I Am Not Deur

I have apparently written so much about Dr. Deur's work that Google Scholar sent me an email asking me to claim his Google Scholar profile. Of course, I didn't do that.

A Physics Blog Of Note (And Hiatus Note)

Manuel Urueña, physicist focused on theoretical gravitation, has an interesting physics blog entitled "Thoughts in theoretical physics" that you may want to check out. 

He has recent posts on the modified inertia formulation of MOND (particularly in light of Mach's principle), gravitomagnetism, gravitational shielding, and other physics conjectures. The blog focuses a bit more on personal conjecture and a bit less on physics "current events" than this one does, but there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm a bit out of pocket for time at the moment, so I haven't carefully analyzed any of his posts yet, but I may do so in the future. If they look good and the blog gets updated with any regularity (which if you look at my blog roll, you know that I define leniently), I may add it to my blog roll when I have the presence of mind to do that.

Also, while there is some chance that I'll post tomorrow or on Thanksgiving Day, I'll be taking a brief hiatus to take a 30th wedding anniversary trip and will be off the grid for that. But, unless my plane crashes, or I'm murdered, or eaten by wild animals, or World War III starts, or the blogger host goes out of business, I'll probably be back afterwards in due course.

Books About Prussia

My paternal line ancestor came from Prussia in 1847 to dodge the draft (Germany did not yet exist).  Some of my ancestors are also connected to one of the classical music composers called Bach's family. Most of the ancestors who stayed ended up just barely on the East German side of the divided Germany after World War II.

Razib notes some good books about Prussia, which a quote here for future reference:

Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is an excellent book. So is The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. Finally, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. One of the most interesting things about Frederick the Great: King of Prussia is how Blanning recounts the importance of personally playing and repeatedly listening to music in the life of the German monarch. He was apparently a very competent flutist.

In the greater scheme of things, Prussia is particularly notable for having an absurdly micromanaging legal code (with dictates, for example, regarding when one should do which chores in a household like laundry) and for encouraging a largely industrial employer based welfare state, not so different from the Japanese economy of the 1980s. Some interesting historical economics also flows from the previously highly balkanized state of what became Germany, comparing economic development with litmus tests like opera house construction and public clocktowers.

Genetically, my father's side makes him look like a broadly Northern European mutt, in significant part because the significant clusters and ancestral populations of Northern Europe don't align very well with the current political boundaries there, and partially because Northern Europe has had considerable population exchange in the modern era in this region.

Triton Station

I've added the blog Triton Station to the sidebar. It is the blog of Stacy McGaugh, the astrophysicist who is best known for compiling the mountains of data the support either modified gravity along the lines of MOND or some other mechanism that achieves the same result to bring about the phenomena often attribute to dark matter.

It debuted on April 16, 2016. Before that McGaugh had a webpage with aesthetics on a par with pong, PacMan, and Usenet, that was packed with great links, but lacked a narrative and flash. It's still out there. But, the blog is updated fairly regularly and the posts are cogent and persuasive, in addition to being 21st century pretty.

Full disclosure: McGaugh and I got our graduate degrees at the same school (he graduated around the same time I arrived on campus), so I could be biased, although this is highly unlikely as I didn't learn this fact until today, and I've followed McGaugh's work for many years.

Fun fact: Papers that I tag on this blog as "dark matter", I first save in a browser bookmarks folder labeled "gravity".

The Ten Most Popular Posts Of 2017 (So Far)

The following ten posts were the most popular at this blog in 2017 as measured by page views. Nine were anthropology posts and one (number 2) was a somewhat meta physics posts. Overall, 86 posts in 2017 were on physics (somewhat less than my usual 50-50 split).

South Asia was discussed in two of the anthropology posts, the Americas were discussed in three of them, Africa was discussed in three of them (number 5 is about Africa even though that isn't obvious from the title) although one of the African posts also discusses Europe and the Middle East (number 4), and one was about the Middle East, which is at the intersection of South Asia, Africa and Europe. No posts exclusively about Europe, or about North, East or Southeast Asia, or Oceania (not even Australia) made the cut for the top ten.

10. Dravidian Speaking Gonds In India

9. The Founding Americans Hung Out In Beringia Before Moving South

8. Central African Hunter-Gatherer DNA Is Distinctive

7. Is Poverty Point, Louisiana Evidence Of Complex Social Organization In Hunter-Gathers?

6. The Middle East Really Has Been In The Middle

5. Another Introgressing Hominin Species?

4. The Source Of the Proto-Chadic Y-DNA R1b-V88 People Of Africa

3. Ancient DNA Refined New World Settlement Paradigm

2. Blog Post Results In Revision Of Next Edition Of New Trade Non-Fiction Book!

1. Harappan Y-DNA Leak

With this post, I have also averaged two posts for every three days this year.

Personal Attacks In The Comments Are Strictly Forbidden Here.

This is a warning.

Many blogs in the areas of anthropology and/or physics tolerate some ad hominem (i.e. personal) attacks on other people leaving comments in the comments at their blog, or even make ad hominem attacks in their own posts.

Ad hominem attacks in the comment are completely unacceptable at this blog, and they will be made in original posts here only in very exceptional circumstances.

I am quite willing to tolerate non-mainstream theories and personal conjectures in the comments. And, other commentators are welcome to criticize those theories and conjectures in other comments. But, ad hominem attacks on other people making comments, whether or not they are justified (and sometimes they are), are not permitted here for any reason. 

This is a forum in which a minimum standard civility is imposed.

If you have a criticism of something that someone else has said, you need to figure out how to say that without making it personal (and without making it a racial or ethnic slur or making your point in any otherwise offensive manner).

Lubos Still Addicted To Pseudo-Science Of Naturalness

Most physicists have (or should have) woken up to the idea that "naturalness" is a fundamentally flawed concept with no validity in generating hypotheses that simply amounts to numerology.

But, Lubos Motl clings to this absurd and presumptuous notion that the universe ought to conform to his preconceptions, even though he should know better.

Sabine's most excellent rant on this subject which I wholeheartedly endorse, is here.

Physics Is Culturally Neutral

Lubos Motl should know better than to make the ad hominem argument that a physics concept is discredited just because a Nobel Prize winning physicist who also became a Nazi at some point in his life toyed with the idea.

In this case he is attacking the loop quantum gravity approach to quantum gravity (he prefers the approach to quantum gravity based upon gravitons in 10-11 dimensional string theory), because the physicist who invented the cathode ray tube (which was at the heart of all video screens for half a century) toyed with a somewhat similar aether theory.

Loop quantum gravity (LQG) is a really a class of theories of quantum gravity that argues that, as in general relativity, gravity involves a background independent deformation of space-time, rather than a force mediated by a boson in the special relativistic space-time background of quantum-mechanics. Thus, in loop quantum gravity, there is quantization of space-time at the Planck scale, rather than quantization of a force acting between particles.

It is certainly fair game to criticize potential flaws in one of the two major approaches to quantum gravity, which is one of the great unsolved problems of physics, and eventually he does address some of his concerns on that score.

But, it is not fair game to field as an argument against LQG the politics of an admittedly technically accomplished physicist who explored a distant predecessor of the idea, any more than it is to denounce half a century of television screens as "Nazi Science". This is the kind of criticism that confuses people who don't know better while not informing or persuading anyone who does know better. It is particularly unseemly coming from someone whose own distasteful politics and poor social skills appear to have cost him a position in the physics department at Harvard, despite his clearly solid command of the discipline of physics itself, however, opinionated he might be in that regard towards rival approaches in his discipline.

Motl's offhand accusations of plagiarism directed at an academic rival (which having read many of the academic rival's papers, I can confidently tell you is hog wash), and his failure to engage in the real issues by offering up straw man versions of LQG, are likewise unworthy of a serious and sincere academic.

Good Advice For Communicating About Science

Good advice on communicating about science from the 4gravitons blog:

If there’s one thing the Center for Communicating Science drummed into me at Stony Brook, it’s to be careful with words. You can teach your audience new words, but only a few: effectively, you have a vocabulary budget. 

Sometimes, the risk is that your audience will misunderstand you. If you’re a biologist who talks about treating disease in a model, be careful: the public is more likely to think of mannequins than mice. . . . 

[N]obody is going to misunderstand “pupillary response”. Nonetheless, that chain of reasoning? It takes time, and it takes effort. People do have to stop and think, if only for a moment, to know what you mean. 

That adds up. Every time your audience has to take a moment to think back and figure out what you just said? That eats into your vocabulary budget. Enough moments like that, and your audience won’t have the energy to follow what you’re saying: you’ll lose them. 

We don’t need to dumb things down to be understood. (Or not very much anyway.) We do need to be careful with our words. Use our vocabulary budget sparingly, and we can really teach people. Spend it too fast…and we lose them.

I would add that the same principle applies to any technical field and even to science fiction and fantasy writing. A small sprinkling of specialized vocabulary words can convey authenticity and the flavor of what you are writing about, without exhausting your "vocabulary budget" and wearing out the audience. 

If you talk about a technical subject to lay persons often, develop a standard repertoire of substitutes for technical vocabulary, and of non-technical but accurate descriptions of technical concepts.

A Moment Of Silence For Marcus

His Online Icon (via Mad Magazine)

I never met Marcus in person, but I discussed physics with him at the Physics Forum bulletin board where he presided over the Beyond the Standard Model forum with a special focus on loop quantum gravity (as well as other areas of physics where we shared interests) on countless lengthy occasions for about twelve years and he was always a perfect gentleman while also having great insights into physics.  He was a great mentor and friend.  He joined the board about a year before I did and in that time made about 25,000 comments and started 757 discussion threads.

It is with a heavy heart that I report that he has died of cancer (Friday or thereabouts).  According to his son, "it was esophagus cancer -- we found out about it in September, but by that point it was advanced to a level where not much could be done. We tried anyway -- chemo, radiation, etc. But, well..."

It is a sad day worthy of a moment of silence to reflect on what we shared.  The world is less wonderful without him.

More Documentation Of Rapid Y-DNA Expansions

* Eurogenes reports on a new (closed access) paper in Nature Genetics documenting a number of punctuated expansions of Y-DNA lineages including R1a-Z93 taking place ca. 2500 BCE to 2000 BCE in South Asia, which is commonly associated with Indo-Aryan expansion.  Ancient DNA argues for a steppe rather than South Asian origin for this Y-DNA lineage near a strong candidate for the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat.

Holocene expansions of Y-DNA H1-M52 (particularly common among the Kalash people of Pakistan) and L-M11 in South Asia are also discussed (incidentally L-M11 is also common among the Kalash people, which makes them plausible candidates for a Harappan substrate in this genetically unique and linguistically Indo-Aryan population).  See also a nice table from a 2003 article on South Asian genetics showing frequencies of both H1-M52 and L-M11 in various populations.

Locus M-11 is one of several defining loci for L-M20 whose geographic range is illustrated in the map above from the L-M20 wikipedia article which is linked above.

Naively, H1-M52 and L-M11 both look to me like pre-Indo-Aryan Harappan expansions.

Some people have argued that the linguistic and geographic distribution of Y-DNA subclade L-M76 argues for an indigenous South Asian origin of the Dravidian languages, which would be consistent with the current linguistic status of the Dravidian languages as not belonging to any larger linguistic family (although it is inconsistent with the relative youth of the Dravidian language family as illustrated by the close linguistic similarities between its member languages, which has to be explained by some other means). However, given the possibility of language shift, it is hard to draw a definitive conclusion from genetics alone.

Also, honestly, the distribution of H1-M52 is probably a better fit to the Dravidian linguistic range than L-M76.

* Dienekes' Anthropology blog catches another controversial conclusion of the paper, that Y-DNA E originated outside Africa.

When the tree is calibrated with a mutation rate estimate of 0.76 × 10-9 mutations per base pair per year, the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of the tree is ~190,000 years, but we consider the implications of alternative mutation rate estimates below. 

Of the clades resulting from the four deepest branching events, all but one are exclusive to Africa, and the TMRCA of all non-African lineages (that is, the TMRCA of haplogroups DE and CF) is ~76,000 years (Fig. 1, Supplementary Figs. 18 and 19, Supplementary Table 10, and Supplementary Note). 

We saw a notable increase in the number of lineages outside Africa ~50–55 kya, perhaps reflecting the geographical expansion and differentiation of Eurasian populations as they settled the vast expanse of these continents. Consistent with previous proposals, a parsimonious interpretation of the phylogeny is that the predominant African haplogroup, haplogroup E, arose outside the continent. This model of geographical segregation within the CT clade requires just one continental haplogroup exchange (E to Africa), rather than three (D, C, and F out of Africa). Furthermore, the timing of this putative return to Africa—between the emergence of haplogroup E and its differentiation within Africa by 58 kya—is consistent with proposals, based on non–Y chromosome data, of abundant gene flow between Africa and nearby regions of Asia 50–80 kya.

I can't say I'm strongly persuaded, although there might be some merit in the details of the TMRCA analysis.  

The CT clade breaks into a DE clade and a CF clade.  So, you can have a CF clade (providing the predominant source of Eurasian Y-DNA) and a D clade (providing a minor source of Eurasian Y-DNA with a quirky distribution with concentrations in the Andaman Islands, Tibet, Japan, and to a lesser extent Siberia and the region between the Andaman Islands and Tibet).  In my view, the quirky distribution of Y-DNA D is consistent with a separate wave of migration, probably thousands of years after the CF expansion, and not with a single CT expansion where parsimony is served by a single unified wave of expansion.

Basal Y-DNA DE is found in both West Africa and Tibet, not strongly favoring either side of the debate.  Y-DNA E in Europe shows a clear African source.

* Razib captures better that larger scope of the paper and attempts to puts it in the context of cultural evolution. Apart from his association of the R1b expansion with Indo-Europeans, and his largely tongue in cheek suggestion of a Levantine origin for modern humans, I think he's basically on the right track.

Looking closely at the data after reading his piece, I am inclined to think that climate events ca. 2000 BCE and 1200 BCE caused Y-DNA expansions in Europe and South Asia to be much more intense than elsewhere in Asia where climate shocks may have been less intense (in Africa, E1b may have arisen from the simultaneous arrival of farming, herding and metalworking, rather than a phased appearance as elsewhere, made possible only once the food production technologies could bridge the equatorial jungle areas of Africa).

* Meanwhile and off topic, Bernard takes a good look at papers proposing a Northern route for the initial migration of mtDNA M and N. I've been aware of these papers for several weeks now, but have not had a chance to really digest these paradigm shifting proposals before discussing them, and I probably won't get a chance for a while yet to come.

The Extinct Megafauna Blog

Usually, I write about when megafauna extinction happened and how.  But, the megafauna that went extinct when modern humans expanded were themselves pretty cool and there is a blog about them called TwilightBeasts.  It is worth your time to peruse.

The image below in anachronistic but illustrates scale well:

Strong Indirect Evidence For Planet Nine

Michael Brown, the world's leading expert in solar system planetary astronomy and co-conspirator in the demotion of Pluto from planet status, has with a collaborator identified strong indirect evidence of a ninth true planet in the solar system.

Meet Planet Nine

Researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet's existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

By comparison, Jupiter is about 317 times the mass of Earth, Saturn is about 95 times the mass of Earth, Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth, and Uranus is about 15 times the mass of Earth, which is the next most heavy planet.  The Sun, in contrast, has a mass about 333,000 times the mass of the Earth.  So, Planet Nine should have a mass on the same order of magnitude as Neptune and Uranus, but should be much smaller than Saturn and Jupiter.

If it is a moderate sized gas giant would expect it to have a mean radius of about 15,000-16,000 miles or so, gravity that might be quite comparable to Earth gravity. But, if it is a rocky planet (like the core of Jupiter or Saturn beneath their clouds and oceans) it could be roughly half the radius and have a surface gravity closer to four times the gravitational pull on the surface of the Earth.

It would have a surface temperature of less than 70 degrees Kelvin (colder than liquid nitrogen), unless it is generating its own heat through some kind of nuclear process insufficiently powerful to cause it to become a star (something similar makes the magma at the center of the Earth a liquid). This is a temperature low enough that many "conventional" superconductors would start to display their superconducting properties.

The authors suspect, for reasons set forth in the final section of their paper, that Planet Nine "represents a primordial giant planet core that was ejected during the nebular epoch of the solar system's evolution." In other words, it is probably about four billion years old and has been with us from the very early days of the solar system.

A Once In A Lifetime Discovery

To give you an idea of how far out Planet Nine must be, the Planet Neptune takes about 165 Earth years to rotate around the sun.  Planet Nine would take roughly a hundred times as long to do so.

"This would be a real ninth planet," says [Mike] Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

The last such discovery was 150 years ago.

Pluto used to be called the Ninth Planet, but is so small that it has been demoted to dwarf planet status. Dwarf planet sized objects (and some objects that are smaller) that are very far from the sun all called Kuinper Belt Objects, such as Sedna.

Brown has discovered more dwarf planets than anyone who has ever lived and now may land the discovery of the only remaining true planet left in the solar system.

Is It Real?  Why Should It Exist?

The linked Science Direct article (really a Cal Tech press release) is quite rich in explaining how the discovery came about and what evidence supports their conclusion, yet very readable.  I came away from it convinced that they are almost certainly correct despite not having directly observed it yet.

The discussion in the initial section of the paper demonstrates how deep the recent literature is on explaining the various phenomena that Batygin and Brown have finally appeared to crack with their Planet Nine hypothesis.

The physics of the solar system can be calculated very precisely because they involve just a single force (gravity) operating with extremely little friction, according to classical mechanics, in a weak gravity regime where general relativity makes only slight corrections to the very simple Newtonian GMm/r^2 force rule.

The general relativity perturbations whose magnitude can be calculated with great precision in principle.  But, the general relativity effect is very small, because Planet Nine, unlike Mercury whose perihelion is tweaked slightly from the Newtonian expectation by general relativity due to its proximity to the strong gravitational field of the Sun, and the direction of the general relativity effect can be calculated much more easily than the full exact general relativity calculation with multiple bodies. So, one can add a one directional error bar for systemic differences between general relativity and Newtonian gravity that is quite small to the Newtonian prediction. Indeed, the correction is probably dwarfed by other experimental uncertainties in the astronomy observations of the solar system objects used an inputs in the model of the solar system used to make the prediction.

So, basically, one is left making predictions using a computer model constructed using only high school physics and calculus and a wealth of available data points on all of the known masses in the solar system, that is still phenomenally accurate to the limits of the precision of state of the art telescope measurements of solar system objects.  (The initial analysis of the multi-body gravitational dynamics that flow from Newtonian gravity is done not using this "dumb" N-body simulation method, but with a more advanced mathematical physics concept known as a Hamiltonian which is an equation that adds up the potential and kinetic energies of all of the objects in a system which must stay constant due to the conservation of energy that has been known in its current form for solar system dynamics since at least 1950. But, it all flows from applying high school physics and calculus to this complex multi-body situation.)

Convincingly, a lot of seemingly unrelated properties of Kuinper Belt Objects, including some that were not the basis of the original formulation of the model are all consistent with a Planet Nine hypothesis.

For example, it turns out that the trick to making these models work with a Ninth Planet that influences the dynamics of a lot of Kuinper Belt objects is for a key property of the Ninth Planet orbit and of the affected Kuinper Belt object fall quite exactly into relatively small integer ratios of each other such as 2:1, 3:1, 5:3, 7:4, 9:4, 11:4, 13:4, 23:6, 27:17, 29:17, and 33:19, because if they lack a common denominator, the objects orbits will never collide even though their orbits overlap (tiny friction effects due to things like tidal effects on the shape of the objects eventually probably would collider, but over time periods too long relative to the age of the solar system for this to have actually happened).  Remarkably, this turns out to be the case.

Similar objects have been observed around other stars, but not to date, around our own.

Why Hasn't It Been Directly Observed?

It appears that a big barrier to observation is that its location has been pinned down only to a particular, very long orbital path around the Sun (which is also quite wide due to margins of errors in the astronomy measurements and calculation uncertainties), rather than to a specific location.  Also its great distance from the Sun means that it is not illuminated strongly (and like all planets does not make its own light) and due to its distance and not super huge diameter (compared, for example, to large gas giants and stars) should be only a tiny, almost point-like object in the night sky.

Depending on the albedo (i.e. reflectivity) of Planet Nine's surface, it may not even be visible via a telescope at all except when it obscures some other known object like a star by passing between it and the Earth. Gas giants and planets with atmospheres like Venus reflect 40-65% of the sunlight that hits them, and gas giants are also larger (because the density of gases and liquids is lower than a rocky core), but rocky objects without much in the way of atmospheres like Mercury, the Moon and Mars reflect only 10%-15% of the light that hits them and also have about half the radius of a gas giant of comparable mass.  So, a rocky Planet Nine would reflect only about 6% or so of the light of a gas giant Planet Nine comparable to Uranus or Neptune, making it significantly harder to detect directly. Since a planet like this is basically unprecedented in the solar system, there is no really strong reason to favor a rocky Planet Nine hypothesis over a gas giant Planet Nine hypothesis which would be very similar to Uranus and Neptune but significantly colder.

Has Planet Nine Been Seen Already?  Probably Not.

Maju notes at his blog a pre-print purporting to have possibly observed a new planet which may or may not be related. The Vlemmings, et al. paper that he notes states that "we find that, if it is gravitationally bound, Gna is currently located at 12−25 AU distance and has a size of ∼220−880 km. Alternatively it is a much larger, planet-sized, object, gravitationally unbound, and located within ∼4000 AU, or beyond (out to ∼0.3~pc) if it is strongly variable." The Liseau preprint to which he links also appears to be describing the same object using the same data.

Neptune is about 30 AU from the Sun, so according to the press release, Planet Nine's orbit should be about 600 AU from the Sun.  This isn't a good fit for the object described by Vlemmings, although without a closer read of the preprints it is hard to see what assumptions were made in order to rule out the possibility definitively.  If the Vlemmings paper is observing a new planet, at any rate, it is probably not observing Planet Nine.

The Paper

The paper open access paper and its abstract as as follows:

Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. 

In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin. 

We find that the observed orbital alignment can be maintained by a distant eccentric planet with mass greater than approximately10 m⊕ whose orbit lies in approximately the same plane as those of the distant KBOs, but whose perihelion is 180° away from the perihelia of the minor bodies. 

In addition to accounting for the observed orbital alignment, the existence of such a planet naturally explains the presence of high-perihelion Sedna-like objects, as well as the known collection of high semimajor axis objects with inclinations between 60° and 150° whose origin was previously unclear. 

Continued analysis of both distant and highly inclined outer solar system objects provides the opportunity for testing our hypothesis as well as further constraining the orbital elements and mass of the distant planet.

Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown, "Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System." Astronomical Journal (January 20, 2016); DOI: 10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22.

Post Script

Hat tip to Maju for altering me to the discovery in the comments on another post.

Michael Brown's website, or his blog, which is in the sidebar, make no mention of the discovery (perhaps due to a publication embargo, or perhaps because he simply no longer maintains either of them).

Time Window Of Transition From First Farmer To Steppe Ancestry In Ireland Narrowed

As I've suspected since at least about four year ago, the modern Western European genetic profile, with lots of Y-DNA R-1b, lactase persistence, and steppe-like autosomal ancestry is a package that arrived sometime after the first wave Neolithic farmers of the megalithic culture and was in place by the Bronze Age in Western Europe, with the Bell Beaker People (whose own linguistic affiliation and origins are somewhat cryptic).

Both Paleolithic continuity theories and Neolithic continuity theories for the source of the modern Western European genotype are now basically ruled out by the ancient DNA.

The window of time in which this happened is narrowed to roughly 3000 BCE to 2000 BCE, i.e. Chalcolithic or early Bronze Age, and probably coincides with about 2500 BCE in Ireland when the Chalcolithic age began and Bell Beaker people appeared.

The Chalcolithic people were able to have such a large demographic impact because farming after thriving in Ireland from ca. 3700 BCE to 3400 BCE, then basically collapsed with farmers reverting to hunting and gathering for much of their sustenance.

As usual, I am skeptical that the wave of migration that brought this demographic transformation was in fact Indo-European Celtic, as obvious an assumption as that might seem, as opposed to a scenario in which the genetic shift is associated with a Bell Beaker linguistically Vasconic population and the language shift from a Vasconic substrate to Celtic occurs later ca. 1200 BCE around the time of Bronze Age collapse.

The Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions were profound cultural shifts catalyzed in parts of Europe by migrations, first of early farmers from the Near East and then Bronze Age herders from the Pontic Steppe. However, a decades-long, unresolved controversy is whether population change or cultural adoption occurred at the Atlantic edge, within the British Isles. We address this issue by using the first whole genome data from prehistoric Irish individuals. 

A Neolithic woman (3343–3020 cal BC) from a megalithic burial (10.3× coverage) possessed a genome of predominantly Near Eastern origin. She had some hunter–gatherer ancestry but belonged to a population of large effective size, suggesting a substantial influx of early farmers to the island. 

Three Bronze Age individuals from Rathlin Island (2026–1534 cal BC), including one high coverage (10.5×) genome, showed substantial Steppe genetic heritage indicating that the European population upheavals of the third millennium manifested all of the way from southern Siberia to the western ocean. This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying introduction of Indo-European, perhaps early Celtic, language. 

Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago.

Lara M. Cassidy, Rui Martiniano et al. "Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome" PNAS (2015) (paragraph breaks and emphasis mine).

Eurogenes posts the results without original post comment, but there is lots of discussion in the comments to the post.

According to Bernard's post, the Y-DNA type for all three men was (to the extent of commonality): R1b1a2a1a2c aka R1b-L21, the most common Y-DNA type in the British Isles today, and a sister clade of the Yamnaya Y-DNA R1b haplogroup.

He notes (in French):

Ils appartiennent à l'haplogroupe du chromosome Y: R1b-L21. Cet haplogroupe est fréquent aujourd'hui dans les Îles Britanniques. On a retrouvé son haplogroupe "père" R1b-P312 dans tous les squelettes campaniformes d'Europe Centrale et son haplogroupe "oncle" R1b-Z2103 dans la plupart des squelettes de la culture Yamnaya dans les Steppes Pontiques. Ces haplogroupes sont absents chez les squelettes des chasseurs-cueilleurs et des fermiers Néolithiques d'Europe.

The mtDNA profile of the three Bronze Age individuals, two of which have mtDNA U5a, suggests that the Bronze Age impact may have been male dominated with Bell Beaker men marrying local women many of whom had hunter-gatherer matriline ancestors.

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog notes from the body text of the article the following ancestry proportions in the Bronze Age sample:

Linearbandkeramik (Early Neolithic; 35 ± 6%), Loschbour (WHG; 26 ± 12%), and Yamnaya (39 ± 8%), in the total Irish Bronze Age group. These three approaches give an overlapping estimate of ∼32% Yamnaya ancestry.

Typically of Middle Neolithic individuals, the Irish Neolithic sample is enriched in hunter-gatherer ancestry relative to early Neolithic individual, probably indicating a resurgence of local relict hunter-gatherer populations, whose status increased and facilitated introgression, when farming was temporarily discredit after the failure of the first wave of farming in Ireland.  But, she had no steppe ancestry.  The ancestry percentages aren't inconsistent with a near total replacement of Bronze Age men with proportionately fewer migrating Bell Beaker women.

Previous studies have shown an affinity to Iberian genetics in the British Isles and I haven't had time to read this closely enough to determine if these studies affirm that conclusion.  On the other hand, intriguing cultural and linguistic clues seem to connect the Balkans and Ireland, although the direction of transmission is not obvious.

In the PCA chart from the paper, the Hungary and German Late Neolithic and Bronze Age individuals are closer to the Irish samples than the Spanish Chalcolithic samples, which are at the Neolithic farmer side of an axis that has German Corded Ware and Steppe individuals at the other end of the axis.

Razib has meaty coverage with lots of context and analysis, most of which  I tend to agree with (he does not directly engage with the linguistic question).  He notes the relevance of legendary history which shouldn't be taken literally but provides useful information.  He provides the general context which is familiar to most of my readers. Particularly noteworthy is this little bit of insight:

But some inferences can be made with various techniques, the details for which you should read the supplements. The Neolithic female seems to be descended from Cardial, and not LBK, early European farmers. That is, the Irish Neolithic is connected to the Atlantic littoral, in keeping with Barry Cunliffe’s thesis in Facing the Ocean. Second, the excess hunter-gatherer ancestry in the Neolithic female exhibits greater affinities with the Loschbour hunter-gatherer from Luxembourg than hunter-gatherers from Central or Eastern Europe. This indicates that as with the the situation in Spain there was local admixture with hunter-gatherers over time.

Naturally this leads one to wonder if the early European farmer ancestry in the Bronze Age Irish samples was from the same group as that of the Neolithic farmer. The surprise is that there isn’t any strong evidence of admixture! Rather, there are better candidates for donor populations on the European continent. The most parsimonious explanation then is that the Bell Beakers mixed with early European farmers, and then rolled over the descendants of the Megalith builders in Ireland. But confidence in this sort of conclusion is weak, as the number of populations is finite, and one should be cautious about making too many inferences from a few samples (though modern Irish are actually a decent proxy for the Bronze Age Irish).

From off topic comments on this paper to another of my posts at this blog form Nirjhar007 on December 28, 2015:

Do you think its too early for that R1b to be IE?

Yes.

Do you this goes along with this? 

Metallurgy arrived in Ireland with new people, generally known as the Bell Beaker People, from their characteristic pottery, in the shape of an inverted bell.[9] This was quite different from the finely made, round-bottomed pottery of the Neolithic. It is found, for example, at Ross Island, and associated with copper-mining there. It is thought by some scholars to be associated with the first appearance of Indo-Europeans in Europe (possibly Proto-Celtic),[10] though this theory is not universally accepted. 

The Bronze Age began once copper was alloyed with tin to produce true Bronze artefacts, and this took place around 2000 BC, when some Ballybeg flat axes and associated metalwork were produced. The period preceding this, in which Lough Ravel and most Ballybeg axes were produced, and which is known as the Copper Age or Chalcolithic, commenced about 2500 BC.

I think it is increasingly undeniable that the Chalcolithic demic change in Western Europe was due to the Bell Beaker People.

But, I also continue to think that the Bell Beaker people were not Proto-Celtic IE people, despite the trend in most of the 20th century's anthropology to think of Bell Beaker is something other than a folk migration, and that instead there was a subsequent language shift around the time of Bronze Age collapse with much less demic impact.  Mostly this is because I don't think that Basque people who exemplify the Western European Chalcolithic source were ever proto-Celtic speakers and because of the Vasconic substrate in place names in Western Europe and the thousand year division between Bell Beaker derived territory and Corded Ware territory culturally.

I do think that the geographic range of Celtic closely tracks places that had a Vasconic substrate, however, and is distinct as an IE language family largely due to that substrate influence.  It isn't impossible to imagine that the Bell Beaker people were linguistically Vasconic, and I do think that the language of the first farmers was probably closer to Vasconic than IE was, but I don't think that the megalithic first farmer language survived anywhere (except perhaps on a few Mediterranean islands like Sardinia) into historically attested times.

In other Bell Beaker news, Bell Beaker mtDNA is closer to Minoan mtDNA than to somewhat similar Androvo and Unitice mtDNA.  Rossen mtDNA is considerably more dissimilar.  This follows suggestive evidence from Y-DNA and other sources of Minoan-Bell Beaker similarity, although neither case has really been conclusive.

I suspect that the Minoans were part of the Aegean wave of an Anatolian demic transition between first farmers and early metal age farmers.  Even if they weren't directly ancestral to the Bell Beaker people, they probably had common origins and quite possible belonged to the same language family.

Interpretations of 750 GeV Bump Abound

Ten preprints were filed explaining the 750 GeV bump the day that it was announced (which is most often abbreviated as a particle described with the symbol S (for scalar)) and eight more preprints were filed the following day.  UPDATE December 20, 2015: Twenty more papers were posted on the 18th. In addition, both Jester and Marco Frasca have advanced interpretations not clearly expressed in preprints in their respective blogs.  The six Higgs bosons theory was also noted and dismissed without meaningful analysis by Lubos Motl at his blog.

Marco Frasca is the only voice out there arguing that there is any way that this bump could be consistent with the Standard Model Lagrangian by any means other than the six Higgs boson route, and thus has staked out what is for the most part the most conservative take on the news.  Of course, there are lots of voices out there arguing that it isn't too late for the 750 GeV bump to turn out to be a fluke with the 145 GeV potential Higgs boson bump in the early days of the LHC which was offered up as a very comparable bump in terms of significance and character that didn't end up amounting to anything in the end.

In addition to the theories that I have described previously, the possibility that this is an axion, a graviton-like particle, or a Goldstone boson associated with supersymmetry breaking (or superpartner of one) have been raised.  Composite particle analysis has been extended to consider a heavy pion or pion-like composite particle.

Still, to mangle an old saw, publication is the most sincere sign of credibility.  We would not be deluged with the amount of fairly high quality instant analysis (often with multiple authors) that we have seen in the last couple of days if professionals in the HEP community weren't taking the 750 GeV bump very seriously.

I am inclined to think that the assumption that any tensor particle that can decay to a diphoton must be a graviton of some type, made by many of commentators is wrong (e.g. consider the counterexample to prove the point even if it isn't particularly likely, of a highly excited tensor glueball).  Also though it is worth noting that any particle with neutral electric charge that can decay in a diphoton mode must do so through a triangle diagram, because neutral particles themselves don't couple to photons.

There is a definite "who ordered that" air to the entire discussion.  While multiple papers have proposed some relationship between this bump and dark matter, it is far too heavy to be a credible dark matter candidate or and is far too heavy to even be a credible dark matter self-interaction force carrying boson.  And, there really isn't any phenomenology gap other than the appearance of the bump itself, that we need to explain with this particle or something very much like it.  This particle does not naturally recommend itself to solving any of the important unsolved questions in physics that we were looking for solutions to when it was observed.

Also, I should mention that the announcement also places strict limits on SUSY theories with many of the preprint authors acknowledging that the 750 GeV bump, if true, completely rules out the entire parameter space of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM).  String theorists and SUSY supporters have retreated to the NMSSM (next to minimal supersymmetric standard model) barricades for the  time being.

VAGUELY RELATED:

* Meson width (which is the inverse of half-life in the proper units) is related to temperature under some leading numerical approximations of QCD by as much as a factor of fifty.  This result could be relevant to the many questions that have arisen over whether the 750 GeV bump is consistent with a Higgs like boson based upon its width, as the unprecedented energy scales of the latest data may have an impact on effective temperature which in turn can influence width and has probably not been widely adjusted for by early commentators.

* The never ending battle to measure the QCD coupling constant continues, although its current accuracy isn't that impressive.  The current world average is down a bit to 0.1177 +/- 0.13 (about 1%) which is down by about 0.0007 from the previous world average.  The real interesting question, however, is not the actual mean value of the QCD coupling constant (even though that is more interesting than it seems), but whether the running of the QCD coupling constant with energy scale is consistent with the Standard Model prediction, or differs as it does in almost all grand unification theories including SUSY.

META NOTE: With this post, both Dispatches at Turtle Island and its sister blog Wash Park Prophet have more posts in 2015 than they did in either 2014 or 2013.

UPDATE December 19, 2015: A 750 GeV Higgs boson could secure that vacuum stability that is merely metastable with a single 126 GeV Higgs boson.

Credible Evidence Of A Beyond The Standard Model 750 GeV Mass Boson

The Resonance Signal and Its Significance

The ATLAS experiment at the large hadron collider (LHC) has seen a signal at 3.5 sigma significance of a potential new particle with a mass of about 750 GeV/c^2 in diphoton events.  The CMS experiment has also seen a signal, of about 2 sigma significance, in diphoton events of roughly the same mass.  The diphoton channel is a particularly clean way to discovery new particles because there is not much background from Standard Model events to interfere at that mass scale.  CMS has also seen a 2.5 sigma signal at roughly the same mass in the charged lepton-neutrino-quark-anti-quark pair channel.

The data from the individual experiments standing alone and after considering look elsewhere effects, is not that significant, but the confirmation from two independent experiments makes these moderately significant bumps seem much more significant. While this doesn't amount to the discovery of a new particle (considered to be 5 sigma evidence), it is the most credible evidence yet that there could be a new particle.

I would put the likelihood of this resonance being real at about 45%, and the likelihood of this resonance being both real and unexplainable by Standard Model physics (e.g. for it not being a Standard Model composite particle of some sort) at about 35%.

Apparent Properties

As a consequence of conservation of intrinsic angular momentum (colloquially called "spin" even though that term has multiple other meanings), a particle that decays in the diphoton channel would have to be either "scalar" or "pseudo-scalar" (i.e. spin-0), or tensor (i.e. spin-2), and would have to have zero electric charge.

In other words, this particle looks a lot like a heavy Higgs boson.  It is also hard to reconcile a heavy Higgs boson which would be expected to have a wide width, with the narrow apparent width of the "bumps" that are actually seen (the width is about 40 GeV).  There is also no particularly well motivated reason to think that this would be a graviton resonance, even though that could, in principle, produce a spin-2, zero charge diphoton resonance.

Potential Theoretical Explanations

Most prosaically, this could be a case where six ordinary Standard Model Higgs bosons are produced at the same time (e.g. through the fusion of multiple gluons at once) and they are synchronized or superimposed upon each other in some manner that causes their combined decay product to be a diphoton decay.  It could be that there are similar bumps at 250 GeV and 500 GeV but that those have not been as apparent because of much larger backgrounds at lower energies.

Supersymmetry (aka SUSY) and a lot of other beyond the Standard Model theories predict the existence of "two Higgs doublets", with a total of five Higgs bosons, a positively charged one, a negatively charged one, an extra "scalar" Higgs boson, and an extra "pseudoscalar" Higgs boson.

Marco Frasca, a physicist whose primary interest is QCD, meanwhile, has argued that the Standard Model Higgs boson should have an infinite number of higher energy excitations.

While lots of models predict such a particle, however, there is less clarity over what kind of couplings this particle would have to other particles (i.e. "what does this particle do?"), and many predict that an extra Higgs boson would be accompanied by other particles (often lighter than the heavy Higgs boson) that have not been discovered.

Importance, If Real

In a lot of ways, a new fundamental particle at 750 GeV would be far more significant than the discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson.

The Standard Model Higgs boson was predicted to exist forty years before it was discovered and was necessary to the consistency and good functioning of the rest of the Standard Model.  When it was discovered, every fundamental particle in the Standard Model had been discovered and none of the particles not predicted by the Standard Model had been discovered.

If there is a new fundamental particle at 750 GeV, however, this is definitive evidence of beyond the Standard Model physics of some kind, although the extensions could be very narrow, for example, in the model that Marco Frasca suggests, or very broad, for example, in the case of non-minimal supersymmetry.

Of course, it is also possible that this signal could be some non-fundamental particle (e.g. an excited state of a spin-0 glueball or an excited state of top quark quarkonia) which would still be very interesting, but far less interesting than a new fundamental particle.

As usual, the next step is watchful waiting as the ATLAS and CMS experimenters do their jobs.

Coverage Elsewhere

Jester has more analysis.  Physics Forum discusses it here.  Not Even Wrong coverage here.  Matt Strassler is cautious and skeptical. Dorigo discusses the results but has little analysis.

Footnote

Today is the last day that the LHC was collect data in 2015.  It will start operations again and start collecting more data sometime around April in the year 2016.

Quick Hits

* The mtDNA atlas blog has only five posts so far, but the content and comments on those posts are thoughtful and well worth reading.

* Geocurrents has a fascinating post on regional variation in religious beliefs in Japan with comparisons to the South Korean situation.  These regional variations appear to reflect the deep historical roots of modern Japan and include animist practices in one area that may reflect pre-Yayoi religious beliefs.

The situation in Japan is complicated by the fact that religious traditions normally considered to be entirely different faiths are followed by the same individuals in different domains of life. Syncretism is pervasive.  Hence, a typical Japanese person may, for example, simultaneously have a Buddhist funeral and pray at Shinto shrines from time to time during life, while following a basically secular Confucian set of social norms.  Query how much this reflects a more general strategy with which Japanese culture has historically chosen a path of selective assimilation in language, culture, and genetic admixture with indigenous populations as well.

This may seem anomalous, but it is less so when one considers analogous instances of Americans who simultaneously consider themselves to be Christian while observing folk traditions with deep "pagan" roots.  For example, most American Christians celebrate both the resurrection of Christ and "pagan" Easter Bunny traditions at Easter, and celebrate both the birth of Christ and Santa Clause traditions at Christmas.

South Korea, generally speaking, is less syncretic.  A person's identity as a Christian, a Buddhist, or a secular person is more distinct at the individual level.

Historically, both Christian identification was not present in meaningful numbers until the 20th century during which it became the most Christian country in Asia due to Christianity's role as an institution facilitating positive political change.

Before that, Korean history tells the story of epic battles that have seen one side and then the other ascendant, between metaphysically secular Confucianists and the intrusive institutions of Buddhist missionaries which have been welcomed during some Korean regimes and persecuted in other regimes, that goes back many, many centuries.

The article does not mention the role of "pagan" practices akin to animistic Chinese folk religion in Korea,[1] perhaps because few people today now self-identify in that way religiously. But, I know from my own extended family lore that these practices were common place and were taken very seriously at least as late as the 1960s at least among Korea's senior citizens, even by people who self-identified religiously as Christian or Buddhist, and that some practices which are on the line between "superstition", "tradition" and "religion", for example, consulting soothsayers and astrologers when naming children, persist in Korea even today, even among people who self-identify as Christian.  So the extent to which Korea is syncretic may have more to do with state of mind than it does with actual practice.

[1] I am making some assumptions in the analogy to Chinese folk religion based upon geography and the source of the once prevailing Confucian belief system in Korea.  But, an alternative hypothesis is that the "pagan" Korean practices of which I am aware have a cryptic source in Japanese Shinto and folk religious belief, rather than Chinese folk religion, and that they became a part of my own extended family's belief system and traditions during the period of Japanese occupation of Japan, but are not actually widely shared among Koreans outside my extended family.  The existence of cryptic Japanese genetic ancestry in this part of my extended family would be consistent with this alternative hypothesis.  But, I lack sufficient information about this part of the family lore, and I also lack sufficient information about syncretic religious practice plays out in daily life for other ordinary Koreans, to evaluate the relatively likelihood of these alternatives very accurately.  Finally, of course, it is entirely possible that Japanese Shinto practice is itself a direct elaboration of Chinese folk religion at some point in early Japanese history that did not persist in the same way in China, in which case the distinction that I am making in this footnote between the two may be something of a category error.

* Scholarly conjectures on the language abilities of Neanderthals are considered.  John Hawks also has a nice piece on the bigger picture of ancient admixture among our ancient ancestors and are more recent ancestors belong to our own species.  He is a bit more more vague that I would like, however, in his discussion of "ghost populations."  He references one of his 2006 journal articles in support of some of the concepts in his post.

* Humans who lived in Florida ten thousand years ago responded to changing sea levels.

* Anthropologists have securely dated traces of human occupation in Australia to at least 53,000 years ago at a new site in a cave on Barrow Island which is now off the Australian coast but would have been part of the continent at the time.

* There are large stone wheels in the Middle East from Syria to Saudi Arabia first sited by airplane pilots in 1927 that appear to be observatories or calendars of some sort and are made with varying degrees of precision.  The oldest have now been dated to 8,500 years ago (6,500 BCE) and continuing in use until at least 5,500 years ago (3,500 BCE) if not later, at a time when the local climate was more favorable. Realistically, in that area and given the climate at the time, these dates suggest that they were built by farmers in the early Neolithic era, rather than by hunters and gatherers in the pre-farming Mesolithic era (even though other finds demonstrate that Middle Eastern hunter-gatherers did have permanent outdoor temple-like structures before domesticated plants were farmed anywhere on Earth).

* First there was a growing awareness of gut bacteria communities.  Now, we know that even expresso machine waste bins develop stable bacterial communities (that are quite distinct from machine to machine) over time.  More generally, this points to another place where scientists can look for genetic evidence about the human past.  While it seems far fetched to be able to recover ancient gut bacteria, scientists have already recovered ancient disease bacteria from well preserved mass plague burial sites.

Connecting the Cultural Dots With Relics And Legends

Gruda Boljevića tumulus is one of the most important archaeological sites found recently in Europe. The reason why I believe that this tumulus is so important, is because it shows that the dolmen building, golden cross disc making culture which developed in Montenegro in the first half of the third millennium BC, has its direct cultural roots in Yamna culture of the Black Sea steppe. Why is this important?

I have already shown that the golden cross discs which appear in Ireland and Britain around 2500 BC have their predecessors in golden cross discs from Montenegro which were dated to 2700 BC (Mala Gruda) and some time between 3050 BC and 2700 BC (Gruda Boljevića). Considering that these golden cross discs first appear in Montenegro and then in Ireland and Britain and nowhere else in between suggests that this cultural trait could have been a result of a direct cultural transfer between Montenegro and Ireland and Britain. Irish archaeologists are reluctant to say whether this cultural influence was due to trade or missionary contacts, or whether it was a consequence of a migration of a group people into Ireland.

This is because Irish archaeologists don't read pseudo histories like the Irish annals. If they did they would have seen the old Irish annals tell us that right at the time when the metallurgy and the first golden cross discs appear in Ireland, a group of people, a tribe a clan lead by Partholón arrives in Ireland. Partholón and his people are credited with introducing cattle husbandry, plowing, cooking, dwellings, trade, and dividing the island in four and most importantly for this story, they are credited with bringing gold which before them was not used in Ireland. They bring the golden cross discs. But where did Partholón and his people come from? The Irish annals tell us that too. They tell us that Partholón arrived to Ireland from the Balkans via Iberia. The Lebor Gabála Érenn, an 11th-century Christian pseudo-history of Ireland, tells us more. It tells us that Partholón came to the Balkans from the Black Sea steppe, the land where at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC we find Yamna culture...

From the Old European culture blog.

It has long been known that Iberians and remarkably similar genetically to the people of the British Isles, and that both populations are rich in Y-DNA R1b. It has also been recently discovered that the Yamna people had Y-DNA R1b, although more fine distinctions of sub-haplotypes of R1b muddy the connection between the Yamna people and Western Europeans.

It is much less well known, as observed in the comments to this post at the Eurogenes blog, the Croatians and the English, at least at a naive three ancestral component analysis level, seem to have very similar autosomal genetic makeups to each other.

Are the Irish legendary histories telling us the true tale of how the people bearing Y-DNA R1b came to arrive in Western Europe?

The Old European Culture blog, slowly and in individually intriguing and convincing installments is cumulatively making a convincing argument in that direction that can be corroborated with well dated archaeological relics. And, while this analysis doesn't name the Western European cultures involved, it does point to some very specific times and places to look for the culture that probably brought Y-DNA R1b to Europe along with a prominent role for cattle. This time and place turn out to be a pretty good fit to the Bell Beaker culture, while it is a rather poor fit to the megalithic culture that was already present when the Bell Beaker culture emerged.

The path suggested by Irish legendary history is notable, in part, because it is a match for one of several outstanding hypotheses for how Y-DNA R1b wound up in Western Europe, and also because legendary history from Ireland may be more reliable than in many other places because its position at an island isolated ocean frontier would have prevented it from being easily muddled with infusions of legendary histories from elsewhere.

This analysis also doesn't attach a definitively linguistic label to this population. Many scholars assume that the Yamna people of the steppe were Indo-Europeans, and there are some good reasons for that assumption. But, it is hardly definitive. While we have written Sumerian and Egyptian documents from this far back in history, we have no comparably old documents in any other languages.

The record is equally consistent with a hypothesis in which the Yamna people spoke a language that was in contact with Proto-Indo-European and borrowed words from it, but was itself non-Indo-European and related to one or more Caucasian languages. In this scenario, a non-Indo-European Yamna derived language arrives in Western Europe in the time frame, while Western Europe undergoes widespread language shift to Celtic or proto-Celtic languages much later, plus or minus a few centuries from Bronze Age collapse in most places. This scenario is attractive, because otherwise, the heavily Y-DNA R1b Basque people would have had to experience a language shift from an Indo-European language to Basque, which seems far less likely to be the case.

Waiting For The Next Big Paper

There have been a number of interesting papers on historical genetics and prehistory in the past couple of weeks that I haven't covered because I've been spending lots of days litigating cases in court and in arbitration forums for my clients.

But, a fair amount of interest in the field is devoted to the next big ancient DNA paper which a number of conference announcements discussed by Bell Beaker blogger suggest is coming sometime soon this autumn (in the Northern hemisphere) that will finally shed light on the genetics of the Western European Bell Beaker phenomena.

Of course, it could turn out that the blogging community had read too much into the tea leaves.  But, if such a paper is released, it could resolve a lot of the biggest remaining questions in historical genetics and prehistory.  Western European ancient DNA has been covered much less comprehensively than Central and Eastern Europe in recent autosomal ancient DNA studies, but the archaeology of Western Europe is pretty comprehensive and the technology can now do amazing things with lower quality remains, so there is good reason to be hopeful that the rumored new paper or two will be far more than hype.

Frustratingly, some of these conferences took place in October, but the content of the presentations has nonetheless apparently escaped the Internet's grasp.  But, this does argue against any major breakthrough papers.

This information, in turn, will also shed a lot of light on the question of when, how and from where the Indo-European languages and any predecessor languages arrived in Western Europe, although since pots are not people, new data can only strengthen or weaken arguments about historical linguistics, rather than resolve them definitively.

A Brief History of Exponents

The Math With Bad Drawing blog has a nice little post explaining very lucidly who the notion of exponents of repeated multiplication was generalized in a way that is pretty much unique to allow for exponents that have values other than whole numbers.

This fact, typically first taught in middle school or high school algebra, has been well known for a long time. Euclid toyed with the idea a little.  Ancient Greek scientist Achimedes first generalized the concept and proved the law of exponents. A fairly efficient form of exponential notation was invented by Nicolas Chuquet in 1484. More than three hundred years ago René Descartes established the modern superscript notation for exponents in the late 1600s around the same time that Newton's law of gravity and motion were invented and around the same time that Newton and Leibniz invented calculus (the modern notation used in undergraduate calculus follows the practice of Leibniz and not Newton's much more awkward notation).

There has been one notable elaboration of a similar concept in mathematics since then, called the fractal dimension which was first formally defined using that name by the late Benoit Mandelbrot in 1967 and entered the upper level college mathematics curriculum in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around the time I was an undergraduate math major. This concept was also invented in Newton's day, but then consigned to the dustbin of history as a curiosity until the late 1800s when several mathematicians developed it some more, and then remained out of sight until Mandelbrot, more or less single handedly repopularized the concept in a way that actually stuck and found practical applications.

The fractal dimension generalizes the notion of a dimension in a manner similar to the way that the law of exponents generalizes the notion of repeated multiplication by relating change in detail to change in scale.  For example, the smaller the ruler you use to measure a shoreline, the longer the shore gets in ruler lengths, because the ragged pattern of a shoreline has a high fractal dimension, while a smooth shoreline would have a low fractal dimension and doesn't change in length at all based upon the length of the ruler used to measure it.

I probably wouldn't ordinarily have found any of the blog post on exponents notable at all. But, earlier just this week, I had been thinking about the precise issue of how the generalized notion of an exponent is so much more subtle than the naive repeated multiplication definition, in the context of thinking about Euler's formula and the Euler's number "e", which is equal to approximately 2.71828 and is a transcendental number that cannot be produced from the ratio of any two integers (something called a rational number). It felt remarkable to see in illustrated print found at random on the Internet, almost exactly the same line of thought.

I guess I still belong to the math tribe, even though I'm a lawyer now.