Razib Khan at Manifest 2026: Genetic Discoveries, AI, and Academia – #114

**Steve Hsu** (0:00)
So again, just asking, just trying to get it to the point where the average listener can understand. These Yamnaya guys, drinking a lot of milk, they have wagons, they have wagons, they're maybe war, maybe they're war-like.

**Razib Khan** (0:12)
Maybe, okay.

**Steve Hsu** (0:13)
They invade a new territory, and this is my guess, tell me if this is not, you know, the ancient DNA science doesn't support this. They kill all the men, they take the women, and one Yamnaya guy's maybe got a lot of women, and he fathers a lot of kids. The elite Yamnaya families are reproducing in this way by crazy, and their Y chromosome is spreading like crazy. When you and I saw this on the posters, you knew exactly what it meant.
But the people there didn't think, they didn't translate the data into this blood.

**Razib Khan** (0:47)
I was just like, what the f**k do you think is happening? Yeah. It's like, okay, so the Yamnaya, also the corded ware, which is the daughter population of the Yamnaya.
You know, like, you guys know, like Thor's Hammer, you know, they have that, the Mjolnir, like little pendants. Well, they use the corded ware, like their pendants were maces. Okay. So what do you do with a mace?
You smash skulls. Okay. So these are not gentle people, you know.

**Steve Hsu** (1:34)
Welcome to Manifold and to, what's the name of your show?

**Razib Khan** (1:38)
Oh, Unsupervised Learning.

**Steve Hsu** (1:39)
Unsupervised Learning. We're here at Manifest. It's Saturday Night Live at Manifest.
We have Razib Khan, Steve Hsu, and a cast of dozens, hundreds, rationalists, rats.

**Razib Khan** (1:58)
It's about quality, not quantity.

**Steve Hsu** (2:00)
What do we have here? We have rats, we have tech bros.

**Razib Khan** (2:04)
Post-rats.

**Steve Hsu** (2:04)
Post-rats, do-mers, dreamers. We got a continental philosopher.

**Razib Khan** (2:10)
Amish guy.

**Steve Hsu** (2:11)
Amish guy, super genius, looking for eggs. Yamnaya girl.

**Razib Khan** (2:18)
I mean, where are the Yamnaya girls?

**Steve Hsu** (2:21)
So, we promised the Q&A, it's gonna be totally unfiltered.

**Razib Khan** (2:25)
We got space in here, people are looking, people are peeking through. Ben, come in.

**Steve Hsu** (2:28)
Come on in, come on in. It's gonna be totally unfiltered. Yeah, Razib will answer all your questions with 100% truthfulness.

**Razib Khan** (2:36)
Well, okay, sometimes I might have to plead the fifth, okay? But in general, I don't do that very often.

**Steve Hsu** (2:43)
Okay, and I thought we would start with ancient DNA, deep history. Yamnaya girl is gonna ask the first question.

**Razib Khan** (2:52)
Speak out, speak out.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:52)
Okay, can everybody hear me?

**Steve Hsu** (2:55)
Well, we may have to repeat your question for the podcast.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:57)
I appreciate all your ready, I mean, over the past two years, especially in the end of the year.

**Steve Hsu** (3:03)
Okay, let me repeat the question. Most pressing ancient DNA questions?

**Razib Khan** (3:09)
Ancient genomic, yeah, genomics.

**Steve Hsu** (3:10)
Ancient genomics questions that need to be answered.

**Razib Khan** (3:12)
So I think a lot of the questions related to phylogeny have been answered. The main question, so phylogeny is just obviously, it's the tree of life, although really it's the graph of life. So there's a lot of admixture, you know, so it's a graph, it's not just like a bifurcate, it's like a series of bifurcations. I think one of them, which David Reich talked about on my friend, Dorkesh Patel's podcast, is that we're not totally sure about what's going on with the admixture with Neanderthals, Denisovans, population structure in Africa. So there was a model of out of Africa that was very popular and very simple and easy to explain about 20, 25 years ago. It's been complicated by these various admixture events. What David has been saying, David Reich has been saying is, okay, you have enough admixture events, it starts to feel like epicycles in a geocentric model. There's something wrong with our assumptions. A lot of people think that. That doesn't necessarily mean that out of Africa is not correct. It just means we might not be thinking about things correctly in terms of just from first principles. Steve's a physicist, obviously, Lord Kelvin, a genius guy, but his assumptions were wrong.
There is a little bit of that going on, I think, with understanding human prehistory before 100,000 years ago. More recently, most of the big questions have been answered about the Holocene in terms of who is descended from whom, who fucked whom. I've been talking about Roman genetics a little bit. I think tomorrow at 12, I think that there's a lot of stuff to explore about the dynamics, the more recent historical processes. A lot of that stuff hasn't been published until very recently because ancient DNA is very expensive and laborious. So they initially were focusing on things like Neanderthals because there's no other way you could really understand this stuff. So if you're going to spend that much money and time and labor, you're going to focus on Neanderthals. Now, they're doing things like looking at, oh, post-Roman Britain. There's other ways we can figure that out through archaeology, through some textual references. But now, ancient DNA is industrialized and scaled enough that they're using it to answer those historical questions. The second thing I want to say is, aside from phylogeny, there's a bigger question of population genomics and evolutionary dynamics, and one of the major forces, major parameters is selection. Obviously, there was a recent paper, Akbari et al.