It will be interesting to see how it compares to modern groups of people. I don't think having ancestors in a place 1700+ years ago gives you defacto claim to ownership either way though.
I'm curious which theological/mythical abrogation you're referring to! Rabbinic tradition generally considers covenant regarding living on the land indefinitely suspended since the 73 CE exile began. Modern religious Jewish Zionist movements claim that suspension is validly terminated and covenant renewed in the act of reclaiming the land by force, mostly motivated by a post-Holocaust reassessment of the waiting-for-moshiach strategy.
Contemporary Christian Evangelicals understand Jewish relocation to the land to be a necessary prerequisite for the Rapture. IDK much about the background or history there.
Having read revelation myself, the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem is a technical prerequisite for the antichrist, because it said he would desecrate the temple, being a prophecy about a nasty dude.
If any Christians out there want to deliberately create the conditions for the antichrist to desecrate the temple so that the rapture can happen sooner and the world can end, to be honest, that is crazy even within a system of faith. On those grounds I don't believe that it could possibly be a mainstream belief.
It is bizarre! Yet it is quite mainstream. See Christians United for Israel, the largest Zionist lobby in the USA with around 1 million members. Their founder is quite explicit about this theological motivation.
There are many YouTube videos of CUFI founder John Hagee giving sermons on this theology, sometimes going so far as praising the Hitler as "God's instrument" for moving Zionism forward
It matters little what science or anthropology generally says -- nationalist/nativist ideology pretty much always fits the facts to the desired outcome, and ignores those that can't be made to do so. (From any "side")
In the end, "legitimacy" of a group claiming exclusive access to a piece of land comes down to might-makes-right.
It would be easier if the lines demarcating groups were drawn according to their behavior and not according to their cultural group. For example, criminals and innocents are a pair of groups with obvious perpetrator-victim relationships, while "likes star trek" and "does not like star trek," a way to group the exact same set of individuals, is impossible to pick a side on. Could you imagine how impossible it would be to have a peaceful society if people said things like, "a Trekkie stole the tape deck out of my car?"
Sadly there are places in the world, a lot of them in Africa, where nobody can look beyond their superficial traits to classify criminals apart from their victims.
> Wouldn't it be amusing if the Israelites were genetically Canaanites --- just with religious differences?
As I understand it, that is the expectation: The consensus among archeologists seems to be that ancient Israelites were simply another group of Canaanites who came to dominate the region. The Exodus is not a historical event.
The point here is not to target the Old Testament but think in wider terms about believes vs. history/archeology. You can find similar challenges in other religions and cultures.
Nothing I said suggests otherwise. I was simply looking at potential aftereffects of the unveiling --- and why any such unveiling might be vehemently opposed by entrenched non-scientific interests.
> I was simply looking at potential aftereffects of the unveiling
I think the world is less run by logic than people generally think. I don't think there will be an aftereffect. There is an Status quo and that's it. This observation is general and in anyway targeted in the context of the article. The Status quo involves any of us.
From the article I understand that the Israelites were a group of Canaanites. Regarding the Exodus, again, according to this article, there could be a connection between the withdrawal of the Egyptians from the region. The topic of challenging scriptures (for every religion) with archeology is very interesting because you need to have the mind open where one and/or the other have gray areas but you cannot repress them.
My comment was not meant as an argument with the last sentence as its conclusion. Sorry for the (obvious) lack of clarity on my part.
Rather, the statement about the Exodus was meant to expand on the "who came to dominate the region": It was meant to convey that they did not come to dominate through systematic genocide of the other Canaanites as depicted in the bible. It is my understand that there is little to no evidence of this event (or the preceding events) having occurred.
The overall understanding that I was trying to communicate was simply that the ancient Isrealites were Canaanites who stayed in Canaan.
nit: (as a non-Christian) There is little to no __archeological__ evidence
The Bible's testimony itself, along with conclusion that people believed in this historical event at some point in time, is at least a some evidence towards it.
Yeah - its like say the illiad. Did the trojan war happen exactly like that? Obviously not. Was there some big war that inspired it? Probably.
Like, you shouldn't take the events of the bible literally, but you could probably reasonably infer that the nations demonized in it probably were historical enemies of the people who wrote it, etc
The problem with this thinking is that many of the "early" books of the Bible appear to be written much later than the "later" books, and while they are probably a record of the attitudes of the writers, they record their attitudes as of the time they were written, not as of the time period the claim to represent.
The Bible is not evidence. It's a bunch of stories written down by a bunch of people, written well after any of the supposed events they wrote about. Perhaps some of those stories can be corroborated by actual (physical) evidence, but Exodus is not one of them.
Generally speaking historical records are called "documentary evidence," and in real life there can be conflicting evidence, out of which may emerge a conclusion.
Exodus is not the story of the origin of the Jewish people, so its historicity has nothing to do with whether or not the Israelites are descendent from Canaanites.
Ok, but that's not shocking or amusing because that's the already-known archaeological situation of the pre-Roman Levant understood by anybody who was paying attention and didn't have an ethno-supremacist or religious axe to grind?
There were probably dozens of different West Semitic speaking cultures/groupings, with plenty of cultural mixing. Hebrew (and Aramaic) speakers were only one of many in the region, all with competing claims over grazing and growing lands, etc. The Bible basically alludes to this all over.
What you have there is the stories of various fragments of it that distilled into more or less powerful tribal federations and, eventually, kingdoms. Told from their vantage, because the others did not commit theirs to writing.
And by the 3rd or 4th century AD, all West Semitic languages had basically gone functionally (but not liturgically) extinct, but the cultural and religious traditions of one of them tenaciously held on through the diaspora.
Hebrew itself was "extinct" as a spoken language by about 200ce. Until the 20th century when it was revived. It was replaced by Aramaic and Greek.
Aramaic lived for a longer period, but then slowly died out. As a liturgical language western Aramaic / Syriac lived on, and eastern variants for longer but as a widespread, spoken lived language in the Levant I believe Greek replaced it, and then Arabic. I understand that "Jewish Palestinian Aramaic" lingered on for some time in some smaller communities.
I think that was only the case in urban areas and/or amongst the more educated upper and middle classes. Syriac and other Aramaic languages were still widespread amongst local Christian population well into the Islamic perod.
Not really. The story of Abraham begins in “Ur of the Chaldees.” The modern consensus is that it should be in southern Iran, but historical sources had it in northern Iran or closer to Turkey. Which is also the source of the Phoenicians / Canaanites.
Between that, the sojourn to Egypt, and the constant complaints about intermarriage in the OT, you’d already expect these to be roughly the same gene pool.
More interesting may be the connection (or lack thereof) between OT-era Jews to modern Jews, which plays into political and racial arguments.
> The story of Abraham begins in “Ur of the Chaldees.”
You're presuming some historicity there that I don't think is warranted. A lot of the stories in Genesis had their origin in stories from Mesopotamia, and I wouldn't read much more into that than you'd read into the Aenead claiming that the Romans originated in Troy. They're just borrowing legitimacy from an older historical tradition.
You’ve missed his point. He’s just saying that if archeological evidence suggests that Iron Age Israelites are genetically just caaninites, there is no inconsistency with the legend. A shocking number of people in this thread seem to think the exodus narrative would imply the Israelites were Egyptians.
I mean you kind of have to be told these things child to ever believe that stuff, our brains work too well after that
Just like yours is trying to, but with competing information
The simple, adult, quantifiable reality is that there is always cross drift between populations by mere nature of humans being compatible species to produce viable offspring with one another
The scripture remained quite intact despite the rise of astronomy and evolution theory. That is because only some people take old scripture literal (but those who do, tend to be quite dangerous).
As a sort of born again Christian I’ve come to believe that modern fundamentalists are among a very small group of people who believe the Torah to be literal. For ancient people they were myths used to remember common law
That is mostly assumed these days. The Israelites were people that
inhabited the Canaanite hinterland. Where they came from and whether
they "came from" somewhere else is unknown and we can only
speculate. Perhaps they were herders who migrated westwards from the
Jordan valley and beyond. They show up in history at around the same
time as the Philistines (1200 BC) whose origins are also unknown.
The early Israelites were polytheists but had some affinity for Yahweh
which was one Canaanite god among many. Why, how and when the
Israelites became monotheists and why Yahweh became their only god is
unknown. My guess (speculation follows) is that the Israelites were
influenced by the Babylonians and Zoroastriansim. Zoroastrians
worshipped fire and Yahweh was the god of fire (and smoke). Perhaps
the many conflicts with other Canaanites caused them to adopt foreign
practices to distinguish themselves from their enemies. Ritual
circumcision perhaps was borrowed from Egypt.
There is not a shred of evidence of an emigration from Egypt and
archaeologists have been searching for it for over 200 years. So why
the Exodus is in the Bible is unknown. At the time these stories were
written down Egypt was a regional super power, so perhaps whoever
wrote it felt that "having been to Egypt" was something to brag about?
Perhaps the story is allegorical?
The story of Moses is probably an allegory of the plucky Israelites beating the local great power who held them in captivity, and fleeing to found their own state... written by people who were presently held in captivity by the local great power, Babylon. Unlike the story of Exodus, the Babylonian captivity is a well-attested historical event, which agrees with archeological evidence and is found in multiple sources.
Yeah, also possible. The Exodus story might have been propaganda meant to prevent Israelite captives in Babylon from losing hope of an eventual return. It might also have served as a threat to the Babylonians/Persians; "See what our god did to the Egyptians, perhaps it's best for you to let us go..." While the Babylonian captivity probably did happen, the Bible doesn't mention that the same fate befell many other people the Babylonians conquered and whose intelligentsia they transferred. The destruction of many Philistine cities appear to have been even more complete than the destruction of Jerusalem.
I wouldn't bet on it. Historiographical claims contradicting ancient history usually turn out to be incorrect and are generally only produced because the absence of other evidence is the only room you have to generate academic papers. It isn't surprising that an event that occurred > 3000 years ago is better attested that an event that occurred ~2500 years ago. 2500 years ago is classic Greece and Thucydides, 3000 years ago is Homer. It is fairly typical for these minimalist positions to be totally overturned by later archeological discoveries...because people don't generally just make things totally up. This doesn't require every word to be literally true, but there's usually truth in them.
Establishing a pious fraud ex nihilo as late as the Babylonian Exile is also a little too pat. You really think that a) the Babylonian Exiles convinced themselves of this with no surviving refutation or debate and b) they managed to impress it on the entire non-Exile population when they returned?
This Smithsonian article on the discovery of mining operations by a semi-nomadic people is a great read and ends on this note, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
> What Ben-Yosef has produced isn’t an argument for or against the historical accuracy of the Bible but a critique of his own profession. Archaeology, he argues, has overstated its authority. Entire kingdoms could exist under our noses, and archaeologists would never find a trace. Timna is an anomaly that throws into relief the limits of what we can know. The treasure of the ancient mines, it turns out, is humility.
Making shit up out of thin air isn't as difficult as you suggest. For centuries English kings thought they were the descendants of King Arthur because of what a cleric wrote in the early 12th century. The Swedish 16th century king Erik XIV proclaimed himself the 14:th (hence the suffix XIV) king of Sweden due to the largely fictitious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_de_omnibus_Gothorum_S... Over 2000 years earlier it must of course have been even easier making facts out of fiction.
> For centuries English kings thought they were the descendants of King Arthur because of what a cleric wrote in the early 12th century.
Stories of Arthur uncontroversially predate the 12th century, and it is an open debate as to whether Arthur was based on a historical figure or not. (I vote yes.) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
> he Swedish 16th century king Erik XIV proclaimed himself the 14:th (hence the suffix XIV) king of Sweden
Some kings assuming a different regnal number on the basis of a semimythical history is not the same as convincing an entire population to change their origin myths.
I believe the origin of the Philistines is known, or at least widely believed based on evidence.
The bible states they were from the island of Crete (Caphtor) and my understanding is there is also archaeological evidence (pottery etc) that suggests they were a Minoan (Indo/European) people in origin.
I believe they were part of the sea people migration during the bronze age collapse referenced by the Egyptians.
What if language could help? The Israelite accent is quite similar to that of the Turks (than of the Arabs). I'd assume they came from the South Of Turkey (before the Turks came to the region) and were distantly relative to the Canaanites but not enough to blend in.
> just with religious differences
I think that was before Judaism/Christianity. Islam is much more recent though. The region did not have that until hundreds of years later.
One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
> One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
When you said "race-based biological weapons" you mean weapons that target specific races?
Yeah 特定种族基因攻击 “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” There are some interesting documents floating around from a few years back if you’re into China-US military stuff.
If race-based targeted medical treatment is a possibility, i.e that targets specific areas of the genome commonly found within specific human groups - then why is it not possible to have a race-based biological weapon?
Ewan has a lot of discussion on the topic in other venues, including Twitter. I grabbed this one as being somewhat representative but if you find the topic interesting I'd suggest digging into his stuff further.
> If race-based targeted medical treatment is a possibility, i.e that targets specific areas of the genome commonly found within specific human groups
Because this isn't possible.
Some conditions are /correlated/ with some groups, under the condition that you're only examining members of that group who already have symptoms of the condition.
> One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
This isn't really clear at all and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, consumer DNA testing pretty reliably agrees with self-reported genealogical claims. Race has become a loaded word, but we understand population genetics pretty well and the effects of long periods of genetic isolation between different population groups are very much measurable.
The claim that it's impossible to develop a bioweapon that targets some genomic pattern that's common in descendants of some formerly long term isolated population and uncommon in others doesn't appear well-supported. In fact, nature already did this herself, as is well attested by the introduction of Eurasian diseases to the Americas.
Those diseases introduced the Americas didn't target specific races. Eurasian peoples could still get them too but had some immunity. If Eurasian people were immune we never would have carried these diseases with us.
Saying that...shamefully it was consciously used as weapon in some instances.
Even if someone has something like a specific immune system genetic profile that makes them more susceptible to a particular virus than other people, that genetic marker is extremely unlikely to correlate at all closely with any socially defined racial or ethnic group.
The effects of European diseases on native American populations is a red herring in this context, as modern populations are increasingly interbred and not isolated, and even with that case, it's not entirely clear that it was genetic vs. developmental, i.e. European children who survived to adulthood likely had been exposed to those diseases when young, while native American adults had not - so if they had been exposed as children, there could have been no difference in susceptibilty.
> This isn't really clear at all and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, consumer DNA testing pretty reliably agrees with self-reported genealogical claims.
The DNA testing is associating you with a cluster; that cluster could be any "size" and isn't based on specific patterns. (And it's fundamentally not causation; you can more or less move anywhere you want and have children with anyone you want.)
There's also a selection effect that they don't show you the clusters that they can't make work.
Also often not true; for fun, look at /r/23andMe for white people from Oklahoma and you'll see it's surprisingly common that their parents told them they were part Cherokee when they aren't even 1% native. Famously happened to Elizabeth Warren, but it's not just her.
The causation is in the past. Up until about 500 years ago there was little to no gene flow between a number of major population groups. Obviously there has been subsequent hybridization, but we can detect that too. The largest pre-1492 hybrid groups I know of are central Asian for obvious reasons, like the Uyghur people.
Last I checked you can’t legally have children with anyone you want in any jurisdiction. You have to get consent and that’s often withheld on the basis of apparent ancestry. Cultural and social factors also make it less common than it would be by random chance.
Elizabeth Warren tested out something like ~1/64th Cherokee I thought? And thanks to the wonders of meiosis you could genealogically have relatively recent ancestors of some group without any genetic markers.
The greater the genetic differences, the more likely a population will survive a pandemic.
Interesting research, but people forget one thing about Human Genetics.
Outside of Africa, genetic differences between people are not that great. People in Africa have far greater genetic differences than everyone in the Americas and Eurasia.
Can you explain why that is the case? I would have thought that the large amounts of immigration from many places to countries like the U.S. would lead to greater genetic diversity.
Humans originated in africa, and only a subset of our species genetic diversity ever left africa. So all immigration from "many places" still represents only a subset of the existing diversity.
There is also some immigration directly from africa, but that can only increase it to at most the same as exists there. Almost certainly somewhat less, in practice.
Interestingly, even within Africa, the human genome notably lacks variability, to a point where it’s hypothesized that there was a fairly severe population bottleneck at some time in the last couple hundred thousand years.
I've heard that humans were at some point reduced to a very small number, like thousands of individuals.
So how did a few thousand individuals become such great genetic diversity? Does genetic diversity come from being isolated, instead of mingling with other migratory groups?
Human genetic diversity on the whole is very, VERY low compared to other species. The superficial physical variation we associate with ethnic diversity (skin tone, nose shape, lip shape, hair color/texture, eye folds and angles) are genetically insignificant compared to their visual impact.
There is small amounts of "multiregionality" since some peoples are part Denisovan and most everyone is part Neanderthal, but it's not even a plurality in anyone we've ever found.
Not the OP but I’m guessing that it’s because humans in Africa were isolated in thousands of communities/regions for hundreds of thousands of years and evolved separately. Meanwhile the diaspora outside of Africa spread via select communities in a much shorter time. Somewhat counterintuitive.
Think about how much you know about a random country, say Hungary. Probably only one composer, maybe one movie. But in Hungary there are millions of books, movies, etc most of which never left.
Same for humans during migrations. Only a small percent of humans left Africa, and then only a smaller percent kept going, etc. So as long as not much time has passed to generate new variation in the areas they settle, only a small fraction of local variation ever leaves is low. And that's what we see, Africa is extremely diverse, Europe/Central Asia less, east Asia even less, etc. It's neither bad nor good, just a number.
There are some other factors, such as mixing with people already present at the destination for a long time (Neandertals, Denisovans) which balance it out slightly.
The US has lots of diversity, but there were a lot of groups in Africa for a very long time (maybe 10k+ separate groups). It's unlikely that people from each one have made it here, or even out of Africa at all, in significant numbers.
It's the founder effect. While on the surface it looks like "large amounts" of migration, it in fact represents a very small percentage of the gene pool. That group effectively becomes an isolated breeding population (though it's far more complex than that because groups would often encounter other groups and there would be interbreeding and such).
Humans have been living in Africa for as long as humans have existed--let's call that a round 300,000 years. The populations around where humanity first existed therefore reflects accumulated genetic diversity for all 300,000 years.
Let's say 100,000 years ago, a small group of humans left Africa for the other places of the world. That small group of humans represent a very small fraction of genetic diversity--it's effectively genetically identical. Assuming no more admixture over the millennia, the out-of-Africa humans will get more genetically diverse. But so are the original Africans, who also have the genetic diversity they started with--they're getting diverse no less quickly than the out-of-Africans, and since they started more diverse, the entire out-of-Africa can't ever catch up.
Real genetics is of course more complicated than this simple picture, but the basic principle holds that you find more diversity the closer you get to the origin.
This is more or less Sartre's take on the identity of Jewishness, that it is essentially defined and maintained by the forces of antisemitic discourse and violence. Arguably a reductive, even insulting, understanding of identity and culture but still a compelling one for many people, people make the same arguments about womanhood and misogyny, Blackness and racism.
A less charged version of this is Daniel Boyarin's take in "Border Lines," that early Christianity and early Rabbinic Judaism were largely defined in opposition to each other. I.e. that being "not that other thing" both established a bright line division where one didn't previously exist, and shaped the things on each side of that line. (And in his opinion, created the very concept of "a religion" as a distinct package of culture and ideas where previously it was more integrated across social activities and behaviors).
As Christianity became dominant, it began to schism internally with much the same pattern, fractally defining parts of itself as things like "not Arian" or "not Catholic." Judaism, embedded within Christian society, still primary organizes around being "not Gentile" which ranges from simply Christian to full blown anti-semitism and pogroms.
"that early Christianity and early Rabbinic Judaism were largely defined in opposition to each other"
I never heard of that theory, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense. I would think early christians mainly defined themself by believing in jesus christ, meaning they believed Jesus from Nazareth was the Messias and the other jews did not believe jesus was the messiahs.
And then you had christians who believed jesus resurrected from the death and those who did not. Then you had those who believed it was only a jew thing and then you had Paulus, who made it a universal religion, ... so all in all, plenty of different things people believed in. So surely some groups of people define themself by what they are not, but I don't think this was valid of early christians.
Or a more concrete example of today, many people today define themself by being anti green, anti progressive, anti woke, antifashist etc. but often struggle to define what they are standing for.
The theory would be that given A believes X and B believes Y, A is more likely to incorporate ~X and B is more likely to incorporate ~Y.
And because beliefs tend to be on a bit of a continuum, what starts with A believes Z <= 4 and B believes Z >=5 evolves to A believes Z <=1 and B believes Z >=9, and both believe anyone who believes 3<=Z<=7 is not part of their group.
I recently saw an interview with Natan Sharansky who was a Soviet dissident who spent many years in Soviet jails fighting to be allowed to immigrate to Israel.
His take on Jewishness at least in context of USSR was that Jews were completely assimilated and only the antisemites defined them as such and hated them and that's all. I think jews in Nazi germany as well suddenly found themselves jewish by the Nazi genocidal ideology while before it was complete assimilation with the German culture.
Since 2000, 11 652 Palestinians and 2 246 Israelis have been killed by someone from the other side. So who is the perpetrator here when one side perpetuates Apartheid policies?
Jesus, a Jew, was born in the land called Israel today, well before islam even existed. Al Aqsa is a form of religious domination (building ones holy site on another, older, holy site) and the very presence of palestinians is a form of colonialism.
What does that have to do with the current-day persecution of Palestinians by Apartheid Israel?
Children under the age of 15 in Palestine make up 50% of the population. In Gaza, it's 45%. One thing I've noticed is news media equating Hamas with the majority of Palestinians, they weren't even born when they came into power.
Apartheid Israel and Palestine are not the same. Israel is the aggressor. They've ethnic cleansed so many Palestinians that there are 5.9 million refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. That's half of Israel's population.
* Illegal Settlers living in Palestine can vote in Israel but not Palestinians. Apartheid South Africa did the same, they put the people in their own "country" and so couldn't vote. Israel doesn't want 1 state as that would mean millions more voting. And it doesn't want 2 states as that would mean giving up valuable land.
* The settlers kill and burn homes to get rid of people: [stealing homes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNqozQ8uaV8) and destroying olive tree groves. They pour concrete into Palestinian farmers' water wells.
There are Palestinian Christians too who are displaced by the illegal Israeli settlers. Israelis are as native as the Palestinians; especially when you consider that Israelis have come from elsewhere in the Middle-East and from Europe. Whereas the Palestinians have always been there, most being ethnically cleansed in the last 75 years. On the other hand, 17% of Israelis speak Russian; they have recently made Israel their home.
But you are arguing disingenuously, you know it, and I'd rather not continue this farce.
That seems a bit taken out of context. The Old Man wasn't talking about ethnic identity, but about political / revolutionary / national traditions in the context of the revival of Napeolonic imagery (and autocracy) in France.
Like many things with him, the quote can also be turned on its head when read in full context. Just like when people quote "Religion is the opiate of the masses" they rarely read the rest of the sentence "the heart of a heartless world". Negative judgement was not being cast on religion just a description of the reality of the situation: the world sucks for the mass of people and people reach for God to save them from it.
Likewise the traditions of the dead generations can also be beautiful dreams. The powerful can and do use the past or religion or whatever to build a mythos for the purpose of domination, but the weak can reach for it as a tool of liberation, too.
I didn't know that bit about that Marx quote, so I looked it up[0], and it's even more mis-quoted (or, charitably, paraphrased) than I'd known, the original (translated to English, of course) being:
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Either way, I think it's time to strike that from my list of presumed anti-religion sentiments.
This story reminds me of that episode on the TV show, The Orville. Season 1 Episode 9. Both the Navarians and Bruidians lay claim as the planet's original settlers. An ancient artifact containing residual DNA is discovered. They agree to a neutral third party to analyze the DNA to determine the planet's original settlers. Spoiler alert: Toward the end of the episode, the analyzed DNA determines both groups shared a common ancestor
Narurally. I think it's widely recognized that social commentary is what distinguishes science fiction (which casts a lens on possible futures extrapolated from our present) from fantasy (escapism, mythology, or hedonism).
well, the first line of the linked page says these are "comic fantasy" and "high fantasy" respectively, so no (though I think Discworld is arguably sci fi). But I get your point and concede that genre boundaries are not solid but more like intersecting clouds.
In a similar vein, scientists discovered T-Rex fossils that had bone marrow that was gellified, something that was supposed to be impossible. They could see blood cells and other structures.
I've been waiting for 10+ years for followup but haven't heard anyting about it. Does anyone have any updates to that? Were they able to dig up any other information from that discover?
You could find liquid bone marrow but I suspect the half-life of DNA itself means we'll never get anything useful out of it. It doesn't have to be dry to degrade.
The myth of the half-life of DNA needs to die. Just one year after the article with the supposed 521 years DNA half-life was published, the DNA of a 700000 year old horse fossil was sequenced [1]. That would have been more than 1000 half-lives, so it should have been completely useless. Except that it wasn't.
I can't find any scientists claiming that sequencing 700,000 year old DNA means the half-life study was incorrect, or even that it was incorrect for any other reason. Do you have sources?
Kilograms of biological material that's been frozen for 0.7MY will contain many orders of magnitude more intact DNA than a few grams of bone marrow that's been in assorted temperatures for a hundred times as long.
I'll let you do the math on how much would remain if we had 1 million tons of horse DNA with a 500 year half life. I'll even let you assume we have 1 trillion tons of horse DNA.
The half-life paper itself cites a readability horizon of 1.5 million years for even non-permafrost DNA. Regardless of what the degradation rate is, reading the genome of a whole frozen animal from 0.7MY ago is much easier than reading the genome from a tiny piece of unfossilized gel that's a hundred times older.
I know that feeling, my man. My shelves are covered in Jurassic Park memorabilia too. It's just not going to happen, though.
But then what's the point of the study? DNA has a half life of 500 years except when it doesn't? If they say 500 years and then you can retrieve DNA from samples 1000 times as old, who's to say they can't go further by another factor of 100?
I never said it was impossible. I meant that based on the fact DNA destabilizes over time even without an external destructive force, that is, it has a half-life, it's supremely unlikely useful genomes will ever be derived from 50+ million year old fossils.
DNA obviously does not behave like radioactive isotopes, so the half-life is dependent on a lot of external factors. The study presents a model for estimating the half-life of DNA for a given storage temperature assuming otherwise similar conditions to their reference samples. That's obviously useful for anyone working with ancient DNA, since it helps guide attention to samples that could potentially contain recoverable DNA.
The 521 years is just the half-life they estimated for their samples. Those are the empirical results, so it makes sense to highlight those in the title, as opposed to estimates from their model.
I don't mean to be rude, but please read the fine manuscript. It's open access, so you don't need to pay
If you have a bunch of observations, you can fit an exponential through them. You can do that in Excel. Here, let me just quickly do that for the half life of the buildings in Europe. ... Ok, done, it's 63 years. Should I publish an article? What conclusions does one draw? The usefulness of a model is how well it can extrapolate. 63 years means I should not find any buildings that are 2000 years old, and still the Pantheon is standing there just fine. Then what exactly is the claim? That it's possible to fit an exponential, but the exponential can't be used for inferring anything outside of my training sample?
And, no you are not being rude. But since you seem to have read the article, can you give me a few pointers why you think it's a good investment of someone else's time to go ahead and read it too? And don't be shy to use Machine Learning or Statistics jargon, we are on Hacker News here, everyone understands concepts like in-sample, out-of-sample, goodness of fit, overfitting and such.
You disagree with the 521 paper, but I'm not sure what your position is. Are you positing that DNA will not destabilize on its own unless subject to a particularly hostile environment? Are you saying it has a half-life but it's so much larger than 500 years that you expect usable DNA to be found in unfossilized dinosaur bone marrow?
The horse paper [1] is not a refutation of the DNA half-life paper [2]:
It's worth remembering that the half-life paper dealt with samples that had "an effective burial temperature of 13.1°C", while the horse sample was obtained from the permafrost. The half-life paper even talks about DNA obtained from ice-core samples in that age-range:
> The rate of depurination is influenced by temperature, among other factors, which explains why the most extreme survival of DNA was documented in approximately 450–800 kyr ice cores.
And if you look at Table 1 in the half-life paper, you'll find estimated half-lifes for a range of temperatures, with an estimated half-life of 9.5k years for a 500bp DNA fragment at -5C and 47k years for a shorter 100bp fragment at the same temperature:
> Still, the results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr).
The horse paper also cites the half-life paper, but not as a refutation.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadEDIT: Correction, the Promised Land is part of the Abrahamic covenant.
Contemporary Christian Evangelicals understand Jewish relocation to the land to be a necessary prerequisite for the Rapture. IDK much about the background or history there.
If any Christians out there want to deliberately create the conditions for the antichrist to desecrate the temple so that the rapture can happen sooner and the world can end, to be honest, that is crazy even within a system of faith. On those grounds I don't believe that it could possibly be a mainstream belief.
There are many YouTube videos of CUFI founder John Hagee giving sermons on this theology, sometimes going so far as praising the Hitler as "God's instrument" for moving Zionism forward
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hagee-still-sells-controv_b_1...
In the end, "legitimacy" of a group claiming exclusive access to a piece of land comes down to might-makes-right.
The other stuff is usually window dressing.
Makes for good grievance politics though, eh?
Sadly there are places in the world, a lot of them in Africa, where nobody can look beyond their superficial traits to classify criminals apart from their victims.
Someone would have a lot of explaining to do. Or maybe a lot of denying and covering up to do.
This would flip the scripture so to speak.
As I understand it, that is the expectation: The consensus among archeologists seems to be that ancient Israelites were simply another group of Canaanites who came to dominate the region. The Exodus is not a historical event.
Nothing I said suggests otherwise. I was simply looking at potential aftereffects of the unveiling --- and why any such unveiling might be vehemently opposed by entrenched non-scientific interests.
I think the world is less run by logic than people generally think. I don't think there will be an aftereffect. There is an Status quo and that's it. This observation is general and in anyway targeted in the context of the article. The Status quo involves any of us.
Yes.
> The Exodus is not a historical event.
This does not follow from your premise at all. (Nowhere does it say that people of the Exodus weren't Canaanites genetically.)
Rather, the statement about the Exodus was meant to expand on the "who came to dominate the region": It was meant to convey that they did not come to dominate through systematic genocide of the other Canaanites as depicted in the bible. It is my understand that there is little to no evidence of this event (or the preceding events) having occurred.
The overall understanding that I was trying to communicate was simply that the ancient Isrealites were Canaanites who stayed in Canaan.
That does not follow either. Civil wars happen all the time, and are usually accompanied by large-scale ethnic cleansing.
It is my understanding that there is little to no evidence of such an event having occurred.
The Bible's testimony itself, along with conclusion that people believed in this historical event at some point in time, is at least a some evidence towards it.
Like, you shouldn't take the events of the bible literally, but you could probably reasonably infer that the nations demonized in it probably were historical enemies of the people who wrote it, etc
There were probably dozens of different West Semitic speaking cultures/groupings, with plenty of cultural mixing. Hebrew (and Aramaic) speakers were only one of many in the region, all with competing claims over grazing and growing lands, etc. The Bible basically alludes to this all over.
What you have there is the stories of various fragments of it that distilled into more or less powerful tribal federations and, eventually, kingdoms. Told from their vantage, because the others did not commit theirs to writing.
And by the 3rd or 4th century AD, all West Semitic languages had basically gone functionally (but not liturgically) extinct, but the cultural and religious traditions of one of them tenaciously held on through the diaspora.
Genetic evidence could eliminate this.
Aramaic lived for a longer period, but then slowly died out. As a liturgical language western Aramaic / Syriac lived on, and eastern variants for longer but as a widespread, spoken lived language in the Levant I believe Greek replaced it, and then Arabic. I understand that "Jewish Palestinian Aramaic" lingered on for some time in some smaller communities.
I think that was only the case in urban areas and/or amongst the more educated upper and middle classes. Syriac and other Aramaic languages were still widespread amongst local Christian population well into the Islamic perod.
Between that, the sojourn to Egypt, and the constant complaints about intermarriage in the OT, you’d already expect these to be roughly the same gene pool.
More interesting may be the connection (or lack thereof) between OT-era Jews to modern Jews, which plays into political and racial arguments.
You're presuming some historicity there that I don't think is warranted. A lot of the stories in Genesis had their origin in stories from Mesopotamia, and I wouldn't read much more into that than you'd read into the Aenead claiming that the Romans originated in Troy. They're just borrowing legitimacy from an older historical tradition.
Just like yours is trying to, but with competing information
The simple, adult, quantifiable reality is that there is always cross drift between populations by mere nature of humans being compatible species to produce viable offspring with one another
The early Israelites were polytheists but had some affinity for Yahweh which was one Canaanite god among many. Why, how and when the Israelites became monotheists and why Yahweh became their only god is unknown. My guess (speculation follows) is that the Israelites were influenced by the Babylonians and Zoroastriansim. Zoroastrians worshipped fire and Yahweh was the god of fire (and smoke). Perhaps the many conflicts with other Canaanites caused them to adopt foreign practices to distinguish themselves from their enemies. Ritual circumcision perhaps was borrowed from Egypt.
There is not a shred of evidence of an emigration from Egypt and archaeologists have been searching for it for over 200 years. So why the Exodus is in the Bible is unknown. At the time these stories were written down Egypt was a regional super power, so perhaps whoever wrote it felt that "having been to Egypt" was something to brag about? Perhaps the story is allegorical?
Establishing a pious fraud ex nihilo as late as the Babylonian Exile is also a little too pat. You really think that a) the Babylonian Exiles convinced themselves of this with no surviving refutation or debate and b) they managed to impress it on the entire non-Exile population when they returned?
This Smithsonian article on the discovery of mining operations by a semi-nomadic people is a great read and ends on this note, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeological-dig-re...
> What Ben-Yosef has produced isn’t an argument for or against the historical accuracy of the Bible but a critique of his own profession. Archaeology, he argues, has overstated its authority. Entire kingdoms could exist under our noses, and archaeologists would never find a trace. Timna is an anomaly that throws into relief the limits of what we can know. The treasure of the ancient mines, it turns out, is humility.
Stories of Arthur uncontroversially predate the 12th century, and it is an open debate as to whether Arthur was based on a historical figure or not. (I vote yes.) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
> he Swedish 16th century king Erik XIV proclaimed himself the 14:th (hence the suffix XIV) king of Sweden
Some kings assuming a different regnal number on the basis of a semimythical history is not the same as convincing an entire population to change their origin myths.
The bible states they were from the island of Crete (Caphtor) and my understanding is there is also archaeological evidence (pottery etc) that suggests they were a Minoan (Indo/European) people in origin.
I believe they were part of the sea people migration during the bronze age collapse referenced by the Egyptians.
> just with religious differences
I think that was before Judaism/Christianity. Islam is much more recent though. The region did not have that until hundreds of years later.
You mean modern Hebrew speakers?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh8140
Also headline is slightly misleading, it's not 'a first':
"Ancient DNA from Chalcolithic Israel reveals the role of population mixture in cultural transformation" (2018)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05649-9
One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
When you said "race-based biological weapons" you mean weapons that target specific races?
Because this isn't possible.
Some conditions are /correlated/ with some groups, under the condition that you're only examining members of that group who already have symptoms of the condition.
This isn't really clear at all and there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, consumer DNA testing pretty reliably agrees with self-reported genealogical claims. Race has become a loaded word, but we understand population genetics pretty well and the effects of long periods of genetic isolation between different population groups are very much measurable.
The claim that it's impossible to develop a bioweapon that targets some genomic pattern that's common in descendants of some formerly long term isolated population and uncommon in others doesn't appear well-supported. In fact, nature already did this herself, as is well attested by the introduction of Eurasian diseases to the Americas.
Saying that...shamefully it was consciously used as weapon in some instances.
The effects of European diseases on native American populations is a red herring in this context, as modern populations are increasingly interbred and not isolated, and even with that case, it's not entirely clear that it was genetic vs. developmental, i.e. European children who survived to adulthood likely had been exposed to those diseases when young, while native American adults had not - so if they had been exposed as children, there could have been no difference in susceptibilty.
The DNA testing is associating you with a cluster; that cluster could be any "size" and isn't based on specific patterns. (And it's fundamentally not causation; you can more or less move anywhere you want and have children with anyone you want.)
There's also a selection effect that they don't show you the clusters that they can't make work.
Also often not true; for fun, look at /r/23andMe for white people from Oklahoma and you'll see it's surprisingly common that their parents told them they were part Cherokee when they aren't even 1% native. Famously happened to Elizabeth Warren, but it's not just her.
Last I checked you can’t legally have children with anyone you want in any jurisdiction. You have to get consent and that’s often withheld on the basis of apparent ancestry. Cultural and social factors also make it less common than it would be by random chance.
Elizabeth Warren tested out something like ~1/64th Cherokee I thought? And thanks to the wonders of meiosis you could genealogically have relatively recent ancestors of some group without any genetic markers.
The greater the genetic differences, the more likely a population will survive a pandemic.
Interesting research, but people forget one thing about Human Genetics.
Outside of Africa, genetic differences between people are not that great. People in Africa have far greater genetic differences than everyone in the Americas and Eurasia.
There is also some immigration directly from africa, but that can only increase it to at most the same as exists there. Almost certainly somewhat less, in practice.
cough mysterious 1:4:9 monolith cough
I've heard that humans were at some point reduced to a very small number, like thousands of individuals.
So how did a few thousand individuals become such great genetic diversity? Does genetic diversity come from being isolated, instead of mingling with other migratory groups?
There is small amounts of "multiregionality" since some peoples are part Denisovan and most everyone is part Neanderthal, but it's not even a plurality in anyone we've ever found.
Same for humans during migrations. Only a small percent of humans left Africa, and then only a smaller percent kept going, etc. So as long as not much time has passed to generate new variation in the areas they settle, only a small fraction of local variation ever leaves is low. And that's what we see, Africa is extremely diverse, Europe/Central Asia less, east Asia even less, etc. It's neither bad nor good, just a number.
There are some other factors, such as mixing with people already present at the destination for a long time (Neandertals, Denisovans) which balance it out slightly.
The US has lots of diversity, but there were a lot of groups in Africa for a very long time (maybe 10k+ separate groups). It's unlikely that people from each one have made it here, or even out of Africa at all, in significant numbers.
Let's say 100,000 years ago, a small group of humans left Africa for the other places of the world. That small group of humans represent a very small fraction of genetic diversity--it's effectively genetically identical. Assuming no more admixture over the millennia, the out-of-Africa humans will get more genetically diverse. But so are the original Africans, who also have the genetic diversity they started with--they're getting diverse no less quickly than the out-of-Africans, and since they started more diverse, the entire out-of-Africa can't ever catch up.
Real genetics is of course more complicated than this simple picture, but the basic principle holds that you find more diversity the closer you get to the origin.
> “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Hope someday we can move on from whatever team we were born into
As Christianity became dominant, it began to schism internally with much the same pattern, fractally defining parts of itself as things like "not Arian" or "not Catholic." Judaism, embedded within Christian society, still primary organizes around being "not Gentile" which ranges from simply Christian to full blown anti-semitism and pogroms.
I never heard of that theory, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense. I would think early christians mainly defined themself by believing in jesus christ, meaning they believed Jesus from Nazareth was the Messias and the other jews did not believe jesus was the messiahs.
And then you had christians who believed jesus resurrected from the death and those who did not. Then you had those who believed it was only a jew thing and then you had Paulus, who made it a universal religion, ... so all in all, plenty of different things people believed in. So surely some groups of people define themself by what they are not, but I don't think this was valid of early christians.
Isn't that definition in opposition?
group A believes in X
group B believes in Y
What the parent poster seemed to imply was
group A believes in not Y.
Or a more concrete example of today, many people today define themself by being anti green, anti progressive, anti woke, antifashist etc. but often struggle to define what they are standing for.
And because beliefs tend to be on a bit of a continuum, what starts with A believes Z <= 4 and B believes Z >=5 evolves to A believes Z <=1 and B believes Z >=9, and both believe anyone who believes 3<=Z<=7 is not part of their group.
Children under the age of 15 in Palestine make up 50% of the population. In Gaza, it's 45%. One thing I've noticed is news media equating Hamas with the majority of Palestinians, they weren't even born when they came into power.
Apartheid Israel and Palestine are not the same. Israel is the aggressor. They've ethnic cleansed so many Palestinians that there are 5.9 million refugees in Jordan and Lebanon. That's half of Israel's population.
* Illegal Settlers living in Palestine can vote in Israel but not Palestinians. Apartheid South Africa did the same, they put the people in their own "country" and so couldn't vote. Israel doesn't want 1 state as that would mean millions more voting. And it doesn't want 2 states as that would mean giving up valuable land.
* Israel has ethnically cleansed and fragmented areas into [isolated cantons divided by Israeli settlements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_enclaves), and implemented [lebensraum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum) tactics. This was called [Bantustans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantustan) in South Africa.
* [It denies Palestinian fishing past 3 nautical miles in some areas, and not past 15 nautical miles](https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline100...)
* [The Apartheid Separation wall](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d0/73/81/d07381fffef632350bcb...)?
* The settlers kill and burn homes to get rid of people: [stealing homes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNqozQ8uaV8) and destroying olive tree groves. They pour concrete into Palestinian farmers' water wells.
* [They control the water completely](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...).
* [They get 12 hours of electricity a day](https://www.ochaopt.org/page/gaza-strip-electricity-supply).
* Palestinians didn't have 3G until 2018, their access is also restricted.
* They [blockade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip) Gaza, making it a concentration camp of 2.2 million people where 44% are children.
* [Not All Israeli Citizens Are Equal](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/opinion/not-all-israeli-c...)
* There were `5,248,185` Palestinian refugees in 2020; that's equal to half the population of Israel.
* [Israel dictates who you can marry](
But you are arguing disingenuously, you know it, and I'd rather not continue this farce.
Like many things with him, the quote can also be turned on its head when read in full context. Just like when people quote "Religion is the opiate of the masses" they rarely read the rest of the sentence "the heart of a heartless world". Negative judgement was not being cast on religion just a description of the reality of the situation: the world sucks for the mass of people and people reach for God to save them from it.
Likewise the traditions of the dead generations can also be beautiful dreams. The powerful can and do use the past or religion or whatever to build a mythos for the purpose of domination, but the weak can reach for it as a tool of liberation, too.
Good book: https://www.amazon.com/Fatherland-Mother-Earth-National-Ques...
(early journal-article version here: file:///home/ryan/Downloads/titusland,+SR_1989_Lowy.pdf)
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
Either way, I think it's time to strike that from my list of presumed anti-religion sentiments.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
https://archive.ph/oLK5q
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent?wpr...
It is trivial to demonstrate the likely existence of a common ancestor. It’s far from trivial to find them.
Are you absolutely sure they weren't engineered by some alien mad scientist? Or even a sane one, just for giggles?
I've been waiting for 10+ years for followup but haven't heard anyting about it. Does anyone have any updates to that? Were they able to dig up any other information from that discover?
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/700000-year-old-hors...
I'll let you do the math on how much would remain if we had 1 million tons of horse DNA with a 500 year half life. I'll even let you assume we have 1 trillion tons of horse DNA.
I know that feeling, my man. My shelves are covered in Jurassic Park memorabilia too. It's just not going to happen, though.
The 521 years is just the half-life they estimated for their samples. Those are the empirical results, so it makes sense to highlight those in the title, as opposed to estimates from their model.
I don't mean to be rude, but please read the fine manuscript. It's open access, so you don't need to pay
And, no you are not being rude. But since you seem to have read the article, can you give me a few pointers why you think it's a good investment of someone else's time to go ahead and read it too? And don't be shy to use Machine Learning or Statistics jargon, we are on Hacker News here, everyone understands concepts like in-sample, out-of-sample, goodness of fit, overfitting and such.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
It's worth remembering that the half-life paper dealt with samples that had "an effective burial temperature of 13.1°C", while the horse sample was obtained from the permafrost. The half-life paper even talks about DNA obtained from ice-core samples in that age-range:
> The rate of depurination is influenced by temperature, among other factors, which explains why the most extreme survival of DNA was documented in approximately 450–800 kyr ice cores.
And if you look at Table 1 in the half-life paper, you'll find estimated half-lifes for a range of temperatures, with an estimated half-life of 9.5k years for a 500bp DNA fragment at -5C and 47k years for a shorter 100bp fragment at the same temperature:
> Still, the results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr).
The horse paper also cites the half-life paper, but not as a refutation.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12323
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23055061/