Neolithic Y DNA from Southwestern France

A post by Dienekes brings to my attention a paper in PNAS, "Ancient DNA reveals male diffusion through the Neolithic Mediterranean route":

The Neolithic is a key period in the history of the European settlement. Although archaeological and present-day genetic data suggest several hypotheses regarding the human migration patterns at this period, validation of these hypotheses with the use of ancient genetic data has been limited. In this context, we studied DNA extracted from 53 individuals buried in a necropolis used by a French local community 5,000 y ago. The relatively good DNA preservation of the samples allowed us to obtain autosomal, Y-chromosomal, and/or mtDNA data for 29 of the 53 samples studied. From these datasets, we established close parental relationships within the necropolis and determined maternal and paternal lineages as well as the absence of an allele associated with lactase persistence, probably carried by Neolithic cultures of central Europe. Our study provides an integrative view of the genetic past in southern France at the end of the Neolithic period. Furthermore, the Y-haplotype lineages characterized and the study of their current repartition in European populations confirm a greater influence of the Mediterranean than the Central European route in the peopling of southern Europe during the Neolithic transition.

Note: contra the authors' assertion, lactase persistence was probably not carried by Neolithic central Europeans; the most common European LP-associated allele has been absent in all central European Neolithic samples tested to date.

Dienekes writes:

R-M269 which, because of its apparent young Y-STR age has been tied by some to either the Mediterranean or Central European Neolithic is conspicuous absently from both at the moment. It may yet surface in a Neolithic context, but its absence this late from a region where, today, it is abundant only adds to its mystery.

In fact, the amateur estimates using actual mutation rates put the spread of R1b into Western Europe clearly post-Neolithic.

R1b and LP in Western Europe are in all likelihood associated with the dispersal of Indo-European languages.

These findings add to ancient DNA evidence indicating large-scale post-Neolithic population replacement in Europe. Coon and other traditional physical anthropologists, it turns out, probably had a better handle on European prehistory 70 years ago than population geneticists did five years ago.

Coon: Race and social evolution (1962)

The conclusion of Carleton Coon's paper from the CIBA Foundation conference "Man and His Future":

I have left to the end the most troublesome — and least rationally handled — aspect of the total problem of social evolution, that of race. Yet it is a real problem and must be faced if we are to do anything but chat about the future of man. Since the time of our first knowledge of Homo erectus our genus has been divided into geographical races adapted in varying fashions and degrees to heat, cold, altitude, and disease. These adaptations remain. How long will the Communist Chinese be able to survive and reproduce their kind in the thin air of Tibet? Will the genetic superiority of native West Africans over White men, which has kept the latter out for centuries, be lost when all the malaria-carrying mosquitoes have been stamped out with millions of tons of DDT? If the races of man stay where they are best adapted, it creates much less trouble than when they move into each other's territories.

And, more importantly, are all peoples equally suited, in a neuroendocrinological sense, to live under the regimentation which is bound to come in a vastly overcrowded world? These are questions that I cannot answer, and the very mention of them is considered indecent in my country. Do the minds of all races work in the same fashion, do not their emotions differ with differences in their hormonal peculiarities, and is it not possible that cultures vary to a certain extent in terms of these variations? These questions require research, and the results may mar the vision of a single world culture. People are genetically and culturally different, and short of a global police state run by persons yet to be determined, entrusted with the power to perform chromosomal surgery and interspecific transplants, they will remain different for a long time to come. If the world is to become united, the union must be a loose confederation of very different units, or it will not long endure.

[Carleton S. Coon, "Growth and Development of Social Groups," in Man and His Future (Gordon Wolstenholme, ed.), a Ciba Foundation Volume (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963), pp. 120-133.]

In his autobiography, Coon says of the reaction to his paper:

In my diary I noted that Haldane had approved it heartily, and Bronowski had liked all of it except the last part, on race. He was a tiny man, almost a dwarf, with a huge, globular head topped with tightly curled, black hair. Had I been his twin, I wouldn't have like it either.

[Adventures and Discoveries, p. 346]

The official publication of the conference, Man and His Future, is available online (thanks, again, to archive.org's biodiversity collection). More on the conference, from Coon's autobiography:

At five o'clock, just after tea, Sir Julian Huxley delivered the first of sixteen papers. It was entitle "The Future of Man--Evolutionary Aspects." For me to try to abstract it here would do it ill justice. I can only note that he mentioned Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, at that time a fashionable subject; the dependence of human progress on a procession of ideas: ecology, new drugs, population control, the population explosion, birth control; and a need for a rise in global IQ. In general, Sir Julian's paper was a stimulating overview of what the symposium was about.

And, describing the final chapter of The Living Races of Man:

Chapter 11, the last, is entitle "The Future of the Races of Man," and subtitled, "Every Man a Genius and the Centaur's Return." It is half joke, half fantasy. In it I toyed with some of the ideas expressed at the CIBA conference of 1962 by J. B. S. Haldane, Joshua Lederberg, Gregory Pincus, and others, about slicing chromosome with nano-knives (microscopic scalpels) to make transgeneric hybrids to serve as seal-human frogmen, building sperm banks that Hermann Muller had begun and William Shockley has revived; my own idea was to re-create black and white centaurs who could play polo with each other forever, thus stalemating interracial troubles.

Carleton S. Coon on the endocrine system and racial differences in temperament

In the final chapter of his final book (the posthumously published Racial Adaptations), Carleton Coon discusses possible hormonal substrates of racial differences in behavior. I find Coon's proposals more interesting (and more empirically-grounded) than those of individuals inspired by Rushton to attribute all racial differences to supposed neatly-ordered differences in testosterone. Coon:

[Testosterone] is an element in aggressiveness, territoriality, and hoarding. Blended with adrenaline and smoothed over with cool judgment, it has marked the history of the Caucasoids in many parts of the world.

More excerpts within (continue reading).

Recording of a 1961 speech by Carleton Putnam

A commenter at HBD Books directed my attention to this audio recording:

Carleton Putnam, author of Race and Reason: A Yankee View giving a speech in Jackson Mississippi on 10/26/61 at a banquet held at the Olympic Room of the Heidelberg Hotel. In this speech Mr. Putnam addresses the following topics; timelessness of American ideals, integrity of the Jackson leadership and press, What is the Problem?, origins of equalitarianism [Franz Boas,Lysenkosim], persecution of legitimate scientists, UNESCO, race and environmentalist propaganda, the role of the church in the spread of equalitarian race doctrine, perverting Lincoln's words and ideas, northern indoctrination as "moral" crusade, integrity of civilisation, not states rights must be the defence for racial problems and leftist "change" [prophetic!]

Tangentially related: Several episodes of the 1950s television show "What in the World?", featuring Carleton Coon and other experts (inluding, in one instance, a surprisingly knowledgeable Vincent Price) attempting to place archaeological and ethnological artifacts, are now up on youtube (via Dienekes).

Carleton Coon on the origin of races

Desmond asked: If you have a moment possibly you could explain Coon's theory of racial origin.

Coon argued the fossil record showed the major races (Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, Capoid, and Congoid) date back at least as far as Homo erectus. Coon believed these five races transitioned to Homo sapiens independently and at different times, with the mutations responsible for the transition either happening multiple times in the different populations or being spread by peripheral gene flow.

Our races jumped from Homo erecus to Homo Sapiens brain size by saltation. Stated more specifically, the essential difference between Homoerectus and Homosapiens lies in the total area of the cerebral cortex of the brain. The cortex is a thin sheet of nerve cells (neurons) twisted and bent to fit its mostly globular container, the skull. Our races moved from the Homoerectus to the Homosapiens state by a doubling of the number of nerve cells in this sheet. [. . .]

At least one race of Homo erectus and possibly all five evolved by saltation into Homo sapiens. From available evidence we may surmise that the appropriate threshold was crossed by each race in response to local opportunities, either by its own mutations or by impregnation of its women by Homo sapiens invaders. In such a case the women would transmit to the new generation their own most useful local climatic adaptations.

[Racial Adaptations, pp. 137-139]

In Coon's view:

When the brain size of Homo erectus increased by a doubling of the cerebral cortex, some of their races got more neurons than their environmental and cultural requirements warranted. The brain sizes of all races rose from about 1,200 cc (in the males) to between 1,450 cc and 1,700 cc, and then fell back to the Homo erectus level or a little higher in the tropics, and to about 1,400 to 1,500 cc in the temperate and polar zones. As far as we know, no Homo erectus are alive today.

While the oldest Homo erectus skulls have been found in the tropics, the oldest Homo sapiens come from Europe, where Caucasoids lived during a warm interglacial well over 250,000 years ago. After interruptions, they were followed by the cold-adapted Neanderthals, whose fate is still a mystery. Some say that while the earliest Homo sapiens' vocal apparatus let them speak, Neanderthal's repertoire of semantically useful sounds was limited. The Neanderthals may have become extinct, they may have been absorbed into the Caucasoid ranks, or they may have moved eastward to sire the American Indians, and, in part at least, the Mongoloids.

[Racial Adaptations, p. 149]

Coon based his belief that "the Caucasoid [is] the oldest sapiens race" on the Swanscombe and Steinheim skulls.

Ancestry of Madison Grant and others

I've compiled some genealogical data on Madison Grant, Carleton Coon, Carleton Putnam, and Charles Davenport.

It's well known that Coon and Putnam are cousins, but they're more distantly related than I had believed. Putnam actually appears to share a more recent common ancestor with Madison Grant (Grant and Putnam being sixth cousins via John Baldwin (1640-1702) and Putnam being Coon's 8th cousin once removed via John Putnam (1579-1662), though Coon and Putnam are also related through John Carleton (1637-1667)). I happened to notice Coon is also related to T.S. Eliot and John Archibald Wheeler -- assuming my sources are correct.

This database is not meant to be authoritative. The first few generations should be reasonably accurate. Beyond that I've generally relied on data others have entered at sites like WorldConnect, which I haven't verified (though none of it jumped out as implausible).

Sources: ancestry.com (Census population schedules, passport applications, and so on), familysearch.org, various digitized newspapers, Google, Google Books, etc. Since -- compiling this information primarily for my own amusement -- I was more interested in speed than authoritativeness, I haven't included source citations; but almost every source I used is accessible over the internet. (One exception: Coon's autobiography, Adventures and Discoveries.)

Coon on American race

Some excerpts from Carleton Coon on the racial types of Americans.

The Races of Europe (1939):

North America became, by the nineteenth century, the greatest Nordic reservoir in the world. But the century which saw the erection of this reservoir also witnessed the beginnings of its change in character; the tide of immigration brought with it members of all the other races of Europe. The people who came to America, from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers to the imposition of the laws restricting immigration, were selected; none were fully representative of the countries from which they came. In America they were subjected to environmental forces of a new and stimulating nature, so that changes in growth such as their ancestors had not felt for centuries produced strange, gangling creatures of their children. In America we have before our eyes the rapid action of race-building forces; if we wish to understand the principles which have motivated the racial history of the Old World, it behooves us to pay careful attention to the New. [pp. 651-652]

[Two Americans from the Photographic Supplement:]

FIG. 2 (3 views). A metrically similar New Englander from a Massachusetts coastal city, of Colonial Yankee lineage. He represents, a reëmergence or survival within the New England stock of the same British Mediterranean element.

FIG. 4 (3 views). New Englander of Colonial British descent. This tall, slenderly built, ash-blond-haired Nordic is an extreme example of the Corded type which entered Britain first during the Bronze Age in conjunction with brachycephals, and later during the Iron Age as an element in the Nordic invading groups. Its presence in New England in 1938 can only be regarded as a complete reëmergence.

[Personally, I think it would be hard to mistake the "Mediterranean" New Englander for anything but the British-descended American he is.]

Races: A study of the problems of race formation in man (1950; with Garn and Birdsell):

[From their list of "races of the world":]
4. Northwest European--Most of Scandinavia, much of the British Isles, Northern France, the Benelux countries, and northwest Germany is inhabited by a population characterized by medium to tall stature, medium build, brown hair, mixed or blue eyes, light skin, straight to wavy hair of moderate abundance, and facial features intermediate between the fine chiselling of the Nordic or Mediterranean and the broader, fleshier Alpine (Plate 2). As types in this population one finds Nordics, Mediterraneans, and stocky, large-headed, broad-faced, often hairy individuals who may have such paleanthropic characters as large teeth and heavy brow ridges. This third type apparently recapitulates in some degree the pre-agricultural population of this region. Western Irish, Scots, Norwegians from the central coast, Swedes from new Goteberg, and certain other local groups deviate srongly in the direction of this type.

The northwest European race is also found as the characteristic form of the major breeding unit in the United States and Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and white South Africa. The white American mean falls so close to it that no further designation is needed. [p.120]

Although [the Nordic] is common as a type, few populations in Europe or elsewhere can be called Nordic in the strict sense. Most which other authors have called Nordic fall into our Northwest European category. [pp. 129-131]

[Coon illustrates the "Northwest European" type with a photograph of himself.]

The Living Races of Man (1965):

The Racial Composition of the People of the United States

The history of the post-Columbian settlement of the United States being the bailiwick of professional historians, we may know less about it than that mythical person, the informed layman, to whom many excellent books on the subject have long been available. Our special interest is to trace the evidence of who came to our country whence and when; where the newcomers settled; to what extent they may have been selected by social and environmental forces before they left and after they arrived; and who mixed with whom.

The present population of the United States is composed principally of the descendants of three ethnic and racial elements: Europeans, Negroes, and American Indians, in order of numerical importance.

[. . .]

In the settlement of the United States the immigrants were not chose at random. Whole congregations migrated with their pastors to New England, and settled in sheltered coves and river mouths. Three centuries later, agents of New England textile mills recruited cheap labor from Sicilian villages, and most of the Albanians who came to work in shoe factories were members of the Orthodox minority from Korca. Middle-class artisans and skilled craftsmen predominated in early New England, and English aristocrats could be seen in the stately mansions of Virginia. The Sicilian laborers were humble and vigorous peasants, whereas among those who more recently have sought refuge from Hitler's police, there were some of our most gifted scholars and scientists.

Selection in migration operated from the beginning. In the early days of colonial settlement it was only natural that citizens of seafaring nations on the Atlantic shore of Europe should be the first to arrive in numbers. Of these nations, Spain and Portugal had business elsewhere. No glittering gold, silver, or heaps of emeralds met the northern explorers' eyes. The densely forested shores of North America were cold and forbidding and the Indians hostile. The British, French, and Dutch were the obvious candidates.

The settlement of the United States is usually divided into four periods: 1620-1790; 1790-1860; 1860-1924; and from 1923 to the ever-advancing present. The first date commemorates the landing of the Pilgrims, despite Jamestown's priority; the next two years are those of elaborate censuses; and 1924 is the date of the immigration law which limited the annual quota from any one country to 2 percent of its representation in 1890. During the first period the settlers came primarily from England and secondarily from Scotland and Scottish communities in Northern Ireland. Neither the Dutch in the Hudson Valley nor the Swedes and Finns in the lower Delaware were ever numerous. In general the English stayed near the coast, and the Scots, as might be expected, forged ahead into higher and more perilous terrain.

Most of this early immigrations occurred within the first few decades of the first period. During this time land travel remained slow and overseas contact intermittent. By 1790 the names of the heads of families are listed by counties and townships. In Massachusetts, one of the most solidly English states, names appear which are still listed in the 1965 telephone books of the same communities. There were then 989 families of Smiths, 340 of Whites, and 187 of Adamses. The Putnams numbered 80; the Eliots, variously spelled, 62; the Emersons 58. Among the top Boston Brahmin families of later periods, only 27 Forbeses, 16 Lowells, 9 Cabots, and one Saltonstall appear. The Gaelic contingent included 150 names beginning with Mc, 60 Kelleys, 8 Murphys, 6 O'Briens, and 3 Sullivans. In other states the proportions varied but the ingredients were, in most cases, the same.

The second period was dominated by the arrival of many Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish, along with more English. Because the English people themselves were a mixture of Celts, Germans, and Scandinavians, English history was only repeating itself in America. The genes remained the same.

After 1860 the pattern changed. Slavs, Russian and Polish Jews, both northern and southern Italians, Peloponnesian Greeks, and Lebanese began to join the stream, which grew into a torrent between 1890 and 1924, when it was suddenly dammed.

[. . .]

During the last two centuries, Americans of British descent, being the easiest to identify in Colonial records, have grown 3 1/2 inch taller than their Revolutionary ancestors, and proportionately heavier. By 1930 the rate of increase had begun to level off. G. T. Bowles surmised, to use his own word, that equilibrium might be reached between 1970 and 1980, at a mean stature for adult males of about six feet, or a little taller. That is as tall as any population measure to date. Bowles's apical decade, which will be a boon to shoe manufacturers, is nearly upon us.

[. . .]

The fourth question--how much "white blood" does a colored person need to pass for white--is difficult to answer because the act of passing is shrouded in secrecy.

[. . .]

The last question is hardest of all because anyone who passes, under the eagle-eyed scrutiny of American white people, is probably largely European genetically, as indicated by the fact that the so-called African blood type cDe is no commoner among white Americans than in many European populations. Glass and Li consider the genetic impact on the American population of passing, no matter how few or how many have achieved it, to have been negligible.

[pp. 301-307]