One of the most distinctive things about humans is how widely spread our species is. Few species that have not hitched a ride with us have managed to spread so far and wide. Men armed with stone tools built boats and settled the furthest islands, from Hawaii to New Zealand; men sewed hides of mammoth skin and built shelters out of snow to survive in the arctic. We live in deserts and swamps, mountains and valleys, and have thrived nearly everywhere we’ve gone.
And–until recently–our ability to travel far and wide resulted in a plethora of human species. Homo Erectus, Neanderthals, and Denisovans all lived around the same time, alongside Homo naledi (South Africa), Homo heidelbergensis (Africa), H. Floresiensis (Island of Flores, Indonesia), and H. luzonensis (from the island of Luzon, Philippines.)
Those aren’t even all the varieties of human that have existed, people who looked and behaved much like us. There were others, some older, some whose bones we haven’t found, yet, but whose DNA shows up in modern humans.
Map of the distribution of Middle Pleistocene (Acheulean) cleaver finds (Wikipedia)
The first out of Africa event occurred about 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus hefted his achulean handaxe and headed north. He seems to have thrived in Asia, arriving in China a mere 100,000 years later, and Indonesia 50,000 years after that. It took a fair bit longer–another 250,000 years–for erectus to arrive in Spain, and he had trouble crossing the mountains into the rest of Europe (it was probably too cold for him.)
This was before widespread use of fire (about one million years ago) and clothes (about 170,000 years ago) allowed humans to spread much further–one of the oldest known sewing needles was wielded not by Homo sapiens, but by our cousins the Denisovans, in Siberia.
But what motivated us? Why did we spread so far?
Before the invention of agriculture, most humans must have been nomadic, at least part of the year. Our stone tools let us be hunters–despite our puny size–and we probably followed our prey, and when we ran out or couldn’t find the animals we sought, we moved on in search of more.
Did being smart let us expand our initial range out of Africa, or did expanding our range as we followed game make us smarter? Probably both; early Homo erectuses skulls had volumes around 850 cubic centimeters, but by the time erectus reached Indonesia, his skull had grown to 1,100 CCs. But erectus did not persist–he was replaced by later waves of humans who emerged from Africa with much more advanced tools.
Settling down must have been quite the change–we moderns find moving stressful, but our ancestors probably found staying put strange and difficult. Perhaps they planted, then wandered off for a few months until their crops ripened.
Even today, I think there’s still some urge to wander left in us. Somewhere between 15 and 25 we get the urge to get out of Dodge, to seek our fortunes (and spouses) somewhere far from home.
I’ve long wondered which group arrived first in Europe: the Indo-Europeans or the Finno-Ugrics. Most Europeans speak one of the hundreds of languages in the Indo-European family tree, but a few groups speak languages from the mostly Siberian Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic family.
(Sorry, guys, I’m out of practice writing and these sentences don’t sound good to me, but the only way to improve is to forge ahead, so let’s go.)
Major countries/ethnic groups that speak Finno-Ugric languages include the Finns (obviously,) Saami/Lapps, Hungarians, and Estonians. The most southerly of this family, Hungarian, arrived in the Carpathian Basin within the span of recorded History (in 894 or 895, followed by a few years of warfare to secure their territory,) but the origins of the other European Finno-Ugric languages remains mysterious.
Who arrived first, the Indo Europeans or the Finns? Did the Saami always live in their current homelands, or did they once range much further south or east? Did they migrate here recently or long ago (since the entire area was under ice sheets during the ice age, no one lived there tens of thousands of years ago.)
With the exception of Hungarian, these languages all hail from the far north (especially if you include the Samoyidic languages, which hail from north of Komi on the map,) a cold and forbidding land where herding, hunting, gathering, and fishing have remained the primary way of life until quite recently–the long winters making agriculture very difficult.
Lamnidis et al have a new paper out on Ancient Fennoscandian DNA that sheds a fascinating light on the subject:
Here we analyse ancient genomic data from 11 individuals from Finland and north-western Russia. We show that the genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago. This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today. Additionally, we show that ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age, which adds to the historical and linguistic information about the population history of Finland.
Let’s cut to the pictures, because they are worth a thousand words:
Just in case you are unclear on the geography, the Modern Saami come from northern part of the Finnoscandian peninsula. Six of the ancient remains came from Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov in the Murmansk Region on the Kola Peninsula–that’s the topmost dot on the map, now in Russia. These remains are very old–dated to about 1610-1436 BC.
Seven remains came from Levänluhta in Isokyrö, Finland, from a more recent burial dated to around 300-800 AD. (Actually, I think Levanluhta is a lake, so This is the most southwestern burial on the map, in an area where the modern Finns live.
And the remains of two people came from a much more recent Saami cemetery in the Kola peninsula, Chalmny Varre, dating from the 17 or 1800s.
All of this DNA was compared against a variety of reference populations:
(I would just like to pause for a moment to appreciate both the beauty and hard work that went into these graphs.)
PC2 graphs are a little complicated, but what we’re basically looking at (in color) are two different human population axes. They very roughly correlate to north-south (up and down) and east-west, (left to right), because people tend to be more closely related to their neighbors than people thousands of miles away, but there’s another, more fascinating story going on here.
On the right-hand side, we have a cline that maps very nicely to north and south, from the Yukagir–a people from a part of Russia that’s so far to the northeast it’s almost in Alaska–at the top and the Semende of Indonesia and the Atayal, an indigenous Taiwanese group, at the bottom. (Most Taiwanese you meet are either newly arrived Han Chinese or older Han Chinese; the aboriginal Taiwanese are different, but likely the ancestors of Polynesians.)
DNA from various Asian peoples
Most east Asian DNA shows up as a blend of these two groups (which we may call roughly polar and tropical). In the chart to the right, taken from Haak et al, the polar DNA is red and the tropical is yellow. So the up-down cline on the right side of the map represents which particular mix of Polar/Tropical DNA these folks have.
On the left side of the graph, we have a farming/hunter-gatherer cline. The first farmers hailed from Anatolia (now Turkey, but that was before the Turks moved to Turkey,) and subsequently spread/conquered most of Europe and probably a few other places, because agriculture was quite successful. So the orange is Middle Easterners; above them are southern Europeans like Albanians and Basques; then the English, French, Hungarians, Finns, etc; and finally some older burials of people with descriptive names like “Eastern Hunter-Gatherer” [EHG] or “Scandinavian Hunter-gatherers” [SHG].
(I have to constantly remind myself what these little abbreviations mean, but The Genetic Prehistory of the Baltic Region probably clears things up a bit:
Similarly, in the Eastern Baltic, where foraging continued to be the main form of subsistence until at least 4000 calBCE15, ceramics technology was adopted before agriculture, as seen in the Narva Culture and Combed Ceramic Culture (CCC). Recent genome-wide data of Baltic pottery-producing hunter-gatherers revealed genetic continuity with the preceding Mesolithic inhabitants of the same region as well as influence from the more northern EHG21,22, but did not reveal conclusively whether there was a temporal, geographical or cultural correlation with the affinity to either WHG or EHG.
The transition from the Late (Final) Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (LNBA) is seen as a major transformative period in European prehistory, accompanied by changes in burial customs, technology and mode of subsistence as well as the creation of new cross-continental networks of contact seen in the emergence of the pan-European Corded Ware Complex (CWC, ca. 2900–2300 calBCE) in Central2 and north-eastern Europe21.
If you remember your Guns, Germs, and Steel, Turkish farmers had a really hard time getting their wheat to grow up in really cold places like Northern Russia, Scandinavia and Narva (near the border between Estonia and Russia on the Baltic Sea,) which is why modern Finland is super poor and Turkey and Mexico, where corn was domesticated, are rich–what it doesn’t quite work like that?
Okay.
Anyway.
So most Europeans today are a mix of Anatolian farmers and various European hunter gatherer groups, with exactly how much you got depending a lot on whether the local environment was hospitable to farming. The pure hunter-gatherer genomes therefore show up as “further north” than the mixed, modern genomes of modern French and British folks.
There were additional events besides the Anatolian conquest that shaped modern European genetics–mostly the aforementioned Indo-European conquest–but the Indo-Europeans were at least part hunter-gatherer by DNA (nomadic pastoralists by profession,) so on this scale, their contributions look a lot like the older hunter-gatherer DNA.
So the interesting part of the graph is the middle, where all of the central Eurasian peoples are plotted. The purple band is various Finno-Ugric/Uralic speakers.
Hungarians are solidly in Europe because the ancient conquering Magyars left behind their language, but not much of their DNA (as we’ve discussed previously.) The Nganasan are one of the most thoroughly Siberian peoples you can imagine; they historically survived by hunting reindeer.
The green swaths (light and dark teal) are mostly Turkic-language speaking peoples; the Turkic peoples originated near Mongolia/Korea and spread out from there, mostly absorbing the DNA of whomever they encountered and passing on their language. The authors have also included Mongolian (which is not in the Turkic language family) in the light green group and some Caucuses groups in the dark teal.
Interestingly, the Yukaghir language (far upper right) is (according to Wikipedia,) potentially in the greater Finno-Ugric/Uralic family:
The relationship of the Yukaghir languages with other language families is uncertain, though it has been suggested that they are distantly related to the Uralic languages, thus forming the putative Uralic–Yukaghir language family.[5]
Based on the genetics, I’d say it looks very likely that the ancestors of Uralic-speaking Nganasan and the Yukagirs were conversing in some sort of mutually intelligible language. Unfortunately, Yukaghir has very few speakers and is likely to die, so there’s not much time to research it.
Finally in the Light Teal we have some groups from Pakistan/Afghanistan, like the Balochi.
(Note that all of the colors used in these studies are arbitrary; DNA doesn’t really have a color.)
So where do our ancient DNA remains fall on this graph?
Today, the Levanluhta site is in Finland, surrounded solidly by Finns (and maybe some random Scandinavians; who knows;) in 300-800 AD, the population was almost identical to modern Saami. So even though Saami and Finns both speak Finno-Ugric languages, the Finns replaces the Saami in this area sometime in the past 1,500 years or so.
One Levanlughta skeleton is an exception–the one marked Levanlughta_B; it is clearly closer to the Finns and English on this graph, but deeper mathematical analysis disputes this conclusion:
One of the individuals from Levänluhta (JK2065/Levänluhta_B) rejects a cladal position with modern Saami to the exclusion of most modern Eurasian populations. This individual also rejects a cladal position with Finns. We analysed low coverage genomes from four additional individuals of the Levänluhta site using PCA (Supplementary Figure 3), confirming the exclusive position of Levänluhta_B compared to all other six individuals (including the four low-coverage individuals) from that site, as is consistent with the ADMIXTURE and qpAdm results. The outlier position of this individual cannot be explained by modern contamination, since it passed several tests for authentication (see Methods) along with all other ancient individuals. However, no direct dating was available for the Levänluhta material, and we cannot exclude the possibility of a temporal gap between this individual and the other individuals from that site.
In other words, it is a mystery.
The remains from Chalmny Varre, which we know was a Saami cemetery, unsurprisingly cluster with the other Saami.
The Bolshoy remains, though, are quite interesting. They are shifted slightly in the direction of the ancient hunter-gatherers (perhaps their descendants, if still around, have mixed a bit with the agriculturalists.) Their physical location is about as far east as the Red Squares (ethnic Russians,) yet the more closely resemble the Mansi or the Selkups. (The modern Mansi live here; the modern Selkups live nearby.)
Getting down to the bar graphs, we see this data presented in a different way.
There are three groups that we can see contributing to most modern Europeans–Farmers, represented by the Orange LBK DNA; exclusively Indo-European, Green, notably not found in the Basque; and hunter-gatherers in Dark Blue. (Note that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans hailed from the Central Eurasian steppes and so their DNA could have gotten around there, too.)
The modern Saami also have a Purple component to their DNA, which finds its highest expression in the Nganasan of far eastern polar Russia.
So the oldest burials–the Bolshoy–show no agricultural DNA. They are hunter-gatherers+Siberians, with a touch of Indo-European (probably from a steppe population that might have contributed to the Indos as well) and a bit they share with… the Karitiana of Brazil? Well, the Native Americans did descend from Paleo Siberians, so some genetic relatedness is expected.
The more recent burials, which cluster with the modern Saami, all show agricultural DNA–probably due to marrying a few of the local Finns/Russians who carry some agricultural DNA (who are almost genetically identical on this scale) rather than a pure LBK agriculturalist.
Here we see why the one outlier, Levanlughta_B, doens’t group with the Finns, either–modern Finns and Russians have some of that Nganasan-style Siberian DNA (probably from the same process that gifted Finnish/Russian DNA to the Saami), but Levanlughta_B doesn’t. Levanlughta_B looks more like the Baltic BA sample (Baltic Bronze Age.) Perhaps this individual was just a merchant, traveler, or lost–or represents a stage before the modern Finnish population had been produced.
The Finnish population itself is interesting, because it is genetically very similar to the Russian, but obviously speaks a language far more closely related to Saami (Lapp) than anything in the Indo-European tree. While it is therefore likely that the Finns replaced the Saami in the area around Lake Levanlughta, it seems also probable that in the process, they absorbed a large number of Uralic-speaking people. Who conquered (or married) whom? Did an ancient Balto-Slavic population move into what is now Finland, marry the local Saami girls, and adopt their language? Did an ancient Siberian population speaking a Uralic language conquer some ancient group of Russians, take their women, pass on their Uralic language, and later move into Finland and drive out the locals? Or perhaps something even more complicated occurred.
As for the Bolshoy, are they related (closely) to the modern Saami, or are they a group that simply died out?
The paper goes on:
While the Siberian genetic component presented here [Purple] has been previously described in modern-day populations from the region1,3,9,10, we gain further insights into its temporal depth. Our data suggest that this fourth genetic component found in modern-day north-eastern Europeans arrived in the area before 3500 yBP. It was introduced in the population ancestral to Bolshoy Oleni Ostrov individuals 4000 years ago at latest, as illustrated by ALDER dating using the ancient genome-wide data from the Bolshoy samples. The upper bound for the introduction of this component is harder to estimate. The component is absent in the Karelian hunter-gatherers (EHG)3 dated to 8300–7200 yBP as well as Mesolithic and Neolithic populations from the Baltics from 8300 yBP and 7100–5000 yBP respectively8.
Karelia is a region that crosses the border between Finland and Russia, so it is significant that this Siberian component isn’t found in ancient Karelian hunter-gatherers. Of course, the Siberians could have just been further north, however, the authors note that we have archaeological evidence of the spread of the Bolshoy people:
The large Nganasan-related component in the Bolshoy individuals from the Kola Peninsula provides the earliest direct genetic evidence for an eastern migration into this region. Such contact is well documented in archaeology, with the introduction of asbestos-mixed Lovozero ceramics during the second millennium BC50, and the spread of even-based arrowheads in Lapland from 1900 BCE51,52. Additionally, the nearest counterparts of Vardøy ceramics, appearing in the area around 1,600-1,300 BCE, can be found on the Taymyr peninsula, much further to the East51,52. Finally, the Imiyakhtakhskaya culture from Yakutia spread to the Kola Peninsula during the same period24,53. Contacts between Siberia and Europe are also recognised in linguistics. The fact that the Nganasan-related genetic component is consistently shared among Uralic-speaking populations, with the exceptions of absence in Hungarians and presence in the non-Uralic speaking Russians, makes it tempting to equate this genetic component with the spread of Uralic languages in the area.
The authors qualify this with a bit of “it’s complicated; people move around a lot,” but basically it’s People: not pots.
That was an enjoyable read; I look forward to the next paper from these folks.
The late Henry Harpending of West Hunter blog, along with Greg Cochran, wrote the 10,000 Year Explosion, did anthropological field work among the Ju/’hoansi, and pioneered population genetics. The biography has many interesting parts:
Henry’s early research on population genetics also helped establish the close relationship between genetics and geography. Genetic differences between groups tend to mirror the geographic distance between them, so that a map of genetic distances looks like a geographic map (Harpending and Jenkins, 1973). Henry developed methods for studying this relationship that are still in use. …
Meanwhile, Henry’s Kalahari field experience also motivated an interest in population ecology. Humans cope with variation in resource supply either by storage (averaging over time) or by mobility and sharing (averaging over space). These strategies are mutually exclusive. Those who store must defend their stored resources against others who would like to share them. Conversely, an ethic of sharing makes storage impossible. The contrast between the mobile and the sedentary Ju/’hoansi in Henry’s sample therefore represented a fundamental shift in strategy. …
Diseases need time to cause lesions on bone. If the infected individual dies quickly, no lesion will form, and the skeleton will look healthy. Lesions form only if the infected individual is healthy enough to survive for an extended period. Lesions on ancient bone may therefore imply that the population was healthy! …
In the 1970s, as Henry’s interest in genetic data waned, he began developing population genetic models of social evolution. He overturned 40 years of conventional wisdom by showing that group selection works best not when groups are isolated but when they are strongly connected by gene flow (1980, pp. 58-59; Harpending and Rogers, 1987). When gene flow is restricted, successful mutants cannot spread beyond the initial group, and group selection stalls.
Human DNA varies across geographic regions, with most variation observed so far reflecting distant ancestry differences. Here, we investigate the geographic clustering of genetic variants that influence complex traits and disease risk in a sample of ~450,000 individuals from Great Britain. Out of 30 traits analyzed, 16 show significant geographic clustering at the genetic level after controlling for ancestry, likely reflecting recent migration driven by socio-economic status (SES). Alleles associated with educational attainment (EA) show most clustering, with EA-decreasing alleles clustering in lower SES areas such as coal mining areas. Individuals that leave coal mining areas carry more EA-increasing alleles on average than the rest of Great Britain. In addition, we leveraged the geographic clustering of complex trait variation to further disentangle regional differences in socio-economic and cultural outcomes through genome-wide association studies on publicly available regional measures, namely coal mining, religiousness, 1970/2015 general election outcomes, and Brexit referendum results.
Let’s hope no one reports on this as “They found the Brexit gene!”
The northern United States long served as a land of opportunity for black Americans, but today the region’s racial gap in intergenerational mobility rivals that of the South. I show that racial composition changes during the peak of the Great
Migration (1940-1970) reduced upward mobility in northern cities in the long run,
with the largest effects on black men. I identify urban black population increases
during the Migration at the commuting zone level using a shift-share instrument,
interacting pre-1940 black southern migrant location choices with predicted outmigration from southern counties. The Migration’s negative effects on children’s
adult outcomes appear driven by neighborhood factors, not changes in the characteristics of the average child. As early as the 1960s, the Migration led to greater white enrollment in private schools, increased spending on policing, and higher crime and incarceration rates. I estimate that the overall change in childhood environment induced by the Great Migration explains 43% of the upward mobility gap between black and white men in the region today.
43% is huge and, IMO, too big. However, the author may be on to something.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb) is a globally distributed, obligate pathogen of humans that can be divided into seven clearly defined lineages. … We reconstructed M.tb migration in Africa and Eurasia, and investigated lineage specific patterns of spread. Applying evolutionary rates inferred with ancient M.tb genome calibration, we link M.tb dispersal to historical phenomena that altered patterns of connectivity throughout Africa and Eurasia: trans-Indian Ocean trade in spices and other goods, the Silk Road and its predecessors, the expansion of the Roman Empire and the European Age of Exploration. We find that Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia have been critical in the dispersal of M.tb.
I spend a surprising amount of time reading about mycobacteria.
Hello my Turkish and Turkic readers! In honor of having written a lot on this blog, we’re taking a look back at our most popular posts, and today’s is on the genetic history of Turkey and the Turkic peoples.
Since my original post, I have learned many things about Turkey–mostly that Turks and other Turkic peoples love their culture and heritage. Note: I will probably use “Turkey” and “Anatolia”, interchangeably in this post. Turkey is the name for the modern state located in the region; Anatolia is a more generic name for the geography. I know that “Turkey” as a state or even a people didn’t exist 8,000 years ago.
Turkey has a long and fascinating history. It is possibly the cradle of civilization, as sites like Gobekli Tepe attest, and one of the birthplaces of agriculture.
Early farmers spread out from Anatolia into Europe and Asia, contributing much of the modern European gene pool. There are many Y-DNA haplogroups in modern Turkey, which most likely means the Turkish male population hasn’t been completely replaced in recent invasions. (It’s not uncommon for an invasion to wipe out 80+% of the male population in an area.) About 24% of Turkish men carry haplogroup J2, which might not have originated in Turkey all of those centuries ago, but by 12,000 years ago it was common throughout Turkey (and today remains the most common haplogroup). This lineage spread with the Anatolian farmers into Europe around 8,000 years ago. and presumably Asia, as well.
The second most common Y-haplogroup, at 16%, is good old R1b, which was carried into Turkey around 5-6,000 years ago by the Indo-European invaders. (The Indo-European invasion in Spain apparently wiped out all of the local men, but was not nearly so bad in Turkey.) These invaders spoke the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European tree, including Hittite and Luwian.
The Anatolian languages went extinct following Anatolia’s conquest by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC (though it took several centuries for the languages to fall completely out of use.)
Haplogroup G–11%–is most common in the Caucasus, spread thinly over much of Anatolia and Iran, and even more thinly through Europe, North Africa, and central Asia. It’s probably a pretty old group–Otzi the Iceman was a member of the G clade.
Haplogroup E-M215 is found in about 10% of Turks and is most common in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, but is also quite common in Bedouin populations. It seems likely to be a very old haplogroup.
J1–9%–is common throughout the Middle East and amusingly reaches 46% among Jewish men named “Cohen.”
The rest of Turkish Y-chromosomes hail either from related haplogroups, like R1a, or represent smaller fractions of the population, like Q, 2%, commonly found in Siberia and Native Americans.
So how much Turkish DNA hails from Turkic peoples?
Modern Turks don’t speak Anatolian or Greek. They speak a Turkic language, which hails originally from an area near Mongolia. The Turkic-speaking peoples migrated into Anatolia around a thousand years ago, after a long migration/expansion through central Eurasia that culminated with the conquering of Constantinople. Today, the most notable Turkic-speaking groups are the Turks of Turkey, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen and Kyrgyz people.
The difficulty with tracing Turkic DNA is that, unlike the Mongols, Turkic DNA isn’t terribly homogeneous. The Mongols left a definite genetic signature wherever they went, but imparted less of their language–that is, they killed, raped, and taxed, but didn’t mix much with the locals. By contrast, the Turkic peoples seem to have mixed with their neighbors as they spread, imparting their language and probably not massacring too many people.
Asian, Australian, and Melanesian ethic groups (including Indian, Middle Eastern, and Chinese) from Haak et al’s dataset
The largest autosomal study on Turkish genetics (on 16 individuals) concluded the weight of East Asian (presumably Central Asian) migration legacy of the Turkish people is estimated at 21.7%.[1]
Note that Turkey shares haplogroup J2 with its Turkic neighbors. This raises an interesting possibility: early Anatolian farmers spread into central Eurasia, mixed with local nomadic Turkic speakers, and then migrated back into Turkey. But 16 people isn’t much of a study.
“South Asian contribution to Turkey’s population was significantly higher than East/Central Asian contributions, suggesting that the genetic variation of medieval Central Asian populations may be more closely related to South Asian populations, or that there was continued low level migration from South Asia into Anatolia.”
“South Asian” here I assume means that Turkey looks more like Iran than Uzbekistan, which is true. The Turkic wanderers likely passed through Iran on their way to Turkey, picking up Iranian culture (such as Islam) and DNA–plus the pre-existing Anatolian population was probably closer to Iran than Uzbekistan anyway.
… the exact kinship between current East Asians and the medieval Oghuz Turks is uncertain. For instance, genetic pools of Central Asian Turkic peoples is particularly diverse and modern Oghuz Turkmens living in Central Asia are with higher West Eurasian genetic component than East Eurasian.[2][3][4]
I think “West Eurasian” is a euphemism for “Caucasian.” East Eurasian (aka Asian) DNA, you can see in the map above, tends to be red+yellow, tending toward all red in Siberia and all yellow in Taiwan. Indo-European groups, including Iranians, tend to have a teal/blue/orange pattern. Turkmen, Uzbeks, and Uygurs, as you can see in the graph, have a combination of both sets of DNA. The Turks also have a small amount of east Asian DNA–but much less–while their neighbors in Iran and central Eurasia share a little Indian DNA.
Several studies have concluded that the genetic haplogroups indigenous to Western Asia have the largest share in the gene pool of the present-day Turkish population.[5][6][7][8][5][9][10][11] An admixture analysis determined that the Anatolian Turks share most of their genetic ancestry with non-Turkic populations in the region and the 12th century is set as an admixture date.[12]
Western Asia=Middle East.
So Turkish DNA is about 22% Turkic, from nomads who entered the country via Iran, and about 78% ancient Anatolian, from the people who had already lived there on the Anatolian plateau for centuries.
But as the Turkic peoples (and many of the comments on my original post) show, culture doesn’t have to be genetic, and many Turkic people feel a strong cultural connection to each other. (And many people report that various Turkic languages are pretty easy to understand if you speak one Turkic language–EG:
hello everyone I’m an Uzbek,
… tatars played a great role in Genghis’s empire and they had an empire after dividing the empire called Golden Horde, it was mongol state but after it became to turki with a time. and their sons are kazakh and kirgiz. Thats why we uzbeks can understand turkish easly more than our neighboors kazakhs. and we uzbeks are not mongoloid like kazakhs.because uzbek language has oghuz and karluk dialect. uzbek-uygur are like turkish-azerbaijani or turkish-crimean tatar. thats why uzbek dialect is most understandable language for every turkic people. but we can understand %95 uygur, %85 turkish-turkmen, %70 azerbaijani %50 kazakh.
Our Uzbeki friend’s full comment is very interesting, and I recommend you read the whole thing.
For that matter, many thanks to everyone who has left interesting comments sharing your family’s histories or personal perspectives on Turkish/Turkic culture and history over the years–I hope you have enjoyed this update.
Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest surviving religions and possibly its first monotheistic one. It emerged in now-Iran about 3,000 years ago, but following the Arab (Islamic) conquest of Persia, many Zoroastrians migrated to India, where they became known as the Parsi (from the word for “Persian.”) To be clear, where this post refers to “Parsis” it means the specific Zoroastrian community in India, and where it refers to “Iranian Zoroastrians” it means the Zoroastrians currently living in Iran.
Although Zoroastrianism was once the official state religion of Persia, today only about 190,000 believers remain (according to Wikipedia,) and their numbers are declining.
Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta observed in 1563 that “there are merchants … in the kingdom of Cambaia … known as Esparcis. We Portuguese call them Jews, but they are not so. They are Gentios.”
Another parallel: Ashkenazi Jews and Parsis are both reported to be very smart. Famous Parsis include Queen Guitarist Freddy Mercury, nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha, and our Harvard-employed friend, Homi K. Bhabha.
Historical records indicate that migrants from Persia brought Zoroastrianism to India, but there is debate over the timing of these migrations. Here we present genome-wide autosomal, Y chromosome, and mitochondrial DNA data from Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians and neighboring modern-day Indian and Iranian populations and conduct a comprehensive genome-wide genetic analysis in these groups. … we find that Zoroastrians in Iran and India have increased genetic homogeneity relative to other sampled groups in their respective countries, consistent with their current practices of endogamy. Despite this, we infer that Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) intermixed with local groups sometime after their arrival in India, dating this mixture to 690–1390 CE and providing strong evidence that Iranian Zoroastrian ancestry was maintained primarily through the male line.
Note that all diasporic–that is, migrant–groups appear to be heavily male. Women tend to stay put while men move and take new wives in their new homelands.
By making use of the rich information in DNA from ancient human remains, we also highlight admixture in the ancestors of Iranian Zoroastrians dated to 570 BCE–746CE, older than admixture seen in any other sampled Iranian group, consistent with a long-standing isolation of Zoroastrians from outside groups. …
Admixture with whom? (Let’s just read the paper and see if it answers the question):
Furthermore, a recent study using genome-wide autosomal DNA found that haplotype patterns in Iranian Zoroastrians matched more than other modern Iranian groups to a high-coverage early Neolithic farmer genome from Iran …
A study of four restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) suggested a closer genetic affinity of Parsis to Southern Europeans than to non-Parsis from Bombay. Furthermore, NRY haplotype analysis and patterns of variation at the HLA locus in the Parsis of Pakistan support a predominately Iranian origin. …
In (1) and (2), we detected admixture in the Parsis dated to 27 (range: 17–38) and 32 (19–44) generations ago, respectively, in each case between one predominantly Indian-like source and one predominantly Iranian-like source. This large contribution from an Iranian-like source (∼64%–76%) is not seen in any of our other 7 Indian clusters, though we detect admixture in each of these 7 groups from wide-ranging sources related to modern day individuals from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Europe, Pakistan, or of Jewish heritage (Figures 2 and S7, Tables S5–S7). For Iranian Zoroastrians, we detect admixture only under analysis (2), occurring 66 (42–89) generations ago between a source best genetically explained as a mixture of modern-day Croatian and Cypriot samples, and a second source matching to the Neolithic Iranian farmer WC1. … The two Iranian Zoroastrians that had been excluded as outliers exhibited admixture patterns more similar to the Lebanese, Turkish Jews, or Iranian Bandari individuals than to Zoroastrians (Table S8).
Parsi Wedding, 1905
If I assume a generation is about 25 years long, 27 generations was about 675 years ago; 32 was about 800 years ago. (Though given the wide range on these dates, perhaps we should estimate between 425 and 1,100 years ago.) This sounds consistent with Parsis taking local wives after they arrived in India between the 8th and 10th century CE (after the Arab conquest of Perisa.) Also consistently, this admixture isn’t found in Iranian Zoroastrians.
The Iranians’ admixture occurred about 1,050 and 2,225 years ago, which is an awfully broad time range. Could Croatian or Cypriot migrants have arrived due to the Greek/Roma/ Byzantine Empires? Were they incorporated into the Persian Empire as a result of its territorial conquests or the Arab conquest? Or were they just long-distance merchants who happened to wander into the area?
The Fire Temple of Baku
The authors found that Parsi priests had “the lowest gene diversity values of all population samples studied for both Y and mtDNA,” though they didn’t have enough Iranian Zoroastrian priest samples to compare them to Parsi priests. (I bet this is similar to what you’d find if you sampled Orthodox rabbis.)
Finally, in the genetic selection and diseases section, the authors write:
In the case of the Iranian Zoroastrians, … some of the most significant SNPs… are located upstream of gene SLC39A10 … with an important role in humoral immunity61 or in CALB2 … which plays a major role in the cerebellar physiology.62
With regard to the positive selection tests on Parsis versus India Hindu/Gujarati groups, the most significant SNPs were embedded in WWOX … associated with neurological disorders like early epilepsy … and in a region in chromosome 20 … (see Table S11 for a complete list). …
Genetic isolation and endogamous practices can be associated with higher frequencies of disease prevalence. For example, there are reports claiming a high recurrence of diseases such as diabetes among the Iranian Zoroastrians, and Parkinson, colon cancer, or the deficiency of G6PD, an enzyme that triggers the sudden reduction of red blood cells, among the Parsis.
However, the authors warn that these results are weak (these are rare conditions in an already small population) and cannot not be depended upon.
Over the past three years, the number of human tragedies on the Mediterranean Sea has reached an unprecedented level.1 The now-iconic image of a German rescue worker cradling a drowned migrant baby in his arms in the sea between Libya and Italy remains a disturbing reminder of the over 5,000 migrants and refugees who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean in 2016 alone.2 Of the European Union’s (EU) responses to this humanitarian crisis, perhaps the most controversial has been Operation Sophia: a naval mission to combat human smugglers and traffickers operating in the Mediterranean, in particular off the coast of Libya.3 As part of Operation Sophia, the EU is now supporting and training the Libyan Navy and Coastguard to combat smuggling and stop migrant departures within Libya’s territorial sea—waters within twelve nautical miles of Libya’s nautical baseline. The EU simultaneously continues to seek permission for European Union Naval Force Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED) vessels and personnel themselves to enter Libya’s territorial sea to seize and dispose of smuggling vessels. (These two components will hereinafter together be referred to as the Operation Sophia “territorial sea component.”)
Okay. Let’s unpack this. First, a little background on Yale Law: for those of you who don’t know, it is regarded as the most prestigious law school in the US. Paul Strauch might be an unknown American law student who doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page (yet,) but he still has the power to influence the development and implementation of European Human Rights law. According to his profile on Linked In, Strauch has only had one real job–he worked as an “Investment Banking Compliance Analyst” for Goldman Sachs for a year. The rest of his “work experience” is three-month internships.
Getting an accurate estimate of the full scale of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean is tricky because dead bodies often end up at the bottom of the sea where they are hard to find, thousands of miles away from any loved ones. A well-publicized sinking can prompt European governments to dredge the sea floor in search of bodies, while a boat that just disappears in the middle of the night and is never heard from again may never get noticed.
Nevertheless, migrant deaths do look like they’ve gone up overall. HCOBC cites over 450 deaths in 2013, and the UNHCR reports over 3,750 in 2014 and estimates more than that for 2016. The numbers for 2017 aren’t out yet, but look similar.
Why are so many people suddenly drowning in the Mediterranean?
The Libyan civil war which began in 2011 turned a relatively stable country with functioning borders into an anarchic free-for-all infested with sociopathic smugglers happy to let you risk death in a rubber raft in the Mediterranean in exchange for all your money.
A quick glance at a map of the Mediterranean reveals that Libya-Italy route is about the worst one you could possibly pick. Morocco to Spain/Gibralter? Only 9 miles! There are totally legal ferry companies that will take you from Tunisia to Sicily in about 10 hours. You can cross from Turkey to continental Europe via the Bosporus, (yes I know the other side of the Bosporus is also Turkey,) or if you want to take the long route, you can island-hop through the Aegean. The minimum distance from Libya to Italy (to the island of Lampedusa) is a much further–290 miles.
But the smugglers aren’t actually trying to get to Italy. As the Irish Times reports,
“It is well-known that the Italian boats save everybody,” [a smuggler] said. Smugglers and migrants said that a rescue by a European vessel in international waters – not reaching the Italian coast – was the goal of every departure. …
But the Libyan coast guard is practically useless. Coast guard officials responsible for most of the coastline where the smuggling occurs say equipment failures have prevented them from carrying out an operation for more than three months, and at least one captain said he was afraid of retribution by the smugglers. …
An Egyptian or Tunisian captain for the boat might get $5,000-$7,000, and blend in with the migrants to avoid responsibility if the boat is stopped, according to the smugglers. About $800 buys a satellite telephone the captain can use to call the Red Cross when the boat reaches international waters, to expedite pick-up by the Italian coast guard.
Well, deaths are sad, but people die every day, especially if they do things that are likely to kill themselves, like try to cross the Mediterranean in a rubber raft. What makes a death in Libyan waters (or the open sea) Italy’s problem–or more generally, Europe’s?
Operation Sophia’s ostensible goal of helping the Libyan coast guard reassert control over Libyan waters is the fastest and most sensible way of stemming the tide and saving the lives of everyone involved. But Strauch takes issue with this:
The EU’s goal of decreasing the number of migrants4 who reach the Mediterranean high seas is understandable, but the territorial sea component presents serious human rights concerns. Instead of traversing the high seas to possibly reach Europe and asylum, migrants will be turned back by the Libyan Coastguard—trained and supported by EUNAVFOR MED—to a country where they likely face prolonged detention, brutality, and persecution. There is also the possibility that migrants and refugees will be caught in the crossfire between the human smugglers and the Libyan Coastguard in collaboration with EUNAVFOR MED. This Comment considers whether the EU’s activities in the territorial sea of Libya will occur within the framework of international human rights law, or whether there are gaps in protection for migrants impacted by the Operation.
These migrants are not in danger in Libya because some faction in the Libyan civil war has it out for them. They’re not even Libyans fleeing violence in Libya. They are opportunistically taking advantage of Libya’s lawlessness in order to cross it, and Strauch is arguing that because of that same lawlessness, it would be a violation of Human Rights Law to send them back.
<–Here’s a map of homicide rates by state (the UNODC report doesn’t include recent violence in Libya.) By this logic, pretty much any of the billions of people from Russia to Brazil should have the right to waltz into the blue-zone country of their choice.
Of course, the actual result of Operation Sophia has not been the return of smuggling vessels to Libya (that phase of the operation is not yet and may never be live.) According to the New York Times, Efforts to Rescue Migrants Caused Deadly, Unexpected Consequences:
Strategies to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean Sea and disrupt smuggling networks have had deadly, unexpected consequences, according to aid groups monitoring the crisis.
It is part of a wrenching Catch-22: Any effort to lessen the migrant crisis can backfire as smuggling networks devise even more dangerous strategies in response. …
Each year, aid groups patrol the area and rescue thousands of migrants at risk of drowning.
Before 2014, rescues took place closer to Italy, with migrant boats traveling as far as Italian waters. By 2014, many rescues were occurring farther south in the Mediterranean. By 2015, rescues reached even closer to the Libyan side of the Mediterranean Sea.
More recently, rescues were taking place closer to Libyan territorial waters…
Smugglers use flimsy boats and provide just enough fuel to reach the edge of Libyan waters. Drivers can remove the engine and head back to Libya on another boat, leaving the migrants adrift until help arrives.
The NY Times fatalistically concludes:
“It’s really time to start looking at some of the long-term policies,” [Federico Soda, the director of the Coordination Office for the Mediterranean with the International Organization for Migration,] added. “Africa and Europe are always going to be neighbors. Movement of people between the two is just a reality of the coming decade.”
Libya’s porous borders are just a reality, like average rainfall in the Sahara or the height of Mount Everest, not something humans actually have control over, so you’d better just get used to it.
So I went down to Sicily, the front line where many immigrants first set foot in Europe to find out the truth about the so-called refugee crisis. …
What I found in Sicily was an organized and large-scale operation. These are so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam, Save the Children, MSF, and others who work with governments from different EU countries to bring in a new population in Europe.
In Catania I met an immigrant named Mohari who arrived just a few days earlier. His journey began in Eritrea, from where he traveled all the way up to the coast of Libya. After six failed attempts, this Eritrean was finally picked up by a boat from Save the Children, only a few kilometers from Libya’s coast. …
Mohari told me he wanted to either Sweden or England. I asked him why he just selected these countries.
– Money, solved his short answer.
There are a number of different ships operating in the Mediterranean to help immigrants. Partly, we have ships from NGOs, but we also have coastguards from different EU countries, including Sweden.
In Catania I met the crew of Triton, a Swedish coastguard vessel operating in the Mediterranean at the request of the EU. The ship is formally there as a Coast Guard, but I found out that they also collaborate with NGO vessels to pick up immigrants on Libya’s coast and transport them to Europe.
It is thought that the Swedish Coast Guard should guard the coasts of Sweden – not pick up Africans in the Mediterranean. After all, it is Swedish tax money that accounts for the cost. However, the Swedes are commissioned by the EU Coast Guard Frontex along with the Coast Guard from other EU countries.
So what happens when NGOs ship arrives in Europe filled with immigrants? I arrived at Pozzallo, a nice city in southern Sicily. There, the Aquarius, operated by a Physician without Frontiers, would arrive early in the morning after picking up about 420 immigrants on the Libyan coast.
I was there in good time when the ship arrived. Everything was in full swing to prepare for Europe’s new citizens. The Red Cross, the police, the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs and several were in place. The ship arrived with what seemed to be almost exclusively young African men. No women or children were able to see on board.
Suddenly, the Italian police arrived at me, asked to see my ID actions and rejected me from the port.
Let me pause here for the irony as the person who is actually legally allowed to be in a Sicilian port is kicked out by the police and people who have entered the country illegally are not.
My trip continued and I wanted to find out where the immigrants are heading after they come to Europe. At the harbor there were buses lined up, ready to take the immigrants on. Many end up in refugee camps. One of these is Cara Mineo. What amazed me was how incredibly good the refugee camp is compared with how the native population lives. Newly built houses, playgrounds, football pitches, basketball courts and more.
A local resident told immigrants to get everything they needed. Mobile phones, cigarettes. They also get free healthcare, free legal assistance and so on… Cara Mineo is a former military base and the military is still there and watches. I was not rejected this time, but was strongly limited in what pictures I could take on the camp.
However, there is even more help to get if you are an immigrant from the third world. Near the train station in Catania, the organization Oxfam had its pop-up tent and helped immigrants. There they are interpretered and tell the immigrants what they need to do to seek asylum and get up to northern Europe. They even go so far as to share leaflets titled #OPENEUROPE Guide To Rights. There you will find a lot of useful information, like which trains you can take north and what the prices are. You also get to know which rights you have (such as access to the phone and the internet). Of course, there are links to web pages that show you how to stay in Europe.
Oxfam’s assistant described how they simply help the immigrants with all the information they need. They also share backpacks with necessities, such as toothbrushes, shoes, towels, paper and pens. She told them that they then ask immigrants to rate the service they received from Oxfam on the organization’s app.
You know, back during the big drought, several of my relatives ended up with no running water because their well dried up. After hearing that a deeper well could reach the water, I started contacting well-digging charities in search of help, but kept getting the same answer: they only drill in Africa. These folks would rather fly to Ethiopia to drill wells than drive a hundred miles up the road to help their neighbors.
Most people who want to “help” others don’t really want to help; they just want the feel-good-fuzzies they get from helping. You don’t have to hand out backpacks and toothbrushes to economic tourists illegally entering your country. You can hand out backpacks and toothbrushes to homeless people and foster children in your own city.
Strauch goes on (this paragraph is so egregious that I’m going to treat it like a Wikipedian):
In recent years, observers and scholars [who?] have rightly [judgmental language] called attention to European states’ heightened implementation of border security protocols and restrictions on asylum access in response to the global migration crisis. [Proof?] The term “Fortress Europe” is now commonplace [where?].6 [The linked source does not prove that the phrase is common.] Over the past twenty years, European states have developed this practice [what practice?] by striking deals with African nations to support maritime interdictions in their territorial seas.7 As a military operation designed to limit the number of migrants in reach of Europe’s borders, Operation Sophia expressly follows in this trend. [What trend? No trend has been demonstrated.]
Just look at that horrible trend of migrants being kept out of Europe
Notice how Strauch just asserts a bunch of stuff without offering any proof for any of it. Over in reality land, a Record 1.3 Million Migrants reached Europe in 2015; this number dropped negligibly to 1.2 million in 2016. Trends here probably have more to do with German Chancellor Angela Merkel having announced an extremely open policy toward migrants and refugees crossing into Germany in 2015 than Italian-Libyan coast guard cooperation.
Strauch never does provide data to back up his claims. Rather he argues:
The Operation Sophia territorial sea component risks violating fundamental international human rights protected by various international conventions.32 These include, in particular, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the 1951 Refugee Convention.33 The states of the European Union are parties to all of these instruments and thus bound under international law by the obligations provided therein.34
The Operation Sophia territorial sea component is at odds with the principle of nonrefoulement, which holds that an individual may not be returned to a place where he or she faces risk of persecution.35 The nonrefoulement principle is affirmed most clearly in Article 33 of the Refugee Convention and is also binding upon European states under the ECHR.36 … Additionally, the duty of nonrefoulement now arguably is customary international law,38 and the overwhelming weight of international authority holds that states are prohibited from engaging in nonrefoulement practices when acting extraterritorially.39
Libya remains a place of possible persecution for the irregular migrants who seek to leave it. In Libya, migrants face possible torture, arbitrary detention, and other abuses.40 Because Operation Sophia engagements seek to ensure that migrant vessels cannot leave Libya’s coast, interception and diversion of vessels containing migrants and refugees imply that they may be forced to return to Libya.41 In addition, the program of disposing of vessels used for smuggling may present nonrefoulement concerns, as these actions effectively ensure migrants seeking transportation cannot leave Libya. For similar reasons, territorial sea engagements may run up against the prohibition against collective expulsion. Affirmed in Article 4 of the Protocol 4 of the ECHR, collective expulsion is “any measure . . . compelling aliens as a group to leave the country, except where such a measure is taken after and on the basis of a reasonable and objective examination of the particular cases of each individual alien of the group.”42
Strauch makes me think Duerte is on to something.
The article keeps going in this manner. Basically it’s Europe’s fault that anyone, anywhere in the world might be subject to violence and so Europe must take in anyone and everyone who shows up on its shores or even just a few miles off Libya’s coast. I recommend that you read the whole thing, just to get the full and thorough picture, but I will leave you with this final line:
Part III then contends that the territorial sea component makes significant and concerning contributions to an emerging norm of militarized, cooperation-based border control.
Strauch is concerned about cooperation? One wonders what kind of non-militarized border control Strauch imagines exists anywhere in the world.
Amazingly, I didn’t have to go digging to find this article–it was just the first article I encountered in this month’s issue of Yale Law Journal. I haven’t even touched the Journal’s other two articles, The Nature of Parenthood:
This Article explores what it means to fully vindicate gender and sexual-orientation equality in the law of parental recognition. … In initially defining parentage through marriage, the common law embedded parenthood within a gender-hierarchical, heterosexual order. Eventually, courts and legislatures repudiated the common-law regime and protected biological parent-child relationships formed outside marriage. While this effort to derive parental recognition from biological connection was animated by egalitarian impulses, it too operated within a gender-differentiated, heterosexual paradigm.
Seventeenth century depiction of Stonehenge from the Atlas van Loon
Stonehenge remains one of the world’s enduring mysteries. Who carved these enormous stones, moved them hundreds of miles, and erected them upon Salisbury plain–and why?
Archaeologists estimate that the first major construction began at Stonehenge around 3,100 BC, when workers dug a large, circular ditch around the site and piled up the resulting dirt in a round bank. But the interesting part of this phase of construction is the third circle inside the first two, consisting of 56 graves, atop which bluestones may have once stood. The bones of deer and oxen were also placed in the surrounding ditch.
Were these sacrifices, or was Stonehenge originally just a cemetery, perhaps for the community’s most important members?
The second stage in Stonehenge’s development, from about 3,000 BC to 2,600 BC, involved the building of wooden structures and further burials. Interestingly, Neolithic grooved ware pottery is associated with this stage.
Grooved ware pottery appears to have been developed way off in the remote, cold, wind-swept Orkney Islands at the tip of Scotland. I’ve written about the Orkneys before, because they also have significant Neolithic sites, including–most relevant to our conversation–the Ring of Brodgar:
The Ring of Brodgar… is a Neolithic henge and stone circle in Orkney, Scotland. Most henges do not contain stone circles; Brodgar is a striking exception, ranking with Avebury (and to a lesser extent Stonehenge) among the greatest of such sites.[1] … These are the northernmost examples of circle henges in Britain.[2] Unlike similar structures such as Avebury, there are no obvious stones inside the circle,[3] but since the interior of the circle has never been excavated by archaeologists, the possibility remains that wooden structures, for example, may have been present. The site has resisted attempts at scientific dating and the monument’s age remains uncertain. It is generally thought to have been erected between 2500 BC and 2000 BC, and was, therefore, the last of the great Neolithic monuments built on the Ness.[4]
The idea that anyone built anything major way off in the Orkneys, which definitely did not support the kind of comfortable, sedentary population that the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus, is remarkable enough. That they built something comparable to Stonehenge and Avebury is incredible, and that a pottery style which appears to have begun in Orkney spread to Britain and Ireland almost defies belief. Surely Orkney lacked the population to man the kind of migrations necessary to impose their pots on others, but perhaps Orkney was some kind of Neolithic cultural leader, perhaps a sacred place people journeyed to from across the seas–or perhaps the people of Orkney traded their pots for products not found locally, their style became popular, and folks in different areas began making their own versions.
But Avebury, Stonehenge, and Brogdar weren’t the only Stone Circles:
The stone circles in the British Isles and Brittany were constructed as a part of a megalithic tradition that lasted from 3300 to 900 BCE, during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages.[2] It has been estimated that around 4,000 of these monuments were originally constructed in this part of north-western Europe during this period,[2] although only around 1,300 of them are recorded, the others having been destroyed.[3]
Around 2,600 BC, Stonehenge entered its 3rd building phase, involving the erection of some 80 large stones in two concentric circles (“Q” and “R”) near the center of the enclosure. These 2-ton stones were transported 150 miles from a quarry in the Preseli Hills, (modern-day Pembrokeshire in Wales.) According to Wikipedia:
This phase tentatively began as early as 2600 BC, although recent radiocarbon dates from samples retrieved from one of the sockets in 2008 during excavations by Darvill and Wainwright suggest a date of around 2400 to 2300 BC. The final report is yet to be published, but some interesting results follow from the partial excavation of Q Hole 13 where ‘associations with Beaker pottery’ were noted.[1]
The Q and R Holes not only represent the foundation cuts for the first central stone construction, but they also were to include several additional stone settings on the northeast. This modified group face the midsummer sunrise with a possible reciprocal stone aligned on the midwinter sunset. This is the first evidence for any unambiguous alignment at Stonehenge (the solstice axis). … the dates suggested from the 2008 excavation (above) implies the Q & R arrays were perhaps no earlier than 2,400 BC, presenting a challenge to the recently accepted Late Neolithic date for the construction of the iconic sarsen monument. …
Now this is really interesting. The original proliferation of these circles is associated with the neolithic Groved Ware Pottery people. They tended to build chambered tombs and to dig large circular ditches and banks accompanied by human burials. They may have marked these graves with large stones.
Reconstruction of a Beaker burial, (National Archaeological Museum of Spain, Madrid)
Then a new kind of pottery shows up, the Beakers. The Bell Beaker pottery arrived in Britain around 2,500 BC, and around that time a new, significant phase in the construction of these sites begins. Large numbers of extremely heavy stones were brought in and the original north-eastern entrance was widened so that it matched the direction of the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset. Additionally, a road appears to have been built Stonehenge and the River Avon between 2600 and 1700 BCE, perhaps a delivery route for supplies that had been floated down the river. The road is partially aligned with the summer solstice, and ends at another stone circle.
So where the Grooved Ware People perhaps had some kind of cult of the dead, or at least put a lot of effort into constructing fancy burial monuments for their dead, the Bell Beaker people appear to have been really interested in solar alignments.
According to BellBeakerBlogger, even Bell Beaker burials reflect this solar interest:
All burials exhibit similarities that are central to Beaker culture or Beaker-ized people. They are usually flexed, individual burials within a plot, cemetery or larger complex. Men and women face the rising Sun, which along with other information, indicates a religious belief with emphasis on a solar deity.
The sequence of events that occurred at Stonehenge also appears to have happened at Avebury:
The chronology of Avebury’s construction is unclear. It was not designed as a single monument, but is the result of various projects that were undertaken at different times during late prehistory.[19]Aubrey Burlsuggests dates of 3000 BC for the central cove, 2900 BC for the inner stone circle, 2600 BC for the outer circle and henge, and around 2400 BC for the avenues.[1]…
Avebury was one of a group of monumental sites that were established in this region during the Neolithic. Its monuments comprise the henge and associated long barrows, stone circles, avenues, and a causewayed enclosure. These monument types are not exclusive to the Avebury area. For example, Stonehenge features the same kinds of monuments, and in Dorset there is a henge on the edge of Dorchester and a causewayed enclosure at nearby Maiden Castle.[20] …
Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson noted that the addition of the stones to the henge occurred at a similar date to the construction of Silbury Hill and the major building projects at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. For this reason, he speculated that there may have been a “religious revival” at the time, which led to huge amounts of resources being expended on the construction of ceremonial monuments.[21]
Religious revival, or triumphant victory celebration?
Work continued at Stonehenge over the next two hundred years, from about 2,600 BC through 2,400 BC, during which the monument’s enormous, central stones were erected. These rocks weigh between 25 and 50 tons each. This was an enormous undertaking that must have required hundreds of people just to move each stone and lift it into place.
Bell beaker pots
“Pots, not people,” is one of archaeology’s most famous maxims, an exhortion to regard a change in material artifacts–say, new pots–as simply a result of local cultural change, trade, or diffusion, rather than the arrival of an entirely new people. The Pots not People reading of the transition from Neolithic Grooved Ware to Copper Age Bell Beakers is simply that people invented new pots (and the technology to work metals.)
In the case of the Corded Ware people, this turned out to be wrong–the Corded Ware People turned out to be the Yamnaya, AKA the Indo-Europeans, who boiled out of the Ukrainian steppe around 4,000 BC, and by 500 BChad conquered almost all of Europe, Iran, Turkey, India, etc. They contributed significantly to the modern European gene pool, especially in eastern Europe.
Arout 3,000 BC, the Bell Beaker culture, named for its distinctively bell-shaped pots, began appearing in Western Europe. The pots didn’t spread smoothly across the continent, but were concentrated along Atlantic and Mediterranean river valleys:
Radiocarbon dating seems to support that the earliest “Maritime” Bell Beaker design style is encountered in Iberia, specifically in the vibrant copper-using communities of the Tagus estuary in Portugal around 2800-2700 BC and spread from there to many parts of western Europe.[2][12]…
The initial moves from the Tagus estuary were maritime. A southern move led to the Mediterranean where ‘enclaves’ were established in south-western Spain and southern France around the Golfe du Lion and into the Po valley in Italy, probably via ancient western Alpine trade routes used to distribute jadeite axes. A northern move incorporated the southern coast of Armorica. The enclave established in southern Brittany was linked closely to the riverine and landward route, via the Loire, and across the Gâtinais valley to the Seine valley, and thence to the lower Rhine. This was a long-established route reflected in early stone axe distributions and it was via this network that Maritime Bell Beakers first reached the Lower Rhine in about 2600 BC.[2][19]
Another pulse had brought Bell Beaker to Csepel Island in Hungary by about 2500 BC. … From the Carpathian Basin Bell Beaker spread down the Rhine and eastwards into what is now Germany and Poland. By this time the Rhine was on the western edge of the vast Corded Ware zone. … A review in 2014 revealed that single burial, communal burial and reuse of Neolithic burial sites are found throughout the Bell Beaker zone.[23]
… The earliest copper production in Ireland, identified at Ross Island in the period 2400-2200 BC, was associated with early Beaker pottery.[2][27] …The same technologies were used in the Tagus region and in the west and south of France.[2][28] The evidence is sufficient to support the suggestion that the initial spread of Maritime Bell Beakers along the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean, using sea routes that had long been in operation, was directly associated with the quest for copper and other rare raw materials.[2]
spread of bell beaker pottery
The Bell Beakers reached Britain around 2,500 BC.
Unfortunately, the Bell Beaker people didn’t leave any written records, so we don’t know what language they spoke. Were they Indo-Europeans? Moroccans? Did they conquer river valleys across Western Europe, or just tried exchange their pots for local goods along long-established trade routs?
And are they responsible for the menhirs found across western Europe?:
A menhir … is a large upright standing stone. Menhirs may be found solely as monoliths, or as part of a group of similar stones. Their size can vary considerably, but their shape is generally uneven and squared, often tapering towards the top. … they are most numerous in Western Europe; in particular in Ireland, Great Britain and Brittany. There are about 50,000 megaliths in these areas,[2] while there are 1,200 menhirs in northwest France alone.[3] Standing stones are usually difficult to date, but pottery, and/or pottery shards found underneath some in Atlantic Europe connects them with the Beaker people. They were constructed during many different periods across pre-history as part of a larger megalithic culture that flourished in Europe and beyond.
Almost nothing is known of the social organization or religious beliefs of the people who erected the menhirs. There is not even any trace of these people’s language; however we do know that they buried their dead and had the skills to grow cereal, farm and make pottery, stone tools and jewelry. Identifying their uses remains speculative. Until recently, menhirs were associated with the Beaker people, who inhabited Europe during the European late Neolithic and early Bronze Age — later third millennium BC, ca. 2800 – 1800 BC. However, recent research into the age of megaliths in Brittany strongly suggests a far older origin, perhaps back to six to seven thousand years ago.[6]
(Sound familiar?)
Of the Beaker Culture of Ireland, Wikipedia states, in classic archaeologist style:
The ‘bronze halberd’ (not to be confused with the medieval halberd) was a weapon in use in Ireland from around 2400-2000 BC[71] They are essentially broad blades that were mounted horizontally on a meter long handle, giving greater reach and impact than any known contemporary weapon (O’Flaherty 2007). They were subsequently widely adopted in other parts of Europe (Schuhmacher 2002), possibly showing a change in the technology of warfare.
Just a change in technology, definitely not evidence of people getting conquered.
We present new genome-wide ancient DNA data from 170 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 100 Beaker-associated individuals. In contrast to the Corded Ware Complex, which has previously been identified as arriving in central Europe following migration from the east, we observe limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker Complex-associated individuals, and thus exclude migration as a significant mechanism of spread between these two regions.
In other words, the initial spread of Bell Beakers from Iberia to central Europe was primarily cultural–the people involved are not closely related.
However, human migration did have an important role in the further dissemination of the Beaker Complex, which we document most clearly in Britain using data from 80 newly reported individuals dating to 3900-1200 BCE. British Neolithic farmers were genetically similar to contemporary populations in continental Europe and in particular to Neolithic Iberians, suggesting that a portion of the farmer ancestry in Britain came from the Mediterranean rather than the Danubian route of farming expansion.
Stone-age Britons were genetically similar to stone-age Iberians.
Beginning with the Beaker period, and continuing through the Bronze Age, all British individuals harboured high proportions of Steppe ancestry and were genetically closely related to Beaker-associated individuals from the Lower Rhine area. We use these observations to show that the spread of the Beaker Complex to Britain was mediated by migration from the continent that replaced >90% of Britain’s Neolithic gene pool within a few hundred years, continuing the process that brought Steppe ancestry into central and northern Europe 400 years earlier.
In other words: Bell Beaker pots s originally diffused culturally to the Rhine, where they were adopted by people with Indo-European steppe ancestry. These steppe people then conquered Britain, killing 90% of the stone-age inhabitants.
The victors appear to have gone on a building spree, repurposing neolithic monuments and dedicating them to their own deities, much as the Christian Hagia Sophia was transformed into a mosque following the Islamic conquest of Constantinople.
Between 2004 and 2006, excavations on the site by a team led by the University of Sheffield revealed seven houses. It has been suggested that the settlement may have originally had up to 1000 houses and perhaps 4,000 people, if the entire enclosed area was used. The period of settlement was probably short, between 15 and 45 years starting sometime between 2525 and 2470 BC.[3]
It may have been the largest village in northern Europe for a brief period.[4][5][6] At 500 metres (1,600 ft) in diameter, the henge is the largest in Britain and recent evidence suggests that it was a complementary monument to Stonehenge.[7]
Grooved ware pottery has been found in abundance at Durrington Walls. Why this sudden concentration of Neolithic pottery around the time of the Beaker invasion and rebuilding of Stonehenge? Were they captives brought to the area to work on the henge? Or a fortified refuge holding out against the invaders?
By the Iron Age, circa 1,600 BC, Stonehenge had largely fallen out of use, or at least new construction had halted. This was long before the arrival of the Celts in Britain, around 500 BC, so whether the Druids ever made use of Stonehenge as a sacred site or not, they certainly didn’t build it.
Distribution of Y-chromosomal haplogroup I1a in Europe.
Commentator Unknown123 asks what we can tell about the differences between German and Polish DNA. Obviously German is here referring to one of the Germanic peoples who occupy the modern nation of Germany and speak a Germanic language. But as noted before, just because people speak a common language doesn’t necessarily mean they have a common genetic origin. Germans and English both speak Germanic languages , but Germans could easily share more DNA with their Slavic-language speaking neighbors in Poland than with the English.
It is suggested by geneticists that the movements of Germanic peoples has had a strong influence upon the modern distribution of the male lineage represented by the Y-DNAhaplogroup I1, which is believed to have originated with one man, who lived approximately 4,000 to 6,000 years somewhere in Northern Europe, possibly modern Denmark … There is evidence of this man’s descendants settling in all of the areas that Germanic tribes are recorded as having subsequently invaded or migrated to.[220][v] However, it is quite possible that Haplogroup I1 is pre-Germanic, that is I1 may have originated with individuals who adopted the proto-Germanic culture, at an early stage of its development or were co-founders of that culture. Should that earliest Proto-Germanic speaking ancestor be found, his Y-DNA would most likely be an admixture of the aforementioned I1, but would also contain R1a1a, R1b-P312 and R1b-U106, a genetic combination of the haplogroups found among current Germanic speaking peoples.[221] …
Note, though, that this map has some amusing results; clearly it’s a more Nordic distribution than specifically German, with “Celtic” Ireland just as Nordic as much of England and Germany.
According to a study published in 2010, I-M253 originated between 3,170 and 5,000 years ago, in Chalcolithic Europe.[1] A new study in 2015 estimated the origin as between 3,470 and 5,070 years ago or between 3,180 and 3,760 years ago, using two different techniques.[2] It is suggested that it initially dispersed from the area that is now Denmark.[8]
A 2014 study in Hungary uncovered remains of nine individuals from the Linear Pottery culture, one of whom was found to have carried the M253 SNP which defines Haplogroup I1. This culture is thought to have been present between 6,500 and 7,500 years ago.[12]
Further:
In 2002 a paper was published by Michael E. Weale and colleagues showing genetic evidence for population differences between the English and Welsh populations, including a markedly higher level of Y-DNA haplogroup I in England than in Wales. They saw this as convincing evidence of Anglo-Saxon mass invasion of eastern Great Britain from northern Germany and Denmark during the Migration Period.[13] The authors assumed that populations with large proportions of haplogroup I originated from northern Germany or southern Scandinavia, particularly Denmark, and that their ancestors had migrated across the North Sea with Anglo-Saxon migrations and DanishVikings. The main claim by the researchers was:
“That an Anglo-Saxon immigration event affecting 50–100% of the Central English male gene pool at that time is required. We note, however, that our data do not allow us to distinguish an event that simply added to the indigenous Central English male gene pool from one where indigenous males were displaced elsewhere or one where indigenous males were reduced in number … This study shows that the Welsh border was more of a genetic barrier to Anglo-Saxon Y chromosome gene flow than the North Sea … These results indicate that a political boundary can be more important than a geophysical one in population genetic structuring.”
In 2003 a paper was published by Christian Capelli and colleagues which supported, but modified, the conclusions of Weale and colleagues.[14] This paper, which sampled Great Britain and Ireland on a grid, found a smaller difference between Welsh and English samples, with a gradual decrease in Haplogroup I frequency moving westwards in southern Great Britain. The results suggested to the authors that Norwegian Vikings invaders had heavily influenced the northern area of the British Isles, but that both English and mainland Scottish samples all have German/Danish influence.
But the original question was about Germany and Poland, not England and Wales, so we are wandering a bit off-track.
source: Big Think: Genetic map of EuropeLuckily for me, Wikipedia helpfully has a table of European Population Genetic Substructure based on SNPs[48][59]. We’ll be extracting the most useful parts.
A score of “1” on this graph means that the two populations in question are identical–fully inter-mixing. The closer to 1 two groups score, the more similar they are. The further from one they score, (the bigger the number,) the more different they are.
Here is a potentially relevant map of the neolithic cultures of Europe
For example, the most closely related peoples on the graph are Austrians and their neighbors in southern Germany and Hungary (despite Hungarians speaking a non-Indo-European language brought in by recent steppe invaders.) Both groups scored 1.04 relative to Austrians, and a 1.08 relative to each other.
Northern and southern Germans also received a 1.08–so southern Germans are about as closely related to northern Germans as they are to Hungarians, and are more closely related to Austrians than to northern Germans.
This might reflect the pre-Roman empire population in which (as we discussed in the previous post) the Celtic cultures of Hallstatt and La Tene dominated a stretch of central Europe between Austria and Switzerland, with significant expansion both east and west, whilst the proto-Germanic peoples occupied northern Germany and later spread southward.
The least closely related peoples on the graph are (unsurprisingly) the Sami (Lapp) town of Kuusamo in northeastern Finland and Spain, at 4.21. (Finns are always kind of outliers in Europe, and Spaniards are kind of outliers in their own, different way, being the part of mainland Europe furthest from the Indo-European expansion starting point and so having received fewer invaders.
So what does the table say about Germans and their neighbors?
source: Big Think: Genetic map of Europe
Northern Germany:
South Germany 1.08
Austria 1.10
Hungary 1.11
Sweden 1.12
Czech Repub 1.15
Poland 1.18
France 1.25
Bulgaria 1.32
Switzerland 1.36
Southern Germany:
Austria 1.04
North Germany 1.08
Hungary 1.08
France 1.12
Czech Repub 1.16
Switzerland 1.17
Bulgaria 1.19
Latvia 1.20
Sweden 1.21
Poland 1.23
Poland:
Czech Repub 1.09
Hungary: 1.14
Estonia 1.17
North Germany 1.18
Russia 1.18
Austria 1.19
Lithuania 1.20
South Germany 1.23
Latvia: 1.26
Bulgaria 1.29
Sweden 1.30
Switzerland 1.46
Obviously I didn’t include all of the data in the original table; all of the other sampled European groups, such as Italians, Spaniards, and Finns are genetically further away from north and south Germany and Poland than the listed groups.
So northern Germany and Poland are quite closely related–even closer than northern Germans are to the French (whose country is named after a Germanic tribe, the Franks, who conquered it during the Barbarian Migrations at the Fall of the Roman Empire,) or the Swiss, many of whom speak German. By contrast, southern Germany is more closely related to France and Switzerland than to Poland, but still more closely related to the Poles than Italians or Spaniards.
Disclaimer: I’m not German nor an expert in German history.
The word “German” can obviously be defined three different ways:
A citizen of the country of Germany
Someone who speaks the German language
A member of the German people
No one is really interested in #1, because this is a legal definition rather than a truly meaningful one. A wealthy enough person can easily gain citizenship in almost any country they want to, but this does not make them an actual member of that society.
About 95 million people speak German as their first language, plus about 15 million who’ve learned it as a second or third language. The wider Germanic language family has about a billion speakers, mostly because a lot of people in India have learned English.
Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe showing culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. 500 BC. The red shows the area of the preceding Nordic Bronze Age in Scandinavia; the magenta-colored area towards the south represents the later Jastorf culture of the North German Plain.
The oddest thing about the Germanic languages is their origin–according to Wikipedia, proto-Germanic spread southward from southern Scandinavia/Denmark (modern name for the region, obviously not the 500-BC name) into central Europe. Have a map:
Red: Settlements before 750 BC Orange: New settlements 750–500 BC Yellow: NS 500–250 BC Green: NS 250 BC – AD 1 Some sources give a date of 750 BC for the earliest expansion out of southern Scandinavia along the North Sea coast towards the mouth of the Rhine. (from Wikipedia)
And another map.
Okay, fine, but note that Scandinavia is a peninsula, and the area just north of the Nordic part is inhabited by people (the Sami/Lapps) who don’t even speak an Indo-European language. Neither do the nearby Finns. Assuming those folks were already there when the proto-German speakers arrived, how did they get from the Indo-European urheimat, just north of the Caucasus mountains, to southern Norway and Sweden, without significantly occupying either northern/eastern Finnoscandia nor central/eastern Europe?
Further, once they arrived in southern Scandinavia, what prompted them to head southward again?
During the initial years of Germanic expansion, the heart of central and western Europe was occupied by Celtic peoples, notably the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures (yes I have another map!)
Yellow: Hallstatt territory, 6th cen BC Teal: Celtic expansion by 275 BC Light Grey: Lusitanian area of Iberia where Celtic presence is uncertain Green: Areas where Celtic languages remain widely spoken today
While the modern Celtic languages are nearly forgotten outside of Ireland and Wales, the pre-Roman Celtic range was quite impressive. Around 390 BC, the Celts sacked Rome; around 280 BC, they defeated the Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae, attacked Delphi, and eventually made their way to Turkey (well, Anatolia), where they established the Kingdom of Galatia. The Galatians earned themselves enduring fame by receiving a letter from St. Paul, which is now the ninth book of the New Testament.
So around 500 BC, the Celts were clearly a force to be reckoned with throughout much of Europe. Then came the Germanics from the north (perhaps they felt pressure from the Sami?) and the Italics from the south.The Germanics spread principally to the east, through modern Poland (which I hear is very flat and thus easy to move through,) and into the core Hallstatt areas of Austria and Switzerland, while the Romans conquered the Celtic areas of France, Spain, and England. (Modern names, obviously.)
As the Roman empire crumbled, the Germans invaded (YES ANOTHER MAP!) and basically conquered everything in their path.
Simplified map of the German migrations of the 2nd through 5th centuries
And then, of course, the Norse went and invaded a whole bunch of places, too, so that England effectively got invaded twice by different Germanic tribes–first the Angles/Saxons/Jutes, and second the Normans.
I’m going to skip the map of the Viking expansion, but you’re probably already well aware of their most far-flung settlements in Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland (North America.) They looted north Africa, settled in southern Italy, and apparently created the first Russian kingdoms, the Kievan Rus and the Volga Bulgars.
Obviously not all of the places the Germanics conquered ended up speaking Germanic languages–I haven’t heard of much Norwegian being spoken in Sicily lately. Nor did all of the places which today speak Germanic languages end up with many Germanic people in them–a small band of conquerors can impose their language on a much larger subject population, and then a small band of warriors from that population can turn around and go conquer someone else and impose the language on them in turn, resulting in a language being spoken by people with very no genetic relationship at all to the original speakers.
For example, even though everyone in England speaks English, very little (only 30%) of the modern English DNA comes from the Angles (or any Germanic tribe)–most of it hails from the pre-Germanic, presumably Celtic population. The English, in turn, conquered large swathes of the globe, and today English is spoken (often as a second language) by folks with zero Germanic ancestry in far-flung places like India, South Africa, and Japan (conquered by the US.)
So our next post, we’ll turn our attention to the Germanic peoples. Where are they now, and how distinct are they from their neighbors?
Oh man! We are finally at part three! The part in which I attempt incorporating two-D space into our diagram:
Right, so as we turn our car around and head back up the road, we notice an intriguing turnoff in the Congolese rainforest: a tribe of the shortest people in the world, the Pygmies. According to Wikipedia:
A pygmy is a member of an ethnic group whose average height is unusually short; anthropologists define pygmy as a member of any group where adult men are on average less than 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches) tall.[1] A member of a slightly taller group is termed “pygmoid“.[2]
Basically, whenever humans live in tropical rainforests, there’s a good chance they’ll get shorter. (Rainforests also produce pygmy elephants.) Maybe it’s because short people can move more easily through the dense forest, or an adaptation to low levels of iodine, sunlight, or other nutrients–I don’t really know.
Wikipedia estimates that there are between 250,000 and 600,000 pygmies living in the Congo rainforest:
Genetically, the pygmies are extremely divergent from all other human populations, suggesting they have an ancient indigenous lineage. Their uniparental markers represent the most ancient divergent ones right after those typically found in Khoisan peoples. African pygmy populations possess high levels of genetic diversity,[10] recent advances in genetics shed some light on the origins of the various pygmy groups. …
“We studied the branching history of Pygmy hunter–gatherers and agricultural populations from Africa and estimated separation times and gene flow between these populations. The model identified included the early divergence of the ancestors of Pygmy hunter–gatherers and farming populations ~60,000 years ago, followed by a split of the Pygmies’ ancestors into the Western and Eastern Pygmy groups ~20,000 years ago.”
But I recall–was it WestHunt?–objecting that the authors of this paper used a too-fast estimation of genetic mutation rates. Oh here it is:
There are a couple of recent papers on introgression from some quite divergent archaic population into Pygmies ( this also looks to be the case with Bushmen). Among other things, one of those papers discussed the time of the split between African farmers (Bantu) and Pygmies, as determined from whole-genome analysis and the mutation rate. They preferred to use the once-fashionable rate of 2.5 x 10-8 per-site per-generation (based on nothing), instead of the new pedigree-based estimate of about 1.2 x 10-8 (based on sequencing parents and child: new stuff in the kid is mutation). The old fast rate indicates that the split between Neanderthals and modern humans is much more recent than the age of early Neanderthal-looking skeletons, while the new slow rate fits the fossil record – so what’s to like about the fast rate? Thing is, using the slow rate, the split time between Pygmies and Bantu is ~300k years ago – long before any archaeological sign of behavioral modernity (however you define it) and well before the first known fossils of AMH (although that shouldn’t bother anyone, considering the raggedness of the fossil record).
See my review of Isaac Bacirongo and Michael Nest’s Still a Pygmy
Let’s split the difference and say that one way or another, Pygmies split off from their hunter-gatherer neighbors and became isolated in the rainforest quite a while ago.
Before we drive on, I’d like to pause and note that I’m not entirely comfortable with using the way Pygmies are sometimes used in racial discussions. Yes, they are short, but they otherwise look a lot like everyone else in the area. Pygmies go to school, often speak multiple languages, live in cities, work at real jobs, read books, operate businesses, drive cars, fall in love, get married, build houses, etc. For more on Pygmies see my review of Isaac Bacirongo’s memoir Still a Pygmy (Isaac is a Pygmy man who speaks, IIRC, 5 languagues, attended highschool, and owned/ran successful pharmacies in two different cities in the DRC before the army burned them down during a civil war.)
Now I admit that Isaac is just one guy and I don’t know what the rest of the Pygmies are like.
Different classes of Mexican mestizos: people over-thought ancestry long before 23 and Me
But let’s hop back in our car, for at the other end of this road we have not a small town of isolated forest-dwellers, but a large group we have so far neglected: the Native Americans.
The indigenous peoples of North and South America today number about 60 million people, plus some quantity of mixed-race people (mestizos.) In some areas these mestizos are majority European by ancestry; in others they are majority Indian; studies in Mexico, for example, estimate that 80-93% of the population is Mestizo, with Indian ancestry averaging between 31% and 66% in different regions. The people of El Salvador are about 86% mestizo; Chileans are about 40% Indian and 60% Europeans; Columbia is about 49% mestizo; etc.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t list the total number of mestizos, and I don’t have time to calculate it, but I will note that the total population of both continents, including Canada and the USA, is about 1 billion people.
map of gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
We’re not sure exactly when (or how) the Indians got here, but it looks like they arrived around 10-20,000 years ago across the then-Bering Landbridge. (I think we should also keep in mind the possibility that they could have built boats.) According to Wikipedia:
Scientific evidence links indigenous Americans to Asian peoples, specifically Siberian populations, such as the Ket, Selkup, Chukchi and Koryak peoples. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been linked to North Asian populations by the distribution of blood types, and in genetic composition as reflected by molecular data, such as DNA.[192] There is general agreement among anthropologists that the source populations for the migration into the Americas originated from an area somewhere east of the Yenisei River. The common occurrence of the mtDNA Haplogroups A, B, C, and D among eastern Asian and Native American populations has long been recognized.[193] As a whole, the greatest frequency of the four Native American associated haplogroups occurs in the Altai–Baikal region of southern Siberia.[194] Some subclades of C and D closer to the Native American subclades occur among Mongolian, Amur, Japanese, Korean, and Ainu populations.[193][195]
Genetic studies of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of Amerindians and some Siberian and Central Asian peoples also revealed that the gene pool of the Turkic-speaking peoples of Siberia such as Altaians, Khakas, Shors and Soyots, living between the Altai and Lake Baikal along the Sayan mountains, are genetically close to Amerindians.[citation needed] This view is shared by other researchers who argue that “the ancestors of the American Indians were the first to separate from the great Asian population in the Middle Paleolithic.”[196][197] 2012 research found evidence for a recent common ancestry between Native Americans and indigenous Altaians based on mitochondrial DNA and Y-Chromosome analysis.[198] The paternal lineages of Altaians mostly belong to the subclades of haplogroup P-M45 (xR1a 38-93%;[199][200][201] xQ1a 4-32%[199][200]).
On the grand scale of human history, (200,000 years, more or less,) 13-20,000 years is not very long, and the Native Americans have not diverged too much, physically, from their cousins in Asia. The G-allele mutation of the EDAR gene arose about 30,000 years ago somewhere in east Asia and gives both modern Asians and Native Americans (but not Europeans and Africans) their characteristic hair and skin tone. While Native Americans are clearly physically, culturally, and geographically distinct from other Asians, (just as Europeans and south-Asian Indians are distinct from each other,) they are genetically close enough that they unquestionably clade together in the greater racial schema.
Also credit Robert Lindsay
As I’ve said before, my diagram is just one way to represent one aspect of the genetic (and physical) distances between people.
Here is another diagram, not mine, which tells the same story in a different way (though it estimates a much lower genetic distance between Bushmen and Bantus than I’d expect. Oh well. different studies get different results; that’s why replication and meta-analysis are super important):
The Melanesians of Papua New Guinea and Australia are in pink (there are some mixed Melanesian / Polynesian populations in the world, but our road trip skipped them.) Their nearest relatives are other south Asians and Polynesians, but those same south Asians are themselves more closely related to Europeans than Australians. Diagrammed like this, it’d be understandable to break off south Asians into one race and put Caucasians, Native Americans, and East Asians into a single race. And I suppose you could, if you wanted to and could get everyone else to start using your categories. Race is biologically real and quite obvious at the macro scale, but a few small groups like Aborigines and Bushmen introduce existential uncertainty that intellectuals can quibble over.I don’t think it would be terribly useful rearrangement, though, for all of the reasons discussed over the past three posts in this series.
Well, that’s the end of our big road trip! I hope you’ve enjoyed it, and that it’s cleared up that nagging question people seem to have: How can Nigerians be more closely related to Europeans than some other Africans? Have a great day, and enjoy the drive home.
Let’s cut to the pictures, because they are worth a thousand words:
Early farmers spread out from Anatolia into Europe and Asia, contributing much of the modern European gene pool. There are many Y-DNA haplogroups in modern Turkey, which most likely means the Turkish male population hasn’t been completely replaced in recent invasions. (It’s not uncommon for an invasion to wipe out 80+% of the male population in an area.) About 24% of Turkish men carry 
So how much Turkish DNA hails from Turkic peoples?
evolutionistx 