Remnants at the fringes theory and the Ainu

I’ve been meaning to get around to this!

Here we have maps of the distribution of red hair and the distribution of blond hair. If we could overlay these maps, we’d see, especially in North Western Europe, a large overlap between the places where blond here is and red hair isn’t. It looks kind of like the blond-haired people started out somewhere around Sweeden and spread out in concentric circles from there, and as they spread, they began displacing an earlier, red-haired people who ended up surviving only on the far fringes of Britain. (The red splotch in the middle of Russia represents the Udmurt people, who could have been originally related to the ancestors of the folks on the coasts of Britain, but I suspect not.)

Luckily for me, we have historical records for this area, and we know that this is exactly what happened, what with the Germanic barbarians invading Gaul and Britain and Prussia and so on.

Anyway, so this is just an idea I’ve had kicking around in my head that when you see something like the red hair/blond hair pattern, the trait that’s in the easy to conquer, fertile, valuable areas is more recent, and the trait that’s in the fringier, more isolated places–sometimes widely separated–is the older one.

“Fringe” areas don’t have to be the edges of coasts. They can also be rainforests, mountain tops, deserts, icy tundra, etc.–just anywhere that’s far away or hard to conquer.

The Ainu

The Ainu are among the most famous Siberian peoples primarily because, once upon a time, Europeans mistook them for Caucasians, probably because the Ainu had beards and other East Asians tend not to. (I think East Asians generally can’t grow shaggy beards, but it’s hard to say because shaving one’s head is so common among men these days.)

Count the beards!

As it turns out, merely having a beard does not, in fact, make you Caucasian; the Ainu are most closely related to other groups from north / east Asia:

Graphs from “The history of human populations in the Japanese Archipelago inferred from genome-wide SNP data with a special reference to the Ainu and the Ryukyuan populations;” Dienekes, Lindsay, and Ahnenkult (via the Wayback Machine) have excellent posts on the paper.

It’s not surprising that the Ainu aren’t actually long lost Europeans, but it is odd that they appear to be most closely–though still distantly–related to the Ryukyuans (aka Okinawans,) and mroe distantly related to their immediate neighbors, the Japanese. The Ainu hail from Hokkaido, in the far north of Japan, (though they may have previously ranged further south:

)

while the Okinawans hail from Japan’s southern end. Here’s another look at their respective genetics:

So we’re left with the Ainu still being quite unusual.

For that matter, their beards actually are rather unusual for the area–while the neighboring Nivkh People have beards, most of the other nearby Siberian groups, like the Yukaghirs and Oroks, (not to mention their Japanese neighbors) don’t seem particularly beardy, even though facial fur seems like it’d be useful in cold places.

Ainu

Yukaghirs

To be clear, based on my past half hour’s worth of research, the Japanese (and other east-Asians) can grow beards, but their beards are generally thin and patchy due to the distribution of hair follicles. The fluffy, full beards of the Ainu appear to be rare among the Japanese and other east Asians.

I’ve yet to find a map I trust of the distribution of hairiness among humans, so we’re going with one I don’t entirely trust:

Why are Norwegians furry, but not Siberians?

Potential issues with this map: 1. Hindley and Damon gathered their estimates from the literature of their day, which means some of these numbers may be quite old; 2. Map is based on a measure of hairiness of people’s finger joints, not beards or overall body hair; 3. It looks like the numbers in the US are based on current populations rather than indigenous ones, which isn’t an issue so much as just something to be clear on; 4. the Wikipedia lists some of the numbers cited in the article, but not those for Melanesia/Indonesia/SE Asia, and the article itself is paywalled; 5. the article’s abstract notes that Solomon Islanders measured 58.8% hairy–purple–which seems in contrast to the very yellow area nearby.

At any rate, judging by the Wikipedia, lots of people rate the Ainu as “very hairy” and the Japanese as “not very hairy.”

Interestingly, the Australian Aborigines seem to have nice beards:

The article on Ainu genetics notes, “…Omoto conducted a pioneering study on the phylogenetic relationship of the Ainu population considering various degrees of admixture. When a 60% admixture with the Mainland Japanese was assumed for the modern Ainu population, the ancestral Ainu population was clustered with Sahulian (Papuan and Australian). This sort of simulations based on the real data is needed.”

Speculative… but interesting.

The Ainu belong to Y-haplogroup D-M55, a sub-clade of D-M174, which according to Wikipedia, is found “at high frequency among populations in Tibet, the Japanese archipelago, and the Andaman Islands, though curiously not in India. The Ainu of Japan are notable for possessing almost exclusively Haplogroup D-M174 chromosomes,…” (You remember our discussion of the Andaman Islanders the other day, right?)

It’d be interesting to know if the Ainu have any Denisovan admixture.

The Ainu language doesn’t seem to be related to any of the nearby languages, not even Nivkh (aside from loan words.) It’s hard to study the Ainu language, since very few people speak it anymore, but so far all of the proposed groupings sound very tentative.

The Ainu also have different teeth from their neighbors. “Sinodont” teeth are found in Japan, China, Siberia, and Native Americans. “Sundadont” teeth are found in the Ainu, Okinawans, ancient Japanese skeletons, Taiwanese aborigines, Filipinos, Indonesians, and folks from Indochina like the Thais and Laotians.

Here’s a helpful map:

(N = Negritos; A = Australians)

The word “Sundadont” refers to “Sundaland“, which is the part of Indonesia that was above water and connected to the mainland back during the last ice age. Getting to Indonesia was therefore potentially quite simple for ancient people, since they could just walk there; getting to Papua New Guinea and Australia was much more difficult, since deep water lay between them. WestHunter has an interesting post on the subject.

However, on the subject of Native American teeth, the Wikipedia notes:

“Rebecca Haydenblit of the Hominid Evolutionary Biology Research Group at Cambridge University did a study on the dentition of four pre-Columbian Mesoamerican populations and compared their data to “other Mongoloid populations”.^[3] She found that “Tlatilco“, “Cuicuilco“, “Monte Albán” and “Cholula” populations followed an overall “Sundadont” dental pattern “characteristic of Southeast Asia” rather than a “Sinodont” dental pattern “characteristic of Northeast Asia”.^[3]“

As we discussed previously, it looks like Melanesians may have been the first folks to reach the Americas, but were later conquered and largely wiped out by a wave of “East Asian”-like invaders.

Taken together, all of the evidence is still kind of scanty, but points to the possibility of a Melanesian-derived group that spread across south Asia, made it into Tibet and the Andaman Islands, walked into Indonesia, and then split up, with one branch heading up the coast to Taiwan, Okinawa, Japan, and perhaps across the Bering Strait and down to Brazil, while another group headed out to Australia.

Later, the ancestors of today’s east Asians moved into the area, largely displacing or wiping out the original population, except in the hardest places to reach, like Tibet, the Andaman Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon Rainforest, and Hokkaido–the fringe.

Each group, of course, has gone its own way; the Ainu, for example, have mixed with the nearby Japanese and Siberian cultures, and adapted over time to their particular climate, resulting in their own, unique culture.

 

 

 

Feminism is a status game

I’ve posted before about my theory that feminism is about high-status people vs. low-status men.

I was thinking today a bit more about status.

Now, there exist feminist concerns that are not status-oriented, such as rape and assault. Feminism is vast; it contains multitudes. We will lay these aside for the moment to focus on status.

One of the things that makes me distrustful of feminism is the way extended family members attempt to use it to create marital discord between my husband and myself in order to get their way during disputes. Advertising does this, too, so I’ll use an example from advertising.

Family harmony and functioning require that husbands and wives agree on how the family’s money is spent, and that neither spouse spends recklessly or excessively. It is often simplest if one spouse has primary responsibility for setting the budget, paying the bills, etc. Sometimes, as in Japan, this is primarily the women; sometimes it is primarily the men. These arrangements are pure necessity: budgetary disorganization or reckless spending lead to financial problems like the electricity bill not getting paid.

Feminism promotes the idea that women should be in control of their own finances, which has been picked up by the advertising industry and promoted as the idea that spending money on whatever the hell you want is an act of female empowerment because you are defying your evil, patriarchal husband’s demands that you stick to a reasonable budget. You deserve it! (whatever “it” is.)

To be fair, advertisers do the exact same thing to men, albeit with slightly different language. You deserve a break today! A Big Mac! Cigarettes! Cars! Whatever it is, it isn’t some unneeded luxury advertisers for which are trying to convince you to fork over your hard-won budget dollars, but something you fundamentally deserve to have.

I get this a lot. “You deserve new clothes!” No, my current clothes are just fine; I am not dressed in rags. I buy new clothes when I need them and spend discretionary budget money on books, games, and other things for the children.

“You deserve a night out! Let’s go downtown and socialize with strangers!” No, I have no particular desire to act like a 20-something singleton cruising the bars. I certainly do not “deserve” to have someone else watch over my kids for me. Nor do I “deserve” to go to a restaurant; food is food. There is no sense in paying extra just so I can eat it outside my house.

“You deserve a vacation!” Fuck no. I hate travel.

“You deserve to sit in the front of the car instead of the back!” I sit in the back so I can supervise the distribution of ketchup packets when we get french fries. This is not a goddam status competition; I just want to make sure ketchup doesn’t go everywhere.

“You are not doing X that I want you to do! It must be because of your husband! He is poisoning you against me! You need to stop letting him boss you around! Stand up to him and let him know you are doing X because you deserve it, girl!”

At this point, I’m like OMFG, let’s just bring back patriarchy and then I can just redirect all of this bullshit at my husband and be like, “Sorry, I don’t make those decisions, that’s his department, so sorry, can’t help you at all! Bye-bye!” Okay, maybe that would be cruel to him, but it would at least spare me.

But none of these decisions were made because of political or patriarchal leanings. They’re all things we decided because they made practical sense for us to do them that way, or because I happen to have a personal preference in that department. The attempt to use feminist arguments a a wedge to make me spend more money or otherwise do things I dislike is, ultimately, an attempt to poison marital harmony by setting me against my husband.

But let’s get back to status.

Status is a shitty game. Chances are, you’ll lose; for 99.999% or so of people, there’s always someone higher status than themselves. Sure, you might have been good at sports in highschool, but in college you discovered that you suck and hundreds of people are much better than you. You might have been good at math in middle school, but come college, you discover that you do not have what it takes to get a degree in math. Or maybe you were skilled enough to get a degree in art, only to discover that people like you are a dime a gross and eating beans out of cans.

It is extremely hard in our modern world to be tops in any industry. It is hard to be tops in your neighborhood. It is hard to be tops in your church. It is hard to be top anything, anywhere, period.

Now rewind your clock to 1900 or so. Most people lived in small, rural farming communities, in which most people had the exact same occupation: farmer. “Status” in your community was directly tied to your ability to be a good farmer, or if you were a woman, a good farm wife. Do you plow your fields well? Work hard? Get the harvest in on time? Treat your neighbors decently and not stumble home drunk in the evenings? Then you were probably regarded as a “good” farmer and had reasonable status in your community. Did you keep the house clean, tend the garden, mend the clothe, watch the children, cook good meals, and preserve food for the winter? Then you were a “good” farm wife.

It’s a hard life, but they were tasks that mere mortals could aspire to do well, and whatever your status, it was obviously derived from the physical execution of your duties. You can’t fake getting in the harvest or cooking a good meal.

I reject–based on lack of evidence–the theory that 1800s farming societies viewed women derrogatorily. Farmsteads could not function without their female members (just as they could not function without men), and farm families spent long hours with no one but each other for company. Under these circumstances, I suspect that people generally valued and appreciated each other’s contributions, rather than engage in dumb fights over whether or not women were good at plowing.

Then came industrialization. People moved off the farms and into cities. Factory work replaced plowing.

While there are bad factory workers, there are no great ones. Working harder or faster than your fellows on the factory line does not result in better widgets or superior performance reviews, because the entire factory is designed to work at the exact same pace. Working faster or slower simply doesn’t work.

Factory work is, in many respects, more pleasant than farm work. It is less labor-intensive, you don’t have to shovel manure, you don’t have to work in inclement weather, and you’re less likely to starve to death due to inclement weather.

But there are many critiques arguing that factory work is inhuman (in the literal sense) and soul-deadening. The factory worker is little more than a flesh-and-blood robot, repeatedly performing a single function.

The farmer may look upon a stack of hay or newborn calf and feel pride in the work of his hands; the farm wife may look likewise on the food stacked in her cellar or her healthy children. But the factory worker has nothing he can point to and say, “I made this.” Factory work levels everyone into one great big undifferentiated mass.

War is perhaps the exception to this rule; those who band together to build tanks and planes to save their homelands do seem to feel great pride in their work. But merely making flip-flops or cellphones does not carry this kind of noble sentiment.

Outside of war, the factory worker has little status, and that he has is determined almost entirely by what others wish to pay him. There are therefore two ways for the factory worker to gain status: the country can go to war, or the worker can get a better-paying job.

Women have generally opted for “better jobs” over “more wars.”

Questions like “Why aren’t there more women in STEM?” or more generally, “Why aren’t there more women in profession X?” along with all the questions about equal pay all seem predicated on a quest for higher status, or at least on the idea that if women aren’t equal in any field, it’s a sign of people devaluing women (rather than, say, women just not being particularly interested in that field.)

So why are people Rh-? (part 2)

Part 1 is here.

Unfortunately, Googling “Why are people Rh-?” leads you down one of those fevered rabbit holes full of crazy. See, “Rh” was originally named after the rhesus monkey because some early blood work discoveries were done with monkey blood instead of human blood, probably for obvious reasons related to monkeys being more common lab subjects than humans. Rh+/Rh- blood in humans doesn’t actually have anything to do with rhesus monkeys. But some people have interpreted the Rh+/Rh- distinction as meaning that some people have monkey blood and are therefore descended from monkeys, while other people don’t have monkey blood and therefore aren’t descended from monkeys. They think Rh- folks are descended from reptiles or gods or angels or ancient human breeding experiments or something else.

I’ve got news for you. You’re all descended from apes. Yes, even you.

Can someone explain what, exactly, motivates these fever dreams of alien god blood? “Crazy” seems an inadequate answer, because most of these people can type in complete sentences and even form coherent paragraphs, in contrast to, say, schizophrenics, who as far as I know have difficulty with such tasks. Is it just a side effect of being too dumb to tell the difference between “things scientists believe are reasonably plausible” and “a guy claiming that Rh- people are space aliens with extra vertebrae?” Or maybe a critical percent of them are just 15?

Anyway, back on topic, since it seems basically like Rh- people shouldn’t exist, why do they? There are three basic possibilities:

1. Random chance.
2. Founder effect in some populations
3. Some beneficial effect to being Rh- or heterozygous

If random chance were the solution, we’d expect to find Rh- people distributed in roughly equal quantities throughout the world, or much of it. This is not what we find. Rather, according to Wikipedia, Rh- is most common among the Basque people (21-36% of Basques are Rh-); fairly common among other Europeans (16%); rare among African Americans, who have some European admixture, (7%); occurs occasionally in Siberians (% not given); shows up in about 1% of Native Americans; and is almost totally unknown in Africans and “Asians.” (Remember that this only counts people who are homozygous for the negative allele; due to heterozygosity, approximately 10% of Native Americans have the the negative allele. By contrast, only 1% of “Asians” have the allele.)

If you’ve read a lot of my posts, that list should match a pattern you already know; you can see part of it at the top of the screen, but Haak’s data includes more of the relevant Siberian and Native American groups:

From Haak et al.

Click to get a good look. Unfortunately, different people use different colors on their charts, so “blue” or “yellow” don’t necessarily mean the same things on different charts. Luckily for us, the “dark blue” seems to represent the same thing in both charts.

Dark blue is an ancient, ancestral, shall we say indigenous DNA group that’s found in ancient European skeletons from places like Sweden and Hungary, and is found in large chunks in all modern European populations (Gypsies probably excepted.) Dark blue is also found, in smaller amounts, in some north African populations, west Asian (including the Caucasus and northern Middle East but not really the bulk of the Middle East,) India, and Siberia (the relevant groups here are the Chuvash, Mansi, Even, Selkup, Aleut, Tlingit, Yukagir, Tubalar, Altaian, Dolgan, and Yakut). It’s found in tiny bits in Native American DNA, either because Native Americans brought it with them when they crossed the Bering Strait, or because of recent European admixture. (Or both.)

Interestingly, the Basque have very little of the “teal” (light green in the graph at the top of the blog,) simply because teal was brought in with the Indo-European invasion and Basque aren’t Indo-European. Teal is also very common in India (Indo-European and all that,) but Rh- isn’t common in India.

The “orange” DNA (light blue at the top of the blog) is found throughout the Middle East, where Rh- isn’t, and isn’t found much in Siberia, where Rh- is.

In other words, the Dark Blue people left DNA in approximately the right amounts in all of the relevant people, and the other color-groups in the chart didn’t.

In Africa and Asia, it seems likely to me that the Rh- people actually are the result of random chance. But among the folks with Blue People admixture, I suspect that we are looking at a Founder Effect–that is, when the original band of hunter gatherers who became the Blue People split off from the other tribes, they just happened, by random chance, to have a higher than average percentage of people with Rh- alleles than the rest of the human population.

This happens all the time; if you were to just pick ten random people off the street and test their DNA, you’d likely find that your random population has some genes that are far more common or rarer than in humanity as a whole.

But this does not explain the persistence of Rh-, much less its rather high frequency among the Basque.

First, I want to stop and make a PSA about the Basque:

The Basque are not super people who descended directly from the gods, aliens, Neanderthals, the first primeval man, or whatever. They’re just some guys who, like the Sardinians, didn’t get conquered by the Indo-Europeans, and so never picked up an Indo-European language and held onto a slightly different culture, though they’ve had a ton of cultural contact with the Spanish and French over the years and probably all speak Spanish and/or French these days.

Humans–by which I mean “anatomically modern humans” as they are called–have been around for approximately 200,000 years. About 100,000-70,000 years ago, humans left Africa and spread out across the rest of the world. (We picked up our Neanderthal admixture around this time, so pretty much all non-Africans have Neanderthal DNA, and even the Africans probably have some Neanderthal DNA because it looks like some non-Africans later went back to Africa and intermarried with the people there, because humans have moved around a lot over the past 100,000 years.)

Indo-European, as a language family, didn’t get going until about 8,000 to 6,000 years ago. It didn’t reach France until about 3,000 years ago, and got to Spain even later.

In other words, the Basques are not the sole living descendents of the first peoples from 200,000 years ago, or Neanderthals from 40,000 years ago. They are among the few unconquered descendents of people who lived about 3,000 years ago. You know, about the time the Greeks and Romans were getting going, or maybe the Assyrian Empire. Not prehistory.

Back to our story.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of research on why Rh- exists, but some folks have been pursuing the Toxoplasma Gondii angle. Basically, the idea is that if Sickle Cell Anemia exists because heterozygous sickle cell carriers are protected against malaria, even if folks who are homozygous for SSA die off.

Toxoplasma turns out to be one of the most common parasitic infections, infecting 30-50% of humans. I have yet to find what I consider a reliable-looking map of rates of T. gondii infection world-wide, but it infects about 22% of Americans over 12, and infection rates reach 95% in some places. (And 84% in France, probably due to bad hygiene and raw meat consumption.)

Even though T. gondii likes pretty much any warm-blooded host, they can only reproduce in cats/felids. So I wouldn’t expect any T. gondii in areas with no cats, like Australia before the Europeans got there.

One of the effects of T. gondii infection is slower reactions, so scientists have looked at whether people with Rh- blood or Rh+ blood have slower reactions with or without T. gondii infections.

The conclusions are kind of mixed, and I put this in the “needs more research” category due to some small Ns, but nevertheless, here’s what they found:

Among uninfected people in an ethnically homogenous population, Rh- males had faster reaction times than Rh+ males. However, when infected, the Rh-s become slower than the Rh+s (who showed very little change). But if we break the Rh+ group into homozygous Rh++ and heterozygous Rh+-s, we see something remarkable: the Rh++s have worse reaction times following infection, but the Rh+-s’ reactions times actually decreased!

The only problem with this theory is that T. gondii has probably historically been most closely associated with parts of the world with more cats, and Africa, the Middle East, and India historically had more cats than Europe, and certainly more than Siberia. If the idea is that being heterozygous is supposed to be protective against T. gondii, we’d expect to see more heterozygotes in areas with high rates of T. gondii, just as Sickle Cell Anemia is common in areas with malaria. We wouldn’t expect it in places like Siberia, where there are very few cats.

But perhaps the answer is more straightforward: Rh++ is protective against T. Gondii, but at the cost of lower reaction times. Rh– confers faster reaction times, but sucks against T. Gondii. Rh-s could therefore have an advantage over Rh++s and proliferate in areas with few cats, like Siberia.

But T gondii has had time to adapt to the older variant (Rh++;) Rh+- confuses it, thus offering protection against slower reaction times mostly by accident rather than positive selection for Rh+- people in areas with high levels of T. gondii.

Of course, this is all speculation; maybe folks in the Basque region have actually just had a lot of housecats and so contacted T. gondii more than other people, or maybe we’re just seeing an “Elderly Hispanic Woman Effect” due to the data being split into a lot of categories.

Things being as they are, I’d suggest studying the Basque and seeing if Basques with Rh- alleles have any traits that Basques with Rh+s don’t.

I really wish there were some more research on this subject! I guess we just don’t know yet.

ETA: I just realized something that, in retrospect, seems really obvious. If the French have an 85% T. Gondii infection rate, then the Basques–whose territory is partly in France and partly in Spain–may also have a very high infection rate. The French must have a ton of cats. Infection rates probably have more to do with the density of domesticated cats than of wild cats; the prevalence of Rh- and Rh+- alleles may have nothing to do with ancient cave people, but be a more recently selected adaptation. I don’t know when cats became common in Europe, but I’m guessing that plague-infested Medieval cities invited a fair number of cats. Hey, better T. Gondii than Yersina Pestis. If the Basques have somewhere near an 85% T. gondii infection rate, and have had it for a while–say, since the Middle Ages–their current high rates of Rh- blood may in fact be due to Rh+- folks being protected against the effects of infection.

I don’t know why I didn’t see that earlier.

Now I want to know whether people with T. Gondii are more likely to go on strike or start revolutions.