Joseph Henrich

So Charlemagne wants to be crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800, even though there's not very much left of it.

Yeah.

But it was still, you know, an ideal.

And that Carolingian empire actually had real effects because they worked with the pope in order to enforce a lot of the marriage and family program.

And the Carolingians had their own agenda because they were trying to use these marriage and family practices to weaken some of the other aristocratic families.

But they had the religious tools that they could put to work.

And if you didn't have those religious beliefs, then you couldn't put them to work.

Well, I've never actually focused on that.

I mean, I guess my immediate reaction was there must be a better way to transmit the knowledge than the whole conquest.

And population decline, spreading disease and stuff.

So certainly it could have been done better.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Europeans are quite well mixed compared to other populations.

And so we were talking about India.

If you do a principal components analysis, so this two-dimensional plot of the genetic similarity, you can actually see the class and people are pretty spread out.

If you put the Europeans on the same plot, they're well mixed.

Right.

Yeah, good question.