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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Reading Hockings et al. in the original we find the press reports about it as overblown as they so often are. There is no proof at all that Chimpanzees actively seek out alcohol. What we do find is, that in the tropics highly nutritional fruit and liquids with high sugar content tend to ferment very quickly, so every fructivore had better develop a tolerance for alcohol contamination. Another well known example are fruit flies.
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As Sweeney herself makes clear in result 12 on page 22, there is no blanket association of race-indicative names to ads with arrest but a slightly different incidence of around one half in both cases. A search engine’s only job is to help you find relevant information. So the real and only question to be asked is this: do names associated to ads with arrest yield more records of actual arrests weighted by the name frequency in the total population or don’t they? In the first case the result points to actual extant information being evaluated, which is its main job, in the second it would point to baseless prejudice. The latter would indeed be a meaningful finding, but the author did not even try to look for it and let her own prejudices dominate over the actual results.
Incidentally it has been two years and so far no journal seems to have wanted to print this. So maybe, just maybe, the peer review process is working sometimes.
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Zihlman & Bolter measure the mass of dead chimpanzee’s corpses with their ill constrained and unknown state of desiccation to a precision of 10 g. They then average half a dozen of those weights to a precision of 100 mg with no hint of an error margin anywhere in sight. (To my knowledge no biological measurement is known to six significant digits.) They determine the fraction of individual tissues like muscle to tenths of a percent. All this in spite of them correctly quoting other sources giving their measurement in correct and sensible terms. Is this peer review and editing at work?
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The result reported by Billups and by Marino et al. is unsurprising. The details of ice dam breakages and the drainage of meltwater lakes are entirely random. The one triggering the Younger Dryas just happened to come at a particularly delicate time. The far greater discharge around 8.2 ka BP only had a negligible effect by comparison. So we should not expect to find this exact sequence repeated in other deglaciation events. All the main elements are there, just not at exactly corresponding times.
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For decades now Kossinna’s ethnic explanation of archaeological cultures has been totally discredited and explanatory models using migration were dismissed as simplistic – cultural transmission alone ruled the day. As so often happens, the new, improved, and modern turns out to be just wrong. Immigration by Indogermanic steppe pastoralists could not have been significant against the already high population density in Central Europa, or so it was thought. Haak et al. and Allentoft et al. have just proved the opposite. We currently see how a small minority of immigrants from the Balkans, Asia, and Africa provide more than half of all primary school children in Germany after only half a century – a blink in the eye of the long run of history.
This has consequences for the hopes for population control. As long as the most fertile peoples are the successful ones as they have always been as far back as we can see, even a success of 90 or 99 % curbing their growth will mean nothing in the long run.
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A final remark. Both Allentoft and Haak have many co-authors who only provided specimens and were not involved in the study itself. This is made explicit in the contributions statement. Had they said “LaCour wrote the paper and Green only supplied his name to get it into science and to boost his own publication record”
I’d have had nothing to criticise. That said all co-authors should carefully read the final draft before committing themselves.
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