Recent content by olivand

Plant based foods will generally be easier to cultivate than animal and they alone create the possibility of generating surpluses which is why civilisations developed only after the adoption of farming which is primarily cultivation of plant based foods (wheat grasses, rice and maize) and...

I'm very worried about it. The risk of catastrophic climate change under certain scenarios discussed in many IPCC reports should spur action by humanity to at least buy itself some insurance. Yet we remain relatively inert and calls for such action are dismissed as hysteria. This is an issue...

I reckon income and education will play an important role (the 2 are also highly correlated) - if average incomes and educational opportunities are lower in the southern states (where obesity rates are higher), obesity will tend to be higher given the particular effort you need to invest to...

I agree that ‘wokism’ lacks a strong scientific foundation. It is mostly theoretical conjecture and its arguments are difficult to test in practice. It has gone quite far beyond philosophical discussion over important issues touching on racial justice, policing, and the manifold dimensions of...

thanks - very useful comments here on these 'Illyrian' samples!

Thanks for your helpful reply! I still find these archeogenetic matches quite confusing - but the specific samples for my Illyrian matches are 13313B and 13313C - there's no mention which haplogroups these particular samples carried. The genetic distance is also measured at 9.99 but matches...

Thanks Hawk - so more related to the Bronze Age expansion rather than early farmer. Thanks for filling in an information gap!

Hi, my LivingDNA results were not unexpected; Iberia 62% Basque 20% France 16% 2% It largely concords with other companies I've used which also identify a very strong south western European Atlantic ancestry. 23andme was significantly less granular, identifying 95% Spanish ancestry and 5%...

Here are my results Iberian 92% (France - Nouvelle Aquitaine) (North-east Spain - Catalonia) English 7% Central Asian 1%

I don't want to paste the long list of my ancient population and deep dive matches but my closest ancient populations turn out to be Visigoths and Illyrians. The latter match is based on skeletal remains dated to around 1600BC and found in present day Croatia (specifically the Veliki Vanik...