Paleogenomics Reveals Ancient Migrations

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting story on how paleogenomics is discrediting post-WW2 archaeology:

“1. The Ghosts of Teouma

A faint aura of destiny seems to hover over Teouma Bay. It’s not so much the landscape, with its ravishing if boilerplate tropical splendor — banana and mango trees, coconut and pandanus palms, bougainvillea, the apprehensive trill of the gray-eared honeyeater — as it is the shape of the harbor itself, which betrays, in the midst of such organic profusion, an aspect of the unnatural. The bay, on the island of Efate in the South Pacific nation Vanuatu, is long, symmetrical and briskly rectangular. In the expected place of wavelets is a blue so calm and unbroken that the sea doesn’t so much crash on the land as neatly abut it. From above, it looks as though a safe harbor had been engraved in the shoreline by some celestial engineer. …”

TL;DR

1.) Prehistoric mankind was like Game of Thrones with large scale migrations that largely wiped out and replaced preexisting populations rather than blending with them.

2.) This is what happened in Europe with ancient Indo-Europeans who migrated from the steppe of eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia.

3.) Remote Oceania was originally colonized by seafaring Austronesians from Taiwan who were later replaced by aborigines from Papua New Guinea.

4.) Modern Indians are the product of the blending of two distinct populations.

The article basically laments that paleogenomics is a minefield for politically correct taboos. Imagine the light this will shed on, say, the origins of Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda now that it is possible to tell not only where ancient populations originally migrated from but when and where they started to blend and to what extent they are mixed. What could this tell us about Jews and Palestinians and their claim to Israel? The ancient Egyptians? Perhaps Europeans in the New World prior to Columbus or the Vikings?