Peopling of Europe book

Jean M.'s book (revised and expanded from her Peopling of Europe website) is now available for pre-order, though it's not scheduled to ship until September or October. I don't necessarily agree with her on every detail, but there's little doubt that on the whole she'll come vastly closer than Sykes, Oppenheimer, or Wells were able to giving an accurate account of the genetic origins of Europeans.

Description and table of contents:

"Huge" Genographic Project ancient DNA study underway?

A reader forwards a comment posted to a mailing list yesterday by a project administrator attending FamilyTreeDNA's Houston conference:

Report from the mixer -- Spencer Wells was there and spoke enticingly of a huge ancient DNA research project that's been underway for some time, in which, instead of a simple replacement by incoming Neolithic populations, they are seeing wave after wave of peoples coming over thousands of years, each wave adding a stratum superimposed on those before it. The set of haplogroups seen in the earlier strata were not like the ones we see today. In particular he says mtDNA H was not there until a fairly recent, post-Neolithic date.

It's clear from already-published ancient DNA results that at least some sublineages of H were present in Neolithic Europe -- but H does seem to have become much more common since then.

He is still apparently clinging to a rather old date for R1b, though. He seems to think it had a major expansion about 10,000 years ago. Haven't genetic genealogists mostly been arguing for a considerably more recent time frame? I hope to see some R1b experts engage him in dialog on that point.

That's a 20,000 year step in the right direction. I won't begrudge him the other 5,000 years for now. I just hope the "huge" ancient DNA effort underway includes Y chromosomes. Another comment from the FTDNA conference:

Katherine, Emily, Joan and Bonnie are already tweeting from the FTDNA conference. Their Twitter accounts are: @khborges, @Genealem, @Luxegen and @Greenleafy

You can also follow the hashtag #FTDNA2011 though not all the tweets are going out with the hashtag. [. . .]

FTDNA has tested over 600,000 people.

The Genographic Project has 450,000 public participation samples and 75,000 indigenous samples.

The Genographic Project has two Basque papers going into journals this week and another paper which includes mtDNA haplogroup U5 is due out next year.

And a few more twitter comments:

khborges Katherine H. Borges SW-Phase 1 of Geno is wrapping up. Phase 2 to begin #FTDNA2011

khborges Katherine H. Borges #FTDNA2011 #Genographic SW- 1 in 17 men in Med are descended from Phoenician traders

khborges Katherine H. Borges #FTDNA2011 #Genographic SW-East Asian human migration patterns follow the rivers

khborges Katherine H. Borges #FTDNA2011 #Genographic SW-10 papers are going off to the journals next week and about a dozen more in the pipeline

Luxegen Joan Miller SW - teaser - big announcement coming in Genographic project next year. #FTDNA2011

Y DNA haplogroup of Charles Darwin

The latest promotional fluff from the Genographic project:

The test revealed that Chris Darwin, and therefore his paternal great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, are from Haplogroup R1b, one of the most common European male lineages.

Still waiting for anything substantial to come out of this project.

NatGeo: "The Human Family Tree"

The worst documentary of its kind yet: a two-hour ad for the Genographic project public participation component, heavy on the we are one / race doesn't exist message. If you thought The Journey of Man would have been great if only it contained vignettes from the lives of vibrant Queens residents (preferably involved in mixed-race relationships), you'll love The Human Family Tree.

Despite six years and tens of millions of dollars in funding, Spencer Wells relays scientific "facts" essentially identical to those he reported in his 2003 effort -- many of these facts being outdated (the idea that R1b is a marker of Paleolithic western European ancestry) or incorrect ("we're all 99.9% the same genetically").

On the positive side, the sloppy editing and narration may provoke some cognitive dissonance in the brighter race deniers who view the program. After some "survival of the fittest" talk (albeit in the context of Africa), after we're introduced to the ideas of climatic and sexual selection, and after we're told the ancestors of Europeans "toughened up" in the harsh climate of Central Asia, Kevin Bacon intones:

Like all of our other physical differences, the genetic changes responsible for our varying shades of color are minuscule. [. . .] For all the problems race has caused, our differences are literally not more than skin deep. Genetically speaking, race does not exist. Without those minuscule changes, though, people might never have survived in these northern latitudes. And that means, we might never have carried on to populate the rest of the world.

And later:

As the world grows increasingly smaller, babies like Leah are becoming the norm. Traits that formed over thousands of generations are being wiped clean in just a few. While cultural barriers continue to fall, biologically we know these barriers never existed in the first place.

If you feel the need to watch a program in this genre, The Incredible Human Journey is a better choice. The episodes on Europe and Asia at least feature a few interesting locations and artifacts, along with some (ultimately dismissive) discussion of multiregionalism.

Spencer Wells and Will Self

Mildly interesting exchange, with the expected PC commonplaces on Wells' part.

WS: Do you think that we are in a race against time here? Do you think there are major questions to be answered?

SW: I do. The diversity of humanity is being subsumed into this global monoculture, if you will. Within the next few generations the genes will still be there, but they will be all mixed up and they will have no context. Socially, I think it's possibly a very good thing. But it just means that we're going to have erased who we are genetically, these patterns of variation that are relatively recent in the grand scheme of things.

Good for whom?

WS: In your book, you couldn't avoid a note of wistfulness. That's something that I've encountered in other people that write and think deeply about prehistory, a wistfulness about the hunter-gatherer period, about the late Paleolithic.

SW: Oh, absolutely, yes. Noble savages. That's actually the subject of my next book.

WS: Is it?

SW: Yeah, it's all about the changes that have happened since the development of agriculture and how, even from the very beginning, they seemed to be bad for us. Anyone who has spent time with hunter-gatherers—have you ever spent time with the San Bushmen, or any of these other groups?

[. . .]

WS: This hand axe is a beautiful piece of work to me in terms of its adaptation. There are some theorists of the Paleolithic who view these other hominid species as being more technically expert than we perhaps might imagine. I wonder about their demise in that sense—and I suppose it wouldn't be called genocide, but perhaps specicide, in this context.

SW: Call it genocide if you want. But I don't think it was something that we set out to do, in the case of the Neanderthals. It's just that they were perhaps better adapted to forested countryside, which is what Europe was until the worst part of the last Ice Age when the grasslands really came in and the tundra moved south. We were better adapted to living in open country and we had larger group sizes and better hunting techniques that had probably been developed on the steppes of central Asia, among other places. We just out‑competed them.

WS: There was a strong inclination towards speciation among humans, but we now have to reassert our connection with nature and the environment at the end of millennia and millennia of doing exactly the opposite. Those Neanderthals have nothing to do with us.

SW: Well it's a generalized xenophobia, to recognize things that are like us, and are, therefore, to be trusted. It's scary to think that might have been something that we've been adapting to do, for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly, it's not a good thing. How do you get past that in this modern world?

WS: But it is a paradox, isn't it, if we're going to be attracted to the other to the extent that it's no longer the other? With the level of miscegenation that we have at the moment, the other isn't going to look like the other anymore.

SW: Eventually, we will all look much more like Tiger Woods, perhaps.

WS: Yeah, then these key markers of who we once were will be eradicated.

SW: Then we'll develop new ones.

WS: It seems to me that humanness has been a question of refinement.

SW: That's the way evolution works. You don't typically have a revolution, you have slow changes, and evolution tinkers with what you have available.

In reality, within the "next few generations" anyway, there is no chance of any significant fraction of the projected two billion sub-saharan Africans or billions of Asians looking "much more like Tiger Woods". Only the West is threatened in this experiment. And even in the West, Wells' outcome is hardly inevitable.

One wonders how Wells reconciles his belief that miscegenation is "possibly a very good thing" socially with his acknowledgment that new group identifiers will always arise. Why not accept human nature now and structure society accordingly?

WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the imminent extinction of the chimpanzee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philosophically queasy moments. But I don't think people have reckoned on it at all.

SW: Any extinction, but particularly chimpanzees.

WS: Particularly the chimp, surely.

SW: It's the finality of it and the notion that, "These are our cousins, and we're the ones who caused their demise."

WS: Isn't it also like kicking out the ladder beneath us? The connection is then gone between us and the rest of the natural world in a really profound way.

SW: Yes, but we've done that before—we did it with Neanderthals.

WS: Yes, we've done it before.

SW: We seem to have no qualms about doing things like that. We're very good destroyers, as well as creators.

WS: I think, I can't remember the figure, but there are something like only 150,000 chimpanzees left in the wild?

SW: And fewer orangutans.

WS: And fewer mountain gorillas. But if they were allowed to get on with it now, they would be fine.

SW: If we set aside the territory, yeah. It's really that simple. It's just like hunter-gatherer human populations. All they need is to be left alone with enough territory and they will be fine.

Yes, Spencer, it really is that simple.