Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
32 transcript-backed records
01 / uncertainty
“We’re getting about 7,200 positions in the DNA that have 50% confidence of being real. Only half of those are real—we don’t know which ones—so 3,600 of them are real.”
02 / belief
“I think the reason he was interested in our laboratory rather than other places was that a focus of our lab has been generating truly large amounts of data from ancient humans.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. This is actively what I’m thinking about all the time right now. There’s a big transformation in terms of the culture of humans 300,000 or 400,000 years ago: this invention of Levallois technology, the ability to make stone tools out of cores.”
04 / belief
“I think we would see their archaeology. There are extraordinary developments in the Americas which are entirely Stone Age.”
05 / belief
“I think there’s more room at the top for a lot of these traits. You can move height extremely in one direction, much more than it is today.”
06 / belief
“I think the model that we’ve put together collectively about the relationships between archaic and modern humans has accreted over time.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if we talked about it before, but I remain very confused about the relationships between archaic and modern humans.”
08 / belief
“The Middle Stone Age and Middle Paleolithic Revolution that they share with modern humans is more fundamentally a part of who they are, in some sense, than we think.”
09 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. Nobody’s thinking about this model right now. It just seems obviously a very natural model to me.”
10 / evaluation
“When you have a single person’s DNA, it provides a tremendous amount of information about history. That’s because when you look at one person’s DNA, it’s not a single person.”
11 / evaluation
“As a result, it’s super hard to detect the signals of adaptive natural selection because they’re a tiny fraction of the total frequency change.”
12 / evaluation
“The reason we think we see much weaker signals for behavioral traits is that behavioral traits, we know from medical studies, are underpinned by much larger numbers of genes than immune traits, which are underpinned by relatively small numbers of genes of strong effect.”
13 / prediction
“We’re in a period of intensified selection. That’s not implausible, because this is a population that went through a huge shock in terms of the way people live and the culture.”
14 / prediction
“I think if you asked Joe prior to this work what the hunter-gatherer selection would be and where their set point for this particular trait would have been… I think he probably wouldn’t have made a very strong prediction, but he would have said, “Maybe you would have expected it to have a high predicted value of this trait because these people were really having to do a lot of things and figure a lot of stuff out.”
15 / evaluation
“The way we think about the history of Europe and the Middle East for the purpose of this study is as an archipelago of little populations in space and time, each pretty isolated from each other.”
16 / commitment
“I think we have to assume that there’s a linkage between the cultural transformations in Africa and Eurasia at this time, and that’s not something the community has really put together with the genetic data.”
17 / evaluation
“The great majority of the ancestors of modern humans, for example in Eurasia, are not from the initial Upper Paleolithic ones. They’re from a later wave from the core in the Near East after 39,000 years ago, that repeoples a place that's been affected by these sparks coming out of the same region.”
18 / observation
“Certainly it's been absolutely central at many periods in human history. But in this key period when a lot of important changes happen—when modern humans develop from Homo habilis and Homo erectus all the way to Homo heidelbergensis and the shared ancestor of Neanderthals, modern humans, and Denisovans— that time period which is when a lot of the important change happened, it's not clear, based on the archaeology and genetics, where that occurred as I understand it.”
19 / belief
“I think you can. People have tried to make animations like this in some ways. But one way to think about it is that there's a huge danger in being too interested in yourself.”
20 / uncertainty
“I don't know. Here’s one thing that is really interesting. A couple of years ago, we published a paper on relatively recent hunter-gatherer populations from mostly eastern and central Africa in order to be able to discern these deep population exchanges that we would really like to know in order to understand human evolution.”
21 / uncertainty
“I don't know. It's very speculative. I'm very tempted to think that there's so many of these groups that some of them would eventually have gone down this route.”
22 / uncertainty
“We don't know that. We just know that today we have it. It could have been only a couple of hundred thousand years ago or 100,000 years ago that these changes happened.”
23 / uncertainty
“The bottleneck occurred well before the mixture with Neanderthals, which is probably somewhere like 50,000 years ago, plus or minus 5000 years or something. We don't know where it occurred.”
24 / uncertainty
“We don’t know the biological underpinning of the differences that modern humans have from our closest living relatives.”
25 / belief
“We think the most likely explanation for what's happening now is that it actually is a male-biased process, but it's one that's interrupted.”
26 / uncertainty
“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.”
27 / prediction
“We think we have many hundreds of places where there's been very strong change in frequency over time, where we're confident, We think there are many thousands where we can see traces, the whole genome is seething with these changes in this period.”
28 / evaluation
“About 10,000 years ago, the ancestors of people in Tasmania—this large island south of Australia—were continuous with the aboriginal populations of Australia. They had fire, but they lost it because it got forgotten somehow.”
29 / evaluation
“In the Netherlands, for example, hunter-gatherers survive for several thousand more years than in the surrounding areas, probably because they're exploiting the wetlands.”
30 / evaluation
“One of the main arguments for the Anatolian hypothesis was that steppe expansions could not have been demographically significant because they were much thinner on the ground than farming expansions.”
31 / evaluation
“The way in which it's a bait-and-switch title is you might read it thinking you're going to learn something about how we became whatever we think is distinctive about us relative to other animals.”
32 / evaluation
“As the quantitative person I am reading this literature, I think people are embarrassed by the implication.”