Haak et al’s full graph

WARNING: This post is full of speculations that I am recording for my own sake but are highly likely to be wrong!

From Haak et al.

Hey, did you know that this isn’t actually Haak et al’s full DNA graph? The actual full dataset looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Isn’t it beautiful?

You’re going to have to click for the full size–sorry I couldn’t fit it all into one screen cap. I’m also sorry that the resolution is poor, and therefore you can’t read the labels (though you should be able to figure out which is which if you just compare with the smaller graphic at the top of the screen. (Supposedly there’s a higher resolution version of this out there, but I couldn’t find it.)

Why the reliance on a greatly cropped image? Just the obvious: the big one is unwieldy, and most of the data people are interested in is at the top.

But the data at the bottom is interesting, too.

On the lefthand side of the graph, we have a measure of granularity–how much fine detail we are getting with our genetic data. The bottom row, therefore, shows us the largest genetic splits between groups–presumably, the oldest splits.

From left to right, we have selections of different ethnic groups’ DNA. Old European skeletons constitute the first group; the mostly pink with some brown section is Native North/South American; the blue and green section is African; the big wide orange section is mostly European and Middle Eastern; then we have some kind of random groups like the Inuit (gold), Onge (pink, Indian Ocean), and Australian Aborigines; the heavily green areas are India; the mixed-up area splitting the green is Eurasian steppe; the yellow area is East Asian; and the final section is Siberian.

Level One: Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) vs. Non-Sub-Saharan Africa

The bottom row shows us, presumably, the oldest split, between the orange and the blue. All of these light blue groups, from the Ju Hoan (Bushmen/San) to the Yoruba (Nigeria,) Somalis to Hadza (Tanzania,) African Americans to Shua (Khoe speakers of Namibia/Botswana,) are from Africa–sub-Saharan Africa, I’d wager (though I’m not sure whether Ethiopia and Somalia are considered “sub-Saharan.”)

All of the other groups–including the sampled north-African groups like Saharawari (from Western Sahara,) Tunisians, Algerians, Mozabites (Algeria,) and Egyptians–show up in orange.

(Note: Light green and orange are completely arbitrary color choices used to represent the DNA in these graphs; there is nothing inherently “orange” or “green” or any other color about DNA.)

I would not actually have predicted this–other studies I have read predicted that the split between the Bushmen, Pygmies, and other groups in Africa went back further in Africa than the split between Africans and non-Africans, but perhaps the Sahara has been the most significant barrier in human history.

Interestingly, the split is not absolute–there are Sub-Saharan groups with non-SSA admixture, and non-SSA groups with SSA admixture. In fact, most of the SSA groups sampled appear to have some non-SSA admixture, which probably has something to do with back-migration over the centuries; predictably, this is highest in places like Somalia and Ethiopia, fairly high along the east coast of Africa (which has historically been linked via monsoon trade routes to other, non-African countries;) and in African Americans (whose admixture is much more recent.) (Likewise, the admixture found in some of the hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa could be relatively recent.)

The Non-SSA groups with the most SSA admixture, are north African groups like the aforementioned Algerians and Tunisians; Middle Eastern groups like the Druze, Syrians, Bedouins, Jordanians, etc.; “Mediterranean” groups like the Sicilians and Maltese; various Jewish groups that live in these areas; and a tiny bit that shows up in the people of the Andaman Islands, Australia, and PNG.

(Oh, and in various old European skeletons.)

Level Two: “Western” vs. “Eastern”

Moving on to level two, we have the next big split, between “Easterners” (mostly Asians) and “Westerners” (mostly Europeans and Middle-Easterners.)

Natives of North/South America, Inuits, Andaman Islanders, Australian Aborigines, Papuans, the Kharia (an Indian tribe that has historically spoken a non-Indo-European language,) some central or northern Asian steppe peoples like the Evens (Siberians,) and of course everyone from the Kusunda (Nepal) through China and Japan and up through, well, more Siberians like the Yakuts, all show up as mostly yellow.

Everyone from Europe, the Middle East, the Caucuses, and all of the sampled Indian populations except the Kharia have orange.

A bunch of little groups from the middle of Eurasia show up as about half-and-half.

Interestingly, some of the older European hunter-gatherer skeletons have small quantities of “Eastern” DNA; this may not represent admixture so much as common ancestry. It also shows up, predictably, in Turkey and the Caucuses; in Russia/Finns; tiny quantities in places like the Ukraine; and quite significantly in India.

Significant “Western” admixture shows up in various Natives North/South Americans (probably due to recent admixture,) the Andaman Islands, Aborigines, PNG, (this may represent something to do with a common ancestor rather than admixture, per se,) and Siberia.

Level Three: Native North/South Americans vs. “Easterners”

At this point, the “light pink” shows up in all of the sampled indigenous tribes of North and South America. A fair amount of it also shows up in the Inuit, and a small quantity in various Siberian tribes. A tiny quantity also show up in some of the older European skeletons (I suspect this is due to older skeletons being more similar to the common ancestors before the splits than trans-Atlantic contact in the stone age, but it could also be due to a small Siberian component having made its way into Europe.)

Even at this level, there is a big difference evident between the groups from Central and South America (almost pure pink) and those from northern North America, (significant chunk of orange.) Some (or all) of that may be due to recent admixture due to adoption of and intermarrying with whites, but some could also be due to the ancestors of the Chipewyans etc. having started out with more, due to sharing ancestors from a more recent migration across the Bering Strait. I’m speculating, of course.

Level Four: Intra-African splits

I don’t know my African ethnic groups like I ought to, but basically we have the Bushmen (aka San,) and I think some Khoe / Khoi peoples in green, with a fair amount of green also showing up in the Pygmies and other hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, plus little bits showing up in groups like the Sandawe and South African Bantus.

Level Five: Australian Aborigines, PNG, and Andamanese split off.

Some of this DNA is shared with folks in India; a tiny bit shows up in central Asia and even east Asia.

Level Six: Red shows up.

This reddish DNA is found in all “Siberian” peoples, people who might have moved recently through Siberia, and people who might be related to or had contact with them. It’s found throughout East Asia, eg, Japan and China, but only found in high quantities among the Inuit and various Siberian groups. At this resolution, oddly, no one–except almost the Itelmen and Koryak–is pure reddish, but at higher resolutions the Nganasan are, while the Itelmen and Koryak aren’t.

Level Seven: The “Indos” of the Indo-Europeans show up

Although no pure light green people have yet been found, their DNA shows up everywhere the Indo-Europeans (aka Yamnaya) went, with their highest concentration in India. Perhaps the light green people got their start in India, and later a group of them merged with the dark blue people to become the Yamnaya, a group of whom then migrated back into India, leaving India with a particularly high % of light green DNA even before the dark blue shows up.

Interestingly, some of this light green also show up in the Andamanese.

Level Eight: The “Europeans” of the Indo-Europeans show up

The dark blue color originates, in the left-hand side of the graph, with a several-thousand years old population of European hunter-gatherers which, as you can see in the slightly younger populations on the far left, nearly got wiped out by a nearly pure orange population of farmers that migrated into Europe from the Middle East. This dark blue population managed to survive out on the Eurasian Steppe, which wasn’t so suited to farming, where it merged with the light-green people. They became the Yamnaya aka the Indo-Europeans. They then spread back into Europe, the Middle East, India, central Asia, and Siberia. (The dark blue in modern Native American populations is probably due to recent admixture.)

Level Nine: The Hadza

The Hadza (a hunter-gatherer people of Tanzania) now show up as bright pink. No one else has a lot of bright pink, but the Pygmies (Mbutu and Biaka,) as well as a variety of other eastern-African groups located near them, like the Luo, Masai, and the Somalis have small amounts.

Level Ten: The Onge (Andamanese)

Not much happens here, but the Onge (from the Andaman Islands) turn peach and stay that way. It looks like a small amount of peach DNA may also be found across part of India (southern India, I’m assuming.)

Level Eleven: Chipewyans (North America)

The Chipewyans turn brown; brown is also found in small quantities in Central America, in moderate quantities in eastern North America, and in the Eskimo/Inuit.

Level Twelve: Pygmies

The Biaka and Mbuti Pygmies differentiate from their neighbors. Tiny quantities of Pygmy DNA found in probably-nearby peoples.

Level Thirteen: Inuit/Eskimo

They become distinctly differentiated from other North American or Siberian tribes (olive green.), Their olive green shade is found in small quantities in some Siberian tribes, but interestingly, appears to be totally absent from other Native American tribes.

Level Fourteen: Horn of Africa

A dusty peach tone is used for groups in the Horn of Africa like the Somalis and Ethiopians, as well as nearby groups like the Dinka. Small amounts of dusty peach are are also found along the East Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East. Smaller amounts appear to be in a variety of other groups related to the Bushmen.

Level Fifteen: The light green turns teal

All of the light green in Europe turns teal, but much of the light green in India stays light green. (Teal also shows up in India.) I have no idea why, other than my aforementioned theory that India had more light green to start with.

Level Sixteen: Amazon Rainforest tribes

The Kuritiana and Suri show up in light olive; light olive is also found in small quantities in other parts of Central and South America, and tiny bits in parts of North America, and maybe tiny amounts in the Eskimo but I don’t see any in the Chukchi, Itelmen, etc.

Level Seventeen: Bedouins

The Bedouins turn light purple; this DNA is also found through out the Middle East, Turkey, North Africa, the Mediterranean (eg Sicily), Greece, Albania, Spain, Bulgaria, Ashkenazim, and a tiny bit In India.

Level Eighteen: Some Bushmen appear to split off from some other Bushmen.

I don’t know much about these groups.

Level Nineteen: Nothing interesting appears to happen.

Please remember that all of this is me speculating. I am definitely not an educated source on these matters, but I hope you’ve had as much fun as I’ve had peering at the DNA and thinking about how people might have moved around and mixed and split to make the colors.

 

Happy 330 Posts (Open Thread)

Partying Mario Style

I completely forgot to mark the 200th and 300th posts, but I just finished post #330, so let’s celebrate!

This is an Open Thread, so please say hello. Feel free to chat, ask questions, or let me know any topics you’d be interested in for future posts.

Alternatively, tell us your favorite book(s).

I don’t normally do links lists, but since this is a special occasion, I’m going to recommend some articles:

The Extinction of the Australian Pygmies, by Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin. Fascinating.

On a probably not-related but convergently-evolved note, we have Whole-genome sequence analyses of Western Central African Pygmy hunter-gatherers reveal a complex demographic history and identify candidate genes under positive natural selection, or you can read the always interesting commentary by West Hunter. And if that’s not enough Pygmies for you, there’s always Model-based analyses of whole-genome data reveal a complex evolutionary history involving archaic introgression in Central African Pygmies.

 

In the beautiful things file, we have A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life. If you read the comments, you’ll see that it’s not really “new” and that other people have been working on it for a while, but the article is still a nice explanation of the concept.

Some interesting food for thought from Dienekes: Are living Africans nested within Eurasian genetic variation (?) and a response by Razib Khan, Why I still Lean Toward a Sub-Saharan Origin for Modern Humanity.

 

ETA: And finally, I just discovered Still a Pygmy, by Isaac Bacirongo and Michael Nest. From the blurb:

How did a Pygmy from Congo end up living in Sydney, Australia? Growing up as a hunter-gatherer in the forests of Congo, where Pygmies were considered inferior to all other Africans and fit only for slave labor and witchcraft rituals*, Isaac Bacirongo never dreamed he would end up living in Australia. He also never imagined that he would get a high school education, fall in love with a “town girl,” start a prosperous business, and even own his own car—unheard of for a Pygmy. … When the tensions of Rwanda’s civil war spilled over into Congo, Isaac’s family fled the invading army, but a brutal occupation force eventually took control of the east and threw Isaac into prison for his human rights activism. After bribing his way out of jail, Isaac escaped Congo to reunite with his wife and 10 children in Kenya. He got work as an interpreter on an investigation into corruption in the UN, only to be threatened again by his involvement in the case and by spies working for Congolese rebel forces. With no future in Kenya and unable to return home, Isaac applied for and eventually received a humanitarian visa to Australia. … This is the inspiring and true story of one man’s transformation from hunter-gatherer to prosperous businessman to Australian resident, and advocate for the rights of his people’s identity. It is the first memoir by a Pygmy author ever published.

*Note: “witchcraft rituals” means “human sacrifice.” Also, cannibalism.

Anyone read it? I’m going to see if the library has it.

 

Anyway, thanks for reading, everyone. Here’s to the next 330 posts!

Adoption as Genetic Strategy? Americans, Indians, and the Mongols

If a man adopt a child and to his name as son, and rear him, this grown son can not be demanded back again. …

If a man, who had adopted a son and reared him, founded a household, and had children, wish to put this adopted son out, then this son shall not simply go his way. His adoptive father shall give him of his wealth one-third of a child’s portion, and then he may go. He shall not give him of the field, garden, and house.

The Code of Hammurabi, lines 185-191

This post was inspired by a friend’s question: Can adoption of non-kin be a viable genetic (or memetic) strategy?

The full version of the question was more like, “Liberals are more positive toward interracial marriage, leading to more genetic variation in liberal communities. Could adoption be a similarly viable strategy for Conservatives, by increasing the ethnic diversity of the people who believe in their memetic values?”

Adoption could also work by just increasing sheer numbers of conservatives, even if it does nothing to genetic diversity.

My first thought was, “That sounds a lot like what the Amercan Indians were trying to do when they kidnapped and adopted white children, and I think Genghis Khan did something similar with the children of subjugated peoples.”

These customs stand in contrast to groups that have historically attempted to wipe out their enemy’s children, like the entire rest of the Mongol conquests, so I thought this question worth exploring.

But there’s a lot here that first needs unpacking. For starters, despite what people claim to believe, conservatives actually have very slightly higher interracial marriage rates than whites and are more likely to live in multi-ethnic households.

Let’s get some graphs.

The data is clear: atheists are the most hated minority in the country, followed by gun owners. (I jest; people are actually pretty polite to atheists, and you’re rude to a gun owner at your own risk.)

America’s most prominent ethnic division is actually between “liberals” and “conservatives,” a feature reflected in attitudes toward “gun owners” and “atheists.” Most Ameicans don’t think of this as an ethnic difference (even though it is,) just because they aren’t all that conscious of the different ethnic settlement patterns that influenced the modern political distribution.

Jayman’s map of the American Nations

Or to put it another way, there isn’t anything magical in the dirt in Massachusetts or South Carolina that has been turning the people there liberal or conservative for the past 300 years or so. The difference is mostly ethnicity–some ethnicities are just more liberal or conservative–but a lot of people (even people who loudly claim that there’s more intraracial than interracial variation,) regard all whites as one great big undifferentiated ethic mass that just happens to hold different opinions in different regions.

The majority of Americans (even the majority of very conservative Americans, however many of those there are,) claim to care more about one’s beliefs (and actions) than about superficial things like skin tone or the geographic origin of one’s ancestors.

This is anti-tribalism.

Tribalism (the human norm,) states that it is morally correct to overlook differences of opinion within your own group, (family, clan, tribe, nation, ethnic group, ethnie, thede, race, clade, take your pick,) and always side with your group against outsiders.

So Americans are perfectly okay with saying that they would not want to marry someone who holds belief they disagree with, but look askance at saying they have an ethnic preference. (Which explains why, even when people say things that are quite negative about outgroup members, they tend to quite vociferously object that they are not “racist” because their objection is not to the outgroup’s appearances, but to their behaviors.)

But what people say and what they do are different matters. According to Volokh:

…among families with step-children or adopted children, 11 percent of conservatives were living in mixed race households compared to 10 percent of liberals living in mixed-race households.

Similarly, 9.4 percent of Republicans living in step- or adopted families were in mixed-race households, compared to only 8.8 percent of Democrats in such families. (Again, this small advantage for Republicans is not large enough to be statistically significant).

And looking at all children instead of non-related children,

• 11.9% of conservatives live in mixed-race families compared to 11.4% of liberals.
• 9.5% of Republicans live in mixed-race families compared to 11.2% of Democrats.

Unfortunately, I am having difficulty finding statistics on the exact % of conservatives/Republicans who are in mixed-race marriages vs. the % of liberals in mixed-race marriages–we may posit that there is a difference between an interracial couple with three interracial children and a white person who, on their third marriage, marries someone who already has a half-white child, but just eyeballing the data, I don’t think there’s going to be a huge statistical difference.

(The difference between “conservatives” and “Republicans” in the data is due to may conservative blacks and Hispanics not voting Republican.)

The folks who are most strongly anti-miscegenation tend to be old people (over the age of 65,) and the folks who are most likely to be in mixed-race households, conservative or liberal, are the minorities themselves–many blacks and Hispanics are married to each other.

If you look only at whites, according to Volokh,

2.0% of non-Hispanic white conservatives live in mixed-race families compared to 2.4% of non-Hispanic white liberals. …

2.8% of non-Hispanic white Republicans live in mixed-race families compared to 0.7% of non-Hispanic white Democrats.

Assuming these numbers are correct…

61% of whites say they’re okay with intermarriage, but only about 2% of them have mixed or other-race children, including step and adopted kids. Given the number of minorities in the country + random chance, about half of the whites who say they’re okay with intermarriage ought to have a mixed-race family–30% of whites, not 2%.

Of course, these folks would object that it’s not that they don’t like minorities, they just happen not to be around any they’ve fallen in love with. It’s not about superficial skin tones; it’s just something else that happens to be incredibly well correlated with superficial skin tones, like paying exorbitant rents in order to live in neighborhoods without any minorities in them. But those Republicans, dude, they’re like super racist.

What about the numbers on adoption?

The Wikipedia page on Adoption starts out nicely, then descends into gibbering mush. It has, tragically, very little information on non-Western adoption customs, and not as much as I’d hoped for on historical adoptions in the West. For that, we’ll have to search elsewhere.

But we’re still going to make use of it for the stats:

Australia	270 (2007–2008)[52]	254,000 (2004)[53]	0.2 per 100 live births	Includes known relative adoptions
England & Wales	4,764 (2006)[54]	669,601(2006)[55]	0.7 per 100 live births	Includes all adoption orders in England and Wales
Iceland	between 20–35 year[56]	4,560 (2007)[57]	0.8 per 100 live births
Ireland	263 (2003)[58]	61,517 (2003)[59]	0.4 per 100 live births	92 non-family adoptions; 171 family adoptions (e.g. stepparent). 459 international adoptions were also recorded.
Italy	3,158 (2006)[60]	560,010 (2006)[61]	0.6 per 100 live births
New Zealand	154 (2012/13) [62]	59,863 (2012/13) [63]	0.26 per 100 live births	Breakdown: 50 non-relative, 50 relative, 17 step-parent, 12 surrogacy, 1 foster parent, 18 international relative, 6 international non-relative
Norway	657 (2006)[64]	58,545(2006)[65]	1.1 per 100 live births	Adoptions breakdown: 438 inter-country; 174 stepchildren; 35 foster; 10 other.
Sweden	1044(2002)[66]	91,466(2002)[67]	1.1 per 100 live births	10–20 of these were national adoptions of infants. The rest were international adoptions.
United States	approx 127,000 (2001)[68]	4,021,725 (2002)[69]	~3 per 100 live births	The number of adoptions is reported to be constant since 1987.

America has about 3 times the adoption rate as the rest of the West, and 15x Australia’s rate!

What’s up with that?

The most commonly given reason for wanting to adopt is infertility, and one of the big drivers of infertility is being overweight, (the other big one is being too old,) so perhaps Americans are just more prone to infertility.

We probably have a larger population of children in orphanages/foster care than the rest of the West, which might have inspired people over time to be more receptive to adoption.

Or perhaps we have a relatively unique view on the idea that family doesn’t have to be blood-related.

International adoptions, though they get a lot of press, are less than 15% of overall adoptions in the US; in Sweden, by contrast, they are over 99.999% of adoptions. (This may be due to few Swedish children being up for adoption.)

Also, according to Wikipedia, only 1.4% of ever-married American women adopt. (What about unmarried women?) So it sounds like the average adopting family adopts 2 or 3 kids.

 

Overall:

Unfortunately for our original inquiry, a 2% intermarriage rate is not going to do much, short term, to white genetics.

By contrast, intermarriage may be an effective strategy for forging genetic/memetic alliances among minorities.

An adoption rate of 3%, even if it were confined entirely to conservatives, isn’t doing much to overall numbers. As a memetic strategy, it is also constrained by the fact that political orientation, in adults, is determined largely by a combination of genetic personality factors and random chance.

The Shakers did an experiment along these lines: none (or extremely few) of the Shakers had children, because they didn’t believe in having sex. However, many Shakers adopted children, raising them in Shaker communities. No one forced these children to become Shakers, but it was certainly hoped that they would.

Most of them didn’t, and the Shakers have died out. (Technically, as of 2012, there were three elderly shakers left in Maine.) You just can’t replace yourself though adoption.

 

So tomorrow, let’s look at some cases where adoption might have played a larger genetic role: the Mongols, the Indians, and if I can find anything interesting on it, ancient Europeans.

The Indigenous People of Europe

The settlement in Cambridgeshire, which had been buried for 3,000 years, was discovered when the tops of crude protest signs were spotted above layers of mud.

Archaeologist Helen Archer said: “The signs, which include ‘Any old iron? NO THANKS,’ and ‘IRON? IR NO,’ a primitive attempt at wordplay, show that the residents were up in arms about climate-based migration patterns.

Note: The Daily Mash is a humor/satire site, similar to The Onion.

Anyway, on to the genetics!

From Haak et al, rearranged by me

Haak et al. made this graph, but I rearranged it so that the oldest samples are on the left and the newest ones are on the right. When multiple samples were about the same age, I ordered them from west to east (that is, from left to right as you look at a standard map. Unless you are in Australia.) I’ve added the dates (shown as ranges) that were in Haak’s paper. Note the asterisk under Karsdorf–those dates are still uncertain.

The first three genomes are from super old skeletons found out in, like, Russia. I don’t know why they look so crazy–maybe because the DNA is really old and so not very good, or maybe because they actually had a bunch of different DNA in them, or maybe because they’re ancestral to a bunch of different groups. I don’t know! Luckily, it doesn’t really matter for today’s post, so I’ll investigate them later.

Approximately 28,000 years later, we have the Blue People, also known as “Western European Hunter Gatherers,” or WHG. There were people in Europe in intervening 28,000 years; they just aren’t on the table, and I don’t know if anyone has successfully sequenced their genomes yet. (More research required.)

As you might guess, the WHG people hunted and gathered. They had stone tools, and were quite widespread, ranging from Spain (the La Brana1 site,) to Sweden to Samara, Russia (and probably beyond.)

And then some new guys showed up: Farmers.

Known as the Early Eurasian Farmers (EEF,) they first appear on our graph in Starcevo, Serbia, their DNA in orange. They came from the Middle East (the birthplace of agriculture,) bringing their wheat, permanent settlements, and livestock.

Neolithic cultures of Europe–Starcevo is i the lower right-hand corner.

These farmers quickly overran the hunter-gatherers throughout western Europe (though the northern extremes held out longer, most likely due to crops that originated in the Middle East taking a while to adapt to the harsh Scandinavian climate.)

(source: Wikipedia)

The hunter gatherers disappeared (most likely slaughtered by the farmers, but perhaps merely overwhelmed numerically) but their DNA lives on in the descendants of those first farmers. Some groups may have combined willingly–others, as the spoils of war. Within the Farmers’ range, the only place the hunter-gatherers managed to live on appears to be a small island off the coast of Sweden (the second “Skoglund” sample.)

But to the east, out on the Eurasian steppes, the hunter-gatherers lived on. The steppes are known more for their rampaging hordes than their farmers, and this is exactly what they became.

The Yamnaya, as we now call them, are about half WHG and half some new population (I call them the Teal People.) As far as I know, no “pure” teal people have yet been found, but teal DNA is all over the place, from India to Spain.

Teal and blue DNA in India central Asia, and Siberia:

The Yamnaya are also known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans–the guys who spoke the language ancestral to all of today’s Indo-European languages. And like all conquering barbarian hordes, they expanded out of their homeland in present-day southern Russia (north of the Caucuses,) and conquered everything in their path.

Just eyeballing the graph, it looks like the resulting peoples are about half Yamnaya, and about half EEF. This tri-part inheritance is still seen in every European population (and some of their neighbors) today:

If we didn’t have the ancient DNA–or if we had less of it–it would be easy to think that the Blue component in modern Europeans had come directly from the ancient WHG population that lived in their particular area. Instead, much (if not most) of the modern “blue” component hails from the steppes of Russia–a remarkable comeback for the WHGs.

Oh, and the “indigenous” people of Europe? They’re all indigenous to the continent.

Some more helpful graphs, maps, and information:

From Haak et al.

From Haak et al.

From Haak et al.

On the Iceman, aka Otzi: found in the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border; Same age as Sweden, between 3359 and 3105 BCE. (Hailed from the vicinity of Feldthurns, Italy.)

Analysis of the mtDNA of Ötzi the Iceman, the frozen mummy from 3,300 BC found on the Austrian–Italian border, has shown that Ötzi belongs to the K1 subclade. It cannot be categorized into any of the three modern branches of that subclade (K1a, K1b or K1c). The new subclade has provisionally been named K1ö for Ötzi.^[14] Multiplex assay study was able to confirm that the Iceman’s mtDNA belongs to a new European mtDNA clade with a very limited distribution amongst modern data sets.^[15]” (source)

Otzi ate grain but was lactose intolerant.

His Y DNA is haplogroup G, which is now rare in Europe:

Various estimated dates and locations have been proposed for the origin of Haplogroup G. The National Geographic Society places haplogroup G origins in the Middle East 30,000 years ago and presumes that people carrying the haplogroup took part in the spread of the Neolithic.^[2] Two scholarly papers have also suggested an origin in the Middle East, while differing on the date. …

Haplogroup G2a(SNP P15+) has been identified in neolithic human remains in Europe dating between 5000-3000BC. Furthermore, the majority of all the male skeletons from the European Neolithic period have so far yielded Y-DNA belonging to this haplogroup. The oldest skeletons confirmed by ancient DNA testing as carrying haplogroup G2a were five found in the Avellaner cave burial site for farmers in northeastern Spain and were dated by radiocarbon dating to about 7000 years ago.^[5] At the Neolithic cemetery of Derenburg Meerenstieg II, north central Germany, with burial artifacts belonging to the Linear Pottery culture, known in German as Linearbandkeramik (LBK). This skeleton could not be dated by radiocarbon dating, but other skeletons there were dated to between 5,100 and 6,100 years old. The most detailed SNP mutation identified was S126 (L30), which defines G2a3.^[6] G2a was found also in 20 out of 22 samples of ancient Y-DNA from Treilles, the type-site of a Late Neolithic group of farmers in the South of France, dated to about 5000 years ago.^[7] The fourth site also from the same period is the Ötztal of the Italian Alps where the mummified remains of Ötzi the Iceman were discovered. Preliminary word is that the Iceman belongs to haplogroup G2a2b ^[8] (earlier called G2a4).

Haplogroup G2a2b is a rare group today in Europe. (source)

Back on the Otzi page:

By autosomal DNA he is most closely related to southern Europeans, especially to the geographically isolated populations of the two Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica.^[41][42]

… In October 2013, it was reported that 19 modern Tyrolean men were related to Ötzi. Scientists from the Institute of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University had analysed the DNA of over 3,700 Tyrolean male blood donors and found 19 who shared a particular genetic mutation with the 5,300-year-old man, which led them to identify the link.^[46]

Hungary Gamba CA= Copper age, 3,300 BC-2,700 AD

From an analysis of the Gamba site:

The Great Hungarian Plain was a crossroads of cultural transformations that have shaped European prehistory. Here we analyse a 5,000-year transect of human genomes, sampled from petrous bones giving consistently excellent endogenous DNA yields, from 13 Hungarian Neolithic, Copper, Bronze and Iron Age burials including two to high (~22 × ) and seven to ~1 × coverage, to investigate the impact of these on Europe’s genetic landscape. These data suggest genomic shifts with the advent of the Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, with interleaved periods of genome stability. The earliest Neolithic context genome shows a European hunter-gatherer genetic signature and a restricted ancestral population size, suggesting direct contact between cultures after the arrival of the first farmers into Europe. The latest, Iron Age, sample reveals an eastern genomic influence concordant with introduced Steppe burial rites. We observe transition towards lighter pigmentation and surprisingly, no Neolithic presence of lactase persistence.

Stuttgart EN:

To investigate European population history around the time of the agricultural transition, we sequenced complete genomes from a ~7,500 year old early farmer from the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture from Stuttgart in Germany and an ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from the Loschbour rock shelter in Luxembourg. We also generated data from seven ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from Motala in Sweden. We compared these genomes and published ancient DNA to new data from 2,196 samples from 185 diverse populations to show that at least three ancestral groups contributed to present-day Europeans. The first are Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who are more closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians than to any present-day population. The second are West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), related to the Loschbour individual, who contributed to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners. The third are Early European Farmers (EEF), related to the Stuttgart individual, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model the deep relationships of these populations and show that about ~44% of the ancestry of EEF derived from a basal Eurasian lineage that split prior to the separation of other non-Africans.(bold mine.)

Source for the maps.

Iosif Lazaridis et al’s model of modern European genetic origins.

Also from Iosif Lazaridis et al.’s paper, “Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans” h/t Dienekes:

 Analysis of ancient DNA can reveal historical events that are difficult to discern through study of present-day individuals. To investigate European population history around the time of the agricultural transition, we sequenced complete genomes from a ~7,500 year old early farmer from the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) culture from Stuttgart in Germany and an ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherer from the Loschbour rock shelter in Luxembourg. We also generated data from seven ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherers from Motala in Sweden. We compared these genomes and published ancient DNA to new data from 2,196 samples from 185 diverse populations to show that at least three ancestral groups contributed to present-day Europeans. The first are Ancient North Eurasians (ANE), who are more closely related to Upper Paleolithic Siberians than to any present-day population. The second are West European Hunter-Gatherers (WHG), related to the Loschbour individual, who contributed to all Europeans but not to Near Easterners. The third are Early European Farmers (EEF), related to the Stuttgart individual, who were mainly of Near Eastern origin but also harbored WHG-related ancestry. We model the deep relationships of these populations and show that about ~44% of the ancestry of EEF derived from a basal Eurasian lineage that split prior to the separation of other non-Africans.

I’m sorry, I forgot where this came from.

See also:

Significant genetic differentiation between Poland and Germany follows present-day political borders, as revealed by Y-chromosome analysis, by Kayser M. et al:

To test for human population substructure and to investigate human population history we have analysed Y-chromosome diversity using seven microsatellites (Y-STRs) and ten binary markers (Y-SNPs) in samples from eight regionally distributed populations from Poland (n = 913) and 11 from Germany (n = 1,215). Based on data from both Y-chromosome marker systems, which we found to be highly correlated (r = 0.96), and using spatial analysis of the molecular variance (SAMOVA), we revealed statistically significant support for two groups of populations: (1) all Polish populations and (2) all German populations. … The same population differentiation was detected using Monmonier’s algorithm, with a resulting genetic border between Poland and Germany that closely resembles the course of the political border between both countries. The observed genetic differentiation was mainly, but not exclusively, due to the frequency distribution of two Y-SNP haplogroups and their associated Y-STR haplotypes: R1a1*, most frequent in Poland, and R1*(xR1a1), most frequent in Germany. We suggest here that the pronounced population differentiation between the two geographically neighbouring countries, Poland and Germany, is the consequence of very recent events in human population history, namely the forced human resettlement of many millions of Germans and Poles during and, especially, shortly after World War II. …

And Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history by Schiffels et al., h/t Steve Sailer

British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations after 400 CE. … Here, we present whole-genome sequences from 10 individuals excavated close to Cambridge in the East of England, ranging from the late Iron Age to the middle Anglo-Saxon period. … we estimate that on average the contemporary East English population derives 38% of its ancestry from Anglo-Saxon migrations. … Using rarecoal we find that the Anglo-Saxon samples are closely related to modern Dutch and Danish populations, while the Iron Age samples share ancestors with multiple Northern European populations including Britain.

Ancient DNA

In the do it yourself department…

From Haak et al, rearranged by me

I got tired of looking at these out of order, so I’ve rearranged them (and added the dates I’ve found so far.) Unfortunately, since my computer does not like photoshop, that’s all I got done today.

Over and out, everyone.

Turkey: Not very Turkic (a genetic history of the Turkic peoples)

Ironic, isn’t it? The geographic distribution of Turkic languages is amazingly vast-yet-splotchy, extending from the eastern border of Bosnia to the far western end of Siberia, where Russia approaches Alaska: (I’d really like to see this map laid atop a topographic map, because that might explain some of the splotchiness–not a lot of people speaking anything in the Taklamakan Desert, for example.) Our oldest known Turkic inscription–thus, our first known use of the Turkic language–comes from the Orkhon Valley, which is located smack dab in the middle of Mongolia. Which, you may have noticed, is not today a Turkic-language speaking place. The Mongolian Language family is, ironically, much less widespread than the Turkic-family:

Given that the Mongols recently conquered almost all of Asia, decimating local populations and leaving behind their genetic legacy (polite speak for “raping all the women,”) they’ve made remarkably little linguistic impact. If we want to get controversial, some linguists propose that the Mongolian family and the Turkic family might be related to each other within a broader “Altaic” language family, which makes plenty of geographic sense, but might not make true linguistic sense. Being me, I always root for nice fancy language family trees, but we’re going to have to call this one “just a theory some guys have and some guys oppose” for now. (The difficulty with reconstructing proto-Turkic or proto-Altaic or the like is that there aren’t a ton of old inscriptions in either family, and not many linguists are trained in them.) Languages get complicated because they can contaminate each other in unexpected ways. To use a familiar example, even though English is a Germanic language, our “do” constructions, eg, “Do you walk?” “I do walk!” and “Do walk with me,” appear to come not from Old or Proto-Germanic, but from Celtic languages. When the Anglo Saxons moved to England and conquered the Celtic peoples living there and made them start speaking Anglo-Saxon, the Celts retained some of their old grammatical structures. But Celtic and Germanic languages are not all that different; they’re both Indo-European, after all. Imagine what craziness you could get by combining peoples who originally spoke languages separated by much vaster gulfs of time.

The English example reminds us of another difficulty in attempting to use linguistics to tell us something about groups and their histories: widely disparate groups can speak the same language. Not only are the English, despite speaking a “Germanic” language, only about 10% German by ancestry (more or less;) but the US has almost 40 million African Americans who all speak English and aren’t genetically English. Even though most people learn to talk by imitating their parents, people have picked up and promulgated many languages that weren’t their ancestors’.

We have a similar situation with Turkey, where the majority of the population clearly speaks a Turkic language, but the genetics shows far more in common with their local Middle Eastern neighbors:

From Haak et al.

Zooming in on the relevant portion:

I like Turkey’s DNA because it’s always easy to spot in these charts. Turkey has some real variation in the distribution of different ancestral populations–the Japanese population, by comparison, is far more genetically homogenous.

The really anomalous guys in the Turkish sample are easily explained–they’re just Greeks, (and the anomalous guys in the Greek Sample are Turks.) Turkey ruled over Greece for quite a while, so it’s not surprising that some Greeks live in Turkey and some Turks live in Greece.

Chechens through Kumyks are all groups from the Caucus Mountains area, which is just north of the Turkish-Iranian border, so it’s not too surprising that all of these groups resemble each other. The Greeks, though, are much closer to their neighbors to the north, like the Albanians.

The Chechen and Lezgian languages are from the “Northeast Caucasian” language family (aka Caspian language family). Remarkably, this geographically tiny splotch of languages (and the similarly named but apparently not linguistically similar Northwest Caucasian language family, [aka Pontic language family,]) is considered, like Indo-European, one of the world’s distinct language groupings:

The Adygei (or Adyghe) speak a Northwest Caucasian language.

The Balkars and Kumyks speak Turkic languages, and the Ossetians speak an Indo-European language, (Indo-Iranian branch.)

Remarkably, even though these Caucasian groups speak languages from four different language families–one of which may have originated in far-off Mongolia–they are genetically quite similar to each other.

The Iranians have a small but noticeable chunk of bright green, which shows up in tiny quantities in some of the other populations in this group. The bright green is highly characteristic of India, where it is found in large quantities.

Iran speaks an Indo-European language, of the Indo-Iranian branch. (Given present politics, it is a bit of a wonder that the Aryan Nation and its ilk are actually named after the Muslim nation of Iran, but there you go, that’s history for you.) So I suspect that Iran got its language due to a small group of Indians conquering the place, imposing their language, and marrying into the local population, but this isn’t really supposed to be a post on the history of Indo-European.

What about Turkey’s neighbors to the south? How much do Turks resemble them? Here are some folks in the local vicinity (Syria and Iraq border Turkey to the south, but Iraq doesn’t seem to have made it into this dataset):

The most noticeable thing here are the big chunks of purple, which reach their maximum in the Bedouins. However, I suspect the purple is (in some manner) related to the dark blue which it replaces; if you glance up at the dataset used for the image at the top of the blog, you’ll note that it shows the same basic ancestral DNA groups for the Middle Easterners as Europeans (albeit in different proportions.) The technical differences between these two data sets aren’t worth getting into; suffice to say that I think the Haak dataset is just showing us a finer grained level of detail, which is why I am primarily leaning on it.

At any rate, the purple is distinctive. The Turks (and Iranians) have some purple, but not a lot; the Caucasians very little. The Middle Easterners also have a bit of pink (and a touch of blue) which hail from Africa. These colors, interestingly, appear not to have made it into the Turkish samples at all.

So while the Turks are similar to the Syrians and other neighbors to the south, I hold that they are genetically more similar to their neighbors in Iran and the Caucuses.

But what about the red and yellow bits? Those come from central Asia. Russia has similar levels of red, which is found all over Siberia and northern Eurasia, including the Sami; Yellow is common across far east Asia, including China, Japan, and Mongolia. Most of the countries that Americans mean when they say “Asian” have a mix of red and yellow.

Since the first written Turkic we have comes from the middle of Mongolia, it is sensible that folks in Turkey, today, might have DNA that appears to have come from the region. However, they don’t have a lot of this DNA, suggesting that the overall number of migrants or conquerors, (Turkic or Mongolian or of some other Asian origin,) was relatively low compared to the rest of the population. Today’s Turks, therefore, are probably descended primarily from the ancient Anatolian population that was there before the Turks, Mongols, Indo-Iranians, or other folks showed up.

Geographically, Turkey is located on a plateau and markedly greener than its neighbors to the south. That alone may account for differences between the Turkish people and their southern, more desert-dwelling neighbors.

What about the other Turkic peoples?

There are a lot of them:

The term Turkic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of peoples including existing societies such as the Turkish people, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashes, Kazakhs, Tatars, Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, Bashkirs, Qashqai, Gagauz, Altai, Khakas, Tuvans, Yakuts, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Karakalpaks, Karachays, Balkars, Nogais and as well as past civilizations such as Yenisei Kirghiz, Dingling, Tiele, Chuban, Pannonian Avars, Göktürks, Bulgars, Kumans, Kipchaks, Turgeshes, Khazars, Seljuk Turks, Ottoman Turks, Mamluks, Timurids, Khiljis, and possibly Huns, Xiongnu, Wusun, Tauri and the Tuoba.

And we don’t have time to run through all of them. We will mention those who are included in Haak’s dataset, though:

(Chuvash? Are you sure?)

These guys have a lot in common–most of them have, at least broadly, similar varieties of DNA–but not enough to be considered a single ethnic group. Like most groups, they tend to be more closely related to their neighbors than to folks far off, and the Turkic peoples are pretty scattered. The especially odd thing about them, though, is that none of these–at least, none of the folks in Haak’s dataset–look like the Mongols, despite the Turkic languages having probably originated somewhere near Mongolia. (And the Mongolian-like DNA they do have might be more easily explained by Mongolian expansions than by Turkic ones.)

Wikipedia comes to a similar conclusion:

The physical characteristics of populations of speakers of Turkic language stretch across a range as wide as the land they inhabit. The Turkic peoples in Europe look European – with the exception of some Crimean Tatars and Turkics in the Caucasus (Kumyks, Nogays, etc.) who look European+Northeast Asian, while Turkics in the Middle East resemble the peoples of the Middle East, those in Central Asia mostly look mixed but have mostly northeast Asian features. Turkics in northeast Asia resemble populations in that region. In trying to answer such questions as what “race” were the Proto-Turkic speakers, neither anthropometric nor genetic studies have been of much assistance to date. What few DNA analyses have been done arrive at the problem as an answer: affinity to primarily western populations in the west, eastern in the east, and a mixture on a gradient from east to west or vice versa in between.^[2] These biological circumstances suggest that racial evolution over the region is earlier than can be considered in the time of the distribution of languages; i.e., the languages may have evolved among populations that were already mixed.

The extremes of the Eurasian continent–Europe, India, SE Asia–have wide zones with a fair amount of genetic homogeneity (even where there are multiple ancestral groups.) In between these zones, however, we get a mixing zone, where different groups come together and new ethnicities are born. All of the Turkic groups here have, to greater or lesser degrees, the tri-color pattern typical of Europe (orange, teal, dark blue) and the di-color pattern typical of SE Asia (red and yellow,) though this is greatly attenuated at the extremes of Turkey and the Yakut. Some groups also have the green characteristic of Indo-Iranians, probably due to bordering those zones.

The Turkic language groups may therefore represent a kind of genetic mixing zone between the large, homogenous zones to their east, west, and south. How long have the steppes (and the mountains to their south) been mixing zones? We don’t know. But the idea that the Turkic peoples were ethnically mixed and heterogenous long before they began speaking Turkic languages at all seems reasonable.

But if Turks aren’t particularly Turkic, why do they speak a Turkic language at all?

Surprisingly, the Turks didn’t even exert military dominance over Turkey until about the 1,000. Prior to this, Anatolia, as we may call the pre-Turkic area–was ruled by the Byzantines, eastern successors to the Roman Empire. The local population was Greek-speaking Christians.

The origins of the Turkic peoples are shrouded in mystery, mostly because of the lack of good written records. There is much speculation, for example, about whether or not the Huns were Turkic, but unless someone can come up with a Hunnic dictionary, we’ll probably never truly know.

The first confirmably Turkic group we know of was the aptly-named Goturks, who lived in parts of China and Mongolia, beginning around the 500s. They apparently controlled a rather large region:

We know of the Goturks because they left behind written records of themselves (beginning in the early 700s,) the Orkhon inscriptions. Interestingly, these Old Turkic inscriptions are written in an alphabet derived from Aramaic (which is, in turn, derived from Phoenician):

What were a bunch of nomadic herders doing making a bunch of monuments inscribed with a derivative form of the Aramaic alphabet up in the middle of Mongolia in the 700s? For that matter, why weren’t they using something derived from Chinese, who lived much nearer?

My best guess is that the alphabet arrived with some eastern variant of Christianity, spread by Christian missionaries through the Persian empire and beyond. (Remember, Iran wasn’t conquered by the Muslims until 651; before that, Christianity had a much larger foothold in the East.) This is not to say that the Goturks were Christians in the way that we typically practice it today, (shamanism focused on the sky god Tengri, whom they shared with the Mongols, appears to have been the dominant religion,) but that they may have had contact with Christian missionaries or religious texts.

At any rate, it looks like the Turkic peoples get on too well with the Chinese, and probably weren’t too keen on the Mongols, (no one was too keen on the Mongols,) which may have inspired them to start migrating. (Or perhaps they were always migrating. They were nomads, after all.)  Either way, by the 800s, a Turkic-speaking people called the Seljuqs had pitched their yurts north of the Caspian sea.

From there they migrated southward, encountering Muslims in Iran, (where they picked up Islam,) and eventually reaching Turkey around the year 1,000. (These migrations probably should not be thought of as single, organized movements of people, but of many migrations, mostly of tribes simply wandering in search of pastures for their animals, conquering neighbors, fleeing conquerors, and generally being a complicated, disorganized bunch of humans.)

At any rate, the Seljuk Empire, founded in 1037, absorbed the crumbling Persian Empire, and invaded the Byzantine Empire in 1068. By 1092, it stretched from the Bosphorus, down through Palestine, across Iran, around Oman, through several -stans, and up to the far western end of China:

This all helped inspire the Crusades, launched in 1096 to help the Byzantines repel the Seljuks, but that is a story for another day. The Mongols showed up around 1243, but by the 1400s, the Turks were in charge again. In 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople–now Istanbul (which is really just a slight corruption of the Greek for “to the city,” “εἰς τὴν πόλιν”)–ending the last vestige of the once vast Roman Empire.

An observer described the looting:

Nothing will ever equal the horror of this harrowing and terrible spectacle. People frightened by the shouting ran out of their houses and were cut down by the sword before they knew what was happening. And some were massacred in their houses where they tried to hide, and some in churches where they sought refuge. …

Old men of venerable appearance were dragged by their white hair and piteously beaten. Priests were led into captivity in batches, as well as reverend virgins, hermits and recluses who were dedicated to God alone and lived only for Him to whom they sacrificed themselves, who were dragged from their cells and others from the churches in which they had sought refuge, in spite of their weeping and sobs and their emaciated cheeks, to be made objects of scorn before being struck down. Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened. …

Temples were desecrated, ransacked and pillaged … sacred objects were scornfully flung aside, the holy icons and the holy vessels were desecrated. Ornaments were burned, broken in pieces or simply thrown into the streets. Saints’ shrines were brutally violated in order to get out the remains which were then thrown to the wind.

The Wikipedia estimates that 4,000 were killed and 30,000 deported or sold into slavery. 4,000 sounds like a low estimate to me, given the nature of warfare, not to mention reports like Barbaro’s:

Barbaro described blood flowing in the city “like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm”, and bodies of the Turks and Christians floating in the sea “like melons along a canal”.^[50]

As I have mentioned before, I strongly recommend not getting conquered.

The Ottoman Empire continued to expand, reaching its greatest extent in 1683:

The few small Turkic-speaking communities in Europe today probably owe their genesis to the Ottoman empire, though some might have arrived on their own, via more northerly routes.

And as for the guys in Siberia? They probably just decided to try walking north instead of south.

Genetic Map of Europe

source: Big Think: Genetic map of Europe

Isn’t it beautiful?

Some thoughts:

Sardinia and the Basques: low Indo-European genetic component.

I’ve been saying for a while the Ashkenazim should be considered a European group. Genetically, they’re half-Italian, and they’ve been living in Europe for about 2,000 years.

Tuscany has, I think, a very high Neanderthal %? I’m not sure why different parts of Italy would be so far apart, but I can see why Italy might have problems with staying unified or forming national-scale institutions.

Finns and Hungarians are not divergent enough from other Europeans to consider their unique language situation indicative of major genetic differences.

World’s most famous Chuvash:

Chuvash are a “Turkic” people of Russia. (Turks are also a “Turkic” people, though ironically, they actually don’t have a lot of Turkic DNA.)

Hrm, I should do a post on the Turkic Peoples.

Does the Bronze Age Herald a Major Transformation in Human Dispersal Patterns?

Humans–Homo Sapiens or Anatomically Modern Humans–have been around for about 200,000 years. We have only recently–for the past few thousand years or so–begun making a serious effort at recording human history and figuring out what happened before our own times.

Most of what we know about major migrations and changes among human populations come from three major sources: written records, archaeology, and genetics.

Written records are (usually) the easiest to work with. We know when the Spaniards discovered Cuba because we have written records of the event, for example. Unfortunately, written records go back only a few thousand years–covering a teeny portion of human history–and can be highly unreliable. After all, we thought the entire world was only 6 thousand years old for a while because a book that seemed to say so.

Archaeology lets us peer much further back than written records, but with much less detail. We don’t know a lot, for example, about the folks who made Aurignacian tools–what they called themselves, what sort of rituals they had, what they hoped or dreamed of. Without those details, it’s hard to care much about one culture or another. After a while, pots blend into pots, stone tools into stone tools.

Can you tell which one is Aurignacian, and which is Gravettian?

(Oh, I threw in a Mousterian tool, as well. Those were made by Neanderthals, not H. sapiens.)

I can’t, either.

It is difficult to tell whether a change in artifacts between one layer and the next reflects a change in people or a change in technology. The proliferation of steel artifacts in the archaeological record in Mexico circa 1500 reflects an influx of new people, but the proliferation of television sets in the future-archaeological record of my area merely reflects a technological development. Finding a lot of mass graves in an area is, of course, a tip-off that invasion and replacement happened, but invasions aren’t always accompanied by easily identified mass-internments.

This is where genetics comes in. If we can find some skeletons and sequence their DNA, and then find some later or earlier skeletons in the same area and sequence their DNA, then we can get a pretty good idea of whether or not the later people are descended from the earlier people. This probably doesn’t always work (if the people in question are under some kind of selective pressure–which we all are–then their descendants might look genetically different from their ancestors simply due to evolution rather than replacement,) but it is a pretty darn good tool.

As I discussed back in “Oops, Looks Like it was People, not Pots,” archaeologists have fiercely debated over the decades whether the replacement of Narva Pots with Corded Ware Pots circa 3750 ago represented a population replacement or just a change in pot-making preferences:

    

Corded Ware on the left, Narva on the right.

Luckily for us, genetics has now figured out that the Corded Ware people are actually the Yamnaya, aka the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and that they expanded out of the Eurasian Steppe about 4,000 years ago, replacing much of the native population as they went.

So it’s starting to look like there were quite a few conquering events of this sort.

From, A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

from A Handful of Bronze Age Men Could have fathered two-thirds of Europeans

In general, if you see a lot of mtDNA and only a little Y-DNA, that means there were a lot of women around and only a few men. And that generally means those men just killed all of the other men and raped their wives and children.

Which appears to have happened on a massive scale throughout much of the world around 10,000-4,000 years ago.

Just off the top of my head, recent large-scale migrations and at least partial replacements include the arrival of Indians in Australia around 4,230 years ago; replacement of the Thule people by the Inuit (aka Dorset aka Eskimo) around 1,000 ago; successive waves of steppe peoples like the Turks and Mongols invading their neighbors; the Great Bantu Migration that began about 3,500 years ago; the spread of Polynesians through areas formerly controlled by Melanesians starting around 3,000 BC; displacement of the Ainu by the Japanese over the past couple thousand years; etc.

Replacement of the Thule by the Dorset, from The genetic prehistory of the New World Arctic

Paths of the great Bantu Migration

Map is in French. Negative numbers are years BC; positive numbers are years CE.

And of course, we know of many more recent migrations, like the one kicked off by Columbus.

So it looks like people have moved around a lot over the past 10,000 years.

Terms like “bronze age” are a little problematic because people adopted different technologies at different times. So the “bronze age” began around 5,300 years ago in the Middle East, 4,000 years ago in Ireland, and skipped the Inuit entirely (they basically went straight from stone and bone tools to guns.)

Agriculture emerged in the Middle East circa 11,500 years ago; followed by the wheel, 8,500 years ago; carts, 6,500 years ago; and domesticated horses about 6,000 years ago. These technologies made the world ripe for warfare–riders on horseback or in chariots were great at conquering, and agricultural settlements, with their large population centers and piles of food, were great for conquering.

Our conventional views of prehistory are tainted, I suspect, by a mis-perception of time. This is probably basically a quirk of perception–since we remember yesterday better than the day before yesterday, and that day better than last week, and last week better than last year, we tend to think of more recent time periods as longer than they really are, and older time periods as relatively shorter. Children are most prone to this; ask a child to make a numberline showing events like “Last week, my last birthday, the year I was born, and the year mommy was born,” and you’ll tend to get a very distorted number line. Grown ups are much better at this task (we can count the time-distance between these events,) but we’re not perfect.

We show this same tendency when thinking about human history. Our written documents barely go back past 3,000 years, and as far as most people are concerned, this is the beginning of “history”. Nevermind that humans have been around for 200,000 years–that’s 197,000 years of human history that we tend to condense down to: humans evolved, left Africa, and invented agriculture–then came us. We tend to mentally assign approximately equal chunks of time to each phase, which leads to things like people thinking that the Basques–who speak a language isolate–are an ancient, archaic people who hail directly from the first humans, or Neanderthals, or somesuch. Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years, and the Indo-European language expansion probably cut the Basques off from their fellow-language speakers about 3,000 years ago. Of course, the Basques could have been cut off since the Neanderthal age, but that’s a jump of 37,000 years (or more) on very little evidence. Likewise, we tend to assume that people just spread out from their original African homeland, got to where they were going, sat down, and never moved again. With the exception of Columbus and his European co-ethnics, everyone is sort of assumed to have gotten where they are now about 100,000-40,000 years ago. (Or the equivalent time period for people who think humanity is much younger or older than it is.)

But the emerging picture is one of conquering–lots of conquering, at least in the time periods we’ve been able to get details on. But go back more than 10,000 years or so, and the records start petering out. We’ve got no writing, far fewer artifacts, and even the DNA breaks down. The technology we’ve developed for extracting and sequencing ancient DNA is amazing, but I suspect we’ll have a devil of a time trying to find any well-preserved 40,000 year old DNA in the rainforest.

So what did the human story look like between 200,000 and 10,000 years ago? Have humans been conquering and re-conquering each other from the beginning? Is it ethnic group after ethnic group, all the way down? Or did lower population density in the pre-agricultural era make it easier to spread out and avoid one’s neighbors than to bother fighting with them? Certainly armies would have spread much less slowly before the domestication of the horse and invention of the chariot. (Not to mention that they require quite a bit of food, which is a tough sort of thing to get in large, easily-transportable form if you’re a hunter-gatherer.)

Certainly prehistoric peoples slaughtered (or slaughter) each other with great frequency–we can tell that:

It doesn’t take a lot of technology to go put a spear into your neighbor’s chest. Even bands of chimps go smash other bands of chimps to bits with rocks.

We also have genetic evidence emerging from further back, ie, An Older Layer of Eurasian Admixture in Africa. As Dienekes summarises:

The authors propose that a genetic component found in Horn of Africa populations back-migrated to Africa from Eurasia ~23 thousand years ago. … For a time, there was a taboo against imagining back-migration into Africa; in a sense this was reasonable on parsimony grounds: Africans have most autosomal genetic diversity and the basal clades of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes; a model with Out-of-Africa is simpler than one with both Out-of and Into-Africa. However, we now know that pretty much all Africans have Eurasian ancestry, ranging from at least traces in theYoruba and Pygmies (to account for the Neandertal admixture) to intermediate values in East Africans, to quite  a lot in North Africans.

Eurasian admixture in Africa seems to be general, variable, and to have occurred at different time scales. It’s still the best hypothesis that modern humans originated in Africa initially and migrated into Eurasia. However, it is no longer clear that Africa was always the pump and never the destination of human migrations.

Whether this was “conquering” or just wandering remains to be discovered.

As for me, my money’s on horses and agriculture making warfare and dispersal faster and more efficient, not fundamentally changing our human proclivities toward our neighbors.

Consanguinity and Socialism

So I’ve been thinking about the connection between consanguinity and socialism.

In one account I read recently, a young man, attempting to better his lot in life, took out a loan, produced 30 loaves of bread, and began selling them along the side of the road. He managed to sell ten loaves before his father came along, spotted the bread, and took the remaining 20 loaves to feed his hungry children–the young man’s siblings and half siblings, of which there were well over a dozen.

Obviously the young man could not pay back his loan, and the business failed.

In Kabloona, de Poncins describes the extreme communality of the Eskimo lifestyle (including, it seems, some form of communal wife-sharing.) One man builds up a cache of fish and seals, and another family comes upon it and eats it all–it cannot be helped, says the author. No one was mad or even irritated. Life in the arctic is so precarious, the food supply so unsteady, that everyone would likely die if they could not depend on their neighbors’ catches in such a way.

He describes another case of a mentally retarded couple who were kept alive primarily through the generosity of their kin-folk.

Toward the end of Frederick and Josephine’s adventure through the Congo, they describe conversations with, IIRC, a white person living in the Congo. He noted that although he had lived there for many years, he had not become friends with the natives–that such was impossible, in fact, because friendship carries with it obligations, and those obligations would quickly bankrupt him.

In The Harmless People, anthropologist Elizabeth Thomas describes the distribution networks that determine exactly how a killed animal is distributed among everyone in the tribe. Obviously it makes sense to distribute a giraffe–no one can eat an entire giraffe, and the Bushmen (aka San) don’t have refrigerators. But even when people are hungry and there isn’t enough to go around, the rules still apply: you must share.

In another account (the name of which, forgive me, has slipped my mind over the intervening decade and a half since I read it,) the author discussed the difficulties of getting the Bushmen started on agriculture/animal husbandry. The crux of the matter was that people would give the Bushmen goats to raise, and then a while later some other Bushmen would come visiting, and the goats would get slaughtered to feed their guests. Pretty soon, the goats were gone and the Bushmen had nothing left to eat, until the outsiders donated some more goats and the round of visiting and goat-eating began again.

Apparently they solved this problem by giving the Bushmen cows. Because a cow has far more meat on it than a visiting family can eat in a week–even a large family–the social obligation to slaughter one’s livestock for visiting relatives didn’t apply to cows.

In The Continuum Concept, Liedloff describes life in an isolated Amazonian village. She relates a story about a young man who, after being raised in the hustle and bustle of the city, came back to his ancestral village (he’d been adopted.) He proceeded to sit on his butt for several years, supported by the rest of the village. He was not entirely idle–he managed to get marry and have children during those years. Eventually he got bored and began raising a garden of his own (it was a horticultural society.)

It took me a long time to figure out why people engage in ritual gift-giving, but one enlightening study on the subject found that Chinese folks with gift-giving networks that extended outside their own villages were less likely to starve during the famines–these folks, it appeared, had been able to call upon their networks when the local crops failed. People whose networks were limited to their own villages had no one to call upon when the village’s crops failed.

I recall someone–I think it was HBD Chick–claiming that Russia traditionally had a somewhat communal style of land inheritance/distribution among its serfs, but I can’t find it, now.

This “socialistic” gift-giving/distribution of wealth and catches is the essence of tribalism, and stands in contrast to capitalism. Westerners tend to either gush glowingly about the wonderful primitives who, in their Edenic state, know nothing of greed but share everything with their neighbors, or confusedly attempt to mush capitalism onto this tribal system and then wonder why it doesn’t work. The socialists tend to advocate that we should become more like the tribesfolk, while capitalists look for ways to get people to act more individually.

Of course, noble savages are a myth and people do not share because they’re morally pure; one glance at the homicide rates for tribal peoples dispels that notion. These systems exist (or existed) because they helped the people in them survive–or at least their DNA. You and your brother share quite a bit of DNA, so sharing your food with him can result in more copies of your DNA wandering around (via your brother’s children,) even if it doesn’t befit you, personally.

No man is an island; we all depend on each other for food and other resources. Where resources are few and times are tough, others become especially critical. Then the “rules” in these societies are often just as strict as ours–the young man with his loaves can no more resist his father’s claim than I can resist paying my taxes. And for the Inuit, the rules are even harsher: if you don’t share now, there will be no one left to share with you when you need them–and you will die.

Do such systems only work where people are closely related? Sharing wealth with my brother may be annoying, but that doesn’t mtter so long as my DNA gets passed on. My brother can be a total lout who takes advantage of me right and left and it doesn’t matter so long as my DNA gets passed on. But it is much more difficult to get people to cooperate with non-family–helping strangers does not lead directly to more of my DNA in the world, and if the helping harms me while helping them, then they may well increase the number of copies of their DNA at my expense.

This does not necessarily mean that cooperation with strangers is a bad idea–or that defecting on strangers is a good idea. Obviously if you’re caught out in a blizzard, it’s in your interest to cooperate with anyone around. And many, many groups have merged over the centuries of human history (and not just through warfare.) Groups can indeed merge, to their mutual benefit.

The question is whether some groups are genetically biased toward–or will reproduce better–under socialism or capitalism, and if consanguinity has any effect on this.

You see, not all brothers are created equal. If you and your brother are identical twins, then you share virtually 100% of your DNA, and giving your brother a cow is as good as giving you a cow; your brother having a kid is genetically as good as you having a kid.

Under normal conditions (as you tend to think of them, my reader), you and your brother share about 50% of your DNA–in this case, your brother has to have two kids to make up for the cost of you losing one.

If you and your brother are actually half-brothers, that % goes down to 25. Now your brother needs to have 4 kids to make up for the loss of one of yours.

But if you’re full siblings and your parents were first cousins–a pretty normal state of affairs throughout most of the world and most of history–then the DNA you share with your brother goes up. And if your grandparents and great grandparents were also cousins, well, you and your brother will start looking pretty similar to each other.

Let’s suppose that a gene for generosity pops up randomly among humans. These generous folks love cooperating. If they are closely related to their family, chances are their relatives also have this gene, and that they will all cooperate together. The less closely they are related to the folks they’re cooperating with, the less chance of those folks sharing the cooperating genes and thus, simultaneously, more chance of defection and fewer genetic gains from cooperating.

So it seems likely that the strongest norms for cooperating will exist within groups that are closely related. (Note that even Sweden-style socialism is quite weak compared to Inuit-style socialism.)

But most folks are, at best, neutral toward their out-group, and often highly antagonistic. (The few groups that are not antagonistic seem to mostly be folks who don’t have much experience with out-groups, due to geographic isolation.) But cooperation across groups may be possible if strong civic institutions / social norms exist to prevent defection.

Are “Whites” Real?

From Haak et al.

I may have given the impression the other day that a “race” exists if and only if it shows up as a singel color (or almost a single color) on Haak’s graph. Certainly mon-=color groups satisfy the requirements for genetic distinctiveness, but mon-chronicity is not a requirement.

Homogeneity is more important than mono-chronicity.

For starters, the number of colors in certain parts of Haak’s graph pobably hhas more to do with the number of ancient skeletons that have been analyzed htan net common ancetry–as you can see from the left side of the graph, scientists have analyzed the genomes of numerous ancient European skeletons (all of which show continuity with modern European people,) but they’ve analyzed rather few ancient sub-Saharan skeletons. This isnt’ ebcause they dislike ancient sub-Saharan skeletons or anything, but because the DNA content breaks down very quickly in the Sub-Saharan environment. Many of the groups here identified as mono-chromatic or nearly mono-chromatic may begin showing up as multi-chromatic as our powers of analysis continue to develop and we learn more about ancient human migrations.

But back to homogeneity. Let’s take a look at the Japanese. (One of the Yellow/Red groups on the right side of the graph.) The Japanese genome, like most east-Asian peoples’, composed of two distinct colors. And in this case, we even have names for these two groups, the Jomon and Yayoi people (not to be confused with the Yanomami or Yamnaya.) (Maybe we should institute a system where all cultures are given a set of coordinates based on physical location and era. EG, the Jomon would be J-35N,139E-12,000BC. Okay, maybe that’s not an improvement for ordinary conversaton, though when I’m trying to look up a group like the Evens, it would be.)

But this does not mean that the “Japanese” possess a great deal of ethnic diversity. The Japanese people are fairly homogenous–notice that the border between red and yellow is very smooth. Almost every Japanese person has the exact same % of Jomon and Yayoi ancestry as every other Japanese person.

This is because the merger of the Jomon and Yayoi cultures happened a long time ago, and the modern Japanese are descended from a single, homogenous population. The Japanese are a single people.

By contrast, take a look at the Evens, a Siberian group, (E-62°N,153°E-Today.) There is no homogeneity in the Evens’ genomes; they are a very mixed group in which different individuals have vastly different genetic heritages. The Evens may exist as a cultural, ethic, or linguistic group, but genetically they are a bunch of different things. The Turks, likewise, have a very choppy profile, though in this case the anomaly is easy to figure out: some “Turks” are Greek. The Ojibwa, Nama, and Yukagir are all jagged–these are groups with a great deal of recent mixing, in which many individuals are not closely related to other group members or share much DNA with them at all.

Zooming back out, let’s take a general look at the European cultures. From Greece through Spain, southern France through Ukraine, we see a smooth, three-color pattern. The blue is perhaps most concentrated in Lithuania, the orange in the Basque, and the teal in Greeks. There is a bit of purple in the south and red in the north east. But overall, the pattern is found, with consistency and evenness, throughout Europe, and not found outside of Europe.

Yes, the borders of Europe are fuzzy–Turkey, the Caucasus, and a variety of steppe-peoples are obviously related to some of the same guys as Europeans. But these do not show the same pattern as the Europeans, and beyond these border zones, the resemblance disappears entirely.

 

So, yes, we may speak of the Orange/Blue/Teal people, and call the “Whites” or “Europeans” if we so desire. They are a real genetic grouping, just like the “Japanese” and the “East Asians” and the Onge.