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Henry Harpending Quotes
1944–2016 United States
Henry Cosad Harpending (January 13, 1944 – April 3, 2016) was an American anthropologist and distinguished professor at the University of Utah, best known for his 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, co-authored with Gregory Cochran. Educated at Hamilton College and Harvard University, his career included faculty positions at Penn State and the University of New Mexico.
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19 quotes
Australian Aborigines never domesticated plants at all.
Introgression is hardly rare; in fact, it is ubiquitous among domesticated plants.
Sometimes racial similarities are only skin-deep.
There are important, well-understood examples of human biological inequality: Some populations can (on average) deal far more effectively with certain situations than others.
It’s time for researchers in the human sciences to shrug off the chains of dogmas like evolutionary stasis and “psychic unity.” There’s no time to lose—and there’s a world to win.
Malaria reshaped the human genome, but only in some peoples. It has been one of the forces differentiating human populations over the past few thousand years.
90 percent of the Tutsi are lactose tolerant today. These mutations spread quite rapidly and must have been very advantageous.
Genetic changes allowed important human developments in 40,000 BC that hadn't been possible in 100,000 BC.
Amerindians were almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world and had to domesticate their own crops.
The supposed special kinds of intelligence don’t predict anything useful or, when they do, predict only to the extent that they are correlated with general intelligence.
Biology keeps culture on a leash, which is why you can't teach a dog to lay poker
Judging by outcomes, modern humans were competitively superior to Neanderthals, but we don't know what their key advantage was
No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn.
There is evidence of an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England
Beginning in Africa, and continuing in the European archaeological record, we see signs of long-distance trade... The Neanderthals never did this
even a few dozen half-Neanderthal babies over thousands of years would have allowed modern humans to acquire most of the Neanderthals' genetic strengths.
The Bantu had iron tools and a set of domesticated plants adapted to Africa, which together gave them a pretty powerful advantage over the hunter-gatherers they encountered.
In order to expand as much as they did, early Indo-Europeans must have had some kind of edge, and in order to expand again and again over millennia, they had to have an edge that was hard to copy.
It doesn't look as if being a modern human, in the sense of having ancestors who were anatomically modern and who originated in Africa, was enough, by itself, to trigger this change. We don't see this storm of innovation in Australia.