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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Due to the small sample size the subgroups in Boucau et al. are statistically indistinguishable. That said in all diagrams shown the unvaccinated become non-infectious faster than the vaccinated and even more so the boosted. This totally invalidates one more of the given pretexts for mandating vaccinations.
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Leech et al. is the first conclusive study about real life mask wearing I’ve seen, not modelling from laboratory data. So yes, they do work. But their effect is a reduction of transmission by 20 %. Yes, 20 % is not zero, but how much bother, effort, and cost is it really worth? Preschool children now routinely draw faces without mouths or noses and toddlers never see smiles or other facial expressions except at home from their mothers. Do we yet know all ramifications? In a random test 90 % of all children have antibodies from having been infected at least once. Is there any residual positive effect at all or has it only slightly drawn out the inevitable?
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I’m at a loss about what is supposed to be new in O’Grady’s review. The early onset of dairying well before the first spread of farming has long been known as has the persistence of lactose intolerance. It is high even now in Greece and all of the Near East, cultures with a diet strong in butter, yoghurt, cheeses and fermented milk drinks. The same was obviously the case in the Neolithic. What might be new and would clarify an unresolved question is when and how lactase persistence quite suddenly jumped to high proportions in some areas of the world.
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Berger et al. is quite interesting and confirms older hypotheses, but nevertheless far too young to provide an answer in the search for the earliest tin sources. Also the pastoralist society that went up into the mountains to extract the ore did not exist much earlier, so it can’t be an incidence of older traces having been obliterated.
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I’m unsure about Kamjan et al.’s results but there are some points about the method. De Cupere et al. obviously introduce the differences into their formula to avoid coding anything as zero. Any trait they code as n distinct steps is weighted n times as much as a presence or absence trait. I’m unsure whether this is intentional and whether they were aware of it. With Kamjan et al.’s modification they convert an index running from zero to one into a value that can yield negative numbers. They don’t seem to be aware of that.
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I doubt the pile-dwelling phenomenon even has a distinct onset as Antolín et al. claim. Pile dwellings are small, short lived, and ephemeral settlements on lake shores. If the shoreline retreats or stays the same, nothing will be left of them and if there is, it’ll be near-impossible to find. Only when built at times of an exceptional low stand and having been silted and flooded ever since, will these settlements be preserved. So what our text books describe as periods of lake dwelling is nothing to do with the cultural phenomenon but only an artefact of preservation.
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It’s nice to see the fact experimentally confirmed by Boyce-Jacino et al., but it has been well-known and obvious for a long time. So if career politicians consistently ignore the advice it can’t be from lack of knowledge, but intentionally to confuse the electorate. If anything, studies like this one will help to further entrench bad practice. It is up to us, not them, always to quote numbers in comprehensible form.
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Hofmann cites Snow and presumably Samida about the mutual incomprehension of cultures while according to Snow himself in his original essay, to Feynman, and to my own experience that incomprehension is all one sided. As per now aDNA has only yielded a huge amount of new data without any overarching theory. Of course the picture those data paint tends to get simplified in abstracts and short summaries, that is their purpose. If they were all there was, we could do away with the rest of those articles. As with the older parts of archaeology, we first need to assemble a lot of different and wide ranging data before the picture emerges. That said we do need some generalizations and commonalities if we want to learn anything from history. Those “complexit[ies] at the site and regional scale that many [...] archaeologists treasure”
(and presumably Hofmann herself) may be fascinating in themselves but they don’t teach us anything beyond the tiny window in place and time they pertain to.
Quite apart from that general view there have been quite specific results that could not have been gained otherwise. One is the unexpected find that there was no admixture and dilution in the first spread of the Neolithic to the Rhine and beyond as had been inferred from today’s gradient in blood factors and second there is now proof for the assumption that wide spread dairying occurred without lactase persistence.
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