Henry Harpending

Henry Cosad Harpending (January 13, 1944 – April 3, 2016) was an American anthropologist and distinguished professor at the University of Utah, best known for his 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, co-authored with Gregory Cochran. Educated at Hamilton College and Harvard University, his career included faculty positions at Penn State and the University of New Mexico. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Harpending worked primarily in biological anthropology and population genetics, but also conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the !Kung and Herero peoples of Southern Africa. His work in population genetics pioneered the study of the relationship between genetics and geography. Quotes We've been almost indoctrinated with this notion that human evolution stopped long ago... Part of the problem was that in the 1950s, social science, in order to validate itself, needed a homogenous humanity, and if you read the literature, it's as if there was a truce. It seems biologists wouldn't even talk about it. Quoted in The Guardian, 15 December 2007 The 10,000 Year Explosion Dog breeds vary greatly in learning speed and capacity... The typical Border collie can learn a new command after 5 repetitions and respond correctly 95 percent of the time, whereas a basset hound takes 80-100 repetitions to achieve a 25 percent accuracy rate. No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn. The ultimate cause of this accelerated evolution was the set of genetic changes that led to an increased ability of innovate. Sophisticated language abilities may well have been the key. We would say that new alleles... that led to this increase in creativity were gateway mutations Judging by outcomes, modern humans were competitively superior to Neanderthals, but we don't know what their key advantage was Beginning in Africa, and continuing in the European archaeological record, we see signs of long-distance trade... The Neanderthals never did this It doesn't look as if being a modern human, in the sense of having ancestors who were anatomically modern and who originated in Africa, was enough, by itself, to trigger this change. We don't see this storm of innovation in Australia. Biology keeps culture on a leash, which is why you can't teach a dog to lay poker Genetic changes allowed important human developments in 40,000 BC that hadn't been possible in 100,000 BC. Bonobos... branched off from common chimpanzees 800,000 years ago, but the two species can have fertile offspring. Most mammalian sister species retain the ability to interbreed for far longer periods. Sometimes zookeepers are surprised by this, as when a dolphin and a false killer whale produce viable offspring. even a few dozen half-Neanderthal babies over thousands of years would have allowed modern humans to acquire most of the Neanderthals' genetic strengths. maternal ancestry for most Mexicans is Amerindian, whereas most of their paternal ancestry is Spanish Introgression is hardly rare; in fact, it is ubiquitous among domesticated plants. Cows were domesticated at least twice... and possibly a third time Amerindians were almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world and had to domesticate their own crops. The advent of agriculture changed life in many ways, not all of them obvious. It vastly increased food production, but the nutritional quality of the food was worse than it had been among hunter-gatherers. It did not materially increase the average standard of living for long, since population growth easily caught up with improvements in food production. Moreover, higher population density, permanent settlements, and close association with domesticated animals greatly increased the prevalence of infectious disease. Protein quality decreased as well, since plant foods contained an undesirable mix of amino acids, the chemical building blocks of which proteins are made. Almost any kind of meat has the right mix, but plants often do not 90 percent of the Tutsi are lactose tolerant today. These mutations spread quite rapidly and must have been very advantageous. Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. In fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture. The big increase in carbohydrates, especially carbohydrates that are rapidly broken down in digestion, interfered with the control of blood sugar and appears to have caused metabolic problems such as diabetes. A high-carbohydrate diet also apparently causes acne and tooth decay, both of which are rare among hunter-gatherers. More exactly, both are caused by infectious organisms, but those organisms only cause trouble in the presence of a high-carbohydrate diet. Australian Aborigines never domesticated plants at all. settlement bottlenecks and limited contacts between the populations of the far-flung Polynesian islands would have interfered with the spread of any favorable mutations that did occur. in a Malthusian world, something always limits population growth. In this case, fewer deaths by violence meant more deaths due to starvation and infectious disease. Moreover, hunter-gatherer societies do not appear to have been divided into well-fed elites and hungry lower classes, a situation that virtually guarantees malnourishment and/or famine among a significant fraction of the population, whereas agricultural societies did have divisions of this sort. Malaria reshaped the human genome, but only in some peoples. It has been one of the forces differentiating human populations over the past few thousand years. It’s time to address the old chestnut that biological differences among human populations are “superficial,” only skin-deep. It’s not true: We’re seeing genetically caused differences in all kinds of functions, and every such difference was important enough to cause a significant increase in fitness (number of offspring)—otherwise it wouldn’t have reached high frequency in just a few millennia. These were not just superficial changes affecting things like hair color, skin color, and the shape of the nose, although even those apparently superficial differences sometimes had important consequences. Some of these differences were far from being superficial or insignificant and profoundly affected the populations in which they appeared, sometimes in unexpected ways. They had a major influence on history; some continue to shape the course of events today. Amerindians, for example, experienced very little infectious disease. The story is similar in other isolated populations, such as the Australian Aborigines, Polynesians, and the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands: They didn’t experience millennia of infectious disease, didn’t evolve improved defenses as most Old Worlders did, and were decimated upon contact with the wider world. Sometimes racial similarities are only skin-deep. In most parts of the world, even in temperate regions, everyone has dark eyes and dark hair. To us these facts suggest that there was something fundamentally different in the selective forces affecting skin color in Europe and East Asia. If those forces were different, at least one of them was probably selecting for something other than vitamin D. Once elites became possible, elite reproductive advantage kicked in. This is the most basic kind of class struggle—the struggle for existence—but it has seldom been noticed by historians, or for that matter by the participants. It could take various forms. In some cases, tremendous advantage accrued to a single male lineage—it’s good to be the king! Researchers have found a surprisingly common form of Y chromosome in 8 percent of Ireland’s male population. There is evidence of an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England By “population sink,” we mean that city dwellers couldn’t manage to raise enough children to break even: Cities in the past, before modern medicine and civil engineering, could only maintain their population with a continuing flow of immigrants from the surrounding countryside. since births and deaths still balanced, every decrease in death by violence was counterbalanced by an increase in deaths caused by infectious disease (which hit everybody, including elites) and starvation (peasants only). Government, especially good government, eventually led to decreased standards of living, at least in terms of calories. Farming led to elites, and there was no avoiding their power. Foragers could walk away from trouble, but farms were too valuable (too important to the farmers’ fitness) to abandon. So farmers had to submit to authority: The old-style, independent-minded personalities that had worked well among egalitarian hunter-gatherers (“A Man’s a Man for a’ That”) were obsolete. Even when some group had a chance to refound society on a more egalitarian basis, as in the case of the medieval Iceland republic, elites tended to reappear. Foragers had no tradition of self-denial and no inclination to deny themselves. They weren’t very good at self-denial back in the early Neolithic period, and they aren’t very good at it even today: Efforts to teach Bushmen to become herders frequently fail when they eat all their goats. People can learn new traditions, but genetic differences must make this kind of self-denial easier for some people than it is for others. It takes a certain type of personality—with traits including patience, self-control, and the ability to look to long-term benefits instead of short-term satisfaction—and natural selection must have gradually made such personalities more common among peoples that farmed for a long time. And once there was property, laziness must have decreased. There were many ways in which hard work could produce enduring assets that could increase an individual’s fitness or that of his children and relatives. Farmers could save to buy more land or livestock. They could build long-lasting improvements like buildings or irrigation works. This was not really possible for hunter-gatherers—there was no way for them to accumulate wealth. If they had full stomachs and their tools and weapons were in good shape, hunter-gatherers didn’t work. They hung out: They talked, gossiped, and sang. They were lazy, and they should have been: Being lazy made biological sense. the well-known middleman minorities, such as Armenians, Jews, Lebanese, Parsees, Indians in East Africa, and Chinese in Southeast Asia, are all descended from long-established agricultural populations. It is also likely that some significant activities had effective thresholds, such that only individuals with atypical traits could perform them. It’s easy to imagine a boulder so heavy that only a few of the strongest men could lift it, but then it’s also easy to imagine a puzzle so difficult that only a few people could solve it, or a song with notes so high that only a few people could sing it. In such situations, outliers are important. both of these factors—social phase transitions and increases in the frequency of people with specific talents—may have played a part in the birth of modern science. Generally, though, we think there was no direct selection favoring creativity itself, and that creative individuals are accidental by-products of selection for other traits, traits that really did pay off in everyday life, such as low time preference and the ability to make complex mental models. Our view is in sharp contrast to those who have argued that creativity conferred fitness benefits... creativity seldom confers large fitness advantages, because good new ideas can be rapidly copied by others. The copiers receive the fitness benefits without paying the associated costs. In fact, it’s been obvious for a long time that innovators seldom harvest much of the benefit generated by their innovations. If a region or population produces major advances in knowledge, science there is real and alive, otherwise not. By that standard, science does not exist in sub-Saharan Africa or in the Islamic world today. As Pervez Hoodbhoy (head of the physics department in Islamabad) has written, “No major invention or discovery has emerged from the Muslim world for well over seven centuries now.” Most mountain ranges affect gene flow but aren’t impassable enough to substantially block it. The Himalayas, however, are an exception. Judging from the limited information we have today, it seems that India shares a fair number of favored new alleles with Europe and the Middle East, but has mixed far less with China. Other people getting in the way must have been one of the most powerful forces slowing gene flow. Many alleles that helped people adjust to agriculture probably came into existence in the Middle East, since agriculture began there. When we consider the ways in which those alleles could have reached western Europe, where agriculture developed later, it’s worth remembering that it only takes a few months to walk that entire distance. If that happened often, you’d expect genes to have spread far more rapidly than they actually did. The problem is that would-be long-distance travelers quickly encountered other groups that spoke a different language and had uncongenial customs. Some were enemies, and all were suspicious of strangers. Passing through other groups was very difficult, so long-distance land travel was almost impossible. In addition to settling Greeks over much of the Middle East, his Alexander's legacy included Greek kingdoms that survived for several centuries in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those kingdoms didn’t just influence the artistic development of Buddhism; they also transmitted alleles... Local marriage could never have spread genes as rapidly as that—but Genghis and Alexander could. it originated about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Blue eyes are most common in northern Europe, centered around the Baltic. The simplest assumption is that the allele originated in the center of the region, where its frequency is very high today, so our best guess is that it first occurred in a Lithuanian village about 6,000 years ago. rom 1500 to 1800, Muslim corsairs captured and enslaved many Europeans: by one estimate, more than a million. Mainly they took captives from the Mediterranean coasts of Italy and Spain, but occasionally they ranged farther afield, raiding Cornwall, Ireland, and even Iceland. Most male slaves were worked to death and made little contribution to the gene pool, but women could and often did end up in harems. You see a similar pattern with the slaves the Arabs took from sub-Saharan Africa: About 5 percent of the maternal ancestry of Arabs in the Middle East is African, judging from mtDNA, but you see very few African Y chromosomes there. The Bantu had iron tools and a set of domesticated plants adapted to Africa, which together gave them a pretty powerful advantage over the hunter-gatherers they encountered. There are important, well-understood examples of human biological inequality: Some populations can (on average) deal far more effectively with certain situations than others. Although Amerindians did develop agriculture independently—a very effective agriculture that included some of the world’s most important crops, such as maize and potatoes—they domesticated few animals, mostly because they had already wiped out most of the species suited to domestication. if infectious disease was so unimportant among Amerindians, selection most likely favored weaker immune systems, because people with weaker immune systems would be better able to avoid autoimmune disorders, in which the immune system misfires and attacks some organ or tissue. Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin, and multiple sclerosis, where it attacks the myelin sheaths of the central nervous system, are well-known examples—both are rare among Amerindians. A less vigorous immune system would have been an advantage under those conditions. Relatively few pathogens, however, traveled in the other direction, from the Americas to the Old World. Syphilis4 and tungiasis (a flea that burrows into the skin) are the only human pathogens we are aware of that originated in the New World and have spread to the Old, although there may be others we haven’t yet recognized—for example, some epidemiologists suspect that rheumatoid arthritis is caused by a cryptic New World pathogen. Some estimates suggest that the indigenous population of the Americas dropped by more than 90 percent over a few centuries, with almost all of the loss due to infectious diseases. This Amerindian vulnerability was a primary reason for European success in the Americas. The Aztecs probably would have utterly destroyed the invaders, were it not for the smallpox epidemic under way at the same time. The leader of the Aztec defense died in the epidemic, and Cortés and his men conquered the Aztec Empire. It is hard to see how Cortés could have won without those microscopic allies, since he was trying to conquer an empire of millions with a few hundred men. Moreover, major Indian polities such as the Mayan city-states were still intact after the defeat of the Aztecs, and the Spaniards might well have lost control except for the series of epidemics that followed. Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incan Empire was also aided by a smallpox epidemic. It killed the emperor and his heir, causing a convenient succession struggle. Considering that Pizarro was invading another empire of millions with only 168 soldiers, it’s obvious that he needed all the help he could get. Amerindian vulnerability to infectious disease shaped history again and again. The first Spanish attempts at colonization in the West Indies were actually jeopardized by it, since the Taino and Arawak peoples diminished so rapidly (they were almost gone by 1530) that the Spanish were left without a labor force. Inhabitants of those Caribbean islands had been even more isolated and shielded from disease than the Amerindians of the mainland, and so were even more vulnerable. The Pilgrims’ first settlement was on land that already had been cleared by an Indian tribe that had been ravaged by some plague (possibly smallpox) just three years earlier. Squanto, the Indian who taught the Pilgrims survival skills, seems to have been one of the few survivors of that tribe. The later Puritan settlement of New England was also furthered by devastating epidemics among the Amerindians, while Jamestown’s safety was only secured when epidemic disease had weakened the local tribes. Even during the twentieth century, first contacts between Amerindians and people of European descent killed one-third to one-half of the natives in the first five years unless there was high-quality medical care available. This was the case during a period in which some of the worst Eurasian diseases (smallpox, bubonic plague, and typhus) were no longer major threats. For example, of the 800 Surui contacted in 1980 in Brazil, 600 had died by 1986, most of tuberculosis. Whenever Europeans made contact with a long-isolated people, whether Amerindians or Australian Aborigines or Polynesians, there was a population crash. When Europeans conquered peoples who had already had extensive contact with other Old World populations, as the British did in India or the Dutch in Indonesia, there was no crash. Another interesting hint is a 2,500-year-old frieze in Persepolis, the capital of the Persian Empire, which shows peoples from many lands bringing tribute. One panel shows a Pygmy with an okapi, a deep-forest relative of the giraffe that was only rediscovered by Europeans in 1901. Sub-Saharan Africa may actually have been easier to reach and explore in classical times than it is today. The Sahara had not yet become as bone-dry as it is now: Horses could cross the desert until Roman times, and there are old, shallow wells in places where the water table is now thousands of feet below the surface. Literacy, the wheel, sailing ships, and guns gave the Europeans a huge military advantage, but nothing came of it for hundreds of years, except in the far south, where a temperate climate allowed Dutch colonization. In the 1800s, quinine became widely available, and that allowed Europeans to venture into interior Africa with moderate success, since falciparum malaria had been the deadliest of many African diseases. Later scientific advances controlled or eliminated a number of other local diseases, including yellow fever and sleeping sickness. This made possible the “scramble for Africa”... But Africa did not become another America: Africans were not displaced by Europeans. In order for limited numbers of colonists to become the predominant population, the locals must die off, and Africans didn’t. Powerful tropical diseases, combined with the local biological defenses (evolved at vast cost), kept Africa African. As in the case of the Columbian expansion, recent human evolution played a key role in determining the victors. One of the largest of all known expansions—the spread of the Indo-Europeans—was likely driven by the mutation that conferred lactose tolerance, one of the most strongly selected alleles that Europeans possess. In order to expand as much as they did, early Indo-Europeans must have had some kind of edge, and in order to expand again and again over millennia, they had to have an edge that was hard to copy. We also know that that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were rather backward in the realms of technology and social complexity. Sumerians invented the wheel, writing, and arithmetic and had cities and extensive irrigation systems at a time when the Proto-Indo-Europeans had, at most, domesticated the horse. When Darius invaded, the Scythians kept retreating farther and farther into the sea of grass: They had no cities or fields and thus had nothing to lose by retreating. Darius eventually realized that his expedition had been fruitless and turned back before his army ran out of supplies. They became a warrior society. That general tendency of pastoral society—a gift for causing trouble—was a key theme in Eurasian history for millennia. The threat receded as agricultural peoples built strong states, intensified again in the Middle Ages as states weakened and steppe techniques improved (reaching an apogee with Genghis Khan), and ended only with the invention of gunpowder. When persecution became a serious problem and the security required for long-distance travel no longer existed, the Ashkenazim increasingly specialized in one occupation, finance, left open to them because of the Christian prohibition of usury. The majority of the Ashkenazim seem to have been moneylenders by 1100, and this pattern continued for several centuries. Such occupations (trade and finance) had high IQ demands, and we know of no other population that had such a large fraction of cognitively demanding jobs for an extended period... from roughly 800 to 1650 or 1700, the great majority of the Ashkenazi Jews had managerial and financial jobs, jobs of high complexity, and were neither farmers nor craftsmen. In this they differed from all other settled peoples of which we have knowledge. The occupational pattern of the Jews living in the Islamic world was different from that of the Ashkenazim... there were many more Jews in the Islamic world than in Europe—more Jews, in fact, than there were white-collar jobs. The selection process we are interested in may have been under way during the Middle Ages, but its results were not yet evident in 1800. Of course, there were no IQ tests then, but there were as yet no Ashkenazi discoveries in science or mathematics either. Admixture has not kept the Ashkenazim from becoming genetically distinct. Even if a population starts out as a mixture of two peoples, as in this case, becoming endogamous (ending intermarriage) and staying so for a long time ensures that the population will become homogeneous. If the population’s ancestry is 60 percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European, for example, a few dozen generations of endogamy will result in a population in which each individual’s ancestry is quite close to 60 percent Middle Eastern and 40 percent European. In other words, you eventually get a population that has a flavor all its own—even more so if it experiences special selective pressures. This means that if you look at the most informative parts of the genome, you can tell whether a certain individual is Ashkenazi (as opposed to, say, a non-Jewish Italian, Greek, or German) just about every time, particularly if all his or her recent ancestors are Jewish. Members of the general public sometimes believe that individual genetic profiles do not necessarily reflect nationality. Somebody who is Swedish, for example, might be genetically closer to someone from Japan than to another Swede, according to this view of things. If this was true, it would apply to a group like the Ashkenazi Jews as well, even though they are not quite a “nationality.” However, that belief is false. In fact, a case where a person of one nationality is closer genetically to someone of a distant nationality than to his or her own compatriots never happens. If you’re Swedish, every Swede (not counting recent immigrants) is genetically closer to you than any person in Japan. It’s possible to be closer to someone in Japan if you consider only one gene: Both of you might have the same blood type while your next-door neighbor might not, for example. Nevertheless, it is somewhat more likely that your neighbor will have the same blood type as you, since the frequency of blood types varies according to nationality. If you look over the whole genome—about 20,000 genes—with a match with your neighbor being somewhat more likely for every single gene, the chance of the overall match with someone Japanese being closer than the match with your neighbor becomes vanishingly small. As a practical matter, if you can distinguish between the members of two populations by looking at them, genetic analysis will be able to do so as well. And sometimes it will be able to make such distinctions when you can’t tell by looking at them. The supposed special kinds of intelligence don’t predict anything useful or, when they do, predict only to the extent that they are correlated with general intelligence. even 2 percent mixing per generation over the past 2,000 years would have caused the Ashkenazim to become almost completely (80 percent) European. A continuing process of admixture (as opposed to a lot of admixture in the early stages) interferes the most with ongoing natural selection, but even if we make that pessimistic assumption, it looks as if the admixture rate was under 1 percent per generation This rapid evolution of our species following the spread of agriculture is indeed a 10,000 year explosion. The explosion is ongoing: Human evolution didn’t stop when anatomically modern humans appeared, or when they expanded out of Africa. It never stopped—and why would it? Evolutionary stasis requires a static environment, whereas behavioral modernity is all about innovation and change. Stability is exactly what we have not had. This should be obvious, but instead the human sciences have labored under the strange idea that evolution stopped 40,000 years ago. All this means, has to mean, that biological change has been a key factor driving history. It’s time for researchers in the human sciences to shrug off the chains of dogmas like evolutionary stasis and “psychic unity.” There’s no time to lose—and there’s a world to win. External links Category:Anthropologists from the United States Category:Biologists from the United States Category:Academics from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Harvard University alumni Category:White supremacists Category:1944 births Category:2016 deaths Category:People from New York (state)