Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
10 transcript-backed records
01 / 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.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / evaluation
“As the quantitative person I am reading this literature, I think people are embarrassed by the implication.”