history

I would like to announce that I have just published a Genetic history of the Iberian Peninsula. It may still need a few corrections, but otherwise I think it is reasonably comprehensive. Your feedback is welcome.

The Middle Ages are often described as a Dark Age between the advanced ancient civilisations like the Romans and the Greeks and the European Renaissance. Yet few people seem to realise that technology continued to progress about as fast as during Roman times throughout the Middle Ages. In fact...

The New Scientist reported last night a theory explaining why Europeans are generally individualists while East Asians are collectivists. According to Thomas Talhelm, a social psychologist the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, rice farming seems to have fostered collective thinking...

Please post your favorite lectures, links, youtube videos, etc with professional historians, archeologists or geneticists giving presentations on historic events, civilizations, cultures, bones, DNA, etc. Here is a one I start with: Prof. James P. Mallory on Origin of Tocharians...

European history is strongly related to that of Asia. Numerous times in the past there was a clash of civilizations and many people lost their lives during these conflicts. Many have been referring to these events as the "barbarism" of Asia. What do you think about it? Has this contact between...

When comparing the North ; Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland.... with South ; Portugal, Spain, Greece, Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria.... the one can notice that the North is working much more than the South. Working hours can be lesser in some countries maybe but their "efficiency" is very...

I have created a new map showing the approximate spread of the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) from the Middle East and the Balkano-Carpathians to the rest of Europe. Please let me know if you find any inconsistency (provide supporting data). The oldest evidence of copper metallurgy is from the...

I made my first R1b migration map over four years ago. Little has changed since then in the way I see the history of R1b people. What changed are the names of subclades and the new branches of S116/P312, like DF19, DF27 and L238, or the recent discovery of the Indo-European Z2103 branch in the...

That's probably a good point, showing that quick events don't register on Y-dna scale. Vikings didn't register much in Russian yDNA, even though they where a ruling elite for short time and gave name Rus to Russia. What registered are the long lasting previous events of older I1 incursions...

I have scrutinised FamilyTreeDNA's Ireland Y-DNA Project and noticed that practically all the Irish surnames belonged to haplogroup R1b, while almost all members of other haplogroups had English, Scottish, or occasionally even Welsh surnames. The Germanic haplogroup R1b-U106 is also dominated...