The Insight Insitome: Your guide to the story of you

This podcast is so illuminating, full of history, genetics, anthropology and culture that it is a must understanding what it means to be « us »! I never missed a single episode since the very first! You will learn and laugh so much because the the team Spencer/Razib aim at two objectives: make you a better informed person about history of man and civilization and never miss a good joke about the human nature...

In your episode on isolated populations, just to clarify some things on the Basques: they are actually quite distinctive and isolated from neighbouring populations, even other Iberians. As shown in Haak et al (2015), they are mostly Mesolithic (Western Hunter-Gatherer) and EEF (Early European Farmer), with only a little bit of Yamna (Indo-European). They actually have a high amount of WHG, not found in other Iberians, far higher than in any other Mediterranean populations. Other studies have also shown Basques to have the oldest mtDNA markers in Europe, such as U8a and a high amount of U5b. Gunther (2015) has shown modern Basques are almost identical to a skeleton in Atapuerca from 5,000 ya, and have been isolated since that time.

I found some of the concepts tough to hold on to but it really is worth it to get a sense of the quiet scientific revolution happening at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, history, evolution, after recent advances in genomics. The episode about Homo Naledi gave me chills, sharing that sense of discovery and wonder about deep history.