Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics | Hacker News Reader

Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics

nature.com

47 pointsonuralp13 comments

Fear of new information/data/methods with more definitive results is a good indicator of people who are afraid of the results.

To me, objections to genetic methods in Archaeology and Anthropology are a sign that they are more interested in presenting a specific interpretation of history rather than discovering the truth.

Not only does the article make the same point you are making but with more nuance, it also discusses arguments from the other side that I think are interesting and important as well. Not sure why you made this comment.

A succinct summary of a 3,000 word article is often valuable.

Sure, if it were a summary. You conveniently left out everything but the title, and ignored entirely the points of the anthroplogists/archaeologists, instead caricaturizing them as “afraid of the results.” As an engineer, this is disappointing.

No anthropologist objects to the use of genetic testing in general. It's an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly. The issue is that interpreting genetics in an anthropological context is nonobvious. What anthropologists are interested in are "people", and people are not strictly their ancestry. There are groups with similar ancestry for instance, but wildly different cultures. Slaves offer easy examples. Your can also find ancestral groups with near identical cultural traits. "Americans" are a convenient, though not precise, example. For added fun, there are even groups with similar ancestry and material culture, yet who speak languages from entirely different families. Have fun testing your preconceptions against that.

What this ultimately means is that genetics alone are not sufficient to precisely capture what we're interested in, nor are traditional archaeological/anthropological methods. You need to reconcile some very different types of data into a synthetic whole. The general problem of how to do this is still being explored.

I agree. It remains true that most people inherit their culture in the same way that we inherit our genes (from our parents). Cultural paradigm shifts don't always imply the previous people were replaced. Ireland's conversion to Christianity is a good example of this. The added data points of genetic analysis can help us determine when a culture shift was due to a paradigm shift in the community or when the shift was due to replacement/displacement of the previous people.

America is a perfect example of the latter, where Native Americans and their culture were largely replaced by Europeans both culturally and genetically. Of course Native Americans and their cultures still exist, but they are no longer dominant in North America. A genetic analysis would confirm that Native Americans didn't simply start building European style cities in the 1500s, they were essentially displaced by another people.

> Those results, in fact, now have him wondering about how cultural practices such as leaving pottery and other tributes at the West Kennet long barrow persisted in the face of such upheavals.

This is the question that I find the most fascinating, and I am glad to see that I am not alone. If a new people did arrive, did they adopt some of the cultural practices of the people they displaced? Did/do humans tend to recognize places of spiritual importance and continue to honor them out of respect for/fear of the ancient gods of a place that they are new to? Displacement with or without competition is a major feature of biological evolution, it would be surprising if it _didn't_ apply to humans.

Don't we know that the displacers often adopt cultural characteristics? Think of Germanic tribes in latter day Rome, the Normans, or the Mongols in Europe and the Near East.

Perhaps a succinct way of phrasing this is that cultures can change much faster (or much slower) than genetic composition of a people, so looking at genetics can give a very misleading impression of a society.

I think a good example of some part of this is southeast Asia. Cambodia, Burma, and Lao are all adjacent to Thailand. The people that makeup these 4 nations visibly share an extremely recent common ancestor. Yet, the cultures and groups of peoples are all quite different and there is even extreme 'racism' among them, which is somewhat ironic.

If you studied these people based on genetic makeup from a distant future it'd just look like a mostly homogenous glob, but that's not even remotely close to accurate. And so an interpretation based primarily on genetics would be completely misleading.

I have a long term project to write a synthesis ancient history of Yunnan. Even though the project is currently on hold due to time commitment to my startup, reading to date has shown that ancient genomics is an amazing resource not only directly for human history but also indirectly via plants. Huge questions of overwhelming significance to regional human history such as the origin and early spread of intensive rice agriculture can be partly answered through ancient plant genetics.

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