I had no idea how wild human history was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich.Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out.From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans who killed off all the other human species 70,000 years ago; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley.So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab.Buy David Reich’s fascinating book, Who We Are How We Got Here.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.If you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.Timestamps(00:00:00) – Archaic and modern humans gene flow(00:20:24) – How early modern humans dominated the world(00:39:59) – How bubonic plague rewrote history(00:50:03) – Was agriculture terrible for humans?(00:59:28) – Yamnaya expansion and how populations collide(01:15:39) – “Lost civilizations” and our Neanderthal ancestry(01:31:32) – The DNA Challenge(01:41:38) – David’s career: the genetic vocation Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with David Reich, who is a geneticist of ancient DNA at Harvard. And David's work and his lab's work and his field's work has transformed, like really transformed our understanding of human history and human evolution. I mean, it's very fascinating stuff from many perspectives. In its own light, it's very interesting.
From the perspective of AI, which I plan on asking you about, it's interesting to understand human evolution and what that implies about what the future of AI might look like. Anyways, I'll stop doing the introduction.
David, we were just chatting before we started recording about what new information you've been studying since the book came out about archaic humans and the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals. Can you explain again what you're studying these days?
Well, I think what's very interesting is that what we have data from now are modern humans, the sequences of people living today. And we also have data from Neanderthals who are archaic humans who lived in Western Eurasia for the last couple of hundred thousand years. And we have now sequences from many Neanderthals. And we also have DNA from Denisovans.
Denisovans are archaic humans who were discovered from the DNA. from a finger bone that was found in a cave in Siberia, not anticipated to be a new group of humans, but were sequenced. So we have DNA from these different sources plus bits of DNA from these sources mixed into modern populations.
And based on this, in the last 10 years or 14 years, we collectively have been piecing together an understanding of how modern humans are related to our closest relatives who are now no longer with us in unmixed form, the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and maybe others who are no longer, not yet sampled. And the model that we have is really a model based on accretion.
So we start with the modern humans and then we add the Neanderthals once we obtain that sequence and we add the Denisovans. And then the model doesn't quite fit and we add... other mixture events to make the model fit. And at this point, there's a number of these mixture events that seem increasingly implausible.
They feel to me a little bit like, I don't know if you know the history of models of how the Earth and the Sun relate to each other in ancient Greek times, but there's these epicycles that were attached by the Greek Hellenistic astronomer Ptolemy to make it still possible to describe the movements of the planets and the stars, given that a model where the Sun revolved around the Earth.
And we've added all of these epicycles to make things fit. And one wonders whether there's some pretty fundamental differences that might explain the patterns that are observed.
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