Our world is shifting. Once upon a time we thought humans spread from Africa, eventually reached and spread through Europe, then settled down to several millennia of farming — punctuated by invasions and population movements in historic times that are more or less known. Well, we didn’t exactly think that, but if you didn’t take time to make a study of it you could be...
Something happened to Europe’s Neolithic farmers. These people had largely displaced the old hunter gatherer population in many places. Then, 5 or 6 thousand years ago they began to decline themselves. Some people have suggested they were displaced by invaders from the steppe. That has been my preferred theory. Other people think they just moved away because of stress from climate change...
My old haplogroup posts are so out of date I ought to hunt them down and delete them. I don’t do it because I (still) like the idea of coming across them them now and then and being reminded what the world was like. This map is not the most rigorous replacement I could find for those old posts, but it shows something much more interesting than mere detail. It shows the approximate...
Many of us who delve into DNA for genealogy have the same frustration. The general public seems to have an almost childlike belief in stories. People either believe their DNA tests are telling the absolute, scientific truth, or they’re skeptics who think it’s all bunk. Comparatively few see the stories for what they are—marketing. Does that seem harsh? Keep reading. The valuable part...
We’ve seen this idea, now very common, that many Hispanos in the American Southwest have crypto-Jewish ancestry. The evidence for this exotic ancestry is weak. The story seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, and there is some reason to believe it might have its roots in the 19th and 20th century Seventh Day Adventists. A recent story in The Atlantic seems to go the other direction...