Ancient Human History, Without the Bullshit

Open, Cross-discipline, Unsupervised, and Sensible

There is a term that is whispered about in hushed tones in the laboratories and research centers of modern science.  If the term is mentioned at all, it’s a guaranteed conversation-ender. 

The term is ‘replication crises’, and in essence, this refers to ‘questionable’ (a very kind word choice) science that is done with statistical probability models – math, in other words – vs. old school lab/field empirical methods, and often with minimal or highly selective physical evidence/data. It is called a “replication” crises, because very few of these sexy. math-led, headline grabbing research results can be reproduced, which is the standard measure of the validity of research.

The methods used in this type of science are tricky to sum up in simple terms, but in essence, with the statistical version of science, researcher do not really hypothesize anything concrete regarding the nature of a phenomenon, instead they seek to hypothesize something about the probability of a phenomena’s nature.

In historical linguistics (the study of the languages of our past), for example, if a researcher suspects/believes that language X is a ‘daughter’ of language Y, they might look for similar words and/or grammatical features that suggest this relationship, groom this data to be algorithmically compared with known related languages, and then run various algorithmic models to find patterns that might confirm or refute their hypothesis. Population genetics (the study of population genomes, ancient or current), pretty much works the same way.

In principle, methods like this can be used to compare vast amounts of often incomplete of data, or fragments of incomplete data, and identify relationships that would be hard for a human to spot, and then rank possible explanations for these relationships in terms of a range of probabilities.

The problems arise for myriad reasons, which I will explore in future posts, but for now, suffice it to say that a great number of human decisions must be made throughout the entire process, and humans, even the scientific ones, often make mistakes and always have some degree of bias. Small errors or questionable choices in how the data is selected, groomed and analyzed can lead to false positives (and false negative), and it’s ultimately up to a human researcher to say what constitutes probable enough to issue a press release announcing their findings. Many times, other researchers cannot replicate their results.

Where this gets really problematic is when new research is done predicated on the assumptions/findings made of earlier, possibly non-replicable (i.e., possibly false) conclusions. What’s worse, these research findings are often plotted/modeled in a taxa or “tree” which, very often, is widely acknowledged to be bloated, often full of bad classifications questionably organized. The result is one of bad data used to generate subsequent generations of bad data. What often appears to be an elegant tree-like model of a language family, or the lineage of a species in a ‘family tree’, for example, are really just a series of historical scientific compromises, grafted together over many years to look like a tree, even when the underlying data has been shown to be erroneously classified or arranged. Trees of convenience vs. trees of science.

A hero of mine, Jimi Hendrix, once said “I hear my mistakes copied so many times I hear great copies of my mistakes”. It’s kinda like that, because there’s no one responsible for checking the math, or no one wants to take on the crap job that is parsing and re-arranging the data. Said differently, the science is moving way faster than our ability/desire to update the models. The incentives favor publishing, not organizing.

By way of comparison, Consider the empirical science of Charles Darwin, the granddaddy of our current paradigm of human history.  Never mind that he was quite wrong about a number of the key assumptions underlying his theory, people understood his methods and hypothesis, and in principle, it could be tested and refuted or validated empirically (in principle).

The new science works differently. It’s less ‘true or false’ and more ‘truthier or falsier’. When a paper states that X, Y, or Z has been “shown”, as per the text and graphs of the abstract, what has really been ‘shown’ (in the fine print of the supplementary docs no one reads) is the probability that X, Y, or Z is show-able. In other words, the conclusions are not empirically observational, in fact they don’t even need to really exist, they just need to be demonstrated to be mathematically ‘probable’, in the largely ungoverned opinions of the researchers involved.

How big of a problem is with this? Well, that’s like asking how big is the problem with plastic in the ocean. We know there’s a lot of it, and we know it’s a really bad thing that someone should probably do something about, but it’s far away, the responsibility is widely diffused, and people don’t really know what to do about it. And what’s more, given the amount of funding pouring into this kind of science, and the money being made in the commercial ancestry market (see below), there is not much of an incentive to clean it up. Add to this the usual challenges in research: data integrity problems, peer reviewers who are ether unavailable or not good at math, buggy, untested code*, researcher bias, etc., and it’s reasonable to assume that there are some questionable research papers out there. But how often do you receive a retraction of some breakthrough, headline-making genetic announcement from FamilyTree.com in your in-box? Probably about as frequently as you receive headlines clarifying the scale of the Pacific Garbage Patch.

This all may seem highly academic or possibly even trivial, but I assure you it is not. Those press release you see about the latest genetic discovery of some ancient population, they are nearly all done this way. Search on-line for the number of times 23andME has changed their mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) ancestral trees.  The reason for all the changes is simple: the earlier version was a probability that was later shown to be quite unprobeable. So, it was made more probable, using proprietary, non-public methodologies. Until the next change.

On that note, a group of executives at 23andMe met and decided to organize customer DNA profiles around the modern countries of our time. Of course, these countries were all invented roughly during the lifetimes of your great grandparents (or great-great grandparents). The populations of these countries today are far from homogeneous, and during the last 10,000 years, nearly all of them have seen complete genetic turnovers (changes in the ethnicities of their inhabitants), in most cases, dozens of times. Your ethnicity, as reported by companies like FamilyTree and 23andMe, is curated and packaged to sell, and if accurate (most are not), the genetic information provided is virtually meaningless.

Why am I starting a blog about ancient human history with all of this? Because we’ve pretty much reached the point where it is impossible to draw any concrete, evidence-based conclusions about our distant past without first understanding how new science has at once illuminated and obfuscated much of our collective history. And if you know how to parse the data in way that is unsupervised and free from the ideological framework of the current paradigm, the picture that emerges is remarkably unlike what we thought we knew. It is way older, way deeper, and way more complex than we have been told to believe. Otherwise, you are forced to take the headlines as fact. I assure you, it is often fiction. Science by press-release. The crayon version of algorithmic data-science.

Of course, science is a process, and no one expects it to be perfect. Ideas come and go, new data/evidence is generated, old data is re-evaluated, new hypotheses are formulated, debated, challenged, validated, etc. This is the way it is supposed to work, and for the most part, in most of science, this is the way it has worked. The ideas is that it gets better with time.

Consider the examples of computer science and astrophysics, two fields highly dependent on math. For the later, since the 19^th century, we have progressed from essentially Copernicus (the sun at the center of the universe) to quantum mechanics, multiple, improved versions of relativity, deep space telescopes, and commercial space flight.  And in tech and computer science we have gone from the lightbulb and telegraph (both inventions of the 19^th century) to the Internet and the iPhone, to use a cliché.  Pretty respectable progress, I’d say.

And what of our progress in the study of ancient human history? 

We’ve sequenced the full human genome, and the genomes of many other species. We have synthetic biology and nanotechnology. We can date old things with a degree of accuracy unimaginable a few decades ago, and we have all this new tech and data science. Tons of new archeological sites have been discovered and despite the challenges with older genetic research, we have pretty good data on a lot of the genetic history of our ancient ancestors. So there’s a ton of revolutionary progress there.

And how has all that great progress shaped our understanding of ancient human history?

Well, it turns out we can now say with a high degree of probability, that, in essence, humans have evolved from primate in Africa between 100k years ago and 50k years ago, all current humans evolved from a single, common, early human ancestor, and we were hunter gatherers until about the time of ancient Mesopotamia, which was the cradle of civilization, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Which is pretty remarkable, since, as science goes, that’s not a whole lot of progress vs the view we held of ancient history propose by Darwin and others back in the 19th century. All that tech, all that innovation, and I guess Darwin totally nailed it.  There were primates, then “proto-humans”, then our ancestral Adam and Eve, then ‘history’ starts, with what we call ‘antiquity’, basically the Greeks and Romans (with an occasional footnote referencing ancient Egyptians), preceded by hundreds of thousands of years of “pre-history”.

Of course, I am stretching the point a bit to make a point, we do know a lot more about our ancient past than we did in Darwin’s time. But the paradigm and the vocabulary remains largely unchanged. A long pre-history of hunting and gathering, then a sudden burst of innovation in ancient Samaria, and roughly 2000 years later, history begins in Europe.

The paradigm of ancient human history has had a truly remarkable shelf-life. Tech has transformed nearly every other element of life and science, and yet our ancient past is still described in a pre-television era, kindergarden-like vocabulary.

Is that all there is/was to our past?

First, consider the timescales for a moment. Pre-history is a very, very long time. It is not unusual to read about the ‘collapse’ of a civilization or the ‘development’ of a technology *agriculture” for example, in terms of centuries or a millennial. That’s a very long time for a collapse or invention. 1000 years ago was the year 1023, the dark ages in Europe. 1000 years from now will be the year 3023. It is impossible for me to imagine what life will be like then. There is some debate about how long anatomically modern humans have roamed the earth, but it is safe to say it has been at least 200,000 years. These people had the same brains as ours, yet for the 99% of history that is our “pre-history”, we stuck to hunting and gathering?

Of course, recent evidence ‘suggests’ that there is far more to our ancient past than the paradigm suggests. Consider the following:

• Around 7500BC, residents of a highly organized and complex human settlement, now referred to as Tel Hreiz in what is now Israel, constructed a sea wall to protect their settlements from Mediterranean storms. The wall was not effective. Tel Hreiz, along with at least 15 similar settlements discovered in the past decade by Israeli archeologists, is now under water due to a roughly 2-phase rise in sea-levels on earth. Roughly 2000 years before destruction of Tel Hreiz, the surface of our planet was violently and nearly completely reconfigured, due to an apocalyptic series of cataclysms that started suddenly. These included massive, worldwide floods and a series of violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. To this day, the notion of any sort of global-scale cataclysm at the end of the last ice age (~10,000BC) is largely dismissed by archeologists and historians. They are the stuff of ‘myth’. Geology and genetic researchers have a very different opinion, as did nearly all our ancient ancestors.
• Genetic evidence now shows conclusively America was not first settled by ancient hunter gatherers who crossed over what is now the baring straights from what is now Siberia ~12,000 years ago. A great deal of migration of early humans did indeed happen across the stretch of land that once connected North America to Asia. But it was not a stretch of land, it was a landmass, larger than the Canadian providences of British Columbia and Alberta combined. For at least 10,000 years the climate of this landmass, known as Beringia today, had a temperate, forested landscape, and teamed with life. It was an ecological ‘hotspot’ on earth at a time in which its neighbors to the east and west were blanketed in ice sheets over a mile thick.
• Beringia was widely populated at this time by groups of peoples with a degree of ethnic and language variation akin to that of Los Angeles today. Parts of Siberia were settled by peoples who migrated from the Americas, not the other way around. By 12,000 years ago, Beringia was submerged into the depths of the Pacific due to a sudden, ~300-foot rise in sea level, rendering it nearly impassable.
• South America was settled long before North America, and migration patterns were initially south to north. The first settlers had no African ancestry, and genetic evidence strongly suggests that anatomically modern humans first arrived in Africa vis South Africa.
• A very robust DNA sample from a Neanderthal in the Altai mountains of Siberia has been sequenced. It is clear in the sequence and from similar research that Neanderthals evolved FROM humans. Until recently, it was believed that anatomically modern humans (AMS) were a sister lineage to Neanderthals and that due to interbreeding (admixture), AMS has traces of Neanderthal in our genome. This is true, we do, but it is likely not a product of interbreeding, but instead the remnants of DNA from the earliest Neanderthal divergence from humans.
• Roughly 50,000 years ago, ancient humans had mastered the sea. Whole sea-faring civilizations migrated from region to region, resulting in the spread of human DNA far more broadly than that which spread via ancient migrants on land.
• The ancestors of these first sea-faring people founded an advanced and highly complex civilization 5000 years ago, in what was a nearly inaccessible and seeming inhospitable stretch of the Peruvian coast. The civilization they founded, known as Caral Supa (among other names), had extensive agriculture and irrigation, metallurgy, medicine, art, technology and build megalithic structures unrivaled anywhere on earth at the time. The Caral predated the Incas and Mayans (and the arrival of the ‘first’ Europeans of modern times) by roughly 4000 years.

• In the country of Georgia, flax thread was used to sew clothing for at least 34k years (the earliest example yet found). Tailoring materials were also found in Spain dating back 45k yeas, and in both regions, archeologists have discovered the remains of early humans dating back 1.8 million year ago.
• Another settlement has been found under the sea off the coast of Israel, just south of Tel Aviv. It has been dated to 18,000 years ago. Amongst the remains, grain storage vessels and sickles were found. Agriculture is said to have been ‘invented’ between 10,000 and 14,000 years later.
• For at least 5000 years before the formation of the first Egyptian kingdom, vast and highly complex trading networks existed across nearly all of the habitable land sea south of the ice sheets of the last glacial Maximum. Across the vast stretch of land and sea from the Western-most coasts of Europe and North Africa, through the Levant, Anatolia, Central Asia and into what is now India, Iran, and Western China and into southeast Asia, hundreds of civilizations with vastly different languages, cultures, genetic profiles and technologies mined, built, harvested, raised and sold nearly any imaginable product, from raw materials for construction and metallurgy to art and luxury goods, and everything in between.
• The inventories and shipping details of the goods exchanged throughout these trade networks (essentially bills of lading) were recorded and sealed in tamper-proof clay disks about the size of an iPhone earbud case. These were used for over 9000 years and could be understood irrespective of the languages of the traders, shippers of middle-people.
• In the New Guinee highlands, a harsh and seemingly inhospitable region thought to be uninhabited until roughly the 1930s (AD), there existed at least dozens of ethnically diverse peoples who were proficient in the systematically controlled burning of areas of otherwise agriculturally unusable plots of land. Although considered to have been completely isolated from the outside world for millennia, they broadly practiced agriculture and raised domestic animals since at least 15,000BC. That banana you had for breakfast was widely grown by a people thought not exist until roughly the lifetime of your grandparents. The genetic and linguistic diversity in just the New Guinee highlanders was akin to that of much of Europe today.
• About 35km west for what is now the city of Vilnius, Lithuania, irrefutable evidence of 10 millennia (that’s 10,000 years) of continuous human (not neanderthal) settlement has been discovered, with complex burial mounds, hill forts, and a large defense systems.
• Millstones were used to grind grains in Australia since at least 50,000BC. That’s roughly 41,000 years before agriculture was “invented”. Humans and early humans occupied the stretch of lands from the Malay Archipelago to the Philippines to Australia for at least this 50,000-year period. Early human remains have been found in this region dating from 700,000 years ago (Philippines) to as far back as 1,600,000 years ago (New Guinee). Madagascar, which, as the crow flies, is nearly 5500 miles to the West of this reason, across open ocean was settled by oceanic seafaring peoples from this region at least 1200 years ago, despite laying just 300 or so miles off the coast of continental Africa.
• Below is a picture of a ceramic figure known as the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.

This amazing work of ceramic art dates to 29-25,000 years ago. It was found not in Mesopotamia or the Levant, but in what is now the Czech Republic. Despite evidence of large, high-density settlements in the same area, we refer to both the civilization which produced this, as well as the organized armies that later sacked and destroyed this civilization as ‘hunter gatherers’.

A piece like this required a high-temperature kiln, incredible artistic skill, and detailed knowledge of clay and pottery-making. Etched into this piece and other ancient artifacts from the time are the signs of a full written language. Aesthetic taste is subjective, of course, but a piece like this and the roughly 30,000 year-old cave paintings lining the walls of the Chauvet Pont ‘Arc cave in what is now France are amongst the most profoundly beautiful examples of human artistic expression I have ever seen.

There are many, many more examples of discoveries like the ones listed above, dating well before the start of the last ice age, and they keep coming in on almost a daily basis.

Taken individually, all of these examples could be seen as ‘outliers’, as they often are, as incomprehensible as that may seem. But taken together the current paradigm is simply non-descriptive and wrong. How wrong?

As I hope to show in my series on ancient Anatolia, and in future posts, ancient human history is far, far deeper, more complex and more global than it is described today. In fact, historians and archeologist don’t even have the words to describe it. Completely meaningless and non-descriptive term like ‘hunter gatherer’ (in the context of Holocene humanity) is used to this day to describe nearly all of humanity before roughly 3000BC, and the peoples of whole, complex human civilizations like Gobekli Tepi. The genetic diversity on earth and the degree of variation in technology, art, organization, construction, culture and knowledge around 5000BC was far greater on planet earth that is today. These people didn’t just pop-up out of nowhere. This degree of variation requires tens of thousands of years to develop. The notion of a ‘cradle of civilization’ 3000 years ago is completely meaningless and insulting to the complex history of our ancient ancestors and anyone interested in ancient history.

I travel a lot, and have visited at least 50 countries across the globe. When I speak to the locals in many of these places, none of this is news. They know their histories and they often fully understand that their past is ancient and complex. They have deep pride in their cultures and the roles their ancestors have played in shaping history. Spend any time in native American communities in the US and you will hear the same thing. Today we dismiss most of it as myth. At a time in history when we are finally starting to respect the importance of diversity in the world we live in today, we dismiss 50,000 of the history of this diversity as fairy tales.

Why? Why do we hang on to a set of beliefs that is narrow and mostly pseudo-scientific (more to come on that) in the face of a massive and ever-growing body of evidence clearly demonstrating that these beliefs are largely wrong? We certainly have the technical and financial means to re-think and re-frame many of these beliefs.

There is a short and a long answer to that question. The short one is that the fundamental models we use to frame the evidence of our past are largely the wrong models for the dataset.

We will explore specific examples of this in future posts, but for now, it’s important to understand that a model is like a template in research. To a large extent the model pre-determines the outcome. It will cast the shape it’s made to cast. You would not use a pasta maker to make cookies. If it fits through the little holes, whatever you put in the pasta maker is going to come out roughly looking like pasta. But it is not pasta. It is something else in the shape of pasta. This is akin to the version of ancient history as we model it today. It is not history, it is something else molded to look like history,

Here’s the long answer: the models are not scientific, they are a belief system, or set of mental models, masquerading as science. The models likely started as science, at least to the extent possible at the time, but the current paradigm has always been and continues to be a set of beliefs, and changing a belief system is way harder for a human to do than you may think. In fact, you may not even recognize its existence as such. I often don’t, and I qualify as human.

This is a feature, not a bug, of the human mind. Facts and evidence can change quickly, but ideas change far more slowly, if at all. Once an idea or mental model is formulated that appears to explain a complex phenomenon, consciously or unconsciously it takes an enormous cognitive load to overcome it, despite the evidence.

This feature of the human mind developed as a survival mechanism, and it is fundamental to how our brains work. We are not wired for truth or facts, we are wired to survive, and truth and facts may be completely irrelevant to survival. Our ancient ancestors knew this intuitively. They knew what they needed to know to survive and, they sought and framed new knowledge for improve the odds of survival, because the consequences of getting it wrong could mean life or death. By contrast, logically (in our pre-frontal cortex) one can be fully aware that a threat to one’s beliefs is probably not a life-or-death matter, but once these beliefs are deemed existential by one’s insular cortex (the neurological emperor of human behavioral complex), its a fight for your life. To abandon or fundamentally change one’s belief template requires tremendous cognitive effort, and the reality is that most of us simply do not have the mental strength to get that done.

For a long time, we have had a functioning mental model to frame our ancient past. But new tech and new discoveries have piled up to the point that that mode longer works. Yet we stick to it, as if fighting for our lives. Not a day passes without some new research paper related to the search for the Indo Aryan homeland, or some new take on grafting clear outlier languages or genetic haplotypes (groups of people with largely the same genetic profile), or the route/timeline of our migration out of Africa, etc. Scientific Squid Games.

Finally, it’s important to touch on the vocabulary of the current paradigm.

Words matter a great deal. They enable or constrain the expression of ideas and concepts. A belief is an abstraction that requires words to express, and the language of the belief template of our current paradigm are purpose-built for those ideas. Terms ‘hunter gatherer’, ‘stone age’. ‘prehistory’, neolithic, ‘Indo Aryan’, ‘Indo European’, ‘invent’, etc. are non-descriptive and misleading. They also do not line up with the vocabulary of the earths geological and climactic history. The further back in time we go, the less descriptive the terms become. Said better, the more misleading the terms become. Whole civilizations spanning thousands of miles with complex millennia-long histories, are regularly grouped together and described using wholly arbitrarily established, un-related terms. Once together grouped as such, a whole host of inferences are often made both by the field of science that has established the grouping, and related fields. We have invented whole civilizations this way, imputing them with language, history, culture, etc. The problem often starts with the initial grouping. Whether for convenience or in error, once grouped, ungrouping becomes increasingly difficult. The group takes on a life of its own, and then things get really messy.

When you hear the word “proto-” in conversations regarding ancient history, your bullshit detector should start to make a lot of noise. Of course, it is reasonable to speculate as to the origin of a language or a people, but it is not reasonable to invent one. But this is precisely what science has been compelled to do, many times, given the limits of our current model of ancient history. Because we assume a single tree philology, with a single trunk in a fixed timescale, absent any evidence to support a people or a language at the time and place where the trunk has been plotted, the language or people are reverse engineered to fit the model. Again, we invent them. Our ancestral mtDNA Adam and Eve? No one has ever had those genes, which researchers will freely admit. The genetics are inferred, invented using statistical probability methods to make the model work. And so were their ancestral Adam and Eve. It turns out, even proto-humans require proto-proto-humans. How that plays out should be fun to watch.

By way of example, I was listening to a podcast the other day with a linguist and a geneticist. I like the podcast, and it’s very interesting for me to listen to the dynamics of the discussions. The podcaster/geneticist is a very smart guy and he clearly understands that many of the foundational assumptions of the current paradigm of human history are bullshit. But he doesn’t say it. Well, it slips out now and again, but mostly, he dances around the obvious. I had to check the date of the podcast several times, I thought it must have been from 2015 or so, given all that we know now. But it wasn’t, it was from 2021, and the discussion was a sincere exploration of the search for the Indo-Aryan homeland, an example of an imaginary place populated by an imaginary group of people who spoke an imaginary proto-language.

The term I use to describe all this is ‘anti-descriptive’ history, history that becomes less and less descriptive, the more we presume to know about it. Of course, not all ancient human history is anti-descriptive, but we should be explicit about the role these models, and the beliefs and biases that accompany them, shape our understanding of our ancient past. Human history is written by humans, and belief is a hell of a drug.

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As I said, I am not a historian or a scientist but I understand the tech, probably better than most historians and many scientists. I can read a scientific paper and have read many hundreds of them. My hope is that I can make the tech more understandable, explore history as unencumbered as humanly possible by the current paradigm/belief template shaping out past. And have some fun doing it. In a perfect world, I will get comments or feedback that cite evidence that refute any number of observations or interpretations I make (send them my way). When this happens, let’s get the actual research on the table and talk about it. Getting my read on ancient history wrong will not hurt my career prospects or prospects for funding in the least. I have no dog in the current fight, and I think ancient history needs more, sensible, subject-matter specific experts outside of the monasteries of archeology, paleontology and linguistics, and with non-hack chops in the fields of AI and data-science.

That’s how open source innovates. The tech gets improved, the bugs get fixed, and new ideas flourish. It is all about the community. There is no such thing as a “pseudo” or “armature” contributor in the opensource community. You contribute valuably where you can add value. It’s time the operating model caught up with the tech in science and history.

Peace!

Next up, we will go way back to roughly 12,000 years ago, and explore one of the most important starting points of our current era, Holocene Anatolia. I’ll spend some time on that topic with the goal of putting all of this into historical context, then move on the central and south Asia, and work my way south and east from there.