I know your comment is tangential, but I have a copy of Jesephus’s writing, and he lived in the time of the supposed Jesus, but nary a mention of him – so I suspect he didn’t exist. AFAIK the only messianic type figure that did exist in the era was St John the Baptist, who was an Essene.

Totally agree!

I suffer from GERD, which is caused by H. Pylori – as do many in my immediate family. Autistic traits are also common in my family, both my mother and brother probably have undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, while I have probably a mild form of it, and recently my 2.5 yo son was diagnosed with ASD and PDD-NOS.

Any connection would certainly be of interest, and also any differences in Autistic symptoms in areas with different native H. Pylori strains are prevalent.

I suspect that just as the last 2 years have been huge for the human genome, the coming years will be huge for the genomes of human microbial flora, gut or otherwise, and their symbiotic relationship and co-evolution with humans!

trajan23, I’ve found the Jesus police to be an interesting site.

hm. it’s been so long. what’s your intent? there are so many books. contact me via email, twitter or FB for follow ups

these would be easy questions to answer if we had the data. the 1000 genomes is collecting samples from ho chi minh city right now. if there’s substructure, we should see it there.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intercourse

the early cultural influences seem to have been south indian specifically (in regards to the techniques of sculpture and the sects of hinduism or buddhism). and the only indian military power which had any impact on southeast asia were the chola of the tamil country.

Also, according to Wikipedia, “at least half of world population is infected”, what means that maybe as many as 50% of us may not carry it at all. This is a path that I’d like to explore in the case of relatively isolated Philippines, which does not have “Austronesian” variants but a Basque and a Bengali one. If Filipino people had lost (or never had) the bacterium to begin with (maybe a dietary habit or just founder effect), that would avoid the need for high competitiveness that you claim for the European strain because it’s really odd that there is no East Asian strains in Philippines, only Indian (Bengali?) and European (Basque) ones.

You label one of the putative flows from India as “Dravidian migration”, however this is at least unproven and you have been mislead by the capriciousness of arrow-drawing by the authors. In fig. 3 it becomes apparent that the ‘Asia2′ haplogroup that (arguably) migrated to SE Asia from India is the Bengali one. There is no mention of Tamils at all.

On the other hand, the ‘European’ haplogroup in SE Asia (but Philippines) corresponds with Andrah Pradesh. These can be assimilated to Tamils very hypothetically but there was never any Tamil migration to Cambodia and Thailand, right? I’d say that this is more like the Hindu influence of some 2000 years ago instead, which may have arrived via Malaysia/Indonesia.

Back to ‘Asia2′, the more I look at it the less clear I have it migrated from South Asia to East Asia. At least the Bengali and Malaysia-Indian strains seem to be derived within a wholly SE Asian subtree. It is not impossible that at least that strain of the ‘Asia2′ haplogroup coalesced in SE Asia and (back-?) migrated to Bengal from there.

Whatever the case it is not the story of human intercourse as you say in the title but more the one of human shared meals, most of which were never that intimate, and maybe of shared latrines.

I’d be interested to know how much of the Kinh’s displacement of the Chams was cultural and how much of it was genetic. How much of today’s South Vietnamese are descended from Cham who adopted Vietnamese culture and language? Or indeed, was the earlier Cham settlement of South Vietnam primarily a genetic or cultural takeover?