David Reich

associated with the beginning of agriculture than there are in the hunter-gatherer period.

I think on an individual level, life could have been experienced more harshly, but in terms of survival, different animals have strategies of investing less in their young, but having many more young, or investing more in their young and having

you know, fewer young and maybe the hunter-gatherer strategy might be the latter and the farmer strategy might be having more young and some of them survive longer or something, more of them survive.

And on average, over a lifetime, there might be a stable enough food that if you don't rely on such adaptations, it might be better.

Yeah.

So that's super interesting.

And I'm going to back up a little bit because in my book, I have a section where I describe when we had these findings for the first time and the conversations we had with archaeologists about these findings.

So ancient DNA has been very disruptive to conventional understanding of the past.

And what happened when we had these findings of massive disruption of the local population in Germany about 45 to 4700 years ago, based on arrival of people from the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Sea, was some of our archaeologists, co-authors, really just were very distressed by the implication.

Because after the Second World War, there had been a reaction where people said this initial idea that people had, based on archaeology, where in the beginning of the 20th century, when people would see new types of pots in a certain layer of the excavation, they would argue that this is the arrival of a new people coming through...

invasion or through movement into a region and it's very disruptive event, the arrival of the Corded Ware Complex or the arrival of the Bell Beaker Complex or something like this.

This is a very disruptive event mediated by invasion or so on.

And that was used by, for example, the Nazis to argue that these were spreads of Aryans moving across the landscape and being very disruptive and violent, for example.

The reaction after the Second World War was to say, we don't know this.

In fact, when you see the arrival of new types of material culture, pots, for example, or tools or ways of organizing life, what you might be seeing is more the spread of culture.

You might be seeing, for example, something like people copying use of a cell phone or

Something like this, which can be used by people of very different backgrounds, and it's just, or a new religion spreading, and it's not actually movement of people.

And in fact, how could there be a big movement of people?

You're looking at densely settled Europe with well-developed agriculture.

How could it be that new people coming in from outside