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svnttoday at 1:21 PM2 repliesview on HN

I haven’t had time to really dig in to the paper but these data (from only one region) are limited in their ability to compare regions, right?

If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya.

The methodology, if it holds up, seems to hold a lot of promise for answering questions like this in the future.


Replies

klooptoday at 4:01 PM

No, this paper doesn't seem to talk about regional differences. The implication seems to be that it wouldn't be surprising to find differences between groups that separated more than 2kya, as there was active changes going on before that time. Not that it predicts any specific differences

> If anything they seem to support homogenization of intellectual capacity/mental health in Eurasia since 2kya.

I would be interested in how you came to that conclusion, unless I'm misleading your post and you specifically mean West Eurasia

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ano-thertoday at 3:30 PM

Yes, they only had data for West Eurasia.

> Just because an allele, SNP, or trait swept into or out of West Eurasia during this time doesn’t mean this happened only in West Eurasia. Researchers can use the new computational methods to look for directional selection in other populations worldwide that have enough ancient DNA sequences and construct a clearer picture of what’s unique to different groups and what generalizes across populations.

> Reich expects that future studies will show that shared selective pressures acted on some of the same core traits across diverse human groups, even as those groups split off and migrated to different parts of the world over tens of thousands of years.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/massive-ancient-dna-study-revea...