More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Reich
Read between
December 30, 2019 - January 6, 2020
People like those at Stonehenge were building great temples to their gods, and tombs for their dead, and could not have known that within a few hundred years their descendants would be gone and their lands overrun.
almost everyone in India is a mixture of two highly divergent ancestral populations, one of which derived about half its ancestry directly from the Yamnaya.
The repressive nature of caste has spawned in reaction major religions—Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism—each of which offered refuge from the caste system.
Star Clusters are not limited to Asia. The geneticist Daniel Bradley and his colleagues identified a Y-chromosome type that is present in two to three million people today and derives from an ancestor who lived around fifteen hundred years ago.16 It is especially common in people with the last name O’Donnell, who descend from one of the most powerful royal families of medieval Ireland, the “Descendants of Niall”—referring to Niall of the Nine Hostages, a legendary warlord from the earliest period of medieval Irish history. If Niall actually existed, he would have lived at about the right time
...more
He went on to whisper that Indians in his experience were also servile, much like he thought they had been under British colonialism, and he speculated that this trait had come about because of selection under the caste system. He also talked about how East Asian students tended to be conformist, because of selection for conformity in ancient Chinese society.
An example is the extreme overrepresentation of people of West African ancestry among elite sprinters. All the male finalists in the Olympic hundred-meter race since 1980, even those from Europe and the Americas, had recent West African ancestry.46
Our particular ancestors are not the point. The genome revolution provides us with a shared history that, if we pay proper attention, should give us an alternative to the evils of racism and nationalism, and make us realize that we are all entitled equally to our human heritage.
