Medieval Warhorses Weren't Big

Shockingly, medieval warhorses weren't as huge and amazing as depicted in TV and movie accounts, although they were still highly valued at the time.

Medieval warhorses are often depicted as massive and powerful beasts, but in reality many were no more than pony-sized by modern standards. . . . Horses during the period were often below 14.2 hands high. . . . Researchers analysed the largest dataset of English horse bones dating between AD 300 and 1650, found at 171 separate archaeological sites.

From here. 

Unsurprisingly Matter And Antimatter Respond To Gravity In The Same Way

As expected, matter and antimatter respond to gravity in the same way. They are at least 97% identical in that respect as more clearly explained in this press release.

The standard model of particle physics is both incredibly successful and glaringly incomplete. Among the questions left open is the striking imbalance of matter and antimatter in the observable universe, which inspires experiments to compare the fundamental properties of matter/antimatter conjugates with high precision. Our experiments deal with direct investigations of the fundamental properties of protons and antiprotons, performing spectroscopy in advanced cryogenic Penning trap systems. For instance, we previously compared the proton/antiproton magnetic moments with 1.5 parts per billion fractional precision, which improved upon previous best measurement by a factor of greater than 3,000. 

Here we report on a new comparison of the proton/antiproton charge-to-mass ratios with a fractional uncertainty of 16 parts per trillion. Our result is based on the combination of four independent long-term studies, recorded in a total time span of 1.5 years. We use different measurement methods and experimental set-ups incorporating different systematic effects.

The final result, −(𝑞/𝑚)𝑝/(𝑞/𝑚)𝑝¯=1.000000000003(16), is consistent with the fundamental charge–parity–time reversal invariance, and improves the precision of our previous best measurement by a factor of 4.3. The measurement tests the standard model at an energy scale of 1.96 × 10^−27 gigaelectronvolts (confidence level 0.68), and improves ten coefficients of the standard model extension.

Our cyclotron clock study also constrains hypothetical interactions mediating violations of the clock weak equivalence principle (WEPcc) for antimatter to less than 1.8 × 10^−7, and enables the first differential test of the WEPcc using antiprotons. From this interpretation we constrain the differential WEPcc-violating coefficient to less than 0.030.

M. J. Borchert, et al., "A 16-parts-per-trillion measurement of the antiproton-to-proton charge–mass ratio." 601 (7891) Nature 53 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04203-w

Looking For Blogroll Suggestions

Every now and then I pay attention to the layout of this blog.

Many of the links in my blogroll are stale, and I plan on migrating them to a permanent "page" of stale science blogs.

This would also be a natural time for me to add new blogs or webpages to my blogroll at the same time.

I'd welcome any suggestions in the comments for active (at least a few posts a year) blogs or reference webpages that regularly address the subject matter of this blog.

Connecting The Dots In The Expansion From The Steppe

Bernard's blog reviews a new paper that combined archaeological and genetic evidence in an effort to put together a more comprehensive narrative of Bell Beaker and Corded Ware expansion into Europe.

Honestly, it isn't the easiest to follow and will probably require a deeper dive to make sense of it. But it does have some nice illustrations from the paper whose abstract and citation are found at the end of this post.

Mobility and migrations are key factors for understanding cultural change. Since the advent of mobility isotopes and especially ancient DNA studies, this fact is in no prehistoric periods so obvious as in the Early Neolithic of the 7th/6th millennium BC and the Copper Age/Early Bronze Age transition of the 4th/3rd millennium BC. 

However, especially for the 3rd millennium BC, there is no consensus on the scale, size, extent, directions, and speed of events. We likewise lack good conceptualisations and explanations for the mechanisms behind people moving. 

Here, an attempt is being made to describe essentials of four events in which archaeology and genetic studies regard recognisable quantities of peoples moving westwards: 1) Yamnaya; 2) Early Corded Ware; 3) Later Corded Ware; and 4) ‘steppe’ Bell Beaker. 

Emphasised is the importance of the geography in the understanding of regional transmissions. Particularly discussed are the roles of versatile/volatile boundaries of the Eastern European forest-steppe region between the Dnieper and Dniester rivers for the formation of Corded Ware, and of the Central European Upper Rhine river region in the border triangle of France, Germany and Switzerland for "steppe" Bell Beaker users. 

Highlighted are also possible origins of the typical gender-differentiated burial custom of Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures in the north-Pontic Zhivotilovka-Volchansk group; the importance of Bohemia and the Elbe river in the earliest spread and first consolidation of Corded Ware users; and the "Beakerisation" of central and southern France rather happening from the east than from the Iberian peninsula.

V. Heyd, "Yamnaya, Corded Wares, and Bell Beakers on the Move." 2 Archaeolingua 383-414 (2021).

Stars Form Much Faster Than Previously Assumed

There may be two factors at work in explaining the "impossible early galaxy observations" discussed in my previous post at this blog.

One of the factors, discussed in that post, is that gravitational based explanations of dark matter phenomena suggest that stars form galaxy structures much more quickly than they do in a cold dark matter paradigm.

Yesterday's new paper suggests that there is also a second factor at work which has nothing to do with the dark matter and dark energy phenomena debates. 

Stars form much more quickly from clouds of hydrogen gas than historically assumed, because magnetic fields in those clouds of hydrogen gas are much weaker than they were previously believed to be. There are plausible reasons for this to be the case, although it isn't yet clear which one of these reasons is actually the cause of this reality. 

But, this second factor is still a much less important one than the gravity v. dark matter distinction in my previous post, because it takes much longer for galaxies to coalesce from individual stars (on the order of hundreds of millions or billions of years) than it does for stars to form from hydrogen gas. The "classical view" is that it takes about ten million years for a typical star to form, while this observations suggests that one million years is closer to the mark. This difference is a mere rounding error relative to the time required to form a galaxy from individual stars.

Astronomers have long thought it takes millions of years for the seeds of stars like the Sun to come together. Clouds of mostly hydrogen gas coalesce under gravity into prestellar cores dense enough to collapse and spark nuclear fusion, while magnetic forces hold matter in place and slow down the process. But observations using the world’s largest radio telescope are casting doubt on this long gestational period. Researchers have zoomed in on a prestellar core in a giant gas cloud—a nursery for hundreds of baby stars—and found the tiny embryo may be forming 10 times faster than thought, thanks to weak magnetic fields.

“If this is proven to be the case in other gas clouds, it will be revolutionary for the star formation community,” says Paola Caselli from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, who was not involved with the research. 

Studying star birth and the tug of war between gravity and magnetic forces has been a challenge because the magnetic fields can be 100,000 times weaker than Earth’s. The only direct way to detect them comes from a phenomenon called the Zeeman effect, in which the magnetic fields cause so-called spectral lines to split in a way that depends on the strength of the field. These spectral lines are bright or dark patterns where atoms or molecules emit or absorb specific wavelengths of light. For gas clouds, the Zeeman splitting occurs in radio wavelengths, so radio telescopes are needed. And the dishes must be big in order to zoom in on a small region of space and reveal such a subtle effect. . . .

In a study published today [January 5, 2022] in Nature, researchers report a magnetic field strength of 4 microgauss—no stronger than in the outer layer. “If the standard theory worked, the magnetic field needs to be much stronger to resist a 100-fold increase in cloud density. That didn’t happen,” says Di Li, the chief scientist of FAST who led the study.

“The paper basically says that gravity wins in the cloud: That’s where stars start to form, not in the dense core,” Caselli adds. “That’s a very big statement.”

The finding implies that a gas cloud could evolve into a stellar embryo 10 times quicker than previously thought, says lead author Tao-Chung Ching of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s National Astronomical Observatories.

 From here. The paper and its abstract are as follows:

Magnetic fields have an important role in the evolution of interstellar medium and star formation. 

As the only direct probe of interstellar field strength, credible Zeeman measurements remain sparse owing to the lack of suitable Zeeman probes, particularly for cold, molecular gas. 

Here we report the detection of a magnetic field of +3.8 ± 0.3 microgauss through the HI narrow self-absorption (HINSA) towards L1544 —a well-studied prototypical prestellar core in an early transition between starless and protostellar phases characterized by a high central number density and a low central temperature. 

A combined analysis of the Zeeman measurements of quasar HI absorption, HI emission, OH emission and HINSA reveals a coherent magnetic field from the atomic cold neutral medium (CNM) to the molecular envelope. The molecular envelope traced by the HINSA is found to be magnetically supercritical, with a field strength comparable to that of the surrounding diffuse, magnetically subcritical CNM despite a large increase in density. 

The reduction of the magnetic flux relative to the mass, which is necessary for star formation, thus seems to have already happened during the transition from the diffuse CNM to the molecular gas traced by the HINSA. This is earlier than envisioned in the classical picture where magnetically supercritical cores capable of collapsing into stars form out of magnetically subcritical envelopes.

T.-C. Ching, et al., "An early transition to magnetic supercriticality in star formation" Nature (January 5, 2022) (open access) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04159-x

The body text explains that:

[T]he molecular envelope of the L1544 core traced by HINSA is at least 13 times less magnetized relative to its mass compared with its ambient CNM. This is different from the ‘classic’ theory of low-mass star formation, which envisions the transition from magnetic subcriticality to supercriticality occurring as the supercritical core forms out of the magnetically supported (subcritical) envelope. Our results suggest that the transition from magnetic subcriticality to supercriticality occurs earlier, during the formation of the molecular envelope, favouring the more rapidly evolving scenario of core formation and evolution for L1544 over the slower, magnetically retarded scenario. In other words, by the time that the molecular envelope is formed, the problem of excessive magnetic flux as a fundamental obstacle to gravitational collapse and star formation is already resolved.

As comment from a peer reviewer disclosed with the article is also notable (and honestly, the paper would have been better if it had been taken more strongly to heart by the authors than they do in minimal deference to it, the substance of the paper is solid but the exposition in the paper is lacking):

They state that their result shows that the reduction in magnetic flux relative to mass occurs earlier than envisioned in the “classical” theory of star formation, but the discussion of this is rather limited (lines 141-149). Yet this is THE astrophysical result of the paper. They should briefly describe the “classical” prediction, namely that mass/flux is reduced by gravity driving neutrals through the ions and magnetic field by a process called ambipolar diffusion. They should explicitly state exactly why their result is contrary to this prediction; that is, what is the argument that the regime sampled by the H I self-absorption is not gravitationally contracting with ambipolar diffusion producing a subcritical region as in the “classical” theory. Further, they should briefly suggest how their result might be explained theoretically if ambipolar diffusion does not. 

Two major possibilities are (1) formation of molecular clouds by flows along flux tubes (i.e., Vazquez Semadeni et al., MNRAS 414, 2511, 2011) and (2) magnetic reconnection (i.e., Lazarian et al., ApJ 757, 154, 2012). 

In (1), for a relatively small distance along a flux tube, as sampled by a small telescope beam, initially there will be little mass and λ will be measured to be highly subcritical. As mass flows into the region of the cloud (not due to gravity but due to colliding interstellar flows), λ (again as sampled in a small telescope beam) increases. Thus clouds start out as atomic and subcritical and accumulate mass over large distances to become molecular and supercritical as they evolve, becoming self-gravitating at about the same time. 

In (2), as the amplitude of turbulence as well as the scale of turbulent motions decrease from the envelope to the core of a cloud, the diffusion of the magnetic field is faster in the envelope. As a result, the magnetic flux trapped during the collapse in the envelope is being released faster than the flux trapped in the core, resulting in much weaker fields in envelopes than in cores. 

Both of these “non-classical” theories would seem capable of explaining the observational result of this paper.

Gravitational Alternatives To Dark Matter Predict Early Galaxies

The James Webb Space Telescope which was successfully launched on Christmas Day 2021 is optimized for observing the near infrared and mid-infrared range of light, which should capture light from galaxies and galaxy clusters from about 13 billion years ago.  

The LambdaCDM Standard Model of Cosmology predicts quite late formation of galaxies and galaxy clusters as demonstrated, for example, by De Lucia & Blaizot (2007). But MOND-based theories and the gravitational self-interaction based approach of Alexander Deur, predict much earlier galaxy formation.

Less impressive telescopes suggest that galaxies were starting to form very early on. This is called the "Impossible Early Galaxy Problem", first described in those terms in Steinhardt et al. (2016), and confirmed in Franck (2017). But the JWST will make that evidence much more clear one way or the other.

The Impossible Early Galaxy Problem is a major blow to the LambdaCDM model, because it starkly contradicts this model not only at the "small scale" level of individual galaxies, but at the "large scale structure" scale of cosmology as a whole. (Another major cosmology scale challenge is the 21cm absorption signal observed by EDGES at cosmic dawn, which is consistent with no dark matter.)

A new post at Triton Station by Stacy McGaugh examines this from a MOND perspective, citing, for example, Sanders (1998), Sanders 2001, and Skordis & Złośnik (2021) (among other things, reproducing the cosmic microwave background power spectrum often touted as the crowning accomplishment of the LambdaCDM model). Alexandre Deur also has a 2021 article on point:

We check whether General Relativity's field self-interaction alleviates the need for dark matter to explain the universe's large structure formation. We found that self-interaction accelerates sufficiently the growth of structures so that they can reach their presently observed density. No free parameters, dark components or modifications of the known laws of nature were required. This result adds to the other natural explanations provided by the same approach to the, inter alia, flat rotation curves of galaxies, supernovae observations suggestive of dark energy, and dynamics of galaxy clusters, thereby reinforcing its credibility as an alternative to the dark universe model.

Alexandre Deur, "Effect of gravitational field self-interaction on large structure formation" arXiv: 2018:04649 (July 9, 2021) (Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett. B) DOI: 10.1016/j.physletb.2021.136510.

Other gravitational based alternatives to dark matter (such as John W. Moffat's MOG theory) also appear, generically, to lead to earlier galaxy formation than cold dark matter theories do. See, e.g., J.W. Moffat (2015). MOG also explains the cosmic microwave background power spectrum. J.W. Moffat (2001).

Both Deur and Moffat's works also overcome the galactic cluster scale difficulties that are an impediment to MOND.

Analyzing Ancient DNA From Central Ukraine

 

At his blog, Bernard examines a new ancient DNA paper looking at remains from the Central Ukraine, mostly from the Neolithic Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, but also with a three sets of remains from the early and the late Bronze Age in the same region. I quote from his summary of the paper at length below. The source paper is an open access pre-print.

The Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was a pre-metal age first farmer culture in an area where farming emerged relatively late for farmers using the Fertile Crescent package of domesticated crops and animals. This package arrived in the Central Ukraine about 1,000 to 1,500 years after this set of food production technologies arrived in the Balkans, lower Egypt, and the upper Indus River Valley. It arrived around the same time that this package reached the British Isles, which are much more remote in distance and latitude from this package's European source in Western Anatolia than Central Ukraine. 

I don't know why it took so long to arrive here. Perhaps the hunting and gathering was so good in the Central Ukraine (perhaps due to abundant fish supplies in the river basins) that the pressure to transition was weaker, or perhaps the local hunter-gatherers were militarily more effective, or perhaps there is some ecological issue of which I am not aware.

As Wikipedia explains:

The majority of Cucuteni–Trypillia settlements consisted of high-density, small settlements (spaced 3 to 4 kilometers apart), concentrated mainly in the Siret, Prut and Dniester river valleys.

During its middle phase (c. 4000 to 3500 BCE), populations belonging to the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built the largest settlements in Neolithic Europe, some of which contained as many as three thousand structures and were possibly inhabited by 20,000 to 46,000 people.

One of the most notable aspects of this culture was the periodic destruction of settlements, with each single-habitation site having a lifetime of roughly 60 to 80 years. The purpose of burning these settlements is a subject of debate among scholars; some of the settlements were reconstructed several times on top of earlier habitational levels, preserving the shape and the orientation of the older buildings. One particular location; the Poduri site in Romania, revealed thirteen habitation levels that were constructed on top of each other over many years.

The results largely confirm expectations from prior work. 

The Neolithic mtDNA results, Y-DNA results, and autosomal DNA are what you would expect for Eastern Europe, with a heavy component of Anatolian farmer, a bit of Western European hunter-gatherer ancestry (both autosomal and uniparental), and a bit of Caucasian and Eastern Eurasian hunter-gatherer ancestry. 

Despite directly abutting the Pontic-Caspian steppe, these people have only 7% steppe ancestry (probably derived mostly from the Caucasian hunter-gatherers integrated into that community) and are overwhelmingly first farmer migrants from Central Europe who would have replaced local hunter-gatherers in the region, rather than local hunter-gatherers who were converted to farming and herding.

The early Bronze Age woman has autosomal DNA basically identical to a Polish Corded Ware individuals and shows continuity in mtDNA. The late Bronze Age woman is comparable to a Hungary Bell Beaker individual and also shows continuity in mtDNA.

The replacement of first farmer people with genetic distinct high steppe ancestry Bronze Age people is expected and typical of Europe as a whole. 

The nuance of the transition from a Central European Corded Ware type genetic profile in the early Bronze Age to a Central European Bell Beaker type genetic profile in the late Bronze Age, however, is a significant detail that wasn't strongly expected. And, despite the tiny sample sizes, previous experience with small ancient DNA samples that were subsequently broadened, and the mechanics of how autosomal DNA works, suggest that these samples can be safely assumed to be a reliable indicator of broad applicability in the region at those times.

Farmers arrived in the Balkans during the 7th millennium BCE and then dispersed along two main routes: along the shores of the Mediterranean and along the shores of the Danube. Unlike Central Europe, Eastern Europe including Ukraine, Moldova, Romania and Western Russia, did not adopt agriculture until 4500 BCE. The Cucuteni-Trypillia cultural complex brings together different cultures of the Middle Neolithic in Eastern Europe, which flows into the Black Sea. . . .

Pere Gelabert and his colleagues have just published a paper entitled: Genomes From Verteba Cave Suggest Diversity Within The Trypillians In Ukraine. They sequenced the genome of twenty ancient individuals from the Verteba cave in Ukraine belonging to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, most of which are dated between 3770 and 3670 BCE. . . .

However, one individual is dated to the Early Bronze Age: 1952 to 1774 BCE. and another from the Late Bronze Age: 980 to 948 BCE. Among these twenty individuals, there are eight women and twelve men. The mitochondrial haplogroups of the Neolithic individuals are T2b, H, HV, K1, N1, J1, U5 and T2c. The Early Bronze Age individual is mtDNA HV and the Late Bronze Age individual is mtDNA T2. The men are from the Y chromosome haplogroup: G2a, I2, and C1a. The two Bronze Age individuals are women. . . .

[In a principal component analysis of autosomal DNA] Farmers in the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture are located in close proximity to other Neolithic European farmers such as those in the LBK culture. The Final Bronze Age individual is located close to individuals of the Bell Beaker culture of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, and the Early Bronze Age individual close to individuals of the Corded Ware culture, with a high proportion of steppe ancestry.

The authors then performed an analysis with the ADMIXTURE software. Individuals of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture have a high proportion of the yellow component characteristic of Anatolian farmers. They also show a low proportion of hunter-gatherer components from the west (in red), but also hunter-gatherer components from the east and the Caucasus (in light and dark purple):

The genetic profile of the Early Bronze Age individual is similar to that of the Corded Culture individuals and that of the Late Bronze Age individual is similar to that of the Hungarian Campaniforme. These results are confirmed by the f3 statistic.

The use of the f4 statistic and the qpAdm software shows that the farmers of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture have a low proportion of steppe ancestry (on average 7%). The relatively high proportion of hunter-gatherer ancestry from the west (up to 18%) is probably linked to the resurgence of this ancestry in the Middle Neolithic. 

From Bernard's Blog (translated from French with Google Translate and my editorial improvements upon that translation). The abstract of the paper discussed states:

The transition to agriculture occurred relatively late in Eastern Europe, leading researchers to debate whether it was a gradual, interactive process or a colonization event. In the forest and forest-steppe regions of Ukraine, farming appeared during the fifth millennium BCE, associated with the Cucuteni-Trypillian Archaeological Complex (CTCC, 4800-3000 BCE). 

Across Europe, the Neolithization process was highly variable across space and over time. Here, we investigate the population dynamics of early agriculturalists from the eastern forest-steppe region based on analyses of 20 ancient genomes from the Verteba Cave site (3789-980 BCE). The results reveal that the CTCC individuals’ ancestry is related to both western hunter gatherers and Near Eastern farmers, lacks local ancestry associated with Ukrainian Neolithic hunter gatherers and has steppe ancestry. An Early Bronze Age individual has an ancestry profile related to the Yamnaya expansions but with 20% ancestry related to the other Trypillian individuals, which suggests admixture between the Trypillians and the incoming populations carrying steppe-related ancestry. A Late Bronze Age individual dated to 980-948 BCE has a genetic profile indicating affinity to Beaker-related populations, detected close to 1,000 years after the end of the Bell Beaker phenomenon during the Third millennium BCE.

A Slight Genetic Tweak Is The Difference Between Mammal Saliva and Snake Venom

A new study shows that mammalian saliva and snake venom have a common genetic source and differ due to relatively modest differences in the evolution of that gene. The paper is:

Agneesh Barua, Ivan Koludarov, Alexander S. Mikheyev. "Co-option of the same ancestral gene family gave rise to mammalian and reptilian toxins." 19(1) BMC Biology (2021) DOI: 10.1186/s12915-021-01191-1

Unsolved Physics Problems

As we begin a new year, it is helpful to consider what is on our plate, not just in one's personal and professional lives, but in the disciplines we are interested in. In physics, these include the following. 

* Determine the seven Standard Model parameters related to neutrinos with greater precision (especially the neutrino masses and the CP violating parameter of the PMNS matrix).

* Rule out non-standard interactions and sterile neutrino hypotheses further.

* Determine how neutrino mass arises (Majorana, Dirac, other, and in any scenario, how this happens).

* Determine how to determine the entire hadron spectrum from first principles, especially scalar mesons, axial vector mesons, and hadrons with four or more valance quarks.

* Are free glueballs possible?

* Determine if there are any relatively stable hadrons other than protons and bound neutrons (some people have suggested that there may be such a hexaquark, but most are skeptical of this possibility).

* Determine if there is a hypothetical upper limit to the scale of hadrons beyond which there is not sufficient energy to bind additional quarks.

* Determine if lepton universality is a correct Standard Model law of physics, and if not, to develop a phenomenological understanding of the deviations from it and the mechanism behind that deviation.

* Do the sphaleron interactions of the Standard Model actually happen?

* Is the value of the QCD coupling constant zero or non-zero in the limit of zero momentum transfer?

* Determine which of the leading predictions for the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (muon g-2) is closest to being correct.

* Determine the source of dark matter phenomena (probably some subtle tweak to the laws of gravity)

* Determine the magnitude and source of dark energy phenomena (probably the laws of gravity combined with understated uncertainty in measurements of it)

* Resolve the Hubble tension or determine that it arises from new physics.

* Determine if the LP & C relationship, that the sum of the squares of the fundamental particle masses in the Standard Model is equal to the Higgs vacuum expectation value continues to hold at greater precision.

* Determine if Koide's rule for charged leptons continues to hold true.

* Identify better phenomenological relationships between the Standard Model experimentally measured parameters.

* Determine with greater precision, all Standard Model experimentally measured physical parameters.

* Determine how gravity affects the high energy running of the parameters of the Standard Model.

* Improve the precision with which we known Newton's constant "G".

* Better develop means of calculating Standard Model physics parameters that do not rely on infinite series approximations.

* Determine if there are aspects of string theory that can be salvaged in the absence of supersymmetry and supergravity.

* Bring about greater recognition that the LambdaCDM Standard Model of Cosmology is beyond salvaging.

* Better determine the critical maximum mass of a neutron star without turning into a black hole with greater precision, both theoretically and observationally, and in so doing, determine more about whether neutron stars contain matter other than ordinary but highly compressed neutrons.

* Determine if Planet 9 exists in our solar system, and if so, where it is and what properties it has.

* Determine if four neutron resonances (basically element-0) can be created in laboratories and exist briefly (two, three and five neutron resonances cannot be created in this way).

* Precisely what triggers wave function collapse?

* Is gravity quantum or classical? Is a quantum gravity transmitted by a carrier boson or a function of the discreteness of space-time?

* Is entanglement really a non-local phenomena? Is physics causal?

Probably Worth Watching

Honestly, I hate watching podcasts and video recorded lectures, and this one is a little more than an hour long. But, I've had my eye on conformal symmetry papers for a while now, as a potentially promising direction for new breakthroughs, and this one was definitely eye catching. 

So, even if I don't watch it, I may chase down some of Shaposhnikov's papers on the topics, at least, to see what progress he's made and to better grasp the gist of his arguments.

UPDATE January 3, 2022: Upon reading several of the papers, I am very impressed that Shaposhnikov and his colleagues are really onto ground breaking Copernican revolution class insights, and I eagerly await what more there is to come. The first two papers below are very impressive and complementary.

I very much recommend taking a look at the talk from earlier this year by Mikhail Shaposhnikov, Conformal symmetry: towards the link between the Fermi and the Planck scales. Shaposhnikov has done a lot of fascinating work over the years, developing in detail a point of view which hasn’t got a lot of attention, but that seems to me very compelling. He argues that the SM and GR make a perfectly consistent theory up to the Planck scale, with the “naturalness problem” disappearing when you don’t assume something like a GUT scale with new heavy particles. Watching the discussion after the talk, one sees how many people find it hard to envision such a possibility, even though all experimental evidence shows no signs of such particles. For more about what he is in mind, see the talk or some of the many papers he’s been writing about this.

From Woit at Not Even Wrong. Some of the recent papers developing these ideas are:

The standard way to do computations in Quantum Field Theory (QFT) often results in the requirement of dramatic cancellations between contributions induced by a "heavy" sector into the physical observables of the "light'' (or low energy) sector - the phenomenon known as "hierarchy problem''. This procedure uses divergent multi-loop Feynman diagrams, their regularisation to handle the UV divergences, and then renormalisation to remove them. At the same time, the ultimate outcome of the renormalisation is the mapping of several finite parameters defining the renormalisable field theory into different observables (e.g. all kinds of particle cross-sections). 

In this paper, we first demonstrate how to relate the parameters of the theory to observables without running into intermediate UV divergences. Then we go one step further: we show how in theories with different mass scales, all physics of the "light" sector can be computed in a way which does not require dramatic cancellations induced by physics of the "heavy" sector. The existence of such a technique suggests that the "hierarchy problem'' in renormalisable theories is not really physical, but rather an artefact of the conventional procedure to compute correlation functions. If the QFT is defined by the "divergencies-free'' method all fine-tunings in theories with well separated energy scales may be avoided.

Sander Mooij, Mikhail Shaposhnikov, "QFT without infinities and hierarchy problem" arXiv:2110.05175 (October 11, 2021).

We show how Einstein-Cartan gravity can accommodate both global scale and local scale (Weyl) invariance. To this end, we construct a wide class of models with nonpropagaing torsion and a nonminimally coupled scalar field. In phenomenological applications the scalar field is associated with the Higgs boson. For global scale invariance, an additional field -- dilaton -- is needed to make the theory phenomenologically viable. In the case of the Weyl symmetry, the dilaton is spurious and the theory reduces to a sub-class of one-field models. In both scenarios of scale invariance, we derive an equivalent metric theory and discuss possible implications for phenomenology.

Georgios K. Karananas, Mikhail Shaposhnikov, Andrey Shkerin, Sebastian Zell, "Scale and Weyl Invariance in Einstein-Cartan Gravity" arXiv:2108.05897 (December 7, 2021) (Phys. Rev. D 104, 124014).

We study scalar, fermionic and gauge fields coupled nonminimally to gravity in the Einstein-Cartan formulation. We construct a wide class of models with nondynamical torsion whose gravitational spectra comprise only the massless graviton. Eliminating non-propagating degrees of freedom, we derive an equivalent theory in the metric formulation of gravity. It features contact interactions of a certain form between and among the matter and gauge currents. We also discuss briefly the inclusion of curvature-squared terms.

Georgios K. Karananas, Mikhail Shaposhnikov, Andrey Shkerin, Sebastian Zell, "Matter matters in Einstein-Cartan gravity" arXiv:2106.13811 (September 21, 2021) (Phys. Rev. D 104, 064036).

Quantum field theories with exact but spontaneously broken conformal invariance have an intriguing feature: their vacuum energy (cosmological constant) is equal to zero. Up to now, the only known ultraviolet complete theories where conformal symmetry can be spontaneously broken were associated with supersymmetry (SUSY), with the most prominent example being the N=4 SUSY Yang-Mills. In this Letter we show that the recently proposed conformal "fishnet" theory supports at the classical level a rich set of flat directions (moduli) along which conformal symmetry is spontaneously broken. We demonstrate that, at least perturbatively, some of these vacua survive in the full quantum theory (in the planar limit, at the leading order of 1/N(c) expansion) without any fine tuning. The vacuum energy is equal to zero along these flat directions, providing the first non-SUSY example of a four-dimensional quantum field theory with "natural" breaking of conformal symmetry.

Georgios K. Karananas, Vladimir Kazakov, Mikhail Shaposhnikov, "Spontaneous Conformal Symmetry Breaking in Fishnet CFT" arXiv:1908.04302 (November 22, 2020) (Phys. Lett. B 811 (2020) 135922).

Back Migration To Africa

There is genetic evidence of significant back migration from the Middle East to Africa, accounting for 30%-40% of modern sub-Saharan African ancestry in most populations and 20% in African hunter-gathers, at a quite great time depth. The data isn't completely consistent however.

Razib Khan mentioned a couple of the relevant papers in a quick post and another relevant paper is mentioned in the comments.

I put off blogging about it in order to write a longer post discussing the previous genetic analysis of uniparental genetics, the historical context, the methodological issues, the linguistic questions this poses, and the archaeology.

But the best was becoming the enemy of the good, so I am making this quick post in order to not let these papers fall off the my radar screen entirely without mention.

The Story Of Celtic

Image via Wikipedia.

Davidski discusses the genetic evidence relevant to the origins of the Celtic languages at his Eurogenes blog:

A new paper at Nature by Patterson et al. argues that Celtic languages spread into Britain during the Bronze Age rather than the Iron Age [LINK]. This argument is based on the observation that there was a large-scale shift in deep ancestry proportions in Britain during the Bronze Age.

In particular, the ratio of Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry increased significantly in what is now England during the Late Bronze Age (LBA). On the other hand, the English Iron Age was a much more stable period in this context.

I don't have any strong opinions about the spread of Celtic languages into Britain, and Patterson et al. might well be correct, but their argument is potentially flawed . . . . Indeed, when I plot some of the key ancient samples from the paper in my ultra fine scale Principal Component Analyses (PCA) of Northern and Western Europe, it appears that it's only the Early Iron Age (EIA) population from England that overlaps significantly with a roughly contemporaneous group from nearby Celtic-speaking continental Europe.

Archaeology and linguistics have generally favored an early Iron Age date for Celtic language expansion into Western Europe including Britain and Ireland. 

But, we've know for some time now that there was massive population replacement in Britain and Ireland by Bell Beaker derived people with lots of steppe ancestry (and lighter skin) in a roughly 300-400 year time period (or less) in the mid-2000s BCE, which almost surely resulted in the replacement of the first farmer languages of Britain and Ireland (presumably derived from the Iberian first farmer language in the same family as the Cardial Pottery Neolithic that took the Mediterranean route, quite possibly a Vasconic language one, as they largely replaced Mesolithic hunter-gathers there whose language is no doubt almost completely lost), with whatever language the Bell Beaker people (radiating from a Dutch Bell Beaker hub) shared. 

This transition was aided because farming as a way of life had collapsed in Britain and Ireland, probably because the first Neolithic farming methods were unsustainable in some way, such as by depleting top soil nutrients, resulting in a reversion to hunting and gathering and probably to herding as well.

The new paper argues that this language was proto-Celtic of some kind. And, there is a lot to like about this hypothesis, since the geographic extent of the Bell Beaker people and the geographic extent of the Celtic languages coincide to a great extent, and because it was a time of language replacement. Also, most of the early Iron Age genetic impact was in Southern England, not in the periphery of places like Scotland, where Celtic persisted longer.

On the other hand, seeing a continental European genetic influx in the early Iron Age from Celtic areas at just the time that linguists (based upon the magnitude of linguistic diversification) and anthropologists (based mostly upon material culture) should have arrived and brought Celtic languages to the region has the virtue of multidisciplinary convergence of evidence. It is a hard signal to see genetically because Celtic areas of continental Europe and the British Isles were quite similar genetically immediately prior to the Iron Age. 

Iron Age technology is also just the kind of elite dominance generating factor that would have allowed for language shift with a fairly modest migration population genetic-wise, much like the Norman invasion that led to the transition from Old English to French influenced Middle English (on essentially the same geographic route) about two thousand years later.

One downside of this model, however, is that it leaves us in the dark about the nature of the Bell Beaker language. This is particularly challenging because while the genetically similar Corded Ware people almost surely spoke an Indo-European language, the Bell Beaker people adopted a lot culturally from pre-steppe Southern Iberians where this archaeological culture began, and could have been heavily influenced by Iberians linguistically as well (in which case the Bell Beaker people might have been Vasconic rather than Indo-European linguistically, as a result of a culturally driven language shift).

One could also imagine a slightly more sophisticated model in which the shared Bell Beaker language family substrate of Celtic regions facilitated the distinctive development of the Celtic languages, perhaps in a manner distinct from that of, for example, the Italic languages, that may have been part of a shared mid-tier language family with Celtic, perhaps in connection with the Urnfield culture of the 12th century BC (Late Bronze Age) expansion immediately preceding the Hallstatt archaeological culture expansion commonly associated with the proto-Celtic languages and people (and followed in much of its area by the La Tène culture). In this model, the divergence of the Italic and Celtic languages arises from differing linguistic substrates.

A lack of consensus of the relationships of the extant and extinct Celtic languages to each other among linguists (driven by scant source material) doesn't help the process of resolving the different possibilities:

Irish, Scottish and Manx form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages, since Breton, the only living Celtic language spoken in continental Europe, is descended from the language of settlers from Britain. There are a number of extinct but attested continental Celtic languages, such as Celtiberian, Galatian and Gaulish. Beyond that there is no agreement on the subdivisions of the Celtic language family. They may be divided into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic.

The different hypotheses (quoted from Wikipedia) are lined up below: 

"Insular Celtic hypothesis" Proto-Celtic Continental Celtic † Celtiberian † Gallaecian † Gaulish † Insular Celtic Brittonic Goidelic

"P/Q-Celtic hypothesis" Proto-Celtic Q-Celtic Celtiberian † Gallaecian † Goidelic P-Celtic Gaulish † Brittonic

Eska (2010)

Eska (2010) evaluates the evidence as supporting the following tree, based on shared innovations, though it is not always clear that the innovations are not areal features. It seems likely that Celtiberian split off before Cisalpine Celtic, but the evidence for this is not robust. On the other hand, the unity of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic is reasonably secure. Schumacher (2004, p. 86) had already cautiously considered this grouping to be likely genetic, based, among others, on the shared reformation of the sentence-initial, fully inflecting relative pronoun *i̯os, *i̯ā, *i̯od into an uninflected enclitic particle. Eska sees Cisalpine Gaulish as more akin to Lepontic than to Transalpine Gaulish.

• Celtic
  • Celtiberian
  • Gallaecian
  • Nuclear Celtic?
    • Cisalpine Celtic: Lepontic → Cisalpine Gaulish†
    • Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic (secure)
      • Transalpine Gaulish† ("Transalpine Celtic")
      • Insular Celtic
        • Goidelic
        • Brittonic

Eska considers a division of Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic into Transalpine and Insular Celtic to be most probable because of the greater number of innovations in Insular Celtic than in P-Celtic, and because the Insular Celtic languages were probably not in great enough contact for those innovations to spread as part of a sprachbund. However, if they have another explanation (such as an SOV substratum language), then it is possible that P-Celtic is a valid clade, and the top branching would be:

• Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic (P-Celtic hypothesis)
  • Goidelic
  • Gallo-Brittonic
    • Transalpine Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic")
    • Brittonic

Italo-Celtic

Within the Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily. This hypothesis fell somewhat out of favour following reexamination by American linguist Calvert Watkins in 1966. Irrespective, some scholars such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor have argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic grouping in 21st century theses.

The Willow In Slavic Folklore

My birth surname, "Willeke", is a derivative of "Willow Tree" in some early modern dialect of German. 

Also, while my ancestry on my father's side is German (well, Prussian, anyway), my Y-DNA patriline probably derived from the Balkans from which my ancestors integrated themselves into migrating populations of steppe men in the early Bronze Age or late Copper Age, and made their way to the northwest.

Naturally, a blog post at the Old European Culture blog about the Willow in Slavic Folklore caught my eye (the source is full of wonderful images and links to related articles, so please, click through and check it out).

The Willow is associated with Slavic spring fertility rituals and summer magical rituals. 

Saturday before Palm Sunday is in Serbia known as Vrbica (Willow day). On that day kids and young women make and wear wreaths made of willow twigs and flowers. On that day, willow twigs with young leaves and flowers, like these, known in English as Pussy Willow are brought to the church where they are blessed the next day, Palm Sunday, which is in Serbia known as Cveti (Flowers day). According to the church, this whole willow business is the consequence of the fact that there are no palms in Serbia, and people replaced palm branches with willow branches...Move on, nothing so see here...

There are few problems with this explanation...Vrbopuc (Willow burst) is an expression which in Serbia means "part of spring during which willow starts growing new green shoots"... In Serbia in the past people believed that during this time of the year women become very horny and very fertile...So this was the best time to make babies...🙂 Vrbopuc is also a term used in Serbia for the period of sudden surge of sexual hormones in teenage boys and girls...

Basically willow was directly linked with human fertility...Which is why in the past in Serbia, girls used to make belts from willow twigs (wrap willow twigs around their bellies), and wear them going to the rivers to perform ritual baths... This ritual bathing was performed on Cveti (Flowers day) but also on Djurdjevdan (St George's day), the old Yarilo day, the old day of the young sun, the old celebration of the beginning of summer...Known also as Beltane... At the same time on St Georges day, while girls were wearing willow belts and bathing, boys and men were blowing into willow horns to "scare the witches away"... It is interesting that this ritual bathing was done before sunrise and willow belt had to be taken off as soon as the sun rose...And that blowing into the willow horns was also done during the night.... I didn't pay much attention to this until I remembered that willow was directly linked with water, water divination....Dodole, young women which took part in rain bringing magic rituals performed during hot summers also wore willow twig belts...

Mother Earth = Yin = Winter, Cold, Wet, Night, Down = Female fertility

Father Sun (Sky) = Yang = Summer, Hot, Dry, Day, Up = Male fertility

Which is why rain, water magic is female magic... And which is why willow, the tree which grows next to water, is associated with rain, water and female fertility, female sexuality...Hence ritual whipping of teenage girls by teenage boys using willow whips, performed in the Czech Republic, Slovakia on Easter Sunday... If men arrive at women's houses after 12 o'clock, women throw a bucket of cold water on them. In some regions the men also douse girls with water... The man first sings a a ritual song about spring, bountifulness and fertility, and the young woman then turns around and gets few whacks on her backside with the willow whip...This was done "so girl would be healthy, beautiful and fertile throughout the following year"...

In Serbia willow was also linked with female coming of age rituals, also performed on Willow day...On that day, young unmarried girls, wearing willow twig belts and willow and flower wreaths walked around the village land and blessed the nature... They would first go to a spring where they would sing and dance and would then wish good morning to the spring water. Spring water is in Serbia called "živa voda" (live water, water of life) and is believed to have magic properties...

Spring is seen as a place where fertile Mother Earth releases her "water of life" in the same way that a fertile woman releases her menstrual blood, female "water of life". In this way the spring water is magically linked with the menstrual blood... So no wonder that the spring is the first stop of the Lazarice group, the group of girls whose "water of life has started to run" (who got their period). BTW they are called Lazarice "because Willow day is by Christians also known as Lazarus day"... After this ritual, the girls would go to meadows to pick wild flowers. They would use these flowers to make wreaths which they would wear on their heads during their procession through the village land and the village... They would then walk through the fields, forests, meadows belonging to the village, and would sing fertility songs wishing nature to be fertile and bountiful.... Young girls, Spring Earth, Female fertility, Earth fertility, water...Willow...

That the belief in the link between willow and fertility was once probably Europe wide, can be seen from this English belief: "Striking an animal or a child with a willow twig will stunt their growth!" This is a great example of Christianity at work...

In Serbia it is actually the opposite...On Willow day, children and animals are whipped with willow twigs so they grow like willow and are healthy and fertile...Which is what you would expect after everything I have presented so far... Willow twigs, particularly the ones cut around St George's day are considered to be most potent when it comes to growing magic...Willow was in the mind of the Slavs definitely linked to growth and fertility... 

So imagine my surprise when I came across this information: Willow contains two very interesting chemicals: indolebutyric acid (IBA) and salicylic acid (SA)... Indolebutyric acid (IBA) is a plant hormone that stimulates root growth. It is present in high concentrations in the growing tips of willow branches... Salicylic acid (SA) is a plant hormone which is involved in the process of “systemic acquired resistance” (SAR) – where an attack on one part of the plant induces a resistance response to pathogens (triggers the plant’s internal defences) in other parts of the plant...

Soooo...The first hormone makes the plant grow...The second hormone makes the the plant healthy...And these hormones can be extracted from the willow shoots and used to help your plants grow and be healthy...

Salicylic acid is also an acne treatment, something young men and women often need to keep themselves looking beautiful.

An English Neolithic Tomb From 3700 BCE

The first farmers of Britain had a polygamous, patrilocal society, in which children from previous relationships of wives of clan members and some other people were sometimes adopted into multigenerational clans.

To explore kinship practices at chambered tombs in Early Neolithic Britain, here we combined archaeological and genetic analyses of 35 individuals who lived about 5,700 years ago and were entombed at Hazleton North long cairn. Twenty-seven individuals are part of the first extended pedigree reconstructed from ancient DNA, a five-generation family whose many interrelationships provide statistical power to document kinship practices that were invisible without direct genetic data. Patrilineal descent was key in determining who was buried in the tomb, as all 15 intergenerational transmissions were through men. The presence of women who had reproduced with lineage men and the absence of adult lineage daughters suggest virilocal burial [ed. women were buried with their husbands] and female exogamy. We demonstrate that one male progenitor reproduced with four women: the descendants of two of those women were buried in the same half of the tomb over all generations. This suggests that maternal sub-lineages were grouped into branches whose distinctiveness was recognized during the construction of the tomb. Four men descended from non-lineage fathers and mothers who also reproduced with lineage male individuals, suggesting that some men adopted the children of their reproductive partners by other men into their patriline. Eight individuals were not close biological relatives of the main lineage, raising the possibility that kinship also encompassed social bonds independent of biological relatedness.

Chris Fowler, et al., "A high-resolution picture of kinship practices in an Early Neolithic tomb" Nature (December 22, 2021). Hat tip: Bernard's blog.

A Muon g-2 Recap

The introduction of an otherwise unimpressive new muon g-2 paper provides a nice recap of where the physics world is in terms of experimental measurements and theoretical calculations of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, muon g-2.

In particular, it notes the not widely known fact that the data underlying the "data driven" Standard Model predicted value showing a 4.2 sigma discrepancy with the experimental value itself shows large discrepancies that bely the claimed low uncertainty associated with this method.

The experimental value of the muon anomalous magnetic moment measured recently by the FNAL Muon g-2 experiment confirms the old BNL result and adds significance to the long standing discrepancy between the measured value and the standard model (SM) prediction, now raised to 4.2 σ. Currently, the world average for this discrepancy is 

∆aµ ≡ a exp µ − a SM µ = (2.51 ± 0.59) · 10^−9 . (1.1) 

The SM estimate recommended by the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative relies on a data-driven approach that makes use of experimental measurements of the σhad = σ(e +e − → hadrons) cross section to determine the hadronic vacuum polarization contribution a HVP µ. This is the most uncertain input in the prediction for aµ and, due to its non-perturbative nature, improving in precision is a difficult task. Apart for the uncertainty, one can also wonder to which level the adopted value can be considered reliable, since determinations of a HVP µ using data from different experiments exhibit a certain disagreement. In particular, KLOE and BaBar disagree at the level of 3σ, especially in the π +π − channel that accounts for more than 70% of the value of a HVP µ, and while BaBar data favour smaller values of ∆aµ, KLOE data pull to increase the discrepancy. 

[1] Due to relatively larger errors, there is instead agreement within 1.5 σ between KLOE and CMD-2, SND, BES-III. 

The HVP contribution can also be determined from first principles by means of lattice QCD techniques. However, until recently, the uncertainties in lattice results were too large to allow for useful comparisons with the data-driven results. A first lattice QCD determination of a HVP µ with subpercent precision was recently obtained by the BMW collaboration a HVP µ = 707.5(5.5) × 10^−10. It differs from the world average obtained from the data-driven dispersive approach by 2.1 σ and, in particular, it would yield a theoretical prediction for aµ only 1.3 σ below the measurement.[2] 

[2] Other lattice determinations also tend to give larger a HVP µ central values although with considerably larger errors. 

. . . [N]ew high statistics measurements of σhad, and in particular in the π +π − channel, that might be soon provided by the CMD-3 collaboration, as well as new high precision lattice evaluations, which might confirm or correct the BMW result, will be of crucial importance not only to strengthen or resize the evidences for a (g − 2)µ anomaly, but also to asses the status of the related additional discrepancies. 

From arXiv:2112.09139.

Personally, I am quite confident that the BMW result, with minor modifications, will turn out to be the correct Standard Model prediction. But it will take time for the scientific consensus to catch up.

If this is true, there is no muon g-2 anomaly and hence, no hint from it of new physics by this very global measure of discrepancies from the Standard Model. This basically rules out most kinds of new physics at the electro-weak scale or anywhere close to it at higher energies.