Paleo-Formosans

A new study has found human remains in Taiwan from 6,000 years ago the support the existence of Paleo-Formosan Negrito people on the island who were very similar to Northern Philippine Negrito people, who may have persisted in relict populations in remote mountains on the island until the late 1800s. 

This doesn't precisely contradict the existing paradigm for the narrative of Formosan pre-history, although it does expand it and solidify it.

The study did not recover ancient DNA. This post provides some context to the find and then provides the abstract to the article and a citation to it.

Modern Taiwanese People

Most people in Taiwan (on the island of Formosa) are ethnically Chinese. Many of the Chinese people who live there are Nationalists who were politically to the right of communists and migrated there when the Chinese Community Party won the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists of the years 1946-1949 in 1949, somewhat like the old regime Cubans who migrated to Florida when Castro turned Cuban in a communist regime.

The ethnically Chinese people of Formosa marginalized and demographically overwhelmed the indigenous farmers and fishers of Formosa which include an ethnic grouping ancestral to the Austronesian people.

The Austronesian People

In historical linguistics and anthropology the focus is on the "indigenous" people of Taiwan from several different linguistic groups, one of which is the parent language of the Austronesian languages spoken in Oceania, much of Southeast Asia, and Madagascar in an expansion that began around 2000 BCE. (The expansion had run its course by about 1000 CE with many intermediate steps, with the linguistically Austronesian people of Madagascar, for example, deriving from a specific narrow geographic area of the island of Borneo in which is now Indonesia.) 

In island Southeast Asia and Oceania, as well as in Madagascar, the first wave of farmers were linguistically Austronesian, a language family that has been traced to a particular tribe of indigenous post-Negrito Formosans, although Austronesian languages are also spoken in some coastal areas. Austronesians encountered, sometimes replaced and sometimes admixed with, previous Papuan and Negrito Southeast Asians.

These indigenous people of Taiwan were farming and fishing people who migrated there from what is now Southern China in the late Neolithic era or the Bronze Age. Thus, the proto-Austronesians in turn originate in the South Chinese Neolithic rice farming revolution, as do essentially all other pre-European colonial era waves of migration to Southeast Asia.

The Austroasiatic People And Subsequent Waves Of Migration To Southeast Asia

In Southern mainland China, mainland Southeast Asia, and northern India (the Munda people), the first wave of farmers were linguistically Austroasiatic, a language family that originates in the South Chinese rice farming Neolithic revolution. There were also later waves of migration of farmers from South China, most recently the Thai people.

The Austroasiatic people (and possibly the Austronesian people as well) expanded away from South China, in part, due to southward migration from the original North Chinese millet farming Neolithic revolution which is the source for the Han Chinese ethnicity that has since become predominant in most of mainland China with substrate influences from Southern Chinese people who were mostly peacefully integrated into the Han Chinese political and linguistic sphere.

The Negrito People Of Asia

But before this indigenous people arrived, there was a Negrito population in Taiwan closely related to the Negrito hunter-gatherer populations of Southeast Asia. Taiwanese Negrito people were particularly similar to the Negrito people who still exist in relict population of the Northern Philippines. 

Negritos are dark skinned (hence the name), and short in stature, with at least ancestral roots in terrestrial hunter-gatherer populations, but are fully modern human and are no more closely related to dark skinned Africans than any other Eurasian or New World population. Their dark skin and small size are examples of convergent evolution since those traits were selective fitness enhancing in the tropical Southeast Asian places that they lived. In mainland Southeast Asia, the prehistoric peoples who gave rise to modern Negritos are called "Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers". 

Negritos have genetic affinities with the Onge hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands and with the pre-Neolithic people of Southern India who ancestry is an important component of the genetic makeup of the modern people of Southern India (with the proportion being largest those of lower caste or "untouchables" or "tribal" ancestry who are socio-economically below lower caste Indians) although almost no one in Southern India today has this ancestry exclusively due to Bronze Age admixture with "Ancestral North Indians".

In the Neolithic era and metal ages, most Negritos were replaced in Formosa, mainland China, Southeast Asia and India's prime territory for human habitation by food producing farmers (a fate shared by hunter-gatherer populations almost everywhere), with relict populations persisting in marginal deep jungles and in mountains that weren't as suitable for herding and farming, and many transitioned from pure terrestrial hunting and gathering to herding.

The Negrito people are very distinct physically from the indigenous Jomon people of Japan who were present there before mainland farmers and herders arrived from Korea (although people similar to the Jomon people may have been present in Korea as well around that time ca. 1000 BCE). But there is some reason to think that they may have common genetic origins.

According to a 2021 genetic analysis:

A TreeMix analysis places the Jomon as an offshoot of the Hoabinhian people (a Mesolithic wave of people in Southeast Asia and Southern China ca. 12,000 to 10,000 BCE), with the Kusunda people (who are hunter-gathers in Western Nepal who historically spoke a language that is an isolate and were animistic religiously) as an intermediate population.

Y-DNA haplogroup D has a cryptic distribution found in isolated pockets across Asia including Siberia and Tibet that tends to favor a Northern route origin.

The mtDNA haplogroups N9b and M7a also tell story so deep in history (both are very basal in the Eurasian mtDNA tree and derived from African mtDNA haplogroup L3) that it is hard to reconstruct. Both mtDNA M and mtDNA N show distributions that tend to favor a Southeast Asian route to Japan, but perhaps this is because the northern bearers of this haplogroup went extinct, and were then almost fully replaced in the Last Glacial Maximum.

On the other hand, there have continuously been modern humans in Japan since before the 12,000 BCE migration associated with the Hoabinhian people, so at least some Jomon ancestry probably precedes that wave of migration. But different selective pressures in Japan and Southeast Asia could also lead to selection for a different physical appearance.

But, at least one linguist has proposed that the language of the Jomon people (the only extant survivor of this language family is the language of the Ainu people who are now found only in Hokkaido, and Ainu's membership in this language family or families is mildly disputed), is part of an "Austric" megafamily root in South China, rather than being a language isolate.

Negritos Are Modern Humans Not Archaic Hominins

Negritos are completely distinct from archaic hominins who preceded modern humans in the region such as Denisovans (a sister clade of archaic hominins to Neanderthals in eastern Eurasia less basal than Homo erectus), to Homo erectus (who arrived in what is now Java, Indonesia from Africa around 2 million years ago and were found throughout Southeast Asia and East Asia), to Homo floresiensis (a.k.a. hobbits due to their physical size and build, remains of whom are found on the island of Flores, Indonesia; 2017 study concludes by phylogenetic analysis that H. floresiensis is an early species of Homo, a sister species of Homo habilis, which is more basal than Homo Erectus, although the time of their migration out of Africa is unclear) to diminutive archaic hominins of the Philippines somewhat similar to H. floresiensis. 

While all non-Africans have a small percentage of archaic Neanderthal admixture, modern humans only have archaic Denisovan admixture to the extent that they have Papuan and Australian Aboriginal ancestry. Among mainland Southeast Asians, East Asians, and island Southeast Asians who are from the west side of the Wallace Line, Denisovan ancestry is barely detectible relative to that proportion of Denisovan ancestry in Papuans and Australian Aborigines. 

This suggests that Negritos are either a second wave of modern human migrants to Southeast Asia and beyond with a small percentage of ancestry from a first wave of modern humans in these areas that admixed with Denisovans, or that the Negrito wave of migration in Southeast Asia and beyond was so much more numerous than in island Southeast Asia, that the few instances of Denisovan admixture were heavily diluted.

The overall percentage of Denisovan ancestry in modern Tibetan people is negligible and essentially impossible to detect, but fitness enhancing genes in Tibetans associated with tolerance for very high altitude environments are Denisovan in origin, indicating that some of their remote ancestors in the region must have had local Denisovan admixture.

No Y-DNA or mtDNA in any modern human is believed to be Denisovan or Neanderthal in origin.

Negritos Were Not The First Wave Of Modern Humans

Negritos were an  early wave of modern humans in a region that spanned from India to Taiwan including much of Southeast Asia, but probably not the first wave. 

The first wave of modern humans in Asia were the ancestors of modern Australian Aborigines and indigenous Papuans, and admixed with Denisovan archaic hominins. Archaeological evidence suggests that they first arrived around the time of the Toba volcanic mega-eruption around 70,000 years ago.

The Paper and Its Abstract

Taiwan is known as the homeland of the Austronesian-speaking groups, yet other populations already had lived here since the Pleistocene. Conventional notions have postulated that the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers were replaced or absorbed into the Neolithic Austronesian farming communities. Yet, some evidence has indicated that sparse numbers of non-Austronesian individuals continued to live in the remote mountains as late as the 1800s. 

The cranial morphometric study of human skeletal remains unearthed from the Xiaoma Caves in eastern Taiwan, for the first time, validates the prior existence of small stature hunter-gatherers 6000 years ago in the preceramic phase. This female individual shared remarkable cranial affinities and small stature characteristics with the Indigenous Southeast Asians, particularly the Negritos in northern Luzon. 

This study solves the several-hundred-years-old mysteries of ‘little black people’ legends in Formosan Austronesian tribes and brings insights into the broader prehistory of Southeast Asia.

Hsiao-chun Hung, et al., "Negritos in Taiwan and the wider prehistory of Southeast Asia: new discovery from the Xiaoma Caves" World Archaeology (October 4, 2022) https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2022.2121315. Hat tip to DDeden in the comments.

STEREO Rules Out Sterile Neutrinos

There are no sterile neutrinos. Anomalies between predictions and results that have been used to suggest that possibility (including but not limited to those in the study below) are due to flaws in how the nuclear sources of the neutrinos were modeled. 

Anomalies in past neutrino measurements have led to the discovery that these particles have non-zero mass and oscillate between their three flavors when they propagate. In the 2010's, similar anomalies observed in the antineutrino spectra emitted by nuclear reactors have triggered the hypothesis of the existence of a supplementary neutrino state that would be sterile i.e. not interacting via the weak interaction. The STEREO experiment was designed to study this scientific case that would potentially extend the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Here we present a complete study based on our full set of data with significantly improved sensitivity. Installed at the ILL (Institut Laue Langevin) research reactor, STEREO has accurately measured the antineutrino energy spectrum associated to the fission of 235U. This measurement confirms the anomalies whereas, thanks to the segmentation of the STEREO detector and its very short mean distance to the core (10~m), the same data reject the hypothesis of a light sterile neutrino. Such a direct measurement of the antineutrino energy spectrum suggests instead that biases in the nuclear experimental data used for the predictions are at the origin of the anomalies. Our result supports the neutrino content of the Standard Model and establishes a new reference for the 235U antineutrino energy spectrum. We anticipate that this result will allow to progress towards finer tests of the fundamental properties of neutrinos but also to benchmark models and nuclear data of interest for reactor physics and for observations of astrophysical or geo-neutrinos.

H. Almazán, et al., "Interpreting Reactor Antineutrino Anomalies with STEREO data" arXiv:2210.07664 (October 14, 2022).

No Statistically Significant Evidence Of Dark Matter At XENON1T

A new paper goes to great length to describe the results of dark matter searches at XENON1T. 

All hints of a signal of dark matter in excess of the expected background results had a local significance of less than 2 sigma (1.7 sigma and 1.8 sigma in two of many bins of the parameter space studied), which is not statistically significant. The significance would have been even lower had the look elsewhere effect been considered.

Less Than Explicit Proofs

How Often Do Bottom Quark To Up Quark Transitions Occur?

The CKM matrix measures the probability of one kind of quark transitioning into another kind of quark in a W boson mediated interactions.

The global average value for the V(ub) element according to the Particle Data Group without doing a global fit on the entire matrix is:

This is a relative precision of about 5%. According to the latest measurement from the Belle II experiment "the magnitude of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element,

V(ub) = (3.55±0.12±0.13±0.17)×10^−3, is extracted. Here, the first uncertainty is statistical, the second is systematic and the third is theoretical." 

The magnitude of the probability of a bottom to up quark transition (which mutes the complex number components of the CKM matrix element that reflects CP violation in the transition probability) is the square of the magnitude of this CKM matrix element (i.e. this happens in about 13 per million transitions).

Combining the uncertainties in quadrature, the measurement is 3.55 ± 0.245 x 10^-3. This is consistent with the PDG value at the one sigma level.

Replicating the existing value from other experiments was no small feat.

We present an analysis of the charmless semileptonic decay B0→π−ℓ+νℓ, where ℓ=e,μ, from 198.0 million pairs of BB¯ mesons recorded by the Belle II detector at the SuperKEKB electron-positron collider. The decay is reconstructed without identifying the partner B meson. The partial branching fractions are measured independently for B0→π−e+νe and B0→π−μ+νμ as functions of q2 (momentum transfer squared), using 3896 B0→π−e+νe and 5466 B0→π−μ+νμ decays.

It Isn't Easy For A Non-Expert To Know If A Question Is Easy Or Hard

 

The 2022 Nobel Prize In Medicine

This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to the person who first sequenced Neanderthal DNA from about 40,000 years ago, an incredible scientific achievement that deserves recognition. As the New York Times explains:

Svante Pääbo, a Swedish scientist who peered back into human history by retrieving genetic material from 40,000-year-old bones, producing a complete Neanderthal genome and launching the field of ancient DNA studies, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday.

New Snowmass Papers On BSM Physics

A new Snowmass paper surveys the lastest work in BSM physics, most of which is utter garbage. 

The opening paragraph states (I highlight the non-problems in the list and insert comments in brackets):

Despite its phenomenal successes, the Standard Model (SM) can only be considered a low energy, effective field theory (EFT) description of particle physics [not really true anymore given the Higgs boson mass] which leaves many unanswered questions about the nature of reality at distance scales shorter than ∼ TeV^−1. 

Among these so-far unanswered questions are the origin of the neutrino masses, an explanation for the quark and lepton flavor structures, the absence of measurable CP violation in QCD, and why the scales associated with gravity and weak interactions are so disparate. The SM also does not explain the observed asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the Universe. It is known that the cosmological dark matter cannot be composed of SM fields and the origin of the periods of accelerated expansion of the Universe are a mystery [ignores the possible new gravitational physics that could explain these phenomena and the old school cosmological constant]. Any explanation for these above mentioned puzzles must involve physics beyond the SM [doubtful].

Some headings from the paper (particularly garbage-full topics in bold):

2 Naturalness [naturalness is fundamentally hokum] 

2.1 Supersymmetry

2.2 Warped Extra Dimensions and Composite Higgs Theories

2.3 Neutral Naturalness

2.4 Cosmological Selection

2.5 Strong CP and Axions

2.6 Quantum Gravity Implications: Swampland

3 Dark Matter

3.1 Interaction Mechanisms

classic freeze-out

Forbidden DM

Asymmetric dark matter

Sommerfeld enhancement

Inelastic dark matter  

3.2 Models

Supersymmetric dark matter [there is no parameter space left for it]

Dark matter in composite Higgs theories [the composite Higgs is dead]

Strong-coupled composite dark matter [basically ruled out]

Atomic/Mirror dark matter

Light dark matter

Axion and wave-like dark matter

Other models of dark matter: . . . sterile neutrino dark matter, ultraheavy dark matter, dynamical dark matter, and hidden sectors and a multi-temperature universe.

4 Baryogenesis [rests heavily on the utterly unsupported premise that aggregate baryon number has to be zero at the Big Bang]

5 Flavor Model Building [full text reproduced below for lack of subheadings]

Flavor violating processes, in particular those involving flavor changing neutral currents (FCNC) have exquisite sensitivity to new sources of flavor and CP violation beyond those of the SM. This high sensitivity to new physics has its origin in the small amount of flavor breaking that is present in the SM. In the SM, the only sources of flavor violation are the hierarchical Yukawa couplings of the Higgs. The origin of the SM arrangement of the various quark and charged lepton masses, the hierarchical structure of the CKM matrix, and the absence of visible hierarchies in the PMNS matrix is often referred to as the SM flavor puzzle. Various classes of ideas exist to solve this puzzle: horizontal flavor symmetries, warped extra dimentions, partial compositeness, and radiative fermion masses. In the SM, the quark FCNCs are suppressed by a loop factor and by small CKM matrix elements. As long as theoretical uncertainties in the SM predictions are under control, quark flavor violating processes can indirectly explore very high mass scales, in some cases far beyond the direct reach of collider experiments. In the lepton sector, SM predictions for FCNCs are suppressed by the tiny neutrino masses and below any imaginable experimental sensitivities. Electroweak contributions to electric dipole moments are also predicted to be strongly suppressed in the SM, several orders of magnitude below the current bounds. Charged lepton flavor violation and electric dipole moments are thus null tests of the SM. Any observation of such processes would be an unambiguous sign of new physics.

In the SM, the Yukawa couplings of the Higgs to the fermions are the only sources of flavor violation. Therefore, the Higgs might be the window into understanding flavor, with the precision Higgs program at the LHC, and in the future also at a Higgs factory, able to provide valuable inputs. In particular, Higgs decays involving tau, h → τµ and h → τe, are cases where the direct searches at the LHC are the most sensitive probes.

In addition to long-standing puzzles, in the last several years a number of “flavor anomalies” have created considerable excitement in the community. Discrepancies between SM predictions and experimental measurements are seen in B decays as well as in the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. If the new physics origin for these experimental anomalies could be established, it would have a transformative impact on the field. First and foremost, such an indirect sign of new physics would establish a new mass scale in particle physics. This scale could become the next target for direct exploration at future high-energy colliders. With sufficient energy, discoveries would, at least in principle, be guaranteed. Second, the couplings of the new physics constitute new sources of flavor violation beyond the SM Yukawa couplings. Existing low energy constraints suggest that such new physics couplings have a hierarchical flavor structure. This provides a new perspective on the Standard Model flavor puzzle and invites the construction of flavor models that link the structure of the SM and BSM sources of flavor violation. At present, the global analyses point towards a small consistent set of dimension-6 effective operators (C9 and/or C10) to explain the B-physics anomalies. The leading candidate UV models generating these operators involve Z(0) (e.g. Lµ − Lτ ) gauge bosons or leptoquarks.

The new Snowmass paper on quantum gravity, string theory, and black holes is also full of dubious assertions.

In short, until we vote a lot of physicists in this camp off the island, physics will continue to be plagued with high IQ idiots pursuing dubious and unsound theories.

The 2022 Nobel Prize In Physics

This year's Nobel prize in Physics was awarded to three physicists who, independently and sequentially, experimentally confirmed that quantum entanglement was a real phenomena that worked in practice the way that quantum theory predicted that it would.