David Reich Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to David Reich. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.
David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)
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?
David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)
There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
It has been said that large staffs are the invariable sign of bad armies.
David Fraser (Knight's Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human 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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
Joseph Goebbels
the single most important source of ancestry across northern Europe today is the Yamnaya or groups closely related to them.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
So it is absolutely clear that modern humans arrived in East Asia and Australia around the same time as they came to Europe.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
I speak English, a language not spoken by my ancestors a hundred years ago.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
One of the handful of places in the world where farming independently began was China.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human 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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
S. Schiffels and R. Durbin, “Inferring Human Population Size and Separation History from Multiple Genome Sequences,” Nature Genetics 46 (2014): 919–25.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
Yet farming was not invented in India. Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
Human history is full of dead ends, and we should not expect the people who lived in any one place in the past to be the direct ancestors of those who live there today.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
His proximity in time to the mixing event makes it possible to obtain a more accurate date of fifty-four thousand to forty-nine thousand years ago.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago?
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The world’s earliest known figurine is a roughly forty-thousand-year-old “lion-man” carved from a woolly mammoth tusk, found in Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The intensification of evidence for modern human behavior after fifty thousand years ago is undeniable, and raises the question of whether biological change contributed to it.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
But the data are sternly consistent: the evidence for Neanderthal interbreeding turns out to be everywhere.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
Were the Neanderthals the only archaic humans who interbred with our ancestors? Or were there other major hybridizations in our past?
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
Our history may not be as simple as the story of a dominant group that was immediately successful wherever it went.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
In 2002, Pääbo and his colleagues discovered two mutations in the gene FOXP2 that seemed to be candidates for propelling the great changes that occurred after around fifty thousand years ago.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)
With this approach, we found that at least some Neanderthal-related genetic material came into the ancestors of present-day non-Africans eighty-six thousand to thirty-seven thousand years ago.20
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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?
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
And yet my perspective as a Jew made me empathize strongly with all the likely Romeos and Juliets over thousands of years of Indian history whose loves across ethnic lines have been quashed by caste.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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?
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
A concern is that when members of groups are directly engaged in scientific investigation of their own history, people’s wish that certain things should be true often colors presentation of the findings.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
But ancient DNA discoveries have rendered the serial founder model untenable. We now know that the present-day structure of populations does not reflect the one that existed many thousands of years ago.34
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly.6 Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
The Yamnaya—who the genetic data show were closely related to the source of the steppe ancestry in both India and Europe—are obvious candidates for spreading Indo-European languages to both these subcontinents of Eurasia.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
Ancient DNA has established major migration and mixture between highly divergent populations as a key force shaping human prehistory, and ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is—or could be—“pure.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses, or pur, and secures land and water for his people, the arya, or Aryans.1
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
But this long-held view about “race” has just in the last few years been proven wrong—and the critique of concepts of race that the new data provide is very different from the classic one that has been developed by anthropologists over the last hundred years.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Kenyon Webster (Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
It is an extraordinary example of how technology—in this case, domestication—contributed to homogenization, not just culturally but genetically. It shows that what is happening with the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution in our own time is not unique in the history of our species.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
David Irving (The War Path)
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.
David Zindell (Splendor)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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
Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past)
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.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
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
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
Paul McGuire (Trumpocalypse: The End-Times President, a Battle Against the Globalist Elite, and the Countdown to Armageddon (Babylon Code))
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)
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.
David Reich (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past)