David Reich Quotes

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.

Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?

We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.

The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.

Seventy thousand years ago, the world was populated by very diverse human forms, and we have genomes from an increasing number of them, allowing us to peer back to a time when humanity was much more variable than it is today.

Prior to the genome revolution, I, like most others, had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect the deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier.

Ten generations back, for example, the number of ancestral stretches of DNA is around 757 but the number of ancestors is 1,024, guaranteeing that each person has several hundred ancestors from whom he or she has received no DNA whatsoever.

What you get, you don't want, and what you want, you don't get. David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich (Focal Point Publications, 2014), Pp. 67

The genome revolution has shown that we are not living in particularly special times when viewed from the perspective of the great sweep of the human past. Mixtures of highly divergent groups have happened time and again, homogenizing populations just as divergent from one another as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.

It has been said that large staffs are the invariable sign of bad armies.

As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals. If we aspire to treat all individuals with respect regardless of the extraordinary differences that exist among individuals within a population, it should not be so much more of an effort to accommodate the smaller but still significant average differences across populations.

The avalanche of new data that has become available in the wake of the genome revolution has shown just how wrong the tree metaphor is for summarizing the relationship among modern human populations.

So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.

Tracing back fifty thousand years in the past, our genome is scattered into more than one hundred thousand ancestral stretches of DNA, greater than the number of people who lived in any population at that time, so we inherit DNA from nearly everyone in our ancestral population who had a substantial number of offspring at times that remote in the past.

A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today.

Constant effort to struggle against our demons—against the social and behavioral habits that are built into our biology—is one of the ennobling behaviors of which we humans as a species are capable, and which has been critical to many of our triumphs and achievements

But “ancestry” is not a euphemism, nor is it synonymous with “race.” Instead, the term is born of an urgent need to come up with a precise language to discuss genetic differences among people at a time when scientific developments have finally provided the tools to detect them.

The right way to deal with the inevitable discovery of substantial differences across populations is to realize that their existence should not affect the way we conduct ourselves. As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals

Well, I thought, climbing slowly out of the slit trench, the shells will catch us above ground now. But if you have to go, you have to go. F Company’s in trouble, and we have to help them. We’re in reserve, so we have to go. And if we’re shelled, we’re shelled. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

S. Schiffels and R. Durbin, “Inferring Human Population Size and Separation History from Multiple Genome Sequences,” Nature Genetics 46 (2014): 919–25.

One of the handful of places in the world where farming independently began was China.

I speak English, a language not spoken by my ancestors a hundred years ago.

Evidence of the antiquity of inequality should motivate us to deal in a more sophisticated way with it today, and to behave a little better in our own time.

for many biological traits—including cognitive ones—there is expected to be a higher proportion of sub-Saharan Africans with extreme genetically predicted abilities.

This is my model too: to build a factory, and then to commandeer it to answer deep questions about the past.

All told, more than half the world’s population derives between 5 percent and 40 percent of their genomes from the Ancient North Eurasians.

India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided.

Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia.

Our history may not be as simple as the story of a dominant group that was immediately successful wherever it went.

We are now producing data so fast that the time lag between data production and publication is longer than the time it takes to double the data in the field.

So it is absolutely clear that modern humans arrived in East Asia and Australia around the same time as they came to Europe.

the single most important source of ancestry across northern Europe today is the Yamnaya or groups closely related to them.

Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago?

Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.

To understand who we are, we need to approach the past with humility and with an open mind, and to be ready to change our minds out of respect for the power of hard data.

Since 2009, though, whole-genome data have begun to challenge long-held views in archaeology, history, anthropology, and even linguistics—and to resolve controversies in those fields.

Today there is an intricate caste system that shapes the lives of many people within Ethiopia, with elaborate rules preventing marriage between groups with different traditional roles.

The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe—Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia—had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry.

These numbers imply that the contribution of European American men to the genetic makeup of the present-day African American population is about four times that of European American women.

The association between steppe genetic ancestry and people assigned to the Corded Ware archaeological culture through graves and artifacts is not simply a hypothesis. It is now a proven fact.

Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans. But we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. The stories we heard later; the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners; the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors; “Johnny Got His Gun” and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I could not look into the future.

After a grenade explosion in a room, could the exact position of each object prior to the explosion be reconstructed by piecing together the scattered remains and studying the shrapnel in the wall?

We scientists are conditioned by the system of research funding to justify what we do in terms of practical application to health or technology. But shouldn’t intrinsic curiosity be valued for itself?

If the ancient DNA studies of the last few years have shown anything clearly, it is that the geographic distribution of people living today is often misleading about the dwelling places of their ancestors.

The genomic evidence of the antiquity of inequality—between men and women, and between people of the same sex but with greater and lesser power—is sobering in light of the undeniable persistence of inequality today.

The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking.

Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture

Evidence of early modern humans outside of Africa well before fifty thousand years ago includes the morphologically modern skeletons in Skhul and Qafzeh in present-day Israel that date to between around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago.

the multidimensionality of human traits, the great variation that exists among individuals, and the extent to which hard work and upbringing can compensate for genetic endowment, the only sensible approach is to celebrate every person and every population as an extraordinary realization of our human genius and to give each person every chance to succeed, regardless of the particular average combination of genetic propensities he or she happens to display. For me, the natural response to the

If as scientists we willfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

I have spent some space discussing errors in Wade’s book because I feel it is important to explain that just because many academics have been engaged in trying to maintain an implausible orthodoxy, it does not mean that every unorthodox “heretic” is right.

The genome bloggers take pleasure in pointing out contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indis​tingu​ishab​ility of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading.

Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago? Today, ancient DNA is enabling this kind of detailed reconstruction of deep relationships among ancient human populations.

The shells had landed on the cobblestone road. "Sonsofbitches," Wiseman muttered. We looked up and grinned at each other. "Here they come again!" Sitting in an inch of water. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, held my breath, and clutched my elbows with my arms around my knees. Three more shells came in, low and angry, and burst in the orchard. "They're walking 'em towards us," I whispered. I felt as if a giant with exploding iron fingers were looking for me, tearing up the ground as he came. I wanted to strike at him, to kill him, to stop him before he ripped into me, but I could do nothing. Sit and take it, sit and take it. The giant raked the orchard and tore up the roads and stumbled toward us in a terrible blind wrath as we sat in our hole with our heads between our legs and curses on our lips.

in our data around 90 percent of males who carry Yamnaya ancestry have a Y-chromosome type of steppe origin that was absent in Iberia prior to that time. It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the steppe.

we need to try to make progress beyond the situation we are facing right now, in which many researchers are reluctant to undertake any studies of Native American genetic variation for fear of criticism, and because of the extraordinary time commitment that would be required

Writing now, I shudder to think of Watson, or of Wade, or their forebears, behind my shoulder. The history of science has revealed, again and again, the danger of trusting one’s instincts or of being led astray by one’s biases—of being too convinced that one knows the truth.

To understand the power of the genome revolution for undermining old stereotypes about identity and building up a new basis for identity, consider how its finding of repeated mixture in human history has destroyed nearly every argument that used to be made for biologically based nationalism.

Although they have not left unmixed descendants, the Ancient North Eurasians have in fact been extraordinarily successful. If we put together all the genetic material that they have contributed to present-day populations, they account for literally hundreds of millions of genomes’ worth of people.

a perennial debate among historians is the extent to which the human past is shaped by single individuals whose actions leave a disproportionate impact on subsequent generations. Star Cluster analysis provides objective information about the importance of extreme inequalities in power at different points in the past.

By computing the proportion of European male and female ancestors that would be necessary to produce the observed difference in European ancestry between chromosome X and the autosomes, Bryc was able to estimate the separate male (38 percent) and female (10 percent) proportion of European ancestors in African Americans.

He acknowledged that the reliance on racial and ethnic categories is useful given our poor present knowledge, but predicted that the future will involve testing individuals directly for what mutations they have, and doing away altogether with racial classification as a basis for making individualized decisions about care.

It is also possible that in this period, individual women began to accumulate more power than they ever had before. Yet because it is biologically impossible for a woman, even a very powerful one, to have an extremely large number of children, the genetic effects of social inequality are much easier to detect on the male line.

G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56.

a result, the most efficient way for evolutionary forces to spread beneficial mutations has often been to invent mutations anew rather than to import them from other populations.44 The limited migration rates between some regions of Africa over the last few thousand years has resulted in what Ralph and Coop have described as a “tessellated” pattern of population structure in Africa. Tessellation is a mathematical term for a landscape of tiles—regions of genetic homogeneity demarcated by sharp boundaries—that is expected to form when the process of homogenization due to gene exchanges among neighbors competes with the process of generating new advantageous variations in each region.

For the great majority of traits, there is, as Lewontin said, much more variation within populations than across populations. This means that individuals with extreme high or low values of the great majority of traits can occur in any population. But it does not preclude the existence of subtler, average differences in traits across populations.

Upper Paleolithic technology itself was not essential to the successful spread of modern humans into Eurasia after around fifty thousand years ago. It was something more profound than Upper Paleolithic stone tool technology—an inventiveness and adaptability of which the technology was just a manifestation—that allowed these expanding modern humans to prevail everywhere, including in the east.

But studies of pollen records in Denmark and elsewhere show that around this time, large parts of northern Europe were transformed from partial forest to grasslands, suggesting that the Corded Ware newcomers may have cut down forests, reengineered parts of the landscape to be more like the steppe, and carved out a niche for themselves that previous peoples of the region had never fully claimed.

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. The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.

On the one side there are beliefs about the nature of the differences that are grounded in bigotry and have little basis in reality. On the other side there is the idea that any biological differences among populations are so modest that as a matter of social policy they can be ignored and papered over. It is time to move on from this paralyzing false dichotomy and to figure out what the genome is actually telling us.

But we have at best a superficial knowledge of the historical and archaeological and linguistic background of any topic we work on, and as knowledge grows, a deeper understanding of each region and the specific questions associated with it will be needed to make progress. Over the next two decades, I expect that ancient DNA specialists will be hired into every serious department of anthropology and archaeology, even history

What will happen once we have genome-wide data from a thousand European farmers living shortly after the transition to agriculture? Comparing the results of a scan for recent natural selection in these individuals to the same scan performed in present-day Europeans should make it possible to understand whether the pace and nature of human adaptation has changed between preagricultural times and the time since the transition to agriculture.

0.8-standard-deviation increase in the average sprinting ability in West Africans would be expected to lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentile point in Europeans. But an alternative explanation that would predict the same magnitude of effect is that there is simply more variation in sprinting ability in people of West African ancestry—with more people of both very high and very low abilities.

A. Okbay et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies 74 Loci Associated with Educational Attainment,” Nature 533 (2016): 539–42; M. T. Lo et al., “Genome-Wide Analyses for Personality Traits Identify Six Genomic Loci and Show Correlations with Psychiatric Disorders,” Nature Genetics 49 (2017): 152–56; G. Davies et al., “Genome-Wide Association Study of Cognitive Functions and Educational Attainment in UK Biobank (N=112 151),” Molecular Psychiatry 21 (2016): 758–67.

So how much Neanderthal ancestry do people outside of Africa carry today? We found that non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1 percent Neanderthal in origin,24 with the higher numbers in East Asians and the lower numbers in Europeans, despite the fact that Europe was the homeland of the Neanderthals.25 We now know that at least part of the explanation is dilution. Ancient DNA from Europeans who lived before nine thousand years ago shows that pre-farming Europeans had just as much Neanderthal ancestry as East Asians do today.26 The reduction in Neanderthal ancestry in present-day Europeans is due to the fact that they harbor some of their ancestry from a group of people who separated from all other non-Africans prior to the mixture with Neanderthals (the story of this early-splitting group revealed by ancient DNA is told in part II of this book). The spread of farmers with this inheritance diluted the Neanderthal ancestry in Europe, but not in East 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.

more plausible explanation is that in this period, it began to be possible for single males to accumulate so much power that they could not only gain access to large numbers of females, but they could also pass on their social prestige to subsequent generations and ensure that their male descendants were similarly successful. This process caused the Y chromosomes these males carried to increase in frequency generation after generation, leaving a genetic scar that speaks volumes about past societies.

compiling the information on the number of years of education for over four hundred thousand people of European ancestry whose genomes have been surveyed in the course of various disease studies, Daniel Benjamin and colleagues identified seventy-four genetic variations each of which has overwhelming evidence of being more common in people with more years of education than in people with fewer years even after controlling for such possibly confounding factors as heterogeneity in the study population.25

once. But most of the present-day population structure of Africa is shaped by the agricultural expansions of the past few thousand years, and so focusing on describing Africa’s mesmerizing diversity paradoxically does the project of understanding the big picture of humans in Africa a disservice just as much as focusing on the common origins of all modern humans in Africa does Africa a disservice. We need to stop focusing on describing the veil and instead rip it away, and for this we need ancient DNA.

After reading the Passover story, Jews intuitively understand how within their population, numbering millions of people, they are related to each other and the past. The story allows Jews to think of those millions of coreligionists as direct relations—and to treat them with equal respect and seriousness even if they do not understand their exact relationships—to break out from the trap of thinking of the world from the perspective of the relatively small families we were raised in. For me, the multitude

The main reason we don’t know as much about the modern human story in Africa is lack of research. Human history over the last tens of thousands of years in Africa is an integral part of the story of our species. Focusing on Africa as the place where our species originated, while it might seem to highlight the importance of Africa, paradoxically does Africa a disservice by drawing attention away from the question of how populations that remained in Africa got to be the way they are today. With ancient and modern DNA, we can rectify

DNA from central Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and Africa will reveal equally great surprises. The product of this effort will be an ancient DNA atlas of humanity, sampled densely through time and space. This will be a resource that I think will rival the first maps of the globe made between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of its contribution to human knowledge. The atlas will not answer every question about population history, but it will provide a framework, a baseline to which we will always return when studying new archaeological sites.

it became clear to us that the great majority of Native Americans, from populations in northern North America down to southern South America, can be broadly described as branches of one tree, forming a sharp contrast to patterns of population relationships in Eurasia. Most populations branched cleanly off the central trunk with little subsequent mixture. The splits proceeded roughly in a north-to-south direction, consistent with the idea that as populations traveled south, groups peeled off and settled, remaining in approximately the same place ever since.

At the time of this writing, our knowledge of East Asian population history is relatively limited compared to that of West Eurasia because less than 5 percent of published ancient DNA data comes from East Asia. The difference reflects the fact that ancient DNA technology was invented in Europe, and it is nearly impossible for researchers to export samples from China and Japan because of government restrictions or a preference that studies be led by local scientists. This has meant that these regions have missed out on the first few years of the ancient DNA revolution.

We cannot deny the existence of substantial average genetic differences across populations, not just in traits such as skin color, but also in bodily dimensions, the ability to efficiently digest starch or milk sugar, the ability to breathe easily at high altitudes, and susceptibility to particular diseases. These differences are just the beginning. I expect that the reason we don’t know about a much larger number of differences among human populations is that studies with adequate statistical power to detect them have not yet been carried out. For the great majority of traits,

The future for ancient DNA laboratories that I find appealing is based on a model that has emerged among radiocarbon dating laboratories. For example, the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit processes large numbers of samples for a fee, and uses this income stream to support a factory that churns out routine dates and produces data more cheaply, efficiently, and at higher quality than would be possible if its scientists limited themselves to their own questions. But its scientists then piggyback on the juggernaut of the radiocarbon dating factory they have built to do cutting-edge science,

Today there are hundreds of millions of people in the Americas with African ancestry, the largest numbers in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. The mixing of three highly divergent populations in the Americas—Europeans, indigenous people, and sub-Saharan Africans—that began almost five hundred years ago continues to this day. Even in the United States, where European Americans are still in the majority, African Americans and Latinos comprise around a third of the population. Nearly all individuals from these mixed populations derive large stretches of their genomes from ancestors who lived on different continents fewer than twenty generations ago.

At the conference, Hitler mapped out plans for a vote to be held throughout Germany and Austria on April 10, to confirm the Anschluss. The question on the ballot paper was: ‘Do you accept Adolf Hitler as our Führer, and do you thus accept the reunification of Austria with the German Reich as effected on March 13, 1938?’ Unlike Schuschnigg's phoney plebiscite, it was a genuinely secret ballot. The result staggered even Hitler: of 49,493,028 entitled to vote, 49,279,104 had cast votes, and of these 99.08 percent had voted ‘Yes’ – altogether 48,751,587 adults had stated their support of Hitler's action. This was a unanimity of almost embarrassing dimensions. His

But this consensus view of many anthropologists and geneticists has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy that the biological differences among human populations are so modest that they should in practice be ignored—and moreover, because the issues are so fraught, that study of biological differences among populations should be avoided if at all possible. It should come as no surprise, then, that some anthropologists and sociologists see genetic research into differences across populations, even if done in a well-intentioned way, as problematic. They are concerned that work on such differences will be used to validate concepts of race that should be considered discredited.

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws. That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us. And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor. Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin. Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause. We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.

The concern is so acute that the political scientist Jacqueline Stevens has even suggested that research and even emails discussing biological differences across populations should be banned, and that the United States “should issue a regulation prohibiting its staff or grantees…from publishing in any form—including internal documents and citations to other studies—claims about genetics associated with variables of race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other category of population that is observed or imagined as heritable unless statistically significant disparities between groups exist and description of these will yield clear benefits for public health, as deemed by a standing committee to which these claims must be submitted and authorized.

There is also a second great area of unrealized common cause between Native Americans and geneticists—the potential to use ancient DNA to measure the sizes of populations that existed prior to 1492 by looking at variation within the genome of ancient samples. This is a critical issue for Native Americans, as there is evidence for about a tenfold collapse in population size in the Americas following the arrival of Europeans and the waves of epidemic disease that Europeans brought, leading to the dissolution of previously established complex societies. The relatively small population sizes that European colonialists encountered when they arrived in the Americas were used to provide moral justification for the annexation of Native American lands.

It is in the area of shedding light on human migrations—rather than in explaining human biology—that the genome revolution has already been a runaway success. In the last few years, the genome revolution—turbocharged by ancient DNA—has revealed that human populations are related to each other in ways that no one expected. The story that is emerging differs from the one we learned as children, or from popular culture. It is full of surprises: massive mixtures of differentiated populations; sweeping population replacements and expansions; and population divisions in prehistoric times that did not fall along the same lines as population differences that exist today. It is a story about how our interconnected human family was formed, in myriad ways never imagined.

To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system—the twelve-year reign of the Nazis—can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the political theorist Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.” “It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration,” wrote the philosopher David Livingstone Smith, who has studied cultures of dehumanization. “It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.

Archaeological studies have documented how beginning around four thousand years ago, a new culture spread out of the region at the border of Nigeria and Cameroon in west-central Africa. People from this culture lived at the boundary of the forest and expanding savanna and developed a highly productive set of crops that was capable of supporting dense populations.15 By about twenty-five hundred years ago they had spread as far as Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and mastered iron toolmaking technology,16 and by around seventeen hundred years ago they had reached southern Africa.17 The consequence of this expansion is that the great majority of people in eastern, central, and southern Africa speak Bantu languages, which are most diverse today in present-day Cameroon, consistent with the theory that proto-Bantu languages originated there and were spread by the culture that also

But on the Y chromosome, the studies found a pattern that was strikingly different. In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago.18 The time around five thousand years ago coincides with the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool.19 This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age, a period of greatly increased human mobility and wealth accumulation, facilitated by the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel and wheeled vehicles, and the accumulation of rare metals like copper and tin, which are the ingredients of bronze and had to be imported from hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

In 1940, Fabian socialist H. G. Wells wrote his own The New World Order, popularizing the phrase. The book advocated unification of the nations of the world to end war and bring global peace. Since the late eighteenth century, when the Illuminati first called for the New World Order, many globalists have openly advocated its creation, including President Woodrow Wilson, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President George H. W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, banker David Rockefeller, and Vice President Joe Biden. “The world’s elite deal in only one commodity—power,” Marrs wrote in The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America. “They seek to gain and maintain the controlling power that comes from great wealth, usually gained through the monopoly of ownership over basic resources. Politics and social issues matter little to the globalist ruling elite, who move smoothly between corporate business and government service… It is this unswerving attention to commerce and banking that lies behind nearly all modern events. It is the basis for a ‘New World Order’ mentioned by both Hitler and former President George H. W. Bush.”19 Over the last century, the elite have engaged in a massive, covert campaign to prepare humanity for the New World Order.

The period before fifty thousand years ago was a busy time in Eurasia, with multiple human populations arriving from Africa beginning at least 1.8 million years ago. These populations split into sister groups, diverged, and mixed again with each other and with new arrivals. Most of those groups have since gone extinct, at least in their “pure” forms. We have known for a while, from skeletons and archaeology, that there was some impressive human diversity prior to the migration of modern humans out of Africa. However, we did not know before ancient DNA was extracted and studied that Eurasia was a locus of human evolution that rivaled Africa. Against this background, the fierce debates about whether modern humans and Neanderthals interbred when they met in western Eurasia—which have been definitively resolved in favor of interbreeding events that made a contribution to billions of people living today—seem merely anticipatory. Europe is a peninsula, a modest-sized tip of Eurasia. Given the wide diversity of Denisovans and Neanderthals—already represented in DNA sequences from at least three populations separated from each other by hundreds of thousands of years, namely Siberian Denisovans, Australo-Denisovans, and Neanderthals—the right way to view these populations is as members of a loosely related family of highly evolved archaic humans who inhabited a vast region of Eurasia.

To understand why it is no longer an option for geneticists to lock arms with anthropologists and imply that any differences among human populations are so modest that they can be ignored, go no further than the “genome bloggers.” Since the genome revolution began, the Internet has been alive with discussion of the papers written about human variation, and some genome bloggers have even become skilled analysts of publicly available data. Compared to most academics, the politics of genome bloggers tend to the right—Razib Khan17 and Dienekes Pontikos18 post on findings of average differences across populations in traits including physical appearance and athletic ability. The Eurogenes blog spills over with sometimes as many as one thousand comments in response to postings on the charged topic of which ancient peoples spread Indo-European languages,19 a highly sensitive issue since as discussed in part II, narratives about the expansion of Indo-European speakers have been used as a basis for building national myths,20 and sometimes have been abused as happened in Nazi Germany.21 The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking. The genome bloggers take pleasure in pointing out contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indis​tingu​ishab​ility of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading.