Open Thread, 11/3/2013

After reading Ancestral Journeys, I decided to get J. P. Mallory's The Origins of the Irish. A bit on the academic side for some, but definitely a good dive into the literature. Mallory is well aware of the latest genetic research, so this is as up-to-date as it gets. It's a good case study in how multidisciplinary prehistoric studies should be done. As I've suggested earlier prehistory looks to be a good deal more complex than we had previous thought, so expanding beyond single methodological perspectives is probably essential if we really care about truth. In other news, a short piece in The New York Times refers to Salafis as 'ultraconservative.' I think this misleads most people about the nature of Salafism: it is a radical utopian system which recently arose out of Islam's confrontation with Western derived modernity. It isn't conserving anything. This aspect of Salafism explains why Saudi ...