Episode
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
Dwarkesh Podcast · May 8, 2026 · 2 h 13 min
David Reich is back. He and collaborator Ali Akbari just published a paper that overturns a long-standing consensus about human evolution — that natural selection has been dormant in our species since the agricultural revolution. By scaling ancient DNA sequencing and developing a new statistical method, they found that selection has actually sped up. Selection went especially bonkers during the…