HeyJaredPifferPilfer
Exploring archaeogenetics, polygenic scores, intelligence, personality, fertility, and the little quirks of culture - from birth rates to coffee and tea
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- Sep 30, 2026
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Solving the Aryan paradox: Why northern Europeans have fair skin but their ancestors were not pale (opens the original)
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In The Four Races of Europe (Part I), I described a puzzle: northern Europeans are generally fair-skinned and carry more Western Steppe Herder (WSH) ancestry than southern Europeans, yet the Yamnaya pastoralists whose genomes help define that ancestry were usually not predicted to be pale. Among 19 Russian Yamnaya analysed by Lazaridis and colleagues, 13 were predicted to have intermediate complexions, four dark and two dark-to-black; none was classified pale. Here, “dark” means darker than
Could Ancient DNA Predict What Went Into the Grave? (opens the original)
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An ancient grave may preserve more than bones. Alongside a person’s remains, which can yield their DNA, archaeologists may find ornaments, weapons, vessels—or no surviving goods at all. Could the objects buried with someone tell us something about their genome, and could the genome change how we read those objects? Might both offer clues to what that person did in life, or to the place they held among others? Figure 1 illustrates the contrast.Figure 1. Two hypothetical burials, different grave f
How climate shaped our genes (opens the original)
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Could centuries of warming or cooling leave a mark on human DNA? That question led me to three earlier posts about personality, height and educational attainment. The results were intriguing enough to deserve a harder test.In Did Cold Climates Select for Cold Personalities?, warming was linked to higher genetic scores for Extraversion, a trait associated with sociability and outgoing behaviour. Did Climate Change Make Humans Shorter or Taller? found higher height scores after cooli
Can we predict population skin color with polygenic scores? (opens the original)
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In previous posts, I used EA4, a polygenic score for educational attainment, to predict standardized school test scores, and a height polygenic score to predict average height. Here I extend that approach to skin pigmentation, a trait that offers a more direct test of how genetic scores perform across populations.Using polygenic scores to predict individual differences within populations is well established. Their use to compare population averages remains controversial. A score that predicts va
A New Study of Education’s Genetics Confirms and Surprises (opens the original)
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This is a paper I am excited about. Four years after EA4, we finally have a new Norwegian genome-wide association study of education that lets us test its findings in a largely independent sample. For anyone who has been waiting to see how well the signal holds up in a fresh cohort, this is a welcome development.The study is Beyond years of schooling, by Eirik Haugland Kvalvik and colleagues. It draws on 120,527 adults from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, known as MoBa. And
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