Yeah, I think to some extent he just ended up with a ton of pressure from his stuff getting too big: he had huge numbers of social media followers and I think he got dragged down by it as well as that making him much more unnerved about older bits of his work being so widely read. It is definitely a pity.
Yeah, archaeogenetics is something we need more people doing, though we also really need good people doing it because I really don't want to think about what some historians would try doing with those methodologies...
Oh wow again there is a whole story happening on closed social media where I can't follow it. It is just a headache. I wish that when people leave the real Internet they would leave a note why and a forwarding address.
When someone deletes a website that I have in my memory, they are deleting part of my mind. When they break incoming links, they are destroying my work.
Its frustrating because we have 150 years of quack racial 'science' that fell apart on inspection ... but that does not mean it is fair to ignore the new data or all the hard work that has gone in to collecting datasets of ancient and medieval DNA. But I think you really need someone who understands statistics, understands genetics, and understands historical argumentation to sort it out. In
Pereltsvaig and Lewis vs. Gray, Atkinson, et al., there was one or two small points where the linguists may have not fully understood the math or the conventions of the glamour mag Gray and Atkinson published in (although their criticisms as a whole were very patient and devastating). The idea that some Polynesians made it to South America seems plausible and its not an idea which Europeans are highly motivated to 'reason'.
Edit: A.J. West seems to have another account at
https://medium.com/@IndoMedieval I have made so many mistakes in life, but one of my best decisions was never creating a birdsite account.