Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fascinating and revelatory, its rather technical initially, even for a medico like me. Archaeological findings lead to conjecture and extrapolation about historical facts about human evolution and migration but genomic analysis provides a definitive pre-history of mankind.
Here is the arrival of crops to the Indian sub-continent where the existing humans were hunter-foragers

The Indian subcontinent is one of the breadbaskets of the world – today it feeds a quarter of the world’s population… The Near Eastern winter rainfall crops, wheat and barley, reached the Idus Valley sometime after nine thousand years ago… Around five thousand years ago local farmers succeeded in breeding crops to adapt to monsoon summer rainfall patterns, and the crops spread into peninsular India. The Chinese summer rainfall crops of rice and millet also reached peninsular India around five thousand years ago. Indian may have been the first place where Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided.

An overview of the caste system in India

How the varna and jati relate to each other is a much-debated mystery… Thousands of years ago, Indian peoples in effectively endogamous tribal groups that did not mix, much like the tribal groups in other parts of the world today. Political elites then ensconced themselves at the top of the social system (as priests, kings and merchants), creating a stratified system in which the tribal groups were incorporated into society as Shudras and Dalits. The tribal organization was thus fused with the system of social stratification to form early jati, and eventually the early jati, and eventually the jati structure percolated up to the higher rans of the society, so that today there are many jati of higher as well as of lower castes. These ancient tribal groups have preserved their distinctiveness through the caste system and endogamy rules.

India may now be the most populous nation but

The Han Chinese are truly a large population, They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large … India is composed of a large number of small populations.

Laying to rest the controversy of Arya Invasion/migration

The Ancient North Indians (ANI) were a mixture of about 50% steppe ancestry related distantly to the Yamnaya, and 50% Iranian farmer-related ancestry from groups the steppe people encountered as they expanded south. The Ancient South Indians (ASI) were also mixed, a fusion of a population descended from earlier farmers expanding out of Iran (around 25% of their ancestry), and previously established local hunter-gatherers of South Asia (around 75% of their ancestry.

Other nationalist narratives

The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-European-spealing Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source. The Hindutva ideology that there was no major contribution to Indian culture from migrants from outside South Asia is undermined by the fat that approximately half of the ancestry of Indians today is derived from multiple waves of mass migration from Iran and Eurasian steppe within the last five thousand years. Similarly, the idea that the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi have ancestry from West Eurasian farmers that Hutus do not – an idea that has been incorporated into arguments for genocide – is nonsense. We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousand and tens or thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and one population is – or could be – pure.

But

An outstanding mystery is the ancestry of the peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization, who were spread across the Indus Valley and parts of northern India between forty-five hundred to thirty-eight hundred years ago, and were at the crossroads of all these great ancient movements of people.

The book ends with ethical issues of gene mapping and the future of genomic studies and its fallout – the deeper study of human biology and evolution

A central question in human evolutionary biology is whether human evolution typically proceeds by large mutation frequencies at relatively small numbers of positions in the genome, as in the case of pigmentation, or by small changes in frequencies at a very large number of mutations, as in the case of height

The microbial diseases to which ancient humans succumbed

Ancient pathogen studies have also revealed the history and origin of ancient leprosy, tuberculosis, and, in plants, the Irish potato famine. Ancient DNA studies are now regularly obtaining material from the microbes that inhabit us , including from dental plaque and faeces, providing information about the food our ancestors ate.

A book to be read in small instalments and savoured later.

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On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An account of jazz loving, panhandling deadbeats, minor criminals, highly libidinous and philandering fellows driving or hitching rides across USA. There are some brilliant bits and colurful descriptions in the narrative

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.
… On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty, she mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows – and still we rolled.

And is this the inspiration for midichlorians?

The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for the human body to absorb more than a usual share. According to Reich (and I am currently reading Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich - no connection!) orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate machine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances.

A Jazz aficanado’s overview of the jazz scene prevailing at that time

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Elridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety – leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swingling Baise and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest – Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie – Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night.

There are occasional whacky philosophical interludes

He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. ‘What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an everywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?’

When music transcends

‘More Mambo Jambo,’ ‘Chattanooga de Mambo,’ ‘Mambo Numero Ocho’ – all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming. The trumpets seemed so loud I thought they could hear them clear out in the desert, where the trumpets had originated anyway. The drums were mad. The mambo beat is the conga beat from Congo, the river of Africa and the world; it’s really the world beat. Oom-ta, ta-poo-poom. The piano montunos showered down on us from the speaker. The cries of the leader were like great gasps in the air. The final trumpet choruses that came with drum climaxes on conga and bongo drums, on the great mad Chattanooga record

As a Desi, I cannot really identify with the America of the Forties, hence the three stars – although the book is regarded as a modern American classic.

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निर्मला मुंशी प्रेमचंद

निर्मला by Munshi Premchand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

प्रेमचंद की असीम कष्ट की कहानी एक नगरीय परिवेश में स्तिथ है। इसमें एक दुर्भाग्यपूर्ण महिला की कहानी का वृतान्त है, जिसे मिथ्याबोध, संदेह, लोलुपता, अहंकारी व्यक्तित्व और, सबसे बढ़कर, गरीबी के कारण घोर निराशा व यातना का सामना करना पड़ा। कथानक में कई अप्रत्याशित मोड़ और घुमाव आते रहते हैं तथा कहानी शीघ्रता से आगे चलती है।
निम्न उदहारण भाषा का सुन्दर उपयोग दर्शाते हैं

निशा ने इंदु को परास्त करके अपना साम्राज्य कर लिया था। उसकी पैशाचिक सेना ने प्रकृति पर आतंक जमा रखा था, सद्वृत्तियाँ मुँह छिपाये पड़ीं थीं और कुवृत्तियाँ विजय-गर्व से इठलाती फिरती थीं। वन में वन्य-जन्तु शिकार की खोज में विचरण कर रहे थे और नगरों में नर-पिशाच गलियों में मँडराते फिरते थे।

कृष्णा की उत्सुकता और यह उमंग देखकर उसका हृदय किसी अलक्षित आकांक्षा आंदोलित हो उठा। ओह! इस समय इसका हृदय कितना प्रफुल्लित हो रहा है। अनुराग ने इसे कितना उन्मत कर रखा है।

इस रचना को मैं मुंशी प्रेमचंद की उत्कृष्ट कृतियों में नहीं गिनूंगा​, अतः, छोटा मुँह और बड़ी बात, मैं तीन सितारों का दर-निर्धारण करता हूँ।


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Blue Sky White CLoud by Nirmal Ghosh

BLUE SKY, WHITE CLOUD: Three Novellas by Nirmal Ghosh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

She moved like an illusion, like smoke, or water, weaving soundlessly among the big, dark woody boles of the ancient oaks, their leaves now the colour of copper and dust

Three intense and distressing stories about man-animal conflict. Increased encroaching on the natural habitat of animals by humans finds the latter coming out second best. The conflict is beautifully narrated from the viewpoints of an elephant in Assam, a leopard in the foothills of the Himalayas and a pair of bar-headed geese on their mind-boggling high altitude migration above the Himalayas from Mongolia to the marshy Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary.

And through the trees, the storm wind howled, and the grass bent under its force and the lash of the rain until it seemed to Ronesh that the whole wilderness was mourning with him.

The bar-headed geese

The air here contains less than half the oxygen content at sea level. Bar-headed gees fly at the limits of life, beyond what mountaineers call the 'death zone' - an elevation higher than the black ravens of the crags, higher than the great Himalayan griffon that cruises the tall spores looking for carrion and prey, taking them clear over across the massive mountains, and down into the plains of India.

And after this arduous journey conquering nature, dodging jet-liners, the geese sadly succumb to the rapacity of humans

Wheeling around the field to gain height, watching the figures below making a noise, they initially failed to notice the high-tension wires strung across the fields, hanging from pylons marching across the plains, partially hidden in the fog.
The lead goose did see them at the last second and, with a honk of warning to the rest of the flock following close behind and alongside, he managed to clear them. The rest somehow managed to get above them as well.
The rest, except for BH7.
White Cloud slammed into the wired and was briefly entangled in them. Then there was a bright flash and she was dead, instantly, her heart giving out.
Crumpled into a ball, she hit the ground, convulsed once and lay lifeless on the field.
Bh6 turned and came down for her, landing nearby. He walked to where she lay. There was no sign of any life. He stood there for a while.
His companion of ten years was gone.

All the stories will move you to tears.

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Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A profound voice from the past, but still fresh and relevant as it was when written. Autobiographical to a certain extent, it is an indictment of communism or a repressive police state and the impotency of medicine in front of inexorable diseases.
Some memorable passages

What name can one give it? Frustration? Depression? When melancholy set in, a kind of invisible but thick and heavy fog invades the heart, envelops the body, constricting its very core. All we feel is this constriction, this haze around us. We don’t even understand at first what it is that grips us.
The tumour itself proclaimed the accuracy of her touch, for it had felt something too. Only a patient can judge whether the doctor understands a tumour correctly with his fingers. Dontsova had felt out his tumour so well that she didn’t really need an X-ray photograph.
The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People…But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told and, besides, demanding something for themselves.
Man has teeth which he gnashes, grits and grinds. But look at the plants – they have no teeth, and they grow and die peacefully.
Vadim had discovered an important and at first glance paradoxical point: a man of talent can understand and accept death more easily than a man with none – yet the former had more to lose. A man with no talent craves for long life, yet Epicurus had once observed that a fool, if offered eternity, would not know what to do with it.
After all, the value of the human race lay not in its towering quantity, but in its maturing quality.
‘Why does it have to be so unjust? Why should I, an oncologist, be struck down by an oncological disease, when I know every single one of them, when I can imagine all the attendant effects, consequences and complications?’ ‘There is no injustice there, on the contrary, it is justice in the highest degree. It is the truest of all tests for a doctor to suffer from the disease he specializes in.’
A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?

It also gives a glimpse of Russia’s romance with Hindi films as one of the characters sing “आवारा हूँ...” from the film “The Tramp” (आवारा).

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Book Review - Yama (The Pit) by Alexandra Kuprin

 

Yama [The pit] by Alexandra Kuprin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Russian version of GB Road, Sonagachi, Kamatipura, this is the story of the red-light area in an unnamed Russian town on the southern frontier called Yamskaya Sloboda (Stage-drivers’ Borough) that mutated to Yamskaya (Little Ditches) and finally, to Yama – The Pit

Right up close to his eyes he saw the eyes of the woman – strangely large, dark, luminous, indistinct and unmoving. For a quarter of a second or so, for an instant, it seemed to him that in these unliving eyes was impressed an expression of keen, mad hate; and the chill of terror, some vague premonition of an ominous, inevitable calamity flashed through the student’s brain.

Here she is – I! A public woman, a common vessel, a cloaca for the drainage of the city’s surplus lust…But for a second of this sensuality in haste – thou shalt pay in money, revulsion, disease and ignominy.

At fourteen years she was seduced, and at sixteen she became a patent prostitute, with a yellow ticket and a venereal disease. And here is all her life, surrounded by and fenced off from the universe with a sort of a bizarre, impenetrable, and dead wall. Turn your attention to her everyday vocabulary – thirty or forty words, no more – altogether as with a baby or a savage: to eat, to drink, to sleep, man, bed, the madam, rouble, lover, doctor, hospital, linen, policeman – and that’s all. And so her mental development, her experience, her interests, remain on an infantile plane until her very death…

Sated after a libidinous bout, the patrons discuss philosophical questions about prostitution

I ask you, what is prostitution in the end? What is it? The extravagant delirium of large cities, or an eternal historical phenomenon? Will it cease some time? Or will it die only with the death of all mankind? Who will answer that?

While there will be property, there will also be poverty. While marriage exists, prostitution also will not die. Do you know who will always sustain and nourish prostitution? It is the so-called decent people, the noble paterfamiliases, the irreproachable husbands, the loving brothers. They will always find a seemly motive to legitimize, normalize and put a wrapper all around paid libertinage, because they know very well that otherwise it would rush in a torrent into their bedrooms and nurseries. Prostitution is for them a deflection of the sensuousness of others from their personal, lawful alcove. And even the respectable paterfamilias himself is not averse to indulge in a love debauch in secret. And really, it is paling to have always the one and the same thing, the wife, the chambermaid, the lady on the side. Man, as a matter of fact, is a poly – and exceedingly so – a polygamous animal. And to his rooster-like amatory instincts it will always be sweet to unfold in such a magnificent nursery garden.

The imposing Madam of the “establishment of ill repute”

She is a tall, full woman of forty-six, with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. Her eyes are encircled with black rims of hemorrhoidal origin.

Here is a scene from a mortuary

all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. Certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould – the signs of putrefaction. One man, without a nose, with upper hare-lip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. A woman who had died from dropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board couch, bulging out of the lid (of the coffin).

The macabre scenario post-post-mortem

All of them had been hastily sewn up after autopsy, repaired, and washed by the moss-covered watchman and his mates. What affair was it of theirs if, at times, the brain got into the stomach; while the skull was stuffed with the liver and rudely joined with the help of sticking plaster to the head

A well-meaning lady educates her ardent young client about the nemesis of a pre-antibiotic generation – syphilis

…not only the nose! The person becomes all diseased. Some doctors say such nonsense as that it’s possible to be cured of this disease. Bosh! You’ll never cure yourself! A person rots ten, twenty, thirty years. Every second paralysis can strike you down, so that the right side of the face, the right arm, the right leg die – it isn’t a human being that’s living but some sort of little half-man-half corpse. The majority of them go out of their minds. To all syphilitics the children are born monsters, abortions, goitrous, consumptives, idiots

A powerful, raw, moving book - only marred by poor translation and printing.

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