Roma (Gypsies) and Genetic Admixtures

Roma (aka Romai aka Gypsies) are in the news as a wave of fears of child stealing sweeps Europe.  Children with common European features, unlike their parents who have more Central Asian features, are being seized by European governments only to find out that the children are in fact Roma and not Greek, Irish, or whatever the local ethnicity is.

Some are wondering how can this be.  The answer is simple: admixtures.  Roma have not stayed genetically "pure" and have intermixed to varying degrees with local populations.  The mixed off-spring grow up in Roma society and are easily culturally assimilated in though they carry different genetic profiles which will later pop up in later generations.  This is how Jews can still be one overarching grouping while having such a range of features from Germany to Yemen and beyond.

GNXP of Discover Magazine has more on genetic admixtures.  (Hat tip: TDAXP)

Layers Upon Layers of the Columbian Exchange and the Great Irish Migration

We already know about one layer of the Columbian Exchange's relationship with the Great Irish Migration.  Mesoamerican Indians grew the potato as a food source, Europeans conquered the Mesoamericans, Europeans brought the potato back to the Old World, European peasants used the potato as a significant food source because it could grow in poor soil, peasant population boomed due to abundant calories, potato blight grew on the main potato crop, famine resulted in deaths and economic destruction, peasants immigrated to the United States and elsewhere for new opportunities.

What scientists just found out is that the HERB-1 was the cause of the potato famine which destroyed Ireland's population so badly the island still has not reached pre-famine levels.  Additionally (and of interest to geographers and historians) is that scientists mapped the genome of the blight.  Looking at the evolution of the pathogen revealed that a sudden period of evolution occurred at the same time the Spaniards were conquering the New World.  The great social disruption and collapse of New World civilizations allowed crops to rot and the potato blight pathogen to spread, evolve, and grow throughout the Western Hemisphere.  The great leap in evolution allowed the blight to occur much earlier than it could ever have if the crops were maintained.  A ticking time bomb of crop disease was set for about 300 years the moment American Indians starting dying.

Human-environment and human-human interaction is amazingly complex.  We will still be discovering how our actions in the past and present will impact humans across the globe for centuries to come.

Example of Genetic Geography: Who are the Afro-Indians

Afro-Indians are Asian Indians who have significant African heritage.  Much cultural anthropological work has been done on the various groups such as the Sheedi, Siddis,and the Cochin Jews.  However, only so much could be discovered through studies of the Afro-Indians in the present.  Geneticists have announced results of their study which show that the African element in India arrived in the most part after the British first came to India and that the Indian part of their heritage comes more from women than men.  Discovery Magazine blog has more.  Much of the genetic speak is way over my head but this shows how historical cultural geographers and geneticists can work together. (Hat Tip: TDAXP)

Wet and Dry Ear Wax Map

Black means the presence of wet ear wax while white represents dry ear wax

I just found out that there is a stereotype that states Chinese have dry ear wax. Shockingly the stereotype has turned out to be true. Japanese scientists have mapped out wet versus dry ear wax and found out that in prehistoric China a genetic mutation occurred which makes ear wax dry. Dry ear wax is found in areas where prehistoric East Asians' descendants are found: namely East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America. Despite some theories on sweat and smell there is no known reason why prehistoric East Asians evolved in order to have dry ear wax.

Catholicgauze, despite having R1a genetics, has very, very wet ear wax.

Czarists v. Kaiserites!

Via Strange Maps, this incredible electoral map of Poland superimposed on the 1914 borders of Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia



The gnxp thread has some good observations. Anyone know how this map squares with post-WWII resettlement patterns?

Genetic Relationship Map of Europe

Map from the New York Times

Biologists have created a map showing the genetic relationship of the average European country citizen to one another. The neat map shows how migration has morphed the blood of Europeans. (Hat tip: The Map Room)

Observations from the map:

Finland is something else. These people have a non-Indo European language that ties in with Hungarian, Estonian, and so native languages in the vast northern nothingness of Russia.

Italy never has had one ethnic Italian people. Rather, it is a collection of peoples under one nationality (even that is stretching it). Northern Italians have Germanic traits and have been in the sphere of Germanic people. Meanwhile the South has had everything from Greek Romans to Arabs to Albanians intermixing.

United Kingdom has overlap from Norway and other places where R1a genetic line is concentrated. Perhaps this is how the proto-Catholicgauzes came to Great Britain.

The Genetic Map of Lebanon

WES1, in red, is the most common haplotype in Lebanese Christians. Note how it is not found anywhere near Lebanon but located in Crusader producing and conquered areas.

Lebanon is known for its diversity. It was the last Christian country in the Middle East up until the early to mid 1900s. It has both Catholics and Orthodox, Sunni and Shiites, and even Druze. The upper classes speak French just as well as Arabic. It is inspired by European-ideals like religious freedom and democracy.

The reason for Lebanon's diversity is geography. Lebanon is located in one of the world's crossroads and its hilly landscape makes it easy for embattled groups like Marionites, Druze, and Shiites to fend off greater threats.

The crossroads aspect is explored by National Geographic and an academic paper entitled Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Lebanon Is Structured by Recent Historical Events (PDF). The long-story short is that Christians in Lebanon are more likely to have European traits while Muslims and Druze have roots back to Arabia. The Ottoman Turk conquest of the 1600s apparently left little impact on the Lebanese genetic makeup. Turks conquered and ruled as an insular caste not mixing in with the locals. This was one of the reason that led to their decline.

Interesting note: Proto-Catholicgauze relatives of the M17 line are more likely to be Druze and Muslim than Christian according to the study. This makes sense because M17 is found more in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia rather than the Crusading states of Western Europe.

Geographic Genetic Chart

From Washington Post. Click to Enlarge

The Washington Post features an article with the above chart about genetic studies that "map" out humanity's diversity. The chart's information backs up the "Out of Africa" theory of human migration with a center point near present-day Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The chart shows the mixture of origins for ethnic groups based on a sample population's DNA. No real surprises but still neat to look at. Russians have some Central Asian pro-Catholicgauzes. Africans are "pure." The information shows the Middle East to be the ancient melting pot with various groups intermixing.

One neat thing to see in future research is to see if the "average" American has more ethnic genetic mixtures than the average Middle Easterner. I assume the United States has more ethnic groups than much of the Middle East but I cannot say how well intermixed America's population is.

Searching for the First Americans

Vikings, Polynesians, Ainu-like people oh my! Now we touch on the quest for the first Americans.

"We don't know." That sentence started off my formal education in North American archaeology. The statement is related to the who and how of the first Americans. There are many theories of who the first Americans were and how they got here and the more evidence we find the less certain we are.

Many of us have been taught the Bering Land Bridge theory. This theory states that Siberian nomads crossed the Bering Land Bridge around 13,000 years ago and spread like wildfire all throughout the continents of North and South America. The dogma of this faith was Clovis technology. This culture, united in the technology of hunting tools designed to bring down mammoths, was believed to have been the first Americans who arrived in America around 13,500 years ago.

Problems existed however. First Clovis tools were found only in certain areas. There were no Clovis tools found in the possible passage way which the Siberians could have taken. Neither could they be found in Alaska or Siberia. Secondly, a clear passage way would have been a nightmare for nomads. Sure, all game animals would be in that narrow passage way but so would anything else with a tasting of meat (There were bears which could stand 12 feet high back then!). And finally as a nail in a coffin, there have been sites in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and even Chile which pre-date Clovis.

So other theories have arisen to explain the settlement of the New World. A rising prominent theory of how the Americas were colonized is the Pacific Coastal Model. This states that Asians hugged the coast (now submerged) and migrated south. This helps explain why sites like Monte Verde in Chile and elsewhere along the Pacific Coast tend to be older than interior sites. Moving along the coast line would allow groups to obtain a large food supply without risking glaciated lands.

Other theories exist however and they have some evidence to back them up. Pre-Siberian American Aborigines is another possibility. Those who back this do not deny the Asian origins of modern Indians but claim there were humans here before that migration. Some of the oldest bones in North America have traits of Australians, Melanesians, and even Africans. It is thought that these small groups were one way or another absorbed into the invading post-Siberian/paleo-Indian population. The Olmec Indians of Mexico created giant heads which look like black Africans but evidence of African heritage is flimsy at best. Elsewhere, Polynesians got as far as Easter Island. Going the rest of the way to Chile would not be out of the question (and it appears some did and brought chickens with them).

Another theory, which I do not subscribe to but brings up powerful points, is the Solutrean hypothesis. Two well respected archaeologist proposed that Clovis technology is actually based on older European technology. Solutrean "culture" was in Europe from about 21,000 years ago until it completely vanished around 15,000 years ago. The theory says Europeans followed the edge of the sea ice to North America and settled there. Problems with this hypothesis are the impracticality of ancient men travelling along sea ice in the middle of the ocean going as far as the Americas (sea ice does not make a good camping site). Also, why the gap of several thousand years between European Solutrean and American Clovis? There should be some overlap.

The Solutrean hypthoesis has one trump card: Haplogroup X. Primarily a European genetic trait, 25% of all Algonquian people have the genetic marker. The sheer number and background checks suggest this is way too high even with the mixing of American Indians and Americans of European descent. Add onto the geographical eastern bias of Algonquians and it seems there reasonably could have been a European migration which mixed with post-Siberian paleo-Indians.

The main history still stands. Genetic tests and physical traits like shoveled teeth still point to an Siberian Asian origin for American Indians. This population was the first one to successfully settle and dominate the Americas. More would come though. The Eskimos came latter and began a bloody campaign to dominate the Arctic. Groups came and went. Some lived in cities which rivaled those of the classical Old World, some lived in cities which were on par with the ancient ones of Mesopotamia, some became farmers in villages, some reached the point of semi-settled but remained partly nomadic, and others like the Sioux were the equivalent of the Barbarian Hordes of Europe. They lived and left there mark on the New World which in part last today. Many place names still carry their memory.

Even with pre-Columbian contacts, things evolved on an independent path for the most part. Then a group of men in 1942 led by an Italian under a Spanish flag would change the whole world.