Ancestry Models

In Lazarides et. al. 2016, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/06/16/059311.full.pdf,  modeling ANI (Ancestral North Indian)

While the Early/Middle Bronze Age ‘Yamnaya’-related group (Steppe_EMBA) is a good genetic match (together with Neolithic Iran) for ANI, the later Middle/Late Bronze Age steppe population (Steppe_MLBA) is not.

However, in Narasimhan et. al. 2018, Steppe_MLBA is seen to be a better match, and Steppe_EMBA is ruled out.  Underlying it are different other components of ancestry that are used.

In Lazarides,  the other components of ancestry are Iran_N(eolithic), Onge, and Han.
In Narasimhan, the other components of ancestry are Iran agriculturist (same as Iran_N?) , AASI (another name for Onge), and a composite of "Indus_Periphery" and Swat SGPT and early historic individuals.  

Why is it important? Because if these genetic findings are correlated with language (a big if!) and  because if the Rg Veda is taken seriously, e.g., its mentions of the Saraswati River, then a post-IVC arrival of I.E. is untenable.  Likewise with the Vedic Indra-Varuna-Mitra- Nasatyas in the Mitanni documents.  Steppe_EMBA doesn't rule out a pre-IVC-collapse arrival; but Steppe_MLBA pretty much does.

One should note that Steppe_EMBA itself lies on the cline between Iran_Chalcolithic and European Hunter Gatherer, and Steppe_MLBA is largely Steppe_EMBA but on the Steppe_EMBA - European_MidNeolithic_Chalcolithic cline.  (see Lazarides 2016 for this, excerpted diagrams here).
But in contemplating the difference between Lazarides and Narasimhan, it seems the Siberian Hunter Gather component is what makes the difference. 

A question would be - do Steppe_EMBA and Steppe_MLBA have "similar ancestry profiles"? Apparently in the context of the Narasimhan et. al. model, for the purpose of modeling ANI they do not.  Yet, for the purpose of modeling ANI,  Indus_Periphery and Swat individuals have a similar ancestry profile.  

Some history of astronomy links

Dennis Rawlins, Contributions.
Neptune's Discovery: The British Case for Co-Prediction
SciAm article (subscription required) The Case of the Pilfered Planet

Comment: Re: confused

Looks like my IntenseDebate comments system is hosed. At least it doesn't work consistently.

So, to reply to a comment until I figure out how to make things work:

Suppose you said that X and Y had a similar ancestry profile of a Norwegian and Italian mix, except that Y also had 22% Japanese ancestry. It makes one wonder, what does a "similar ancestry profile" mean?

How about "X is half tin and half copper" vs. "Y consists of equal parts of tin and copper with 22% arsenic"? Seems like the obvious analogy to me.

---
This analogy doesn't work for me for several reasons:

First of all, X and Y are different alloys, some variety of bronze versus arsenical bronze.

Next: the X itself consists of 14-42% AASI (and the rest Iranian farmer and Siberian Hunter Gatherer)

So this is like saying X is 14% tin and 86% copper or 42% tin and 58% copper and Y is various proportions of tin, copper and arsenic (arsenic averaging 22%).

Next: What does "similar ancestry profile" mean of X and Y when X and Y don't share at least 22% of their ancestors?

Next: since when is 78% of a genome similar to 100% of another? 

Next: A majority of Indians are somewhere on the ANI/ASI cline with little other admixture.  Would you say they "share the same ancestry profile"?

Next: Out of 246 groups of Indians that this pre-print had genetic profiles for, they excluded 106. Some for paucity of data; but others for having something more than just ANI/ASI.  i.e., for that part of the analysis, these 106 groups did not have "similar ancestry profiles".

Next: just as a practical thing - if someone said, I have the same ancestry profile as European Americans but also 22% African - well, unless they are "passing" this someone has gone from being white to being black.  Trump supporters (well, some of them) would likely riot over a statement that they share an ancestry profile.

---
IMO, on an entirely different tack, I get a suspicion that some of the genetics people don't really understand the algorithms that underlie their computational analytic apparatus; it is largely black-boxes to them.

---
 PS: Let's get to some amusing applications of "similarity".

These two geometric figures are similar though one is triangle and the other is a quadrilateral.

"I'll offer you a similar deal as I offered him, except you'll pay 22% more."

Confused: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia

The recent preprint under discussion: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia, has the passages below.

Suppose you said that X and Y had a similar ancestry profile of a Norwegian and Italian mix, except that Y also had 22% Japanese ancestry.  It makes one wonder, what does a "similar ancestry profile" mean? 

 

276 Third, between 3100-2200 BCE we observe an outlier at the BMAC site of Gonur, as well as two
277 outliers from the eastern Iranian site of Shahr-i-Sokhta, all with an ancestry profile similar to 41
278 ancient individuals from northern Pakistan who lived approximately a millennium later in the
279 isolated Swat region of the northern Indus Valley (1200-800 BCE). These individuals had
280 between 14-42% of their ancestry related to the AASI and the rest related to early Iranian
281 agriculturalists and West_Siberian_HG. Like contemporary and earlier samples from Iran/Turan
282 we find no evidence of Steppe-pastoralist-related ancestry in these samples. In contrast to all
283 other Iran/Turan samples, we find that these individuals also had negligible Anatolian
284 agriculturalist-related admixture, suggesting that they might be migrants from a population
285 further east along the cline of decreasing Anatolian agriculturalist ancestry. While we do not
286 have access to any DNA directly sampled from the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), based on (a)
287 archaeological evidence of material culture exchange between the IVC and both BMAC to its
288 north and Shahr-i-Sokhta to its east (27), (b) the similarity of these outlier individuals to post-
289 IVC Swat Valley individuals described in the next section (27), (c) the presence of substantial
290 AASI admixture in these samples suggesting that they are migrants from South Asia, and (d) the
291 fact that these individuals fit as ancestral populations for present-day Indian groups in qpAdm
292 modeling, we hypothesize that these outliers were recent migrants from the IVC.

449 Finally, we examined our Swat Valley time transect from 1200 BCE to 1 CE. While the earliest
450 group of samples (SPGT) is genetically very similar to the Indus_Periphery samples from the
451 sites of Gonur and Shahr-i-Sokhta, they also differ significantly in harboring Steppe_MLBA
452 ancestry (~22%). This provides direct evidence for Steppe_MLBA ancestry being integrated into
453 South Asian groups in the 2nd millennium BCE, and is also consistent with the evidence of
454 southward expansions of Steppe_MLBA groups through Turan at this time via outliers from the
455 main BMAC cluster from 2000-1500 BCE. Later samples from the Swat time transect from the
456 1st millennium BCE had higher proportions of Steppe and AASI derived ancestry more similar to
457 that found on the Indian Cline, showing that there was an increasing percolation of Steppe
458 derived ancestry into the region and additional admixture with the ASI through time.

The Mosaic Distinction

Jaideep Prabhu in firstpost.com:

Theo Sundermeier, professor of theology at Heidelberg University, makes an insightful distinction in his Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext between primary and secondary religions. The former, Sundermeier explains, developed over hundreds, if not thousands, of years, usually within a single culture, society and language with which the religion is inextricably intertwined. These would include the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions as easily as Hinduism. The latter category of religions are those that originate from an act of revelation or foundation and are monotheistic, universal, and of the Book. Secondary religions denounce primary religions as paganism, a collection of superstitions, and idolatry. The three Abrahamic faiths fit this description well.

Note the Primary and Secondary Religions.

This seemingly obvious categorisation holds an evolution of great import. From primary to secondary, religion changes from being a system that is irrevocably embedded in the institutional, linguistic, and cultural conditions of a society to become an autonomous system that can transcend political, ethnic, and other boundaries and transplant itself into any alien culture. As Jan Assmann, an Egyptologist at the University of Konstanz, describes in his Die Mosaische Unterscheidung: oder der Preis des Monotheismus, this change, which he calls the Mosaic distinction, is hardly about whether there is one god or there are many gods, but about truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance.

Note Jan Assmann (thanks to a friend!)

Assmann argues that the Mosaic distinction created an entirely new category of truth - faith - and draws an interesting parallel with a scientific development that Werner Jäger, a 20th century classicist at Harvard University, described as the Parmenidian distinction in Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture.

 .....

Before the Mosaic distinction, there were four kinds of fundamental truths: experiential (water is wet), mathematical (two plus two is four), historical (the life of Mokshagundam Visveswaraya), and truths conducive to life (ethics). The Mosaic distinction cleaved faith from knowledge and installed the former as a fifth truth that claimed knowledge of the highest authority even if it could not be verified on scientific grounds.

Read the whole essay, please. Here's another key passage.

For the first time in history, justice, law, and freedom are declared to be the central themes of religion and the sole prerogative of god. Though technically true, this is a misleading statement. The monotheistic point of view is that since god is the true authority, only he can be the final arbiter of justice; the temporal laws of man are inferior to the divine. The story of the exodus from Egypt ties in well with ideas of liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. Furthermore, their escape, divinely sanctioned, also took the power to sit in judgment over them away from the pharaoh and invested it in god. The Shemot, or the Book of Exodus, is thus more concerned with political theology than with idolatry (the story of the golden calf). Thus, in monotheism, the political role of justice was given to religion. The authority of the king was superseded by that of the high clergy, god's representatives on earth, as papal power well into the Early Modern era demonstrated. This fusion of the political with the religious in secondary religions, but not primary belief systems, is exactly what makes secularism a requirement solely of the former in the modern era.

In pagan religions, justice was of this world for even the gods were of this world. A Roman or an Egyptian who had been wronged could appeal to the local magistrate for justice for its own sake without reference to the gods. Indeed, in Hinduism, dharma is not only properly a function of kaala, desha, and paristhiti but the chaturanga purusharthas mention it along with artha and kama as one of the three goals of mortal life. The ultimate goal, moksha, is beyond short-term earthly consideration. As Hindi novelist Gurudutt explains in Dharma tatha samajwad and Dharma, sanskriti, aur rajya, the individual is free to interact with the divine in a manner of his choosing but wherever he must interact with another, their conduct must be guided by the precepts of dharma, artha, and kama. Ethics and the law were intrinsically this-worldy and had no business to be under divine purview. Thus, justice, or ethics at least, existed much before secondary religions came on the scene but were not truly a part of the religious system.

 kaala = era;  desha = country, place,  paristhiti = circumstances (e.g., historical/social/political circumstances); chaturanga = four-fold; purushartha = object of human pursuit, goal of life;  artha = material prosperity; kama = pleasure; dharma = right way of living, human behaviors considered to be necessary to maintain right order in the universe,  duty, etc. (difficult to translate); samajwad = socialism; sanskriti = civilization, rajya ~= politics.

If you've come this far, here's a bonus for you:
(PDF file) Jan Assman, The Mosaic Distinction, Israel, Egypt and the Invention of Paganism.

The space "severed or cloven" by the Mosaic distinction was not simply the space of religion in general then, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this a "counterreligion" because it not only constructed but rejected and repudiated everything that went before and everything outside itself as "paganism".  It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement.  Whereas polytheism or rather, "cosmotheism" rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counterreligion blocked intercultural translatability.  False gods cannot be translated.

Primary and secondary religion; religion and counterreligion!  Where does it end?  

A comment from @bennedose

From here (copied in full):

This paper has some of the following issues which I find interesting. I believe that geneticists are mistaken when any good work that they do is mixed with the unscientific hypotheses about language spread that linguists have established for the last 150 years. Genes do not code for language. Genetic fact should not be mixed up with tenuous linguistic hypotheses.

1.The linguistics dates of IE spread are taken from David Anthony (ref no 46) whose assumptions linking the archaeology of Andronvo grave pits and Sintashta culture with grossly erroneous translations of the Rig Veda are untenable. In particular Anthony’s linking of Rig Veda 10:18 with Kurgans is based on an incorrect translation, apart from other assumptions.

2. This paper reinforces what was earlier suggested by Reich et al and Priya Moorjani (refs 44 and 45) that ASI-ANI mix occurred in the last 2000-4000 years ago. Both this paper and the earlier Reich paper suggest that there was lack of mixing of ASI and ANI before that. In fact this paper says that ASI and ANI were "largely unformed) 4000 years ago (page 14).

Now here is what is odd. If ANI and ASI ancestry represent IE speakers and Dravidian language speakers (respectively) and if they started mixing as recently as in the last 4000 years when the migrations are said to have occurred, but the admixture had NOT occurred before that date - it tears down all assumptions of a "Caste system" having been created by the migration of ANI/IE speakers displacing ASI/Dravidian language speakers. If they were mixing, there were not remaining separate. It is as simple as that.

If one assumes (probably wrongly) that IE languages came to India about 1500-2000 BCE then it appears that the real mixing of ASI and ANI started AFTER those people came contrary to all assertions by linguists that endogamy commenced in India with the arrival of IE speakers in India.

3. Of course all this ignores and fails to explain how the oldest IE language Sanskrit has references to hydronyms and the riverine geography of IVC area from 3000 BCE and the start of aridity in 2000 BCE - adding to the growing body of evidence that linguistic hypotheses have depended upon dubious assumptions.

It is notable that German and Greek have perhaps 25-40 % Indo-European language content, the rest of the words having a non Indo-European or pre- IE origin. However Sanskrit, the oldest known IE language has 97% Indo-European word content. This anomaly cannot be explained by saying that no language was spoken in India before the arrival of IE languages in 1500 BCE.

4. This paper makes statistical predictions about the entire Indian subcontinent with zero samples from IVC or anything east or south of that (as clearly admitted in the paper). The closest "south Asia" samples are from Swat in Pakistan. Swat is closer to "Turan" (Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan) than to major IE speaking areas of India like Bengal, south Gujarat, Maharashtra and the Eastern Gangetic plain. So linguistic conclusions connected to genetics need to be viewed with caution.

A Musing

Very roughly the story goes like this (don't use any dates or figures from here):

Let's look at 7000 years before present. What do we have?
- attested in Iran by aDNA "Iranian farmer".
- in India, unattested by aDNA, but reasonably safe theoretical assumption, the AASI profile.

What else in India? What would the ancestry of someone in Punjab 7000 years before present be? In the absence of anything other information we'd have to say, it is some combo of Iranian farmer + AASI.

Suppose we found in Punjab aDNA from 7000 years ago. Then whatever it was, it would not be explainable in terms of some contemporary Iranian farmer; at best it would trace to some common ancestor with the contemporary Iranian farmer aDNA, with the theoretical AASI thrown in. The finding in BMAC of 3 persons with AASI but no steppe ancestry suggests that this Punjab aDNA would also show no recent common ancestor with steppe.

The other peoples in India of 7000 years ago would presumably be better modeled via this Punjabi aDNA + AASI rather than Iranian farmer + AASI. But we don't have aDNA from Punjab from 7000 years ago, and so the only choice is to model people in India in terms of Iranian farmer (ostensibly an outsider) and AASI. And of course, in the absence of aDNA there is nothing really to model. A principle of parsimony says that the people of north India of this time had (Iranian farmer + AASI) ancestry. Nothing more can be said.

The same goes for Indians from 6000 years ago, 5000 years ago, 4000 years ago. 3000 years ago, we get the first aDNA in the Indian subcontinent, that from Swat. It can only be modeled in terms of aDNA found so far - Iranian farmer, Siberian and Central Asian Hunter Gatherer, Steppe MLBA, EMBA)  and theoretical populations like AASI. If we had aDNA from Punjab from 7000 years ago, for example, the best model of Swat aDNA might be rather different; just like the discovery of the aDNA of three Indus_Periphery persons turned the theoretical constructs ANI and ASI from being quite ancient (from more than 14000 years ago) to arising only post-Saraswati-Sindhu civilization.

One revelation of this paper (assuming that it is correct) is that genetic models seem to be not stable against small perturbations. Three samples of aDNA turned the origins of ANI and ASI upside down.

Similarly on the Eurogenes blog there is a post from about an year ago, that Indian populations are better modeled with Steppe EMBA than Steppe MLBA.  The recent pre-print finds Steppe MLBA to be more relevant. That is, with "Indus_Periphery" aDNA thrown into the mix, now Steppe MLBA provides a better fit for Indian populations than Steppe EMBA.  This is counter-intuitive to me, and IMO, is another indication of the instability of genetic models.

It may be a fair inference that further discoveries could destabilize the model that this pre-print proposes. Unfortunately it seems likely that little if any aDNA in the main part of India will ever be found.

Human generation times

1. The paper discussed in my previous two blog posts, "The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia" uses a time per human generation of 28 years.

2. This time is derived from a paper by one of the authors, "A genetic method for dating ancient genomes provides a direct estimate of human generation interval in the last 45,000 years", P. Moorjani et. al. That paper comes up with an estimate of 26-30 years, from which the mid-value is used.

3. "The Genomic Formation...." uses this human generation time of 28 years in two places.

...we estimate that the time of admixture between Iranian agriculturalist-related ancestry and AASI ancestry in the three Indus_Periphery samples was 53 ± 15 generations ago on average, corresponding to a 95% confidence interval of about 4700-3000 BCE assuming 28 years per generation

....Using admixture linkage disequilibrium, we estimate a date of 107 ± 11 generations ago for Iranian agriculturalist and AASI-related admixture in the Palliyar, corresponding to a 95% confidence interval of 1700-400 BCE assuming 28 years per generation.

4.  Here we notice something.  (107 + 11) generations * 28 years =  3304 years.  The Iranian agriculturalist and AASI admixture in the (modern) Palliyar  dates to 1300 BCE to 700 BCE.

5. Moreover, if we go with the generation time measured with the !Kung, 25.5 years - the lower end of P. Moorjani's estimation, it only makes it worse for the idea that all this admixture happened around the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization.

6. The ancestry of the Indus_Periphery samples may likewise become too late for the archaeological  record of agriculture.

PS: Note that for the Indus_Periphery, the date is 53 ± 15 generations prior to the date of the Indus_Periphery samples, i.e., prior to 3100-2200 BCE.

PPS: The life expectancy at birth in the Paleolithic is estimated to be 33 years per Wiki.  The per generation time of 28 years means that the average age of a woman relative to the birth of her children is 28 years.  E.g., if women uniformly bore children at ages 20, 24, 28, 32 the generation time would be (20 + 24 + 28 + 32)/4 = 26.  You can see that women would be bumping up into the life expectancy.  On the other hand, what is important is actually the conditional life expectancy, which is the life expectancy of women who survived up to at least one live birth, which may be better than that 33 years.  Still, one would think that in the Paleolithic, women in the 18-28 age group would have more children than the women 28-38 age group, if only for the reason that there's more of them.

PPPS: The Wiki that gives the Paleolithic life expectancy at birth also says "Based on the data from modern hunter-gatherer populations, it is estimated that at 15, life expectancy was an additional 39 years (total 54)"" Supposedly after surviving birth the probability of reach age 15 was 0.6.

A paper linked at the Wiki gives (figure 10) the yearly mortality rate ("Proportion that die") of the Aché people of Paraguay.  The yearly mortality rate starts at 0.10 around birth, and rapidly falls to 0.02 between five and ten years of age (the curves are different for males and females).  It then remains steady between 0.01 and 0.02 until age 40, after which it starts rising fairly rapidly.  A cohort of 100 women aged 20 years would reduce to 86 by age 30, and 74 by age 40 if the annual mortality rate ("proportion that die") was 0.015.

In comparison, in 2013, per WHO data, globally,  the adult mortality rate - the probability of dying between ages 15 and 60 - was for men 0.182 and for women 0.121.

Also note that if women were having a lot of babies, and if the population was growing very slowly if at all, then there must have been a corresponding number of deaths.

Map from: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia

A pre-print on bioarxiv: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia has this as figure 4:

Some interesting features:

1. Mehrgarh, the oldest agricultural village in South Asia dates to 7000 BCE, so the date on (1) doesn't square with archaeology.

2. The steppe folks had to take a really convoluted route to avoid BMAC (incorrectly marked as BAMC? on the map).

3. There is no archaeological evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization being carried into the south peninsula; but ASI is supposed to have formed during/after the collapse of the IVC.

4. Let us note that the Mittani documents of around 1400 BC record Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the two Nasatyas.  The Rg Veda with its North Indian geography also shows the evolution of one Nasatya into two; see this or below. Nevertheless, the old idea was that the proto-Indo-Aryans branched out east and west through BMAC, the western branch giving rise to the Mitanni documents. The route shown here and the suggested dates really make explaining the Mitanni documents even harder.

Thus, if this map is right, the mystery deepens.

PS: the more conventional map from Wiki:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IE_expansion.png

 

Hoisted from the comments: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia

A pre-print on bioarxiv: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia

Some excerpts follow.

Book memo: The Clever Gut Diet

The Clever Gut Diet, by Dr. Michael Mosley - probably one of the better books in the genre, because the author seems to hew to the science and not overstate what is known.  I haven't tried the recipes.  I might get a copy for myself - the one I read is from the public library.

An attempt at clarity about religion

I start with a quote from "Introduction to Modern Set Theory" by Judith Roitman.

".... 'x is a unicorn in Africa' describes exactly the same set of animals as 'x is a winged horse in Europe'. Both sets are empty.  But the descriptions are quite different."

"In philosophy, descriptions are related to a notion called intensionality, which has to do with how the mind gives meaning to language.   The actual thing described is related to a notion called extensionality.  In mathematics we care only about extensionality.  We don't care about intensionality".

Book memo: The Crucible of Islam

The Crucible of Islam by B.W. Bowersock presents what little is known about the history of Arabia in the years preceding the emergence of Islam and immediately after.  Since not a lot is known, the volume is a slim one.

Some of the history appears to be a replay of our times - Arabia as one of the arenas of great power politics, with the Zoroastrian Persians backing the Jews and the Christian empire of Byzantium backing the Ethiopian Christians despite sectarian differences.  Mainly I learned that apparently in 614, when the Persians besieged Jerusalem, the Jews supported them; and in 638 it was the Christians that turned over the city to the armies of the Muslim Caliph 'Umar al Khattab. Archaeology suggests that neither the 614 nor the 638 invasions significantly damaged Jerusalem, and that the kind of Islamization we moderns are more familiar with began only after a generation or so.  I also learned of Michael Lecker's hypothesis about the Prophet's migration to Medina.

Lecker begins with a straightforward observation of a remarkable coincidence-- a coincidence so obvious that it is astonishing to find that it has failed to engage the attention of most historians of the hijra.  The year of the hijra, 622, was precisely the year in which the Byzantine emperor Heraclius began his military onslaught on the Persian Empire......Heraclius must have known from Arabian history of the sixth century that his Persian antagonists supported the Jews, much as the Byzantines supported the Christians, and it was no secret that the Jewish population of Medina was among the most significant community of Jews in northwestern Arabia....He would have certainly seen in the city's Jewish population a political resource that the Persians might exploit against the Byzantine Christians.  This was, after all, exactly what they had done when the captured Jerusalem in 614 by offering support to the Jews in the process of dislodging the Christians and their sacred relics. In planning his Persian offensive in 622 Heraclius would have had every reason to ensure that the Persians would not stir up trouble in the Hijaz of the kind that they had already provoked in the Palestine.   It made perfect sense for him to turn to his Ghassanid clients to address this contingency and what Lecker has now demonstrated is that those clients were in a position to influence the Khazraj and the Jews.  He has meticulously noted the Ghassanid presence in groups that are listed in the Constitution of Medina, notably among both Khazraj and Jews.   This link across the various tribes and religions would explain the otherwise puzzling cooperation of the pagan, anṣa̅r, and Jews, after a recent history of hostility, in both the invitation to Muḥammad and the subsequent incorporation of the Believers into the community of Medina.

 Well, if Lecker is correct, both the Persians and Byzantines were consumed and displaced by what ensued.

Who wants to trap you in history and why?

One of the questions raised and addressed by Joydeep Bagchee and Vishwa Adluri.
''The Enduring Meaning of the Mahabharata'' - Part 1


Part 2:

Information Wars

This is the age of the Information War, where all kinds of interests are trying to shape the universe of information that you live in.

My advice is -- if an issue really matters to you, then try to get to primary sources with as few layers of reporting between you and the source as possible.   If the issue doesn't matter to you, then be aware that the information you have is likely inaccurate, incomplete, and probably reflects somebody else's prejudices.

A very topical example is the difference between what Paul Krugman actually said in this speech in India and how it was reported in various India media with varying degrees of emphasis and accuracy. I'm not going to link to the reports, look them up for yourself!

Other examples are e.g., the hype about Stephen Hawking's last publication. See Not Even Wrong for a summary.   A really old example is from more than a decade ago, when Indian newspapers had screaming headlines "PM Vajpayee changes India's nuclear doctrine" (India had and has a no first-use doctrine.)   What PM Vajpayee said in a speech (in Hindi, rough translation) - "Does Pakistan imagine that India will remain sleeping while it (Pakistan) prepares a first strike?"  That this translates into a policy of a preemptive first strike takes a huge flight of imagination.

Koenraad Elst on "The Founder of My Religion"

While remaining within the "Hinduism is some type of religion" idea, Koenraad Elst describes the nature of religious authority in Hinduism, in this transcript of a talk that he gave in 2009, on the theme "The Founder of My Religion".

In Hinduism, authority rests with a vast array of scriptures: the Veda-s and the Bhagavad-Gita most famously, but also in the Agama-s or doctrinal scriptures of all the various sects, such as the Nanak Panth (= Sikhism)'s Guru Granth. But more importantly, it rests with every enlightened master, everyone who visibly embodies the sacred. It rests with your parents and personal teachers, and ultimately also with yourself. Your own common sense and intuition are the most important guide in your life's choices, informed by the plethora of Hindu sources of light, and not excluding even the non-Hindu sources. Living Hinduism is an application to the religious sphere of "the wisdom of crowds", the principle the combined insights of many provide a more accurate guide than the insights of an individual, be he prophet or messiah. I note with satisfaction that the Ahmadiya movement has incorporated a bit of this Hindu attitude by acknowledging Krishna and the Buddha as legitimate religious teachers.

May all beings in the Universe be happy.

A book on my reading list: The Impossibility of Religious Freedom

As a reminder to self:
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (2007), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom
Introduction (PDF file)
Blurb (emphasis added):

The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground.

Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains.

A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is associate professor of law and director of the Law and Religion Program at the University at Buffalo Law School. She is also the author of Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States. 

What is इतिहास?

Itihaasa (इतिहास) is commonly translated as "history".

Here is a competing meaning, and seems to be more in tune with the actual exemplars of Itihaasa that we have (e.g., the Mahabharata).

इतिवृत्त (Itivritta) is the word that means chronicle, annals, record of historical events; and in dramaturgy, it means the plot of a play.

PS:

PS: footnote 20 on this page on the Natya Shastra has this:

https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-natyashastra/d/doc202329.html#note-e-79660

Kauṭilya in his definition of itihāsa enumerates purāṇa and itivṛtta as belonging to its contents. An itivṛtta, according to Winternitz, can only mean an “historical event” and purāṇa probably means “mythological and legendary lore.” Vol. I. p. 518. Pargiter has, however, extracted solid historical facts from some of the extant Purāṇas (See his Ancient Indian Historical Traditions, London, 1922). According to the Indian tradition itihāsa is said to be an account of events that occured in the past, carrying in it instructions about duty, wealth, enjoyment of pleasure, and salvation. The same tradition assigns the position of itihāsa to the Mahābhārata the great Indian epic. It is possibly this itihāsa that has been connected with the Nāṭyaveda by the author of the śāstra. Hence it appears that Oldenberg’s theory about the original connexion between epic and dramatic poetry, is worthy of serious consideration. Nāṭyākhyaṃ pañcamaṃ vedaṃ setihāsaṃ karomy aham (15) seems to be very significant. Ag. (I. p. 13) explains setihāsam as itihāsopadeśakarūpaṃ saprabbedam. See Winternitz, Vol. I. pp. 100 ff, 312 n,

PS: duty, wealth, enjoyment of pleasure, and salvation = dharma, artha, kama, and moksha

On the Right to Bear Arms: George Mason

This webpage, of Dr Walter Williams of the faculty of George Mason University has a whole bunch of quotes of US of A founding fathers, supporting a particular interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."
— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788

If you look up the source, (yes, it is the 1836 edition not the 1788 edition) you will see that it should read:

"I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except for a few public officers."

That "now" is significant, and is not some random addition by some editor, as can be seen by the full text below.  I wonder how many other distortions have been introduced by our worthy gun lobby.

Divya Jhingran on Shashi Tharoor's "Why I am a Hindu"

Shashi Tharoor published a book recently, "Why I am a Hindu". (As of this blog post, I haven't read it.)

Divya Jhingran, co-author with Balangangadhara of Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem?: The Making of Indian Religions, has some reflections on Shashi Tharoor's book.  She argues that "a more apt title for Tharoor’s book would have been “Why I am a Protestant”.

As S.N. Balagangadhara notes, if you take away the Bible and you take away Jesus, there will be nothing left that would be recognizable as a religion called Christianity. Similarly, if you take away the Quran and take away Mohammad, there will be nothing left that would be recognizable as a religion called Islam. Religions stand or fall based upon these two factors. If these two factors are necessary components of religion, it obviously means that the Indian traditions are phenomena of a different kind. You cannot use different standards of determination in judging this matter. Even Buddhism does not need a Buddha, nor does Jainism need a Mahavira. The Indian traditions will still exist, each as a distinct entity and each distinguishable from the other without any such props. They are human discoveries that can be communicated in any number of ways, not a belief system handed down from God.

Jakob de Roover: "Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism"

In this hour-long talk, Professor Jakob de Roover, a PhD student of Balagangadhara, gently explains why ideas that work in Europe don't work in India.  IMO, it is well worth the time spent.

Synopsis of The Heathen in His Blindness

Kausik Gangopadhyay has a synopsis of Balagangadhara's "The Heathen..." in Pragyata.

Rakhigarhi gossip

Per someone on the intertubes, he was told by Dr. Kumaraswamy Thangaraj that the Rakhigarhi aDNA publication would take several months.  So it isn't coming out anytime soon.

Gandhi on the authority of the shastras

 From the digital version of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi:

205. THE PUNDIT SABHA OF KASHI 

When I was in Kashi, three questions were sent to me on behalf of the Kashi Pundit Sabha. I considered it my duty to answer these questions, but I did not then have time to do so. Later the questions lay in my file. I could not attend to them during my tour either. Now I am cleaning up my file. The questions are:

1. How can a sanatani Hindu who is well versed in the doctrines of sanatana dharma and accepts the Vedas and the smritis based on them as an infallible authority, contend that there is no untouchability in Hinduism or lend his support to freely mixing with untouchables, excepting on the occasions enumerated in the well-known verse: “In religious processions, marriages, emergencies, rebellions and in all festivals, contact with untouchables does not polllute”? 

2. Your work is among the people of India who are predominantly sanatana dharmis and who implicitly believe in the Gita dictum: “Let the Shastras, therefore, be they authority in deciding what is to be done and what is to be shunned.” How can you then effectively carry on the work of eradicating untouchability till you have proved that this work is in conformity with the Shastras? 

3. The Muslim Ulemas are firmly convinced that there is merit in killing all those who follow any religion other than Islam for they are Kaffirs, and that Muslims can mingle with them only when they accept Islam. So long as all Muslims are under the influence of these Ulemas, how can Hindus make friends with Muslims while protecting the Hindu dharma? 

More on the Aryan nonsense

Professor Subhash Kak quotes Vernant and Olender 1992, Pannikar 1997 in the following; the highlighted sentences really caught my attention:

Now we know that to speak of a “pure” race is meaningless since all external characteristics of humans are defined in a continuum. In the 19th century atmosphere of European triumphalism, what obtained in Europe was taken to be normative. With hindsight it is hard to believe that these ideas were not contested more vigorously.

Although this was the age which marked the true beginnings of modern science, old myths continued to exercise great power. When it was found that the languages of India and Europe were related in structure and vocabulary, the West responded with “a tissue of scholarly myths. These myths were steeped in erudition, informed by profound knowledge of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by comparative study of linguistic data, mythology, and religion, and shaped by the effort to relate linguistic structures, forms of thought, and features of civilization. Yet they were also myths, fantasies of the social imagination, at every level. The comparative philology of the most ancient languages was a quest for origins, an attempt to return to a privileged moment in time when God, man, and natural forces still lived in mutual transparency. The plunge into the distant past in search of `roots’ went hand in hand with a never forgotten faith in a meaningful history, whose course, guided by the Providence of the one God, could be understood only in the light of Christian revelation.

As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European studies, they also invented the mythical figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a providential pair which, by revealing to the people of the Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed upon them the patent of nobility that justified their spiritual, religious, and political domination of the world.” (Vernant 1992)

Although the term Aryan never had a racial connotation in the Indian texts, the scholars insisted that this was the sense in which the term ought to be understood. It was further assumed that Aryan meant European by race. By doing so Europe claimed for itself all of the “Aryan” texts as a part of its own forgotten past. The West considered itself the inheritor of the imagination and the mythic past of the Aryan and the idea of the monotheism of the Hebrew. This dual inheritance was the mark of the imperial destiny of the West. Despite his monotheism, the poor Jew, since he lacked Aryan blood, should have seen “the dark silhouette of the death camps and the rising smoke of the ovens.” (Vernant 1992). On the other hand, the Asiatic mixed-blood Aryan had no future but that of the serf. He could somewhat redeem himself if he rejected all but the earliest core of his inheritance, that existed when the Aryans in India were a pure race. For scholars such as Max Muller this became ultimately a religious issue. Echoing Augustine, Muller saw in his own religious faith a way for progress of the Asiatic. We would smile at it now but he said, “Christianity was simply the name `of the true religion,’ a religion that was already known to the ancients and indeed had been around `since the beginning of the human race.”‘ (See Olender, 1992) But ideas – bad and good – never die. Muller’s idea has recently been resurrected in the guise that Christianity is the fulfillment of Vedic revelation! (E.g. Panikkar, 1977).

 Olender's book is The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century.  The blurb at amazon.com:

Aryan Mathematics!

(Wiki) Walter William Rouse Ball, known as W. W. Rouse Ball (14 August 1850 – 4 April 1925), was a British mathematician, lawyer, and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1878 to 1905.....Educated at University College School, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1870, became a scholar and first Smith's Prizeman, and gained his BA in 1874 as second Wrangler. He became a Fellow of Trinity in 1875, and remained one for the rest of his life.

Ball wrote "A Short Account of the history of Mathematics", seems to have been first published in 1888, and went through four editions with revisions by the author, the last one which appeared in 1908.  Dover published an edition in 1960, and also published an edition in 2010 .

A quote from Ball:

The Hindoos, like the Chinese, have pretended that they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic architecture and sculpture) can be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan invasion. This invasion seems to have taken place at some time in the latter half of the fifth century or in the sixth century, when a tribe of Aryans entered India by the north-west frontier, and established themselves as rulers over a large part of the country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognised by their superiority over the races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually degenerated.  For the first two or three centuries they, however, retained their intellectual vigour, and produced one or two writers of great ability.

WageIndicator.org data on India

From wageindicator.org:

Notice also how the data is collected (in the footnote).

QOTD

Quote of the day, actually from January 13th.  This is the National Public Radio game show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me".   In the Bluff the Listener segment, three bizarre stories are read out, only one of which is true, and the listener is supposed to guess which one that is.

Transcript here, or audio here.

The quote? Ah, yes!

See, this is the Silicon Valley, where everybody's got Asperger's syndrome or has to act like they do.

IBM's predictions from December 2013

http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/16/ibm-reveals-its-top-five-predictions-for-the-next-five-years/

In a nutshell, IBM says:

• The classroom will learn you.
• Buying local will beat online.
• Doctors will use your DNA to keep you well.
• A digital guardian will protect you online.
• The city will help you live in it.

Lemuria and the Aryan-Dravidian "debate" in India

Please read this.

To understand the Dravidianists of today, it is absolutely essential to understand the history and mythology of the ancient Tamil country.

According to this history and mythology, in really really really ancient times (nobody has told us how ancient), the eastern, western and southern parts of today’s Kanyakumari were attached to a really really really vast tract of land known as Lemuria or Kumari Nadu or Kumari Kandam. This really really really vast tract of land was subsequently submerged in the sea. The Tamils who survived this catastrophe migrated northwards.

And then in a short period, these Tamils migrated further northwards and occupied all of Bharata, and also made as their home today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan. The language they spoke in those days has today transformed into what is known as Brahui.

Today’s Dravidianists claim that because the Aryans invaded from outside, the ancient Tamils were exterminated from the northern parts of India, and also that because the invasion was unsuccessful south of the Vindhyas, the Tamils lived in peace and prosperity in these areas.

 And this:

It was 10 at night when this happened. The Tamil Professor directly went to the Vice Chancellor’s house and gave him an adverse report of what had occurred at the dinner. “You have filled the [History Endowment] Committee with only Aryans! The Aryan members have naturally selected another Aryan as the speaker. And you endorsed their selection. Now look what has happened—a direct humiliation of Tamil itself! A massive, utter humiliation!”

I later learned that the Vice Chancellor had erupted in fury, twirled his moustache and patted his biceps.

David Frum: who and what Trump is

David Frum in The Atlantic:

Who and what Donald Trump is has been known to everyone and anyone who cared to know for years and decades. Before he was president, he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist. Before he was the country’s leading racist conspiracy theorist, he was a celebrity gameshow host. Before he was a celebrity gameshow host, he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate. Before he was the multi-bankrupt least trusted name in real estate, he was the protege of Roy Cohn’s repeatedly accused of ties to organized crime. From the start, Donald Trump was a man of many secrets, but no mysteries. Inscribed indelibly on the public record were the reasons for responsible people to do everything in their power to bar him from the presidency.

Instead, since he announced his candidacy in mid-2015, Donald Trump has been enabled and protected.

The enabling and protecting not only continues. It accelerates.

 and

In 2016, there were voters who genuinely, in good faith, believed that Donald Trump was a capable business leader, moderate on social issues, who cared about the troubles of working class white America—and would do something to help. There may well still be some people who believe this—but nowhere near enough to sustain a presidency.

What sustains Trump now is the support of people who know what he is, but back him anyway. Republican political elites who know him for what he is, but who back him because they believe they can control and use him; conservative media elites who sense what he is, but who delight in the cultural wars he provokes; rank-and-file conservatives who care more about their grievances and hatreds than the governance of the country.

Some.Rakhigarhi news from April 2016

An Amar Ujala photo-story from April 14, 2016 says that a total of 18 skeletons have been recovered from Rakhigarhi.

The Tribune of Chandigarh reported that 15 skeletons were recovered in the recent round of excavation.

The sources said excavators had opened 20 graves and skeletons had been found in 15 of them. They said DNA samples were being sent to the laboratories for bio-molecular scientific analysis.

The archeologists said the DNA samples would be analysed at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad; Howard University, USA; and the Seoul National University, South Korea.

This I had missed.  I had thought that they were still trying to get aDNA from the skeletons excavated in 2014, and apparently, so did Tony Joseph, in his article in the Hindu.

Metspalu v Laziridis: trying to understand

Am trying to square Metspalu, et. al.'s 2011 paper and Laziridis et. al.'s 2016 paper.

Here's what's bugging me.  The diagram below is a crop from a diagram in the Metspalu paper, a graphical representation of the genetic make-up of various populations.

You can see South Asia is mainly k5 and k6.  k6 is mostly confined to South Asia, while k5 extends into Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and into Western Europe.

They write:

We found no regional diversity differences associated with k5 at K = 8. Thus, regardless of where this component was from (the Caucasus, Near East, Indus Valley, or Central Asia), its spread to other regions must have occurred well before our detection limits at 12,500 years. Accordingly, the introduction of k5 to South Asia cannot be explained by recent gene flow, such as the hypothetical Indo-Aryan migration. The admixture of the k5 and k6 components within India, however, could have happened more recently—our haplotype diversity estimates are not informative about the timing of local admixture.

___________
PS: thanks to guest's comment below, I know clarification is needed: Metspalu et. al. run  ADMIXTURE, which estimates how much a modern sample of unrelated individuals derives their ancestry from a set of postulated ancestral populations.

 The typical dataset consists of genotypes at a large number J of single nucleotide poly- morphisms (SNPs) from a large number I of unrelated individuals. These individuals are drawn from an admixed population with contributions from K postulated ancestral populations. Population k contributes a fraction qik of individual i’s genome.

You try various Ks and ADMIXTURE also estimates the standard errors on the results.  Reich 2009 used a Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to come up with ANI/ASI.  ADMIXTURE was created in 2009 apparently. 

We are told:

Choice of an appropriate value for K is a notoriously difficult statistical problem. It seems to us that this choice should be guided by knowledge of a population’s history. Be- cause experimentation with different values of K is advisable, admixture prints values of the familiar AIC (Akaike Information Criterion) and BIC (Bayesian Information Criterion) statistics, widely applied in model selection. 

_______________ 

 Strictly speaking, their detection limit is 500 generations, and they use 25 years per generation. The point is that k5 in South Asia dates to more than 500 generations or 12,500 years ago.

The next is a little leap of mine - is it justified? In the Ancestral North Indian/Ancestral South Indian (ANI/ASI) model,  ANI corresponds to k5 and ASI corresponds to k6.  That this is so is not entirely clear to me.

We now come to Laziridis et. al.  They do an ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis of Near Eastern samples (Near Eastern with respect to Europe)  dating from 12000 to 1400 years ago, and they refer to aDNA analyses of Steppe inhabitants; as far as I know, the Steppe aDNA does not go back before 12000 years.  Now, the Laziridis paper says:

We show that it is impossible to model the ANI as being derived from any single ancient population in our dataset. However, it can be modelled as a mix of ancestry related to both early farmers of western Iran and to people of the Bronze Age Eurasian steppe...

 But if ANI == k5, and k5 spread before 12500 years ago (strictly speaking, 500 generations, while the aDNA dates are presumably radiocarbon dates) why would one expect to explain ANI in terms of contemporary peoples or peoples younger than ANI?

Perhaps one can say that Near Eastern aDNA,  Steppe aDNA and ANI (k5) all arose from the mixture of two ancestral populations X and Y (ancestors of the 12000-year-ago-people) and the Near Eastern aDNA and the Steppe aDNA represent relatively unmixed descendants of X and Y respectively, while ANI is a descendant mixture of X and Y.   I don't think this is what the Laziridis paper does.

My guess is Laziridis et. al. instead of sticking to just to genetics, also buy into the predominant theory of the spread of Indo-European languages, and hence attempt to explain ANI in this illogical way, or else Laziridis thinks the Metspalu paper is wrong and ANI(k5) is younger than 12500 years; or else I have misunderstood Laziridis or else ANI != k5.

PS: the most probable of the above alternatives is that I misunderstand Lazirides, the second most probable is that Laziridis et. al. don't think Metspalu is correct, and ANI is (much) younger than 12500 years.

_____
PS: Jan 6: This larger excerpt of a diagram in Metspalu shows ADMIXTURE with K=8 and K=12 (K is the number of hypothetical ancestral populations) and you can see that it does not really change the story that most of Indian ancestry traces to two components.  One would hope that one can come up with an objective definition of k5, k6 that is the same when computed with different but adequate samples.

New Rakhigarhi gossip

The Hindi newspaper Dainik Jagaran has a story out today that purports to leak out the Rakhigarhi aDNA results.   The article goes into the current theory of how Indo-European languages entered India, and then the article says it is quoting Dr Neeraj Rai of the Birbal Sahni Institute (mentioned in a previous blog post) about the findings.

The key sentences:

लेकिन डॉ. नीरज राय के नेतृत्व में हरियाणा के हिसार, राखीगढ़ी आदि इलाकों में लगी अंतरराष्ट्रीय वैज्ञानिकों की टीम ने आनुवंशिक शोधों के आधार पर इस तथ्य को झुठला दिया है। अंतरराष्ट्रीय जर्नलों में प्रकाशित होने वाला शोध सामने आते ही पूरे विश्व में चर्चा, बहस और मंथन का नया दौर तो शुरू होगा ही मानव सभ्यता के वैश्विक इतिहास में बहुत बड़ा परिवर्तन हो जाएगा।

डॉ. राय बताते हैं कि डेक्कन कॉलेज, पुणे के कुलपति प्रोफेसर वसंत शिंदे ने हड़प्पा और अन्य स्थलों पर खुदाई का नेतृत्व किया है। इस दिशा में चल रहे शोधों के क्रम में उनकी अगुआई में पुरातत्वविदों की एक टीम ने सिंधु घाटी की सभ्यता में मिले सबसे महत्वपूर्ण शहर हरियाणा के हिसार में पड़ने वाले राखीगढ़ी साइट की खुदाई की। वर्ष 2014 की शुरुआत में उन्हें चार कंकाल मिले। इन कंकालों के डीएनए परीक्षण के लिए उन्होंने तब सीसीएमबी हैदराबाद और अब बीरबल साहनी इंस्टीट्यूट लखनऊ के युवा वैज्ञानिक डॉ. नीरज राय की टीम को लगाया।

डॉ. राय की टीम में देश-विदेश के अन्य वैज्ञानिकों ने मिलकर जो शोध हासिल किया, उससे पता चला कि राखीगढ़ी में मिले ये कंकाल उन प्रजातियों के पूर्वजों के हैं जो इंडो-यूरोपियन भाषा परिवार की भाषाओं के वक्ता हैं और दुनिया में स्वयं को सर्वश्रेष्ठ प्रजाति के रूप में घोषित करने का दावा करते रहे हैं। इन कंकालों के डीएनए उत्तर भारतीय ब्राह्मणों के डीएनए से काफी मैच करते हैं। 61 वर्षीय शिंदे के लिए, यह परियोजना पुरातत्व के एक लंबे और प्रतिष्ठित कैरियर की परिणति है। इस शोध के लगभग सारे परिणाम सामने आ चुके हैं। शीघ्र ही उनके प्रकाशन के बाद आर्य जातियों के आगमन, आक्रमण और प्रसार संबंधी विवादों पर भी विराम मिलने की संभावना है। 

The key point is that we are told that the Rakhigarhi aDNA matches significantly that of North Indian Brahmins.   This is interpreted in the article that the Rakhigarhi skeletons were of Indo-European language speakers. 

Of course, I'd advise waiting for the scientific publication.

New Yorker: Making China Great Again

A long article but should be read.

Yan Xuetong is the dean of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Modern International Relations. At sixty-five, Yan is bouncy and trim, with short silver hair and a roaring laugh. When I arrived at his office one evening, he donned a black wool cap and coat, and we set off into the cold. Before I could ask a question, he said, “I think Trump is America’s Gorbachev.” In China, Mikhail Gorbachev is known as the leader who led an empire to collapse. “The United States will suffer,” he warned.

Over a dinner of dumplings, tofu, and stir-fried pork, Yan said that America’s strength must be measured partly by its ability to persuade: “American leadership has already dramatically declined in the past ten months. In 1991, when Bush, Sr., launched the war against Iraq, it got thirty-four countries to join the war effort. This time, if Trump launched a war against anyone, I doubt he would get support from even five countries. Even the U.S. Congress is trying to block his ability to start a nuclear war against North Korea.” For Chinese leaders, Yan said, “Trump is the biggest strategic opportunity.” I asked Yan how long he thought the opportunity would last. “As long as Trump stays in power,” he replied.