I just had a discussion with Razib Khan about some of the exciting recent developments in paleogenetics. In 2018, I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here and was absolutely captivated by the idea that we could learn about cultures, population movements, and other aspects of our past through the analysis of prehistoric, ancient, and more recent DNA.

The field of paleogenetics is a fast-moving one, so there have been a great many discoveries in the five-plus years since the book was published. Reich was on Dwarkesh’s podcast a few months ago discussing some of them. Until another authoritative book comes out on this topic – which I was excited to learn that Razib might soon write – the best you can do is subscribe to his Unsupervised Learning newsletter, where you can find poetic articles on the intersection between genomics, culture, and history.

The immediate motivation for this conversation was his recent piece on how the Indo-European explosion of 5,000 years ago actually led to a decline in civilizational complexity in Europe. After some initial chit-chat on the latest on Ukraine and debating stupid people on X, we discuss that essay, along with various other topics, including

* The race of the Ancient Greeks

* The fluctuations in Neanderthal admixture in humans throughout prehistory

* What the Indo-Europeans looked like

* The identity of the Ancient Persians and their relationship to modern Iranians

* “Cold winters” theory, and why we see a looks gradient from Northern to Southern Europe

* The discrediting of white nationalist ideas

* Theories about group IQ differences

* What paleogenetics can actually tell us about cultures, the rise and fall of civilizations, and how people lived

* The irrefutable non-human DNA evidence suggesting there are unlikely to be lost civilizations yet to be discovered

Near the end, I tell Razib that he’s basically one of those guys who appears on Rogan and talks about lost civilizations and such, except that what he says is actually grounded in science. In a world with twenty more IQ points, he would be a lot better known than Graham Hancock. While the enthusiasm towards ideas about the human past of Rogan and Hancock fans is understandable, they unfortunately don’t have the judgment to distinguish between science and myth.

Every time I learn more about paleogenetics, whether through reading or talking to Razib, I come away invigorated. Aside from perhaps some lessons about human nature, there is little practical knowledge to be gained from such work. Still, some of us are noble enough to want the truth about ourselves, and to be able to stand in awe of the process that has led to us knowing so much about how humans, and our humanoid cousins, lived, worked, loved, and died across tens of thousands of years based on nothing more than the artifacts and genetic material they left behind.