Genetics and the Rise of Agriculture

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.

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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