David Reich

But...

I find that confusing as a statement.

It seems that somehow some set of characteristics, it's tempting to think that some sort of cultural or biological, but more likely cultural characteristics are in place and seated already at the time of the last ice age, such as when the reemergence happens, this happens in multiple places simultaneously.

That culture is very old in the Americas.

Yeah, it's tempting to think that.

So I'm very confused about this personally.

People say that the last 10,000 years are very unique on a scale of millions of years.

If that's true, maybe we're in a very special time.

That is somehow a period of warmth and stability of climate that's unprecedented for two million years.

Maybe that's true.

But the other way people often say it is that we're in these cyclical periods of a few tens of thousands of years.

And the Holocene, the last 12,000 years or so, is a period of warming.

And then there's a period of a couple of tens of thousands of years, which is the last ice age.

And then there's before that, there's a few tens of thousands of years of warming.

And that's when we sample...

the Neanderthals, the late Neanderthals from.

And then before that, there's another stage of cooling.

And then before that, another stage of warming.

So this is marine isotope stage one, three, five, seven, nine are the warm periods.

We're in one now.