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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I’m going to leave your arguments about scientific practice and appeals to authority to someone else, and note that nearly everything you write about population history is wrong.

No, not every human alive is descended from every other human alive 7,000 years ago. Humans had already dispersed by then; I’m probably a descendant of every western hunter gatherer and early European farmer and yamnaya on the landscape 7,000 ya, but of no sub Saharan Africans or aboriginal Australians from after the ice age. And your statement about genetic diversity in Africa is also not true; technically speaking, pygmies and Khoisan are farther from any other human population than any other human population is from any other population… but the vast majority of sub Saharan Africans are descended from early Niger-Congo speakers, who are an identifiable genetic cluster like eg Europeans or orientals.

Even leaving out the San, Pygmies, etc, subsaharan africans do have greater genetic diversity than non-africans—their bottleneck was smaller than the out-of-africa group's, if I remember correctly.

I'm not sure what the Bantu expansion looks like genetically.

But I don't think this means that you can't model them as a group, at least when we're in the context of talking about group representation and affirmative action. It's not like other groups aren't composed of a bunch of smaller groups that also vary (elites vs. commoners, if nothing else).

And yes, the 7000 years point is obviously wrong—very few people today outside of the Americas would be descended from the average native american 7000 years ago. It's also irrelevant.