David Reich

I think that a lot of people we work with are incredibly excited about being able to do this.

Prehistory is a period of time we know so little about.

We have such poor clues.

True archaeologists who are truly dedicated to understanding the past are super thirsty for knowledge about the time periods.

And if a new scientific technique...

becomes available that can probe these times, the true archaeologists who are truly interested in the past get incredibly excited.

And they embrace it as they've embraced previous scientific techniques, such as scientific archaeology, such as isotopic analysis, such as radiocarbon dating.

And that's been my experience with people again and again in archaeology, with people who really want to know about the time periods before writing when at some point one didn't even imagine one could learn anything.

being excited about this new type of information.

I think sometimes people are dug in to particular views of the past that are challenged by the new findings that come from scientific research, such as ancient DNA.

And when the DNA is strictly in opposition to some of these models, that becomes an area of tension.

And I think I have found myself to be proven wrong in a number of cases, including by my own work or by other work amongst my colleagues.

And I hope to be someone who can welcome that.

One of my idols in this field is the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who is a British archaeologist who is responsible for the Anatolian theory of...

of Indo-European origins, the idea that farmers spread Indo-European languages, the language spoken in Armenia and in Iran and in Northern India and in much of Europe today, spread with farming after 8,500 years ago from Anatolia in all different directions.

and that the demographic expansion and economic transformation associated with that spread farming.

It's very plausible, and there was a debate with Maria Gimbutas and others who argued that these languages spread from the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

And 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, and that this is why the steppe could not explain it, even though other linguistic arguments made the steppe seem more plausible.

And so when the genetic revolution happened with regarding to our understanding of Yamnaya expansions and Indo-European origins in 2015, Colin Renfrew at some point said, I was wrong.

I was wrong about this topic.