A Notable Life In Quantum Physics

Chien-Shiung Wu was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics and high energy physics, and was a female Chinese physicists in an era where women still made up only a tiny percentage of scientists in the field. 

If something remembers you with a speech like this, one hundred and ten years after you were born, when you have long passed away, then you did something right in life.

In 1950, Chien-Shiung Wu and her student published a coincidence experiment on entangled photon pairs that were created in electron-positron annihilation. This experiment precisely verified the prediction of quantum electrodynamics. 

Additionally, it was also the first instance of a precisely controlled quantum entangled state of spatially separated particles, although Wu did not know about this at the time. 

In 1956, Wu initiated and led the so-called Wu experiment, which discovered parity nonconservation, becoming one of the greatest experiments of the 20th century. 

As Chen Ning Yang said, Wu's experiments were well known for their precision and accuracy. Experimental precision and accuracy manifested Wu's scientific spirit, which we investigate here in some detail. 

Yu Shi, "Scientific Spirit of Chien-Shiung Wu: From Quantum Entanglement to Parity Nonconservation" arXiv:2504.16978 (May 31, 2022) (This paper is the translated transcript of the speech the author made at the International Symposium Commemorating the 110th Anniversary of the Birth of Chien-Shiung Wu, on May 31, 2022 in Chinese. The above abstract is the translation of the original abstract of the speech.)

She earned her undergraduate degree in physics (which had a thesis requirement at the time) in China in 1934, prior to the Maoist Revolution, and earned a PhD working under a professor only three years older than her who had studied under Madame Curie, and under the first female PhD in Physics in China, who earned that degree at the University of Michigan (where I also earned my graduate degree). Wu earned her PhD at the University of California at Berkley in 1940 (thirty years before my father earned his PhD at Stanford).

Wu was admitted by the University of Michigan to study at her own expense, and was financially supported by her uncle. On her way to Michigan, Wu visited Berkeley, where she was so impressed, especially by Ernest O. Lawrence’s cyclotron, that she wanted to stay in Berkeley. The cyclotron had been invented by Lawrence, so it was an ideal place for studying physics. Another important factor that influenced Wu’s decision was that she cared a lot about gender equality, and there was gender discrimination at the University of Michigan. In addition, there were a lot of Chinese students at the University of Michigan at the time, and Wu didn’t want her socializing be dominated by fellow Chinese students. So she stayed in Berkeley. Her decision reflected her devotion to physics as a woman.

She then taught at Smith (from which my sister-in-law graduated), and then Princeton, and then she worked at Columbia University as part of the Manhattan Project. 

She was highly productive (publishing more than fifty papers in the early 1950s when a huge share of U.S. women were homemakers in the Baby Boom), and her early post-war research agenda involved the verification of Fermi’s theory of β decay.

Chien-Shiung Wu served as the President of the American Physical Society from 1975 to 1976.

James W. Cronin, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for his discovery of charge conjugation-parity (CP) nonconservation, once said, “The great discovery of Chien-Shiung Wu started the golden age of particle physics.” 

She continued to publish through at least 1980, and died in February of 1997. The author of the paper had met her.

The Imperial Chinese Harem System

The Imperial Chinese Harem System persisted with only brief interruptions over almost all of China's dynasties (when there were splits, most or all of the factions had them) from 220 BCE to 1908 CE, about 2128 years! 

This is a longer period of time, for example, than the entire history of Christianity, and the institution changed far more modestly during that time period than Christianity did.

During last days of China's final Qing Dynasty, which formally ended in 1912 with an Emperor's abdication (with a brief restoration that was not widely recognized later in the nineteen teens), however, it had already started to peter out:

The Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–1722) holds the record for having the most imperial consorts [in the Qing Dynasty] with 79, while the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875–1908) holds the record for having the fewest, with one empress and two consorts—a total of just three imperial consorts.

Functionally, this system, somewhat like the Saudi Arabian monarchy's succession system, insured that the hereditary emperorship would not end for lack of an heir. It also provided a pool of potential heirs from which a worthy successor could be chosen, mitigating, although not entirely eliminating, the harm caused by the occasional "mad king". 

What Causes Patriarchy?

Alice Evans, in her blog post "3 Things I Got Wrong About Patriarchy" (June 26, 2022), concludes (convincingly) that:

(1) Patriarchy in a society with plough agriculture arises not mostly due to the importance of men's physical labor relative to women, but instead, as a result of how patrilineal inheritance is used to concentrate wealth and power in a society, to encourage clan-like organization, and to create a need to resolve conflicts between men living in close clan communities over women.

(2) Christian Europe has been surprisingly egalitarian because Christian doctrine was actually followed in the Middle Ages and because rich nobles would use church morals rules against patriarchy as a bludgeon against rivals to prevent them from concentrating power and wealth. Christianity reduced patriarchy relative to many of its immediate predecessor societies in Europe.

(3) Islam promoted patriarchy, when other economic conditions made it feasible, even when the economic and technological conditions didn't compel a patriarchy outcome that wasn't present before a conversion to Islam. But oil wealth didn't change the pre-oil discovery level of patriarchy in an Islamic society very much as many scholars had hypothesized.

She reaches these conclusions, that are not conventional wisdom in anthropology and economics, by looking at more data over longer time periods, with greater detail than other scholars doing the same kind of analysis usually do. 

She was also willing to discount her own cognitive biases, for example, that religion was less important than economics in these matters.

The Legacy Of Herding

The Legacy Of Herding

Historical food productions practices influence culture and morality long after those food production practices are long gone.

According to the widely known ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis from social psychology, traditional herding practices are believed to have generated a value system that is conducive to revenge-taking and violence. 

We test this idea at a global scale using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large-scale surveys. 

The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor. First, the culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking. Second, contemporary ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today. Third, the contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior in the globally representative Global Preferences Survey. In all, the evidence supports the idea that this form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict across the globe.

Yiming Cao, et al., "Herding, Warfare, and a Culture of Honor" NBER (September 2021).

Another paper fleshes out the concept a bit more (and has a nice literature review), although its description of the southern United States as historically a herding culture is doubtful. Appalachia was indeed settled by Scotch-Irish herders and does have a culture of honor, but, the lowlands of the American South (which also has a culture of honor), where plantation farming became predominant, was settled by lesser English gentry farmers, not by descendants of herders.

A key element of cultures of honor is that men in these cultures are prepared to protect with violence the reputation for strength and toughness. Such cultures are likely to develop where (1) a man's resources can be thieved in full by other men and (2) the governing body is weak and thus cannot prevent or punish theft. 

Todd K. Shackelford, "An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Cultures of Honor" Evolutionary Psychology (January 1, 2005) (open access). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300126

The example of the Southern United States suggests that a weak state may be as important a factor in the development of a culture of honor as a herding economy.

The Legacy Of Plough v. Hoe Farming

Parallel hypotheses from the same disciplines associate ancestral heavy plough farming with strongly patriarchal societies with strong differentiation in gender roles, and ancestral hoe farming with less patriarchal and sometimes even matrilineal societies.

The Legacy Of Clan Based Societies

It has also become common in modern political theory to associate weak government approaching anarchy with clan based societies in which women are forced into highly subordinated roles, somewhat in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes ("nasty, brutish and short") as opposed to those who idealize an Eden-like "state of nature." See, e.g., Valerie M. Hudson, et al., "Clan Governance and State Stability: The Relationship between Female Subordination and Political Order" 109(3) American Political Science Review 535-555 (August 2015).

The Legacy Of Cousin Marriage

Also along the same lines, cousin marriage (often common in clan based societies and also among feudal aristocrats) tends to be a practice the undermines democratic government:

Image from here.

How might consanguinity affect democracy? 

Cousin marriages create extended families that are much more closely related than is the case where such marriages are not practiced. To illustrate, if a man’s daughter marries his brother’s son, the latter is then not only his nephew but also his son-in-law, and any children born of that union are more genetically similar to the two grandfathers than would be the case with non-consanguineous marriages. Following the principles of kin selection (Hamilton, 1964) and genetic similarity theory (Rushton, 1989, 2005), the high level of genetic similarity creates extended families with exceptionally close bonds. Kurtz succinctly illustrates this idea in his description of Middle Eastern educational practices:

If, for example, a child shows a special aptitude in school, his siblings might willingly sacrifice their personal chances for advancement simply to support his education. Yet once that child becomes a professional, his income will help to support his siblings, while his prestige will enhance their marriage prospects. (Kurtz, 2002, p. 37).

Such kin groupings may be extremely nepotistic and distrusting of non-family members in the larger society. In this context, non-democratic regimes emerge as a consequence of individuals turning to reliable kinship groupings for support rather than to the state or the free market. It has been found, for example, that societies having high levels of familism tend to have low levels of generalized trust and civic engagement (Realo, Allik, & Greenfield, 2008), two important correlates of democracy. Moreover, to people in closely related kin groups, individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are part of the cultural idiom of democracy, are perceived as strange and counterintuitive ideological abstractions (Sailer, 2004).

From the body text of the following article whose abstract is also set forth below: 

This article examines the hypothesis that although the level of democracy in a society is a complex phenomenon involving many antecedents, consanguinity (marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) is an important though often overlooked predictor of it. Measures of the two variables correlate substantially in a sample of 70 nations (r = −0.632, p < 0.001), and consanguinity remains a significant predictor of democracy in multiple regression and path analyses involving several additional independent variables. 

The data suggest that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop. 

Possible explanations for these findings include the idea that restricted gene flow arising from consanguineous marriage facilitates a rigid collectivism that is inimical to individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are key elements of the democratic ethos. Furthermore, high levels of within-group genetic similarity may discourage cooperation between different large-scale kin groupings sharing the same nation, inhibiting democracy. Finally, genetic similarity stemming from consanguinity may encourage resource predation by members of socially elite kinship networks as an inclusive fitness enhancing behavior.

Michael A. Woodley, Edward Bell, "Consanguinity as a Major Predictor of Levels of Democracy: A Study of 70 Nations" 44(2) Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (2013). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022112443855

A Few Notable Points About Charlemagne

The Basics

Charlemagne was King of the Franks, in an empire centered more or less around modern France but extending further, from 768 CE to his death in 814 CE (co-ruling with his brother Carloman I until 777 CE). 

He was a close ally of the Pope, and was crowned "Emperor of the Romans" by the Pope in 800 CE in what came to be called the Carolingian Empire.

This was right in the middle of the "Middle Ages" of Europe and towards the end of what are sometimes known as the "Dark Ages" of Europe. His rule preceded the Great Schism of 1054 in which the Roman Catholic Church split from the Eastern Orthodox churches.

Personal Life

He was born before his parents were married in the eyes of the church. They may, however, have had a Friedelehe (a.ka. a "peace" marriage), a Germanic form of quasi-marriage not accepted by the Christian church, with the following characteristics:

• The husband did not become the legal guardian of the woman, in contrast to the Muntehe, or dowered marriage (some historians dispute the existence of this distinction).
• The marriage was based on a consensual agreement between husband and wife, that is, both had the desire to marry.
• The woman had the same right as the man to ask for divorce.
• Friedelehe was usually contracted between couples from different social status.
• Friedelehe was not synonymous with polygyny, but enabled it.
• The children of a Friedelehe were not under the control of the father, but only that of the mother.
• Children of a Friedelehe initially enjoyed full inheritance rights; under the growing influence of the church their position was continuously weakened.
• A Friedelehe came into being solely by public conveyance of the bride to the groom's domicile and the wedding night consummation; the bride also received a Morgengabe (literally "morning gift", a gift of money given to a wife upon consummation of a marriage).
• A Friedelehe was able to be converted into a Muntehe (dowered or guardianship marriage), if the husband later conveyed bridewealth (property conveyed to the wife's family). A Muntehe can also be characterized as a secular legal sale of a woman by her family clan's patriarch to her husband (sometimes with the requirement that the consummation of the marriage be witnessed).

Other alternative relationship forms that existed in that era included a Kebsehe with an unfree "concubine" in the Middle Ages, the morganatic marriage (a marriage without inheritance rights, usually of a noble to a commoner lover after the death of a first legitimate wife), the angle marriage (a "secret marriage" entered into without clergy involvement comparable to modern "common law marriage" banned by the church in 1215 but continuing in practice into the 1400s), and a robbery or kidnapping marriage (a forced marriage by abduction of the bride, sometimes with her or her family's tacit connivance to avoid an arranged marriage or because the couple lacks the economic means to arrange a conventional marriage).

Charlemagne "had eighteen children with eight of his ten known wives or concubines. . . . Among his descendants are several royal dynasties, including the Habsburg, and Capetian dynasties. . . . most if not all established European noble families ever since can genealogically trace some of their background to Charlemagne." The accounts are not entirely consistent.

He was mostly a serial monogamist, although he had two successive concubines at the same time as the marriage that produced most of his children, for about two years. 

His first relationship was with Himiltrude. After the fact, a later Pope declared it a legal marriage (despite the fact that she would logically have resulted in the invalidity of Charlemagne's later marriages as she lived until age 47). But she appears to have been a daughter from a noble family (as would be expected if she had an opportunity to have a relationship with a king's son), so she wasn't a serf who was an unfree kebese concubine either. An informal marriage-like relationship along the lines of  a Friedelehe that was not recognized by the church probably best characterizes her status at the time. This relationship produced one son who suffered from a spinal deformity and was called "the Hunchback" who spent his life confined to care in a convent.

Charlemagne's relationship with Himiltrude was put aside two years later when he legally married Desiderata, the daughter of the King of the Lombards, but the relationship with Desiderata produced no children and was formally annulled about a year later. 

He then married Hildegard of the Vinzgau in 771 with whom he had nine children before Hildegard died twelve years later in 783. 

Two of the children were named Kings (one of Aquitaine and one of Italy), one was made a Duke of Maine (a region in Northwestern France that is home to the city of La Mans), three died as infants, one daughter who never married died at age 25 after having one son out of wedlock with an abbot, one daughter died at age 47 after having had three children with a court official he remained in good standing in Charlemagne's court out of wedlock, and one daughter probably died at age 27 having never married or had any children although the time of her death is not well documents and she may have spent her final years in a convent. 

During his marriage to Hildegard he had two concubines, apparently successively, with whom he had one child each, Gersuinda starting in 773 and producing a child in 774, and Madelgard in 774, producing a daughter in 775 who was made an abbess. 

He then married Fastrada in 784 and she died ten years later in 794, after having two daughters with him, one of whom became an abbess. 

He then married Luitgard in 794 who died childless six years later in 800. 

After Luitgard's death, Charlemagne had two subsequent successive concubines. The first was Regina, starting in 800 with whom he had two sons (in 801 and 802), one of whom was made a bishop and then an abott, and the other of whom became the archchancellor of the empire. The second was Ethelind, starting in 804 with whom he had two sons, in 805 and 807, the first of whom became an abbot.

A Female Byzantine Rival

His main competitor for the title of Emperor was the Byzantine Empire's first female monarch, Irene of Athens.

Brutal Conversions Of European Pagans And Wars

Charlemagne was engaged in almost constant warfare throughout his reign and often personally led his armies in these campaigns accompanied by elite royal guards call the scara.

• He conquered the Lombard Kingdom of Northern Italy from 772-776. He briefly took Southern Italy in 787, but it soon declared independence and he didn't try to recapture it.
• He spent most of his rule fighting pitched campaigns to rule mostly Basque Aquitaine and neighboring regions, and the northern Iberian portion of Moorish Spain.
• In the Saxon Wars, spanning thirty years ending in 804 and eighteen battles, he conquered West German Saxonia and proceeded to convert these pagan peoples to Christianity, and took Bavaria starting in 794 and solidified in 794.
• He went beyond them to fight the Avars and Slav further to the east, taking Slavic Bohemia, Moravia, Austria and Croatia.

In his campaign against the Saxons to his east, Christianized them upon penalty of death and leading to events such as the Massacre of Verden. There he had 4,500 Saxons, who had been involved in a rebellion against him in Saxon territory that he had previously conquered, executed by beheading in a single day.

According to historian Alessandro Barbero in "Charlemagne: Father of a Continent" (2004) at pgs. 46-47, "the most likely inspiration for the mass execution of Verden was the Bible" and Charlemagne desiring "to act like a true King of Israel", citing the biblical tale of the total extermination of the Amalekites and the conquest of the Moabites by Biblical King David.

A royal chronicler, commenting on Charlemagne's treatment of the Saxons a few years after the Massacre of Verden records with regard to the Saxon that "either they were defeated or subjected to the Christian religion or completely swept away."

Quote of the Day

One of the most frequent critical remarks I have gotten on my book is that I seem confident. I was supposed, it seems, to begin each paragraph with “I'm sorry, but.”

But I am not sorry. I mean what I say. Yes, in the foundations of physics we are financing some 15,000 or so theorists who keep producing useless scientific articles because they believe the laws of nature must be beautiful. That's exactly what I am saying.

- Sabine Hossenfelder. 

The Citation Gap In Physics Publications

Usually, I write about scientific discoveries rather than the scientific process, but today I'll take a moment to look at what is behind the gender gap in physics paper citations.

Sabine Hossenfelder, at her blog, makes a convincing effort to determine why papers by men are cited such much more often than women in physics, as a rebuttal to another investigator who concluded that women are cited less often because they are inferior physicists.

Essentially, almost all of the gap is attributable to women dropping out of active research positions in the profession entirely very early in their careers. This is common among both men and women, but it is more common among women. Among researchers who have published at least five papers, including one in the last three years, there is basically no gender based citation gap. As she explains:

[T]he vast majority of people who use the arXiv publish only one or two papers and are never heard of again. This is in agreement with the well-known fact that the majority of physicists drop out of academic careers.

The first one or two papers of a junior researcher who never publishes again is much less likely to be cited by someone else than a paper published by someone who continues to actively publish for a long time. And, women are much more likely to leave the academic physics profession than men, in part, because many leave to spend time raising children and never return to research physics positions afterwards.

The Economics Of Caste Formation and Maintenance In India

An interesting new economics article attempts to elucidate economic forces that would lead to the formation and continued survival of India's hereditary caste system.

While the suggestions of the factors at play are highly speculative, and the mathematical analysis included in the paper is really mere sophisticated window dressing for a set of ideas that can be just as viably explained in word, the speculation is nontheless interesting.

One of the lessons that economics teaches us is that actions that appear to be economically irrational are often due to our inferior understanding of the details of the transaction.  Few pervasive and stable economic institutions are actually economically irrational, although the tradition narrative for why any particular economic or political institutions works is often mostly or completely wrong.

Indeed, it isn't implausible that the system was devised for reasons entirely different than those stated in this article, but survived because the economic logic set forth there works.

The article is Chris Bidner and Mukesh Eswaran, "A Gender-Based Theory of the Origin of the Caste System of India." (December 11, 2012).  The abstract is as follows:

This paper proposes a theory of the origins of India’s caste system by explicitly recognizing the productivity of women in complementing their husbands’ skills. We explain the emergence of caste and also the core features of the caste system: its hereditary nature, its insistence on endogamy (marriage only within castes), and its hierarchical character. We demonstrate why the caste system requires the oppression of women to be viable: punishments for violations of endogamy are more severe for women than for men. When there are such violations, our theory explains why hypergamy (women marrying up) is more acceptable than hypogamy (women marrying down). Our model also speaks to other aspects of caste, such as notions of purity, pollution, commensality restrictions, and arranged/child marriages. We also suggest what made India’s caste system so unique and durable. Finally, our theory shows that, contrary to claims made by the most dominant anthropological theory, economic considerations were of utmost importance in the emergence of the caste system.

Also, while it isn't very relevant to the conclusion, which is simply including background for an economics analysis as opposed to discussing history or anthropology per se, the paper's discussion of the history of caste set forth in the introduction is not well supported by the overall academic literature in the subject.  The introduction states (footnotes omitted) that:

Historians of caste since the 19th Century had long argued that the caste system arose after an Aryan invasion from the north-west around 1,500 BCE after which the victors imposed an oppressive system on the vanquished. This was a conjecture based on references in the Rig Veda, the earliest of Hindu scriptures, to an Aryan race. However, this claim has been largely discredited in recent decades. There is no archeological evidence of any such invasion; the Vedic culture, which started after 1,500 BCE and which spawned the caste system, seems to have been an indigenous innovation of an earlier culture at Harappa [Shaffer (1984), Shafer and Lichtenstein (2005)]. Recently, genetic evidence has also confirmed that there could not have been any large scale infusion of genes into India since 3,500 BCE [e.g. Sahoo et al (2006)]. Since both archaeological and genetic evidence firmly imply that the caste system of India was an entirely indigenous development—not one foisted by foreign invaders—it therefore has to be explained in these terms

In fact, there is overwhelming and solid archaeological, linguistic, genetic and legendary history evidence for an Aryan invasion by proto-Indo-Iran people around 1900-1800 BCE that had a profound impact on Hindu Indian ethnogenesis.

This transition is marked archaeologically by the arrival of a new class of metal goods (e.g. the very earliest iron goods and iron working and substantial new volumes of Bronze goods), pottery techniques (e.g., the Black and Red Ware culture was a transitional one showing Indo-European influences), chariot technologies, and burial methods (e.g., a shift from burial to cremation in the Cemetery H culture) that first appeared on the Eastern European steppe that corroborate passages in the Rig Veda such as RV 10.15.14.  This demonstrates that the Rig Veda is appropriately viewed as legendary history, even though it is a religious text with fictional elements.

Linguistically, Indo-Aryan invasion is marked by the emergence of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language that is the source for all of the other Indo-Aryan languages of India in much the same way that Latin is the source of the Romance languages of Europe, or Old Norse is the source for the North Germanic languages of Europe.  Sanskrit is undeniably derived from the Indo-European languages, which are overwhelmingly believed to have originated outside India.  And, in the prehistoric, preliterate era, it was impossible for language shift to occur without the presence of a substantial superstrate population to bring it to a new people.  The time depth of Sanskrit derived languages fits the Indo-Aryan hypothesis well.

Genetically there are strong signs of an influx of people with West Eurasian affinities to India at about the right time depth (e.g. Y-DNA R1a1a1b) that are common in other Indo-European populations are found in India, and their frequencies are greater in the Brahmin ruling class, and in populations that speak Indo-European as opposed to Dravidian or Tibeto-Burmese languages.  There is also a discernible distinction between an Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian autosomal composition of autosomal DNA in India.  While only some of that distinction is attributed to migration ca. 1900 BCE-1800 BCE and a subsequent expansion over centuries to the rest of India, there is strong evidence of major admixture between the two populations at about the right time.

Indo-Aryans probably contributed less than 20% of the ancestry of Northwest Indians who speak Indo-Aryan languages (concentrated more heavily in Brahmins) and less as one moves South, to a continent that already contained genetic distinction between the Harappan North and the non-Harappan South.  But, the fact that the genetic evidence does not support the theory that there was wholesale replacement of the bulk of the population of South Asia (which clearly didn't happen), does not mean that there is not genetic evidence to support a substantial demic migration of linguistically Indo-European Indo-Aryans who predominantly became the new ruling class in most of India.

The genetic impact of Indo-Aryans on India, for example, is greater than the genetic impact of the Turks on the country now known as Turkey (which was about 8%), yet the Turk superstrate culture clearly had a profound cultural impact on Anatolia which had been largely Hellenistic culturally immediately before that transition (from the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great until the 8th century CE).

Overall, the evidence supports the arrival of an Indo-European superstrate population known as the Aryans around 1900-1800 BCE in Northwest India which expanded into much of India, and became a superstrate ruling class that had profound cultural impact on India.

There are three main points upon which there is lack of clarity.

1.  How much of the transition was imposed by force as opposed to accepted voluntarily by indigeneous people of India?  

The Harappan civilization collapsed on its own prior to the advent of the Indo-Aryans  in connection with the 4.2 kiloyear climate event, an arid period that was accompanied by the drying up and disappearance Saravasti River of the Rig Vedic epics around which much earlier Harappan civilization was organized as ruins recovered in the ancient, now dry, riverbanks reveal.

It could be that the survivors of Harappan civilization left in disarray welcomed these new rulers, and it is true that there isn't much archaeological evidence for heavy military conflict for a sustained period at the time of Harappan-Aryan transition, or it  could be that they were conquered militarily in a manner sufficiently decisive and swift to leave few archaeological traces.  There is no serious doubt, however, that the Indo-Aryans formed the core of a new ruling class, first in Northwest India, and over a few centuries, over much more of India.

2. How much cultural influence did the Harappan substrate have on the Indo-European culture brought by the Indo-Aryans?

Certainly, some aspects of the indigeneous Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley contributed materially to the culture of the Indo-Aryan invaders who subjected the majority of indigeneous Indias whom they ruled.  For example, we know that curry, the staple Indian recipe, is of Harappan origins.

While Hinduism has elements of historically documented Indo-European paganism also found in Greek, Italic, Celtic, Hittite and Germanic societies in the West, and commonalities with the Old Persian religion documented in the ancient Iranian scripture known as the Avesta, which combined can be used to infer the proto-Indo-European religious system, it is certainly clear that substrate Harappan influences materially impacted the religion that came to be known as Hinduism.  For example, Hinduism has less human-like deities than other Indo-European religions, probably due to Harappan substrate influence, and the use of the psycho-active substance "Soma" has a less central role in other Indo-European religions and is probably a case of substrate influence.  The sacred cow taboo of India is another feature of Hinduism not shared by other Indo-Europeans.

One of the leading explanations of the formation of the caste system in India sees the Brahmin priestly caste as one invented as a way to graft an Indo-European ruling caste (probably male dominated and taking local wives from prominent families in many cases), onto a pre-existing caste system that had previously consisted only of the other three of the four varnas which Wikipedia describes as: the Kshatriya (those with governing functions), the Vaishya (agriculturalists, cattle rearers and traders) and the Shudra (who serve the other varna).

This interpretation is supported by the fact that Brahmin's in India are more similar to Indo-Europeans genetically than members of other varna in India.

One might imagine a pre-Aryan caste system of Northwest India with a hereditary aristocracy (seen in ancient and feudal societies across the world), a hereditary class of freeholders and merchants (perhaps viewed as Harappan citizens), and a hereditary class of serfs (perhaps made up of ethnically distinct non-Harappan Dravidians conquered by Harappans prior to Indo-Aryan invasion, perhaps mostly as Harappans fleeing their homeland where their primary river system dried up relocated to the Northeast, an archaeologically established migration).  Dalits aka "untouchables" may have been hunter-gather populations or other less technologically advanced farmers or herders conquered after the Indo-Aryan era formation of the four varna system.

There is certainly no archaeological evidence that supports the existence of India's four varna plus Dalit caste system during the pre-Indo-Aryan Harappan era.

Efforts to discern the nature of the Harappan language from their proto-linguistic system of seals, or the non-Indo-European substrate influences in Sanskrit, have largely failed so far.

3. How did Hinduism and Indo-Aryan genetic influences that are particularly common in Brahmins extend to areas that now, or in the historic era, were Dravidian speaking?

Harappan civilization prior to the arrival of the Indo-Aryans ca. 1900-1800 BCE, did not extend beyond Northwest India, which is where Indo-Aryan influence on South Asia commenced.

Now, the Hindu religion is found throughout India, and Brahmin's even in Dravidian speaking areas show heightened levels of Indo-Aryan genetic contributions.

One possibility is that there was a missionary effort to Dravidian areas carried out by Brahmin's after the Indo-Aryan invasion that successfully secured acceptance of their priestly highest caste role and the Hindu religious and caste system voluntarily in Dravidian areas, but that this missionary effort was insufficient to secure the language shift that the initial Indo-Aryan invasion did.

Another possibility is that the Indo-Aryan invasion, over time, conquered all but a small pocket of Southeast India, instituted Hinduism there and wiped out the existing languages, and then was retaken in part during an expansionist Dravidian counter-campaign that recaptured some, but not all, of India that had never been Harappan, after the Hindu religious and caste system had been put in place there.  But, the religious and caste elements survived the reconquest of these areas by Dravidians.
 
This second theory would also help to explain the shallow time depth of the Dravidian language family (indicating a common proto-language as recently as 500 BCE with others arguing for dates in the range of 1100-700 BCE), that has supposedly had many thousands of years to develop indigeneously.  Most of the languages in that family would have been wiped out in the Indo-Aryan invasion, leaving the remaining language family all derived from the Dravidian dialects spoken in the small pocket of Southeast India that managed to resist the Indo-Aryans and then expanded into areas where other autochronous Indian languages were once spoken and then were wiped out by the Indo-Aryans.

It is hard to find a more parsimonious explanation for the lack of Dravidian linguistic variation in a theory in which Dravidian is the thousands of years old ancestral language of India, in which it is derived from the Harappan language, or in which it arose locally or from abroad around the time of the South Indian Neolithic ca. 2500 BCE.  The linguistic variation of the Dravidian languages even have less time depth than that of the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia, despite strong circumstantial evidence that they were spoken in India before the Indo-European languages.

Hat Tip: Marginal Revolution.

Back To Ancient History

The burst of early spring physics conferences seem to be past and so it is time to think about the deep past and population genetics again.

* John Hawks have flagged a number of interesting articles.  One study, linking population size and technological complexity in Oceania at first contact with European sailors reaches a facinating conclusion:

Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology.
 

* On the methodology front, someone has found a way to turn W.E.I.R.D. samples into a feature rather than a bug when doing genomics:

Although much is known about college students as a special sample in terms of their behavioral traits such as intelligence and academic motivation, no studies have examined whether college students represent a “biased” sample in terms of their genotype frequencies. The present study investigated this issue by examining the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium of genotype frequencies of 284 SNPs covering major neurotransmitter genes in a sample of 478 Chinese college students, comparing these frequencies with those of a community sample (the 1000 Genomes dataset), and examining behavioral correlates of the SNPs in Hardy–Weinberg disequilibrium. Results showed that 24 loci showed Hardy–Weinberg disequilibrium among college students, but only two of these were in disequilibrium in the 1000 Genomes sample. These loci were found to be associated with mathematical abilities, executive functions, motivation, and adjustment-related behaviors such as alcohol use and emotion recognition. Generally, genotypes overrepresented in the college sample showed better performance and adjustment than under-represented or non-biased genotypes. This study illustrates a new approach to studying genetic correlates of traits associated with a socially-selected group—college students—and presents the first evidence of genetic stratification in terms of education attainment.
 

* On the "to do" list, one of the projects at the top of list is to look into the circumstances that lead to language formation, which may or may not be distinct from "ordinary" language evolution.  A number of examples and leads to research come to mind to get at it, but full fledged language formation is very rare and mostly prehistoric with the exception of certain creoles and a couple of other outliers.

There are creoles whose formation process is well documented, and short of creoles punctuated language evolution via intense language contact.  There are instances of isolated communities of deaf people developing their own personal sign languages from scratch.  There is a growing literature discussing how societies and subcultures that split off (e.g. the differentiation of the Romance languages, revolutionary Americans, gang members, mother-in-law languages and "women's languages", Urdu v. Hindi) deliberately differentiate themselves linguistically as a means of distinguishing between insiders and outsiders and developing cultural identity.  There are lots of data points on what drives language shift, which language formation requires, but language formation also requires more.

There are purposefully constructed languages or linguistic constructs (e.g. pig latin) although very few of them seem to catch on.  They are like third parties in a two party biased first past the post single member district electoral system.  The viable ones form out of schism in existing ones or are driven by nationalism (e.g. reconstructed modern Hebrew), not to advance intellectually compelling ideas.

I think that the extent to which language formation and change is punctuated rather than evolutionary is greatly underestimated.  But, I'm curious in particular about how more tightly integrated features of a language like phonetics and grammer change relative to less core features like non-core lexical change.  For example, feminism has made some pretty significant changes in these kinds of features recently in English.

In particular, I'm curious about what circumstances might lead to the formation of a new viable language in the modern era.

LBK Farmers Were Patrilocal

A new study looking at stronium levels in Linear Pottery (LBK) archaeological culture associated bones from about 300 individuals, roughly half men and half women, which can be used to determine what kind of soils were common in the place where the person grew up and can be compared to the place where they were buried, shows that the LBK culture was predominantly patrilocal. Far more women died as adults someplace other than where they were born, than did men. LBK men often married women from someplace other than the town where they grew up and brought them back to their home towns.

The study makes additional inferrences about inheritance systems and inequality in LBK culture. Higher status grave good were found in the graves of men who grew up in areas with good soils. But, the conclusions drawn about inheritance and inequality are in my view less strongly supported by the evidence, since any system of succession at death to someone in the community according to any set of rules is going to produce a similar pattern. The economic inequality in that society could simply flow from one village having better farming conditions than another, which is not what we normally think about when we think of social inequality within a society.

The LBK culture was organized into villages (hamlets really) which each had perhaps dozens to something less than a hundred people, with a number of "Long houses" (a Long house of 6 meters by 45 meters with some space devoted to housing animals would be typical) that were inhabited for up to about thirty years at a time, some of which were close to each other, and others of which were far from other nearby villages. Anthropologists sometimes call a unit of social organization of this size a "band" as distinct from a larger "chiefdomship" in which a community leader typically has greater power over a larger group of poeple.

Long houses were gathered into villages of 5–8 about 20 m apart, placed on 300–1250 acres. Nearby villages formed settlement cells, some as dense as 20 per 25 km², others as sparse as 1 per 32 km². This structuring of settlements does not support a view that the LBK population had no social structure, or was anarchic. On the other hand the structure remains obscure and interpretational. One long house may have supported one extended family; however, the short lifespan would have precluded more than two generations. The houses required too much labor to be the residences of single families; consequently, communal houses are postulated. . . . At least some villages were fortified for some time with a palisade and outer ditch.

Early practice was to bury women and children beneath the floors of their houses, with later LBK settlements establishing village cemetaries. In one example, the population density in an archaeologically excavated apparently typical LBK community grew from something the order of 60 per equal mile (1 person per 10 acres) to 120 people per square mile (1 person per 5 acres) - which was much greater than the population density of the preceding hunters and gatherers of Europe (at least in areas where fishing was not the main means of subsistence). The political organization of the LBK society above the village level is not known, and could have supported larger political units in many areas. Indeed, the existence of bride exchange between villages (as well as shared cultural patterns such as beading designs and pottery designs, and as well as indications of some level of longer distance trade) indicates tha there must have been at least some level of interaction and shared community between isolated LBK villages.

The LBK culture was the first European farming culture in the Danube, Elbe and Rhine river basins (flourishing ca. 5500–4500 BCE) and was roughly contemporaneous with the first Southern European coastal region farming culture usually called the Cardial Pottery culture.  Their crops included a couple of kinds of wheat, peas, lentils, hemp and flax grown in small plots.  They also had cattle and some other domesticated animals.

Replacement As A Human Population Norm

The genetics of Andaman Islanders (off the coast of Burma), together with paleoclimate data, pretty strongly suggest that they were isolated from other human populations for about 20,000 years and fit more or less within a range of genetic variation that still exists today in Northeast India. Only a handful of human populations have been isolated that long, and most have seen massive waves of population replacement, sometimes multiple times, since the introduction of agriculture.

The observation that the only population in Europe that doesn't speak an Indo-European or Uralic language, the Basque, are the most lactose tolerant population in the world (suggesting their ethnogenesis probably took place sometime after a selective effect that arose after the development of dairy farming allowed the trait to reach fixation in this population), likewise dispells the notion that any large current population of Europe draws much of its ancestry from Upper Paleolithic Europeans.

Only a handful of modern populations have a strong likelihood of having more or less uninterrupted descent from the pre-Last Glacial Maximum populations of the places that they live today. For example, pre-LGM (ca. 20,000 years ago), the Americas and much of Oceania were uninhabited. Most, but probably not all, Tibetans have genetic origins in East Asia at sometime since the LGM.

The Bantu populations of Southern and Eastern Africa are more recent arrivals, as is the population of Madagascar. Before then, Southern Africans looked like modern Bushmen, they weren't racially the same as what we now call "black" Africans. And, Africa's West Africans and Nilo-Saharans are likewise populations that are probably predominantly products of migrations and population expansions within the last 20,000 years.

There are very strong indications from multiple lines of evidence that all modern humans have common origins in a single human community within the last 250,000 years or so somewhere in Africa, and the similarly strong indications that all non-Africans probably have origins in one (or at most two or three) main migration events sometime in the last 100,000 years. But, we can draw only weak conclusions about the first 80,000 years of our existence as Eurasian hunters and gatherers from the genetic landscape of today. Indeed, it is extremly challenging simply to discern the outlines of the first 7,500 years of our pre-history from the time that agriculture and domesticated animals other than dogs arose until written records began to recount events with any regularity.

The latest discoveries from ancient DNA and archaeology and population genetics increasingly suggest that in Europe, at least, there isn't even all that much genetic continuity between the early Neolithic era and the present. In most of Europe, there have been at least one or two major waves of population near replacement since then. Large swaths of Europe have their genetic roots predominantly in Indo-European migrations and expansions that have taken place since the Bronze Age (in other words, since about 2,500 BCE).

Of course, in some places, the current population traces its roots where it lives now much less far in the past. The vast majority of North Americans predominantly have ancestors who arrived in the North America within the last five hundred years, and the median ancestor of a contemporary North American probably arrived within the last century and a half or so. Northern Thailand experience a major population replacement in the 13th century. Northern Japan experienced a major demographic shift in the last thousand years, with Hokkaido experiencing that shift in the last few hundred years. New Zealand has only been inhabited for about a thousand years and has experienced 80% to 90% population replacement in the last couple of centuries. Population replacement was even more complete in the last couple of centuries in Australia. Texas, California and much of the rest of the Western United States have gone from being populated almost entirely by people of Iberian and Native American descent in 1800, to being populated predominantly by people descended from neither of those populations today. Jews were a tiny proportion of the population of Israel a century ago. Most of the Han Chinese people in Western China have roots there only in the last seventy years, and most of the Caucasians in Eastern Russia have roots there within the last two centuries. The white and colored populations of Southern Africa didn't exist when Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. Large shares of the population in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are non-citizen foreign workers. The vast majority of Alaskans have roots there only in the last seventy years.

While Young Earth Creationists are profoundly wrong about the age of our world, of our species and our life on earth, most of our cultural legacies can be traced to the Holocene era, which starts roughly when the Young Earth Creationists claim that the world came into being. The most widely accepted estimate for the origin of the Indo-European language family that includes languages from Gaelic to English to Greek to Persian to Hindi is about 6,000 years give or take a few centuries. Sumerian, the most widely spoken language of Iraq and the first to be recorded in writing, is a dead language, as are all other languages that can be definitely said to belong to the same language family. The pygmy languages probably died sometime in the Bantu expansion. The languages spoken in Pakistan's civilization for thousands of years prior to the arrival of Indo-European languages are probably lost and completely dead now. The Afro-Asiatic languages that are still spoken today probably have a common origin no older than farming, and Arabic, the overwhelmingly dominant member of the linguistic macro-family was spoken by no one but some minor tribes of herders in the Arabian desert as recently as sixteen hundred years ago. Twenty-five hundred years ago, no one in Japan spoke Japanese. Two thousand years ago, no one in Turkey spoke any language even remotely related to Turkish.

The oldest of the world's major organized religions that is still practiced today, Hinduism, is probably about 4,500 years old. Polytheistic religions that were dominant from England to Egypt to Finland just two thousand years ago have only a tiny number of practioners and most of those practitioners are neo-pagans are who resurrected those faiths after more than a millenium in which those faiths had vanished from old myths and images starting in the 18th or 19th century.

Foods that now define nations, like potatoes in Ireland, spicy kim-chee in Korea, and black tea in England were never consumed in those respective countries five hundred years ago. Bananas never found their way into the diet of African monkeys until human mariners brought them there around the time of the Bantu expansion or later. The Kumara that is central to the Maori diet in New Zealand and in much of the rest of Oceania somehow made its way from South America (probably in a single sea voyage) in roughly the last millenium.

While we have approximately 5500 years of written history for at least parts of the world, mass produced books are only 500 years old.

Modern political and economic institutions are even younger. There is no place on earth that has been continously a democracy for a thousand years. All but a few of the world's democracies were democratic two hundred and fifty years ago, and even in those places the franchise was much narrower than it is today. Two hundred years ago there was almost no where in the world that women were allowed to vote. When I was born, about 95% of law students were men, now it is just over 50%. All but a few of the current regimes in Europe have been interrupted in the last seventy years. Slavery has gone from being an international norm to an abberation in two hundred years. The use of the death penalty has declined dramatically in the last two or three generations. Marriages that aren't arranged have been the norm for less than a couple of centuries in most of the world, and in many places less than a century.

We are becoming aware of our most ancient roots just as the last traces of them are vanishing.