Exploring archaeogenetics, polygenic scores, intelligence, personality, fertility, and the little quirks of culture - from birth rates to coffee and tea. Click to read PifferPilfer, by Davide Piffer, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Populations connected to the spread of Indo-Aryan languages contributed ancestry to South Asia. The difficult questions are how much they contributed, when they arrived, and why the answer differs so ...
For most of modern economic history, explanations have focused on institutions, geography, culture, and historical contingency. Some countries developed more capable states, some were better positione...
A new genetic study argues that continental women, not unusually successful Jōmon men, created Japan’s sex-biased ancestry. But that distinction only works if some men reproduced with multiple women. ...
Average height at age 18 is partly inherited and is also an imperfect cumulative marker of growth conditions from prenatal life through adolescence. Maternal and early-childhood undernutrition predict...
Picture the stereotypical northern European: pale skin, blue eyes, blond hair and no difficulty drinking fresh milk as an adult. Because these traits are now common in many of the same populations, it...
One of the last high-quality Neanderthal genomes shows a population that was vulnerable—but not spiralling into mutational meltdown. In Goyet Cave in Belgium, Neanderthal bones were highly fragmented ...
This started with a Twitter thread from Lyman Stone about one of those claims that sounds as though it ought to be settled with cocktail-napkin arithmetic. You have two parents, four grandparents, eig...
Spain’s regional disparities are economic as well as educational. In 2024, GDP per person was €41,016 in the Basque Country and €39,076 in Navarre, compared with €24,566 in Andalusia and €25,227 in Ex...
Copernicus displaced us in space. Darwin displaced us in nature. AI is displacing us in intelligence. Last week, the argument about whether machines are “really intelligent” began to feel strangely da...
Rome built a flattering story about civilization and the peoples beyond its frontier. Ancient DNA lets us test one narrow part of it, and the answer changes once time enters the picture. The word “bar...
The air-conditioning culture war is funny until your bedroom is still an oven at midnight. Ancient data raises a darker question: what happens when a society is built for a cooler climate? Every summe...
Erling Haaland is 1.95 metres tall. He is Norwegian, built like a centre-back and fast enough to make the comparison feel unfair. If you wanted a living prop for the old image of the towering Viking, ...
This project began with my 2025 paper with Daniel Van Pelt and Emil Kirkegaard, “Regional Migration Patterns and Educational Outcomes in Italy: A Surname-Based Analysis of Historical Population Moveme...
Over centuries, Confucian societies built unusually durable educational institutions. They took textual mastery, examination success, bureaucratic competence, and family status, and bound them tightly...
The idea that cold environments might favor larger brains did not come out of nowhere. Across animals, there is evidence that harsher and more variable environments can favor larger brains. In birds, ...
The Roma have historically been a difficult population to map genetically due to a lack of dense genomic data and a complex, highly disrupted migratory history. They are neither a standard European po...