Finnis, Saami, and Fennoscandian DNA

 

Distribution of the Finno-Ugric languages

I’ve long wondered which group arrived first in Europe: the Indo-Europeans or the Finno-Ugrics. Most Europeans speak one of the hundreds of languages in the Indo-European family tree, but a few groups speak languages from the mostly Siberian Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family.

(Sorry, guys, I’m out of practice writing and these sentences don’t sound good to me, but the only way to improve is to forge ahead, so let’s go.)

Major countries/ethnic groups that speak Finno-Ugric languages include the Finns (obviously,) Saami/Lapps, Hungarians, and Estonians. The most southerly of this family, Hungarian, arrived in the Carpathian Basin within the span of recorded History (in 894 or 895, followed by a few years of warfare to secure their territory,) but the origins of the other European Finno-Ugric languages remains mysterious.

Who arrived first, the Indo Europeans or the Finns? Did the Saami always live in their current homelands, or did they once range much further south or east? Did they migrate here recently or long ago (since the entire area was under ice sheets during the ice age, no one lived there tens of thousands of years ago.)

With the exception of Hungarian, these languages all hail from the far north (especially if you include the Samoyidic languages, which hail from north of Komi on the map,) a cold and forbidding land where herding, hunting, gathering, and fishing have remained the primary way of life until quite recently–the long winters making agriculture very difficult.

Lamnidis et al have a new paper out on Ancient Fennoscandian DNA that sheds a fascinating light on the subject:

Here we analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and north-western Russia. We show that the genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today. Additionally, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age, which adds to the historical and linguistic information about the population history of Finland.

Let’s cut to the pictures, because they are worth a thousand words:

Just in case you are unclear on the geography, the Modern Saami come from northern part of the Finnoscandian peninsula. Six of the ancient remains came from Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov in the Murmansk Region on the Kola Peninsula–that’s the topmost dot on the map, now in Russia. These remains are very old–dated to about 1610-1436 BC.

Seven remains came from Levänluhta in Isokyrö, Finland, from a more recent burial dated to around 300-800 AD. (Actually, I think Levanluhta is a lake, so  This is the most southwestern burial on the map, in an area where the modern Finns live.

And the remains of two people came from a much more recent Saami cemetery in the Kola peninsula, Chalmny Varre, dating from the 17 or 1800s.

All of this DNA was compared against a variety of reference populations:

(I would just like to pause for a moment to appreciate both the beauty and hard work that went into these graphs.)

PC2 graphs are a little complicated, but what we’re basically looking at (in color) are two different human population axes. They very roughly correlate to north-south (up and down) and east-west, (left to right), because people tend to be more closely related to their neighbors than people thousands of miles away, but there’s another, more fascinating story going on here.

On the right-hand side, we have a cline that maps very nicely to north and south, from the Yukagir–a people from a part of Russia that’s so far to the northeast it’s almost in Alaska–at the top and the Semende of Indonesia and the Atayal, an indigenous Taiwanese group, at the bottom. (Most Taiwanese you meet are either newly arrived Han Chinese or older Han Chinese; the aboriginal Taiwanese are different, but likely the ancestors of Polynesians.)

DNA from various Asian peoples

Most east Asian DNA shows up as a blend of these two groups (which we may call roughly polar and tropical). In the chart to the right, taken from Haak et al, the polar DNA is red and the tropical is yellow. So the up-down cline on the right side of the map represents which particular mix of Polar/Tropical DNA these folks have.

On the left side of the graph, we have a farming/hunter-gatherer cline. The first farmers hailed from Anatolia (now Turkey, but that was before the Turks moved to Turkey,) and subsequently spread/conquered most of Europe and probably a few other places, because agriculture was quite successful. So the orange is Middle Easterners; above them are southern Europeans like Albanians and Basques; then the English, French, Hungarians, Finns, etc; and finally some older burials of people with descriptive names like “Eastern Hunter-Gatherer” [EHG] or “Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers” [SHG].

(I have to constantly remind myself what these little abbreviations mean, but The Genetic Prehistory of the Baltic Region probably clears things up a bit:

Similarly, in the Eastern Baltic, where foraging continued to be the main form of subsistence until at least 4000 calBCE¹⁵, ceramics technology was adopted before agriculture, as seen in the Narva Culture and Combed Ceramic Culture (CCC). Recent genome-wide data of Baltic pottery-producing hunter-gatherers revealed genetic continuity with the preceding Mesolithic inhabitants of the same region as well as influence from the more northern EHG^21,22, but did not reveal conclusively whether there was a temporal, geographical or cultural correlation with the affinity to either WHG or EHG.

The transition from the Late (Final) Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (LNBA) is seen as a major transformative period in European prehistory, accompanied by changes in burial customs, technology and mode of subsistence as well as the creation of new cross-continental networks of contact seen in the emergence of the pan-European Corded Ware Complex (CWC, ca. 2900–2300 calBCE) in Central² and north-eastern Europe²¹.

If you remember your Guns, Germs, and Steel, Turkish farmers had a really hard time getting their wheat to grow up in really cold places like Northern Russia,  Scandinavia and Narva (near the border between Estonia and Russia on the Baltic Sea,) which is why modern Finland is super poor and Turkey and Mexico, where corn was domesticated, are rich–what it doesn’t quite work like that?

Okay.

Anyway.

So most Europeans today are a mix of Anatolian farmers and various European hunter gatherer groups, with exactly how much you got depending a lot on whether the local environment was hospitable to farming. The pure hunter-gatherer genomes therefore show up as “further north” than the mixed, modern genomes of modern French and British folks.

There were additional events besides the Anatolian conquest that shaped modern European genetics–mostly the aforementioned Indo-European conquest–but the Indo-Europeans were at least part hunter-gatherer by DNA (nomadic pastoralists by profession,) so on this scale, their contributions look a lot like the older hunter-gatherer DNA.

So the interesting part of the graph is the middle, where all of the central Eurasian peoples are plotted. The purple band is various Finno-Ugric/Uralic speakers.

Hungarians are solidly in Europe because the ancient conquering Magyars left behind their language, but not much of their DNA (as we’ve discussed previously.) The Nganasan are one of the most thoroughly Siberian peoples you can imagine; they historically survived by hunting reindeer.

The green swaths (light and dark teal) are mostly Turkic-language speaking peoples; the Turkic peoples originated near Mongolia/Korea and spread out from there, mostly absorbing the DNA of whomever they encountered and passing on their language. The authors have also included Mongolian (which is not in the Turkic language family) in the light green group and some Caucuses groups in the dark teal.

Interestingly, the Yukaghir language (far upper right) is (according to Wikipedia,) potentially in the greater Finno-Ugric/Uralic family:

The relationship of the Yukaghir languages with other language families is uncertain, though it has been suggested that they are distantly related to the Uralic languages, thus forming the putative Uralic–Yukaghir language family.^[5]

Based on the genetics, I’d say it looks very likely that the ancestors of Uralic-speaking Nganasan and the Yukagirs were conversing in some sort of mutually intelligible language. Unfortunately, Yukaghir has very few speakers and is likely to die, so there’s not much time to research it.

Finally in the Light Teal we have some groups from Pakistan/Afghanistan, like the Balochi.

(Note that all of the colors used in these studies are arbitrary; DNA doesn’t really have a color.)

So where do our ancient DNA remains fall on this graph?

Today, the Levanluhta site is in Finland, surrounded solidly by Finns (and maybe some random Scandinavians; who knows;) in 300-800 AD, the population was almost identical to modern Saami. So even though Saami and Finns both speak Finno-Ugric languages, the Finns replaces the Saami in this area sometime in the past 1,500 years or so.

One Levanlughta skeleton is an exception–the one marked Levanlughta_B; it is clearly closer to the Finns and English on this graph, but deeper mathematical analysis disputes this conclusion:

One of the individuals from Levänluhta (JK2065/Levänluhta_B) rejects a cladal position with modern Saami to the exclusion of most modern Eurasian populations. This individual also rejects a cladal position with Finns. We analysed low coverage genomes from four additional individuals of the Levänluhta site using PCA (Supplementary Figure 3), confirming the exclusive position of Levänluhta_B compared to all other six individuals (including the four low-coverage individuals) from that site, as is consistent with the ADMIXTURE and qpAdm results. The outlier position of this individual cannot be explained by modern contamination, since it passed several tests for authentication (see Methods) along with all other ancient individuals. However, no direct dating was available for the Levänluhta material, and we cannot exclude the possibility of a temporal gap between this individual and the other individuals from that site.

In other words, it is a mystery.

The remains from Chalmny Varre, which we know was a Saami cemetery, unsurprisingly cluster with the other Saami.

The Bolshoy remains, though, are quite interesting. They are shifted slightly in the direction of the ancient hunter-gatherers (perhaps their descendants, if still around, have mixed a bit with the agriculturalists.) Their physical location is about as far east as the Red Squares (ethnic Russians,) yet the more closely resemble the Mansi or the Selkups. (The modern Mansi live here; the modern Selkups live nearby.)

Getting down to the bar graphs, we see this data presented in a different way.

There are three groups that we can see contributing to most modern Europeans–Farmers, represented by the Orange LBK DNA; exclusively Indo-European, Green, notably not found in the Basque; and hunter-gatherers in Dark Blue. (Note that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans hailed from the Central Eurasian steppes and so their DNA could have gotten around there, too.)

The modern Saami also have a Purple component to their DNA, which finds its highest expression in the Nganasan of far eastern polar Russia.

So the oldest burials–the Bolshoy–show no agricultural DNA. They are hunter-gatherers+Siberians, with a touch of Indo-European (probably from a steppe population that might have contributed to the Indos as well) and a bit they share with… the Karitiana of Brazil? Well, the Native Americans did descend from Paleo Siberians, so some genetic relatedness is expected.

The more recent burials, which cluster with the modern Saami, all show agricultural DNA–probably due to marrying a few of the local Finns/Russians who carry some agricultural DNA (who are almost genetically identical on this scale) rather than a pure LBK agriculturalist.

Here we see why the one outlier, Levanlughta_B, doens’t group with the Finns, either–modern Finns and Russians have some of that Nganasan-style Siberian DNA (probably from the same process that gifted Finnish/Russian DNA to the Saami), but Levanlughta_B doesn’t. Levanlughta_B looks more like the Baltic BA sample (Baltic Bronze Age.) Perhaps this individual was just a merchant, traveler, or lost–or represents a stage before the modern Finnish population had been produced.

The Finnish population itself is interesting, because it is genetically very similar to the Russian, but obviously speaks a language far more closely related to Saami (Lapp) than anything in the Indo-European tree. While it is therefore likely that the Finns replaced the Saami in the area around Lake Levanlughta, it seems also probable that in the process, they absorbed a large number of Uralic-speaking people. Who conquered (or married) whom? Did an ancient Balto-Slavic population move into what is now Finland, marry the local Saami girls, and adopt their language? Did an ancient Siberian population speaking a Uralic language conquer some ancient group of Russians, take their women, pass on their Uralic language, and later move into Finland and drive out the locals? Or perhaps something even more complicated occurred.

As for the Bolshoy, are they related (closely) to the modern Saami, or are they a group that simply died out?

The paper goes on:

 While the Siberian genetic component presented here [Purple] has been previously described in modern-day populations from the region^1,3,9,10, we gain further insights into its temporal depth. Our data suggest that this fourth genetic component found in modern-day north-eastern Europeans arrived in the area before 3500 yBP. It was introduced in the population ancestral to Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov individuals 4000 years ago at latest, as illustrated by ALDER dating using the ancient genome-wide data from the Bolshoy samples. The upper bound for the introduction of this component is harder to estimate. The component is absent in the Karelian hunter-gatherers (EHG)³ dated to 8300–7200 yBP as well as Mesolithic and Neolithic populations from the Baltics from 8300 yBP and 7100–5000 yBP respectively⁸. 

Karelia is a region that crosses the border between Finland and Russia, so it is significant that this Siberian component isn’t found in ancient Karelian hunter-gatherers. Of course, the Siberians could have just been further north, however, the authors note that we have archaeological evidence of the spread of the Bolshoy people:

The large Nganasan-related component in the Bolshoy individuals from the Kola Peninsula provides the earliest direct genetic evidence for an eastern migration into this region. Such contact is well documented in archaeology, with the introduction of asbestos-mixed Lovozero ceramics during the second millennium BC⁵⁰, and the spread of even-based arrowheads in Lapland from 1900 BCE^51,52. Additionally, the nearest counterparts of Vardøy ceramics, appearing in the area around 1,600-1,300 BCE, can be found on the Taymyr peninsula, much further to the East^51,52. Finally, the Imiyakhtakhskaya culture from Yakutia spread to the Kola Peninsula during the same period^24,53. Contacts between Siberia and Europe are also recognised in linguistics. The fact that the Nganasan-related genetic component is consistently shared among Uralic-speaking populations, with the exceptions of absence in Hungarians and presence in the non-Uralic speaking Russians, makes it tempting to equate this genetic component with the spread of Uralic languages in the area.

The authors qualify this with a bit of “it’s complicated; people move around a lot,” but basically it’s People: not pots.

That was an enjoyable read; I look forward to the next paper from these folks.

Mental Slavery

Defaming Prophet Muhammed not free expression: ECHR:

Defaming the Prophet Muhammed “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace” and thus exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression, ruled the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday, upholding a lower court decision. …

According to a statement released by the court on Thursday, the Vienna Regional Criminal Court found that these statements implied that Muhammad had pedophilic tendencies, and in February 2011 convicted Mrs. S. for disparaging religious doctrines.

A free man may speak his conscience, at least on his own time. A slave may not.

I have never (that I recall) said anything negative (or positive) about Muhammad. He’s long dead, and I haven’t particularly studied Islam. But it remains a fact agreed upon in Islamic sources that 53-year old Mohammad married his third wife, Aisha, when she was six years old and consummated the marriage well before the legal age of consent in Western countries (most sources say 9 or 10 years old). Aisha herself became an important figure in Islam following Mohammad’s death, and is credited with having narrated 2,210 hadiths on subjects such as inheritance and Mohammad’s personal life–making her, it appears, something of an Islamic legal scholar.

Of course, it was not terribly unusual for girls to be married off at very young ages in the past–the Virgin Mary herself was probably only about 12-14 when she was betrothed, and child marriage is still quite common in much of the Middle East.

Regardless, 1. modern Christians don’t think it’s a good idea to imitate Joseph and marry a 12 year old, and 2. if you tried to pull something like this in the modern US, you would absolutely be branded a “pedophile” and sent to prison.

Note: The European Court of “Human Rights” is merely upholding a ruling under Austrian law–blame should probably laid first at Austria’s feet for convicting this woman in the first place. It has banned not just freedom of speech and conscience, but facts–simply because they are embarrassing.

Parsis, Travellers, and Human Niches

Irish Travellers, 1954

I.

Why are there many kinds of plants and animals? Why doesn’t the best out-compete, eat, and destroy the others, rising to be the sole dominant species on Earth?

In ecology, a niche is an organism’s specific place within the environment. Some animals eat plants; some eat dung. Some live in the sea; others in trees. Different plants flower and grow in different seasons; some are pollinated by bees and some by flies. Every species has its specific niche.

The Competitive Exclusion Principle (aka Gause’s Law) states that ‘no two species can occupy the same niche’ (or positively, ‘two species coexisting must have different niches.’) For example, if squirrels and chipmunks both want to nest in the treetops and eat nuts, (and there are limited treetops and nuts,) then over time, whichever species is better at finding nuts and controlling the treetops will dominate the niche and the other, less successful species will have to find a new niche.

If squirrels are dominating the treetops and nuts, this leaves plenty of room for rabbits to eat grass and owls to eat squirrels.

II. So I was reading recently about the Parsis and the Travellers. The Parsis, as we discussed on Monday, are Zoroastrians, originally from Persia (modern-day Iran,) who settled in India about a thousand yeas ago. They’re often referred to as the “Jews of India” because they played a similar role in Indian society to that historically played by Jews in Europe.*

*Yes I know there are actual Jews in India.

The Travellers are an Irish group that’s functionally similar to Gypsies, but in fact genetically Irish:

In 2011 an analysis of DNA from 40 Travellers was undertaken at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. The study provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who separated from the settled Irish community at least 1000 years ago; the claim was made that they are as distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians.^[36]

It appears that Ireland did not have enough Gypsies of Indian extraction and so had to invent its own.

And though I originally thought that only in jest, why not? Gypsies occupy a particular niche, and if there are Gypsies around, I doubt anyone else is going to out-compete them for that niche. But if there aren’t any, then surely someone else could.

According to Wikipedia, the Travellers traditionally were tinkers, mended tinware (like pots) and acquiring dead/old horses for slaughter.

The Gypsies appear to have been originally itinerant musicians/entertainers, but have also worked as tinkers, smiths, peddlers, miners, and horse traders (today, car salesmen.)

These are not glorious jobs, but they are jobs, and peripatetic people have done them.

Jews (and Parsis, presumably) also filled a social niche, using their network of family/religious ties to other Jews throughout the diaspora as the basis of a high-trust business/trading network at a time when trade was difficult and routes were dangerous.

On the subject of “Madeburg rights” or law in Eastern Europe, Wikipedia notes:

In medieval Poland, Jews were invited along with German merchants to settle in cities as part of the royal city development policy.

Jews and Germans were sometimes competitors in those cities. Jews lived under privileges that they carefully negotiated with the king or emperor. They were not subject to city jurisdiction. These privileges guaranteed that they could maintain communal autonomy, live according to their laws, and be subjected directly to the royal jurisdiction in matters concerning Jews and Christians. One of the provisions granted to Jews was that a Jew could not be made Gewährsmann, that is, he could not be compelled to tell from whom he acquired any object which had been sold or pledged to him and which was found in his possession. Other provisions frequently mentioned were a permission to sell meat to Christians, or employ Christian servants.

External merchants coming into the city were not allowed to trade on their own, but instead forced to sell the goods they had brought into the city to local traders, if any wished to buy them.

Note that this situation is immensely better if you already know the guy you’re selling to inside the city and he’s not inclined to cheat you because you both come from the same small, tight-knit group.

Further:

Under Bolesław III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border in Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev.^[32] Bolesław III recognized the utility of Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. … Mieszko III employed Jews in his mint as engravers and technical supervisors, and the coins minted during that period even bear Hebraic markings.^[30] … Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.

If you need merchants and goldsmiths, someone will become merchants and goldsmiths. If it’s useful for those merchants and goldsmiths to all be part of one small, close-knit group, then a small, close-knit group is likely to step into that niche and out-compete anyone else trying to occupy it.

The similarity of the Parsis to the Jews probably has less to do with them both being monotheists (after all, Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs are also monotheists,) and more to do with them both being small but widely-flung diasporic communities united by a common religion that allows them to use their group as a source of trustworthy business partners.

Over hundreds or thousands of years, humans might not just move into social niches, but actually become adapted to them–Jew and Parsis are both reported to be very smart, for example.

III. I can think of several other cases of ethnic groups moving into a particular niche. In the US, the gambling and bootleg alcohol trade were long dominated by ethnic Sicilians, while the crack and heroin trades have been dominated by black and Hispanic gangs.

Note that, while these activities are (often) illegal, they are still things that people want to do and the mafia/gangs are basically providing a goods/services to their customers. As they see it, they’re just businessmen. They’re out to make money, not commit random violence.

That said, these guys do commit lots of violence, including murder, blackmail and extortion. Even violent crime can be its own niche, if it pays well enough.

(Ironically, police crackdown on ethnic Sicilian control in NYC coincided with a massive increase in crime–did the mafia, by controlling a particular territory, keep out competing bands of criminals?)

On a more pleasant note, society is now rich enough that many people can make a living as professional sports stars, marry other professional sports stars, and have children who go on to also be professional sports stars. It’s not quite at the level of “a caste of professional athletes genetically optimized for particular sports,” but if this kept up for a few hundred years, it could be.

Similarly, over in Nepal, “Sherpa” isn’t just a job, it’s an ethnic group. Sherpas, due to their high elevation adaptation, have an advantage over the rest of us when it comes to scaling Mt. Everest, and I hear the global mountain-climbing industry pays them well for their services. A Sherpa who can successfully scale Mt. Everest many times, make lots of money, and raise lots of children in an otherwise impoverished nation is thus a successful Sherpa–and contributing to the group’s further genetic and cultural specialization in the “climbing Mt. Everest” niche.

India, of course, is the ultimate case of ethnic groups specializing into specific jobs–it’d be interesting to see what adaptations different groups have acquired over the years.

I also wonder if the caste system is an effective way to minimize competition between groups in a multi-ethnic society, or if it leads to more resentment and instability in the long run.

Book Review: Aphrodite and the Rabbis

When I started researching Judaism, the first thing I learned was that I didn’t know anything about Judaism. It turns out that Judaism-in-the-Bible (the one I was familiar with) and modern Judaism are pretty different.

Visotzky’s Aphrodite and The Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as we Know it explores the transition from Biblical to Rabbinic Judaism. If you’re looking for an introductory text on the subject, it’s a good place to start. (It doesn’t go into the differences between major modern-day Jewish groups, though. If you’re looking for that, Judaism for Dummies or something along those lines will probably do.)

I discussed several ideas gleaned from this book in my prior post on Talmudism and the Constitution. Visotzky’s thesis is basically that Roman culture (really, Greco-Roman culture) was the dominant culture in the area when the Second Temple fell, and thus was uniquely influential on the development of early Rabbinic Judaism.

Just to recap: Prior to 70 AD, Judaism was located primarily in its homeland of Judea, a Roman province. It was primarily a temple cult–people periodically brought sacrifices to the priests, the priests sacrificed them, and the people went home. There were occasional prophets, but there were no rabbis (though there were pharisees, who were similar.)  The people also practiced something we’ll call for simplicity’s sake folk Judaism, passed down culturally and not always explicitly laid out in the Mosaic Law. (This is a simplification; see the prior post for more details.)

Then there were some big rebellions, which the Romans crushed. They razed the Temple (save for the Western Wall) and eventually drove many of the Jews into exile.

It was in this Greco-Roman cultural environment, Visotzky argues, that then-unpracticeable Temple Judaism was transformed into Rabbinic Judaism.

Visotzky marshals his arguments: Jewish catacombs in Rome, Talmudic stories that reference Greek or Roman figures, Greek fables that show up in Jewish collections, Greek and Roman words that appear in Jewish texts, Greco-Roman style art in synagogues (including a mosaic of Zeus!), the model of the rabbi + his students as similar to the philosopher and his students (eg, Socrates and Plato,) Jewish education as modeled on Greek rhetorical education, and the Passover Seder as a Greek symposium.

Allow me to quote Visotzky on the latter:

The recipe for a successful symposium starts, of course, with wine. At least three cups, preferably more, and ideally you would need between three and five famous guests. Macrobius describes a symposium at which he imagined all the guests drinking together, even though some were already long dead. They eat hors d’oeuvers, which they dip into a briny sauce. Their appetite is whetted by sharp vegetables, radishes, or romaine lettuce. The Greek word for these veggies is karpos. Each food is used as a prompt to dig through one’s memory to find apposite bookish quotes about it. … Above all, guests at a symposium loved to quote Home, the divine Homer. …

To kick off a symposium, a libation was poured to Bacchus Then the dinner guests took their places reclining on pillows, leaning on their left arms, and using their right hands to eat. Of course, they washed their fingers before eating their Mediterranean flatbreads, scooping up meats and poultry–no forks back then.

Athenaeus records a debate about desert, a sweet paste of fruit, wine, and spices. Many think it a nice digestive, but Athenaeus quotes Heracleides of Tarentum, who argues that such a lovely dish ought to be the appetizer, eaten at the outside of the meal. After the sumptuous meal and the endless quotation of texts… the symposium diners sang their hymns of thanksgiving to the gods. …

All of this should seem suspiciously familiar to anyone who has ever attended a Passover Seder. The traditional Seder begins with a cup of wine, and blessings to God are intoned. Then hands are washed in preparation for eating the dipped vegetables, called karpos, the Greek word faithfully transliterated int Hebrew in the Passover Haggadah. Like the symposiasts, Jews dip in brine. The traditional Haggadah recalls who was there at the earliest Seders: Rabbi Eliezer … Rabbi Aqiba, and Rabbi Tarphon (a Hebraized version of the Greek name Tryphon). The converation is prompted by noting the foods that are served and by asking questions whose answers quote sacred scripture. …

Traditionally the Passover banquet is eaten leaning on the left side, on pillows. Appetites are whetted by bitter herbs and then sweetened by the paste-like Haroset (following the opinion of Heracleides of Tarentum?) Seder participants even scoop up food in flatbread. Following the Passover meal there are hymns to God.

Vigotzsky relates one major difference between the Greek and Jewish version: the Greeks ended their symposiums with a “descent into debauchery,” announced api komias–to the comedians! Jews did not:

Indeed, the Mishnah instructs, “We do not end the meal after eating the paschal lamb by departing api komias.” That final phrase, thanks to the Talmud of Jewish Babylonia, where they did not know Greek, has come to be Hebraized as “afi-komen,” the hidden piece of matzo eaten for desert.

The one really important piece of data that he leaves out–perhaps he hasn’t heard the news–is the finding that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically about half Italian. This Italian DNA is primarily on their maternal side–that is, Jewish men, expelled from Judea, ended up in Rome and took local wives. (Incidentally, Visotzky also claims that the tradition of tracing Jewish ancestry along the maternal line instead of the paternal was adopted from the Romans, as it isn’t found in the Bible, but is in Rome.) These Italian ladies didn’t leave behind many stories in the Talmud, but surely they had some effect on the religion.

On the other hand, what about Jews in areas later controlled by Islam, like Maimonides? Was Rome a major influence on him, too? What about the Babylonian Talmud, written more or less in what is now Iraq?

Modern Christianity owes a great deal to Greece and Rome. Should modern Judaism be understood in the Greco-Roman lens, as well?

Cathedral Round-Up #25: Yale Law and the Expansion of “Persecution”

Way back in Round-Up #7, I noticed the Cathedral was trying to expand the notion of “refugee” to include “economic migrants.” In today’s Round-Up, courtesy of the Yale Law Journal, Paul Strauch would like to expand “persecution” to include “might get killed by common criminals.”

Strauch’s first paragraph (from When Stopping the Smuggler Means Repelling the Refugee: International Human Rights Law and the European Union’s Operation To Combat Smuggling in Libya’s Territorial Sea) is a doozy:

Over the past three years, the number of human tragedies on the Mediterranean Sea has reached an unprecedented level.1 The now-iconic image of a German rescue worker cradling a drowned migrant baby in his arms in the sea between Libya and Italy remains a disturbing reminder of the over 5,000 migrants and refugees who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean in 2016 alone.2 Of the European Union’s (EU) responses to this humanitarian crisis, perhaps the most controversial has been Operation Sophia: a naval mission to combat human smugglers and traffickers operating in the Mediterranean, in particular off the coast of Libya.3 As part of Operation Sophia, the EU is now supporting and training the Libyan Navy and Coastguard to combat smuggling and stop migrant departures within Libya’s territorial sea—waters within twelve nautical miles of Libya’s nautical baseline. The EU simultaneously continues to seek permission for European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) vessels and personnel themselves to enter Libya’s territorial sea to seize and dispose of smuggling vessels. (These two components will hereinafter together be referred to as the Operation Sophia “territorial sea component.”)

Source: Human Costs of Border Control

Okay. Let’s unpack this. First, a little background on Yale Law: for those of you who don’t know, it is regarded as the most prestigious law school in the US. Paul Strauch might be an unknown American law student who doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page (yet,) but he still has the power to influence the development and implementation of European Human Rights law. According to his profile on Linked In, Strauch has only had one real job–he worked as an “Investment Banking Compliance Analyst” for Goldman Sachs for a year. The rest of his “work experience” is three-month internships.

Getting an accurate estimate of the full scale of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean is tricky because dead bodies often end up at the bottom of the sea where they are hard to find, thousands of miles away from any loved ones. A well-publicized sinking can prompt European governments to dredge the sea floor in search of bodies, while a boat that just disappears in the middle of the night and is never heard from again may never get noticed.

Nevertheless, migrant deaths do look like they’ve gone up overall. HCOBC cites over 450 deaths in 2013, and the UNHCR reports over 3,750 in 2014 and estimates more than that for 2016. The numbers for 2017 aren’t out yet, but look similar.

This is a bad idea

Why are so many people suddenly drowning in the Mediterranean?

The Libyan civil war which began in 2011 turned a relatively stable country with functioning borders into an anarchic free-for-all infested with sociopathic smugglers happy to let you risk death in a rubber raft in the Mediterranean in exchange for all your money.

A quick glance at a map of the Mediterranean reveals that Libya-Italy route is about the worst one you could possibly pick. Morocco to Spain/Gibralter? Only 9 miles! There are totally legal ferry companies that will take you from Tunisia to Sicily in about 10 hours. You can cross from Turkey to continental Europe via the Bosporus, (yes I know the other side of the Bosporus is also Turkey,) or if you want to take the long route, you can island-hop through the Aegean. The minimum distance from Libya to Italy (to the island of Lampedusa) is a much further–290 miles.

But the smugglers aren’t actually trying to get to Italy. As the Irish Times reports,

“It is well-known that the Italian boats save everybody,” [a smuggler] said. Smugglers and migrants said that a rescue by a European vessel in international waters – not reaching the Italian coast – was the goal of every departure. …

But the Libyan coast guard is practically useless. Coast guard officials responsible for most of the coastline where the smuggling occurs say equipment failures have prevented them from carrying out an operation for more than three months, and at least one captain said he was afraid of retribution by the smugglers. …

An Egyptian or Tunisian captain for the boat might get $5,000-$7,000, and blend in with the migrants to avoid responsibility if the boat is stopped, according to the smugglers. About $800 buys a satellite telephone the captain can use to call the Red Cross when the boat reaches international waters, to expedite pick-up by the Italian coast guard.

source

The vast majority of migrants coming via Libya are not Syrians refugees fleeing ISIS (who of course take the eastern Mediterranean/Bosporus routes,) but regular Sub-Saharan Africans who have traveled through Libya’s non-existent borders in search of a quick route to European prosperity.

Well, deaths are sad, but people die every day, especially if they do things that are likely to kill themselves, like try to cross the Mediterranean in a rubber raft. What makes a death in Libyan waters (or the open sea) Italy’s problem–or more generally, Europe’s?

Operation Sophia’s ostensible goal of helping the Libyan coast guard reassert control over Libyan waters is the fastest and most sensible way of stemming the tide and saving the lives of everyone involved. But Strauch takes issue with this:

The EU’s goal of decreasing the number of migrants4 who reach the Mediterranean high seas is understandable, but the territorial sea component presents serious human rights concerns. Instead of traversing the high seas to possibly reach Europe and asylum, migrants will be turned back by the Libyan Coastguard—trained and supported by EUNAVFOR MED—to a country where they likely face prolonged detention, brutality, and persecution. There is also the possibility that migrants and refugees will be caught in the crossfire between the human smugglers and the Libyan Coastguard in collaboration with EUNAVFOR MED. This Comment considers whether the EU’s activities in the territorial sea of Libya will occur within the framework of international human rights law, or whether there are gaps in protection for migrants impacted by the Operation.

These migrants are not in danger in Libya because some faction in the Libyan civil war has it out for them. They’re not even Libyans fleeing violence in Libya. They are opportunistically taking advantage of Libya’s lawlessness in order to cross it, and Strauch is arguing that because of that same lawlessness, it would be a violation of Human Rights Law to send them back.

<–Here’s a map of homicide rates by state (the UNODC report doesn’t include recent violence in Libya.) By this logic, pretty much any of the billions of people from Russia to Brazil should have the right to waltz into the blue-zone country of their choice.

Of course, the actual result of Operation Sophia has not been the return of smuggling vessels to Libya (that phase of the operation is not yet and may never be live.) According to the New York Times, Efforts to Rescue Migrants Caused Deadly, Unexpected Consequences:

Strategies to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and disrupt smuggling networks have had deadly, unexpected consequences, according to aid groups monitoring the crisis.

It is part of a wrenching Catch-22: Any effort to lessen the migrant crisis can backfire as smuggling networks devise even more dangerous strategies in response. …

Each year, aid groups patrol the area and rescue thousands of migrants at risk of drowning.

Before 2014, rescues took place closer to Italy, with migrant boats traveling as far as Italian waters. By 2014, many rescues were occurring farther south in the Mediterranean. By 2015, rescues reached even closer to the Libyan side of the Mediterranean Sea.

More recently, rescues were taking place closer to Libyan territorial waters…

Smugglers use flimsy boats and provide just enough fuel to reach the edge of Libyan waters. Drivers can remove the engine and head back to Libya on another boat, leaving the migrants adrift until help arrives.

The NY Times fatalistically concludes:

“It’s really time to start looking at some of the long-term policies,” [Federico Soda, the director of the Coordination Office for the Mediterranean with the International Organization for Migration,] added. “Africa and Europe are always going to be neighbors. Movement of people between the two is just a reality of the coming decade.”

Libya’s porous borders are just a reality, like average rainfall in the Sahara or the height of Mount Everest, not something humans actually have control over, so you’d better just get used to it.

Peter “Sweden” Imanuelson has an interesting account of his recent trip to Sicily:

So I went down to Sicily, the front line where many immigrants first set foot in Europe to find out the truth about the so-called refugee crisis. …

What I found in Sicily was an organized and large-scale operation. These are so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam, Save the Children, MSF, and others who work with governments from different EU countries to bring in a new population in Europe.

In Catania I met an immigrant named Mohari who arrived just a few days earlier. His journey began in Eritrea, from where he traveled all the way up to the coast of Libya. After six failed attempts, this Eritrean was finally picked up by a boat from Save the Children, only a few kilometers from Libya’s coast. …

Mohari told me he wanted to either Sweden or England. I asked him why he just selected these countries.

– Money, solved his short answer.

There are a number of different ships operating in the Mediterranean to help immigrants. Partly, we have ships from NGOs, but we also have coastguards from different EU countries, including Sweden.

In Catania I met the crew of Triton, a Swedish coastguard vessel operating in the Mediterranean at the request of the EU. The ship is formally there as a Coast Guard, but I found out that they also collaborate with NGO vessels to pick up immigrants on Libya’s coast and transport them to Europe.

It is thought that the Swedish Coast Guard should guard the coasts of Sweden – not pick up Africans in the Mediterranean. After all, it is Swedish tax money that accounts for the cost. However, the Swedes are commissioned by the EU Coast Guard Frontex along with the Coast Guard from other EU countries.

So what happens when NGOs ship arrives in Europe filled with immigrants? I arrived at Pozzallo, a nice city in southern Sicily. There, the Aquarius, operated by a Physician without Frontiers, would arrive early in the morning after picking up about 420 immigrants on the Libyan coast.

I was there in good time when the ship arrived. Everything was in full swing to prepare for Europe’s new citizens. The Red Cross, the police, the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs and several were in place. The ship arrived with what seemed to be almost exclusively young African men. No women or children were able to see on board.

Suddenly, the Italian police arrived at me, asked to see my ID actions and rejected me from the port.

Let me pause here for the irony as the person who is actually legally allowed to be in a Sicilian port is kicked out by the police and people who have entered the country illegally are not.

My trip continued and I wanted to find out where the immigrants are heading after they come to Europe. At the harbor there were buses lined up, ready to take the immigrants on. Many end up in refugee camps. One of these is Cara Mineo. What amazed me was how incredibly good the refugee camp is compared with how the native population lives. Newly built houses, playgrounds, football pitches, basketball courts and more.

A local resident told immigrants to get everything they needed. Mobile phones, cigarettes. They also get free healthcare, free legal assistance and so on… Cara Mineo is a former military base and the military is still there and watches. I was not rejected this time, but was strongly limited in what pictures I could take on the camp.

However, there is even more help to get if you are an immigrant from the third world. Near the train station in Catania, the organization Oxfam had its pop-up tent and helped immigrants. There they are interpretered and tell the immigrants what they need to do to seek asylum and get up to northern Europe. They even go so far as to share leaflets titled #OPENEUROPE Guide To Rights. There you will find a lot of useful information, like which trains you can take north and what the prices are. You also get to know which rights you have (such as access to the phone and the internet). Of course, there are links to web pages that show you how to stay in Europe.

Oxfam’s assistant described how they simply help the immigrants with all the information they need. They also share backpacks with necessities, such as toothbrushes, shoes, towels, paper and pens. She told them that they then ask immigrants to rate the service they received from Oxfam on the organization’s app.

You know, back during the big drought, several of my relatives ended up with no running water because their well dried up. After hearing that a deeper well could reach the water, I started contacting well-digging charities in search of help, but kept getting the same answer: they only drill in Africa. These folks would rather fly to Ethiopia to drill wells than drive a hundred miles up the road to help their neighbors.

Most people who want to “help” others don’t really want to help; they just want the feel-good-fuzzies they get from helping. You don’t have to hand out backpacks and toothbrushes to economic tourists illegally entering your country. You can hand out backpacks and toothbrushes to homeless people and foster children in your own city.

Strauch goes on (this paragraph is so egregious that I’m going to treat it like a Wikipedian):

In recent years, observers and scholars [who?] have rightly [judgmental language] called attention to European states’ heightened implementation of border security protocols and restrictions on asylum access in response to the global migration crisis. [Proof?] The term “Fortress Europe” is now commonplace [where?].6 [The linked source does not prove that the phrase is common.] Over the past twenty years, European states have developed this practice [what practice?] by striking deals with African nations to support maritime interdictions in their territorial seas.7 As a military operation designed to limit the number of migrants in reach of Europe’s borders, Operation Sophia expressly follows in this trend. [What trend? No trend has been demonstrated.]

Just look at that horrible trend of migrants being kept out of Europe

Notice how Strauch just asserts a bunch of stuff without offering any proof for any of it. Over in reality land, a Record 1.3 Million Migrants reached Europe in 2015; this number dropped negligibly to 1.2 million in 2016. Trends here probably have more to do with German Chancellor Angela Merkel having announced an extremely open policy toward migrants and refugees crossing into Germany in 2015 than Italian-Libyan coast guard cooperation.

Strauch never does provide data to back up his claims. Rather he argues:

The Operation Sophia territorial sea component risks violating fundamental international human rights protected by various international conventions.32 These include, in particular, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the 1951 Refugee Convention.33 The states of the European Union are parties to all of these instruments and thus bound under international law by the obligations provided therein.34

The Operation Sophia territorial sea component is at odds with the principle of nonrefoulement, which holds that an individual may not be returned to a place where he or she faces risk of persecution.35 The nonrefoulement principle is affirmed most clearly in Article 33 of the Refugee Convention and is also binding upon European states under the ECHR.36 … Additionally, the duty of nonrefoulement now arguably is customary international law,38 and the overwhelming weight of international authority holds that states are prohibited from engaging in nonrefoulement practices when acting extraterritorially.39

Libya remains a place of possible persecution for the irregular migrants who seek to leave it. In Libya, migrants face possible torture, arbitrary detention, and other abuses.40 Because Operation Sophia engagements seek to ensure that migrant vessels cannot leave Libya’s coast, interception and diversion of vessels containing migrants and refugees imply that they may be forced to return to Libya.41 In addition, the program of disposing of vessels used for smuggling may present nonrefoulement concerns, as these actions effectively ensure migrants seeking transportation cannot leave Libya. For similar reasons, territorial sea engagements may run up against the prohibition against collective expulsion. Affirmed in Article 4 of the Protocol 4 of the ECHR, collective expulsion is “any measure . . . compelling aliens as a group to leave the country, except where such a measure is taken after and on the basis of a reasonable and objective examination of the particular cases of each individual alien of the group.”42

Strauch makes me think Duerte is on to something.

The article keeps going in this manner. Basically it’s Europe’s fault that anyone, anywhere in the world might be subject to violence and so Europe must take in anyone and everyone who shows up on its shores or even just a few miles off Libya’s coast. I recommend that you read the whole thing, just to get the full and thorough picture, but I will leave you with this final line:

Part III then contends that the territorial sea component makes significant and concerning contributions to an emerging norm of militarized, cooperation-based border control.

Strauch is concerned about cooperation? One wonders what kind of non-militarized border control Strauch imagines exists anywhere in the world.

 

Amazingly, I didn’t have to go digging to find this article–it was just the first article I encountered in this month’s issue of Yale Law Journal. I haven’t even touched the Journal’s other two articles, The Nature of Parenthood:

This Article explores what it means to fully vindicate gender and sexual-orientation equality in the law of parental recognition. … In initially defining parentage through marriage, the common law embedded parenthood within a gender-hierarchical, heterosexual order. Eventually, courts and legislatures repudiated the common-law regime and protected biological parent-child relationships formed outside marriage. While this effort to derive parental recognition from biological connection was animated by egalitarian impulses, it too operated within a gender-differentiated, heterosexual paradigm.

and Disparate Statistics, about the use of statistical evidence in evaluating claims of disparate impact.

Letters of Marque and Reprisal: A Quick History

Sir Francis Drake

Article 1, Section 8, line 11 of the US Constitution states that Congress shall have the power:

“To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

“Letters of Marque and Reprisal” are the official way a pirate becomes a privateer, authorized to capture foreign vessels. The most famous privateer, of course, was, Sir Francis Drake:

Sir Francis Drake, vice admiral (c. 1540 – 28 January 1596^[3]) was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Drake carried out the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, from 1577 to 1580, and was the first to complete the voyage as captain while leading the expedition throughout the entire circumnavigation. With his incursion into the Pacific Ocean, he inaugurated an era of privateering and piracy in the western coast of the Americas—an area that had previously been free of piracy.^[4]

Specifically, he inaugurated the Age of Piracy in the Pacific by introducing non-Spanish ships into the ecosystem.

In 1243, King Henry III authorized the first privateers in English law, and the crown began issuing official Letters of Marque in 1295. These early letters authorized a kind of “private war,” allowing their recipients to avenge themselves against some foreign ship or ships of a foreign nation more generally for some previous harm. (Until 1620, an application for Letters of Marque had to include the shipowner’s estimate of losses they had previously suffered at the target’s hands.)

By the 16th century, the Letters had shifted from serving purely personal interests to allowing private shipowners to become a kind of auxillary navy, capturing the ships of enemy nations and profiting from the sale of their goods.

Business could be quite profitable for these “legal pirates”–for example, the tiny, Channel Island of Guernsey netted 900,000 Pounds worth of American and French ships during the American Revolution.

Letter of marque given to Captain Antoine Bollo, 27 February 1809

Like modern day mercenaries, enterprising pirates like Jean Lafitte who wished to practice their profession with less risk of being hanged by land-based authorities, shopped around from country to country for Letters of Marque. When one war ended and hostilities ended between two countries, privateers moved on to the next conflict, and offered their services to the new countries involved. After his employ by the Americans during the War of 1812, Lafitte offered his services to the Spanish against Mexican revolutionaries, giving himself cover to establish a smuggling station in Galveston, Texas (then part of Spain.) When he was driven from Galveston, he offered his services to the Cubans, and when they tired of him, he obtained Letters from Colombia.

At times, the Letters of Marque seem to have been used less against legitimate enemies of the state and more for pure gain:

The East India Company arranged for letters of marque for its East Indiamen such as the Lord Nelson, not so that they could carry cannons to fend off warships, privateers, and pirates on their voyages to India and China—that they could do without permission—but so that, should they have the opportunity to take a prize, they could do so without being guilty of piracy.

That said, Letters of Marque did obligate their holders to observe the rules of war toward the sailors (and vessels) they captured, rather than massacre them in the piratical way. Captured sailors and other passengers were supposed to be treated as prisoners of war and returned unharmed to land. Admiralty Courts could revoke the letters–and even fine privateers–if they did not. Similarly, privateers could not just abscond with captured goods, but had to turn them over to the Admiralty Courts, which would auction them off and then give the privateers part of the profits.

Likewise, if the navy of a foreign country captured a ship bearing Letters of Marque, they were supposed to not just execute the sailors but treat them like POWs. However, in many cases countries did not recognize the validity of other countries’ Letters, partly because they didn’t recognize those countries and partly because they were at war with them. During the Civil War, the Union charged a crew of Confederate privateers with piracy and threatened to hang them. The case was only resolved in the privateers’ favor when Confederate president Jefferson Davis threatened to retaliate by hanging Union POWs.

The infamous Captain Kidd in New York Harbor

The infamous Captain William Kidd, though he had an official Letter of Marque signed by King William III of England, was hanged as a pirate in 1701. Whether Kidd was actually a pirate or just a privateer who was unjustly accused is still a matter of debate.

Letters of Marque fell out of fashion after the end of the Crimean War in 1856, (though land-locked and navy-free Bolivia was still issuing them in 1879 to anyone willing to attack Chilean ships.) The US government hasn’t issued any Letters since 1815, but there was some confusion during WWII about whether the Goodyear Blimps were official privateers.

This was not as absurd as it sounds–the confusion arose because the blimps, with armed civilian crews, were flying anti-submarine patrols off the coast of California. But they had not been issued official Letters of Marque, and so were not privateers.

Ron Paul, a Constitutionally-interested guy, has tried to revive Letters of Marque to fight against “air pirates” like the 9-11 attackers. Similar to hiring Blackwater in Iraq, his proposal would have let the president issue Letters of Marque against specific terrorists and Somali pirates. But so far, his bills have not become laws and Letters of Marque have not returned.

Who Built Stonehenge? Bell Beakers and Neolithic Burials

Seventeenth century depiction of Stonehenge from the Atlas van Loon

Stonehenge remains one of the world’s enduring mysteries. Who carved these enormous stones, moved them hundreds of miles, and erected them upon Salisbury plain–and why?

Archaeologists estimate that the first major construction began at Stonehenge around 3,100 BC, when workers dug a large, circular ditch around the site and piled up the resulting dirt in a round bank. But the interesting part of this phase of construction is the third circle inside the first two, consisting of 56 graves, atop which bluestones may have once stood. The bones of deer and oxen were also placed in the surrounding ditch.

Were these sacrifices, or was Stonehenge originally just a cemetery, perhaps for the community’s most important members?

The second stage in Stonehenge’s development, from about 3,000 BC to 2,600 BC, involved the building of wooden structures and further burials. Interestingly, Neolithic grooved ware pottery is associated with this stage.

Grooved ware pottery appears to have been developed way off in the remote, cold, wind-swept Orkney Islands at the tip of Scotland. I’ve written about the Orkneys before, because they also have significant Neolithic sites, including–most relevant to our conversation–the Ring of Brodgar:

The Ring of Brodgar… is a Neolithic henge and stone circle in Orkney, Scotland. Most henges do not contain stone circles; Brodgar is a striking exception, ranking with Avebury (and to a lesser extent Stonehenge) among the greatest of such sites.^[1] … These are the northernmost examples of circle henges in Britain.^[2] Unlike similar structures such as Avebury, there are no obvious stones inside the circle,^[3] but since the interior of the circle has never been excavated by archaeologists, the possibility remains that wooden structures, for example, may have been present. The site has resisted attempts at scientific dating and the monument’s age remains uncertain. It is generally thought to have been erected between 2500 BC and 2000 BC, and was, therefore, the last of the great Neolithic monuments built on the Ness.^[4]

The idea that anyone built anything major way off in the Orkneys, which definitely did not support the kind of comfortable, sedentary population that the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus, is remarkable enough. That they built something comparable to Stonehenge and Avebury is incredible, and that a pottery style which appears to have begun in Orkney spread to Britain and Ireland almost defies belief. Surely Orkney lacked the population to man the kind of migrations necessary to impose their pots on others, but perhaps Orkney was some kind of Neolithic cultural leader, perhaps a sacred place people journeyed to from across the seas–or perhaps the people of Orkney traded their pots for products not found locally, their style became popular, and folks in different areas began making their own versions.

But Avebury, Stonehenge, and Brogdar weren’t the only Stone Circles:

The stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany were constructed as a part of a megalithic tradition that lasted from 3300 to 900 BCE, during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages.^[2] It has been estimated that around 4,000 of these monuments were originally constructed in this part of north-western Europe during this period,^[2] although only around 1,300 of them are recorded, the others having been destroyed.^[3]

Around 2,600 BC, Stonehenge entered its 3rd building phase, involving the erection of some 80 large stones in two concentric circles (“Q” and “R”) near the center of the enclosure. These 2-ton stones were transported 150 miles from a quarry in the Preseli Hills, (modern-day Pembrokeshire in Wales.) According to Wikipedia:

This phase tentatively began as early as 2600 BC, although recent radiocarbon dates from samples retrieved from one of the sockets in 2008 during excavations by Darvill and Wainwright suggest a date of around 2400 to 2300 BC. The final report is yet to be published, but some interesting results follow from the partial excavation of Q Hole 13 where ‘associations with Beaker pottery’ were noted.^[1]

The Q and R Holes not only represent the foundation cuts for the first central stone construction, but they also were to include several additional stone settings on the northeast. This modified group face the midsummer sunrise with a possible reciprocal stone aligned on the midwinter sunset. This is the first evidence for any unambiguous alignment at Stonehenge (the solstice axis). … the dates suggested from the 2008 excavation (above) implies the Q & R arrays were perhaps no earlier than 2,400 BC, presenting a challenge to the recently accepted Late Neolithic date for the construction of the iconic sarsen monument. …

Now this is really interesting. The original proliferation of these circles is associated with the neolithic Groved Ware Pottery people. They tended to build chambered tombs and to dig large circular ditches and banks accompanied by human burials. They may have marked these graves with large stones.

Reconstruction of a Beaker burial, (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid)

Then a new kind of pottery shows up, the Beakers. The Bell Beaker pottery arrived in Britain around 2,500 BC, and around that time a new, significant phase in the construction of these sites begins. Large numbers of extremely heavy stones were brought in and the original north-eastern entrance was widened so that it matched the direction of the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. Additionally, a road appears to have been built Stonehenge and the River Avon between 2600 and 1700 BCE, perhaps a delivery route for supplies that had been floated down the river. The road is partially aligned with the summer solstice, and ends at another stone circle.

So where the Grooved Ware People perhaps had some kind of cult of the dead, or at least put a lot of effort into constructing fancy burial monuments for their dead, the Bell Beaker people appear to have been really interested in solar alignments.

According to BellBeakerBlogger, even Bell Beaker burials reflect this solar interest:

All burials exhibit similarities that are central to Beaker culture or Beaker-ized people. They are usually flexed, individual burials within a plot, cemetery or larger complex. Men and women face the rising Sun, which along with other information, indicates a religious belief with emphasis on a solar deity.

The sequence of events that occurred at Stonehenge also appears to have happened at Avebury:

The chronology of Avebury’s construction is unclear. It was not designed as a single monument, but is the result of various projects that were undertaken at different times during late prehistory.^[19]Aubrey Burl suggests dates of 3000 BC for the central cove, 2900 BC for the inner stone circle, 2600 BC for the outer circle and henge, and around 2400 BC for the avenues.^[1]…

Avebury was one of a group of monumental sites that were established in this region during the Neolithic. Its monuments comprise the henge and associated long barrows, stone circles, avenues, and a causewayed enclosure. These monument types are not exclusive to the Avebury area. For example, Stonehenge features the same kinds of monuments, and in Dorset there is a henge on the edge of Dorchester and a causewayed enclosure at nearby Maiden Castle.^[20] …

Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson noted that the addition of the stones to the henge occurred at a similar date to the construction of Silbury Hill and the major building projects at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. For this reason, he speculated that there may have been a “religious revival” at the time, which led to huge amounts of resources being expended on the construction of ceremonial monuments.^[21]

Religious revival, or triumphant victory celebration?

Work continued at Stonehenge over the next two hundred years, from about 2,600 BC through 2,400 BC, during which the monument’s enormous, central stones were erected. These rocks weigh between 25 and 50 tons each. This was an enormous undertaking that must have required hundreds of people just to move each stone and lift it into place.

Bell beaker pots

“Pots, not people,” is one of archaeology’s most famous maxims, an exhortion to regard a change in material artifacts–say, new pots–as simply a result of local cultural change, trade, or diffusion, rather than the arrival of an entirely new people. The Pots not People reading of the transition from Neolithic Grooved Ware to Copper Age Bell Beakers is simply that people invented new pots (and the technology to work metals.)

In the case of the Corded Ware people, this turned out to be wrong–the Corded Ware People turned out to be the Yamnaya, AKA the Indo-Europeans, who boiled out of the Ukrainian steppe around 4,000 BC, and by 500 BC had conquered almost all of Europe, Iran, Turkey, India, etc. They contributed significantly to the modern European gene pool, especially in eastern Europe.

Arout 3,000 BC, the Bell Beaker culture, named for its distinctively bell-shaped pots, began appearing in Western Europe. The pots didn’t spread smoothly across the continent, but were concentrated along Atlantic and Mediterranean river valleys:

Radiocarbon dating seems to support that the earliest “Maritime” Bell Beaker design style is encountered in Iberia, specifically in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary in Portugal around 2800-2700 BC and spread from there to many parts of western Europe.^[2][12]…

The initial moves from the Tagus estuary were maritime. A southern move led to the Mediterranean where ‘enclaves’ were established in south-western Spain and southern France around the Golfe du Lion and into the Po valley in Italy, probably via ancient western Alpine trade routes used to distribute jadeite axes. A northern move incorporated the southern coast of Armorica. The enclave established in southern Brittany was linked closely to the riverine and landward route, via the Loire, and across the Gâtinais valley to the Seine valley, and thence to the lower Rhine. This was a long-established route reflected in early stone axe distributions and it was via this network that Maritime Bell Beakers first reached the Lower Rhine in about 2600 BC.^[2][19]

Another pulse had brought Bell Beaker to Csepel Island in Hungary by about 2500 BC. … From the Carpathian Basin Bell Beaker spread down the Rhine and eastwards into what is now Germany and Poland. By this time the Rhine was on the western edge of the vast Corded Ware zone. … A review in 2014 revealed that single burial, communal burial and reuse of Neolithic burial sites are found throughout the Bell Beaker zone.^[23]

… The earliest copper production in Ireland, identified at Ross Island in the period 2400-2200 BC, was associated with early Beaker pottery.^[2][27] …The same technologies were used in the Tagus region and in the west and south of France.^[2][28] The evidence is sufficient to support the suggestion that the initial spread of Maritime Bell Beakers along the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, using sea routes that had long been in operation, was directly associated with the quest for copper and other rare raw materials.^[2]

spread of bell beaker pottery

The Bell Beakers reached Britain around 2,500 BC.

Unfortunately, the Bell Beaker people didn’t leave any written records, so we don’t know what language they spoke. Were they Indo-Europeans? Moroccans? Did they conquer river valleys across Western Europe, or just tried exchange their pots for local goods along long-established trade routs?

And are they responsible for the menhirs found across western Europe?:

A menhir … is a large upright standing stone. Menhirs may be found solely as monoliths, or as part of a group of similar stones. Their size can vary considerably, but their shape is generally uneven and squared, often tapering towards the top. … they are most numerous in Western Europe; in particular in Ireland, Great Britain and Brittany. There are about 50,000 megaliths in these areas,^[2] while there are 1,200 menhirs in northwest France alone.^[3] Standing stones are usually difficult to date, but pottery, and/or pottery shards found underneath some in Atlantic Europe connects them with the Beaker people. They were constructed during many different periods across pre-history as part of a larger megalithic culture that flourished in Europe and beyond.

Almost nothing is known of the social organization or religious beliefs of the people who erected the menhirs. There is not even any trace of these people’s language; however we do know that they buried their dead and had the skills to grow cereal, farm and make pottery, stone tools and jewelry. Identifying their uses remains speculative. Until recently, menhirs were associated with the Beaker people, who inhabited Europe during the European late Neolithic and early Bronze Age — later third millennium BC, ca. 2800 – 1800 BC. However, recent research into the age of megaliths in Brittany strongly suggests a far older origin, perhaps back to six to seven thousand years ago.^[6]

(Sound familiar?)

Of the Beaker Culture of Ireland, Wikipedia states, in classic archaeologist style:

The ‘bronze halberd’ (not to be confused with the medieval halberd) was a weapon in use in Ireland from around 2400-2000 BC^[71] They are essentially broad blades that were mounted horizontally on a meter long handle, giving greater reach and impact than any known contemporary weapon (O’Flaherty 2007). They were subsequently widely adopted in other parts of Europe (Schuhmacher 2002), possibly showing a change in the technology of warfare.

Just a change in technology, definitely not evidence of people getting conquered.

On May 9, 2017, The Beaker Phenomenon And The Genomic Transformation Of Northwest Europe was published on BioRxiv, finally providing some of the answers to our many questions:

We present new genome-wide ancient DNA data from 170 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 100 Beaker-associated individuals. In contrast to the Corded Ware Complex, which has previously been identified as arriving in central Europe following migration from the east, we observe limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker Complex-associated individuals, and thus exclude migration as a significant mechanism of spread between these two regions.

In other words, the initial spread of Bell Beakers from Iberia to central Europe was primarily cultural–the people involved are not closely related.

However, human migration did have an important role in the further dissemination of the Beaker Complex, which we document most clearly in Britain using data from 80 newly reported individuals dating to 3900-1200 BCE. British Neolithic farmers were genetically similar to contemporary populations in continental Europe and in particular to Neolithic Iberians, suggesting that a portion of the farmer ancestry in Britain came from the Mediterranean rather than the Danubian route of farming expansion.

Stone-age Britons were genetically similar to stone-age Iberians.

Beginning with the Beaker period, and continuing through the Bronze Age, all British individuals harboured high proportions of Steppe ancestry and were genetically closely related to Beaker-associated individuals from the Lower Rhine area. We use these observations to show that the spread of the Beaker Complex to Britain was mediated by migration from the continent that replaced >90% of Britain’s Neolithic gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the process that brought Steppe ancestry into central and northern Europe 400 years earlier.

In other words: Bell Beaker pots s originally diffused culturally to the Rhine, where they were adopted by people with Indo-European steppe ancestry. These steppe people then conquered Britain, killing 90% of the stone-age inhabitants.

The victors appear to have gone on a building spree, repurposing neolithic monuments and dedicating them to their own deities, much as the Christian Hagia Sophia was transformed into a mosque following the Islamic conquest of Constantinople.

On a probably related note:

Durrington Walls is the site of a large Neolithic settlement and later henge enclosure located in the Stonehenge World Heritage Site. It lies 2 miles (3.2 km) north-east of Stonehenge in the parish of Durrington, just north of Amesbury.

Between 2004 and 2006, excavations on the site by a team led by the University of Sheffield revealed seven houses. It has been suggested that the settlement may have originally had up to 1000 houses and perhaps 4,000 people, if the entire enclosed area was used. The period of settlement was probably short, between 15 and 45 years starting sometime between 2525 and 2470 BC.^[3]

It may have been the largest village in northern Europe for a brief period.^[4][5][6] At 500 metres (1,600 ft) in diameter, the henge is the largest in Britain and recent evidence suggests that it was a complementary monument to Stonehenge.^[7]

Grooved ware pottery has been found in abundance at Durrington Walls. Why this sudden concentration of Neolithic pottery around the time of the Beaker invasion and rebuilding of Stonehenge? Were they captives brought to the area to work on the henge? Or a fortified refuge holding out against the invaders?

By the Iron Age, circa 1,600 BC, Stonehenge had largely fallen out of use, or at least new construction had halted. This was long before the arrival of the Celts in Britain, around 500 BC, so whether the Druids ever made use of Stonehenge as a sacred site or not, they certainly didn’t build it.

 

Additional sources:

Nature: Ancient-genome study finds Bronze Age ‘Beaker culture’ invaded Britain

Sarkboros: Bell Beakers and the North African Late Neolithic, on potential Bell Beaker origins in Morocco

Razib Khan: The coming of the Milesians: abstract of “The Bell Beaker Paper”

Let’s Talk Genetics (Polish and German)

source: Big Think: Genetic map of Europe

Continuing with our discussion of German/Polish history/languages/genetics, let’s look at what some actual geneticists have to say.

(If you’re joining us for the first time, the previous two posts summarize to: due to being next door to each other and having been invaded/settled over the millennia by groups which didn’t really care about modern political borders, Polish and German DNA are quite similar. More recent events, however, like Germany invading Poland and trying to kill all of the Poles and ethnic Germans subsequently fleeing/being expelled from Poland at the end of the war have created conditions necessary for genetic differentiation in the two populations.)

So I’ve been looking up whatever papers I can find on the subject.

In Contemporary paternal genetic landscape of Polish and German populations: from early medieval Slavic expansion to post-World War II resettlements, Rebala et al write:

The male genetic landscape of the European continent has been shown to be clinal and influenced primarily by geography rather than by language.¹ One of the most outstanding phenomena in the Y-chromosomal diversity in Europe concerns the population of Poland, which reveals geographic homogeneity of Y-chromosomal lineages in spite of a relatively large geographic area seized by the Polish state.² Moreover, a sharp genetic border has been identified between paternal lineages of neighbouring Poland and Germany, which strictly follows a political border between the two countries.³ Massive human resettlements during and shortly after the World War II (WWII), involving millions of Poles and Germans, have been proposed as an explanation for the observed phenomena.^{2, 3} Thus, it was possible that the local Polish populations formed after the early Slavic migrations displayed genetic heterogeneity before the war owing to genetic drift and/or gene flow with neighbouring populations. It has been also suggested that the revealed homogeneity of Polish paternal lineages existed already before the war owing to a common genetic substrate inherited from the ancestral Slavic population after the Slavs’ early medieval expansion in Europe.^{2 …}

We used high-resolution typing of Y-chromosomal binary and microsatellite markers first to test for male genetic structure in the Polish population before massive human resettlements in the mid-20th century, and second to verify if the observed present-day genetic differentiation between the Polish and German paternal lineages is a direct consequence of the WWII or it has rather resulted from a genetic barrier between peoples with distinct linguistic backgrounds. The study further focuses on providing an answer to the origin of the expansion of the Slavic language in early medieval Europe. For the purpose of our investigation, we have sampled three pre-WWII Polish regional populations, three modern German populations (including the Slavic-speaking Sorbs) and a modern population of Slovakia. …

AMOVA in the studied populations revealed statistically significant support for two linguistically defined groups of populations in both haplogroup and haplotype distributions (Table 2). It also detected statistically significant genetic differentiation for both haplogroups and haplotypes in three Polish pre-WWII regional populations (Table 2). The AMOVA revealed small but statistically significant genetic differentiation between the Polish pre-war and modern populations (Table 2). When both groups of populations were tested for genetic structure separately, only the modern Polish regional samples showed genetic homogeneity (Table 2). Regional differentiation of 10-STR haplotypes in the pre-WWII populations was retained even if the most linguistically distinct Kashubian speakers were excluded from the analysis (R_ST=0.00899, P=0.01505; data not shown). Comparison of Y chromosomes associated with etymologically Slavic and German surnames (with frequencies provided in Table 1) did not reveal genetic differentiation within any of the three Polish regional populations for all three (F_ST, Φ_ST and R_ST) genetic distances. Moreover, the German surname-related Y chromosomes were comparably distant from Bavaria and Mecklenburg as the ones associated with the Slavic surnames (Supplementary Figure S2). MDS of pairwise genetic distances showed a clear-cut differentiation between German and Slavic samples (Figure 2). In addition, the MDS analysis revealed the pre-WWII populations from northern, central and southern Poland to be moderately scattered in the plot, on the contrary to modern Polish regional samples, which formed a very tight, homogeneous cluster (Figure 3).

Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer famous for developing heliocentric model of the solar system

This all seems very reasonable. Modern Poland is probably more homogenous than pre-war Poland in part because modern Poles have cars and trains and can marry people from other parts of Poland much more easily than pre-war Poles could, and possibly because the war itself reduced Polish genetic diversity and displaced much of the population.

Genetic discontinuity along the Polish-German border also makes sense, as national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries all make intermarriage more difficult.

The Discussion portion of this paper is very interesting; I shall quote briefly:

Kayser et al³ revealed significant genetic differentiation between paternal lineages of neighbouring Poland and Germany, which follows a present-day political border and was attributed to massive population movements during and shortly after the WWII. … it remained unknown whether Y-chromosomal diversity in ethnically/linguistically defined Slavic and German populations, which used to be exposed to intensive interethnic contacts and cohabit ethnically mixed territories, was clinal or discontinuous already before the war. In contrast to the regions of Kaszuby and Kociewie, which were politically subordinated to German states for more than three centuries and before the massive human resettlements in the mid-20th century occupied a narrow strip of land between German-speaking territories, the Kurpie region practically never experienced longer periods of German political influence and direct neighbourhood with the German populations. Lusatia was conquered by Germans in the 10th century and since then was a part of German states for most of its history; the modern Lusatians (Sorbs) inhabit a Slavic-speaking island in southeastern Germany. In spite of the fact that these four regions differed significantly in exposure to gene flow with the German population, our results revealed their similar genetic differentiation from Bavaria and Mecklenburg. Moreover, admixture estimates showed hardly detectable German paternal ancestry in Slavs neighbouring German populations for centuries, that is, the Sorbs and Kashubes. However, it should be noted that our regional population samples comprised only individuals of Polish and Sorbian ethnicity and did not involve a pre-WWII German minority of Kaszuby and Kociewie, which owing to forced resettlements in the mid-20th century ceased to exist, and also did not involve Germans constituting since the 19th century a majority ethnic group of Lusatia. Thus, our results concern ethnically/linguistically rather than geographically defined populations and clearly contrast the broad-scale pattern of Y-chromosomal diversity in Europe, which was shown to be strongly driven by geographic proximity rather than by language.^{1 …}

Two main factors are believed to be responsible for the Slavic language extinction in vast territories to the east of the Elbe and Saale rivers: colonisation of the region by the German-speaking settlers, known in historical sources as Ostsiedlung, and assimilation of the local Slavic populations, but contribution of both factors to the formation of a modern eastern German population used to remain highly speculative.⁸ Previous studies on Y-chromosomal diversity in Germany by Roewer et al¹⁷ and Kayser et al³ revealed east–west regional differentiation within the country with eastern German populations clustering between western German and Slavic populations but clearly separated from the latter, which suggested only minor Slavic paternal contribution to the modern eastern Germans. Our ancestry estimates for the Mecklenburg region (Supplementary Table S3) and for the pooled eastern German populations, assessed as being well below 50%, definitely confirm the German colonisation with replacement of autochthonous populations as the main reason for extinction of local Slavic vernaculars. The presented results suggest that early medieval Slavic westward migrations and late medieval and subsequent German eastward migrations, which outnumbered and largely replaced previous populations, as well as very limited male genetic admixture to the neighbouring Slavs (Supplementary Table S4), were likely responsible for the pre-WWII genetic differentiation between Slavic- and German-speaking populations. Woźniak et al¹⁸ compared several Slavic populations and did not detect such a sharp genetic boundary in case of Czech and Slovak males with genetically intermediate position between other Slavic and German populations, which was explained by early medieval interactions between Slavic and Germanic tribes on the southern side of the Carpathians. Anyway, paternal lineages from our Slovak population sample were genetically much closer to their Slavic than German counterparts. …

Note that they are discussing paternal ancestry. This does not rule out the possibility of significant Slavic maternal ancestry. Finally:

Our coalescence-based divergence time estimates for the two isolated western Slavic populations almost perfectly match historical and archaeological data on the Slavs’ expansion in Europe in the 5th–6th centuries.⁴ Several hundred years of demographic expansion before the divergence, as detected by the BATWING, support hypothesis that the early medieval Slavic expansion in Europe was a demographic event rather than solely a linguistic spread of the Slavic language.

Marian Rejewski, Polish mathematician and cryptologist who reconstructed the Nazi German military Enigma cipher machine sight-unseen in 1932

I left out a lot of interesting material, so I recommend reading the complete discussion if you want to know more about Polish/German genetics.

But what about the maternal contribution? Luckily for us, Malyarchuk et al have written Mitochondrial DNA analysis in Poles and Russians:

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation was examined in Poles (from the Pomerania-Kujawy region; n = 436) and Russians (from three different regions of the European part of Russia; n = 201)… The classification of mitochondrial haplotypes revealed the presence of all major European haplogroups, which were characterized by similar patterns of distribution in Poles and Russians. An analysis of the distribution of the control region haplotypes did not reveal any specific combinations of unique mtDNA haplotypes and their subclusters that clearly distinguish both Poles and Russians from the neighbouring European populations. The only exception is a novel subcluster U4a within subhaplogroup U4, defined by a diagnostic mutation at nucleotide position 310 in HVS II. This subcluster was found in common predominantly between Poles and Russians (at a frequency of 2.3% and 2.0%, respectively) and may therefore have a central-eastern European origin. …

The analysis of mtDNA haplotype distribution has shown that both Slavonic populations share them mainly with Germans and Finns. The following numbers of the rare shared haplotypes and subclusters were found between populations analyzed: 10% between Poles and Germans, 7.4% between Poles and Russians, and 4.5% between Russians and Germans. A novel subcluster U4-310, defined by mutation at nucleotide position 310 in HVS II, was found predominantly in common between Poles and Russians (at frequency of 2%). Given the relatively high frequency and diversity of this marker among Poles and its low frequency in the neighbouring German and Finnish populations, we suggest a central European origin of U4-310, following by subsequent dispersal of this mtDNA subgroup in eastern European populations during the Slavonic migrations in early Middle Ages.

In other words, for the most part, Poles, Russians, Germans, and even Finns(!) (who do not speak an Indo-European language and are usually genetic outliers in Europe,) all share their maternal DNA.

Migrants, immigrants, and invaders tend disproportionately to be male (just look at any army) while women tend to stay behind. Invading armies might wipe each other out, but the women of a region are typically spared, seen as booty similar to cattle to be distributed among the invaders rather than killed. Female populations therefore tend to be sticky, in a genetic sense, persisting long after all of the men in an area were killed and replaced. The dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup in the area (R1a) hails from the Indo-European invasion (except in Finland, obviously,) but the mtDNA likely predates that expansion.

These data allow us to suggest that Europeans, despite their linguistic differences, originated in the common genetic substratum which predates the formation of the most modern European populations. It seems that considerable genetic similarity between European populations, which has been revealed by mtDNA variation studies, was further accelerated by a process of gene redistribution between populations due to the multiple migrations occurring in Europe during the past milenia…

It is interesting, though, that recent German invasions of Poland left very little in the way of a genetic contribution. I’d wager that WWII was quite a genetic disaster for everyone involved.

If you want more information, Khazaria has a nice list of studies plus short summaries on Polish DNA.

Let’s Look at Poland

Let’s Look at Poland

The original

So far in this investigation of Polish/German genetics, we’ve focused almost entirely on the German side of the picture, so today I’d like to pause and learn a bit about Poland.

I have a certain fondness for Poland, born of Polish-American friends and Polandball comics.

Humans have been living in [the area that is now-called] Poland for longer than H. sapiens has been around. (H. erectus and neanderthalis lived there, first.)

We’re not sure exactly what language(s) were spoken by the various tribes in [what is now] Poland, [henceforth refererd to as “Poland” for simplicity’s sake,] during the Bronze Age and before, simply because they left no written records and had very little contact with the literate peoples of Greece and Rome, who could have written about them.

Recreation of the Biskupin fort, Lusatian Culture, Poland

As we’ve discussed before, the idea that everyone outside of Classical Greece and Rome lived in rude barbarism is probably a bit wrong; pre-literate, bronze-age Europe had long-distance trade, pleasant villages, art, and luxury goods.

One of the more prominent goods produced local area was amber, gathered on the shores of the Baltic and traded to places like Greece, Rome, and Spain in exchange for copper and tin (necessary for making bronze.)

We’re still not sure exactly when and how the Indo-European languages spread to Europe, but the Corded Ware Culture, culturally and genetically Indo-European, appeared in Poland (and elsewhere) around 3,000 BC. It was later replaced by various other cultures like the Lusatians, who probably also spoke Indo-European languages.

The Slavic languages appear to have started differentiating around 2,800 BC in modern Ukraine and proceeded to spread out from there. The modern Slavic languages are divided into East (Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainina,) West (Polish, Czech, Slovak,) and South (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Bulgarian, etc.)

According to Wikipedia:

Western historians refer to the period of migrations that separated Antiquity from the Middle Ages in Europe as the Great Migrations or as the Migrations Period. …

The first phase, from 300 to 500, saw the movement of Germanic, Sarmatian and Hunnic tribes and ended with the settlement of these peoples in the areas of the former Western Roman Empire. …

The second phase, between 500 and 900, saw Slavic, Turkic and other tribes on the move, re-settling in Eastern Europe and gradually making it predominantly Slavic.

Back row: A. Piccard, E. Henriot, P. Ehrenfest, E. Herzen, Th. de Donder, E. Schrödinger, J.E. Verschaffelt, W. Pauli, W. Heisenberg, R.H. Fowler, L. Brillouin;
Middle Row: P. Debye, M. Knudsen, W.L. Bragg, H.A. Kramers, P.A.M. Dirac, A.H. Compton, L. de Broglie, M. Born, N. Bohr;
Front Row: I. Langmuir, M. Planck, M. Skłodowska-Curie, H.A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, P. Langevin, Ch.-E. Guye, C.T.R. Wilson, O.W. Richardson

In other words–and I wager this is probably a pretty controversial claim–archaeologists think there may have been Germanic-speaking tribes in Poland prior to the fall of the Roman Empire, and Slavic-speaking tribes moved into the area.

Poland itself is named for the Polans, a Slavic tribe that inhabited the area in the 700s.

In 1867, double-Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie was born in Warsaw. (The Curie family has collectively won 5 Nobels, though one of these was a Peace Prize, meaning the Curie family alone has won more Nobel prizes than the majority of countries in the world.)

Modern Poland is a lovely country stocked with the survivors of some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities:

Under the two occupations, Polish citizens suffered enormous human and material losses. It is estimated that about 5.7 million Polish citizens died as a result of the German occupation and about 150,000 Polish citizens died as a result of the Soviet occupation. Ethnic Poles were subjected to both the Nazi and Soviet persecution. The Jews were singled out by the Germans for a quick and total annihilation and about 90% of Polish Jews.(close to three million people) were murdered. …

About  ¹⁄₆ of Polish citizens lost their lives in the war,^[44][45] most of the civilians targeted by various deliberate actions. The German plan involved not only the annexation of Polish territory, but also a total destruction of Polish culture and the Polish nation (Generalplan Ost).

The long-term Nazi plan, as I understand it, was to kill all the Slavs.

After WWII, about 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were kicked out of eastern Europe (no real surprise). As for Poland:

A 2005 study by the Polish Academy of Sciences estimated that during the final months of the war, 4 to 5 million German civilians fled with the retreating German forces, and in mid-1945, 4.5 to 4.6 million Germans remained in the territories under Polish control. By 1950, 3,155,000 had been transported to Germany, 1,043,550 were naturalized as Polish citizens and 170,000 Germans still remained in Poland.^{[123]:455–60,466}

This is depressing material, but obviously relevant to our original question of Polish-German genetic similarity, as such flight/expulsions are likely to drive the existing populations apart. But we’ll look closer at the genetics in the next post.

On Germanic and Polish DNA

Distribution of Y-chromosomal haplogroup I1a in Europe.

Commentator Unknown123 asks what we can tell about the differences between German and Polish DNA. Obviously German is here referring to one of the Germanic peoples who occupy the modern nation of Germany and speak a Germanic language. But as noted before, just because people speak a common language doesn’t necessarily mean they have a common genetic origin. Germans and English both speak Germanic languages , but Germans could easily share more DNA with their Slavic-language speaking neighbors in Poland than with the English.

According to Wikipedia, the modern Germanic peoples include Afrikaners, Austrians, Danes, Dutch, English, Flemish, Frisians, Germans, Icelanders, Lowland Scots, Norwegians, and Swedes.^[225][226]

And here is a map that is very suggestive of Viking raiders:

(It’s also not a bad map of the distribution of Germanic peoples in 750 BC.)

Wikipedia states:

It is suggested by geneticists that the movements of Germanic peoples has had a strong influence upon the modern distribution of the male lineage represented by the Y-DNA haplogroup I1, which is believed to have originated with one man, who lived approximately 4,000 to 6,000 years somewhere in Northern Europe, possibly modern Denmark … There is evidence of this man’s descendants settling in all of the areas that Germanic tribes are recorded as having subsequently invaded or migrated to.^[220][v] However, it is quite possible that Haplogroup I1 is pre-Germanic, that is I1 may have originated with individuals who adopted the proto-Germanic culture, at an early stage of its development or were co-founders of that culture. Should that earliest Proto-Germanic speaking ancestor be found, his Y-DNA would most likely be an admixture of the aforementioned I1, but would also contain R1a1a, R1b-P312 and R1b-U106, a genetic combination of the haplogroups found among current Germanic speaking peoples.^{[221] …}

Haplogroup I1 accounts for approximately 40% of Icelandic males, 40%–50% of Swedish males, 40% of Norwegian males, and 40% of Danish Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups. Haplogroup I1 peaks in certain areas of Northern Germany and Eastern England at more than 30%. Haplogroup R1b and haplogroup R1a collectively account for more than 40% of males in Sweden; over 50% in Norway, 60% in Iceland, 60–70% in Germany, and between 50%–70% of the males in England and the Netherlands depending on region.^[222]

Note, though, that this map has some amusing results; clearly it’s a more Nordic distribution than specifically German, with “Celtic” Ireland just as Nordic as much of England and Germany.

Wikipedia also states:

According to a study published in 2010, I-M253 originated between 3,170 and 5,000 years ago, in Chalcolithic Europe.^[1] A new study in 2015 estimated the origin as between 3,470 and 5,070 years ago or between 3,180 and 3,760 years ago, using two different techniques.^[2] It is suggested that it initially dispersed from the area that is now Denmark.^[8]

A 2014 study in Hungary uncovered remains of nine individuals from the Linear Pottery culture, one of whom was found to have carried the M253 SNP which defines Haplogroup I1. This culture is thought to have been present between 6,500 and 7,500 years ago.^[12]

Further:

In 2002 a paper was published by Michael E. Weale and colleagues showing genetic evidence for population differences between the English and Welsh populations, including a markedly higher level of Y-DNA haplogroup I in England than in Wales. They saw this as convincing evidence of Anglo-Saxon mass invasion of eastern Great Britain from northern Germany and Denmark during the Migration Period.^[13] The authors assumed that populations with large proportions of haplogroup I originated from northern Germany or southern Scandinavia, particularly Denmark, and that their ancestors had migrated across the North Sea with Anglo-Saxon migrations and DanishVikings. The main claim by the researchers was:

“That an Anglo-Saxon immigration event affecting 50–100% of the Central English male gene pool at that time is required. We note, however, that our data do not allow us to distinguish an event that simply added to the indigenous Central English male gene pool from one where indigenous males were displaced elsewhere or one where indigenous males were reduced in number … This study shows that the Welsh border was more of a genetic barrier to Anglo-Saxon Y chromosome gene flow than the North Sea … These results indicate that a political boundary can be more important than a geophysical one in population genetic structuring.”

In 2003 a paper was published by Christian Capelli and colleagues which supported, but modified, the conclusions of Weale and colleagues.^[14] This paper, which sampled Great Britain and Ireland on a grid, found a smaller difference between Welsh and English samples, with a gradual decrease in Haplogroup I frequency moving westwards in southern Great Britain. The results suggested to the authors that Norwegian Vikings invaders had heavily influenced the northern area of the British Isles, but that both English and mainland Scottish samples all have German/Danish influence.

But the original question was about Germany and Poland, not England and Wales, so we are wandering a bit off-track.

source: Big Think: Genetic map of EuropeLuckily for me, Wikipedia helpfully has a table of European Population Genetic Substructure based on SNPs^[48][59]. We’ll be extracting the most useful parts.

A score of “1” on this graph means that the two populations in question are identical–fully inter-mixing. The closer to 1 two groups score, the more similar they are. The further from one they score, (the bigger the number,) the more different they are.

Here is a potentially relevant map of the neolithic cultures of Europe

For example, the most closely related peoples on the graph are Austrians and their neighbors in southern Germany and Hungary (despite Hungarians speaking a non-Indo-European language brought in by recent steppe invaders.) Both groups scored 1.04 relative to Austrians, and a 1.08 relative to each other.

Northern and southern Germans also received a 1.08–so southern Germans are about as closely related to northern Germans as they are to Hungarians, and are more closely related to Austrians than to northern Germans.

This might reflect the pre-Roman empire population in which (as we discussed in the previous post) the Celtic cultures of Hallstatt and La Tene dominated a stretch of central Europe between Austria and Switzerland, with significant expansion both east and west, whilst the proto-Germanic peoples occupied northern Germany and later spread southward.

The least closely related peoples on the graph are (unsurprisingly) the Sami (Lapp) town of Kuusamo in northeastern Finland and Spain, at 4.21. (Finns are always kind of outliers in Europe, and Spaniards are kind of outliers in their own, different way, being the part of mainland Europe furthest from the Indo-European expansion starting point and so having received fewer invaders.

So what does the table say about Germans and their neighbors?

source: Big Think: Genetic map of Europe

Northern Germany:
South Germany 1.08
Austria 1.10
Hungary 1.11
Sweden 1.12
Czech Repub 1.15
Poland 1.18
France 1.25
Bulgaria 1.32
Switzerland 1.36

Southern Germany:
Austria 1.04
North Germany 1.08
Hungary 1.08
France 1.12
Czech Repub 1.16
Switzerland 1.17
Bulgaria 1.19
Latvia 1.20
Sweden 1.21
Poland 1.23

 

Poland:
Czech Repub 1.09
Hungary: 1.14
Estonia 1.17
North Germany 1.18
Russia 1.18
Austria 1.19
Lithuania 1.20
South Germany 1.23
Latvia: 1.26
Bulgaria 1.29
Sweden 1.30
Switzerland 1.46

Obviously I didn’t include all of the data in the original table; all of the other sampled European groups, such as Italians, Spaniards, and Finns are genetically further away from north and south Germany and Poland than the listed groups.

So northern Germany and Poland are quite closely related–even closer than northern Germans are to the French (whose country is named after a Germanic tribe, the Franks, who conquered it during the Barbarian Migrations at the Fall of the Roman Empire,) or the Swiss, many of whom speak German. By contrast, southern Germany is more closely related to France and Switzerland than to Poland, but still more closely related to the Poles than Italians or Spaniards.

To be continued…