Cited by 65Race, Genetics, and SocietyForensic and Genetic ResearchPhilosophy, History, and Historiography

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 39 of the 39 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 90 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

Open access
Parmenter, Christopher Stedman·2024·History and Theory

Abstract

This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work—a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This historiographical essay argues that genomic history of the ancient Mediterranean, which emerged after 2014 with methods for extracting ancient DNA from hot-climate remains, has revived bioessentialist assumptions and rhetoric strikingly reminiscent of pre-World War II racialism. Tracing the field's intellectual genealogy from the postwar UNESCO anti-racist consensus through David Reich's *Who We Are and How We Got Here* (2018) to post-2020 ethical reckonings, the author calls for abandoning the label "genomic history" and treating the genome as evidence about processes, not as a "master text" of history.

Key findings

  • Genomic historians position aDNA as an authoritative "third source" for ancient history; Iosif Lazaridis is quoted calling it a source separate from the not "fully objective" nature of texts or the inscrutability of the archaeological record, and Reich claims "theory is always trumped by data" and that genome variation "has surpassed the traditional toolkit of archaeology."
  • The essay draws explicit parallels between Reich's rhetoric and that of prewar racialists: Reich's framing of ancient groups such as "Ancient North Eurasians" as groups that "would without a doubt have been called a 'race' had they lived today," and his revival of a framework established by Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931), whose "settlement archaeology" held a necessary correspondence between material culture, language, environment, and race. Sixty-seven social scientists signed an open letter condemning Reich's views after the book appeared.
  • Case studies of early aDNA work show small, unrepresentative samples used for sweeping claims: Stamatoyannopoulos et al. (2017) used 241 living Peloponnesian individuals to "disprove" Fallmerayer's 1830 extinction thesis; Lazaridis et al. (2017) compared 19 ancient genomes from Crete and mainland Greece with 30 present-day residents of Greece and Cyprus; Schuenemann et al. (2017) used 151 individuals from skulls pilfered from Abusir el-Meleq with no known archaeological contexts, concluding ancient Egyptians had less sub-Saharan African ancestry than present-day Egyptians.
  • Post-2020 responses are described as limited: the 2021 Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. ethics manifesto (signed by Reich and Krause) devoted only a single dismissive paragraph to genomic history's interventions in racial or ethnonationalist controversies, and the author calls it "limited, defensive, and apparently nonbinding." Lazaridis et al.'s 2022 study added 215 coauthors including humanists and purged prewar race science from its bibliography, yet still closed its three-thousand-year period of study with the appearance of Slavs and Turks.

Methods

  • Design: a historiographical and intellectual-genealogy essay, not an empirical study; the author traces bioessentialist readings of culture from their postwar disappearance to their return in Mediterranean premodernist scholarship.
  • Data: published scholarship, chiefly David Reich's *Who We Are and How We Got Here* (2018) as the field's central methodological text, plus archaeogenetic publications from 2014 to the present (Stamatoyannopoulos et al. 2017; Lazaridis et al. 2017 and 2022; Schuenemann et al. 2017; Skourtanioti et al. 2023; Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al. 2021), read against prewar race science and cultural historicism (Kossinna, Madison Grant, Fallmerayer).
  • Analysis: close rhetorical and methodological comparison between genomic-history claims and prewar racialist/cultural-historicist frameworks, organized in five parts covering origins (1960s–70s genetics, HGP, HGDP), Reich's monograph, the revival of cultural historicism, Mediterranean controversies 2015–2020, and the post-2020 aftermath.

Limitations

  • Stated by the author: he acknowledges that flaws in genomic historians' work "should not foreclose the use of genetic or genomic data" in Mediterranean antiquity, and that these scholars "backpedaled their more sensational rhetoric" after the 2020 protests; he also concedes the "optimistic model" he proposes (the fate of craniometry) deserves caution given its post-1945 context.
  • Stated by the author: he anticipates the objection that concentrating on Reich's monograph and its jacket copy is unfair, noting that the monograph "was obviously not peer reviewed."
  • Evident from the text: the argument rests heavily on one popular synthesis (Reich 2018) and on rhetorical parallels rather than systematic sampling of the archaeogenetic literature; the author's own position is explicitly partisan ("I am personally doubtful that the so-called 'Yamnaya' people possess any greater validity than the 'Dinarics,' 'Nordics,' or 'brachycephaloids'"), and no quantitative or comparative coding of the corpus is described.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/hith.12328

Cites

39 of 39 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Figures

Figure 1 This photo of a billboard in Philadelphia shows how the spirit of UNESCO's 1950 Statement on Race was deployed as a marketing slogan for a pharmaceutical firm and a real estate developer. The photo was taken by the author on 28 September 2021.
Figure 1 This photo of a billboard in Philadelphia shows how the spirit of UNESCO's 1950 Statement on Race was deployed as a marketing slogan for a pharmaceutical firm and a real estate developer. The photo was taken by the author on 28 September 2021.CC-BY · From the PDF

Verification

Claims the paper makes

89 Sources not found · 51 Own interpretation · 43 No basis given · 3 Not checked yet · 1 Own result

Verify all 1 references — free account

Show all 51 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 121
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 45
136 of 136
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The ethnonationalist Right has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s.

    “which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    A direct relationship between culture and biology is racialist.

    “In positing a direct relationship between culture and biology, genomic historians have consciously or unconsciously revived the racialist assumptions that undergirded the study of the ancient past prior to World War II.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    An individual person's genome is largely unaffected by the environment and mostly reflects ancestry.

    “Unlike other formerly used datasets (such as skeletons), an individual person's genome is largely unaffected by the environment.It mostly reflects ancestry.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Race science made Nazism possible.

    “The problem was not that the Nazis twisted archaeology or anthropology in their machinations to hoodwink the public; it was that race science made Nazism possible.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Prior to Lazaridis et al.'s article, few Mediterranean premodernists paid much attention to archaeogenetics.

    “Prior to the publication of Lazaridis et al.'s article, few Mediterranean premodernists paid much attention to archaeogenetics.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Italian historiography exudes pride in the cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism of ancient Rome.

    “Italian historiography exudes pride in the cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism of ancient Rome.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The use of pilfered human remains to reconstruct the phenotypes of ancient people is outrageous.

    “What Gourdine et al. diplomatically left out is the sheer outrageousness of Schuenemann et al.'s entire project.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Scientists should not impose modern racial constructions onto the ancient world.

    “why were scientists still obsessed with imposing modern racial constructions onto the ancient world?”
8 of 8

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

1 of 1

Citations

Cites

Show all 36 references

Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019), 98.
  2. Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci, introduction to Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism, ed. Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 2.
  3. See also Lazaridis et al., "Genetic Origins," 215. 104. See Schoep, "Building the Labyrinth," 13-14. 105. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987-2006), cited in Lazaridis et al., "Genetic Origins," 217. 106.
  4. Verena J. Schuenemann et al., "Ancient Egyptian Mummy Genomes Suggest an Increase of Sub-Saharan African Ancestry in Post-Roman Periods," Nature Communications 8 (2017). 125. Harney et al., "The Genetic Legacy of African Americans." This recent study is critiqued in Ewen Callaway, "Ancient DNA Reveals the Living Descendants of Enslaved People through 23andMe," Nature 620 (2023), 251-52. 126.
  5. George E. Mylonas and Doris Raymond, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Washington University, 1953), 2:1224-31. 14682303, 0, · DOI

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Metadata

Authors
Parmenter, C. S.
Affiliations
The Ohio State University (US)
Corresponding author
Parmenter, Christopher Stedman
Venue
History and Theory
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2023-10-08
Volume
63
Issue
1
Pages
45-70
ISSN
  • 0018-2656 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-2303
OpenAlex
W4387451084
Cited by
63
References
36
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 40 · 2024: 19
FWCI
40.61
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
History and Theory (publishedVersion, cc-by)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Race, Genetics, and Society
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Forensic and Genetic Research
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Philosophy, History, and Historiography
Keywords
ancient DNA, ancient Mediterranean, race, racialism, ethnic nationalism, migration, conflict, cultural change, premodern period, intellectual genealogy

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/hith.12328
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Parmenter, C. S. (2024). THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS? GENOMIC HISTORY AND THE RETURN OF RACE IN THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN. History and Theory. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12328