kids are 'mixed,' and he's supporting post-racial liberal norms, even though he's willing to talk to people farther right.)

This makes a lot of sense, because they're trying to make a world that would be a good world for their children, and even if these men aren't perfect, that's something you can build a society out of.

At the same time, we'll see a 'woman of color' politician married to a white man, who presumably has 'mixed' children herself, go off and create 'BIPOC-only' parties or something.

This probably isn't statistically significant, just politically salient in terms of who gets promoted and platformed.

But still, what the fuck.

#racepol #quick post

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Det sted man er fra er alltid pent, det er fedrelandsfølelsen i det små, hjemmefølelsen.*

- Knut Hamsun

*The place you're from is always beautiful, it's the sense of country in a small way, the feeling of home.

Most of us have heard of Lapland, but we’re not supposed to call it that anymore. The correct term these days is Sápmi - i.e. the land inhabited by the Lapps (or, rather, the Sami - as they very much prefer to be known). And, fair enough: they’ve got every right to assert their own identity, especially after centuries of domination by their southern neighbours.

Some of those neighbours are now keen to make amends for past injustices. For instance, the Swedish government made a point of using its presidency of the EU Council of Ministers to celebrate Sami National Day.

I can only imagine that it was worded with the best intentions, but if you read any of the Scandinavian press and media, it’s clear that it hasn’t gone down well with everyone. The problematic claim is that the Sami are “the EU’s only indigenous people” (my italics).

For a start, what is meant here by ‘indigenous’? According to most dictionaries, it’s the property of being original to, or characteristic of, a particular part of the world. In which case, there are all sorts of European peoples who could claim to be indigenous to Europe. For instance, the geneticist Razib Khan points out that the ancestors of today’s majority-Swedish population have been in Scandinavia for at least as long as the ancestors of today’s Sami.

The Norwegians and Swedes originated from the Norse people. The Norse people in turn originated from the Proto-Germanic peoples who migrated to the area of northern Germany, Denmark, southern Scandinavia. The Proto-Germanic peoples in turn originated from the Proto-Indo-European people whose homeland lies in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the area around Ukraine and southern Russia.

Likewise, the Sami are not quite indigenous to the area either. The Sami originated from the Proto-Uralic people, whose homeland was around the Ural mountains (and was therefore close to the Proto-Indo-Europeans and resulted in interactions between their protolanguages, resulting in lexical borrowings). The Proto-Uralic peoples, just like the Proto-Indo-Europeans, slowly expanded and migrated, but in their case they expanded to the northwest and the northeast (with the notable exception of the Hungarians who ended up in Hungary). The Proto-Samic people, a subgroup of the Proto-Uralic peoples that gave rise to the modern Sami, were said to have displaced or merged with a much earlier indigenous Paleo-European group that was already in northern Scandinavia. This is evidenced by substrate words present in the Sami languages that derive neither from Proto-Uralic nor from Proto-Indo-European.

In any case, if Europeans are going to have a competition as to who was in Europe first, then it might be won by those with the most Neanderthal ancestry - because, as genomic testing has revealed, millions of us carry Neanderthal genes.

But perhaps the Swedish government is using indigenous to mean something more specific. According to Merriam-Webster the word relates to “the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonised by a now-dominant group”. This extra element of oppression by outsiders sharpens up the definition. However, while it applies to the Sami people and their history, it doesn’t do so uniquely. There are many ethnic groups in Europe that have been around for ages and which have been maltreated by foreign overlords. Just ask the Welsh, for instance, or the Basques.

It could be argued that the Sami are in a special category because of where they live (i.e. the most northerly reaches of Europe) and how they lived there (e.g. by reindeer herding). To have maintained a traditional culture for so long into the modern era surely sets them apart. But, again, this is debatable. While there’s no doubting the distinctiveness of the Sami, other Europeans can also lay claim to ancient traditions that have survived against the odds. To take a topical example, the Ukrainians are literally sacrificing their lives for a distinctive culture, language and history that Putin wants to erase.

Progressives ought to think twice before making an issue about who is and isn’t indigenous in Europe. While the label might play into the victim/oppressor narratives of the woke Left, it can also be exploited by the far-Right.

At a time when populism is a constant threat, telling people that they’re not indigenous to a place where they and their ancestors have lived for “time immemorial” is less than helpful. I’m sure that the Swedish government meant well, but it’s pulling on a dangerous thread.  

When language is allowed to become dissociated from meaning or the map from the territory, then fractional strife and chaos awaits. Orwell understood it perfectly from his observations of Stalinists: control language and you control expression; control expression, you control dialogue, and eventually the political narrative.

#hamsun #knut hamsun #quote #norsk #norwegian #scandinava #sweden #sami #indigenous #identity #society #traditions #culture #europe #home

[argumate]

Razib Khan divides the world between India, China, and The West, which could also be called The Rest, given that it's basically all the world that isn't India or China.

[worldoptimizations]

[hgeckil]

Hitit Sözleri, Bizans Surları, Anadolu'nun Türkleştirilmesi: Roma'nın son fatihlerinin hikayeleri

RAZIB KHAN @ https://razib.substack.com/ Batı, Anadolu imparatorluklarına neler borçlu: 2000 yıllık Anadolu biyolojik sürekliliği ve kültürel önemi… Ağrı Dağı (Ararat)’ın uzun gölgesi: Küçük Asya’nın insanlık üzerindeki büyük etkisi. Anadolu’da olan Anadolu’da kalmaz (kültürel ve biyolojik olarak)… Anadolu’nun Türkleştirilmesi: Roma’nın son fatihlerinin hikayeleri Türk dünyasının batı…

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[pazodetrasalba]

It's every man for himself

Dear Caroline:

Funny you should have posted this. This morning I read the following tweet from Razib Khan, whom I incidentally only came to know about through your blog:

I am not in the business of kicking hornet's nests, so I won't go into this. It would seem from your chronicle of this long-forgotten facebook fight that you wouldn't either, except for the fact that this very entry, along with many others, testify to the contrary. Of course, you were writing them in what at the time was a partially anonymous account in a partially obscure platform.

They say that discretion is the better part of valor, and in spite of my dogmatic affinity for truth, I would tend to agree that the possible outcomes of discussing some issues with/in the view of certain people is not only a waste of time, but positively negative for the consequences it is likely to produce (so you see, I sometimes think like a utilitarian). And this would be an example of what I think your community calls infohazards.

I've talked before on how easy it is to cherrypick words and sentences from your blog to denigrate you, which is an inditement on the laziness and bad faith of said readers, but it would be silly to ignore that you were putting yourself in the block by being so reckless with the language at times, even granted the anonymity mentioned above. And yet I wouldn't put all the blame on that: there's also, I'd guess, a virtuous impulse to telling contrarian truths, which is one of the many things I love about you.

Words are very polysemic, and get overwritten with new meanings and interpretations in their social history. Using a rather conventional definition of feminism, such as 'a movement that proclaims that men and women are generally equal, and should enjoy equal rights and opportunities', I think you can be squarely described as such, and a lot of your posts reflect this explicitly or implicitly (the one that immediately comes to mind is one about getting access to contraceptive pills while you were in Hong Kong). I would go as far as to say that even 'Trad Caroline' would have also signed up to this, even if she might have thought that the average would be happier as a housewife or that the sexual revolution had been a mistake. In this last regard, there's a recent feminist book by Louise Perry that makes exactly that case, and not from a conservative perspective.

So I would conclude that your antipathies were towards some types of feminism, and part of your rationalist critiques of many other doxas of our postmodern age. Personally, I don't have any wish of getting friends or friends of friends getting angry at me for advocating for your right to express and have the views you expressed over here, but I most definitely won't leave you on your own, Caroline ("every woman to herself"), even if I have to pay a price for it. That's just the way I am (even if I am also privileged in this freedom by my relative insignificance and by my autonomy and independence from the consequences of almost anybody's anger and disapproval).

Quote:

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

Franz Kafka

#caroline ellison #truth

[cnwnoticias]

Ross Douthat: Uma lista da minha estante para quem gosta de romances de fantasia

Depois de enviar a coluna da semana passada comparando “Succession” a uma obra de fantasia no estilo “Game of Thrones”, gravei um episódio de podcast com Razib Khan no qual conversamos sobre nossa afeição por verdadeiros romances de fantasia, nossa experiência como adeptos precoces de George R.R. Martin e outros assuntos de profundo interesse nerd. Foi uma conversa abrangente, mas que ficou…

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[likeatlas]

Chow the new has reminded us spinoff of game of Thrones, Westeros and incest go together like brother and sister. Since that is the case, it may not qualify as spoilers reveal that inbreeding rears its misshapen head in the second episode of House of the Dragon. But if you haven't seen the episode, and would like to save the incestuous plot twist for when you see it, read on. First, a quick reminder of the incest we've encountered before in Westeros. game of Thrones It began with Bran Stark observing the incestuous kisses of Jaime and Cersei Lannister, twins who were themselves the product of Tywin Lannister's marriage to Joanna Lannister, his cousin. Tywin and Joanna's marriage, by the way, doesn't count as incest in the eyes of Westeros, just as marriage between cousins, in the real world, has usually been acceptable. We will focus today on even closer interrelationships. Cersei's three children, supposedly fathered by her husband King Robert, were actually Jaime's children. The eldest, Joffrey, was an evil sadist, much like several members of the Targaryen family that Robert and Jaime had dethroned. Jaimie killed the "Mad King," Aerys Targaryen, whose madness (she became obsessed, we're told, with burning people alive) is attributed in the show to centuries of Targaryen inbreeding. "Every time a new Targaryen is born," says King Jaehaerys, "the gods flip a coin and the world holds its breath to see how it will land." As far as the Targaryens are concerned, the advantages of inbreeding are obvious. Not only can the family buy in bulk the same peroxide-free shampoo that doesn't damage hair, but it also keeps its power concentrated instead of scattered. It happens over and over again, deliberately and accidentally. Jaeherys's descendant, Daenerys Targaryen, as viewers of game of Thrones, escapes a troubled relationship with her brother, Viserys, and ultimately sleeps with Jon Snow, the bastard son of a nobleman from the other side of Westeros. Somehow, in Jon, Daenerys has inadvertently found her long-lost nephew. It is a family tradition as old and well maintained as riding dragons. It's a tradition that reappeared in last night's episode of House of the Dragon. King Viserys (an ancestor of the aforementioned Viserys) is offered the hand of Lady Laena Velaryon shortly after the death of his first wife. Laena is not only 12 years old, but she is Viserys's niece (Viserys's grandparents are Laena's great-grandparents, Laena's mother is Viserys's cousin. Viserys and Laena are not very close uncle and niece). Viserys reconsiders and doesn't marry the 12-year-old girl (so far, it's somewhat woke up) and instead chooses Allicent Hightower, his 15-year-old daughter's apparently teenage best friend (wow!). Allicent is not supposed to have such a distant relationship with Viserys, but, for once, a Targaryen takes the less incestuous of two options. However, the Targaryens usually know how to keep it in the family, even more so than royal families in the real world. What points out geneticist Razib Khan, “Daenerys Targaryen's inbreeding coefficient is 0.375. Carlos II, the last Spanish Habsburg, who was impotent, drooling, mentally handicapped and barely able to walk, had a coefficient of 0.254”. What is an inbreeding coefficient? Does marrying your cousin qualify as incest? And what, fundamentally, is the problem with incest? David Balding, honorary professor of genetics, evolution and the environment at University College London, can explain it to us. First of all: what qualifies as incest? Is Viserys safe? Cross that out: are any of the potentially incestuous Viseryses clean? "There is no real biological rule," says Balding. “In most societies I know of, the limit is on cousins, so some societies allow cousin marriages” (this category includes the UK) “and others do not. But I think 'incest' is usually reserved for first-degree relatives: brother, sister, father, daughter, that sort of thing." And why is it taboo? “You have a lot of flaws in your DNA,” explains Balding.

“Most of them don't matter too much, because you have two genomes, one from your mother and one from your father. And in most cases, as long as one of them is good, you're fine." But if your parents are related, that greatly increases your chances of having two copies of the same gene. In this way, the children of incest are more at risk of suffering from what are known as recessive diseases such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia, which require two copies of the same gene. “The risk of these diseases in the general population is quite low. Therefore, the risk is doubled”, what could be done by procreating with a cousin, “some societies consider it acceptable and others do not. But then if you get much closer, like uncle-niece and brother-sister, then the rates go up a lot more.” This is bad news for the Lannister twins and the Jon and Daenerys couple. Essentially, a high level of genetic diversity among parents supports the good health of their offspring. Balding describes how the body can compensate for a segment of poor-quality DNA, but not a pair; this is how inbreeding in plants and animals is associated with infertility. Of Charles II, the maligned Habsburg king, Balding says his inbreeding "definitely could have been a contributing factor" to his various anomalies. Portraits of the king, who fathered no heir and as such was the last of his line, show a protruding "Habsburg jaw." He may have had a combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis. Their family tree would make sense from top to bottom or vice versa. Her autopsy, according to the doctor who performed it, revealed (somewhat unlikely) a corpse that “did not contain a single drop of blood; her heart was the size of a peppercorn; her lungs corroded; his rotten and gangrenous intestines; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and the head of it was full of water.” Let it be a lesson to those who supported the union of Jon and Daenerys. For a king who marries his niece, says Balding, “the offspring will most likely be fine. But he will be at much greater risk than if he had married a commoner.” One doubts that many viewers will support Viserys in marrying a 12-year-old girl; this is yet another reason to hope that we will never see it happen. “They are relatively distant,” says Balding of Viserys and Laena. “I think they would still get some effects there, but not big ones. On the other hand, he says, sometimes royal families are related by different lines of descent. (This is true of European royalty; Prince Philip and the Queen, not uncharacteristically for their demographic, were third cousins.) "So the risk could be higher again." And the Targaryens as a family? Undoubtedly, the destructive madness is less an example of the dangers of intermarriage than an invention of the author. "Maybe it's a little bit of both," says Balding. “I think it makes sense. There is some sort of mental deficiency outcome associated with inbreeding, so in general that's plausible, but of course people are likely to exaggerate all of that." (More complex conditions like schizophrenia, he says, don't boil down to having two copies of the wrong gene; there's no easy answer to Targaryen madness and violence.) Matt Smith and Milly Alcock as Daemon and Rhaenyra Targaryen in 'House of the Dragon' (HBO) As unlikely as it may seem to see game of Thrones, humans are generally very unwilling, more so than other mammals, to have sex with their immediate relatives. "It's interesting how it evolved," says Balding. “It is not very well understood how this resistance occurs, but of course it does happen.” As for the coefficient, a brother-sister pair will have an inbreeding coefficient of 0.5 or 50 percent. Even in dogs, Balding says, "anything over 10 percent is considered kind of bad news." On the other hand, no human being is completely unrelated to another. "Eventually, if you go back far enough," Balding tells me, "you and I will have common ancestors."

Maybe House of the Dragon has even more inbreeding to offer us. Viewers have wondered if there were "vibes weird, like incest” between Prince Daemon, Viserys's brother, and Princess Rhaenyra, Viserys's daughter, when he puts a necklace on her in the first episode. The plot of the rest of the show's first season remains a top secret, but given the ending to all of this: crazy Daenerys Targaryen burning down King's Landing, we can assume the family continues to keep their procreation firmly at home. 'House of the Dragon' airs weekly on Sundays in the US, with the UK premiere coming at 2am the next morning on Sky. The episode will then repeat at 9pm on Mondays and will be available to stream on Sky and NOW after its initial broadcast. https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

[rendakuenthusiast]

#indo european #razib khan #podcast

[atrahasis]

I keep on forgetting that Razib Khan’s blog exists but it’s on of my favorites.

#blog #razib khan

[arcticdementor]

Our species is unique in that we are both extremely social, and incredibly diverse in our cultures. The eusocial insects are a match for us in gregariousness, with their colonies of millions, but their social structures are far less multifarious and hew closely to particular prescribed forms species by species. Army ants advance as columns in their millions, fungus-farming ants cultivate their “crops” peacefully, while bees swarm in colonies that split like clockwork upon reaching a predetermined population size. Human societies do not exhibit such fixed regularities and may morph within a single generation, or vary radically on opposite slopes of a mountain. Human culture is marvelously plastic, and it can be adaptive due to intense selection pressure, or simply buffeted by the winds of randomness and whimsy.

But despite the likely role of chance in our social evolution, the shape of human cultural phenomena always rests upon a bedrock of our inherited biology overlaid with environmental influences dictated by place and time. Our societies develop their characteristic outlines at the intersection of fixed eternal instincts and protean social innovations. Despite our cultural diversity, it is little surprise that under similar conditions, we often converge on similar outcomes. As James C. Scott articulates in Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, cereal-based agriculture reliably results in states that control and sequester surplus production, and then use it to support a military or cultural elite. Whether in ancient Mesopotamia, China or Mesoamerica, early cereal-based societies evolved progressively toward tighter social integration and class stratification, as well as achieving an increase in political scale.

Fully-fledged pastoral nomadism emerged far later than sedentary agriculture, and its social and political configuration is markedly different than cereal-based agricultural societies’. As I noted, pastoral nomads are patrilineal and patriarchal, in contrast to sedentary agriculturists who exhibit more variety in the expectations of their gender relations. And notably, nomadic pastoralists put a particular demographic in the driver’s seat: groups of young men shaped, bonded and tempered by their experiences both protecting their tribe’s wealth from enemies and plundering that of others. Collective acts of shocking and transgressive violence were traditionally the fires that kindled into existence these young men’s cohesion and ferocity, and thus the culture that they subsequently shaped. If a thousand platoons bound society together, these cadres of adolescents and young men drove their tribes forward at the literal tip of their spears.

…

Maasai practices may strike some in the industrialized world as strange, but they are eerily redolent of traditions that have been recorded by chroniclers and unearthed by archaeologists from many of our forebear societies across Eurasia. Anyone who has seen the 2007 film 300 knows that Spartan male citizens were initiated into age-sets to harden and train them. Their toughening rites of passage involved activities like being forced to steal food, as well as an autumn ritual where they were given license to kill agricultural slaves, and punished if they couldn’t bring themselves to do so. The Spartans here were clearly replicating the form of the Indo-European koryos.

The koryos were bands of unmarried men who lived on the edge of their communities, just as fledgling Maasai warriors do today. With no possessions or real wealth, these young men raided for much of the year to survive. Formally expelled from respectable society for a period of years, they stole, killed, and committed sexual assault as a matter of course, and their savagery was tolerated, so long as the brutality was directed outward, to victims beyond the community.

The striking ubiquity of the young-warrior tradition among Indo-European peoples (and the similarities of the institution across them) is preserved in disparate mythologies and customs. Warriors of the descendant variants of the koryos often enter into battle nude or without armor, in berserker fury, perhaps inebriated, intoxicated or drugged. The Romans repeatedly describe this phenomenon among the Celtic and Germanic tribes they battled, while Norse berserkers and Indian Vedic youth are known to have entered battle wearing wolf skins. The legend of Norwegian king Harald Fairhair’s wolf-skin-clad warrior bodyguard corps still lives on more than a millennium after his 9th-century reign.

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The association between the koryos and canids, dogs and wolves, is a recurring motif. Vedic boys were initiated into the koryos by dog-priests, while in ancient Iranian tradition these warriors were described as evil “two-footed dogs.” The Irish Achilles, Cuchulainn, named himself the “hound of Cullen,” while frenzied Scandinavian warriors might wear wolf-skins during their anti-hero’s journey (vividly depicted in the contemporary film The Northman). Meanwhile, in glorious Athens, the ephebos, an institution that trained young men to be soldiers and citizens, was under the patronage of Apollo, who curiously was also associated with wolves in Greek mythology.

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But the loyal dog, man’s best friend? Here, our intimacy with contemporary domesticated dog breeds risks leading us to a misapprehension of the nomadic context millennia ago; the dogs of that period would be far closer behaviorally to their wolf ancestors. Perhaps here we see the peak fit of the dog/wolf trope to wayward, unrestrained bands of males on the precipice of adulthood. Their potential to coalesce into a powerfully disciplined, loyal and hierarchical pack is undeniable. But until they are fully tamed, trained and their wild impulses fully curbed, they are for all intents and purposes as actual wolves in the midst of society’s hen house. Little wonder then that pastoralist societies conventionally exiled them en masse as far from the center of civilization as possible until that developmental period of peak danger safely passed. Or that they referred to them as dogs and wolves. Often the greatest threat to the stability of society was literally in its midst. Male adolescence was… an inexhaustible reservoir of dogs.

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It is important to note that the human relationship with dogs long predates pastoralism, as they are the only animal whose domestication occurred during the Pleistocene. Dogs likely began to be associated with our species thousands of years before the peak of the last Ice Age, at least 23,000 years ago. A dog guarding the underworld is a commonplace in pan-Eurasian myth that has persisted over tens of thousands of years. Indeed, it is even present among some North American peoples, who share ancient 25,000-year-old Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) Paleo-Siberian heritage with the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. The common genetic origins of the human populations 25,000 years ago, along with the domestication of the dog in Northern Eurasia at this time, is strong circumstantial evidence for the shared roots of the similar myths about dogs from the European Atlantic all the way to the heart of North America. In fact, portions of the koryos’ enduring canid mythology might then even date to modern humans’ first settlement of northern Eurasia, nearly 40,000 years ago, when our ancestors first faced off against Siberian wolves.

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Material evidence reflecting the nature of the early koryos would allow scholars to confirm the insights from these myths, and establish independent sources to add to the credibility of the oral histories. This seems to have happened in 2019, when Dorcas Brown and David Anthony published a paper arguing they had discovered the site of an early koryos initiation. In Late Bronze Age midwinter dog sacrifices and warrior initiations at Krasnosamarskoe, Russia they document a coming-of-age ritual of the Srubna Culture, an ancient Iranian people that occupied the Pontic–Caspian steppe for five centuries after 2000 BC.

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The ranging of these human “wolf-packs” across Eurasia 5,000 years ago altered the course of history, triggering a cascade of changes that reconfigured the Bronze Age world. To get a sense of the magnitude of this cataclysmic overhaul, perhaps we should consider a well-known example of change and transformation temporally closer to us, in the early historical period. Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization documents the material realities of the Roman Empire’s collapse in the 4th to 6th centuries AD. Rather than spin out extended textually-based arguments, as historians often do, Ward-Perkins, an archaeologist by training, simply points out that pollution deposits left by industry did not regain Roman levels in British ponds for another 1,400 years. The end of the Roman Empire was not just a political collapse; it was a cultural, economic and social catastrophe, recorded and reflected in the material remains. The term “Dark Age” to describe what followed wasn’t hyperbolic, it was dead honest.

I thought of this when J. P. Mallory told me last year that one reason archaeologists studying early Indo-Europeans in Northern Europe rely almost exclusively upon grave goods in their investigations is that for roughly 1,000 years, that is all the material record offers. Mallory, trained as an archaeologist, had an intuitive feel for this issue that I naturally lacked, and it was at that moment that I realized the collapse of the great European Neolithic societies around 3000 BC was a prehistoric “end of civilization.” And despite the catalytic role likely played by cultural decline and climate change, the appearance of aggressive Indo-European agro-pastoralists was responsible for the ultimate extinction of Europe’s Neolithic civilizations. The post-Neolithic Indo-European Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures known to us by their distinctive, but indisputably humble vessels, never constructed anything as grand as what had been wrought by the megalith builders of Western Europe, nor did they craft richly vibrant pottery like the Cucuteni–Trypillia of Eastern Europe had. They were among Stonehenge’s inheritors, not its creators. Likewise, in the Indian subcontinent, the Indo-Aryans would not replicate the material accomplishments of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) for over a millennium after their arrival around 1800 BC. The IVC at its peak, around 2100 BC, boasted a network of vast cities with public sanitation and hydraulic works that spanned 25% of South Asia. But after its decline and collapse, urbanism only regained its footing in the subcontinent after 500 BC. Like the Anglo-Saxons in post-Roman Britain, the early Indo-Europeans ruled over a fallen world. But their reign of barbarity lasted more than a millennium, rather than the century of Anglo-Saxon darkness.

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Kristiansen, in short, is presenting a theory that argues the koryos, the ‘black youth’ (black was the color associated with Indo-European koryos across many societies) were instrumental in expanding the range of Indo-European culture through aggressive raiding and eventually conquest. Like the early Romans under Romulus and Remus, they procured mates through means violent and foul. This may have been a general Indo-European trend. Sociolinguist Peggy Mohan argues in Wanderers, Kings and Merchants that the Vedas leave open the possibility that the wives of Indo-Aryan warriors and priests did not themselves speak Sanskrit, but a native Indian language. The expansion and conquests spearheaded by the koryos may have been unplanned, but it’s also easy to see their inevitability in the face of a massive social reorganization triggered by steppe nomadism. Just as water flows downhill, the crystallization of the koryos with the rise of steppe nomadism may have rendered conquest of the supercontinent's rich western and southern flanks by nomads nearly inevitable.

The thesis then is that a migration of males drove the cultural shift is supported by copious genetic evidence. Data from both Europe and India indicate that steppe ancestry was brought by males and that the maternal lineage (mtDNA) of modern Europeans and Indians is predominantly indigenous. More concretely, the expansion of Indo-Europeans is associated with the spread of two paternal lineages, haplogroup R1b and R1a. Haplogroup R1b appears mostly in Central and Western Europe, while haplogroup R1a is today found in Eastern Europe, and across the Indo-Iranian world. The genetic separation between European and Indo-Iranian R1a lineages dates to about 3500 BC, suspiciously close to when the Yamnaya seem to have adopted nomadism.

But perhaps the most striking thing about R1a and R1b is that these lineages found throughout Indo-European-speaking populations are characterized by a massive demographic expansion that occurred so fast the mutations we usually count on to differentiate the branching structure of a phylogeny had no time to accumulate. As you can see below, R1b and R1a exhibit very broad “rake” topologies on a cladogram. The demographic process that drove this was an incredible population explosion of men carrying these Y haplogroups. A 2015 paper comparing genetic diversity between Y chromosomes and mitochondrial (maternal) lineages, found that over 4,000 years ago, for dozens of generations, more than ten women had children for every man in the regions characterized by expansionary Yamnaya. These genetic data make the case for massive levels of de facto polygamy among these early elite Indo-European kindreds.

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It is our biological legacy as a species that boys in late adolescence, on the cusp of manhood, are prone to impulsive violence and aggression in the course of proving their fitness and establishing their position within their status hierarchy. But bound together in age-set cohorts tasked to range across vast territories as they tended to flocks and defended herds, the koryos tapped into that synergy and cohesion that emerges naturally among bands of young men. They leveraged their newly formed brotherhood toward an explosive outward expansion, enabled by the adoption of nomadism so that their ambitions were born out on a scale never before seen. Separate, they were thin reeds easily snapped, but bundled together, they were deadly and undeniable. Wandering the vast open spaces of Eurasia, the koryos discarded any attachments of family, community or morality and grasped the possibilities of conquest without reservation. From the verdant forests of Western Europe to the pastures of Western Mongolia and the monsoon jungles of India, all was to become their dominion. If the aspiration of a mature society is to inculcate virtue and maintain order, the dream of youth is to be awesome and fearsome.

The evidence from genetics makes it clear that these young men conquered the world for their people, from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean, taking whatever they could grasp without compunction. Myth and language both pointed to the likelihood that the early Indo-European cultures were patrilineal and patriarchal, but genetics and archaeology confirm these facts. The extremely rapid demographic increase of a select few male lineages 4,000 years ago tells us that koryos were not just any members of the community, but the elite, the elect from the families of the warrior caste. From India to Germany, these young wolves established exogamous and patrilocal communities, and just like Comanche Indian braves 4,000 years later, they abducted local women to bear their sons whenever they wished.

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In the new age after the dark receded, the brutal barbarism wrought by the koryos would be reined in, channeled in the service of the polis, undeniable strength wedded to justice, and the warrior caste, the kshatriya, for example, charged with protecting the weak rather than preying upon them. Impersonal material forces transformed the prehistoric world, unleashing the anti-culture. But after this interregnum of waste and destruction, it was force of mind, it was new ethical religions and philosophies that ultimately banished our terrifying, innate wolf energy back to the periphery of polite society. And from there, it has haunted our dreams and pervaded our myths ever since.

#razib khan #substack #read the whole thing #part 2 of 2 #koryos

[iteratedextras]

So previously, I've proposed that Colorblind Liberal Individualism functioned as a way to deny high-quality human capital to White Nationalism - since people wouldn't be punished for their race, they had no need to racially organize, which is a lot of work.

Instead, highly qualified people could just go work for money, leaving behind only guys for whom "being white" was the only thing they had going for them.

Some people are arguing that the quality of black movement leadership in the United States has declined.

I think, perhaps, we could propose the same mechanism.

Under the current order, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are "intellectuals, who are also black." Anyone who has seen the two of them discussing can tell they're both sharp guys. Like Razib Khan, I suspect they both see themselves as being part of the broader pan-national community of intellectuals (even if they're also Americans or Westerners).

[mattanddeena]

#Razib khan #history #genetics

[argumate]

I suppose the other entertaining thing about Razib Khan's quite reasonable definition of The West is that it's repudiation of "Judeo-Christian values" and an affirmation of "Judeo-Christian-Islamic values".

[probablyasocialecologist]

Our planet was very different 100,000 years ago, and if we could survey that time, we would be astounded by the human diversity across its surface. To enumerate what little we know with certainty, there were at a minimum: modern humans, Neanderthals, at least three to four varieties of Denisovans, and two pygmy Homo populations in Southeast Asia. Likely there were still remnant Homo erectus in Southeast Asia as well, and other diverged lineages within Africa, and a new Homo in Nesher Ramla, Israel, in the Middle East with affinities to Neanderthals.

Razib Khan, Here be humans

#Paleontology #Prehistory #Anthropogeny #Anthropology