Posted on 06/24/2003 10:33:30 AM PDT by blam
Y chromosomes rewrite British history
Anglo-Saxons' genetic stamp weaker than historians suspected
19 June 2003
HANNAH HOAG
Some Scottish men's Y's are remarkably similar to those of southern England. © GettyImages
A new survey of Y chromosomes in the British Isles suggests that the Anglo-Saxons failed to leave as much of a genetic stamp on the UK as history books imply1.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain repeatedly between 50 BC and AD 1050. Many historians ascribe much of the British ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons because their written legacy overshadows that of the Celts.
But the Y chromosomes of the regions tell a different story. "The Celts weren't pushed to the fringes of Scotland and Wales; a lot of them remained in England and central Ireland," says study team member David Goldstein, of University College London. This is surprising: the Anglo-Saxons reputedly colonized southern England heavily.
The Anglo-Saxons and Danes left their mark in central and eastern England, and mainland Scotland, the survey says, and the biological traces of Norwegian invaders show up in the northern British Isles, including Orkney.
Similar studies, including one by the same team, have looked at differences in mitochondrial DNA, which we inherit from our mothers. They found little regional variation because females tended to move to their husbands.
But the Y chromosome shows sharper differences from one geographic region to the next, says geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, of Stanford University, California. "The Y chromosome has a lower mutation rate than mitrochondrial DNA."
Goldstein's team collected DNA samples from more than 1,700 men living in towns across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. They took a further 400 DNA samples from continental Europeans, including Germans and Basques. Only men whose paternal grandfathers had dwelt within 20 miles of their current home were eligible.
The Y chromosomes of men from Wales and Ireland resemble those of the Basques. Some believe that the Basques, from the border of France and Spain, are the original Europeans.
The new survey is an example of how archaeologists, prehistorians and geneticists are beginning to collaborate, comments Chris Tyler-Smith of the University of Oxford, UK, who tracks human evolution using the Y chromosome. "It would be nice to see the whole world surveyed in this kind of detail, but it's expensive and there are other priorities."
References Capelli, C. et al. A Y chromosome census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13, 979 - 984, (2003). |Article|
© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003
Very interesting!
My mother and I both share the same trait of having only 3 central incisors on our bottom row of teeth (most people have 4).
I have wondered why for a long time, and if this is a common genetic trait.
BTW, mom's ancestry is Irish, English and American Indian.
Excellent. I bet you are a fan of Barry Fell and Gloria Farley, huh?
"In Plain Sight", (Old World Records In Ancient America), Gloria Farley.
I'm not sure who I am anymore, lol.
When I was younger, I looked just like this Irish guy. I have an English name.
My mother used to sing that song, I'm My Own Grandpa, when I was a little boy.
And who knows if there was even an earlier migration? That's why it's dangerous to play "I was here first and you took my land." Almost no ethnic population now lives where it started out and depending on what year you want to stop at, any number of ethnic groups can make a claim on just about any square foot of land on the planet. Of course I've always wondered if we could make a case that non-Africans were forced out of Africa and deserve "reparations" for the dismal treatment they received some 50-100 thousand years (or more) ago. If one really wants to play "This was my ancestor's land.", considering that everyone came out of Africa, then the colonial Europeans were simply "coming home".
Since Kennewick man became a political hot potato, I don't think there have been any genetic tests. For obvious reasons, the Native Americans don't want that (it might show that they stole someone else's land, thus letting some air out of their victim status). But as blam pointed out in the correction, the answer is "probably".
My amateur guess is that the Western and South American pre-Clovis populations came from the Southeast Asian genetic family and any pre-Clovis Europeans (possibly Lapp-like or Basque-like), if there were any (I'm about 60/40 that there were), were along the Atlantic coast, since there are ancient genetic markers in some Native Americans that are normally considered characteristically "European". Of course it is also possible that the Basques or Lapps did some post-Clovis mixing and that there weren't any ancient Europeans here.
As with things like the genetics of North Africans, the Aryan invasion of India, Japanese genetic origins, and the presence of Caucasians in China, these issues are politically and/or religiously charged. Many people have a lot of emotional energy invested in the ancient origins of their race or ethnic group and most people would rather not know just how much mixing used to happen. Ultimately, I wish we could get on with judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin -- or how many molars of a certain type they have. Kennewick man would simply be another piece to the puzzle of the ancient history of the Americas and not a political issue if people could just drop the identity politics and worry about the truth.
Yes, Europeans came and took the land from the Native Americans. It's possible that the Native Americans took the land from someone else. That's old news. Let's worry less about judging sins of and crimes against our ancestors and more about what we can do to improve things for ourselves today. I shouldn't get thrown in jail if my father kills someone and certainly I shouldn't be held responsible if a random member of my race did something awful 100, 1,000, or 10,000 years ago.
That really is fascinating. We're going to be finding out about a lot of new relatives, I suppose. I'll read those articles when I get back later.
You know, I'd often heard about women like that, but I was always lucky enough not to get involved with any them. Just one of them can be real budget buster. ;-)
My amateur view is very close to yours. I am puzzled by the below statue though.
Statue found by archeologists in an ancient Olmec (1500-300BC) dig.
Friday 21 May 1999
Mungo Man older than thought
By JANINE MacDONALD
CANBERRA
Fresh analysis of the skeletal remains found at Lake Mungo in NSW 25 years ago indicate he may be up to 68,000 years old - making him 28,000 years older than earlier scientific estimates.
The revised dating of the remains by scientists at the Australian National University rewrites the history of Australia's occupation and has profound implications for worldwide debate over the origins of modern man.
Cross-matching a range of recent dating tests puts the minimum date of the burial of the remains at 56,000 to 68,000 years ago. The research, to be published today in the Journal of Human Evolution, came up with almost identical dates.
But the researchers add that the location of the Mungo skeleton, deep in Australia's south-east, suggests Homo sapiens arrived in the north-east much earlier, taking time to migrate inland and adapt to desert conditions before travelling down the continent.
The previous accepted estimate was that humans had roamed the country for 40,000 to 60,000 years.
The redating was carried out using three different methods - uranium series, electron spin resonance and optically stimulated luminescence. The researchers say they date the remains at 62,000 years, plus or minus 6000 years.
The findings strengthen the theory that two forms of man - the delicate people first and the robust people later - came to the outer reaches of the continent from two different parts of Asia tens of thousands of years ago.
These groups, along with others that came later, are then said to have merged to form modern Aborigines and Melanesians.
"The research has important implications for the global debate over the development of modern human variation, the beginning of human sea travel and the settlement by the ancestors of Aboriginal Australians of the semi-arid areas of the continent," said archaeologist Dr Alan Thorne.
The finding is certain to spark renewed debate between the multi-regionalists, who believe different people migrated from different parts of Asia, and those who support the "out of Africa" model that dates all human origin to Africa.
The discovery began more than a quarter of a century ago, when on 26 February 1974, the shifting sands of a lunette around Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area revealed an eroding gravesite.
It was a human skeleton - known as Lake Mungo 3 - that had been covered in red ochre during a burial ritual. The hands were interlocked and positioned over the penis.
Five years earlier the cremated remains of a female skeleton, known by local Aborigines as Mungo Lady, were found in the same area.
Using carbon-dating, a technique only reliable to around 40,000 years old, the skeleton was first estimated at 28,000 to 32,000 years old.
The figures were later revised upwards to about 40,000 years old.
Dr Thorne said the new research also provided new minimum ages for human cremation and the use of ochre in burials. The burial of Mungo Man involved the spreading of red ochre over the body during the burial ceremony. This is the earliest known use of pigment for artistic, philosophical or religious purposes.
References
Thorne, Alan (1999). Australia's Oldest Human Remains: Age of the Lake Mungo 3 Skeleton. Journal of Human Evolution 36: 591-612.
(Mungo Man has a modern human body but his DNA does not match any human alive today)
this is interesting, and my conclusions were in error.
with any luck, in my lifetime we can see some detailed workup of indo-european dna and migration patterns approximated.
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