David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

About this episode

David Reich discusses his new research on human evolution and the impact of the Bronze Age on genetic selection.

David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution. By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up. Selection went especially bonkers during the Bronze Age (around 3,000 years ago). That’s when gene frequencies for everything from immune function to body fat to intelligence were most in flux. Over the last 10,000 years, selection pushed the genetic predictor of cognitive performance up by roughly a full standard deviation — most of it between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago. After we finished recording, David sketched out on a whiteboard his new heretical model about who the Neanderthals really were. Luckily, I took out my iPhone and managed to record it. He thinks the standard story (that Neanderthals are some separate archaic lineage we interbred with a little) just doesn’t fit the evidence. Instead, he proposes that Neanderthals are essentially genetically-swamped modern humans. A small population somewhere around the Caucasus…

People in this episode

Host: Dwarkesh Patel

Guest: David Reich

Topics covered

• human evolution
• ancient DNA
• natural selection
• Neanderthals
• Bronze Age
• cognitive performance

Keywords

• Bronze Age
• natural selection
• ancient DNA
• Neanderthals
• cognitive performance
• human evolution

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Caucasus, Europe, Africa

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