
Divided by DNA: The uneasy relationship between archaeology and ancient genomics - onuralp
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03773-6
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gnarbarian
Fear of new information/data/methods with more definitive results is a good
indicator of people who are afraid of the results.

To me, objections to genetic methods in Archaeology and Anthropology are a
sign that they are more interested in presenting a specific interpretation of
history rather than discovering the truth.

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jonathanyc
Not only does the article make the same point you are making but with more
nuance, it also discusses arguments from the other side that I think are
interesting and important as well. Not sure why you made this comment.

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gnarbarian
A succinct summary of a 3,000 word article is often valuable.

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jonathanyc
Sure, if it were a summary. You conveniently left out everything but the
title, and ignored entirely the points of the anthroplogists/archaeologists,
instead caricaturizing them as “afraid of the results.” As an engineer, this
is disappointing.

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hyperion2010
> Those results, in fact, now have him wondering about how cultural practices
> such as leaving pottery and other tributes at the West Kennet long barrow
> persisted in the face of such upheavals.

This is the question that I find the most fascinating, and I am glad to see
that I am not alone. If a new people did arrive, did they adopt some of the
cultural practices of the people they displaced? Did/do humans tend to
recognize places of spiritual importance and continue to honor them out of
respect for/fear of the ancient gods of a place that they are new to?
Displacement with or without competition is a major feature of biological
evolution, it would be surprising if it _didn't_ apply to humans.

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acjohnson55
Don't we _know_ that the displacers often adopt cultural characteristics?
Think of Germanic tribes in latter day Rome, the Normans, or the Mongols in
Europe and the Near East.

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TangoTrotFox
Perhaps a succinct way of phrasing this is that cultures can change much
faster (or much slower) than genetic composition of a people, so looking at
genetics can give a very misleading impression of a society.

I think a good example of some part of this is southeast Asia. Cambodia,
Burma, and Lao are all adjacent to Thailand. The people that makeup these 4
nations visibly share an extremely recent common ancestor. Yet, the cultures
and groups of peoples are all quite different and there is even extreme
'racism' among them, which is somewhat ironic.

If you studied these people based on genetic makeup from a distant future it'd
just look like a mostly homogenous glob, but that's not even remotely close to
accurate. And so an interpretation based primarily on genetics would be
completely misleading.

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contingencies
I have a long term project to write a synthesis ancient history of Yunnan.
Even though the project is currently on hold due to time commitment to my
startup, reading to date has shown that ancient genomics is an amazing
resource not only directly for human history but also indirectly via plants.
Huge questions of overwhelming significance to regional human history such as
the origin and early spread of intensive rice agriculture can be partly
answered through ancient plant genetics.

