Turks
razib | January 26, 2010One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The Neandertal genome story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there've been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the past. The input of genetics has basically demanded a revision of the contemporary consensus of the origins of the Etruscans which emerged from archaeology. Though certainly ancestry and genetic relationship are informative, ancient DNA has also given us windows into the change of function and a…
razib | June 4, 2009In the 19th & 20th centuries with the emergence of nationalism and its various scholarly subsidiaries in archaeology, philology and ethnography quite a few pan-ethnic movements rooted in language were born. Pan-Slavism, the Greater German idea (Grossdeutsch) and Pan-Arabism come to mind. As evident in their names these ideas shadowed relationships of language, but they often veered into racialist territory. In The History and Geography of Human Genes L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported a substantial overlap between phylogenies generated from classical autosomal markers, and those of linguistic…