Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich

1. What We Know and How We Know It

To get to the good parts of The Iliad you first have to trudge through 300 pages of gruesome Bronze Age combat. One day it's the Greek heroes laying waste to dozens of minor Trojan fighters, the next day the gods are with Troy and it's the Greeks dropping like flies in their flight back to their ships. Back and forth they scoot in their chariots. The poet takes the time to tell us everyone's names and birthplaces and a bit about their dads. To the extent it works, it functions more like a tapestry than a story, or, like a symphony. Occasionally the scene is illuminated by some flash of sublime imagery. But mostly—it's a slog.

This is exactly how it feels to read "Who We Are and How We Got Here", 2018, by David Reich of Harvard, whose paleogenetics research has been central to the "ancient DNA revolution" which has been rapidly overturning our understanding of prehistory over the past decade or so. The 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Svante Pääbo in 2022 for the the work that kicked all this revolution off. I hadn't been paying any attention, so I took everyone’s recommendation and picked up Reich’s book.

The first three quarters of the Reich's book give a thorough overview of the new findings.

Each section goes like this: first we learn a little about how archaeologists had previously studied some people in some region. We learn about a theory or two which scholars had settled on before ancient DNA methods were available. Often these prior theories were also based on genetic evidence, sometimes from just a couple of years before. Then we get a little summary of some innovation in ancient DNA technique, or are vaguely told about some statistical method. And then we get to learn what really happened: who descended from who, who they bred with, where they migrated, who died out, and how it all fits in with existing archaeological and linguistic evidence and theories.

Repeat 30x. Like The Iliad, there are a lot of names. It’s a slog.

But scattered throughout the tedium are bursts of amazing novelty. Over and over, my naive mental model of "how prehistory happened, basically, I guess" was revised by some tasty morsel of new information. Just from the first few chapters you learn things like:

• The blond, blue-eyed, and light-skinned mutations actually arose in three entirely different ancient populations who lived very far apart in space and time. This makes Nazis look pretty stupid.
• Neanderthals definitely interbred with the ancestors of all non-African modern humans, and their DNA makes up a fairly similar fraction of the DNA of almost all non-Africans today.
• Speaking of: Neanderthals were tool-makers and created art and we have no good reason to think they were stupid brutes at all. Their brains were bigger than ours, after all!
• And then there were the Denisovans: a whole other divergent lineage which also interbred with modern humans in Eastern Asia. Plus there's evidence of other even-older lineages, from which no fossils have been found, but whose existence can be deduced from DNA traces left behind by later interbreeding.
• Maybe you had assumed that early humans simply migrated out of Africa in a single rush, spread widely across the land, and then just stopped moving and started drifting apart to produce the variety of modern races. I hadn't even realized I believed that, but I guess I did. Not so, according to Reich. In fact, the 50k years or so of human prehistory outside Africa involved numerous subsequent migrations and plenty of interbreeding, all occurring well before the acceleration of the inter-population contact we think of as accompanying the spread of agriculture, cities, and empires.
• By the time "history" started being written down, nearly everyone on the map was already some kind of mixture of diverse much-older populations, and these archaic populations would have been as different from each other as the major "racial groups" are today.

One cannot help but marvel that the bulk of these discoveries occurred over a period of only about six years—and the book was written six years ago! I was lightly interested in this field in college, I could have been involved! It's great stuff. I don't think I've ever had my assumptions proven wrong so many times by so short a book. Everything I learned in school is irrelevant now.

Here's how it all happened: advances in molecular biology made it possible to extract and analyze DNA from the bones of ancient humans, even when the original organic material is almost entirely degraded and contaminated with microbes. These techniques were rapidly improved and scaled up throughout the 2010s, and as of 2018 had, according to Reich, "surpassed the traditional toolkit of archaeology" in their capacity to convincingly determine the movements and changes in prehistoric human populations. The breadth of the findings came as a surprise to almost everyone. It's an advance comparable to the invention of radiocarbon dating. Before, we could tell when a person had lived, but our best guess as to whothey were relied on the comparatively crude analysis of skeletal structure and archaeological context. DNA, it turns out, is fantastically more informative. It's all very cool. The book is a perfectly adequate exposition, and so for that purpose I'd recommend it.

But given how interesting it all is, how does the book manage to stay so dry?

One problem is that the scattered descriptions of Ancient DNA techniques seem to strike the exact wrong level of detail to keep a reader interested—more than necessary to understand the results, but less than necessary to form a good mental model of what's going on. We learn about the the "Four Population Test" and the "Three Population Test", and are treated to a useless description of principal component analysis. For a wider audience it would have sufficed to call these "comparing" and “contrasting” and "summarizing". But I'd have preferred to go the other direction and learn a lot more genetics. The book makes many arguments which hinge on an accurate mental model of genetics and these techniques, but Reich never adequately conveys the model itself. Populations as clusters drifting through gene-space. Overlaps in this drift are evidence of interbreeding... something like that. Sans a model all the intricate arguments were just exhausting. They ought be fun little riddles!

But the real reason for the dryness is that, in the first three-fourths of the book, Reich steers clear of the most of the many and thorny moral dimensions of this research, that is, the really interesting parts.

2. Why We Do This and How We Talk About It

After so much fighting The Iliad finally starts to move forward only in book 16: "Patroclus Fights and Dies". Everyone has had their day of glory, with the exception of Achilles, who simmers in his camp, refusing to fight for the king who slighted him. We've already been told how it all will end. With all the Greek heroes wounded and pressed against their ships, Patroclus dons Achilles' armor, leads the counterattack, overextends himself, and is cut down by Hector.

Until this point the moral content of the epic could be put as: "Ares is equitable, he kills those who kill." Every death until now had been a tally on a scoreboard, and war a game for the winning of glory, but Patroclus is no NPC. We find ourselves suddenly kicked onto a new plane; he is so sympathetic and his death so unnecessary that when he too falls victim to the inevitably of the war it brings real grief. All the action to this point is suddenly found to have been of moral consequence after all. And we begin to glimpse why someone would have recalled and written about a handful of days from the end of a war some four hundred years before.

Only in its last three chapters does "Who We Are and How We Got Here" turn its full attention to the many moral dimensions of this work, in two chapters discussing inequality, race, genetic determinism, and the moral justification for all this research—especially, for the exhuming of ancient bones.

In the introduction Reich recalls being asked, "how do you get funded to do all this stuff?" He mumbled something about risk factors for disease, an incomplete answer he later regrets. "Shouldn't intrinsic curiosity be valued for itself?” he writes. “Shouldn't fundamental inquiry into who we are be the pinnacle of what we as a species hope to achieve?"

Should it? Why are we doing any of this? The scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. Well, they thought about it, but it sounds like they thought about it afterwards. This review—if you're wondering why anyone would put so much effort into reviewing a dry but basically-fine book of popular science—is borne of my desire to articulate a better answer to that question: why do any of this? Should we be doing it at all?

To start with, I don't buy Reich's notion of "intrinsic curiosity". To me what feels like "curiosity" often resolves into a kind of constellation of fainter but emotionally-charged topics—like a star resolving into a whole cluster when viewed through a sharper telescope. The brain is excellent at associating information to moral topics, even quite a few hops away.  (Think of how easy it is to detect eugenicist implications from afar.)  We sense when some fact might bolster an argument that's worth making, or when it threatens to give credence to an argument we know to be harmful.It's these implications which feel important, however distantly. The emotions which arise give energy and keep us interested (how the culture war fuels discourse). But when moral implications go unaddressed, the moral mind grows wary. We start interjecting: what about...? Are you saying...? We become offended.  To hold one's tongue for too long, this whole faculty has to switch off. But with it goes the energy. Hence the dryness.

One expects that upturning all the stones of past population movements would reveal a tremendous amount of murder, hierarchy, and sexual violence. But Reich persistently employs only eerie neutral terms like "mixed with", "displaced" and "migrated", and never addresses the latitude of interpretation this language affords. It began to feel insensitive, then callous, and eventually inhumane. What exactly is meant by "males were extraordinarily successful at leaving offspring..."? Worst of all is the phrase "replaced their mitochondrial DNA", as if a human population was a slime mold wandering across the earth lapping up other populations' genomes. Both of those flag as euphemisms for mass rape, or forced marriage at least. I think of Orwell’s famous essay on political vagaries and euphemism (e.g. “elimination of unreliable elements”)—academic jargon is no different.

A sense of horror grows throughout the thirty-odd accounts. The reader begins to expect the worst, wondering: How bad was it really? When are you going to tell me? Have these geneticists come to think of past populations as abstract blobs of DNA?

Reich addresses these questions far too late in the book. Yes, ancient DNA analysis can reveal signatures of "sex bias" by considering the relative times to common ancestors of Y-chromosomes vs. mitochondria. More than a few times in history we see clear signals of narrow bottlenecks in Y-chromosomal diversity. The classic example is the common paternal lineage of millions of people across Eurasia; 8% of the present-day male population in the former Mongol Empire.

One of the most impactful events in history was the rapid spread 5000 years ago of the violent and patriarchal Yamnaya steppe-dwellers into both Northern Europe and India, carried by the technological power of the domesticated horse and wagon, perhaps in the wake of a spreading plague which very plausibly have crossed over to humans from these early domesticated animals. These were the speakers of "Proto-Indo European", the ancestor of languages from Celtic to Sanskrit, whose elites appear to have installed themselves as the ruling class across these conquered lands and were "extraordinarily successful"—Reich's term—in spreading a narrow range of closely-related Y chromosomes.

This of course is the group the Nazis called the Master Race and tried claim ancestry to, except they got nearly every single detail wrong. But as to the brutality of their expansion, ancient DNA only appears to confirm what one would assume from what we know of recorded history. Based on a graphic in the book something like half of the Y chromosomes in the world disappeared. In Iberia 90% of Y chromosomes derive from steppe ancestry, as opposed to only 30% of the rest of the genome. (But this claim appears to have since been called into question.) The least brutal explanation would be that the local men all died honorably in battle and the remaining women were all happily married. It doesn’t sound likely. But Reich's academic circumspection connotes that what almost surely entailed some amount of genocide and rape, or at a minimum subjugation into a steep hierarchy, was some kind of positive accomplishment.

The chapter on inequality is adequate when it finally arrives, and provided some relief to my sense of moral discomfort.It should have been discussed throughout—it would have made for a better book.  Indeed—“Sex biases” turn up often, post-colonial South America, in enslaved African Americans, in India, and in Pacific Islands due to the migrations from Papua New Guinea. These primarily-male migrations and mixing events often lead to caste structures.

But I continued to have objections to the language. The neutral professional dialect of an academic comes off as profane to a general audience. One should at least speak to the inadequacy of this language at conveying the horrors of the past. Reich describes but barely judges.  It does not suffice to be neutral. This could be considered an oversensitivity, but I disagree: these are the objections of my “moral immune system” against the proclivity for proven-harmful assumptions to show up in a Trojan-horse at the gates of my conceptual universe. Once you're describing a population as a drifting ball of genetic diversity, or an individual as “succeeding” or failing according to the evolutionary fitness objective of their genome, you're halfway to an eugenicist worldview already. This language risks mistaking for humans something nonhuman—mere genes and genomes and populations. Morality is not found on the plane of genetic analysis, just as morality is nowhere to be found on the bloodsoaked battlefields of The Iliad, until suddenly, it is.

In a famous essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, the 20th century Christian mystic Simone Weil designates “force” as the true hero of The Iliad. Force turns a human into a “thing”—a corpse—inert matter. The threat of force can transmute a person into something less than a human: an entity whose actions are governed by fear or the reflective instinct for retribution rather than by a full and accountable consciousness. Past application of force acts similarly, as trauma. And, she argues, the wielder of the force is transmuted into a “thing” alike, into a lesser kind of human, being blinded either by rage, or if they succeed at subjugating others, by the necessity of closing their conscience to the humanity of the conquered. The Iliad was composed, I think, to teach us how to return to the human plane from the dehumanized world of force—or, from that of genetics.

3. Who We Study and What They Think About It

The famous opening line: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”. The statedsubject of The Iliad is the rage of Achilles, that is, the anger of the single most dangerous man on the battlefield; it is his prowess which ensures his anger matters at all. Whoever has power must be taken seriously by others—hence Achilles' anger can determine the course of an entire war. A lesser warrior would have been hanged. Whoever lacks power can only appeal for their emotions to be respected. They cannot make it so by force. Unless the powerful—or enough of the collective—choose to care, the powerless will go uncared for.

In the end King Priam of Troy arrives before Achilles a suppliant begging for the return of the body of his son Hector to be buried. Priam’s appeal breaks Achilles’ rage at last. The two weep together. The king's request is granted. No one bothers to grieve, though, for the thousands of lesser combatants who have been butchered in droves over the past 500 pages.

A social hierarchy begins as an unequal allocation of power, but it becomes a hierarchy when the emotions and needs and stories of the powerful supersede those of the weak. In a hierarchy the powerful can always have can get satisfaction when angered, without regard for the justness of their claims. The weak must let their grievances go. This asymmetry does not follow from unequal power; it is apart from it. Equals would instead work out their differences on equal terms—as a mutual disbursement of resources and reparations to fill each’s individual hierarchy-of-needs, without any regard for their individual capacity for force. The only relevant power is the power to aid.

A few times in WWA&HWGH Reich addresses the various conflicts between genetic researchers and the subjects—or the descendants of long-dead subjects—under study. The basic issues are:

• Many people for various reasons do not want the "true" story of their ancestral history told—certainly not by somebody other than themselves.
• The remains of the dead are considered sacrosanct in many cultures. In all likelihood, the people whose graves are being opened would not have approved of it.
• Some groups, particularly Native Americans, have been repeatedly deceived in the past about the use of their DNA for research.

The first objection is quite understandable in light of all the sexual violence already hinted at in the paleogenetic record. It is no easy task to reassess "who you are", especially when it means coming into contact and reckoning with the violence of history. It could be said that the truth will set us free, but it won’t be easy, or  happen quickly. And this runs, too, into the thicket of notions of indigeneity and identity, which I'll come back to. Suffice to say: there are good reasons to not want to know where we came from.

As to the second: Reich’s team of technicians "grinding powder out of ancient remains" sounds like… necromancy? Even Reich was uncomfortable with the idea, and had to consult a rabbi. And: divining the truth about the distant past with blood drawn by a ritually-purified needle? You sound like a fantasy villain. It all flags as profane, even to fully-westernized me at a considerable ironic distance.

So what? Faced with these kinds of objections, Reich seems to believe his research is altruistic and therefore self-justifying, and that the objectors will come around eventually. He notes he knows of no cases where genetic research has caused harm, and that Native Americans' distrust might be on balance doing harm. Harm as he defines it, that is—a utilitarian accounting of lifespans, argued from a few examples of genetic risk factors and potential public health applications. He frames delays in the spread of the Ancient DNA “revolution” as "missing out" on opportunities. He approves when a dispute over the nonconsensual use of a 1996 blood collection from the Karitiani people is circumvented by the use of an earlier set of DNA samples for which explicit consent was given—statutory permission is good enough for him.

This perspective disturbs me. Reich appears to believe what he wrote at the beginning of the book: "shouldn't intrinsic curiosity be valued for itself?" But why ask? Is it because you doubt it yourself?

Of course if he’s “doing good” he doesn’t have to worry about it. He can bolster his case with some examples of “doing good", some plausible arguments for doing some more, and vague statements about connecting people to their roots. The rabbi validated the project on the grounds of "breaking down the barriers between people". Sounds nice, doesn't it? The mistrust of others, we feel, is valid only in cases of outright deception or destruction on the part of researchers. I don't intend to downplay the public health benefit, but I cannot help but think the basis for this research is not really the arguments he cites in its support. The arguments sound nice, but what came first was his own curiosity. The arguments just help him get his way. This curiosity is his, and fame and satisfaction are its rewards. He want to do this research—it’s his desire. We, reading, want to know too. I think Reich puts it as a question because he knows it that this works is at root done from self-interest.

What then are we to make of people who don't want to have their "barriers between people" broken down? The scientist wants one thing, the subjects another. Each has their reasons. How should these concerns be balanced? The most pertinent "barrier between people" is the scientist's essential disrespect for the validity of the the subjects’ objections. At what point could a population's desire not to have their ancestors exhumed, or not to revise their sense of identity, outweigh the curiosity of researchers—permanently? Could those minorities’ views ever really change the researchers’ minds such that they cease this research entirely?

In Reich's world it's only a matter of time until these people come around to the side of truth. That or the research will go behind their backs and get what it wants anyway.

To respect another person means to permit their emotions to carry weight to you, and to let their boundaries act as boundaries for your behavior—even if you disagree about what’s best for them, or it inconveniences you, or holds you back from getting what you want. You will always be able to find some way to circumvent them: find loopholes, deceive, or win in court on the basis of some law, or besiege with arguments and appeals until someone gives in. These are all exercises of power, because the other person has no way to stop you.

A prominent Western scientist possesses a great deal of power, though it hardly looks like power. They speak and act with the authority of a priest with privileged access to “the truth”. One would seem to have to defeat the authority of the entire empirical tradition for one's feeling—not a rational thing but a physical fact of the world, like the moon—to be taken seriously. To believe such a grounding in “the truth” ought to supersede a mere feeling is a distinctly Western belief.

The scientist in this situation runs no real risk of uprooting their beliefs. The subject does, and it's no small risk: to change a deep belief or a sense of identity can be destabilizing or even traumatizing event, requiring months or years of reintegration and a considerable amount of loss. When the mind resists, it does so for a good reason—to be pressured to change your mind is a genuine threat, not a simple misunderstanding.

This unreciprocated power over others’ minds is ripe for abuse. The "barrier between people" is load-bearing. If it isn’t actively hurting others it ought to be left alone. And it's not enough to choose to leave it alone and promise you'll keep making that choice. Whoever lacks power will only be safe when the scientist class is open to having their minds changed too—such that they can be disavowed of the belief which keeps producing this impulse to discredit and bypass others’ resistance.

Reich wonders at one point if he “has a responsibility to make a respectful but strong case for the value of his research”. Well: not using your power to get what you want is the essence of respect. This requires first recognizing the extent of your power—understanding that even making your case would be an exercise of power. Once understood, you can choose not to use it. This choice, if not just a roundabout way of gaining advantage for yourself, will instill real trust: that what others feel matters to you, and won't cease to matter when it becomes inconvenient for you. As to Reich’s responsibility, my answer is: don't do it. In the face of resistance, back off. It's true you could get away with whatever you want. You’re Achilles here—you could hurt somebody. Don't.

4. Who We Are and What It Means

Speakers of Proto-Greek, a Proto-Indo-European offshoot, arrived in Greece approximately 1000 years before the Trojan War, and the intensely-patriarchal warrior society depicted in the poem is plausibly a descendant of the Yamnayan culture. Men are identified by their male lineage: Peleus’ son Achilles. Atreus’ two sons. We can surmise, that to the Yamnaya, your father—more so than your people—was what defined “who you are”.

Reich's title suggests our DNA and ancestry can tell us "who we are". There is a great deal of danger here. Convince yourself that “who you are” entails an entitlement to wealth or land—on the basis of your ancestry, your homeland, your race, your gender, your intelligence, or an ancient prophecy—and you grant yourself license to take it by force. Or if you can convince someone else of “who they are” and what that means in terms of e.g. racial stereotypes, backed up by social pressure or force or rational or religious argument, it becomes possibly to subjugate and pacify them into a caste system. The mechanism is no different from believing you’re “not a math person”—believing it, after being hurt by it a few times, makes it true. In this way a small quantity of force can subjugate far more people than could be subdued at once by the force itself. This  “fractional reserve banking” of power is how hierarchical societies are maintained.

But the Ancient DNA revolution described in WWA&HWGH does a great deal to discredit the idea that we can find out "who we are" by looking deep into the history of our DNA. Nearly all living humans today, it turns out, are the product of numerous migrations both in recorded history and before. Prehistoric peoples moved around far more than we previously thought. These early population groups were as different from each other and from today's apparent "races" (in the dumb 19th-century sense) as today's "races" are from each other. These groups migrated and mixed multiple times to produce the apparent racial groups we see today. “Who we are” today does not turn out to be a very good signal as to “where we came from”. For the most part the concept of "races”, indigenous homelands and inherent differences ceases to make any sense.

In chapter 11 Reich takes on the thorny subject of human biodiversity, in opposition on the one hand to what might be called “liberal post-racial orthodoxy”, that all “racial groups” are the same, and on the other, to modern race science—that no they’re not and also racial stereotypes are correct and imply moral differences. The two camps exist in their highly-moralized forms as reactions to each other. Reich sticks to a middle ground: that the genomics revolution is already making the liberal orthodoxy untenable, though of course the race science position is downright stupid, because race is a terribly uninformative variable from which to infer anything about a person, so if you’re still doing that, you're definitely doing it for racist reasons. He comes off well in this section. But I would add that, to the extent genetic differences matter, the real question is how we’re going to handle a future where we can make fine-grained predictions about the capabilities of every single human. Ancestry will fall out of the picture entirely—but then we’ll have to face directly this question of “who we are” and “what it means”, and what it takes to stop it from defining us.

5. What We Believe and Where It Came From

The whole Trojan War was fought over Helen, and the plot of the Iliad in particular hinges on the return of one abducted woman and the reappropriation of another. Elsewhere, King Priam of Troy had fifty children by many concubines. And the inevitable output of the fall of Troy was to be the rape and abduction of its women and the ruthless slaughter or enslavement of its men and children.

This was the role of women in time described in the Iliad. And it’s reasonable to suppose the culture of the Yamnaya looked similar. There's a common reading of the Yamnayan expansion, insinuated by Reich, which might be called a feminist and anti-colonial one: that the steppe people invented patriarchy and perhaps many of the other trappings of highly inegalitarian societies, or at least were very early adopters, and it was their spread which seeded these beliefs across the face of Eurasia. They outcompeted the local cultures with the power of the horse, looted wealth, plague, and an unusual inclination for evil. In the most extreme telling these new social structures blotted out the various egalitarian, matriarchal and communal cultures which had existed for millenia, including the steppe-herders' own, and this expansion in fact marked the origin of colonial violence itself, with the later genocides like that of the indigenous Americans along similar lines being only a recent instantiation of an ancient pattern.

The explanation given for the transition to a property-based and patriarchal society is that cattle-herding (which arrived in the steppe from, perhaps, Anatolia) is a high-variance way of life, with wealth tending to flow to the already-powerful who can lend out stock to those ruined by misfortune. Cattle are easy to steal, so if anyone is inclined everyone else needs to be able to defend themselves. Hence the whole mode of production tends towards unequal societies with many warriors serving a single wealthy warlord, and perhaps towards patrilineal descent. Now add in bride-prices paid in stock, and polygamy. Tie it all up with heavily-reinforced social constructs (the debt of the weak to the strong, an honor culture) and religion (an all-powerful Zeus-ish sky-father, a conquering charioteer war god like Indrus of the Rig Veda), and you get a sort of self-replicating automata of violence. What are the other young men to do? Unable to break the power of their real enemy—the patriarchal monopoly at home—but armed with advanced technology and intoxicated by an extremist religion, a horde of angry incels descends on the rest of world to seize for themselves these same entitlements, at the expense of all peaceful people.

I'm no anthropologist, and while I find this narrative quite plausible in its broad strokes, I'm sure it is far too simple and badly inflected by the biases of the writers I've encountered, and my own. For my purposes we need not take it as fact but just as an illustration of the sorts of theories that could be borne out by the study of early human history.

Nazis used their concept of a Master Race to legitimize their own entitlement to power. The more evidence we have, the more absurd their entitlement appears. Such narratives thrive in conditions of obscurity. Blue eyes, for example, were nothing new. There was nothing special or essential about the Yamnaya people—they conquered only possible because they lived where horses lived. They were only unique in their their capacity for evil. And even that wasn’t essential to them—I can't help but see the Yamnaya with a sliver of grace in light of this view of social constructs. If the true events were anything like this description, the psychological climate must have been as totalizing and constricting as that of the Nazi regime, more akin to a mass demonic possession rather than anything essential to "who they were".

Ancient DNA research has the power to cast away the obscurity in which such ideologies take root. If a belief can be shown to have been invented, then it is not essential to human nature. And if a belief is not essential, then it can be changed.  If it can shown to have been a reaction to the conditions in which it was created—either economic conditions, or fitted to the beliefs and power of contemporaries—then again it is not essential, and in all likelihood is not appropriate in our time, and again can be changed.

Such research has the potential to be a kind of "psychotherapy for civilizations". This to me is the highest calling of historical research, and the right answer to the question of why any of this is worth doing: to step free of the beliefs which led to violence and inequality in the past and which continue to do so today. It is a healing process to be undertaken in times of peace, and to do it well is to "win at peacetime". When we understand where the  underlying belief comes from it becomes possible to release it. In other words: we have to learn from our mistakes, so that we can act differently in the future.

For an individual this requires time in deep self-reflection or conversation or therapy. For a whole society it has more of a character of an "exorcism". The instinct towards this healing process is I think what our "intrinsic curiosity" resolves into, when followed all the way to its end. We are driven to cast out the demons which produce suffering. We want to change our minds—but this is no simple task, as discussed earlier. Rationality only works to a point. What makes it possible to change our deep beliefs is the capacity for grace, by which I mean the refusal to treat evil as essential—a mistake theory rather than a conflict theory. What allows us change others’ minds is another grace in another sense: an openness to our having our own deep beliefs change at the same time.

A number of times I have been aggrieved by the treatment of leftism by rationalists. What leftism aims to accomplish is exactly this kind of “exorcism” I have described, though I wish the public face of the left undertook the work with more wisdom and grace. The rhetoric of the left today tends to hinge on implications of guilt, instead. But the right basis for acting differently is not a guilt about “who we are” or “what we did”—we didn’t do that, in almost every case. Guilt is not inherited, no more than the entitlement to power is; rather guilt is created anew each generation. But the weaponization of guilt can be seen with grace too: it is an imperfect gesture towards the responsibility entailed by all our power. Because power is inherited, and the average Westerner has inherited quite a lot of it. The right basis for acting differently is not “who we are” but “what we can do”—it is the responsibility which comes with all our power.

Simone Weil considered The Iliad to be the first expression of "the Greek genius", and the conscience in it as a kind of original minting of concepts of grace, justice, and equity; the godly counterparts to the demonic social constructs which may have been inherited among the steppe-herders. The Iliad allowed the later Greeks to see the errors of their forebears—how a war could play out by a kind of inertia of human nature, the will of the gods, Agamemnon's pride, Achilles' rage, every single choice to overreach and continue fighting, the sunk cost of the whole thing. Seen in full the mind begins to comprehend the relationship between beliefs and choices and consequences and grief, and thereby to learn to act differently. The Western philosophic tradition is a direct cultural descendant of The Iliad, and we can draw a line from Aristotelian rationalism to Reich’s own empirical tradition. If it too is contingent, it ought not to be held too tightly. Is it possible to change our minds? Can we imagine a world where we don't dig up old bones on principle—ever? Where we never find out "where we came from"?

6. The Shield of Achilles

When Patroclus falls on the battlefield he is wearing the armor of Achilles. A melee ensues over the body, but Hector has already made off the armor. Achilles cannot yet fight. As he grieves his fallen friend, his goddess mother Thetis races to Olympus to petition Hephaestus. The god of the forge sets his twenty bellows to work, and forges for the greatest of the fighters a “breastplate brighter than gleaming fire”, a “sturdy helmet… beautiful, burnished work”, and “greaves of flexing, pliant tin”.

And he forges a round shield, on which—in what is for some reason the single most moving passage of the entire epic—he emblazons an image of two cities, one besieged in war and one in peacetime. In this passage the poet’s consciousness suddenly lifts far above the plane of war to gaze upon the breadth of life as it was known. The poet’s eye turns on one Bronze Age scene, then another: a raiding party coming across shepherds—an army huddled in council—the violent clash of battle—a fallow field at plowtime—now a field at reaping, its king rejoicing, a sacrifice prepared for the midday meal—a boy playing a lyre for the grape-pickers in the vineyard—a pair of lions falling upon a driven herd of cattle—sheep grazing safely in a shaded glen—a crowd breathless at the sight of dancers, struck with joy. And the god of fire renders the Ocean River itself to engirdle the indestructible shield.

Perhaps you're still wondering what The Iliad is doing in this "book review". It happens to have been the book I read immediately before writing. Also, I happen to become obsessed with it. But the real reason is: reading “Who We Are and Where We Came From” gives a glimpse into the breadth of life of humanity in prehistory, something like a Stone Age “Shield of Achilles”. This new paleogenetics has the power to shine so much light into the pre-recorded period that I expect in a generation we will make no distinction between “history” and “prehistory” at all. The narrative I believed a decade ago was not a human one: no more than a cartoon depiction of subhumans propagating across the planet, leaving their artifacts and bones and fading away, all within a great obscuring cloud. Some time later humanity as we know it was to emerge into the light of recorded history, but only after a great discontinuity. What came before seemed to be essentially different—a mystic world, set apart from our own. No longer: it’s all humanity. Always has been.

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I will leave you with this: a depiction of the lives of our distant ancestors, in imitation of the Shield of Achilles, as rendered in stone by the hand of some forgotten god.

A Long-Forgotten Stone

...and he carves in the stone three peoples, tight-knit families each,

offshoots of a single clan, divided long ago. It was a small thing,

their dispute: where best to hunt, where the great Grandfather bear

and other men, might not intrude? So divided, they set out

to meet their separate fates in cheerful spirits, each among them sure

they'd chosen best. Millenia go by. Now three peoples, they

speak in separate tongues, with no inkling of their mutual relation.

One clan still thrives in a fecund river valley. Winter, when it comes, is

not so harsh. He renders in the stone a family curled up in a cave,

where the shifting light of fire brings animals to life before their eyes.

They share stories of seasons long ago, long since grown to legends in the telling.

A newborn baby never leaves its mother's side, and the choicest winter game goes

first to her, so her milk can make a sturdy hunter of this child.

After years of peacetime there was little here to fear—they knew well the shining sun

and trusted her to reappear in time. Spring’s fertile offspring would return, and

this child too will in time become acquainted with her joys.

And he traces out a hunting-band, flung far from the shelter of the caves,

coursing through the woodland, their quarry flagging in the summer heat,

unfit to outrun such pursuers.

But then in those deep woods

is heard another voice—the second of the clans, whose hunters

scout the way before a  heavy-laden convoy. The lands they found

were not so rich, and in time they came to fear the winter's pressing chill.

Each year the cold came quicker, and the great columns of ice were

unrelenting. Many had to starve before the choice was made. In the stone

Is etched a council of the elders passing judgment: hope is gone—

there is no future for them here, but only death. So out they set

to find a richer clime, recalled in myth—where the wolves were not so hungry

in the night. They brought what they could carry, trekked for years,  

numbers ever dwindling, with Winter at their heels. They prayed

for their deliverance. The sky was vengeful—still aggrieved

at some offense, they had to guess. They swore: a portion of our bounties

will be yours, o gods, if you only let us share again in bounty!

And he hews a scene in stone: the distant relatives alight upon each other.

They know each other not. Then a young man of the fertile valley, abound

with the strength of a rich life, looks up. His eyes meet other eyes—

the stare of a young woman, who despite her years has known

more grief than he known, by far.

The third clan, too, knew well

how merciless the seasons oft could be. It was not their fate to flee

the ice itself, but to be fled towards. But when the others came,

they came like wolves. Their hearts were bitter towards all people,

and the earth itself, which punished them for nothing. Their meeting ended in

a brutal slaughter: the third clan's hunters cut down in their tracks,

too trusting, unprepared to steel their hearts so quickly. The interlopers took

their pick of what was left behind: food and garments, tools

and woven bladders to bring water on the hunt. Women too, though many

women’s lives were lost already. Those who did escape, their hearts

turned bitter too—mistrusting all, in turn.

All this he carves, and carves again

a thousand times. So many generations—eternities—

calamities to seed fear in the world, great waves sent forth

to cause fear alike in others when they break. Still the sea will settle—

and the cycle of the seasons will go on. And each time Spring arrives,

and all the children taste her joys, their fear grows fainter.

And the long dark days of winter, with little else to do, afford

time to retell stories, and to learn from their mistakes, to not forget

what it took to withstand bygone seasons. All this he sets in stone,

and buries in the earth, a fractal chronicle of life,

all but forgotten, but no less true for having been forgotten.