David Reich: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Final question. You mentioned these different revolutions in our ability to understand the past, like radiocarbon dating and obviously now with ancient DNA and genomic sequencing. Is there something that feels like the next thing along the spectrum? One would hope in the future—like a thousand years from now when the future AIs are looking back on human history—hopefully there's no lost period. Hopefully, they literally know what kind of gods the tribe in the Near East that basically settled Eurasia worshiped. They would know everything. Along that spectrum, we're making progress. What is the next thing after advances in more genomic sequencing or more samples from different parts of the world? I don't know. The discovery of the ability to extract DNA from ancient human remains was such a shock that we could even do this. We just didn't think we could do this. There's a section in the introduction of my book which was sort of my impression of what it was like. I had a conversation with my PhD supervisor about what it would be like if one somehow could open a cave or a room that was echoing still with languages that don't exist anymore, that are not yet spoken. You could hear the words still echoing somehow after thousands and thousands of years and record that down. That's what ancient DNA is like. It's an unexpected gift from the past that what we thought was an incredibly delicate biological molecule in fact is intact. There must be other such things. It's just hard to imagine what they are. In ancient DNA, there is an extraordinary amount still to do. There is systematic sampling from many, many places in the world where yet there has not yet been sampling. There is systematic sampling in the ability to sample from deep, deep into the past, up to the point where we can begin to decouple these lineages from each other. That will reveal incredible richness and that's something that we should all look forward to. There will be insights that come from that, both in terms of the understanding of individual places—places like many parts of Africa and South Asia and Australia and New Guinea and so on—where we have essentially no data currently in terms of ancient DNA. We’ll also get insight in terms of deep time and the deep lineages that mix together to form us, where we really have no sampling except for the Denisovans and Neanderthals right now. That's a great place to close. David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I highly, highly recommend your book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. It’s just so wild. Basically, a lot of the stuff you learned in grade school at least needs a lot more clarification. Some of it is wrong. The fact that that's the case is crazy. I hope that, in five to ten years, there's a new edition of the book or a new future book you write. For all the questions that you talked about today, which we don't have the answers to, it seems like there's a bunch of progress happening here. I'm very eager to see what the future results look like.…

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