What Influenced Proto-Indo-European Metal Working And Religious Practice?

Eurogenes mentions in the comments to a recent post the following (open access) article, which despite non-standard terminology for what it calls the Hamangia culture sees that culture also known as the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture (a descendant of a first wave Neolithic Anatolian farmer descendant culture) as a primary source of agricultural knowledge, metal working and burial practices of the Sredniy Stog culture (ca. 5000 BCE to 3500 BCE). The Sredniy Stog culture, in turn, is a likely candidate for being the Proto-Indo-European culture, which would explain how these technologies and beliefs could have arrived without carrying Caucasian genetic influences with them.

In other words, this article really starts to connect the dots of early Indo-European origins, in a way that seems to fit with everything else that we know.

The Contacts of the Eastern European Steppe People with the Balkan Population during the Transition Period from Neolithic to Eneolithic

Conclusions 

The transition from the Neolithic to Eneolithic in the Eastern European steppe was connected with the intensive contacts of people of the Azov-Dnieper, Low Don, Pricaspiy, Samara, Orlovka and Sredniy Stog cultures with the Balkan population and first with the Hamangia culture. The results of these contacts were some imports: adornments from copper, cornelian, marine shells and pots in the steppe sites and plates from the bone and nacre, pendants from teeth of red deer in the Hamangia graves. The Hamangia infuence in the burial rites of the steppe population was very important and caused to use stone in graves and above them, pits with alcove, new adornments of burial clothes. The strongest impact we have fixed for the population in northern area of the Sea of Azov, where the radical changes in the burial rite and the formation of a new Sredniy Stog culture took place. It was connected with the adoption of new religious elements connected with the formation of the centre of steppe metal working.

It is also notable that the Cucteni-Trypillian culture was a more or less direct successor (in a disruptive transition in which farmers overtook steppe people) in roughly the same geographic location to the (basically steppe) Bug-Dneister culture that in my opinion was probably the source for the band of men, who after a long migration, would become the Chadic people of Africa.

Collisionless Dark Matter Still Doesn't Work

A Dark Matter Particle Oriented Astronomer Acknowledges The Need For A New Paradigm

The nearly collisionless dark matter of the lambda CDM model is inconsistent with the extremely tight fit of inferred dark matter distributions with the visible luminous matter in galaxies.

A major new review paper strains to find a different kind of dark matter to address the problem, but a gravity modification that captures the insights of MOND while addressing its flaws, still makes more sense as a solution. 

The distribution of the non-luminous matter in galaxies of different luminosity and Hubble type is much more than a proof of the existence of dark particles governing the structures of the Universe. Here, we will review the complex but well-ordered scenario of the properties of the dark halos also in relation with those of the baryonic components they host. Moreover, we will present a number of tight and unexpected correlations between selected properties of the dark and the luminous matter. Such entanglement evolves across the varying properties of the luminous component and it seems to unequivocally lead to a dark particle able to interact with the Standard Model particles over cosmological times. This review will also focus on whether we need a paradigm shift, from pure collisionless dark particles emerging from "first principles", to particles that we can discover only by looking to how they have designed the structure of the galaxies. 

Paolo Salucci, "The distribution of dark matter in galaxies" (November 21, 2018) (60 pages, 28 Figures ~220 refs. Invited review for The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review).

Consider, for example, this quote from the review article at page 52:

Remarkably, the situation much simplifies when we express the circular velocity V (r) 12 in the double-normalized form: V (r/Ropt)/V (Ropt) The profiles of the RCs emerge as a function of just one parameter, at choice among the above six, plus Vopt, Mvir and the angular momentum for unit mass j (see Lapi et al. 2018). Remarkably, this occurs independently on whether a galaxy is dark matter or luminous matter dominated for R < Ropt. The emerging evidence is that structural quantities deeply rooted in the luminous sector, like the disk length scales, tightly correlate with structural quantities deeply rooted in the dark sector, like the DM halo core radii.

Continuing at pages 54-55:

In spirals, dwarf disks and LSBs there are extraordinary multiple connections between the dark and the luminous components. This occurs over many orders of magnitudes in halo masses and over the whole ranges of galaxies morphology and luminosity. The “standard” explanation relates to a dynamical evolution of the galaxies, in particular, of their DM halo densities, caused by powerful baryonic feedbacks. Although this scenario is far than being rejected, it seems, however, unable to cope with the intriguing wealth of correlations between quantities deep-rooted in opposite dark/luminous worlds that we have presented in this review. More in detail, while we cannot completely rule out the possibility that astrophysical phenomena can be responsible for the above intriguing scenario, on the other hand, what emerges in galaxies allow us to propose a shift of paradigm, according to which, the nature of dark matter is not given to us by convincing theoretical arguments, but must be searched in the various properties of the DM halos and stellar disks.

More Confirmation 

The latest post at Triton Station also underlines this point with pointed examples.  While Self-Interacting Dark Matter (SIDM) models can reproduce the rotation curve fits predicted by MOND, they do so with two extra parameters, a couple of which are degenerate, and plain old cold dark matter models simply can't accomplish this feat.

The post demonstrates that because MOND has fewer degrees of freedom than SIDM it is sensitive to measurement errors (nuisance parameters) that SIDM models just absorb in their fits, allowing MOND to distinguish, for example, between erroneous and true distances of galaxies for Earth and errors in measuring the inclination angle of the galaxy relative to Earth, that SIDM models cannot.

The End Game

I continue to think that the gravitation based solution worked out by Alexandre Deur (a professional physicist whose primary work is in QCD) is the most promising explanation of the data, since it solves pretty much all of the (acknowledged) short fallings of the toy model MOND theory. In particular, his approach is fully relativistic, fits cluster data including colliding cluster data in addition to galaxies, explains a feature of large elliptical galaxies not explained by MOND, isn't ruled out by neutron star-black hole merger data because it involves only a single kind of massless graviton, has (in principle if not in practice) one less free parameter than MOND, explains some or all dark energy phenomena without the cosmological constant, and has a solid theoretical quantum gravity effect motivation that is reality checked by parallels to its predictions for gravity in mathematically similar QCD. In his approach, both dark matter phenomena and dark energy phenomena are basically weak field consequences of the distinctions between quantum gravity and classical general relativity that arise from the interactions of gravitons with other gravitons.

He makes his approach mathematically tractable by using a scalar (i.e. spin-0) graviton approximation which he credibly shows would be very similar in the relevant respects to a full fledged spin-2 graviton theory which is mathematically insurmountable because a massless spin-2 graviton cannot be described by a theory that we know how to renormalize, following a mathematical strategy used to manage the difficult math involved in describing spin-1 gluons in QCD.

Alas, this approach hasn't yet attracted enough interest from full time gravity theorists to receive a really thorough independent vetting, even though several of Deur's articles on the subject have been published in peer reviewed journals.

Unlike pure collisionless dark matter models (which don't work), SIDM models (which can produce rotation curves similar to those of MOND), clearly fail Occam's Razor relative to Deur's gravity based explanations of dark matter, because, in addition to having four more free parameters, it also introduces not just a new beyond the Standard Model dark matter fermion, but also a fifth force governing interactions between dark matter particles and other dark matter particles and also with baryonic matter with a carrier boson of its own, and also some sort of boson to explain dark energy, in addition to the graviton present in quantum gravity formulations of both theories. Deur's approach actually has one less fundamental parameter than general relativity with a cosmological constant.

If I had a few million dollars, I'd spend it on a research program to more comprehensively develop and evaluate Deur's work, because, in my opinion, his work presents the most promising work on quantum gravity with phenomenological applications of anything done by anyone in physics. Indeed, I don't think that I am overstating the case to say that his work rivals that of Einstein's in overall importance. Quantum gravity is the Holy Grail of fundamental physics, and his work gets you 90% of the way there. Since I don't have that kind of money, however, the best that I can do is to get out the word to people whom might have those resources.

One important feature to develop, in particular, in any gravitation based solution to the dark matter problem is its early universe cosmology, because no gravitationally based approach to explaining dark matter has yet received serious attention as a means of explaining the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation's third peak that is explained by cold dark matter. This doesn't rule out these approaches, however, because this is only true because nobody knows what these theories predict at all, rather than because observation falsifies these theories. There is theoretical work out there, however, that demonstrates that it is possible in principle to replicate the CMB background of dark matter with a theory somewhere in the parameter space of the scalar graviton simplifications of quantum gravity used by Deur, although the details of such a theory are not well developed.

Turtle Island

New Supra-Kingdom Of Living Beings On Earth Discovered

The discovery of a new branch at the second most basal level of the tree of life is something doesn't happen very often at all. This kind of being could use a common name that comes more trippingly off the tongue, however.

Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that's so different from other living things that it doesn't fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms. 

Two species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt collected on a whim during a hike in Nova Scotia by Dalhousie University graduate student Yana Eglit. 

A genetic analysis shows they're more different from other organisms than animals and fungi (which are in different kingdoms) are from each other, representing a completely new part of the tree of life, Eglit and her colleagues report this week in the journal Nature. 

"They represent a major branch… that we didn't know we were missing," said Dalhousie biology professor Alastair Simpson, Eglit's supervisor and co-author of the new study.

"There's nothing we know that's closely related to them."

In fact, he estimates you'd have to go back a billion years — about 500 million years before the first animals arose — before you could find a common ancestor of hemimastigotes and any other known living things. . . . 

Like animals, plants, fungi and ameobas — but unlike bacteria — hemimastigotes have complex cells that have mini-organs called organelles including a nucleus that holds chromosomes of DNA, making them part of the "domain" of organisms called eukaryotes rather than bacteria or archaea. 

About 10 species of hemimastigotes have been described over more than 100 years. But up until now, no one had been able to do a genetic analysis to see how they were related to other living things. . . .

Based on the genetic analysis they've done so far, the Dalhousie team has determined that hemimastigotes are unique and different enough from other organisms to form their own "supra-kingdom" — a grouping so big that animals and fungi, which have their own kingdoms, are considered similar enough to be part of the same supra-kingdom. 

From here.

The Population of England 1100 to Present

It's hard to miss the impact of the black plague on the population of England in this time series from 1100 CE to the present. It took England about 250 years to recover.

Via BoingBoing.

Another chart showing more regions for a shorter period of time and a complete demographic history of Britain with less precise population estimates can be found in a prior post at this blog. This demonstrates, for example, that the population of Ireland is still 25% below its pre-potato famine peak, almost two centuries later.

Why Is Knowing About The Maykop Culture And Other Early Caucasus Cultures Important?

Eurogenes writes in his latest post about the fall and possible demic and cultural impacts that the Maykop culture may have had on the Indo-Europeans. Another archaeological culture close in time and place to the Maykop culture is the Kura-Araxes culture. Wikipedia places these cultures in time and space:

In the south it borders the approximately contemporaneous Kura-Araxes culture (3500—2200 BC), which extends into eastern Anatolia and apparently influenced it. To the north is the Yamna culture, including the Novotitorovka culture (3300—2700), which it overlaps in territorial extent. It is contemporaneous with the late Uruk period in Mesopotamia. 

The Kuban River is navigable for much of its length and provides an easy water-passage via the Sea of Azov to the territory of the Yamna culture, along the Don and Donets River systems. The Maykop culture was thus well-situated to exploit the trading possibilities with the central Ukraine area. 

New data revealed the similarity of artifacts from the Maykop culture with those found recently in the course of excavations of the ancient city of Tell Khazneh in northern Syria, the construction of which dates back to 4000 BC. 

Radiocarbon dates for various monuments of the Maykop culture are from 3950 - 3650 - 3610 - 2980 calBC. 

After the discovery of the Leyla-Tepe culture in the 1980s, some links were noted with the Maykop culture.The Leyla-Tepe culture is a culture of archaeological interest from the Chalcolithic era. Its population was distributed on the southern slopes of the Central Caucasus (modern Azerbaijan, Agdam District), from 4350 until 4000 B.C. Similar amphora burials in the South Caucasus are found in the Western Georgian Jar-Burial Culture. 

The culture has also been linked to the north Ubaid period monuments, in particular, with the settlements in the Eastern Anatolia Region. The settlement is of a typical Western-Asian variety, with the dwellings packed closely together and made of mud bricks with smoke outlets. 

It has been suggested that the Leyla-Tepe were the founders of the Maykop culture. An expedition to Syria by the Russian Academy of Sciences revealed the similarity of the Maykop and Leyla-Tepe artifacts with those found recently while excavating the ancient city of Tel Khazneh I, from the 4th millennium BC.

Why are these cultures important?

Overwhelming genetic, archaeological and linguistic evidence establishes that people whose ancestors spoke a common language, called proto-Indo-European (PIE for short), on the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Europe (more or less where the Ukraine is today), dramatically expanded from this region in pretty much all directions sometime in the Late Neolithic era to the Bronze Age.

Indo-European Linguistic Impact

While there are details that are legitimately subject to debate, there is no doubt that all of the languages of Europe except Basque, Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish and the language of the Saami (as well as some relict groups in Russia), are derived from PIE.

So are all of the currently extant languages of Iran, many of the languages of Afghanistan, and all of the languages of South Asia that are derived from Sanskrit, the most prominent of which is Hindi. All but a couple of the languages of India and its vicinity that are not Indo-European are either part of the Dravidian language family (found only in South Asia and among its expatriates) and the Munda language family (related to the Austro-Asiatic language family, the most famous member of which is Vietnamese).

Indo-Europeans speaking languages known as Tocharian in the Tarim Basin has a civilization that existed from about 2000 BCE to 600 CE, until it was overrun by the ancestors of the modern Uyghur people who are now an oppressed minority in the interior highlands of China.

Indo-European Religious Impact

The Indo-Europeans also had a common polytheistic religion which forms of common basis for the core of the pre-Christian religions of Scandinavians (e.g. the god Thor), the pre-Christian religions of the classical Greeks and Romans, and aspects of the Hindu and Zoroastrian religions.

Indo-European Population Genetic Impact

The influx of Indo-Europeans into Europe, West Asia, the Levant, and South Asia significantly influenced the genetic makeup of both regions because this was a mass migration, and by the time that this influx ran its course, most of these regions reached a population genetic mix quite similar to the one we see today. This was the last big wave of major demographic change in Europe and South Asia. (In Turkey and much of Central Asia, Turkish populations made a subsequent impact of the population genetic makeup, and the Levant's genetic history is complicated.)

Why Did The Indo-Europeans Have So Much Of An Impact?

Despite their identifying name, almost no credible academics think that anything inherent in the nature of the Indo-European languages had much, if anything, to do with their great impact of Europe and South Asia.

Instead, there are two main factors that are seen as influential.

One is climate. Some of the most important Indo-European expansions happened when climate conditions for farming temporarily deteriorated in Europe, West Asia, South Asia and North Africa (at least), causing existing advanced civilizations based upon farming in these regions to collapse, into which people from the European steppe, more suited to these conditions and associated with herding economies rather than settled farming economies surged in.

Another is technology. The Indo-Europeans were some of the first people to make practical use of horses for transportation and doing work, were some of the first people to use the wheeled transportation like chariots and charts and wagons, and were early users of metal tools and weapons at a time when many advanced civilizations managed with little metal and inferior metallurgy technology.

If you bring a stone club and a wooden spear to a sword fight, you are probably going to lose.

Where Did The Indo-European's Technological Edge Come From?

Horses and Wheels Were Home Grown

No one seriously doubts that the Indo-Europeans developed their mastery of horses (and probably wheels as well) independently and originally.

Their Metallurgy Probably Originated In The Caucasus Mountains

But, the archaeological record suggests that the advanced metallurgy technology that allowed Indo-Europeans to have widely used metal tools and weapons of a quality superior to those of the people whose land they conquered was not something that they invented themselves.

Instead, the breakthrough metallurgy technologies that the Indo-Europeans subsequently adopted and leveraged into domination of a large part of the world, probably originates in one or more of the cultures of the Caucasus Mountains in the 3000s BCE (basically the Copper Age and early Bronze Age of the region).

So, the question is, how was this technological advantage in metallurgy transferred to the Caucasus Mountains cultures to the Indo-Europeans of the steppe, and what other cultural legacies were part of the package of ideas that were transferred between the cultures?

Kurgans Probably Originated In The Caucasus Mountains

For example, one of the litmus tests used to distinguish Indo-Europeans from other cultures in the days when ancient DNA analysis (or even taking genotypes of modern people) was a glint in a mad scientist's eye, was the practice of burying at least some people in elaborate grave mounds called "kurgans."

And, it turns out, kurgans were also used at around the same time by the cultures of the Caucasus mountains who were among the first to invent advanced metallurgy, and that those cultures may have actually invented the Kurgan burial practice and then transmitted it to the Indo-Europeans as another part of a cultural package that was transmitted from the Caucasus mountain cultures to the Indo-Europeans.

Usually, moreover, anthropologists assume that burial practices go hand in hand with religious ideas about souls and the afterlife. 

So, there is some strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Indo-Europeans received not only metallurgy, but also some major religious beliefs that became widespread among them from these Caucasus mountain cultures.

Models Of Cultural Expansion - Demic Transition v. Cultural Diffusion

From roughly the 1970s to the 1990s, the watchword in anthropology was that "pots are not people."

This meant that cultural and technological transformations could spread from one ethnically and physiologically distinct (and as we would later learn, genetically distinguishable) group of people to another by means of "cultural diffusion" distributed through trade, by missionaries, and by wandering wise men. 

Now, almost everyone around this time was illiterate, because full fledged writing had only been invented in a few places (and certainly hadn't reached the cultures of the Caucasus mountains or the steppe), so cultural diffusion had to involve some person to person interaction (or at least imitation at a distance or reverse engineering of discovered items). But, no one disputes that it is possible to transfer culture with only a minimal exchange of, and interactions of people who live near each other.

Starting sometime in the 2000s as mass genotyping of modern populations and then ancient DNA data began to inform our understanding of prehistory, however, this view began to shift. This view shifted back in the direction of the model that anthropologists prior to the late 20th century which had adopted the "pots are people" paradigm that archaeological cultures could usually be associated with particular linguistic and ethnic groups.

Most of the time, it turns out, dramatic changes in archaeological cultures characterized by relics of physically expressed culture such as their pottery designs, corresponded quite closing with populations having distinct genetic makeups.

While the modern point of view isn't quite as quick to attribute cultural change to genocidal population replacement, it soon became clear that massive demographic change, often male dominated, was common enough that the default assumption was that major changes in culture, language and technology were usually the result of mass migration of members of a superstrate culture overwhelming an autochthonous substrate culture.

We see this in Greece. We see this in Germany and Poland. We see this in England. We see this in South Asia. We see this when Anatolia went from being linguistically Indo-European to Turkish speaking.

There are exceptions. 

For example, a very thin elite of invading Magyar warrior herders who conquered Hungary, in the century or two leading up to 1000 CE, caused a linguistically Indo-European population to experience language shift to the language that we now call Hungarian which is part of the Uralic language family whose members also include Estonian, Finnish and the language of the Saami (as well as some relict groups in Russia), that has its origins in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains that geographers consider the dividing line between Europe and North Asia, in what is currently known as Russia.

Similarly, the amount of demic change in population make up that caused people in England and the rest of the British Isles to speak English rather than the pre-existing Celtic languages, while it involved some demic shifts in some places, mostly involved culturally driven language shifts.

In parallel with the rise of English, in Egypt and the Levant, Arabic started to replace other languages of the region at around the same time without a lot of change in the population genetics of these regions.

Half the world away, a kind of yam native to South America called the kumara of something similar, became widespread in Polynesia, even bringing its South American name with it, while leaving very little genetic trace in South America or in Polynesia beyond Easter Island.

In Italy, the Etruscans would have been hard to distinguish from Romance language speakers from the physical remains that they left behind, had both cultures not been literate leaving written documents behind, and had contemporaneous Latin histories not told us otherwise, but while they shared many technological innovations with the Romance language speakers who surrounded them, they were genetically somewhat distinct as are many of their descendants in Tuscany who now speak Italian (the Etruscan language went extinct ca. 100-200 CE). The technology that the Etruscans shared with the Italic language speakers around them had to have been transmitted substantially with cultural diffusion rather than major population replacement.

And, in one of the oldest examples, many of the core crops that allowed the Dravidian peoples of Southern India in the South Asian Neolithic revolution around 2500 BCE to 2000 BCE to transition from hunting and gathering to farming were originally domesticated in the African Sahel and Ethiopian highlands before they appeared in India, with little obvious African genetic influx from the regions where these crops were domesticated.

But, these are exceptions, and they naively, except for the South Asian Neolithic, seem to be concentrated mostly in the last 3000 years or so, after the Bronze and Neolithic eras had ended.

The Indo-Europeans and the People of the Caucasus Mountains

There has been a breakthrough discovery this year using ancient DNA, presaged by earlier discoveries a few years older, that Eurogenes is touting in the post that I link above and some earlier ones, that demonstrates quite convincingly that the amount of genetic contribution that people from one of the key Caucasus mountains cultures that was probably a source of technology and other cultural ideas for the Indo-Europeans, the Maykop culture, was very small. Perhaps not zero, but far smaller than would be expected, for example, in the "go to" model of modern prehistorians of cultural and technological transitions usually being mediated by male dominated mass population shifts that the Indo-Europeans themselves would later reenact again and again across West Eurasia.

So, question of how the Indo-Europeans got their metallurgy technology and kurgan burial practices and probably other parts of a Caucasus mountains sourced cultural package appears now to very likely have been predominantly through cultural diffusion rather than a demic shift.

This means that the attention now shifts to the question of what was included in the cultural package that was transmitted from cultures like the Maykop culture and Kura-Araxes culture in the Caucasus mountains to the steppe people at the time, at least some of whom were probably early Indo-Europeans.

Looking At Pots

This is both harder to know and easier to determine. 

We have been able to accurately date objects discovered by archaeologists and determine by reliable means including chemical analysis of the materials in them, where objects and practices of various types were first invented and when objects they find arrived where we found them via trade rather than by being made locally. And, all of this much more mature area of inquiry is now relevant again, but is now informed by insights influencing which hypotheses about prehistory are most plausible from ancient DNA.

The more we know archaeologically about these less studied early cultures of the Caucasus mountains, the more we can discern what elements of early Indo-European culture had their source there, and what elements were home grown or were borrowed from some other source.

But, while metallurgy technology and burial practices and food sources and pottery designs leave lots of remains behind that archaeologists can analyze and use as clues, lots of other aspects of culture, most notably, the languages of the illiterate peoples of prehistory, are much more ephemeral and have to be deduced through less direct means like analyzing the kinds of geographically distinctive words that exist in the oldest available documents from various languages known to descend from proto-Indo-European languages (and the likely linguistic descendants of languages of the Caucasus mountains at the time) several thousand years after the cultural diffusion and technology transfers we are trying to understand happened.

Paleo-Lingistics

The several language families of the Caucasus mountains today seem very distinct indeed from the Indo-European languages, even though we can point to some linguistic clues like loan words of some isolated evidence of language contact between these several language families. But, the linguistic data strongly discourages the notion that one of these language families was a source of or major contributor to the other. So, if these Copper Age and early Bronze Age cultures of the Caucasus mountains had a major linguistic impact on the Indo-Europeans back then, they must have spoken a language very different than the ones spoken in this region today, or in any other region we can connect with archaeology to these cultures and reliably assign a language to from the earliest known historical records.

We can't rule out that possibility, and indeed, the Maykop culture itself collapsed rather abruptly, and may have left little linguistic trace of itself. But, the weight of the evidence tends to favor a scenario in which a language used by the average person was not a component of the cultural package that the Indo-Europeans acquired from the mountains that provided an important part of the technological edge that allowed them to conquer people for thousands of miles in all directions from their original homeland.

Other Open Questions About Cultural Exchanges Between The Steppe And The Mountains

Of course, while the evidence points very strongly to cultural diffusion as the means by which this technology transfer took place, we still don't know precisely what vector was involved in that cultural diffusion. Did Indo-European men go to the mountains to learn their trades like foreign exchange students and then return to the steppe? Did it involve merchant traders? Did it involve missionaries? 

Most tantalizingly (because more ancient DNA can tell us if we are right and the evidence is too subtle and unclear at this point to reach a definitive conclusion on this point is it happened at only a low level), did it involve women from the mountains who were exchanged in small numbers as brides who had an outsized cultural influence in the steppe communities they joined?

We do know from ancient DNA that patrilocal families that exchange brides between communities were common in many early Indo-European communities in Europe. But, we have less clear evidence about how much of this exchange happened between the mountains and the steppe.

These are the questions that remain open and that we want to understand better with future research.

Looking In Other Directions

We also care about the Caucasus mountain cultures of this era because of their connections to the South and that region itself, going both forward and backward in time from the time when these cultures thrived.

Going back in time, the main open question is the extent to which these cultures derived from or were significantly influenced by the cultures of Mesopotamia and the adjacent highlands of Iran and Anatolia.

Likewise, how are these cultures connected to the earliest hunter-gathers and the earliest farmers of the Caucasus? Ancient DNA suggests that the first farmers in this region seem to be derived from the earliest hunter-gathers of the region, rather than being migrants like the first farmers in most of Europe. And, those hunter-gathers could have ancient roots indeed, because the Caucasus were one of the few refugia in Europe where modern human could survive during the Last Glacial Maximum.

And, looking forward in time, while these cultures in the Caucasus do not seem to have been involved in a mass migration to the steppe, there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that they may have been a pivotal source for a mass migration into somewhat more similar and nearby highlands of Anatolia and perhaps on to what would become Minoan Crete. This mass migration came after the Neolithic revolution in Anatolia whose descendants were the primary source of the first farmers of Europe (and have their closest modern genetic match in the people of Sardinia today), and resulted in a significant genetic change, but also lacked that steppe ancestry, which is usually considered diagnostic of Indo-European origins, that would become common place in Anatolia around the time of the Bronze Age Hittite empire.

Of course, much, much later, roughly a thousand years ago, give or take a couple of centuries, Anatolia received an infusion of Turkic ancestry that originated in a migration from the general vicinity of Northern China and Mongolia, which obscured earlier layers of the gene pool of Anatolia and neighboring regions today.

Likewise, linguistic divisions involving language families separated by great time depth, in different parts of the modern Caucasus region, which is linguistically extremely Balkanized, despite being very close to each other geographically, also make it necessary to trace back each linguistically community separately and simultaneously to figure out how this came to be. Some of these language families appear to trace back to the earliest days of farming in the region if not earlier. Others are obviously recent arrivals by comparison, but figuring out just how recent is important as one strips away recent history so as to understand more ancient history. Some of the modern residents in the region, meanwhile, may indeed have ancient ancestry in the region and even some of those who speak more recently arrived languages may be due to either migration (leaving the question of what happened to the people they replaced), or language shift, or a mix of both.

Three Sigma Tension Seen In Standard Model Parameter Measurement

The Standard Model has lots of experimentally measured physical constants. One set of those physical constants describe the CKM matrix (the letters are the first initials of the surnames of the scientists who came up with it).

The CKM matrix measures the probability that a quark of one type will turn into a quark of another type, conservation of mass-energy permitting. (To be precise, the matrix elements themselves are the square roots of the relevant probabilities.)

There are eighteen possible transitions between quark types in W boson mediated interactions whose probabilities can are described in the Standard Model by four parameters. These parameters are measured by measuring how often the eighteen possible transitions take place in various kinds of experiments and using that data to fit the four parameters.

One of the eighteen possible transitions is the probability of a transition from an up quark to a strange quark. There are many ways that this can be measured. One way to measure it involves the decays of a compound particle knowns as a kaon. Another way to measure it, used in the most recent experiment, involves decays of a fundamental particle known as a tau lepton. It can also be measured directly, or determined indirectly, when you know that several quantities combined are equal to a known value and you know the value of the other amounts in the sum. In this case, the "sum" is the rule that the probabilities of all possible events should add up to 100%, when there are three possibilities and we know two of the probabilities are are trying to determine the third.

This is notable because the latest experimental measurement is three standard deviations from another measurement of the same quantity, given the respective margins of error of the measurements.

The key language is that: "The Vus determinations based on the inclusive branching fraction of τ to strange final states are about 3σ lower than the Vus determination from the CKM matrix unitarity."

This means that if you add up the three possible things that could happen to an up quark that transitions, the probabilities should add up to 100%. But, if you take the best available known values of Vud (which is use to determine the probability that an up quark transitions to a down quark) and Vub (which is used to determine the probability that an up quark transitions to a bottom quark) and subtract those from 100%, the probability that is left over is significantly bigger than the directly measured value of Vus (which is used to determine the probability that an up quark transitions to a strange quark).

So, either one of the three directly measured elements that give us transition probabilities (i.e. Vud, Vus, and Vub) is lower than the true value, or there is another possibility that the Standard Model does not permit (i.e. an up quark can transition into something other than a down quark, a strange quark or a bottom quark) that happens with a probability sufficient to make the total sum of the probabilities equal 100%.

This is a pretty notable anomaly, although sometimes three sigma results are still just statistical flukes, because so many different quantities are measured and we only pay close attention to the improbable ones. Also, sometimes the margins of error are modestly underestimated, making the discrepancies look more significant than they actually are in reality.

Any big anomaly could, of course, be a sign of beyond the Standard Model Physics and show that the Standard Model is wrong. But, because this anomaly is isolated, rather than fitting a pattern of multiple anomalous measurements that look like they could have a common source, and because there wasn't any strong theoretical prediction from any popular beyond the Standard Model physics theories that this would happen, it is premature at this case to speculate what kind of "New Physics" could give rise to this anomaly. A fluke or experimental error seems far more likely at this point.

The paper reporting the latest anomaly and its abstract are as follows (emphasis added):

We report the status of the Heavy Flavour Averaging Group (HFLAV) averages of the τ lepton measurements We then update the latest published HFLAV global fit of the τ lepton branching fractions (Spring 2017) with recent results by BABAR. We use the fit results to update the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix element Vus measurements with the τ branching fractions. We combine the direct τ branching fraction measurements with indirect predictions using kaon branching fractions measurements to improve the determination of Vus using τ branching fractions. The Vus determinations based on the inclusive branching fraction of τ to strange final states are about 3σ lower than the Vus determination from the CKM matrix unitarity.

Alberto Lusiani, "HFLAV τ branching fractions fit and measurements of Vus with τ lepton data" (November 15, 2018).

Ancient DNA Shows Structure In Settlement Of Americas

Newly analyzed ancient DNA shows significant population structure in the settlement of the Americas by the founding population and multiple waves of internal migration include the extinction of some branches of the founding population of the Americas. For example, the ancestors of modern high altitude occupants of the Andes mountains split from low altitude residents of the region about 9,000 years ago.

There is a wealth of new detail in the three new papers discussed in the linked New York Times story. I don't have time to give those papers a full treatment now, but will update this post and make new posts when I do.

Beowulf Toponyms In England

The epic poem Beowulf is typically one of the oldest works of literature that school children study (usually in translation to modern English). "Beowulf is by far the longest known Old English poem and – at just over 3,000 lines – preserves about one tenth of surviving English verse from before the Norman Conquest." According to Wikipedia the origins of this story set in Scandinavia in the 6th century CE (with some archaeological corroboration of matters mentioned in the poem) are uncertain:

The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars; the only certain dating pertains to the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025. . . . 

Many suggest that Beowulf was first composed in the 7th century at Rendlesham in East Anglia, that the Sutton Hoo ship-burial also shows close connections with Scandinavia, and that the East Anglian royal dynasty, the Wuffingas, may have been descendants of the Geatish Wulfings. Others have associated this poem with the court of King Alfred the Great or with the court of King Cnut the Great.

Approximate central regions of tribes mentioned in Beowulf, with the location of the Angles in Angeln. See Scandza for details of Scandinavia's political fragmentation in the 6th century.

The charter reference discussed below suggests that the epic was know well before 931 CE, because this myth must have already been widely known in the 10th century in England since it inspired place name in Wiltshire.

Wiltshire

According to a charter written in 931 CE:

This charter is a grant of land in Ham from Æthelstan (d. 939), the first king of England, to his ‘faithful official’ Wulfgar. The amount of land involved is considerable: 9 hides, or roughly the size of 9 Hyde Parks [ed. which is about 350 acres]. In order to be clear about exactly which pieces of land were being transferred, this charter, like many other Anglo-Saxon documents, included a boundary clause in Old English, describing the path you would walk around the edges of the gift.

'First, [go] to the east ... Then westward to the mossy bank. Then down to the hedge/boundary of Beow’s home, eastward to the blackberry thicket. Then to the black pit/cave. Then north by the head to where the short dyke [is]. [Take] out of this one acre, then [go] to the bird’s pond (mere) to the path ... After that to the long meadow. Then to Grendel’s lake (mere). Then to the hidden gate, then back east ...'

Since the landscape includes Beow’s home and Grendel’s lake, it is tempting to think that these names were inspired by the poem Beowulf (although Beowulf is set in Scandinavia, not Wiltshire). At least three other Anglo-Saxon documents mention ‘Grendel’: there is another instance of ‘Grendel’s lake’, there’s a reference to ‘Grendel’s gate’, and one charter has an added boundary clause referring to ‘Grendeles pytte.’

Of course, some people have suggested that these Grendels aren’t ‘Grendels at all, but rather a ‘green delf’ (green quarry) or even Greendales. However, the association with pits and swamps does link these names to some sinister places from Old English literature. Alternatively, a ‘grendel’ could have been a generic term for 'monster', and these 'grendels' could have inspired the poem, and not the other way around. . . .

The charter was witnessed by, among others, two Welsh ‘sub-kings’: Hywel Dda of Deheubarth (d. 949/950) and Idwal Foel of Gwynedd. Hywel was later credited with codifying Welsh law and he may be the only early medieval Welsh ruler who issued surviving coins. He also frequently visited England and even called one of his sons Edwin, an English name (whether out of taste or political expediency). Idwal allegedly died fighting the English in 942. However, he witnessed several of Æthelstan’s charters and there is no evidence he fought against Æthelstan at Brunanburh.

This would have happened at the end of an era, about 135 years before the Norman invasion of England in 1066 CE that gave rise to "Middle English", a successor to Anglo-Saxon "Old English" that was heavily influenced by the Norman French and Latin utilized by the new ruling class. English continues to evolve, however, and starts to become recognizable in the 15th to 16th centuries giving rise to early modern English.

The Archaeological Evidence Related To Beowulf

Like the Illiad whose recount of the Trojan War has been corroborated in part by archaeology from the ancient city of Troy, Beowulf is in a genre that I describe as "legendary history" in which elements of history fact are mixed freely with literary inventions often of a fantastic or supernatural nature, and it isn't always entirely clear when the fact ends and the fiction begins. I would also count much of the Hebrew Bible (i.e. the Old Testament) as belonging to the legendary history genre as well.

There is some archaeological evidence and evidence from other historical documents of some of the matters recounted in Beowulf. Per the Wikipedia entry on Beowulf referenced above:

The poem deals with legends, was composed for entertainment, and does not separate between fictional elements and historic events, such as the raid by King Hygelac into Frisia. Though Beowulf himself is not mentioned in any other Anglo-Saxon manuscript, scholars generally agree that many of the other figures referred to in Beowulf also appear in Scandinavian sources. This concerns not only individuals (e.g., Healfdene, Hroðgar, Halga, Hroðulf, Eadgils and Ohthere), but also clans (e.g., Scyldings, Scylfings and Wulfings) and certain events (e.g., the Battle on the Ice of Lake Vänern). 

In Denmark, recent archaeological excavations at Lejre, where Scandinavian tradition located the seat of the Scyldings, i.e., Heorot, have revealed that a hall was built in the mid-6th century, exactly the time period of Beowulf. Three halls, each about 50 metres (160 ft) long, were found during the excavation. 

The majority view appears to be that people such as King Hroðgar and the Scyldings in Beowulf are based on historical people from 6th-century Scandinavia. Like the Finnesburg Fragment and several shorter surviving poems, Beowulf has consequently been used as a source of information about Scandinavian figures such as Eadgils and Hygelac, and about continental Germanic figures such as Offa, king of the continental Angles. 

19th-century archaeological evidence may confirm elements of the Beowulf story. Eadgils was buried at Uppsala according to Snorri Sturluson. When the western mound was excavated in 1874, the finds showed that a powerful man was buried in a large barrow, c. 575, on a bear skin with two dogs and rich grave offerings. The eastern mound was excavated in 1854, and contained the remains of a woman, or a woman and a young man. The middle barrow has not been excavated.

Large Hadron Collider Run 2 Ends Soon

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will shut down in December and won't start up again until 2021. In the meantime there will be basically no new high energy physics experimental data and scientists will have to pour over the data that has been already collected instead. 

Since 2015 the LHC experiments have been taking data from proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV. This is “Run 2” of the LHC, “Run 1” was at the lower energy of 8 TeV. The proton-proton Run 2 ended this morning, with the LHC shifting to other tasks, first machine development, later heavy ions. It will shut down completely in December for the start of “Long Shutdown 2 (LS2)”, which will last for over two years, into early 2021. During LS2 there will be maintenance performed and improvements made, including bringing the collision energy of the machine up to the design energy of 14 TeV. 

ATLAS is reporting 158 inverse fb of collisions delivered by the machine during Run 2, of which 149 inverse fb were recorded, the CMS numbers should be similar. Most data analysis reported to date by ATLAS and CMS has only used the 2015 and 2016 data (about 36 inverse fb) although a few results have included data through 2017 (about 80 inverse fb). My impression is that for many searches they have been waiting for the full run 2 dataset to be available. Perhaps results of searches with the full dataset might start becoming available by the time of summer 2019 conferences. 

The LHC run 3 is planned for 2021-2023, producing perhaps 300 inverse fb of data, results perhaps available in 2024. It will thus be quite a long time after run 2 results start appearing before better ones due simply to more data become available.

From Not Even Wrong.

An Oldie But Goodie

The top quark was experimentally discovered in 1995 although experimenters were hot on its path a couple of years earlier, and the Higgs boson was discovered and its mass was first measured in 2012. The masses predicted in this 1993 paper are close to the values ultimately measured.

A model for composite electroweak bosons is re-examined to establish approximate ranges for the initial predictions of the top and Higgs masses. Higher order corrections to this 4-fermion theory at a high mass scale where the theory is matched to the Standard Model have little effect, as do wide variations in this scale. However, including all one loop evolution and defining the masses self-consistently, at their respective poles, moves the top mass upward by some 10 GeV to near 175 GeV and the Higgs mass down by a similar amount to near 125 GeV.

David E. Kahana, Sidney H. Kahana, "Top and Higgs Masses in Dynamical Symmetry Breaking" (December 21, 1993).

Of course, this doesn't mean that the approach taken to make these predictions in 1993 was necessary an accurate explanation of why those particles have the masses that they do. Hundreds of predictions with significant margins of error were made and somebody had to be right as a matter of random chance, since a general ballpark in which the mass values had to fall was already known.

Arguably, this is little more than numerology. But, it is particularly interesting numerology as the ultimate prediction was correct long in advance.

While an accurate prediction doesn't insure that the reasoning used to produce that prediction is valid, if the reasoning used by an investigator produces an inaccurate prediction then we known that there was something wrong with that investigator's method or source data that informed the prediction.

India's Caste Endogamy Was Very Extreme

The interracial intermarriage rate in Jim Crow America was about 1%. At that rate, if introgression of non-white individuals into whites continued for 50 years, the average person with white ancestry would be 40% non-white. (I suspect this exaggerated figure is due to improper use of a 1% introgression rate per year rather than per generation, but even a few generations of modest introgression does have a notable effect over a very long time period)

.

In India, caste cemented itself, not just at the Varna level, but at the Jati level about 1500 years ago. This implied an endogamy rate on the order of 99.8% (with 10% introgression over that time period) to 99.9% (with 5% introgression over that time period) to 99.98% (with 1% introgression over that time period).

I think the source is Razib or someone he quoted, but I could be mistaken. I accidentally failed to hit the publish button on this post back on April 17, 2018.

A Pre-Clovis Spear Point In Texas

A pre-Clovis spear point found in Texas from about 15,000 years ago largely reaffirms the existing paradigm for how the founding population of the Americas settled these regions after the Last Glacial Maximum. 

In particular, it clarifies that there were populations in the interior of North America before there was an ice free land corridor from Beringia to North America in the north. Somebody either walked across a glacier for many miles, or took a boat down the Pacific coast and them migrated inland before the ice free land corridor opened.

In other New World pre-history news, a new paper (whose results were previously blogged here) notes that a one study outlier genetic finding in the Amazon has no trace in ancient DNA:

Intriguingly, a signal of Australasian ancestry that has been observed in some Amazonian groups is not evident in any of the ancient Siberian or Beringian samples sequenced here, or in previous studies.

Pontus Skoglund‏ notes that: "the signal is found in Tianyuan at 40kya, stronger than Australasians in its connection to Amazonians in fact. No less mysterious though!" He cites this source. This Tianyuan connection is also stronger than the connection to the Andamanese people.

My own theory is that the genetic trace seen is the product of one or two individuals or a nuclear family who were newcomers to the Beringian community that were in the first wave of advance to settle South America.

Quote of the Day

[Professor Steven] Weinberg raises an eyebrow and points to his office. 

His office, it turns out, is half the size of mine, an observation that vaporizes what little ambition I ever had to win the Nobel Prize.

- Sabine Hossenfelder, "Lost in Math" (2018) at page 96.

For what it is worth, "Lost in Math" is a treasure trove of dry wit for those with some familiarity with modern physics, and this is merely one of many gems that her book contains.

An abstract from today that sums up the attitudes in the field about high energy physics that she is critiquing is this one:

The standard model of particle physics is an extremely successful theory of fundamental interactions, but it has many known limitations. It is therefore widely believed to be an effective field theory that describes interactions near the TeV scale. A plethora of strategies exist to extend the standard model, many of which contain predictions of new particles or dynamics that could manifest in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As of now, none have been observed, and much of the available phase space for natural solutions to outstanding problems is excluded. If new physics exists, it is therefore either heavy (i.e. slightly above the reach of current searches) or hidden (i.e. currently indistinguishable from standard model backgrounds). We summarize the existing searches, and discuss future directions at the LHC.

Salvatore Rappoccio, "The experimental status of direct searches for exotic physics beyond the standard model at the Large Hadron Collider" (October 24, 2018).

Thirty three pages of null results follow. The review begins with the following introduction:

Particle physics is at a crossroads. The standard model (SM) explains a wide range of phenomena spanning interactions over many orders of magnitude, yet no demonstrated explanation exists for a variety of fundamental questions. Most recently, the discovery of the Higgs boson [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] at the ATLAS [10] and CMS [11] detectors has elucidated the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking, but there is no explanation for why the scale of its mass is so much different from naive quantum-mechanical expectations (the “hierarchy problem”) [12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20]. Dark matter (DM) remains an enigma, despite extensive astronomical confirmation of its existence [21, 22, 23]. Neutrino masses are observed to be nonzero [24, 25, 26, 27], and elements of the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix [28, 29] have been measured, but these masses are not easily accounted for in the SM [30]. Unification of the strong and electroweak forces is expected, but not yet observed nor understood [31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44]; such models often predict the existence of yet-to-be-observed leptoquarks (LQs) or proton decay [45]. Furthermore, there are unexpected observations that are not explained in the SM, such as the baryon asymmetry [46], anomalies in the decays of bottom-quark hadrons [47], a discrepancy in the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g-2) [48], and the strong CP problem [49, 50, 51]. Even further, there are open questions about long-standing observations, such as whether or not there is an extended Higgs sector [52], why there are multiple generations of fermions with a large mass hierarchy [32, 53, 54, 55], and why no magnetic monopoles are observed to exist [56]. For these reasons, the SM is considered to be an effective field theory, and that physics beyond the SM (BSM) should exist.  

In this Review, we will (non-exhaustively) discuss a subset of these questions that have been investigated recently at the LHC with 13 TeV proton-proton collisions by the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb [57] experiments. From a collider standpoint, we will discuss the solution to the hierarchy problem, dark matter, the origins of neutrino masses, unification, and compositeness. We will also discuss the possibilities for improvements of these searches at the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) or other future colliders. One very popular group of theories to explain several of these phenomena involve supersymmetric (SUSY) extensions to the SM [12, 13]. With a few exceptions, this Review will focus on answers to the above questions that do not involve SUSY, although it remains a theoretically attractive solution. This Review will also primarily not focus on solutions that involve an extended Higgs sector, nor open anomalies in hadron spectroscopy.  

Many models of BSM physics that can be tested at the LHC involve spectacular signatures that distinguish them from SM backgrounds. It is therefore worthwhile to discuss the searches for new physics with their unique signatures in mind. As such, we will first broadly discuss the signatures used for LHC BSM searches, and then discuss the implications on various scenarios.

I have highlighted the problems identified and underlined those that are legitimate problems as opposed to mere quibbled with what the laws of Nature actually happen to be. The decision to omit SUSY limitations and extended Higgs sectors is a telling sign of the decreasing popularity of these theories.

The decision to ignore "open anomalies in hadron spectroscopy" is a reflection of the extent to which QCD is so inexact, compared to other aspects of high energy physics, that anomalies often don't mean very much. 

Siberia Has Experienced Repeated Population Replacement

The first wave of archaic hominin migration out of Africa which expanded as far into Southern Asia as Indonesia and China, Homo erectus, probably never reached Northern Asia in any significant numbers.

But, before modern humans arrived in Northern Asia, Denisovans and Neanderthals (archaic hominins) reached at least as far as the Altai Mountains. We don't know with much precision when they arrived there or by precisely what route, but both were present in the Altai region around 90,000 years ago when a child with one Denisovan parent and one Neanderthal parent was born. Sometime after 40,000 years ago, they became extinct (or at least almost extinct) in the region. We don't know if they ever overlapped with modern humans in that region, but the timing of the latest evidence of their presence in Northern Asia and the earliest evidence of a modern human presence in Northern Asia is suspiciously close in time. Ancient Altai Neanderthal DNA shows evidence as admixture with modern humans that was estimated to have taken place ca. 100,000 years ago, but these admixture events probably took place with their ancestors in Southwest Asia, rather than Northern Asia.

Ancient DNA and archaeology establishes that the original modern humans in Siberia (who arrived there about 38,000 years ago), the "Ancient North Siberians" (ANS) were wiped out during the Last Glacial Maximum (about 20,000 years ago) except for refugia populations in Beringia (and possibly also the Altai Mountains region) who contributed to Ancient Paleosiberian gene pools.

Ancient DNA also confirms the hypothesis that Siberia was the source for both the "Ancient Paleosiberian" (AP) population that emerged after the Last Glacial Maximum which gave rise to the founding population of the Americas (which has only a few relict tribes in Siberia itself who are their descendants), and for the East Asian shifted "Neosiberian" populations that largely replaced the Ancient Paleosiberians around 11,000 years ago who were a genetic source for Na-Dene and Inuit Native Americans ancestors' migration to the Americas and most modern indigenous Siberians. 

In the last 7000 years or so, there have been more waves of migration across Northern Asia, although some of these waves did not reach all of the way to far Northeastern Siberia. 

First, Uralic populations migrated West and East from central Siberia (starting ca. 5000 BCE).

Then, Tocharian Indo-Europeans migrated from the Pontic-Caspian steppe as far east as the Tarim Basin which they reached ca. 2000 BCE, and a trickle of Pontic-Caspian steppe people made it as far as Bronze Age China. 

Ethnically and linguistically Turkish populations migrated west starting in the first few centuries BCE and CE, and extending their reach from a source in Northeast Asia to a maximum extend in Turkey (with a substantial Turkish immigrant population arriving Germany after World War II). The Oghuz Turks started to arrive in Anatolia around the 9th century CE and this demographic shift (in Anatolia, a significant introgression into the pre-existing population but not a population replacement) was consolidated by the 11th century Seljuk Empire which was both Turkic and Persian that controlled almost all of Anatolia.

Islamic culture accompanied by significant (but not replacement level) ethnically Iranian/Middle Eastern migration followed that in an eastward direction, overlapping with the westward Turkish migration, and ultimately leaving a lasting impact as far east as what is currently Western China, during the Tang Dynasty.

By the 13th century CE there was a Mongolian wave of western migration (which also expanded to the East from Mongolia). The eastward Mongolian expansion had a more lasting impact than the western expansion.

A few centuries later, the Russians, initially with a Scandinavian elite and Slavic masses, migrated east again, leaving us with the current status quo, more or less. This expansion wiped out all but a few thousand of the remaining Ancient Paleosiberian populations in Siberia. The Russians made it all of the way to Alaska, uniting all of Siberia and former Beringia and Alaska politically as well as biogeographically, until 1867 when the Alaska Purchase transferred Alaska to the United States.

The paper recounting the new ancient DNA discoveries has the following abstract and citation:

Far northeastern Siberia has been occupied by humans for more than 40 thousand years. Yet, owing to a scarcity of early archaeological sites and human remains, its population history and relationship to ancient and modern populations across Eurasia and the Americas are poorly understood. 

Here, we report 34 ancient genome sequences, including two from fragmented milk teeth found at the ~31.6 thousand-year-old (kya) Yana RHS site, the earliest and northernmost Pleistocene human remains found. 

These genomes reveal complex patterns of past population admixture and replacement events throughout northeastern Siberia, with evidence for at least three large-scale human migrations into the region. 

The first inhabitants, a previously unknown population of "Ancient North Siberians" (ANS), represented by Yana RHS, diverged ~38 kya from Western Eurasians, soon after the latter split from East Asians. 

Between 20 and 11 kya, the ANS population was largely replaced by peoples with ancestry from East Asia, giving rise to ancestral Native Americans and "Ancient Paleosiberians" (AP), represented by a 9.8 kya skeleton from Kolyma River. AP are closely related to the Siberian ancestors of Native Americans, and ancestral to contemporary communities such as Koryaks and Itelmen. Paleoclimatic modelling shows evidence for a refuge during the last glacial maximum (LGM) in southeastern Beringia, suggesting Beringia as a possible location for the admixture forming both ancestral Native Americans and AP. 

Between 11 and 4 kya, AP were in turn largely replaced by another group of peoples with ancestry from East Asia, the "Neosiberians" from which many contemporary Siberians derive. We detect additional gene flow events in both directions across the Bering Strait during this time, influencing the genetic composition of Inuit, as well as Na Dene-speaking Northern Native Americans, whose Siberian-related ancestry components is closely related to AP. 

Our analyses reveal that the population history of northeastern Siberia was highly dynamic, starting in the Late Pleistocene and continuing well into the Late Holocene. The pattern observed in northeastern Siberia, with earlier, once widespread populations being replaced by distinct peoples, seems to have taken place across northern Eurasia, as far west as Scandinavia. 

Sikora et al., The population history of northeastern Siberia since the Pleistocene, bioRxiv (October 22, 2018), doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/448829

Books About Prussia

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

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

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

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

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

Fuzzy Dark Matter Model Tightly Constrained By Astronomy Measurements; MOG Allegedly Ruled out

Fuzzy dark matter is a dark matter particle theory that involves very light bosons as dark matter particles (in contrast, for example, to warm dark matter which uses keV mass scale sterile fermions).  A new preprint purports to confine the allowed mass range of fuzzy dark matter particles to within a factor of ten using astronomy measurement from the Milky Way and one other galaxy. This same method could conceivably rule out the entire parameter space of fuzzy dark matter theories with the right observation.

The fuzzy dark matter (FDM) model treats DM as a bosonic field with astrophysically large de Broglie wavelength. A striking feature of this model is O(1) fluctuations in the dark matter density on time scales which are shorter than the gravitational timescale. Including for the first time the effect of core oscillations, we demonstrate how such fluctuations lead to heating of star clusters, and thus an increase in their size over time. From the survival of the old star cluster in Eridanus II we infer ma≳0.6→1×10−19 eV    within modelling uncertainty if FDM is to compose all of the DM, and derive constraints on the FDM fraction at lower masses. The subhalo mass function in the Milky Way implies ma≳0.8×10−21 eV to successfully form Eridanus II. The window between 10−21 eV≲ma≲10−20 eV is affected by narrow band resonances, and the limited applicability of the diffusion approximation. Some of this window may be consistent with observations of Eridanus II and more detailed investigations are required.

David J. E. Marsh, Jens C. Niemeyer, "Strong Constraints on Fuzzy Dark Matter from Ultrafaint Dwarf Galaxy Eridanus II" (October 19, 2018).

By comparison a graviton from a falling apple near Earth should have energy of 10^-30 ergs. One erg equals 6.242 * 10^11  eV, so a graviton from a falling apple (which is also a boson) ought to have an energy on the other of 6*10^-19 eV which is quite close in order of magnitude to the estimated energy of fuzzy dark matter particles in this study.

For the energy range, a graviton based quantum gravity theory (such as Deur's analysis) and a fuzzy dark matter theory, ought to be very similar.

Meanwhile, another paper purports to rule out John Moffat's MOG theory, which uses a scalar, vector, tensor function, based upon detailed Milky Way observations. Until now, this has been one of the most robust modified gravity theories to date, explaining phenomena where Milgrom's MOND theory fails, such as cluster physics and cosmology data and passing other tests that competing modified gravity theories have failed. 

This could be correct, but previous efforts to falsify modified gravity theories have resulted from a misunderstanding of the application of those theories, so it may be premature to rule it out based upon this study alone. A lack of a comparison of the errors observed to the measurement errors and any theoretical errors in the abstract, in particular, is a cause of skepticism of this result.

We perform a test of John Moffat's Modified Gravity theory (MOG) within the Milky Way, adopting the well known "Rotation Curve" method. We use the dynamics of observed tracers within the disk to determine the gravitational potential as a function of galactocentric distance, and compare that with the potential that is expected to be generated by the visible component only (stars and gas) under different "flavors" of the MOG theory, making use of a state-of-the-art setup for both the observed tracers and baryonic morphology. Our analysis shows that in both the original and the modified version (considering a self-consistent evaluation of the Milky Way mass), the theory fails to reproduce the observed rotation curve. We conclude that in none of its present formulation, the MOG theory is able to explain the observed Rotation Curve of the Milky Way.

Carolina Negrelli, Maria Benito, Susana Landau, Fabio Iocco, Lucila Kraiselburd, "Testing MOG theory in the Milky Way" (October 16, 2018).

As the introduction to the pre-print explains:

A dark component of matter has become one of the pillars of current ΛCDM model: it is invoked to explain the mismatch between the observed dynamical mass, and that inferred by observations of the visible component, of astrophysical objects over a large range of mass and spatial scales, from Galaxy Clusters [1–4] to Spiral [5–7] and Dwarf Galaxies [8], including our own, [9], and provides a consistent explanation to the power spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background [10], and to the formation of astrophysical structures [11]. Yet, the very nature of this dark matter is currently unknown, and none of the proposed candidates (from stable particles in extensions of the Standard Model, to primordial Black Holes [12, 13]) has been unambiguously detected yet. 

An alternative proposal to explain the mismatch observed in the data relies on a modification of the theory of gravity. Several proposals, such as MOND, TeVeS and MOG [14–16], have been able to give an explanation to phenomena around data coming from numerous and diverse sources: motion of globular and galaxy clusters [17–19] and rotation curves of spiral and dwarf galaxies [20, 21]. 

While some analysis indicate that TeVeS and MOG have difficulties explaining the Bullet cluster data [22] or to reconcile gas profile and strong–lensing measurements in well known cluster systems [23], others claim that MOG can fit both Bullet and the Train Wreck merging clusters [24, 25]. It has been pointed out that the detection of a neutron star merger by the LIGO experiment rules out MOND-like theories [26]. Recent analysis state the former being correct for bi-metric theories such as MOND and TeVeS, but not for MOG [27]. Some of the above controversies are yet to be resolved, so it is currently unclear if MOG phenomenology can offer a solution at all scales. 

In this work, we adopt an agnostic approach, and only focus on the prediction of MOG theory on the scale of Spiral Galaxies, with a specific one: our own host. In order to test the predictions of MOG theory within the Milky Way, we use state–of–the–art compilations of kinematical tracers and observationally inferred morphologies, adopted in recent studies of Dark Matter distribution [9, 28, 29], and already used to test MOND phenomenology [30].

They money figures from the MOG paper are as follows:

The authors claim a 5 sigma discrepancy, but eyeballing the data, the discrepancies between the SG flavor of MOG and the Milky Way data appear to be statistically significant only in the area where there is a transition from the Newtonian regime to the modified gravity regime at about 15 to 25 kiloparsecs from the central region, although the fit is less strong in closer core than at the edges of the galaxy (something that is also generically true of particle dark matter theories).

A previous paper by some of the same authors about MOND in 2015 (which was ultimately published) was the following, which found that MOND with a simple interpolation function did fit the Milky Way data.

Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) is an empirical theory originally proposed to explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies by modifying the gravitational acceleration, rather than by invoking dark matter. Here,we set constraints on MOND using an up-to-date compilation of kinematic tracers of the Milky Way and a comprehensive collection of morphologies of the baryonic component in the Galaxy. In particular, we find that the so-called "standard" interpolating function cannot explain at the same time the rotation curve of the Milky Way and that of external galaxies for any of the baryonic models studied, while the so-called "simple" interpolating function can for a subset of models. Upcoming astronomical observations will refine our knowledge on the morphology of baryons and will ultimately confirm or rule out the validity of MOND in the Milky Way. We also present constraints on MOND-like theories without making any assumptions on the interpolating function.

Fabio Iocco, Miguel Pato, Gianfranco Bertone, "Testing modified Newtonian dynamics in the Milky Way" (October 26,2015)