Roots And Trees

On how new DNA findings reinforce a linguistic hypothesis about the origin of Indo-European languages and of the peoples behind that origin and growth.  From Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning, We are what we speak: Indo-European phylogenetic and linguistic trees concur.

Here's the opening:

The ancient-DNA era for the human species is not yet 15 years old. It kicked off with the 2010 paper Paleo-Eskimo genome (followed by blockbusters on Neanderthals and Denisovans). Today, remains from tens of thousands of ancient humans offer us decipherable DNA information, each contributing to fill in gaps in our understanding of prehistory.

No matter the brilliance and insight of its practitioners and theorists, human prehistory’s age of genetic inference, when we were limited to examining modern genomes to learn about ancient peoples, was like trying to comprehend the world’s oceans solely from the activity observable in its brightly lit uppermost layers, the photic zone that reaches down at most about 200 meters. Though some key insights date to the before times, the paleogenomic era after 2010 has been absolutely revolutionary and transformative. Name a superlative, and it probably isn’t strong enough.

Razib's essays on human origins are uniformly well written and informative.  His podcasts are less well organized and his political ones not particularly well done.