I do not believe that IQ tests measure intelligence. Rather I believe that they measure a combination of intelligence, learning and concentration at a particular point in time. …
You may wish to read the whole thing there.
The short response is that I basically agree with the bit quoted, and I suspect that virtually everyone who takes IQ tests seriously does as well. We all know that if you come into an IQ test hungover, sick, and desperately needing to pee, you’ll do worse than if you’re well-rested, well-fed, and feeling fine.
That time I fell asleep during finals?
Not so good.
Folks who study IQ for a living, like the famous Flynn, believe that environmental effects like the elimination of leaded gasoline and general improvements in nutrition have raised average IQ scores over the past century or two. (Which I agree seems pretty likely.)
The ability to sit still and concentrate is especially variable in small children–little boys are especially notorious for preferring to run and play instead of sit at a desk and solve problems. And while real IQ tests (as opposed to the SAT) have been designed not to hinge on whether or not a student has learned a particular word or fact, the effects of environmental “enrichment” such as better schools or high-IQ adoptive parents do show up in children’s test scores–but fade away as children grow up.
There’s a very sensible reason for this. I am reminded here of an experiment I read about some years ago: infants (probably about one year old) were divided into two groups, and one group was taught how to climb the stairs. Six months later, the special-instruction group was still better at stair-climbing than the no-instruction group. But two years later, both groups of children were equally skilled at stair-climbing.
There is only so good anyone will ever get at stair-climbing, after all, and after two years of practice, everyone is about equally talented.
The sensible conclusion is that we should never evaluate an entire person based on just one IQ test result (especially in childhood.)
The mistake some people (not Chuancey Tinker) make is to jump from “IQ tests are not 100% reliable” to “IQ tests are meaningless.” Life is complicated, and people like to sort it into neat little packages. Friend or foe, right or wrong. And while single IQ test is insufficient to judge an entire person, the results of multiple IQ tests are fairly reliable–and if we aggregate our results over multiple people, we get even better results.
As with all data, more tests + more people => random incorrect data matters less.
I think the “IQ tests are meaningless” crowd is operating under the assumption that IQ scholars are actually dumb enough to blindly judge an entire person based on a single childhood test. (Dealing with this strawman becomes endlessly annoying.)
So this complicated looking graph shows us the effects of different factors on IQ scores over time, using several different data sets (mostly twins studies.)
At 5 years old, “genetic” factors, (the diamond and thick lines) are less important than “shared environment.” Shared environment=parenting and teachers.
That is, at the age of 5, a pair of identical twins who were adopted by two different families will have IQ scores that look more like their adoptive parents’ IQ scores than their genetic relatives’ IQ scores. Like the babies taught to climb stairs before their peers, the kids whose parents have been working hard to teach them their ABCs score better than kids whose parents haven’t.
By the age of 7, however, this parenting effect has become less important than genetics. This means that those adopted kids are now starting to have IQ scores more similar to their biological relatives than to their adoptive relatives. Like the kids from the stair-climbing experiment, their scores are now more based on their genetic abilities (some kids have better balance and coordination, resulting in better stair-climbing) than on whatever their parents are doing with them.
By the age of 12, the effects of parenting drop to around 0. At this point, it’s all up to the kid.
Of course, adoption studies are not perfect–adoptive parents are not randomly selected and have to go through various hoops to prove that they will be decent parents, and so tend not to be the kinds of people who lock their children in closets or refuse to feed them. I am sure this kind of parenting does terrible things to IQ, but there is no ethical way to design a randomized study to test them. Thankfully, the % of children subject to such abysmal parenting is very low. Within the normal range of parenting practices, parenting doesn’t appear to have much (if any) effect on adult IQ.
The point of all this is that what I think Chauncey means by “learning,” that is, advantages some students have over others because they’ve learned a particular fact or method before the others do, does appear to have an effect on childhood IQ scores, but this effect fades with age.
I think Pumpkin Person is fond of saying that life is the ultimate IQ test.
While we can probably all attest to a friend who is “smart but lazy,” or smart but interested in a field that doesn’t pay very well, like art or parenting, the correlation between IQ and life outcomes (eg, money) are amazingly solid:
And if this makes us feel mercenary, well, other traits also correlate:Shamelessly stolen from Jayman.
There’s a simple reason why this correlation holds despite lazy and non-money-oriented smart people: there are also lazy and non-money-oriented dumb people, and lazy smart people tend to make more money and make better long-term financial decisions than lazy dumb people.
Note that none of these graphs are the result of a single test. A single test would, indeed, be useless.
Defining exactly who is white is contentious and difficult–so I shan’t. If you want to debate among yourselves whether or not the Irish or Hindus count, that’s your own business.
Here’s Haak et al’s full graph of human genomes from around the world, (see here and here for various discussions.) The genomes on the far left are ancient European skeletons; everything from the “pink” section onward is modern. The “African” genomes all have bright blue at their bottoms; Asian (and American Indian) genomes all have yellow. The European countries tend to have a triple-color profile, reflecting their recent (evolutionarily speaking) mix of European hunter-gatherers (dark blue), Middle Eastern farmers (orange), and a “teal” group that came in with the Indo-European speakers, but whose origins we have yet to uncover:
Unsurprisingly, the Basque have less of this “teal.” Middle Easterners, as you can see, are quite similar genetically, but tend to have “purple” instead of “dark blue”
Physically, of course, whites’ most distinctive feature is pale skin. They are also unique among human clades in their variety of hair and eye colors, ranging from dark to light, and tend to have wavy hair that is “oval” in cross-section. (Africans tend to have curly hair that is flat in cross section, and Asians tend to have straight hair that is cylindrical in cross section. See map for more hair details.)
There are other traits–the Wikipedia page on “Caucasian race” (not exactly synonymous with “whites”) notes:
According to George W. Gill and other modern forensic anthropologists, physical traits of Caucasoid crania are generally distinct from those of the Mongoloid and Negroid races. They assert that they can identify a Caucasoid skull with an accuracy of up to 95% by the following features: [20][21][22][23][24]
An orthognathic profile, with minimal protrusion of the lower part of the face (little or no prognathism).
Retreating zygomatic bones (cheekbones), making the face look more “pointed”.
But I am not going to deal with any of these, unless I hear of something like the EDAR gene coding for a bunch of traits.
Old racial classifications made use of language groups as stand-ins for racial groups. This turns out to be not very reliable, as we’ve found that in many cases, a small group of conquerors has managed to impose its language without imposing its genetics, as you’ve discovered in real life if you’ve ever met an African or Indian who speaks English.
The first known modern humans in Europe (IE, not Neanderthals nor Homo Erectuses,) popularly known as Cro-Magnons and unpopularly known as European early modern humans, (because anthropologists hate being understood dislike sounding like commoners,) lived around 43,ooo-45,000 years ago in Italy. By 41,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons had reached the southern coast of England.
Humanity’s path out of Africa
(Incidentally, Mungo Man, found in south-east Australia, is also estimated to be about 40,000 years old, suggesting that either:
A. People took a much longer route from Africa to Europe than to Australia
B. Europe was difficult to enter when folks left Africa, possibly because of glaciers or Neanderthals
C. There were multiple Out-of-Africa events, or
D. Our knowledge is incomplete.
D is obviously true, and I favor C regardless of Mungo’s true age.)
source: Wikipedia
These Cro-Magnons appear to have been brown skinned, brown eyed, and black haired–they likely looked more like their close relatives in the Middle East (whatever they looked like,) than their distant descendants in modern Europe. (Despite all of the mixing and conquering of the centuries, I think modern Europeans are partially descended from Cro-Magnons, but I could be wrong.)
The Cro-Magnons carved the famous “Venus of Willendorf” (we don’t really know if the figurine was intended as a “goddess” or a fertility figure or just a portrait of a local lady or what, but it’s a nice name,) among many other similar figurines, some of them quite stylized.
Some people think the figurines look African, with cornrows or peppercorn hair and steatopygia. Others suggest the figurines are wearing hats or braids, and point out that not all of them are fat or have large butts.
So when did Europeans acquire their modern appearances? Here’s what I’ve found so far:
Variations in the KITL gene have been positively associated with about 20% of melanin concentration differences between African and non-African populations. One of the alleles of the gene has an 80% occurrence rate in Eurasian populations.[52][53] The ASIP gene has a 75–80% variation rate among Eurasian populations compared to 20–25% in African populations.[54] Variations in the SLC24A5 gene account for 20–25% of the variation between dark and light skinned populations of Africa,[55]and appear to have arisen as recently as within the last 10,000 years.[56] The Ala111Thr or rs1426654 polymorphism in the coding region of the SLC24A5 gene reaches fixation in Europe, but is found across the globe, particularly among populations in Northern Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia.[57][58][59]
According to a team of researchers from Copenhagen University, a single mutation which arose as recently as 6-10,000 years ago was responsible for all the blue-eyed people alive on Earth today.
The team, whose research is published in the journal Human Genetics, identified a single mutation in a gene called OCA2, which arose by chance somewhere around the northwest coasts of the Black Sea in one single individual, about 8,000 years ago.
The hair color gene MC1R has at least seven variants in Europe giving the continent a wide range of hair and eye shades. Based on recent genetic research carried out at three Japanese universities, the date of the genetic mutation that resulted in blond hair in Europe has been isolated to about 11,000 years ago during the last ice age.[25] …
Recent archaeological and genetic study published in 2014 found that, seven “Scandinavian hunter-gatherers” found in 7700-year-oldMotala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2, they also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and also contribute to lighter skin and blond hair.[29] …
Genetic research published in 2014, 2015 and 2016 found that Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans, who migrated to Europe in early bronze age were overwhelmingly dark-eyed (brown), dark-haired and had a skin colour that was moderately light, though somewhat darker than that of the average modern European.[49] While light pigmentation traits had already existed in pre-Indo-European Europeans (both farmers and hunter-gatherers) and long-standing philological attempts to correlate them with the arrival of Indo-Europeans from the steppes were misguided.[50] …
Genetic analysis in 2014 also found that Afanasevo culture which flourished in Altai Mountains were genetically identical to Yamnaya Proto-Indo-Europeans and that they did not carry genetic alleles for blonde hair or light eyes.[55][51][52]Afanasevo culture was later replaced by second wave of Indo-European invaders from Andronovo culture, who were product of Corded Ware admixture that took place in Europe, and carried genetic alleles that causes blond hair and light eyes.[55][51][52]
An interesting finding [in Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans] is that the Luxembourg hunter-gatherer probably had blue eyes (like a Mesolithic La Brana Iberian, a paper on which seems to be in the works) but darker skin than the LBK farmer who had brown eyes but lighter skin. Raghavan et al. did not find light pigmentation in Mal’ta (but that was a very old sample), so with the exception of light eyes that seem established for Western European hunter-gatherers (and may have been “darker” in European steppe populations, but “lighter” in Bronze Age South Siberians?), the origin of depigmentation of many recent Europeans remains a mystery.
… we estimate that the onset of the sweep shared by Europeans and East Asians at KITLG occurred approximately 30,000 years ago, after the out-of-Africa migration, whereas the selective sweeps for the European-specific alleles at TYRP1, SLC24A5, and SLC45A2 started much later, within the last 11,000–19,000 years, well after the first migrations of modern humans into Europe.
In a 2015 study based on 230 ancient DNA samples, researchers traced the origins of several genetic adaptations found in Europe.[46] The original mesolithic hunter-gatherers were dark skinned and blue eyed.[46] The HERC2 and OCA2 variations for blue eyes are derived from the original mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and the genes were not found in the Yamna people.[46] The HERC2 variation for blue eyes first appears around 13,000 to 14,000 years ago in Italy and the Caucasus.[38]
The migration of the neolithic farmers into Europe brought along several new adaptations.[46]The variation for light skin color was introduced to Europe by the neolithic farmers.[46] After the arrival of the neolithic farmers, a SLC22A4 mutation was selected for, a mutation which probably arose to deal with ergothioneine deficiency but increases the risk of ulcerative colitis, celiac disease, and irritable bowel disease.
The genetic variations for lactose persistence and greater height came with the Yamna people.[46]
To sum:
Skin: 10,000 years, 11-19,000 years, possibly arriving after blue eyes
Blond hair: 11,000 years
Blue eyes: 6-10,000 years ago, 13,000 to 14,000 years ago
It looks like some of these traits emerged in different populations and later combined as they spread, but they all look like they arose at approximately the same time.
Obviously I have neglected red and brown hair, green and hazel eyes, but the genetics all seem to be related.
Okay, so this is just me thinking (and mathing) out loud. Suppose we have two different groups (A and B) of 100 people each (arbitrary number chosen for ease of dividing.) In Group A, people are lumped into 5 large “clans” of 20 people each. In Group B, people are lumped in 20 small clans of 5 people each.
Each society has an average IQ of 100–ten people with 80IQs, ten people with 120IQs, and eighty people with 100IQs. I assume that there is slight but not absolute assortative mating, so that most high-IQ and low-IQ people end up marrying someone average.
IQ pairings:
100/100 100/80 100/120 80/80 120/120 (IQ)
30 9 9 1 1 (couples)
Okay, so there should be thirty couples where both partners have 100IQs, nine 100/80IQ couples, nine 100/120IQ couples, one 80/80IQ couple, and one 120/120IQ couple.
If each couple has 2 kids, distributed thusly:
100/100=> 10% 80, 10% 120, and 80% 100
120/120=> 100% 120
80/80 => 100% 80
120/100=> 100% 110
80/100 => 100% 90
Then we’ll end up with eight 80IQ kids, eighteen 90IQ, forty-eight 100IQ, eighteen 110 IQ, and 8 120IQ.
So, under pretty much perfect and totally arbitrary conditions that probably only vaguely approximate how genetics actually works (also, we are ignoring the influence of random chance on the grounds that it is random and therefore evens out over the long-term,) our population approaches a normal bell-curved IQ distribution.
Not bad for a very, very rough model that is trying to keep the math very simple so I can write it blog post window instead of paper, though clearly 6 children have gotten lost somewhere. (rounding error???)
Anyway, now let’s assume that we don’t have a 2-child policy in place, but that being smart (or dumb) does something to your reproductive chances.
In the simplest model, people with 80IQs have zero children, 90s have one child, 100s have 2 children, 110s have 3 children, and 120s have 4 children.
oh god but the couples are crossed so do I take the average or the top IQ? I guess I’ll take average.
Gen 2:
100/100 100/80 100/120 80/80 120/120 (IQ)
30 9 9 1 1 (couples)
60 kids 9 kids 27 kids 0 4 kids
6, 48, 6
So our new distribution is six 80IQ, nine 90IQ, forty-eight 100IQ, twenty-seven 110IQ, and ten 120IQ.
(checks math oh good it adds up to 100.)
We’re not going to run gen three, as obviously the trend will continue.
Let’s go back to our original clans. Society A has 5 clans of 20 people each; Society B has 20 clans of 5 people each.
With 10 high-IQ and 10 low-IQ people per society, each clan in A is likely to have 2 smart and 2 dumb people. Each clan in B, by contrast, is likely to have only 1 smart or 1 dumb person. For our model, each clan will be the reproductive unit rather than each couple, and we’ll take the average IQ of each clan.
Society A: 5 clans with average of 100 IQ => social stasis.
Society B: 20 clans, 10 with average of 96, 10 with average of 106. Not a big difference, but if the 106s have even just a few more children over the generations than the 96s, they will gradually increase as a % of the population.
Of course, over the generations, a few of our 5-person clans will get two smart people (average IQ 108), a dumb and a smart (average 100), and two dumb (92.) The 108 clans will do very well for themselves, and the 92 clans will do very badly.
Speculative conclusions:
If society functions so that smart people have more offspring than dumb people (definitely not a given in the real world,) then: In society A, everyone benefits from the smart people, whose brains uplift their entire extended families (large clans.) This helps everyone, especially the least capable, who otherwise could not have provided for themselves. However, the average IQ in society A doesn’t move much, because you are likely to have equal numbers of dumb and smart people in each family, balancing each other out. In Society B, the smart people are still helping their families, but since their families are smaller, random chance dictates that they are less likely to have a dumb person in their families. The families with the misfortune to have a dumb member suffer and have fewer children as a result; the families with the good fortune to have a smart member benefit and have more children as a result. Society B has more suffering, but also evolves to have a higher average IQ. Society A has less suffering, but its IQ does not change. Obviously this a thought experiment and should not be taken as proof of anything about real world genetics. But my suspicion is that this is basically the mechanism behind the evolution of high-IQ in areas with long histories of nuclear, atomized families, and the mechanism suppressing IQ in areas with strongly tribal norms. (See HBD Chick for everything family structure related.)
Basically: Everyone outside of Africa has some Neanderthal DNA. It looks like the ancestors of the Melanesians interbred once with Neanderthals; the ancestors of Europeans interbred twice; the ancestors of Asians interbred three times.
Small amounts of Neanderthal DNA also show up in Africa, probably due to back-migration of people from Eurasia.
Denisovan DNA shows up mainly in Melanesians, but I think there is also a very small amount that shows up in south east Asia, some (or something similar) in Tibetans, and possibly a small amount in the Brazilian rainforest.
Now some kind of other archaic DNA has been detected in the Hazda, Sandawe, and Pygmies of Africa.
Finishing up with our discussion, (in response to a reader’s question):
Why are people snobs about intelligence?
Is math ability better than verbal?
Do people only care about intelligence in the context of making money?
Now, this is the point in the conversation where somebody tends to say something like, “My cousin / little sister /uncle is retarded, but they are still a beautiful, wonderful person and I love them as much as everyone else, and therefore it is mean to say that smart people are higher status than dumb people.”
It is good that you love your family. You should love your family. I am sure your relatives are lovely people, and you enjoy their company, and would be worse off without them.
But by the same token, I am grateful for the fact that I have never had polio, smallpox, or Ebola. I am thankful that I did not die in childbirth (my own or my childrens’.) I am thankful for life-saving surgeries, medications, and mass-vaccination campaigns that have massively reduced the quantity of human suffering, and I happily praise the doctors and scientists who made all of this possible.
That is why doctors and scientists are higher status than dumb people, and why math-smart people (who tend to end up in science) believe that they should have more status than verbal-smart people.
But on to #3--what is this “intelligence” and “money” connection? (And why does our questioner think it is so bad?)
The obvious answer is no, people don’t only care about intelligence in the context of making money. People also care about enjoying music and reading good books and having fun with their friends, having pleasant conversations and not dying of cancer.
But people are practical creatures, and their first priority is making sure that they and their children will eat tomorrow.
In a purely meritocratic society, more intelligent people will tend to end up in professions that require more intellect and more years of training, which will in turn allow them to demand higher wages. (So will people with rare physical talents, like athleticism and musical ability.) Unintelligent people, by contrast, will end up in the jobs that require the least thought and least training, where they will soon be replaced by robots.
The incentive to pay your doctor more than your trash collector is obvious.
The truly bright and creative, of course, will go beyond merely being employed and actually start companies, invent products/processes, and generally reshape the world around them, all of which results in making even more money.
The truly dull, by contrast, even when they can get jobs, tend to be impulsive and bad at planning, which results in the loss of what little money they have.
We do not live in a purely meritocratic society. No one does. We make efforts to that end, though, which is why public schools exist and employers are officially not supposed to consider things like race and gender when hiring people. Which means that our society is pretty close to meritocratic.
And in fact, the correlation between IQ and wealth/income is remarkably robust:
There are a few outliers–the gulf oil states are far richer than their IQs would predict, due to oil; China is poorer than its IQ predicts, which may be due to the lingering effects of communism or due to some quirk in the nature of Chinese intelligence (either way, I expect a very China-dominant future)–but otherwise, IQ predicts average per cap GDP quite well.
Here people tend to bring up a few common objections:
1. I know a guy who is smart but poor, and a guy who is dumb but rich! Two anecdotes are totally sufficient to completely disprove a general trend calculated from millions of data points.
Yes, obviously some really smart people have no desire to go into high-paying fields, and devote their lives to art, music, volunteering with the poor, raising children, or just chilling with their friends. Some smart people have health problems, are unfairly discriminated against, live in areas with few jobs, or are otherwise unable to reach their potentials. Some dumb people luck into wealth or a high-paying job.
It would be a strange world indeed if IQ were absolute destiny.
But the existence of outliers does not negate the overall trends–smarter people tend to get jobs in higher-paying fields and manage their money more effectively; dumb people tend to get jobs in lower-paying fields and manage their money ineffectively.
2. Maybe everyone is equally smart, but just expresses it in different ways. (Corollary form: IQ is just a measure of how good you are at taking IQ tests.)
Either we mean something when we say “intelligence,” or we do not. If we want to define “intelligence” so that everyone is equally smart, then yes, everyone is equally smart. If we want to know if some people are better than others at doing math, then we find that some people are better than others at doing math. Are some people better than others at reading? Yes. Are some people better than others at football? Yes.
If you transported me tomorrow to a hunter-gatherer community, and they gave me a test of the skills necessary for survival there, I’d flunk (and die.) They’d conclude that I was an idiot who couldn’t gather her way out of a paper bag.
Very well, then.
But neither of us lives in a hunter-gatherer society, nor do we particularly care about the skills necessary to survive in one. If I want to know the kinds of intelligence that are necessary for success in industrial societies–the kind of success that may have led to the existence of industrial societies–then you’re looking at normal old “intelligence” as people conventionally use the term, measured by IQ scores, the SAT, vague impressions, or report cards.
3. “You’ve got causality backwards–people with money send their kids to expensive prep schools, which results in them learning more, which results in higher IQ scores. These “smart” kids then use family connections/prestige to land good jobs, resulting in higher wealth.”
As this shows, the heritability of IQ and of behavioral traits is consistently high, reaching into the 0.8-0.9+ range. This means, out of a group of people, at least 80-90% of the overall differences between them (known as the “variance” in statistical parlance) can be attributed to genetic differences between them. This chart shows that this becomes most evident in adulthood, when genes have been given a chance to fully express themselves. I have summed this up in a neat set of rules:
Heredity: 70-80%
Shared environment: 0%
Something else [random chance]: 30-20%
In other words, adopted kids end up with the IQ scores you’d predict from looking at their biological parents, not their legal parents. Baring extremes of poverty or abuse, the way your parents raise you–including the quality of the schools you attend–has very little long-term effect on IQ.
On a related note, massively increased school expenditures since the ’80s has done very little to test scores:
IQ doesn’t lend itself to much environmental manipulation – indeed, interventions that attempt to boost IQ have all met with failure. As well, IQ remains predictive even when measured in youth. It is predictive even when one controls for things like socioeconomic status (say during childhood). Indeed, the best control for this, looking at different siblings within a family, finds that IQ is predictive of real world outcomes between siblings – the sibling with the higher IQ tends to do better.
Everybody wants to know why some groups or countries out perform other groups or countries, but no one likes to be told that they–or a group that they belong to–are less intelligent than others. No one wants to be in the red; everyone wants to blame their troubles on someone else.
Thus a great deal of debate; some people want to prove that the wealth and poverty of nations depends on IQ, and some people want to prove that it does not. No matter your personal opinions on the matter, it’s pretty hard to have a discussions about IQ without the debate resurfacing.
Now, I fully believe that rich people enroll their kids expensive test-prep classes, which result in small increases in SAT scores over students who’ve never seen the test before (an effect that wears off once classes are over.) It may also be that people from countries where schools barely exist look at a test and have no idea what you want them to do with it, regardless of intelligence. But if parental income were the entire story, rich whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians ought to all get similar SAT scores, (with the exception of verbal scores for ESL-students,) and poor whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians ought to all get similar, lower scores. Instead, the children of wealthy Black parents have worse SAT scores than the children of poor whites and Asians. (Except Asian verbal scores, which are pretty bad at the low end–probably an ESL-artifact.)
Regardless, a certain kind of intelligence appears to be useful for building certain kinds of societies.
Conclusion:
Yes, there are lots of reasons to value intelligence, like making art and enjoying a good book. And there are many lifestyles that people enjoy that do not require making lots of money, nor do they have much to do with capitalism. But there exists, nonetheless, a fairly reliable correlation–at the group level–between average IQ and income/wealth/development level. Most people don’t care about this because they want to exploit each other and destroy the environment, but because they want to be well-fed, healthy, and happy.
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.)
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.
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)
… 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]
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.
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.)
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.
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. …
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.
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:
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 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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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:
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 culturefrom 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 ArcticPaths of the great Bantu MigrationMap 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.
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.
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.
