genetic structure https://www.scienceblogs.com/ en A little bit of the Others in Us https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/03/17/a-little-bit-of-the-others-in <span>A little bit of the Others in Us</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p><a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/03/abstracts-from-aapa-2010.html">Dienekes</a> has reposted some of the abstracts from the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This one caught my eye, <b>Genetic analyses reveal a history of serial founder effects, admixture between long separated founding populations in Oceania, and interbreeding with archaic humans</b>:</p> <blockquote><p>Genetic anthropologists continue to debate whether human neutral genetic variation primarily reflects a continuum of demes connected by local gene flow or colonization and serial founder effects. A second unresolved issue concerns the genetic contribution of archaic species to the modern human gene pool. Some studies suggest that this contribution was substantial and that it played an important role in human adaptation. These issues remain unresolved because of inadequacies and biases in datasets, problems in statistical methodology, and the failure to recognize that different evolutionary processes may produce similar outcomes. This study redresses these limitations by analyzing gene identity within and between populations in a dataset comprised of 614 STRs assayed in 1,983 people from 99 widespread populations. Our strategy is to fit hierarchical models to these data and examine residual deviations from the models. Each model involves nesting smaller units such as populations into larger units such as continental regions. It is possible to restate many of these models as either expansions or reductions of each other and thereby identify aspects of population structure that have had a major impact on the overall pattern of diversity. The strong fit of a model estimated using the Neighbor Joining algorithm indicates that human genetic diversity primarily reflects a history of successive founder effects associated with our exodus from Africa, not a continuum of demes connected by gene flow. Residual deviations from the model suggest: 1) the genomes of Oceanic peoples are the product of two independent waves of migration to the region and admixture, and<b> 2) genetic exchange occurred between archaic and modern humans after their initial divergence.</b></p></blockquote> <p>Would be nice if they <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2006/11/neandertal_humans_introgressio.php">found a gene</a> which was likely differentiated between archaic and modern alleles, but it doesn't look like that. But the number of populations seems rather large.</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Tue, 03/16/2010 - 22:51</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/evolution" hreflang="en">evolution</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/human-genetics" hreflang="en">human genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/evolution" hreflang="en">evolution</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2169765" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1268865263"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Maybe I should not speak out of school, but a person on a Human biodiversity Forum, ABF, is running trials using Structure, and some blocks of SNPs derived from forum members. One of his tests using these SNPs, about 750, showed what he called "Paleolithic" Eurasian. I got 1.0% for that, I also got 0.7% for Oceanian. I know those two figures are low and could be dismissed as noise, but my results are higher than the others. On his phylogenetic tree, those two groups are near each other. I am Southern European, quite Mediterranean, and Oceania is quite distant from where I was born and where my ancestry derives.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2169765&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="VskfAL7wEdFevztDu3IqCKgwvQLyKbMw5xqdKd6oSac"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Ponto (not verified)</span> on 17 Mar 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2169765">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2169766" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1268921041"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Ponto,</p> <p>Can you link to the relative forum post, as I'd like to join in the fun too!</p> <p>TIA</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2169766&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="EQs7XrGqqWEKTO6FRblWD0VSLCQsV4y_bXbYZkgAjlw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pconroy (not verified)</span> on 18 Mar 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2169766">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2010/03/17/a-little-bit-of-the-others-in%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:51:16 +0000 razib 101318 at https://www.scienceblogs.com The extracted history of Greenland/Kalaallisut https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/02/10/the-extracted-history-of-green <span>The extracted history of Greenland/Kalaallisut</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Interesting that I just <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/02/the_rise_of_the_neo-neandertal.php">pointed to Neandertal DNA</a>, a really big story just came out on ancient Greenlander genetics, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/science/11genome.html">Whole Genome of Ancient Human Is Decoded</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good preservation of DNA in a swatch of his hair so thick it was originally thought to be from a bear.</p> <p>This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that have been decoded so far. It also sheds new light on the settlement of North America by showing there was a hitherto unsuspected migration of people across the continent, from Siberia to Greenland, some 5,500 years ago.</p> <p>The Greenlander belonged to a Paleo-Eskimo culture called the Saqqaq by archaeologists. Using his genome as a basis, a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen determined that the Saqqaq man's closest living relatives were the Chukchis, people who live at the easternmost tip of Siberia. His ancestors split apart from Chukchis some 5,500 years ago, according to genetic calculations, implying that the Saqqaq people's ancestors must have traveled across the northern edges of North America until they reached Greenland.</p></blockquote> <p>One of the interesting aspects of this nearly total genome sequencing is that with the current state of knowledge of the loci which control skin and eye color and hair form, i.e., extremely salient phenotypic traits, you can reconstruct the general appearance of deceased individuals who are sequenced. The practical application of this in criminal forensics is obvious in its utility, but when applied to "historically sensitive" topics it will likely be more fraught. Because of the relative completeness of the genome a lot of functional information was extracted, but there's also very interesting phylogenetic information. <b>It looks like the that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saqqaq_culture">Saqqaq culture</a> is an instance of geographical "leapfrogging."</b> They skirted the northern margins of North America to settle in Greenland, with their ultimate provenance being the far eastern tip of Asia. Here's the abstract, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7282/full/nature08835.html">Ancient human genome sequence of an extinct Palaeo-Eskimo</a>:</p> <!--more--><blockquote>We report here the genome sequence of an ancient human. Obtained from ~4,000-year-old permafrost-preserved hair, the genome represents a male individual from the first known culture to settle in Greenland. Sequenced to an average depth of 20Ã, we recover 79% of the diploid genome, an amount close to the practical limit of current sequencing technologies. We identify 353,151 high-confidence single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), of which 6.8% have not been reported previously. We estimate raw read contamination to be no higher than 0.8%. We use functional SNP assessment to assign possible phenotypic characteristics of the individual that belonged to a culture whose location has yielded only trace human remains. We compare the high-confidence SNPs to those of contemporary populations to find the populations most closely related to the individual. <b>This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit.</b></blockquote> <p>Here's some of the panels from figure 3, which shows the location of various populations sequenced and compared to this individual (he's "starred" in the second two panels).</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-6dc4b1ce5c1316d8ad1a39e84c1ed2ae-chuck1.png" alt="i-6dc4b1ce5c1316d8ad1a39e84c1ed2ae-chuck1.png" /></p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-d268225947179afad2b996af04a6a5ce-chuck2.png" alt="i-d268225947179afad2b996af04a6a5ce-chuck2.png" /></p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-e3f1d4bd87de04635f641dddd841eacf-chuck3.png" alt="i-e3f1d4bd87de04635f641dddd841eacf-chuck3.png" /></p> <p>The second panel is a straightforward PC plot, showing the top two dimensions of variation within the genetic data. In the third panel you have the characterization of the genomes of individuals assuming a K number of ancestral populations generating the extant variation (e.g., three colors of equal proportion in the bar plot individual 1/3 ancestry from three populations). So for example the Uygurs are a mix of east and west Eurasian genes, which is what the history would lead us to expect. The ADMIXTURE program assumed K = 5, so 5 putative ancestral populations. </p> <p>These types of studies are going to revolutionize our understanding of population movements and deep history at higher latitudes. In particular I am excited by the potential they have in elucidating the more complicated network structure of the flow of genes, and by inference, cultural information.</p> <p><b>Related:</b> Edward Yong <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2010/02/meet_inuk_-_full_genome_of_ancient_human_tells_us_about_his.php">also has a post up</a>.</p> <p><b>Citation:</b> Nature 463, 757-762 (11 February 2010) | doi:10.1038/nature08835</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Wed, 02/10/2010 - 13:52</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/evolution" hreflang="en">evolution</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/archaeogenetics" hreflang="en">archaeogenetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/greenland" hreflang="en">Greenland</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/evolution" hreflang="en">evolution</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168917" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265828786"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Any word on if he was lactose tolerant? In Chukchis, 88% are homozygous for the intolerant allele. In Alaskan Eskimos, 80% are intolerant phenotypically. Doesn't sound like he was a pastoralist, but you never know what Greenlanders 5500 years ago were up to.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168917&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="x-jnElHq9UkQMh_86XrHg00QqXlF_8OdcqKKll6xxLI"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://akinokure.blogspot.com" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">agnostic (not verified)</a> on 10 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168917">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168918" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265834800"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Out of curiosity are the laplanders of Scandanavia also this same group? I believe they are genetically different from the Chukchis but I believe are far more Asian than European.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168918&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="0iFxNl45_HRTXTMPGGAl5MPaEe1Z6P0X6BUorPgI2sU"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.libertypages.com/cgw" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Clark (not verified)</a> on 10 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168918">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168919" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265837916"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Individuals and peoples can travel long distances over empty space relatively quickly. Historically (and prehistorically) what kept peoples from moving far was typically resistance from a different people standing in the way, along with the temptations along the way of comfortable places to settle. Where neither was a factor (on the steppe during the early period, on the ocean, in the arctic) travel and migration can be rapid.</p> <p>Also, of course, arctic distances are shorter than they look on maps. From Nome Alaska to Thule Greenland is 2080 miles.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168919&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="IpaYFxIjI8oYcYkxcVFMyMESZl8cDNt486S-py5t63c"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">John Emerson (not verified)</span> on 10 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168919">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168920" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265840812"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>the sami might be part of this story, but i would bet against it right now. their mtDNA looks really ancient in europe (u5). also, they are, i believe, closer to siberians than any other european group, but they are not closer to siberians than to europeans (specifically, finns, and even other scandinavians).</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168920&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="jHwVQ5EHD_Z0q-kFhJY8kSbS0Aj2HNK-R1ipEgjcdq8"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168920">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168921" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265867207"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>A correction for your post title: Kalaalisut is the name of the main Greenlandic <i>language</i>. The Eskimo population there is called "Kalaallit", the country is "Kalaallit Nunaat".</p> <p>With that out of the way: thank you for this in-depth post. It adds a lot to what I've seen elsewhere.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168921&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="-dXc9bUsO4cVTbB7L7ivXfwr59IEHb05gZlMysd62Uw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">vasha (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168921">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168922" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265895152"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Wow -- those "relatedness" patterns are curious.</p> <p>They don't seem to fit with the concensus patterns. Why are Aleuts and Greenlanders grouped so much with Europeans? What's with the Mayas, and the Chukchis?</p> <p>How many migrations were there, and in how many different directions?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168922&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="rO_wcjBXkK3lnz6cq8qQ5SK_hGE1uvF6hhsPCgDBLAQ"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">frog (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168922">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168923" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265899276"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Oh -- the non-Saqqaq data is contemporary, so it includes post-Columbian migrations. Makes it much less useful -- I thought it was pre-Columbian data, since we already know about migrations in the last 500 years.</p> <p>But still, where the hell does the "American" tree come from?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168923&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="dV7N404b1_Dd62hpTkUIO49iKB65a9ANV6c-HZLx-Ps"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">frog (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168923">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168924" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265900326"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>From the archaeological and linguistic evidence, it has been concluded that the Aleut and Inuit are the most recent arrivals from Asia, with the Na-Dene (Athabaskans, mostly in Arctic Canada, but also Navajo and Apache in NM and AZ and others in California) coming before them, and the great body of Amerinds before that. The third "Amerind" group is just a lumping group, no one knows how many migrations it represents.</p> <p>From what I could Google, the Inuit reached Greenland pretty late, about 1400 AD. The Dorset culture which preceded them arrived after 500 BC. So this evidence was from still a third people, which could have been Athabaskan or Amerind, or simply an otherwise unattested migration from Asia.</p> <p>Google does not tell me when the Athabaskans arrived. A recent theory which seems to be well-grounded has found linguistic relationships between the Athabaskan languages and Ket in Siberia, previously thought of as an isolate. </p> <p>There are a number of isolate languages in NE Siberia, as well as languages whose relationships outside the region are few. And the Bering strait isn't very intimidating to the people who live near it, though I wouldn't want to cross it in a skin boat. Some Inuit remain in Asia.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168924&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="qIhlhThHS-ed40H4-Z1myo1enTHcQ3DRaYNrQWno_fo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">John Emerson (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168924">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168925" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265901499"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I just looked more carefully at the graph. Taking the color coding as accurate, this means that the Saqqaq were entirely unrelated with Europeans and Early Amerinds, has some relationship to East Asian (Chinese and Japanese), had the next closest relationship to misc. Siberian peoples, and had the closest relationship to Chukchees. Greenlanders, Aleuts, and Na-Dene share the relationship with Chukchis but not with the other Siberians, with the Na-Dene having the most Amerind kinship.</p> <p>It seems to me that given the data, the Saqqaq could have been close to either the original Inuit-Aleut migration or the INa-Dene migration, once allowance is made for interbreeding recently with Europeans and over a long period with Amerinds.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168925&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="sR-tq4lIhmX9HvOPSuFYM4P67CpDcShLkSlcESYExGc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">John Emerson (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168925">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168926" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265919068"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>There are quite a few interesting aspects to this story. One thing that it brings to mind was something that is not often considered when discussing these people of the far north which is that they can travel such long distances. Prior to the recent introduction of modern technology in transportation, even people in so-called advanced civilizations, for the most part didn't travel all that far, but the people of the north, using both skin boats and sleds pulled by dogs and reindeer regularly travelled long distances; hundreds of miles across landscape the rest of the world's cultures would find unimaginable and yet through their technologies these same landscapes, frozen rivers and the teeming waters of the ice-edge, became avenues for seasonal migrations and means by which they could exploit vast areas for their animal resources, far beyond what the rest of the world could undertake prior to modern mechanization.<br /> In the warm weather and 24 hour daylight of summer, when the rest of us might think it would be the right time to be out and about, northern people become sedentary, whereas in the winter, once the land is frozen solid the people of the arctic start to travel over long distances.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168926&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="JbslCotTAZHpjgntiCL3TsgCMb9_9qo-_v3vZc_4G6w"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">doug l (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168926">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168927" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265919385"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>One more note: if you look at a north polar projection of the world it becomes evident that to the people of the north, with their dog-sleds and skin boats, the resources for which they were perfectly adapted to exploit and the region across which they travelled actually connected them to Europe, Asia, Greenland and North America; all of it being exploitable and accessible and even inviting; one big coastal system without any of it being seperated by any insurmountable barrier.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168927&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="n3PR-RypAXC9LSRKH1Ms4qfoj_uCvAQBFIPbQ235sAw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">doug l (not verified)</span> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168927">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168928" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265930235"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I had a different thought than most others in this thread; since the cost of genome sequencing has come down so much in the past few years, and we've gotten such useful results from human hair, I was wondering if maybe somebody could do sequencing on purported sasquatch hair. Sequence the genome found in the cells of the hair to see how closely, and how distantly, it is related to other primates.</p> <p>Yes, I am well aware that I am ... different.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168928&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="-WNiwzVK_VShoBYx8PbjUWfXT99Tn3ieTB_fsBCD9mw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://opines.mythusmage.org" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Alan Kellogg (not verified)</a> on 11 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168928">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2010/02/10/the-extracted-history-of-green%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:52:55 +0000 razib 101215 at https://www.scienceblogs.com X chromosome marks the spot, again https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/02/07/x-marks-the-spot-again <span>X chromosome marks the spot, again</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>A few days ago I <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/02/the_x_chromosome_is_different.php">discussed a new paper</a> which explores the patterns of natural selection in the genome of the X chromosome. As you know the X is "carried" disproportionately by females, as males have only one copy, so it offers up an interesting window into evolutionary dynamics (see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060556579/geneexpressio-20">The Red Queen</a> for a popular treatment). Today <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/02/x-chromosome-variation-in-global.html">Dienekes</a> points me to a new paper in <a href="http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/1/R10">Genome Biology</a> which puts the focus on the X chromosome again, <a href="http://genomebiology.com/2010/11/1/R10">Characterization of X-Linked SNP genotypic variation in globally-distributed human populations</a>:</p> <blockquote><p><b>Background</b><br /> The transmission pattern of the human X chromosome reduces its population size relative to the autosomes, subjects it to disproportionate influence by female demography, and leaves X-linked mutations exposed to selection in males. As a result, the analysis of X-linked genomic variation can provide insights into the influence of demography and selection on the human genome. Here we characterize the genomic variation represented by 16,297 X-linked SNPs genotyped in the CEPH human genome diversity project samples.</p> <p><b>Results</b><br /> We found that X chromosomes tend to be more differentiated between human populations than autosomes with several notable exceptions. Comparisons between genetically distant populations also showed an excess of X-linked SNPs with large allele frequency differences. Combining information about these SNPs with results from tests designed to detect selective sweeps, we identified two regions that were clear outliers from the rest of the X chromosome for haplotype structure and allele frequency distribution. We were also able to more precisely define the geographical extent of some previously described X-linked selective sweeps.</p> <p><b>Conclusions</b><br /> The relationship between male and female demographic histories is likely to be complex as evidence supporting different conclusions can be found in the same dataset. Although demography may have contributed to the excess of SNPs with large allele frequency differences observed on the X chromosome, we believe that selection is at least partially responsible. Finally, our results reveal the geographical complexities of selective sweeps on the X chromosome and argue for the use of diverse populations in studies of selection.</p></blockquote> <p>The low effective population of the X chromosome and the power of drift to produce greater between population difference comes up in this paper again, as it did in the one I discussed a few days ago. What's going on here is that noisy variation has no specific direction, <b>so random genetic variation which accumulates within the genomes of different populations will tend to be different.</b> A given locus in a large mixed population may have many alleles, a<sub>1</sub>, a<sub>2</sub>...a<sub>n</sub>, at a given locus. If you divide the population into smaller clusters which no longer have any contact, and maintain the proportions of the alleles identical to the parental populations, the frequencies will begin to drift in different directions. The probability of any allele, a, fixing to 100% is the same in all populations, but the populations will likely fix different alleles. Ergo, they will start to exhibit greater between population differences. This is easily illustrated visually. The colors below represent different alleles. In the parental population three alleles are extant at 1/3, and in the initial daughter populations they are also at 1/3. Over time one notes that in these smaller populations different alleles fix, and the variance between the populations increases. If the X chromosome always is assumed to have a smaller effective population size, then it would be more strongly shaped by these dynamics than the autosome.</p> <!--more--><p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-191373b363604687869dc69ec4b60699-popchange.png" alt="i-191373b363604687869dc69ec4b60699-popchange.png" /></p> <p>In this paper they confirmed that the X chromosome exhibits greater between population variance, more or less. The table below uses the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Diversity_Project">HGDP</a> data set and clusters populations by region to produce within and between population genetic variance statistics. Since the font is small, I will tell you in general it confirms that the X chromosome shows more between population variance than the autosomal genome when comparing between continents, but the pattern was less clear within continents, and for East Asian populations the X chromosome is actually <i>less</i> differentiated than the autosome.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-3846b63a116c9240bf653351f3cd3a21-xamova.png" alt="i-3846b63a116c9240bf653351f3cd3a21-xamova.png" /></p> <p>There are patterns in the data here, but it's a little more complex and stark than the assertion that the X is always more variant between population groups. The authors wisely advise caution in overly general pronouncements on the nature of demographic processes due to inferences made from genomic data, since those inferences may be highly sensitive to population.</p> <p>They also wondered if the X chromosome showed difference patterns of population genetic substructure than the autosome, so they compared the X with chromosome 16 using frappe. The X are the two top panels, chromosome 16 the second two. The plot below shows K = 7, that is, 7 putative ancestral groups.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-ffbea4afd275aee9431f4c09c590dd09-frappe.png" alt="i-ffbea4afd275aee9431f4c09c590dd09-frappe.png" /></p> <p>Specific populations are less relevant than that the X chromosome and chromosome 16 seems to exhibit pretty much the same pattern. There are some differences between populations, which might reflect sex-mediated migration or mating. The 7 K clusters seem to map onto 7 geographical regions, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and America. I can't understand why the Hazara or Uyghur would be more East Asian on the X than the autosome from history though. In particular in the case of the Hazara one assumes that this admixed group derives from the mating of West Eurasian (Persian) women and East Asian (Mongol) men (an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxana_Saberi">inverse Saberi</a>). There may be limitations of the sample size or the SNPs in their data set.</p> <p>Next they looked at pairwise allele frequency differences, δ. In short, the bigger the allele frequency differences, the bigger the δ. Our prior assumption is that there will be more high δ results on the X than the autosomes. This is correct, in particular for African vs. non-African pairs. The table below shows the high δ values for three extreme distinct and differentiated populations, the French, Han and Yoruba.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-1f06faf6ce0e3df0206561a3722ed062-xdelta.png" alt="i-1f06faf6ce0e3df0206561a3722ed062-xdelta.png" /></p> <p>They note that the high δ alleles on the X come in clusters. This is what was reported in the other paper as well. Additionally, it is evident from comparing the high δ SNPs with the total number of SNPs on the autosome and X that the X is enriched for between population differences in allele frequency. Not surprising, but nice to be validated.</p> <p>But the next part is a little complicated. They wondered if the between population differences were simply due to differences in sex effective population size and sex ratio of migration, N<sub>f</sub>/N and m<sub>f</sub>/m. Remember that if the female effective population is low, that will reduce the effective population of the X because 2/3 of the X are in females. Similarly, strong bias toward male or female migration and results in gene flow across populations will influence the ratio of δ values on autosomes and the X. </p> <p><b>They conclude from their model that demography can not explain the between population differences.</b> Rather, they strongly suggest that between population differences may be due to natural selection. The second table above shows evidence that X high δ markers are overrepresented as genic SNPs; that is, mutations which might actually produce coding changes. This is strongly suggestive of selection. Additionally, they found that there was a skew toward derived SNPs among high δ regions on the X for Africans in relation to the autosomal regions.</p> <p>Finally, they looked at their data set for signatures of natural selection using haplotype based tests, iHS, CLR, and XP-EHH. The latter two detect selective sweeps which are almost complete, that is, the adaptive allele is nearly at 100%. By contrast iHS tends to be better at detecting alleles where the sweep is partially complete. On the X chromosome they found an association between high δ regions, and positive results for the haplotype based tests of natural selection. After they fixed in on specific regions where the various methods intersected, they surveyed the literature for genes in that region which might be of adaptive and/or functional significance. I will leave it to you to look over the genes in detail, but it is interesting to note that one of the genes is a relation of <i>EDAR</i>, though the significance is left rather fuzzy.</p> <p>The main upshot of this paper seems to be that there are multiple pointers that <b>the peculiarities of the X chromosome can not be placed at the feet of demographic parameters.</b> That is, some researchers have assumed that the prevalence of patrilocality and polygyny in relation to matrilocality and polyandry, combined with the structural fact that the X is disproportionately carried in females, can explain the differences in patterns of genetic variation. The data here suggest that natural selection may be a necessary supplement to explain what we see. Specifically, the authors point to one way in which the X is exposed to selection to a greater extent than the autosomal genome: <b>males are haploid for most of the X chromosomal genes because they only have one copy, so recessively expressed traits are always expressed in males.</b> The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_linkage">sex linkage</a> of traits such as color blindness are the most well known result of this phenomenon. Let's make this concrete. Assume that a gene comes in two flavors, a and b, and that a homozygote b produces a lethal trait. So:</p> <p>Frequency of b = 50% in parents, 25% of offspring die<br /> Frequency of b = 10% in parents, 1% of offspring die<br /> Frequency of b = 1% in parents, 0.01% of offspring die</p> <p>Frequency of b = 50% in parents, 50% of alleles exposed to selection<br /> Frequency of b = 10% in parents, 18% of alleles exposed to selection<br /> Frequency of b = 1% in parents, 2% of alleles exposed to selection</p> <p>As the frequency of the allele decreases, more and more of the copies of the allele are "masked" from selection in the form of heterozygotes. By contrast, in the X chromosome 1/3 of the copies are <i>not</i> masked because they are carried by males, who are operationally haploid. This means that in the case of the X chromosome conventionally recessive traits are not always recessive, and so selection is potentially more efficacious in driving allele frequencies to fixation. Ergo, some of the clusters and regions of between population genomic difference are likely due to local adaptation.</p> <p><b>Note:</b> This paper extensively references the framework outlined in <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/03/signals_of_recent_positive_sel.php">two</a> <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/06/adaptation_might_not_be_a_sphe.php">papers</a> which came out of the Pritchard lab earlier this year.</p> <p><b>Citation:</b> Characterization of X-Linked SNP genotypic variation in globally-distributed human populations, Amanda M Casto , Jun Z Li , Devin Absher , Richard Myers , Sohini Ramachandran, Marcus W Feldman, Genome Biology 2010, 11:R10doi:10.1186/gb-2010-11-1-r10</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Sat, 02/06/2010 - 23:00</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/anthroplogy" hreflang="en">Anthroplogy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/adaptation" hreflang="en">adaptation</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genomics" hreflang="en">genomics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/natural-selection" hreflang="en">natural selection</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/selection" hreflang="en">selection</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/x-chromosome" hreflang="en">x chromosome</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168855" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265552339"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>So if a congenitsl genetic disease is showing up in the sons of a couple it's something most likely hidden and repressed in the mother's side? What if a genetic disease is on a leg of the male supplied X but isn't being countered by the mother's, can that pass on a congenital disease. </p> <p>I have a friend who is seems to me there is stuff from his side and his wife's side of the family that are showing up in the grandkids, which of course you have to throw in the women and men their kids have married. I try not to be an egghead when offering my condolences or advise for therapy/medical stuff. Almost makes a person not just want a pre-nupt but a DNA testing of their potential mate for any offspring.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168855&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="pkoDP-NLeSigspndPa1gATpQAvBlsXqj8sNV8e57dMI"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">megan (not verified)</span> on 07 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168855">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168856" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265630900"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Good blog! You said, "The 7 K clusters seem to map onto 7 geographical regions...". Does this have anything at all to do with the so-called "Seven Daughters of Eve", or is this just a coincidence?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168856&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="lEsKrMNw6shQ79bN8FjUuXButhrk4ihHfnyd9DCQCYw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">IanW (not verified)</span> on 08 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168856">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168857" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1265633743"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Weird. A few years ago, there was some fuss about the X chromosome being abnormally less divergent from chimps, even considering it's a sexual chromosome. It was supposedly caused by a complex speciation event, in which the human lineage got its less divergent X from recent hybridization with the chimp lineage, about 1 million years ago. Now, all of a sudden, it's exceptionally divergent among humans. I don't get it. Maybe feminists got all irritated with just the Y evolving faster and decided to do something serious about it.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168857&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Vtb8aaDAxq68EaJO2g2QvuBw3l8k-Hv9VLLUyPNbEx0"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Zod (not verified)</span> on 08 Feb 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168857">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2010/02/07/x-marks-the-spot-again%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 04:00:55 +0000 razib 101209 at https://www.scienceblogs.com The origins of the Yakuts https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/01/26/the-origins-of-the-yakuts <span>The origins of the Yakuts</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>One of the more substantive consequences of the powerful new genomic techniques has been in the area of ancient DNA extraction and analysis. The <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/02/090212-neanderthal-genome.html">Neandertal genome</a> story is arguably the sexiest, but closer to the present day there've been plenty of results which have changed the way we look at the past. The input of <a href="http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017254414699180528062:uyrcvn__yd0&amp;q=etruscan+site:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/&amp;sa=Search">genetics</a> has basically demanded a revision of the contemporary consensus of the origins of the Etruscans which emerged from archaeology. Though certainly ancestry and genetic relationship are informative, ancient DNA has also given us windows into the change of function and a record of adaptation which rests less on inference. I'm thinking here of the fact that <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2007/02/recent_human_evolution_in_the.php">ancient inhabitants of Central Europe</a> 7,000 years ago do not seem to have been able to process milk in the manner which is the <a href="http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;client=pub-5976931228913298&amp;cof=FORID:13;AH:left;S:http://scienceblogs.com;CX:ScienceBlogs%252Ecom%2520Search%2520Engine;L:http://scienceblogs.com/channel/img/logo_science-blogs.gif;LH:66;LP:1;VLC:%23551a8b;DIV:%23cccccc;&amp;cx=017254414699180528062:uyrcvn__yd0&amp;adkw=AELymgUtRu9PUxE0rbOH01Ehm8Q09NlTziwl2cg3dhXBXwRgobYdQu8yOW1lpAnNatWQC1PGHo2dq33ldQVxOw7sghXh_QNYY-x--eTMFh8tV970GPUd0BuF3Z7HngJmAgnYOFjifqEOtFlDuiMsR4AjU36Bx6WufhfFidXRHBtrC1gP27XmX7sRlupAoV0IfzLw9YUh_AMka1H7lcXWTCTtXIfwiu5xzw&amp;boostcse=0&amp;ei=ZpFeS_jGC4G4M-CdhYoP&amp;sa=X&amp;oi=spell&amp;resnum=0&amp;ct=result&amp;cd=1&amp;q=lactase+persistence+site:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/&amp;spell=1">norm</a> in that region today; some we know about because we know that they lacked the mutation which confers lactase persistence in Europeans. There are other examples, and I assume that in the near future we'll still see a steep exponential increase in the generation of new results as techniques get better and cheaper.</p> <p>A new paper explores the demographic history of an obscure Siberian population using DNA extraction and phylogenetic analysis. The questions are historical, and relatively easy to resolve. <b>Who are the Yakuts, where did they come from?</b> Those of you who have played <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)">Risk</a> know that Yakutsk is a region of Siberia, and the Yakuts are residents of that region. Interestingly the Yakuts speaking a Turkic language. Here is a map which shows the modern distribution of Turkic languages (I have shaded in what is presumed to be the Turkic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urheimat">Urheimat</a>):</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-ee85660791bbe863b9b5875792b244ce-turkdomain.png" alt="i-ee85660791bbe863b9b5875792b244ce-turkdomain.png" /></p> <p>Within the last 2,000 years the Turkic languages have rapidly spread across Eurasia. Most of the expansion was to the south and west, but as you can see, some pushed their way into Siberia. These are the Yakuts. I have discussed the <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/06/what_it_means_to_be_a_turk.php">genetics of Anatolian Turks</a> before. These Turks sit at one end of the domains of the language family, and how Anatolia came to be Turkic-speaking can tell us something about the dynamics of language change and ethnic reorientation more generally. The Yakuts may tell us something more.</p> <p><a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/10/25">Human evolution in Siberia: from frozen bodies to ancient DNA</a>:</p> <!--more--><blockquote><b>Background</b><br /> The Yakuts contrast strikingly with other populations from Siberia due to their cattle- and horse-breeding economy as well as their Turkic language. On the basis of ethnological and linguistic criteria as well as population genetic studies, it has been assumed that they originated from South Siberian populations. However, many questions regarding the origins of this intriguing population still need to be clarified (e.g. precise origin of paternal lineages and admixture rate with indigenous populations). This study attempts to better understand the origins of the Yakuts, by performing genetic analyses on 58 mummified frozen bodies dated from the 15th to the 19th century, excavated from Yakutia (Eastern Siberia). <p><b>Results</b><br /> High quality data were obtained for the autosomal STRs, Y-chromosomal STRs and SNPs and mtDNA due to exceptional sample preservation. A comparison with the same markers on seven museum specimens excavated 3 to 15 years ago showed significant differences in DNA quantity and quality. Direct access to ancient genetic data from these molecular markers combined with the archaeological evidence, demographical studies and comparisons with 166 contemporary individuals from the same location as the frozen bodies, helped us to clarify the microevolution of this intriguing population.</p> <p><b>Conclusion</b><br /> <b>We were able to trace the origins of the male lineages to a small group of horse-riders from the Cis-Baikal area. Furthermore, mtDNA data showed that intermarriages between the first settlers with Evenks women led to the establishment of genetic characteristics during the 15th century that are still observed today.</b></p></blockquote> <p>Presumably they focused on Y and mtDNA for ease of analysis and extraction. It's really convenient that Yakuts live in Siberia; stuff keeps, including biological remains (the paper has some photos which show corpses in a state of decomposition, but still definitely recognizable). We might never be able to do anything similar to explore the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion">Bantu expansion</a> because the local conditions don't favor preservation (the same issue may explain why East Africa has been a goldmine of palaeoanthropology, while West and Central Africa has not).</p> <p>In any case, the ancient DNA confirm continuity between the original Yakuts and present day Yakuts, by and large. On the other hand, there is evidence for asymmetrical gene flow in regards to the sexes. It seems that the Turkic males who arrived from the south with their pastoralist culture took wives from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evenks">Evenks</a>, a local Tungusic group. The difference is evident in two charts which visualize genetic differences across various populations.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-17698cba0c95aaf7a3a8c1c284ce83c8-yakgendistanceY.png" alt="i-17698cba0c95aaf7a3a8c1c284ce83c8-yakgendistanceY.png" /></p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-cc6a489de09491ec4ba62e9c5beac28b-yakgendistancemtDNA.png" alt="i-cc6a489de09491ec4ba62e9c5beac28b-yakgendistancemtDNA.png" /></p> <p>Note two points</p> <p>1) Pre-modern and modern Yakuts cluster together on both maternal and paternal lineages.</p> <p>2) In maternal lineages the Yakuts cluster with other populations, but on Y chromosomal lineages they do not.</p> <p>Let me quote the author's conclusion:</p> <blockquote><p>We were able to demonstrate that the Yakutian population formed before the 15th century, from a small group of settlers from the Cis-Baïkal region and a small number of women from different South Siberian origins. The genetic characteristics of the Yakuts were well established in the Central Yakutian population during the 15th century, even if there was a small loss in genetic variation during the last two centuries associated with stochastic processes or other phenomena.</p></blockquote> <p>Genetically the Yakuts are a hybrid population, but culturally they are Turkic. This is not a totally exceptional pattern. <a href="http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017254414699180528062:uyrcvn__yd0&amp;q=ashkenazi+site:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/&amp;sa=Search">Ashkenazi Jews</a> and many <a href="http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;client=pub-5976931228913298&amp;cof=FORID:13;AH:left;S:http://scienceblogs.com;CX:ScienceBlogs%252Ecom%2520Search%2520Engine;L:http://scienceblogs.com/channel/img/logo_science-blogs.gif;LH:66;LP:1;VLC:%23551a8b;DIV:%23cccccc;&amp;adkw=AELymgXW2LYxlX3oW2S6ISaRQO4iZwRgp517FPsjnObZZ7QWBPWTamI2FDfJPpRch7pYdQ9wofVnaiNu0mnOtMz8rr2-An2Gs3Da0EX0TOebf9ySvyL2nf-tz4sgkSvgYl-prr1ZWHmTo-zvL6ZfrvqKbn4SfgzorbpovePgWAL_5mkRDjc3EpXRfuQXoQ5c9ZlGBh_DA0nSPmaN6gN3NCDvYylyudGI4A&amp;boostcse=0&amp;q=mestizos+site:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/&amp;btnG=Search&amp;cx=017254414699180528062:uyrcvn__yd0">Latin Americans</a> exhibit the same disjunction between genetic admixture, and relative dominance of particular cultural forms as opposed to synthesis. Part of the issue here is that biological and cultural evolution operate differently, with the latter being far more flexible and unconstrained by the inheritance modes imposed by DNA and sexual reproduction.* </p> <p>The Yakuts also may serve as an example of a particular mode of long distance gene flow which was possible only with the rise of horses. There are of course normal exchanges between neighboring populations, or, on occasion forcible assimilation. But with nomadism there came to be the possible of leap-frogging and transplantation of cultures and populations at great distances. The Hungarians, Hazara and Anatolian Turks are all examples of this dynamic. It also seems that while localized gene flow is more likely to be female-mediated (due to dominance of patrilocality worldwide), this long range gene flow is more likely to be male-mediated.</p> <p><b>Citation:</b> BMC Evolutionary Biology 2010, 10:25doi:10.1186/1471-2148-10-25</p> <p>* The fact that some children adopted as infants from Korea or India into American families wish to refamiliarize themselves with "their culture" does remind us that people tend connect to the two. But this is a matter of human values and psychology, not necessity due to a genuine connection (unless you believe in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asatru_Folk_Assembly#.22Metagenetics.22">metagenetics</a>).</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Tue, 01/26/2010 - 03:48</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/history" hreflang="en">History</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/gene-flow" hreflang="en">gene flow</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-distance" hreflang="en">genetic distance</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/turks" hreflang="en">Turks</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/yakuts" hreflang="en">Yakuts</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168715" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1264499989"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>"Yakutsk is a region of Siberia"</p> <p>No, Yakutsk is the capital of Yakutia :)</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168715&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="ocy6sts3Do-Jun0IU6r3fxnP-1QYBa2ax9DmDz281lo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Alex Besogonov (not verified)</span> on 26 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168715">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2010/01/26/the-origins-of-the-yakuts%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Tue, 26 Jan 2010 08:48:13 +0000 razib 101184 at https://www.scienceblogs.com How Columbus was not a seer https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/01/13/how-columbus-was-not-a-seer <span>How Columbus was not a seer</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>A week ago I <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/01/columbus_was_a_seer.php">pointed out</a> that in some visualizations of world wide population variation South Asians &amp; mestizos seem to overlap which each other to a great extent. The reason for this is that both populations can be modeled as admixtures between two separate, but related, populations. Mestizos are the products of pairings between Europeans and indigenous America populations, while South Asians seem to be a stabilized hybrid population which emerged from the fusion of a West Eurasian (closely related to European) and East Eurasian (distantly related to East Asians) populations. The East Eurasian ancestors of South Asians may be distantly related to indigenous American populations, but in a world wide scale the relationship is relatively close (i.e., compared to Europeans vs. indigenous Americans). So when mapped onto a plot of genetic variation incorporating world wide populations South Asians and mestizos naturally resemble each other. That said, a <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2010/01/columbus_was_a_seer.php#comment-2190245">commenter observes</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Great example of how two dimensions lose information.</p> <p>Given how different the two populations are genetically, guarantee that the third component separates them pretty cleanly.</p></blockquote> <p>Correct. A new paper illustrates this. <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0008695">Magnitude of Stratification in Human Populations and Impacts on Genome Wide Association Studies</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) may be biased by population stratification (PS). We conducted empirical quantification of the magnitude of PS among human populations and its impact on GWAS. Liver tissues were collected from 979, 59 and 49 Caucasian Americans (CA), African Americans (AA) and Hispanic Americans (HA), respectively, and genotyped using Illumina650Y (Ilmn650Y) arrays. RNA was also isolated and hybridized to Agilent whole-genome gene expression arrays. We propose a new method (i.e., hgdp-eigen) for detecting PS by projecting genotype vectors for each sample to the eigenvector space defined by the Human Genetic Diversity Panel (HGDP). Further, we conducted GWAS to map expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) for the ~40,000 liver gene expression traits monitored by the Agilent arrays. HGDP-eigen performed similarly to the conventional self-eigen methods in capturing PS. However, leveraging the HGDP offered a significant advantage in revealing the origins, directions and magnitude of PS. Adjusting for eigenvectors had minor impacts on eQTL detection rates in CA. In contrast, for AA and HA, adjustment dramatically reduced association findings. At an FDR = 10%, we identified 65 eQTLs in AA with the unadjusted analysis, but only 18 eQTLs after the eigenvector adjustment. Strikingly, 55 out of the 65 unadjusted AA eQTLs were validated in CA, indicating that the adjustment procedure significantly reduced GWAS power. A number of the 55 AA eQTLs validated in CA overlapped with published disease associated SNPs. For example, rs646776 and rs10903129 have previously been associated with lipid levels and coronary heart disease risk, however, the rs10903129 eQTL was missed in the eigenvector adjusted analysis.</p></blockquote> <!--more--><p>The main point of the paper is to smoke out population substructure which might generate spurious false positives in health-related <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study">genome-wide association</a> studies. The problem is pretty obvious. Imagine you have a medical study with a lot of blacks and whites, and you just assume they're all genetically basically the same. Then you look for associations of particular genetic variants within the population which has disease X. Of course, it could be that blacks or whites tend to have more of disease X than the other population, and, it turns out hat <b>blacks and whites also tend to differ on a whole lot of genes.</b> Modern human population genetics might have "disproved race," but it sure is very interested in "population substructure."</p> <p>Patterns of between population variation can be visualized by extracting out the independent dimensions of variance, and plotting them against each other. Generally the charts I post on this illustrate the two dimensions which can explain the most variance in the data set (the alleles frequencies across all the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-nucleotide_polymorphism">SNPs</a> in this case), principal components 1 and 2. But the comment above highlights that there are many other dimensions, though they explain less of the variance.</p> <p>One issue that the authors of the above paper pinpoint is that the nature of these dimensions are sensitive to the populations which you include in your original data set to generate them. They distinguish here between the dimensions generated from the full <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Diversity_Project">HGDP</a> data set, which includes ~50 world populations, and visualizations which rely only on one population. In this study they project their own samples of European, African and Hispanic Americans on the dimensions extracted out of the HGDP data set, and also onto dimensions generated from the populations themselves. As an example, consider Hispanic American projected upon the dimensions of variation constructed from Asians, Africans and Europeans, or, Hispanic Americans projected upon the dimensions of variation extracted from only the variance extant within their own population. From what I could tell they actually didn't find that correcting for total genome variation using these two methods was particularly helpful in generating greater clarity as to the role of population substructure in producing false positives. So let's focus on on the visualizations, which go back to the title of the post.</p> <p>The first chart has PC 1 &amp; PC 2 from the HGDP populations, with their sample of about 50 African Americans projected onto it:</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-4ac43dd7789af8bc31fb3dd3f844cced-col1.png" alt="i-4ac43dd7789af8bc31fb3dd3f844cced-col1.png" /></p> <p>Pretty much zero surprise here. I would be willing to assume that the self-identified African American who clusters with Europeans is an error of some sort (e.g., a sample mix-up), but other studies show the same tendency quite frequently. I conclude then that there are actually people who are inadvertently "passing" as black, at least culturally (on the outside they probably look whiter than <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Butterfield">G. K. Butterfield</a>).</p> <p>The second chart now has PC 1 &amp; PC 3. So the dimension of variation which explains the second largest proportion of variance has now been replaced by the dimension which explains the third largest proportion.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-4e2d228c070864e0b31fb7579588c99c-col2.png" alt="i-4e2d228c070864e0b31fb7579588c99c-col2.png" /></p> <p>Now Native Americans are distinct from East Asians in the HGDP sample. This is because of PC 3. This goes to the commenter's point that looking at more dimensions of variation gives us a better sense of real population differences. </p> <p>Jumping back to PC 1 and 2, but with Hispanics projected onto the HGDP generated space:</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-72d7d2bf5667a2e788981ede88e47366-col3.png" alt="i-72d7d2bf5667a2e788981ede88e47366-col3.png" /></p> <p>I don't know the provenance of the Hispanics, but it looks to me that they're likely to include many <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/05/skin_color_does_not_always_pre.php">Puerto Ricans</a>, seeing as there's a large amount of African admixture here. Nevertheless, you still see the overlap between Hispanics and South Asians that you did with the Gujarati-Mexican comparison, though attenuated. So let's look at PC 1 &amp; PC 3.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-2f6c7a3af8a8af38638affd08b3e4ff8-col4.png" alt="i-2f6c7a3af8a8af38638affd08b3e4ff8-col4.png" /></p> <p>And yes, all of a sudden mestizos and South Asians do not overlap, and in fact South Asians are further from mestizos than Europeans or Middle Easterners. One could have predicted this from the previous chart.</p> <p>Finally, I want to round out the inspection by looking at two charts which project European Americans onto PC 1, PC 2 and PC 3. The European Americans are black points.</p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-5f7e3fdf298582384c45cbcdbe1eeef0-col5.png" alt="i-5f7e3fdf298582384c45cbcdbe1eeef0-col5.png" /></p> <p><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-2734ae19ccaf12451614dfecbe381824-col6.png" alt="i-2734ae19ccaf12451614dfecbe381824-col6.png" /></p> <p>Note that European American outliers seem to have a bias toward drifting in the direction of the Native Americans and African Americans. I don't discount the possibility of errors here, but it is important to note that deviations away from the HGDP European cluster in the last chart are toward the two groups which European Americans have historically been in contact with in North America.</p> <p><b>Note:</b> The subjects specific to this study seem to have been resident in the eastern half of the United States. This would tend to support my supposition that they are less likely to be Mexican Americans, and more likely to be Puerto Rican or Cuban Americans, if they were Hispanic.</p> <p><b>Citation: </b>Hao K, Chudin E, Greenawalt D, Schadt EE (2010) Magnitude of Stratification in Human Populations and Impacts on Genome Wide Association Studies. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8695. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008695</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Tue, 01/12/2010 - 23:18</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genomics" hreflang="en">genomics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/hispanics" hreflang="en">Hispanics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/population-substructure" hreflang="en">Population Substructure</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168446" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263362765"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I believe that in some contexts this is called "churning" -- the loss of information and approach to entropy. I've talked to linguists about whether something like this could happen to a language, making its antecedents unrecoverable. Two processes that happen to language are creolization and the development of a Sprachbund". </p> <p>In the first, a language is stripped down to a minimum for contact with foreigners and made into a pidgin trade language which usually has vocabulary from two or several languages and a structure which is characteristic of most pidgins, but not necessarily of either donor language. The pidgin then becomes a creole when residents of the trade center grow up speaking mostly pidgin and the language develops beyond its rudimentary beginnings.</p> <p>The Sprachbund is the trading back and forth of features between neighboring languages which are not historically related (from different language groups). One example is Romanian, which has picked up features from the surrounding Slavic languages -- the Balkan Sprckbund. Another is East Asia, where it is now thought that languages from several different unrelated or distantly related language groups (Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, and maybe others) have picked up enough common features to make up a sort of adoptive family. The Sprachbund wikis are worth reading.</p> <p>My theory was that of an unwritten language has endured, say, two cycles each of creolization and sprachbundization during (say) three thousand years (not impossible) ancestors before that time might be unrecoverable. It would essentially be a new isolate (as opposed to a survivor isolate).</p> <p>The two processes are not unrelated, either. Every creole language would be part of a sprachbund comprised by its neighboring languages. </p> <p>There's an example of this in the novel "The Good Soldier Schweik". Over the period of a century or more educated Czechs had picked up a German-type pronoun usage, whereas uneducated Czechs tended to stick to the Czech form, and nationalist Czechs insisted on the old form. </p> <p>These factors might throw a monkey-wrench into attempts to build superfamilies larger than the known families (most famously Nostratic). They don't in any way discredit the established families (Indo-European, Semitic, Bantu, Malayo-Polynesian) but make work going beyond them difficult or impossible. The Turkish-Mongol-Manchu family has been questioned, though, and the language relationships of SE Asia are still up in the air.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168446&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="YGnh1ip-2Od75BTZcwggDt12Wl2kn0X5tNjbcfVtnUA"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">John Emerson (not verified)</span> on 13 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168446">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168447" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263374531"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Razib, I wonder whether it would ever be illuminating to plot (some) genetic data on a triangular diagram, rather than on multiple rectangular diagrams?<br /> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_plot">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_plot</a></p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168447&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="BvdtZw66bc0RfoRb_QU1VfqzvS9lTxGT6NA8gGVOlkg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">bioIgnoramus (not verified)</span> on 13 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168447">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168448" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263390992"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>bio, follow the link to puerto ricans. there's a ternary plot in there.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168448&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="7xM_unLK4q398XMFNSVddeXzYAprzQRr0E0e467HqN0"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 13 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168448">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168449" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263394088"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Why don't people also do 3D plots? With computers, it really isn't that difficult.</p> <p>And if the data isn't too dense, then taking a snapshot of the 3D plot from a small set of different angles should be quite telling. (Or, you could make interactive 3D plots, that could rotate, hide and show data, etc.)</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168449&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="gTTvA9EAZUzntAXUBHC4-Q0JP-y9MwqhLLLZt93Qveo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://changelog.ca/" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" content="Charles Iliya Krempeaux">Charles Iliya … (not verified)</a> on 13 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168449">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168450" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263394841"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>they often don't look that good on 2-D paper i think. OTOH, seems like there'd be a good place for it in the supplemental information with visualization software.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168450&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Qu5ZIvKl15nWTgEuCH0oYhnrJENTSYvPb2BFXvLACXg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 13 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168450">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168451" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263839313"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Maple can make 3d scatter plots. You can move them around with the mouse to look at them from different angles.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168451&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="c6ci84LJbMcsUQjeX0gVe3_LpTuYcMQjsriIXbsgzCY"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Melykin (not verified)</span> on 18 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168451">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2010/01/13/how-columbus-was-not-a-seer%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:18:16 +0000 razib 101149 at https://www.scienceblogs.com Are Chinese subsets of Southeast Asians? https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/12/15/are-chinese-subsets-of-southea <span>Are Chinese subsets of Southeast Asians?</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>That's probably the big takeaway of a new paper on the genetics of Asians, a set which includes South Asians, but in the new research mostly focuses on the people of East Asia. In a global context this work is important. The backstory is that there are disagreements about the exact process of the "Out of Africa" migration. Most researchers would agree that the vast majority, perhaps all, of the distinctive genetic content of the human species derives from a migration from the African continent between 50 and 100 thousand years ago (closer to the former date than the latter likely). Note that there were other human lineages outside of Africa, the Neandertals being the most prominent, but various "archaic" groups were extant in eastern Asia as well down to the arrival of modern African-derived human groups. This is part of the reason why <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis">H. floresiensis</a> isn't <i>that</i> outlandish, a lineage of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus_soloensis">H. er ectus</a> was extant in Southeast Asia until the ~50,000 years ago, with the arrival of moderns.</p> <p>Those are the agreements. The disagreement, in particular in regards to East Asia, is rather simple. <b>Was there one, or two, waves from Africa, and did one, or both, settle East Asia?</b> The two-wave model was promoted heavily in the early aughts by Spencer Wells. The whole argument is laid out in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812971469/geneexpressio-20">The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey</a>. The title hints to the fact that Wells and his collaborators primarily focused on paternal lineages, the Y chromosomes, in their reconstructions. Here's a screenshot from <a href="https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html">The Genographic Project</a> which highlights the two-wave model:</p> <form mt:asset-id="23813" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-52e840eec48488e6f52a844fdf3ca1e9-genographc.png" alt="i-52e840eec48488e6f52a844fdf3ca1e9-genographc.png" /></form> <p>In the context of East Asia, the two-wave model posits that there was a southern coastal migration, which pushed into Australia via southern India. And, there was a northern migration up through Central Asia from which arose both Europeans and East Asians.</p> <p>The new paper in <i>Science</i> is <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/326/5959/1541">Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia</a>:</p> <!--more--><blockquote>Asia harbors substantial cultural and linguistic diversity, but the geographic structure of genetic variation across the continent remains enigmatic. Here we report a large-scale survey of autosomal variation from a broad geographic sample of Asian human populations. Our results show that genetic ancestry is strongly correlated with linguistic affiliations as well as geography. Most populations show relatedness within ethnic/linguistic groups, despite prevalent gene flow among populations. More than 90% of East Asian (EA) haplotypes could be found in either Southeast Asian (SEA) or Central-South Asian (CSA) populations and show clinal structure with haplotype diversity decreasing from south to north. <b>Furthermore, 50% of EA haplotypes were found in SEA only and 5% were found in CSA only, indicating that SEA was a major geographic source of EA populations.</b></blockquote> <p>I don't think that the insight that language &amp; genes are closely correlated will be <i>that</i> surprising. This was highlighted by L. L. Cavalli-Sforza on a <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/11/from_population_genetics_to_li.php">coarser scale</a> two decades ago, but has now been validated in a more fine-grained fashion by larger data sets and more powerful analytical techniques. The reasons for this should be obvious: <b>marriage networks will coalesce around comprehensibility.</b> There are exceptions, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Lee#Biography">Tommy Lee's</a> Greek-born mother reputedly did not speak English when she married his father, an American serviceman stationed in Europe.</p> <p>To illustrate the relationships they constructed:</p> <p>a) A maximum-likelihood based phylogenetic tree, showing relationships between groups</p> <p>b) Also a Structure based chart which shows ancestral proportions inferred from 14 putative source populations</p> <p>I've reedited and formatted figure 1 to fit on the screen clearly. The key here is to look how at the separation occurs as a function of language. This is not a magical process, no doubt language served as a barrier between groups in the past, and to some extent is also a cultural signal which can be used to infer the past identity of a given set of individuals in the present (this is an intuition which naturally less strongly perceived by Americans).</p> <form mt:asset-id="23815" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-e58e7e515abebf2a71e578d3a1b02713-asianfig1a.png" alt="i-e58e7e515abebf2a71e578d3a1b02713-asianfig1a.png" /></form> <form mt:asset-id="23816" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-6aef093cc822030fa037f50615c364c7-asianfig1b.png" alt="i-6aef093cc822030fa037f50615c364c7-asianfig1b.png" /></form> <p>Note what I said in the title: the peoples of Northeast Asia are viewed in this study as subset a of various Southeast Asian groups. Additionally, the Indians branch out as the furthest outgroup, as we'd expect.</p> <p>To get a sense of the relationships geometrically there is the obligatory PC plot. From figure 2 I want to focus on panels B &amp; D. The first includes Indians and Europeans, while the second does not, and excludes the outliers among the East Asian populations. In other words, the first chart gives a sense of East Asian variation in a worldwide context, while the last is a finer-grained snapshot which elucidates the details of relationships among East Asians.</p> <form mt:asset-id="23817" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-ed0f5ecd0ef2c65e2d80c9f83ab18cfa-asianfig2a.png" alt="i-ed0f5ecd0ef2c65e2d80c9f83ab18cfa-asianfig2a.png" /></form> <p>Remember that the axes represent independent dimensions which can be extracted out of the genetic variance data. PC 1 represents the dimension which has the largest component of variance, and PC 2 the second largest, and so forth. Much of nature of the scatter (or lack thereof) in this figure is predicable from previous work. Europeans are relatively homogeneous on a worldwide scale, but the Europeans represented by "CEU" are Mormons from Utah, who are themselves a subset of European variation. So the tight cluster is expected. Indians vary quite a bit along an axis. A recent <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/south_asians_as_a_hybrid_popul.php">paper</a> has offered an explanation for why Indians so often seem to exhibit a linear distribution: South Asians can be conceived as a two-way admixture between a European-like population, likely invasive to the subcontinent, and an older resident population with distant affinities to the peoples to their east. This ancient eastern affiliated substrate, upon which the European-like element was overlain, is very <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/12/south_indian_phylogeography.php">evident in mtDNA lineages</a>. "CN-UG" are Uyghurs, who are a relatively recent <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/03/uyghurs_are_hybrids.php">hybrid population</a>.</p> <p>The second panel is also somewhat expected. Recent work has <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/11/population_substructure_within.php">reaffirmed a strong north-south cline</a> within China among the Han. Chinese data have been confused, but these results seem to tacitly support the contention that the peoples of South China were often culturally assimilated and absorbed into the Han identity.</p> <form mt:asset-id="23819" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-f152802e91908e3a5e249afc3a8dce6e-asianfig3a.png" alt="i-f152802e91908e3a5e249afc3a8dce6e-asianfig3a.png" /></form> <p>Finally, here's a figure which shows haplotype diversity declining as one moves north. A similar figure could be drawn along a line out of Africa to the northeast. Or from East Asia to North America. The inference is that the population with reduced diversity is derived from the population with greater diversity. The reason for this can be illustrated by the old example of a photocopy; subsequent copies have less information than previous copies. When a daughter population emerges from a parent population generally the former is a subset of the latter, and so it is less diverse. There may be a bottleneck whereby many distinctive alleles disappear through extinction. In this case the inference is that <b>the populations of China, Japan, etc., are derived from a Southeast Asian group, ergo, they are less diverse.</b> Not only that, but in terms of distinctive alleles the northern groups seem to be a subset of the southern groups. Here is the final paragraph of the paper:</p> <blockquote><p>To unambiguously infer population histories represents a considerable challenge...Although this study does not disprove a two-wave model of migration, the evidence from our autosomal data and the accompanying simulation studies...point toward a history that unites the Negrito and non-Negrito populations of Southeast and East Asia via a single primary wave of entry of humans into the continent</p></blockquote> <p>This conclusion rests on some assumptions. Here is the anthropology blogger <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/12/mapping-human-genetic-diversity-in-asia.html">Dienekes</a> bringing up some objections:</p> <blockquote><p>As to the main thesis of the paper, namely that East Asians are descended from Southeast Asians rather than Central Asians, I have to say that I am not convinced. This thesis is based on two observations: minimum sharing between East Asians and Central/South Asians and south-north reduction of genetic diversity in East Eurasians. However, the high genetic diversity in Southeast Asians can be explained if they are taken to be old hybrids of Mongoloid northerners with "Australoid"-like southerners as physical anthropology suggests, and the seeming absence of influence of present-day Central/South Asians is due to the fact that the latter are largely Caucasoids of western Eurasian origin, and, thus, do not represent any putative ancestral populations to modern Mongoloids.</p></blockquote> <p>In other words, Dienekes is suggesting that <b>the populations of Southeast Asia emerged in the same manner as those of South Asia, an admixture event between an indigenous substrate and an exogenous northern population.</b> In China we have a great deal of historical evidence which points to north-south migration, in particular in the period between 500 and 1500. The greater diversity of the South Chinese may then derive <i>in part</i> from the fact that they are an admixed population, who carry within them the genetic heritage of the indigenous peoples, as well as Han immigrations from the north. But, it may also be true that the original Han were migrants from the south. One might posit the same with the more general model of East Asia, with the original Northeast Asians being derived from Southeast Asians, and contemporary Southeast Asians being admixtures between a "back-migration" from Northeast Asia and the local substrate. We know specifically that many of the peoples of Indochina have origins on South China, so this is not without some support from history.</p> <p><b>Citation:</b> Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia, Science 326, 1541 (2009);<br /> The HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium, et al., DOI: 10.1126/science.1177074</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Tue, 12/15/2009 - 01:23</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/anthroplogy" hreflang="en">Anthroplogy</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/china" hreflang="en">china</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/east-asia" hreflang="en">East Asia</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/population-substructure" hreflang="en">Population Substructure</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168098" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260865310"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>"back-migration" - a pleasant reminder of the Beaker People and their purported tendency to "reflux".</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168098&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="iMpF4GsjuoCFJoyJXnW84E41qJscFD_98nojykXKC3I"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">bioIgnoramus (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168098">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168099" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260875324"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Heh. This might make the US Census category Asian as a natural grouping more justifiable.</p> <p>Would it be likely that the ASI part of the Indian mix is closely related to the South-East Asian stock the East Asians evolved from?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168099&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Ow4kSgX8d5BbZtxmtm2sChbmXXXR2DJK1MJaTTJzxWo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">deadpost (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168099">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168100" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260877426"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>sorry if this question shows gross ignorance, but what do the numbers represent in the phylogenetic tree?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168100&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="dya9ypdOjZw56Ocjko1tWVuiwb0OT-tP0Bjrb99d0Ug"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pzed (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168100">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168101" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260880052"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>hmmm and I thought Chinese were all descended from Indians! Or at least, thats what the Indian media seems to be reporting...</p> <p><a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Ancestors-of-Chinese-came-from-India-Study/articleshow/5328596.cms">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Ancestors-of-Chinese-came-from…</a></p> <p><a href="http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_the-chinese-evolved-from-indians-study_1322647">http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_the-chinese-evolved-from-indians…</a></p> <p>All speciousness aside, it seems there are any manner of (wrong) conclusions to be drawn from this data to suit any number of pet theories.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168101&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="JimLU_CWLG-2D3GiOZTJTHDf6e93DFjfpzTWWS6T_pE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Jing (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168101">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168102" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260884519"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>Would it be likely that the ASI part of the Indian mix is closely related to the South-East Asian stock the East Asians evolved from?</i></p> <p>not closely related. let's go back to indians, who are ANI + ASI. if you have ANI, ASI, Europeans, East Asians, the ASI + East Asians would form one clade, the Europeans + ANI the other. the Europeans and ANI are rather close. the ASI and East Asians not so close. but closer to each other than they are to ANI &amp; Europeans. or at least that's the model.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168102&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="3G3MpG0I9wdsWbsswn8HamQw4Ie3Ao0_BFF0l-VU7AM"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168102">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168103" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260908383"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Stephen Oppenheimer has a single migration out of Africa</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168103&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="af5vlD01oQwPxSZe61i417FKaZ_sPuvsVeRfNgDPM0k"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">rec1man (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168103">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168104" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260912072"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The green seems to be a Taiwanese aborigine (Austronesian) signature, and the only others who have ample amounts of it are Phillippines "negritos", Melanesians, and southern Chinese, which makes sense of as they would be admixed with the Austronesian phenomenon.</p> <p>In microcosm, if this is to be interpreted by the HUGO team as Taiwanese aborigines as being derived from the more diverse Phillippines "negritos", then they mistook the buttock for the head.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168104&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="E9XG_sJYEEFQhpE_B8qnZX4Iuczn5lP9tD-eyGjfejk"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://the-apple-eaters.blogspot.com" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">ren (not verified)</a> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168104">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168105" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260917543"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>sorry if this question shows gross ignorance, but what do the numbers represent in the phylogenetic tree?</i></p> <p>pzed, those would be bootstrap values.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168105&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="rjTwUOH3ZUFaOYf1Lp0DyGPpdGWURhDJk1G4ZHpv7Ho"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Altyn Khan (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168105">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168106" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260937609"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I'm still amazed at how "geographically correct" the PCA plots are. Europeans, Indians, East Asians fall almost exactly where they should be in a "real" map (however, Philippines / Malaysia are a bit off). This can be expected when we deal with close-by populations with constant, isotropic gene flow (e.g. within Europe). But between NW Europeans (CEU) and Japanese?... </p> <p>Actually perhaps this is another sign that Europeans and East Asians really do originate from the same branch of Out-of-Africa migration. From this common origin, normal diffusion brings the familiar pattern of geographically correct PCs aligned with N-S and E-W axes. </p> <p>Perhaps the fact that Malaysian/ Philippine Negritos do not fit the expected geographical pattern indicates that they do not come from the same branch, and therefore the PCA map (which is dominated by the other, EU-EA-India branch, since this has the largest variance) cannot be expected to apply to them?</p> <p>&lt;/wild_uninformed_speculation&gt;</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168106&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="63GA2dLmpKik9IxVBJG5CXQwsPURAlK8ooyVh1OpFUc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">toto (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168106">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168107" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260967319"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>thanks altyn!</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168107&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="rx9PgpW3xhZ7jYLAnF204SeHCPwQ_MP9cCoa6_dDbOg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pzed (not verified)</span> on 16 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168107">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168108" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1261809747"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>My thinking is that east-Asians show strong adaptation for extreme cold weather, and that fits with the time of their split from the Caucasians (possibly due to a glacial intrusion in central Eurasia cutting off the two populations). Subsequent glacial maximum would have driven them south into SE Asia, overrunning the existing Australoid population there, and interbreeding to some extent. Then as the weather warmed they expanded north again. This explains why NE Asians are related to SE Asians but show less genetic diversity. </p> <p>The timings would seem to be around ca 20-25,000 YBP for the Caucasian/east-Asian split, and around 10,000 YBP for the re-expansion northwards of the east-Asians.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168108&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="avDzgTFXIdF_Z6WpGx6ADIE0hDOR04vND8tztzryUsE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Simon (not verified)</span> on 26 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168108">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2009/12/15/are-chinese-subsets-of-southea%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Tue, 15 Dec 2009 06:23:35 +0000 razib 101093 at https://www.scienceblogs.com Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern & European hybrids https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/12/09/ashkenazi-jews-are-middle-east <span>Ashkenazi Jews are Middle Eastern &amp; European hybrids</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>According to search engine traffic one of the most <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/how_ashkenazi_jewish_are_you.php">popular posts</a> on this weblog has to do with the genetic background of Ashkenazi Jews. That is, those Jews whose ancestors derive from Central &amp; Eastern Europe, and the overwhelming number of Jews in the United States. The genetic origins of this group are fraught with politics naturally. With the rise of biological science the characteristics of Jews were used as a way to differentiate them as a nation apart in more than a cultural and religious sense. After World War II other researchers attempted to show that Jews were not genetically distinct with relatively primitive blood group assays. Rather, they were the descendants of converts.</p> <p>More recent genetic work has given mixed results. The reasonable inference then is that Jews themselves are a population with a complex history, and that complexity is manifest in their genetics. A new paper explores these issue in more detail, <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/80/abstract">Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations</a>:</p> <blockquote><p><b>Background</b><br /> Genetic studies have often produced conflicting results on the question of whether distant Jewish populations in different geographic locations share greater genetic similarity to each other or instead, to nearby non-Jewish populations. We perform a genome-wide population-genetic study of Jewish populations, analyzing 678 autosomal microsatellite loci in 78 individuals from four Jewish groups together with similar data on 321 individuals from 12 non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.</p> <p><b>Results</b><br /> We find that the Jewish populations show a high level of genetic similarity to each other, clustering together in several types of analysis of population structure. Further, Bayesian clustering, neighbor-joining trees, and multidimensional scaling place the Jewish populations as intermediate between the non-Jewish Middle Eastern and European populations.</p> <p><b>Conclusion</b><br /> These results support the view that the Jewish populations largely share a common Middle Eastern ancestry and that over their history they have undergone varying degrees of admixture with non-Jewish populations of European descent.</p></blockquote> <p>The general results of the paper are well illustrated by the figures.</p> <!--more--><p>The figure below shows the putative ancestry of individuals assuming a K number of ancestral populations. As you can see, the Jews within the sample are placed between Middle Eastern and European groups. At K = 5 and K = 6 the relationship between Jews and Palestinians shows up; a common ancestral population which parted aways at some point.</p> <form mt:asset-id="23533" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-7880d817e307eaaa53a24e255c49ce3d-jewsa1.png" alt="i-7880d817e307eaaa53a24e255c49ce3d-jewsa1.png" /></form> <p>And here's a neighbor-joining tree. The Jewish groups in red, Europeans in blue and Middle Eastern groups in olive.</p> <form mt:asset-id="23534" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-8745bd8ca17ce6cc74c6be27bdb56117-jewsa2.png" alt="i-8745bd8ca17ce6cc74c6be27bdb56117-jewsa2.png" /></form> <p>Now here are Jews compared to various populations. Jews are in red. I've reedited and labelled for clarity.</p> <form mt:asset-id="23535" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-417e7d877716fbaaec7ce3c658e1bc50-jewsa3.png" alt="i-417e7d877716fbaaec7ce3c658e1bc50-jewsa3.png" /></form> <p>From the conclusion of the paper:</p> <blockquote><p><strong>A simple explanation for the clustering of the Jewish populations is that this pattern is the consequence of shared ancestry with an ancestral Middle Eastern group.</strong> Under this scenario, the intermediate placement of the Jewish populations with respect to European and Middle Eastern populations would then result from early shared ancestry of the Jewish and Middle Eastern populations, followed by subsequent admixture of the Jewish populations that took place with European groups or other groups more similar to the Europeans than to the Middle Eastern populations in the study. Although it is difficult to assess the specific nature of the admixture on the basis of our analysis, this explanation is supported by other genetic studies that find a combination of shared ancestry and admixture among Jewish populations...and by historical records of conversions to Judaism...Further sampling of matched Jewish and neighboring non-Jewish populations will be informative for investigating the evidence for this scenario.</p> <p>...</p> <p><b>In several analyses, the population in the study that is most similar to the Jewish populations is the Palestinian population.</b> This result is reflected by the fact that for K=5, Bayesian clustering with Structure assigns the Jewish populations and the Palestinians to the same cluster...and by the relatively close placement of the Palestinians and the Jewish populations in MDS plots of individual distances...This genetic similarity, which is supported by several previous studies...is compatible with a similar Middle Eastern origin of the Jewish populations and the Palestinians. Admixture of the Palestinians with groups with European origins might have maintained or augmented this shared ancestry, especially if it was paralleled with similar admixture of these groups with Jewish populations.</p> <p>...</p> <p>We note that caution is warranted in interpreting some of our results. For example, in the population trees produced from three distance measures...there is disagreement on the branching order of three of the European populations closest to the Jewish populations (Adygei, Sardinian, and Tuscan). Thus, from these data, it is difficult to make strong inferences regarding the most similar European populations to Jewish groups. However, consistent with studies that have incorporated a single Jewish population in a broader European context...<strong>southern groups from Europe are placed closer to the Jewish populations than more northerly groups.</strong> </p></blockquote> <p>This paper clarifies and puts into sharper focus what we knew, and leaves open more details for future research.</p> <p>1) Jewish populations do have a common ancestral affinity.</p> <p>2) But, that affinity is complemented by admixture with the populations amongst whom the Diaspora settled.</p> <p>3) There is a suggestion that in the case of Ashkenazi Jews the European contribution was more likely to be from southern, and not northern, Europe. This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that the Ashkenazi group crystallized during the medieval period in northern Europe, amongst German and Slavic speaking peoples. These data would imply that in fact there was a relatively strong separation between these groups and the Jews, at least when it came to gene flow into the Jewish group (other data from Poland does show the effect of Jewish assimilation into the gentile majority). Therefore, the admixture may have occurred within the bounds of the former Roman Empire, during the Imperial or early post-Imperial period.</p> <p>4) The close relationship of Jews to Palestinians is not surprising. Jews are reputedly a Levantine population by origin, and the historical and genetic evidence points to Arabicization in the Levant and Mesopotamia as having occurred through acculturation, and not population replacement. Many of the Palestinians are likely of original Jewish or Samaritan origin, though I would guess that they were likely at least nominally Christianized during the Byzantine persecutions of the 6th century.</p> <p>5) There remain questions as to which groups the Ashkenazi Jews admixed with, and when they admixed. There should be a different pattern of genetic variance if the admixture event was early and ceased, or if it was constant and gradual gene flow. The phylogenetics implies the former, because of the lack of much allele sharing with northern Europeans specifically, amongst whom the Ashkenazi Jews were resident for the past ~1,000 years. Within the text of the paper there are also hints of possible relationships to a population of the Caucasus, opening an avenue for some validity of the Khazar hypothesis. There have been other data which also point to the Khazar hypothesis. The origins of the Jews then likely are complex.</p> <p>Many of the confusions and muddled points will likely be clarified soon with more data and analysis. At <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/12/jews-intermediate-between-middle.html">Dienekes</a>' some observed that a greater number of Mediterranean populations would have been useful. What if the Jewish admixture event tended to occur with Greeks in Alexandria and in the cities of Asia Minor? That would explain the proximity to Italians, but lack of overlap with other European groups.</p> <p><b>Citation:</b> BMC Genetics 2009, 10:80 doi:10.1186/1471-2156-10-80</p> <p>(H/T <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/">Dienekes</a>)</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Wed, 12/09/2009 - 11:20</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/culture" hreflang="en">Culture</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/ashkenazi-jews" hreflang="en">Ashkenazi Jews</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/jewish-genetics" hreflang="en">Jewish Genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/population-genomics" hreflang="en">population genomics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/population-substructure" hreflang="en">Population Substructure</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168029" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260376379"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>palestine before 1917<br /> <a href="http://www.aldeilis.net/english/images/stories/israelpalestine/claimsbefore1917.pdf">http://www.aldeilis.net/english/images/stories/israelpalestine/claimsbe…</a></p> <p>I'm not surprised by this. I live across the street from two jewish families, one of them russian. there are alot of russian jews around here (Boston) and they look more russian than jewish.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168029&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="zXLIRtgvriEJlB0YJqr4lOH6_8GPxxGeyNf_LImWPVk"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">lester (not verified)</span> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168029">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168030" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260376993"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>these data don't show much slavic or germanic admixture. so if they look russian it is much more likely that they're simply half-jewish, as outmarriage rates were really high in russia during the communist period.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168030&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="ikmX3Fdv4M_a96lhX8XSHAo7D5qPBgq5XpMOWRByV0U"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168030">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168031" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260377641"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>there are lots of russian jews here. some of them seem more jewish and some of them more russian. generally the more russian looking ones came later than the jewish looking ones, who tend to have come here earlier. my mother works at a jewish rest home and the residents kind of diss the russians for not knowing alot of the jewish customs, which were I guess discouraged under communism</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168031&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="-4J4DwSYciTQ0QY4w1c3Q7GMCZbXAY7yE-18CvrJKg0"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">lester (not verified)</span> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168031">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168032" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260382573"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>wednesday I babysit and drink a little afterwards, sorry if above was a little disjointed</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168032&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Qj7jzy-8UN1HPeVZ4O3elR00X7i1nvzjmh11ozdqcNs"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">lester (not verified)</span> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168032">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168033" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260385890"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I have known a lot of Ashkenazi in my life, and the majority have blue or gray eyes and pale skin. That seems to suggest something other than a Middle Eastern and southern European mix. Maybe it is a founder effect.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168033&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="S424jvaiRoAfq_PCGcNpLLKresDvFYMikLHlxNnVdoc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Huxley (not verified)</span> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168033">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168034" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260386434"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>selection? yes, the frequencies you see the literature suggest too much light eye color.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168034&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="hl9-FxTly6yAf0-bo2Ays6dFuB9CwbvZF1Z-v1edSQE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168034">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168035" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260390318"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Is there a study like this which includes Sephardics and Mizrahis? It's odd that this study included so many middle eastern and mediterrenean groups but not those. Wouldn't that be crucial to answering the original question- "Genetic studies have often produced conflicting results on the question of whether distant Jewish populations in different geographic locations share greater genetic similarity to each other or instead, to nearby non-Jewish population."</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168035&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="GjJgnd1PmAZ5mJvMz4sZ59PiJu6q-zbfmTQ9uL0982E"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://FeministX.blogspot.com" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="" content="FeministX.blogspot.com">FeministX.blog… (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168035">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168036" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260391634"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>Is there a study like this which includes Sephardics and Mizrahis?</i></p> <p>this study includes 3 sephardic (or mostly sephardic) groups. i think there might be a study with persian jews coming out soon, so that would be mizrachi i guess.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168036&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Y2UgGhsO957W4e-ISEmJd26_ZycjhToLvp-Zjo7XF6w"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168036">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168037" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260393169"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>One thing that keeps striking me in a lot of these studies is how little evidence of Khazar influence. Historically, the claim that the Ashkenazic population were descended mainly from the Khazars has been associated with anti-Semitism. In that regard, there's some degree of luck that the claim isn't accurate, since if it were I suspect many Jews rather than acknowledge the fact would have simply taken a very anti-science and anti-genetics attitude. (The tendency is very strongly for ideologues to accept science only when it doesn't contradict their pre-existing views). It should be interesting to see how in the long-run people react to this data. Many Palestinians don't want to be closely related to Jews. Moreover, Jewish supporters of Israel frequently like to argue that the Palestinians are a late population that came in during the Islamic conquest. So people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be uncomfortable with these results. </p> <p>Now personal speculation: If one looks at the late Second Temple period, around the birth of Jesus, it seems that the largest (or certainly one of the largest) groups of Jews were Hellenized Jews living in Palestine. It wouldn't be intrinsically surprising if they were part of the ancestral population of the modern day Palestinians. I'm not sure that your speculation about Samaritans makes sense. My impression is that they were always a small minority of the general population. There's been work on their genetics (see for example <a href="http://evolutsioon.ut.ee/publications/Shen2004.pdf">http://evolutsioon.ut.ee/publications/Shen2004.pdf</a> ). I don't really know much about that sort of work but my impression is that the very small Samaritan population makes such work difficult.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168037&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="WAI21J87ubjApJUg2C7qK3TF0Y5Z8CNc5anVQfCHbes"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joshua Zelinsky (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168037">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168038" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260393739"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>re: khazar's, there's stuff about the adygei in there. i think it's probably not relevant, but who knows? if the palestinians have it might just be a common heritage of levantines and peoples of the caucasus. that being said, the original khazars were turkic, so that would show up pretty easily among jews.</p> <p><i>Now personal speculation: If one looks at the late Second Temple period, around the birth of Jesus, it seems that the largest (or certainly one of the largest) groups of Jews were Hellenized Jews living in Palestine. It wouldn't be intrinsically surprising if they were part of the ancestral population of the modern day Palestinians.</i></p> <p>yes. hellenized jews were probably a disproportionate number of the early christians. see rodney stark's work; the correlation between jewish settlements and early christian settlements is pretty strong. as i said, by the time the muslims conquered palestine it looks to have been mostly christian. </p> <p><i>My impression is that they were always a small minority of the general population. There's been work on their genetics (see for example</i></p> <p>way more numerous in the late antique period. analogy: zoroastrians. small population today, a lot more in the past. the samaritans were numerous enough to have rebelled during the reign of justinian the great and cause a lot of trouble. after that, not so much trouble :-)</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168038&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="3YFv-mtGlIoaf9JVbOSWhr6foAJQgGqkwJtyXgxhPQs"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168038">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168039" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260394435"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>re: sephardic jews. i should elaborate for future readers since semantic confusions tend to abound. after the expulsion of jews from spain they went everywhere. though many went to holland, or even to the ashkenazi jewish world of central europe, the largest number went to the muslim world (ok, the largest number stayed in spain and become christian). so the jews of morocco and the ottoman empire were quickly dominated by sephardic jews. some non-sephardic native jews persisted as minority traditions (romaniotes in greece), but basically the sephardic jews took everything over.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168039&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="_uik7JFdXNLtGzHaiLek-EaTTWeJNQEf2nrr5o1D408"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168039">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168040" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260420982"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Razib,</p> <p>Actually, if I'm not mistaken, in Morocco, the Sephardim formed a culturally elite minority that was numerically inferior to the pre-Sephardi Moroccan Jewry.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168040&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="6xwGJgmC3NnazVB7bWVAxS8mAau0B_VG3SY46MUYcXE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.com" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Michael Makovi (not verified)</a> on 09 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168040">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168041" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260423075"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>Actually, if I'm not mistaken, in Morocco, the Sephardim formed a culturally elite minority that was numerically inferior to the pre-Sephardi Moroccan Jewry.</i></p> <p>sure. that's the problem with all the post-expulsion sephardic communities. but the quantities seem woolly to me.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168041&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="awko2p-RDok7EVztbmItiOSZtZabfbSgknWW8G2K32U"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168041">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168042" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260436736"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>There are more interpretations that are consistent with the historical record. I think there's an overreliance on the Levantine ancestry of these groups.</p> <p>I recall reading that approx. 10% of the Roman Empire was "Judaic" -- about half of the Roman Empire were Phoenician/Semitic areas, from Spain across the Mediterranean to Lebanon. We know that these areas were also later on heavily Jewish -- and one can reasonably expect that at least proto-Judaism and allied religious traditions went along the trade routes through these regions.</p> <p>So maybe these "admixtures" aren't late admixtures at all -- but reflect ancient population links on the Mediterranean coasts and islands, that became specifically "Jewish" later, as the lines between the Hellenic Christians and non-Hellenic Jews left little LEGAL space for all the other varieties of Hellenic/Semitic religious expression. </p> <p>Both Jews and Christians have religious reasons to forget the complexity of pre-Talmudic/pre-Nicene religious expression. But the data here should remind us of it. </p> <p>One must remember that apparently the Urheimat of Afroasiatic languages is either Ethiopia or the current Sahara desert -- that there were millenia of trans-Mediterranean trade of the culturally and linguistically related Egyptian populations -- that the Jewish populations were part of the greater Phoenician trade networks that lasted until the Carthaginian war -- that the seminal "Jewish" identity as opposed to Hellenistic is a late event, remember the Maccabean forced circumcisions -- that even within the Torah tradition, the Samaritans were a large population until the 10th century persecutions in the ME -- that Rome itself was a babble of cultures, fusing Semitic traditions with Hellenistic traditions willy nilly for close to a millenium -- that ambiguous, marginal cultural populations exist to this day, including such groups as the Mandaneans.</p> <p>Those trees seem to reflect that reality -- that what we see is populations crystallized out of the Mediterranean stew; particularly note the connection between Anatolians ("Turks") and Levantine-related populations. I think we're being fooled by people's self-image.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168042&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="O6Ck7FBi2PGtlvMiVaOfy5cBg5MWExf65hNRZy-R-tc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">frog (not verified)</span> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168042">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168043" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260442758"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Orcadians is an odd choice for germanics. Why not germans? There's a good chance ashkenazim are closer to southern europeans on these graphs simply because there's a cline from northern europe down the middle east, I don't think this establishes southern european blood in them at all.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168043&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="twIrECK0TB1RP5J_1lIPA_N3WllV036-JMvaGTFklH0"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joe (not verified)</span> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168043">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168044" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260458624"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i> Orcadians is an odd choice for germanics. Why not germans? There's</i></p> <p>there are germans in the HGDP sample?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168044&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="T7FO86V0qQe8aNTs3IUi_V8Ci0ckchNdkagt6EX8V90"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168044">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168045" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260461185"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Joshua, among Jews who will matter in the next generation (Orthodox Jews and the right-wing fringes of others) Khazar findings are far less emotionally repugnant than Palestinian findings. Khazars, after all, were spoken of highly by Judah HaLevi, were righteous converts (or so the right-wing masses believe) and were Jewish warriors, a thing the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are highly supportive of. Palestinians on the other hand...</p> <p>Being one of those people (on the fringes of non-orthodoxy and considering Orthopraxy) I want to quickly note that in every sense that matters on the emotional front of this matter, Druze are not Palestinians. In fact, I'm hesitant to pass around this link to friends on account of the fact that no non-specialist will understand that Razib seems to have included Druze and Beduin within the bubble of "Palestinian" being as he's more concerned with geography than with the squables among various micro-peoples on some tiny patch of land.</p> <p>Knowing their confusion on this score I may simply attempt a quick turnabout by pointing them towards my Lechi-fighter friend Ezra Yakhin who wrote a whole book on how the Palestinians are the literal descendants of Amalek (and why they should therefore be ritually slaughtered). Horror and laughter aside (laughter because it's the outlandish suggestion of an old guy who I saw shouted off the stage for this suggestion by Lechi colleagues of his at a program in honor of Lechi's founder, Yair Avraham Stern) this point will in fact alleviate loads of psychic discomfort by reminding post-Holocaust Jewry of the ancient Jewish approach where relativity wasn't everything and the descendants of Esau were considered to be the most despicable anti-semites in the world.</p> <p>On to subjects on which I'm a moron: Razib, any chance you could explain briefly how to understand all of these pretty pictures? </p> <p>Seriously, I know I can read a few wiki entries on em and I already have some small grasp of a few of them but from long experience (not least by your almost wholly accurate descriptions and explanations of matters in my own field of Jewish arcana, where your level-headedness demonstrates how easilly accessible accurate analyses is of ANY issue so long as your love of exotica is married to skepticism) I've come to trust you for accurate and pithy descriptions of things. Any chance you could give me a few sentences offering the basics on each of these different types of graphs. It would actually make quite the awesome post that you could perpetually link to when including graphic material in any analysis. I'm certainly not the only intelligent auto-didact who would be able to more greatly appreciate your pieces were he to have more than a general guess as to how to appreciate the data in your colorful graphs. </p> <p>Cheers,</p> <p>mnuez</p> <p>Blogged on a phone</p> <p>There's plenty more I'd like to talk about with regards this post such as which population of Palestinians were chosen (Hebron or Khan Yunis?) And whether the chosen population was selected for based on their hypothesized antiquity in the area (I know black-African and Egyptian "Palestinians" living in Jerusalem, were they as likely to have been picked for study as a Gallillean Palestinian with a 1200 year old family tree?) And of course many other related topicas as well but I believe that even at this juncture I can safely claim my award for longest comment left by a phone tapper.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168045&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="pAQR0Sl-LFZK9RyMD1zcQiM4jWiwr34xqf-Vl_8gBGY"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">mnuez (not verified)</span> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168045">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168046" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260463803"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i> I want to quickly note that in every sense that matters on the emotional front of this matter, Druze are not Palestinians. In fact, I'm hesitant to pass around this link to friends on account of the fact that no non-specialist will understand that Razib seems to have included Druze and Beduin within the bubble of "Palestinian" </i></p> <p>figure D = just palestinians, so i don't know where you'd getting that i confounded the two. i specifically didn't want to talk about the druze because they're a relatively genetically isolated group like the kalash who seem to have 'drifted' into their own direction. and there's a huge difference between syrian, lebanese and israeli druze on the questions that someone like you would care about :-) (i.e., "but is it good for the jews?") anyway, i'd be willing to bet $100 dollars that modern palestinians share more distinctive alleles with jews circa hasmonean period than the ashkenazi. in other words, modest confidence, though i wouldn't be surprised if i was wrong either. perhaps the gov. of israel will fund some DNA extraction? thank god jews didn't cremate!</p> <p>as for the plots, my understanding is that they're just plotting genetic distances between individuals based on the distinctive alleles shared. you could represent it 3-d too i guess. basically you have a matrix where the rows &amp; columns are ij pairwise distances between individual i and j and you're visualizing into a particular space of independent dimensions.</p> <p>p.s. by chance i saw you making fun of "fred scrooby" via a google search. pretty funny stuff. interesting how two jewish grandparents becomes 'some distant jewish ancestry.'</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168046&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="4mrg7E4JjwKL7BChvgJy0cXqXugD657yGQPCkEVWW2I"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168046">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168047" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260463977"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>re: MDS plots, they used the cmdscale function in R:</p> <p><a href="http://www.personality-project.org/r/mds.html">http://www.personality-project.org/r/mds.html</a></p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168047&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="MAJsRzGKLhVnk5tamjMuuk99WZv1XOXzxycF5zKRrH4"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168047">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168048" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260465814"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The results of this study are consistent with the findings in my book "The Jews of Khazaria, Second Edition" - the only comprehensive book on the Khazars that incorporates genetic data. If you were annoyed by the pseudohistorical book denying Ashkenazim have any substantial Israelite ancestry that recently got undeserved press in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, you can refer to my book instead. There is nothing offensive about the fact that Southern Europeans and Khazars (and others) have contributed to Ashkenazic ancestry as well.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168048&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="_d00fYeUVu2rzpTfk0wDRACSNv4wq5zsY2RDwRvWPuk"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.khazaria.com/brook.html" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Kevin Brook (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168048">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168049" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260475814"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Is the Jewish affinity with Adygei truly Khazarian or is it because of Armenian/Anatolian-Turk DNA the Ashkenazi and European Sephardim picked up in Asia Minor? </p> <p>Bauchet in 2007 demonstrated the Ashkenazim clustered quite closely with Greeks and Armenians.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168049&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="ESfDr8xmCRRR3k2LGnh7a0SHNjBwzuR-t3AA7Nb4DOQ"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">observer (not verified)</span> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168049">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168050" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260495898"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>"there are germans in the HGDP sample?"</p> <p>That's the problem, there aren't. I see a lot of comments here saying that this proves there is very little germanic and slavic blood in ashkenazis, but where does that come from? It's obvious with slavics, because we have russians represented. But how can it be claimed that there's little germanic blood in them?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168050&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="LYI0uNEhCYkxSZGV89SRyQSQwS0Bz7osKd0B4sdMGeA"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joe (not verified)</span> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168050">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168051" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260499459"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>joe, most euro variance is north-south. in the context of the questions here orcadians are probably a sufficient proxy.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168051&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="kBDsDrYwqckBvLSWYjGqe0g-OxfMEoDyRNFtA89LagI"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 10 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168051">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168052" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260523064"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>That's true, but I'm still not impressed. Doesn't that cline keep going right down the edge of the Mediterranean? Shouldn't a jewish-north europe mix looks an awful lot like a jewish-south europe mix but with slightly different weights?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168052&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="LuMFMr_PWa_Ab2R-jsVZL6NPZXf02vtRRbG9Cyab31w"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joe (not verified)</span> on 11 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168052">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168053" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260523658"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>That's true, but I'm still not impressed. Doesn't that cline keep going right down the edge of the Mediterranean? Shouldn't a jewish-north europe mix looks an awful lot like a jewish-south europe mix but with slightly different weights?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168053&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="p1SfbVzuwGM5gEOOi3MBwf54Wdbz6-njvu-f8q5oPJc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joe (not verified)</span> on 11 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168053">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168054" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260740598"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The Khazars were not exactly an East European or a slavic group. They were a people hailing from Northern Caucasia with at least some Central Asian blood. Ashkenazis may be genetically close to Kurds, Turks and Armenians, however Chechens have also been proven to be genetically close to other Caucasian peoples including Armenians. Modern day Chechnya would have been part of Khazaria. It also would include Ingushetia, Ossetia, Dagestan, etc. Middle eastern genetic markers have been found in those groups. The Ashkenazis also have assorted Haplogroup G markers, which are found near or around the Caucasus, some originating in the Caucasus perhaps. Although, in depth studies have not been done in the caucasus region, especially in the northern cacausus. So the fates of the infamous Khazars still remain unclear.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168054&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="vvvZ8t9rQhALLDVpGo2lk-C5qWocbXqDMyQaGs2lphY"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">mike (not verified)</span> on 13 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168054">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168055" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260827911"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Joshua said:<br /> <i>One thing that keeps striking me in a lot of these studies is how little evidence of Khazar influence. Historically, the claim that the Ashkenazic population were descended mainly from the Khazars has been associated with anti-Semitism. In that regard, there's some degree of luck that the claim isn't accurate...</i></p> <p>But there are studies out there which detail exactly the genetic contribution of Khazars to Jews?! Check out this study by Ellen Levy Coffman, who pretty much prooves that Ashkenazi Levites are Khazars by descent:<br /> <a href="http://www.jogg.info/11/coffman.htm">http://www.jogg.info/11/coffman.htm</a></p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168055&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="A_VvjiQL33wdiMcAfvZ6mdNHYC2jV7DOWiNGrlHPcuo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pconroy (not verified)</span> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168055">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168056" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260834017"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The genetic similarity of Jews to Kurds and other populations of the northern Middle East was posited, if I recall, in a Y-chromosome study by Nebel. Kurdish and Anatolian samples have not so far as I know been included in any of the more recent Jewish autosomal studies, and Armenian samples have only shown up in Bauchet's paper from 2007. So it's really not clear how close Jewish populations are to the Kurds or Anatolians at this point, and we should be wary to posit a relationship since the autosomal studies give a picture of significantly more admixture (at least among Ashkenazim) than the Y-chromosome studies.</p> <p>I have nothing against the Khazars (in fact, I considered the possibility of being their descendant rather intriguing as a child until I learned of their propaganda utility to Stormfronters and Arab nationalist crazies). However, it would be nice to actually know a bit about their genetic makeup before considering any relationship between them and the Ashkenazim to be proven. At its strongest, the case is very circumstantial.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168056&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="j0y47eLMvMrwGtNN8pliEN87njvcySeY1Y8IdEqX3pE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">nebbish (not verified)</span> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168056">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168057" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260835529"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>once the sample sizes get huge for all populations does the signature of rare "east asian" haplotypes in ashkenazi jews rise above that of sephard, mizrachi and other west european populations? if so, that might be a signature of turkic admixture (the khazar themselves were an admixed horde, but their origins were certainly in greater mongolia, like the avars).</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168057&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="BKvy-CpUWT6YuOpGxHNGmwwneEtRWJ5bCcNVbC5hCJ8"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168057">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168058" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260836918"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>The genetic similarity of Jews to Kurds and other populations of the northern Middle East was posited, if I recall, in a Y-chromosome study by Nebel. Kurdish and Anatolian samples have not so far as I know been included in any of the more recent Jewish autosomal studies, and Armenian samples have only shown up in Bauchet's paper from 2007.</i></p> <p>The historical evidence in favor of Ashkenazi and European Sephardic DNA being mostly Anatolian and not Levantine looks quite good to me. </p> <p>Historically we know Jews enjoyed a large presence in Asia Minor reaching all the way back to the 4th century B.C. and lasting to the post Western Roman Empire-Byzantine period.</p> <p>Since the Jews of Asia Minor were established there for more or less 1,000 years I don't see how it is possible that the ancestors of European Jewry could have avoided picking up a considerable amount of Anatolian-Turk, Greek and Armenian DNA from: </p> <p>A) Jewish men taking local Anatolian wives and </p> <p>B) from Anatolian converts to Judaism when the Jews actively engaged in proselytism before Christian authorities outlawed Jewish proselystism between the 5th and 7th centuries.</p> <p>There is no doubt some Levantine Arab blood left in modern European Jewry. However I would bet that the majority of their Middle Eastern DNA is Anatolian-Turk, Armenian and maybe Kurdish. Probably only a moderate to low amount of European Jewish DNA originates from the original Levantine Jews.</p> <p>Even the above paper states that Turkish Jews were a bit difficult to distinguish from Ashkenazi Jews, and it is certain Turish Jews have a substantial Anatolian DNA component.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168058&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="RVseS4FtvQTc6uQ1dBrKvcdxQmkQHPmTtRvWU0GKsBs"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Observer (not verified)</span> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168058">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168059" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260837555"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>Since the Jews of Asia Minor were established there for more or less 1,000 years I don't see how it is possible that the ancestors of European Jewry could have avoided picking up a considerable amount of Anatolian-Turk, Greek and Armenian DNA from:</i></p> <p>no turk. substitute in kurd (or as they would say, 'isaurian').</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168059&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="9S3ahR-D8lTg68A9S-3B6kA2EI1dXKMyEZkS2_it1Ck"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168059">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168060" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260844580"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>observer's comments seem plausible enough to me. but one should note that on the Y chromosomal lineages there is a clear connection to *levantine* middle easterners, not anatolians. i.e., the cohen modal haplotype is from the branch of haplogroup J common among arabs. though the kurds are collapsed into this group too, though the turks are not. see more at the citations in wiki:</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew#Male_lineages:_Y_chromosomal_DNA">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew#Male_lineages:_Y_chromosomal_DNA</a></p> <p>though this is consistent with the model above, as long as patrilineages are maintained, the autosome can be replaced....</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168060&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="KV7-tE9H5oS8FNWmFMFAbIO8YvdCsy2gRKbLDIzvMYY"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 14 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168060">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168061" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260853249"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The Khazar theory may seem improbable to certain political groups and ideologues, however let us not mix politics and genetics. There needs to be larger studies done in the greater Caucasus region, there is a lot of data that is missing for the area. We should compare how the Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingush and other Caucasian peoples compare to Ashkenazis first before making any rash conclusions either way.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168061&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="t9iq1grqPnqCt0546fWeDJuVXNRJggel8PjpMDI_Ogs"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">mike (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168061">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168062" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260875795"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>me. but one should note that on the Y chromosomal lineages there is a clear connection to *levantine* middle easterners, not anatolians. i.e., the cohen modal haplotype is from the branch of haplogroup J common among arabs.</i></p> <p>This is a good point.</p> <p>But J2 - which is common in Ashkenazi and European Sephardi - is found most frequently in the Caucasus (for "mike" and his Khazars), the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia and gradually less as one moves Southeast from Syria and Lebanon and deeper into Arabia:</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J2_(Y-DNA)">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_J2_(Y-DNA)</a></p> <p>Haplogroup J2 is found mainly in the Fertile Crescent, the Caucasus,[5] Anatolia, the Balkans, Italy, the Mediterranean littoral, the Iranian plateau, and Central Asia.[1] More specifically it is found in Iraq,[20] Syria, Lebanon,[21] Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Greece, Italy and the eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula[22], and more frequently in Iraqis 29.7% (Sanchez et al. 2005), Lebanese 25% (Semino et al 2004), Palestinians 16.8% (Semino et al 2004) [1], Syrians 22.5% (Luis et al. 2004), Sephardic Jews 29%, Kurds 28.4%, Jordan 14.3%, Oman 15% (Di Giacomo et al. 2004) &amp; 10% (Luis et al. 2004), UAE 10.4%, Yemen 9.7%[23], in Israel[1], in Palestine[1], and in Turkey.[4]</p> <p>J2 is found at very high frequencies in the peoples of the Caucasus - among the Georgians 21%[5]-72%,[6] Azeris 24%[7]-48%,[6] Ingush 32%,[8] Chechens 26%,[8] Balkars 24%,[13] Ossetians 24%,[8] Armenians 21.3%[6]-24%,[8] and other groups.[5][8]</p> <p>In Europe, the frequency of Haplogroup J2 drops dramatically as one moves northward away from the Mediterranean. In Italy, J2 is found with regional frequencies ranging between 9% and 36%.[14] In Greece, it is found with regional frequencies ranging between 11% and 46%. Frequencies are high in Turkey, approximately 24% of Turkish men are J2 according to a recent study,[4] with regional frequencies ranging between 13% and 40%.[12] Combined with J1, up to half of the Turkish population belongs to Haplogroup J.</p> <p>It has been proposed that haplogroup subclade J2a-M410 was linked to populations on ancient Crete by examining the relationship between Anatolian, Cretan, and Greek populations from around early Neolithic sites[24]. Haplogroup J2b-M12 was associated with Neolithic Greece (ca. 8500 - 4300 BCE) and was reported to be found in modern Crete (3.1%) and mainland Greece (Macedonia 7.0%, Thessaly 8.8%, Argolis 1.8%) [25].</p> <p>Sephardic Jews have about 29% of haplogroup J2[1] and Ashkenazi Jews have 23%[1], or 19%[26]. It was reported in an early study which tested only four STR markers [27] that a small sample of Italian Cohens belonged to Network 1.2, an early designation for the overall clade now known as J2a4, defined by the deletion at DYS413. However, a large number of all Jewish Cohens in the world belong to haplogroup J1 (see Cohen modal haplotype).</p> <p>J2 subclades are also found in Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia.</p> <p>Haplogroup J2 has been shown to have a more northern distribution in the Middle East, although it exists in significant amounts in the southern middle-east regions, a lesser amount of it was found when compared to its brother haplogroup, J1, which has a high frequency southerly distribution. This suggests that, if the occurrence of Haplogroup J among modern populations of Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia does reflect Neolithic demic diffusion from the Middle East, the source population is more likely to have originated from Anatolia, the Levant or northern Mesopotamia than from regions further south.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168062&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="bEpLfes_0R1dXZAa4Q3etYXd0IDOGxCHwgQVznCsgwg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">observer (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168062">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168063" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260882815"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>For more on the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH), check this out:<br /> <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/08/finally-updated-look-at-y-chromosomes.html">http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/08/finally-updated-look-at-y-chromoso…</a></p> <p>Basically it seem that the original Cohen only lived in Roman times at the earliest - per Dienekes.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168063&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="nEsliEHTriKBEttWPyWA8GIYUA49i99U27ZdnjXGDMg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pconroy (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168063">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168064" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260883463"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Nebbish said:<br /> <i>I have nothing against the Khazars (in fact, I considered the possibility of being their descendant rather intriguing as a child until I learned of their propaganda utility to Stormfronters and Arab nationalist crazies). However, it would be nice to actually know a bit about their genetic makeup before considering any relationship between them and the Ashkenazim to be proven.</i></p> <p>So to simplify, you are in favor of any science that supports certain Jewish causes and against it if it doesn't - basically you view science as a tool of politicians - nice?!</p> <p><i>At its strongest, the case is very circumstantial.</i></p> <p>"There are none so blind as those who don't want to see..."</p> <p>The fact that the Khazar elite converted en masse to Judaism is not in dispute, the only fact in dispute is if the rank and file Khazar converted too. Of course it would be nonsense to say that Ashkenazim are simply Khazars, they are not, but they have substantial (12%) Khazar admixture.</p> <p>Additionally, I share genomes with a number of Ashkenazim, and can tell you that the a many of them have minor East Asian gene segments - usually 1-2% East Asian.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168064&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="NT5rn2tqkh7seY3LhXvLiJye4PUuLH4jFMzww_fHk1s"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">pconroy (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168064">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168065" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260890802"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The 12 or so percent refers to Eastern European admixture. The Khazars were not Eastern Europeans. They were from the Caucasus. Caucasians have been proven to have y-chromosomal lineages similar to Middle Easterners. Ashkenazis (a caucasian people) cluster closely with Armenians in fact.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168065&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="xigSHLJDkXAcZ8OF52YPt86cVDP0et-XjQoL8yuMW30"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">mike (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168065">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168066" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260897187"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>*I should have written Armenians (a Caucasian people) cluster closely with Ashkenazis in fact.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168066&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="4GuFSF2ktYsZugALmeAiWdkCTuC8uHFrSIyLvTTO5jA"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Mike (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168066">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168067" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260897398"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>careful about the terms thrown around guys. remember that for most of history (up until the early 20th century genocide) armenians were more of an east anatolian populations than a caucasian one. as for the khazar's being caucasian, their locus of power was on the broad plains to the north, and though they were likely an admixed group by the time they began to be influenced by judaism their origins are turkic, and so ultimately in mongolia.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168067&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="-foJp1TFVHYpuMD3nEHmALxvV1E6yt_K2FrxxnmAiRg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168067">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168068" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260919943"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>pconroy,<br /> That isn't what I meant at all. The maximalist position that would support the Jewish ethno-nationalist political cause is no admixture of any kind. Not even the original Hammer paper from 2000 proposed that, although it and the other early Y-chromosome studies claimed that the situation was close to that. The autosomal studies clearly show that admixture has occurred, and I am quite comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with declaring all or even a substantial portion of the admixture to be of Khazar origin given that we know so little about the genetics of the Khazars (almost no physical remains, lack of clarity about their population genetic profile at the time of their conversion to Judaism, etc.). It seems really premature to declare the case of Ashkenazi admixture solved based on the circumstantial evidence that Ellen Levy Coffman cites. There are potential alternative explanations for small quanta of East Asian ancestry among Jews (silk road trade, a deep ancestral component within the Middle East, etc.), although the Khazars might be the answer. And there is a nontrivial chance that extensive admixture with the Khazars (whose origins lay in Mongolia, as Razib has noted) would not explain where Ashkenazi and other Jewish populations lie in relation to S. Euro populations.</p> <p>As for the relationship between Turkish Jews and Ashkenazim, it doesn't necessarily say much about Jewish Anatolian admixture. The Turkish Jewish population is heavily Sephardic in ancestry due to migrations after the expulsions from Spain There may not be much continuity with the ancient Anatolian Jewish populations. Having said that, Roman-period Anatolia, Greece, and Italy rank high on my likelihood meter for sources of admixture that might differentiate modern Jews from the peoples who currently inhabit their ancient stomping grounds due to large Jewish populations in those regions from the Hellenistic period onward.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168068&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="xB2X6Qpo5eQ_OLy2C0BZNnJt0BLGilYheY-9twm7M2o"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">nebbish (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168068">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168069" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260923682"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>The Khazar theory may seem improbable to certain political groups and ideologues, however let us not mix politics and genetics.</i></p> <p>It is hard for people to separate them in this context. Frankly, I find claims of legitimacy based on ancient ancestry to be very hard to see as philosophically justifiable anyways so it isn't that relevant. However, it isn't unreasonable to look at the data and wonder what political implications it has. The key there is to be careful that the genetics informs ideology or politics not the other way around.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168069&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="NSyR2zAgT4fX8PCLEOUZk6U4LCEeN8aLz1gH_38MDDQ"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Joshua Zelinsky (not verified)</a> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168069">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168070" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1260924429"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I believe that the Khazar theory may actually have some merit. If you were to look at the Anatolian example, you would find that the majority of Anatolian "Turks" are actually Turkified Anatolians. The same could easily have happened for the Khazars. The majority of "ethnic" rather than racial Khazars could have been native Northern Caucasia, and the central asian admixture would have been at a minimum. Western Asian haplogroups are very common in the Caucasus region. Just as historically many Anatolians have considered themselves turks until population genetic studies proved otherwise. Both J1 and J2 appear in the Caucasus, as do various Haplogroup G subclades which Ashkenazi jews belong to, although this still needs more testing. The big mystery so far deals with haplogroup E1b1b1. It has not been tested thoroughly in the Caucasus, especially the Northern Caucasus. The Khazar question is still an open one.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168070&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="j-v6TdbNOrqdN74DHyjZ1YTsCNOzaBaW0YykPigR_JA"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Executor (not verified)</span> on 15 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168070">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168071" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1261027103"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>There must be something about the Jews to be so intensely studied. I think it is not so much genetics but the fact that they have kept fairly distinct through the millenia. What other ethnic group has done so? No more Romans, we can only guess at the Hellenes of old, Etruscans gone, Phoenicians disappeared, even the Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celtiberians, Vandals..the list goes on. All gone, but the Jews are still with us. That says something about them and probably why they are so disliked by just about everyone.</p> <p>I don't really accept this separation thing between Europe and the Middle East in genetics. The average European and average Middle Easterner just a cline in the West Eurasian Caucasoid form of humanity. Most Europeans derive from people with Middle Eastern origins whether it was in the Neolithic or later ages.</p> <p>With SNP tests you can separate ethnic groups, Northern English from Southern English, people from Watford from people from Westminster. The answer is so what, a big deal. It depends on what choices you make, which SNPs vary more in each population. Jews would overwhelmingly cluster with standard Europeans compared with South Asians or East Asians or Africans. Jews would cluster with Italians, Greeks and other Mediterraneans compared with NW or NE Europeans. Jews will cluster with Lebanese and Syrians if they were the only ones chosen. It would be interesting to see where Greeks, Italians and other Mediterraneans cluster with when only Middle Easterners are chosen. Choice rules which cluster they fit into. </p> <p>Interesting to see that the researchers have mostly Jewish names. Probably means Jews want to claim their distinctness and their origins to the Hebrews, Israelites, Judaeans and other mythic ethnic groups to stake their claim to Israel/Palestine. Lots of agendas there.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168071&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="W9Gc72Bi1TBc-K4tS2Ughf5lI_Y_ndS160ZNUElOQtA"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Ponto (not verified)</span> on 17 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168071">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168072" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1261068030"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Here is Dienekes' take:</p> <p><a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/12/jews-intermediate-between-middle.html">http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2009/12/jews-intermediate-between-middle.h…</a></p> <p> Dienekes said...<br /> The more interesting thing (to me) about recent Jewish demography is how Ashkenazi Jews (who were a very small minority of the Jewish population) grew to become a great demographic component of that population.</p> <p>How did this growth occur? the AJ found new living space in Europe, where they could grow in numbers. By contrast, Jews elsewhere had already experienced their growth phase and faced decline due to conversion. Thus the AJ component of the total Jewish group increased.</p> <p>Drawing a parallel, Jews in Palestine in the Hellenistic-Roman era were plentiful (locally) but they were demographically constrained by the limited available space. But, their Diaspora had much more available space to grow in. So, I would guess that the major part of extant Jews' ancestry is from Roman-era Diaspora Jews rather than Roman-era Palestine Jews.</p> <p>The interesting question (to me) is how much European ancestry did the Jews receive in the Hellenistic-Roman period, and how much in the medieval-Roman one. I believe that both elements are present, but I would wager that the European element in AJs consists of a fairly uniform Italian-Balkan-Anatolian "old" stratum, and a very variable German-Slavic "new" stratum.</p> <p>Thursday, December 17, 2009 11:43:00 AM</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168072&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Pz_VYbsuXZ6L24YboGFOH5-5xIyiJrCUyvzJtWe-xMw"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">observer (not verified)</span> on 17 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168072">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168073" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1261114179"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>This is what can happen when geneticists have their ideologies determine where to look and what to look at specifically, while ignoring other possibilities. I like how the Khazars are referred to mainly as R-M17 by the researchers, when in the Northern Caucasus region multiple Western Asian haplogroups are clearly present. The Khazars would not have been merely Eastern Europeans. Just take a look at the Caucasian peoples now living around the area of what was Khazaria. There are striking similarities with the Ashkenazi Jewish population.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168073&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="rl9LKMOXzlJ1pHbh8YJbkOPAUeGr1HLAryearhzLHGc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Arthur (not verified)</span> on 18 Dec 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168073">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2168074" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1263268978"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Here are my thoughts on the the origins of the Ashkenazi, in light of the genetic data presented so far.</p> <p>1. The "Near eastern" populations utelized are not representative specimens. They are levant populations, which, as historical records demonstrate, received substantial European admixture over a 1300 year period (at least). They also admixed with Turkish and Armenian populations. Cluster analysis of the Levant populations demonstrates this in a number of studies. According to Cavalli-Sforza (2008), the Druze and Palestinians are around 50% European, and 30-50% Near Eastern (my estimates from the structure chart), with some admixture from Central Asian Caucasoids. </p> <p>The results of genetic affinity studies using Palestinians and Druze as proxies for Near Eastern populations, are therefore different from what researchers have reported. Rather than showing how "Near Eastern" the Ashkenazi are, these studies demonstrate how European the levant populations are. Notice that in the occasional studies which do include surrounding Near Eastern populations, the Levant clusters closely with Europeans. This is exactly what we should expect from the historical record - hybridized (Europeanized) populations with a Near Eastern base.</p> <p>2. The similarity of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish populations in the above study, is misleading for two reasons. (1) The Sephardic populations are European in origin, and do not represent Near Eastern Jews. (2) The Ashkenazi population is likely drawn from the same base as the Sephardic population of Spain. The implication, then, is that Sephardic and Ashkenazi populations are not totaly distinct, but instead, variants of a common population with origins in South Eastern Europe, where Jews first appeared on the continent. Actual Near Eastern Jewish populations from Iraq, Iran, and other countries, do not cluster well with Ashkenazi Jews. Had they been included, the results of the above study would likely have looked much different.</p> <p>3. Ashkenazi Jews fit well with South Eastern Europeans, particularly Greeks and Italians. The reason why is obvious: according to the historical record, Greek and Roman converts to Judaism WERE the source of Jewish introduction to the continent. Furthermore, according to historical evidence, there was not, at any time, a major movement of Palestinian Jews into Europe. Now, the question is, does the genetic evidence support the historical documentation? Yes, it is almost exactly what you would expect to find. Here is why:</p> <p>A. Historicaly, Ashkenazi were founded from Roman and Greek converts, so their affinity to Europeans should be closest to those populations. The genetic distance should be low. It is. In the above study, Ashkenazi only segregate from other Europeans at clusters of k=5 or more. But notice that they NEVER group well with Palestinians (only 25-30% it seems), and that this grouping dissappears altogether in the next iteration. The temporary grouping is explained by the European admixture in Palestinians. Other studies show similar structuring of Ashkenazi clustering with Greeks and Romans. </p> <p>B. Ashkenazi have some influence from Kazars according to historical records, but not much. It's also likely they have some admixture from Caucaus region peoples and surrounding populations such as Turks. This explains the weak affinity to the Adgei.</p> <p>C. The mysterious "third component" of the Ashkenazi is probably an artifact of several genetic factors other than admixture. Notice that the "mysterious" Jewish signature (at k=5+) isn't found in Levant populations, despite both Jewish and levant groups having substantial admixture with Europeans and partial origin in the SAME Near Easterners. The mysterious signature has been found in most other genomic studies of the Ashkenazi. Notice that the "Jewish" component is highest in the Sephardic populations. Why? Because the Jewish component is probably ancient genetic variation from South Eastern Europe that was brought by Sephardics to Spain, but substantialy lost by the Ashkenazi through (1) drift, (2) bottle necking, and (3) admixture with non-Southern Europeans. This is supported by the fact that the Southern Europeans (Italians, etc) have the highest values for the third component than all other European populations. Only the Adgei have higher a greater proportion, and they are in the caucaus. This seems odd at first. The explanation may be that the Caucaus, Northern Turkey, and Southern Europe, share a common genetic affinity which is reflected in the structure chart. This affinity may exist on a cline so that the southern-most and eastern-most portions of Europe share it more than the rest. If Jews were drawn from this region, then it would explain the observed population structures. Of course, there may be some other explanation too, this is rather speculative.</p> <p>Your thoughts?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2168074&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="_o-lBaabIWP6ThdW-hWYxK4rWkFSab3hQewfdHnExRc"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">FanofGeneX (not verified)</span> on 11 Jan 2010 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2168074">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2009/12/09/ashkenazi-jews-are-middle-east%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:20:19 +0000 razib 101089 at https://www.scienceblogs.com Same science, different inference https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/10/12/same-science-different-inferen <span>Same science, different inference</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>About <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/the_politics_of_genetic_histor.php">two weeks ago</a> I pointed to the peculiar disjunction between what a <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/south_asians_as_a_hybrid_popul.php">paper on Indian genetics actually said</a>, and how people, including some of the researchers who contributed to the paper, were spinning it. For instance, the finding that South Asians can be reasonably modeled as a two-way admixture between "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI) and "Ancestral South Indians" which varies in ratio between between 7:3 and 2:3 across regions &amp; caste groups was translated into "the genetic unity of India." And now I notice in <i>The Guardian</i> another Indian has an article titled <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/10/india-genome-society">Tracing the fissures in India's society: The worlds of variation discovered within the Indian genome only emphasise the difference that divides our nation</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Despite our country's much-vaunted pluralism, Indians harbour a keen sense of difference, be it of language, religion or complexion. We also often have exaggerated visions of history, or at least of myth, history's livelier twin. For instance, many Chitpavan Brahmins, a caste group in the Indian state of Maharashtra, have been known to attest their relatively fair skin to a boatload of Vikings (apparently very, very lost) who washed up centuries ago on the western coast. So it comes as little surprise to Indians that scientific research increasingly traces the roots of our diverse society to the distant past.</p> <p>The latest study of the genetic history of India (detailed by Adam Rutherford) unearths worlds of variation within the Indian genome. Indians could read this new DNA evidence in a reassuring light, as confirmation of that oft-repeated cliche of India's "continental" diversity: not only do its billion-plus citizens belong to an astonishing array of linguistic and religious groups, but also India is four times more genetically diverse than Europe.</p></blockquote> <p>This is a position which can be supported by the findings in the paper. The same findings which some of the paper's researchers spun arguing for genetic unity. Mapping population genetics findings into plain English is more an art than a science. Something think about when people make grand assertions; e.g., "There are no human races," or, "We are all Africans." Science being what it is strong assertions are usually grounded in some genuine empirical results or analytic insight, but how one interprets those assertions may differ greatly contingent upon the database you have to work with as a filter.</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Sun, 10/11/2009 - 21:02</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/culture" hreflang="en">Culture</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-categories field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Categories</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/channel/social-sciences" hreflang="en">Social Sciences</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2167177" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1255342182"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>On that "India is 4x more genetically diverse than Europe" -- any idea what definition of Europe is being used?</p> <p>This is a simplistic question, but how much more genetically diverse is Africa than Europe? How do Europe and, say, East Asia compare. My assumption is that Europe and East Asia are probably the least diverse, while sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia are probably the most.</p> <p>This came up in a discussion where I was arguing that I, a pasty white euro-mutt American, am genetically more closely related to Obama than 95% of American blacks. My point was that most American blacks are of West African descent, while Obama was half East African -- and that there is much more genetic difference between East and West Africa than between my euro-mutt background and whatever Obama's half white background might be. (Not that I'm eager to claim kinship with a corrupt left-wing putz like Obama, but I still think I'm a closer cousin than most blacks are.)</p> <p>But my friend, an educated artsy white liberal, didn't believe me, and I didn't have any specific data to cite other than the general impression I've gotten over the years. I thought this was something that was just generally known.</p> <p>Is there any chart somewhere that ranks countries, regions, or official race categories by amount of genetic diversity? I'd like to see more "X is Y times more genetically diverse than Z" claims, if there is actual data to back up such claims, of course.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2167177&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="3WwkNYOZZvj1nd5cnLafhpYGzZAcxwfNp_B5iFOAvPk"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">chris (not verified)</span> on 12 Oct 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2167177">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2167178" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1255356955"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>chris, yeah, i think you are right. in terms of total genome content you're gonna exhibit more similarity, since european:european similarity is greater than west african:east african. the main confound would be the amt. of white ancestry in a given black american. some of these charts might help:<br /> <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/13/0903341106.abstract">http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/08/13/0903341106.abstract</a></p> <p>the rank order in genetic diversity is i think:<br /> africa &gt; south asia &amp; mid east &gt; europe &amp; southeast asia &gt; east asia &gt; americas</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2167178&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="uKwxFxuEIigxzN_Bmw9x-w2vW5KUmXhQkWNdjTLwRx8"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 12 Oct 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2167178">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2009/10/12/same-science-different-inferen%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Mon, 12 Oct 2009 01:02:50 +0000 razib 100963 at https://www.scienceblogs.com Brazil, the case of triracial white people https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/15/brazil-the-case-of-triracial-w <span>Brazil, the case of triracial white people</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><form mt:asset-id="19151" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-43ba90ee37488f9432d4aede6524ad9c-AdrianaLima11.png" alt="i-43ba90ee37488f9432d4aede6524ad9c-AdrianaLima11.png" /></form> <p>One of the problems with human genetics where it resembles economics are the ethical issues involved in experimentation. Luckily for science, but unluckily for individuals, medicine offers many "natural experiments." But in the area of population genetics and history analyses of pedigrees or family based studies centered around particular traits and genes have limitations of scale. Luckily for science again, and unluckily for millions of Amerindians and black Africans, Latin America offers a <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/03/genetics_the_mythbuster_the_ca.php">cornucopia</a> of <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/09/admixture_ancestry_and_its_asc.php">possibilities</a> when it comes to exploring the outcomes ensuing from admixture between geographically distinct populations when they are brought together. Not only is the scale of the admixture significant, but since it has happened in historical memory there are many supplementary textual records which allow us to describe the dynamics.</p> <p>Brazil is arguably the most extreme case, both in scale and scope. Several years ago the <a href="http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001085.html">arrival of genomics</a> allowed for a fine-grained investigation of the way in which traits, which code for racial identity, and ancestry, relate to each other. After all, to ascertain ancestry humans don't perform a fine-scale genomic sequencing, but rather simply assess a subset of traits which reflect a finite underlying set of genes. Most prominent among those traits are skin color, which is <a href="http://www.google.com/cse?cx=017254414699180528062:uyrcvn__yd0&amp;q=skin+color+site:http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/&amp;sa=Search">controlled by about 6 genes</a> when it comes to the vast majority of the between population variation (one gene alone, <i>SLC25A5</i>, can account for on the order of 1/3 of the between population variance between Africans and Europeans).</p> <p>What the data from Brazil suggest are that:</p> <p>1) There is a correlation between phenotype (racial self-classification) and ancestry.</p> <p>2) But that correlation is modest at best, and a significant proportion of the Brazilian population which is white has more black ancestry than a significant proportion of the Brazilian population which is black.</p> <p>A group which has explored these topics in the past has come out with a new paper, <a href="http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&amp;pid=S0100-879X2009005000026&amp;lng=en&amp;nrm=iso&amp;tlng=en">DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians</a>:</p> <!--more--><blockquote>We review studies from our laboratories using different molecular tools to characterize the ancestry of Brazilians in reference to their Amerindian, European and African roots. Initially we used uniparental DNA markers to investigate the contribution of distinct Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA lineages to present-day populations. High levels of genetic admixture and strong directional mating between European males and Amerindian and African females were unraveled. We next analyzed different types of biparental autosomal polymorphisms. Especially useful was a set of 40 insertion-deletion polymorphisms (indels) that when studied worldwide proved exquisitely sensitive in discriminating between Amerindians, Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans. When applied to the study of Brazilians these markers confirmed extensive genomic admixture, but also demonstrated a strong imprint of the massive European immigration wave in the 19th and 20th centuries. The high individual ancestral variability observed suggests that each Brazilian has a singular proportion of Amerindian, European and African ancestries in his mosaic genome. <b>In Brazil, one cannot predict the color of persons from their genomic ancestry nor the opposite.</b> Brazilians should be assessed on a personal basis, as 190 million human beings, and not as members of color groups</blockquote> <p>I think the bold sentence is too strong. When speaking to an American audience I think it may be justifiable, as we Americans tend to assume a much stronger <i>a priori</i> connection between color and ancestry than is justifiable in Brazil. But on average people of white self-identification are quite a bit more European than those of black self-identification. Intersection of sets does not to me entail rejection of the utility of categorizations <i>in toto</i>, though perhaps it would in the case of medically oriented genome-wide association studies.</p> <p>The authors used 40 "ancestrally informative markers" which distinguished between world populations. They were in particular interested in markers which could distinguish Africans, Europeans and Amerindians, since these are the three putative founding populations for modern Brazilians. Using the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Diversity_Project">HGDP</a> samples here is the efficacy of their markers:</p> <form mt:asset-id="19148" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-7f7f0884a9422ff9bb4cbdc4c01f2598-7913i02.png" alt="i-7f7f0884a9422ff9bb4cbdc4c01f2598-7913i02.png" /></form> <p>Assuming 3 ancestral populations their markers infer that Europeans are 95% European, Africans 95% African and Amerindians 95% Amerindian. There is naturally some imprecision, but not too bad for 40 markers.</p> <p>How do the Brazilians fit into this? I've reformatted for clarity:</p> <form mt:asset-id="19149" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-41e7b3d26b484430eb30514a8a0f8434-7913i03.png" alt="i-41e7b3d26b484430eb30514a8a0f8434-7913i03.png" /></form> <p>Everything matches intuition. In the whither southern states of Brazil whites are whiter. One interesting point though is that Amerindian ancestry is low, but similar, across most of Brazil. Here is a table of ancestry:</p> <form mt:asset-id="19150" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img src="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/wp-content/blogs.dir/461/files/2012/04/i-6e848c32839d3399fbc512f64600db01-7913t01.png" alt="i-6e848c32839d3399fbc512f64600db01-7913t01.png" /></form> <p>Due to caveats of sample size and representativeness, one should be careful, <b>but I believe that the low, but non-trivial amount of Amerindian ancestry across Brazil, among both whites and blacks, dovetails perfectly with the history of an early admixture which has dispersed through the population.</b> The paper reaffirms that the Amerindian (and black African) ancestry in Brazilians seems strongly female-mediated, while the European ancestry is male-mediated, through examination of mtDNA and Y lineages. The initial generations of mestizos must naturally have identified with their European fathers and melted into the white population, at which point they contributed their ancestry again to African slaves, and intermarried with newer immigrants from Europe.</p> <p>Finally, one of the glaring facts one can observe in Brazil is that <b>admixture does not lead to homogenization of a population into a uniform brownness.</b> Rather, <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2006/09/can_you_tell_if_youre_black_or.php">extantgenetic variance is preserved</a>, and phenomena such as assortative mating can result in the reemergence of phenotypic races decoupled from ancestry. This also makes the reality of racism in Brazil, despite widespread admixture, less surprising.</p> <p>H/T <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/">Dienekes</a></p> <p><b>Citation:</b> PENA, S.D.J.; BASTOS-RODRIGUES, L.; PIMENTA, J.R. and BYDLOWSKI, S.P.. DNA tests probe the genomic ancestry of Brazilians. Braz J Med Biol Res [online]. ahead of print [cited 2009-09-15], pp. 0-0 . Available from: <http:>. Epub Sep 11, 2009. ISSN 0100-879X. doi: 10.1590/S0100-879X2009005000026.</http:></p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Tue, 09/15/2009 - 11:15</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/culture" hreflang="en">Culture</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/brazil" hreflang="en">Brazil</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166858" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253029938"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Uhmm, studies were done back to the sixties showing that for Brazilians, appearance is only a very weak determinant of racial categorization, and social status is much higher.</p> <p>So, to the extent that social status is inherited, you may find a correlation between genetic ancestry and racial classification -- but only because of their cross-correlation to social status, which may be the prime causative factor. The results are both unsurprising and overstate the value of racial classification -- it's not that "white people" are "more European", it's that "rich people" are "more European", and rich people are identified as white.</p> <p>So, such a study would be much more useful in a society such as the US, where phenotype is much more determinant of people's racial classification in practice.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166858&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="vK-hmz4ZQJ9Fxxzn8aLyWObVjpB52XYoF15WdUR3A7A"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">frog (not verified)</span> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166858">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166859" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253035190"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>it's not that "white people" are "more European", it's that "rich people" are "more European", and rich people are identified as white.</i></p> <p>well, correlations <a href="http://www.ds.unifi.it/VL/VL_EN/prob/prob5.html">aren't always transitive</a>, but point taken. do note that previous study used underarm skin color as a "check" on self-classification.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166859&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="EIO9KPR9jSBUEG7tscuBpyfja-Kt1p0_359m6r-yDu8"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166859">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166860" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253036683"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>"Brazilians should be assessed on a personal basis, as 190 million human beings, and not as members of color groups": why just Brazilians?</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166860&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="fpuCebyGU4vhJ_r4fb2Ui0AZDOVa2O7wy_PeoB5ILrg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">bioIgnoramus (not verified)</span> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166860">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166861" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253036938"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>bio, "genetic background," i.e., your population origin, may give a lot of insight or information when it comes to assessing the effect of particular genetic variants. in the context of brazilians this is more fraught because of the wide range of the genetic background.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166861&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="3PKBYt7HtS6Gf6ni50GpGINaiyGhLfWDu6Li4vfqcF4"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166861">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166862" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253041310"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Brazil also has the largest population of ethnic Japanese anywhere outside of Japan. Yet I've seen little indication whether Brazilians of East Asian ancestry have mixed significantly with the EuroAfroIndian majority. Did this study look at East Asian markers at all? Or are Japanese-Brazilians effectively culturally isolated?</p> <p>Historically, it's my understanding that up until the 1920s or so, Brazil was racially stratified along the typical New World post-colonial lines. Ironically perhaps, when Getúlio Vargas was trying to implement Estado Novo style fascism, he hit on promoting racial intermarriage in an attempt to create a new "Brazilian race" of sorts. It's probably the only known attempt by a fascist to promote miscegenation.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166862&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="0xGQ4VSKugvUBh2hkvO8OifDqORmOw4AFTb-zsD3Ms0"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">HP (not verified)</span> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166862">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166863" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253041690"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>Brazil also has the largest population of ethnic Japanese anywhere outside of Japan. Yet I've seen little indication whether Brazilians of East Asian ancestry have mixed significantly with the EuroAfroIndian majority. Did this study look at East Asian markers at all? Or are Japanese-Brazilians effectively culturally isolated?</i></p> <p>they are only 2% of the pop. max. not enough to "matter" really. rather, the rest of the brazilian population will effect the japanese a lot more (as is evident by the fact that many japanese migrants to japan are actually mixed-race). </p> <p><i>Historically, it's my understanding that up until the 1920s or so, Brazil was racially stratified along the typical New World post-colonial lines. Ironically perhaps, when Getúlio Vargas was trying to implement Estado Novo style fascism, he hit on promoting racial intermarriage in an attempt to create a new "Brazilian race" of sorts. It's probably the only known attempt by a fascist to promote miscegenation.</i></p> <p>the admixture certainly predates the period you're talking about. most certainly for the amerindian element, which seems relatively equally distributed, but probably for the others too. if admixture was from the 1920s it seems you'd see <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/01/how_ashkenazi_jewish_are_you.php">more discrete clusters</a> since many more people should be "multiples of 1/4." in any case, i'm perplexed you think brazil has an atypical racial stratification now. from all i know the creme rises to the top, as is usually the case, if you know what i mean....</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166863&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="a3WEqKJ1bQZMf8-Llb5svz2kNPNy7jQAEwavc0mRfpo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166863">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166864" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253044758"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I've only been studying about Brazil off and on for the last couple of months, so my understanding is very superficial at this point. I'm more interested in Brazilian music and popular culture, and have only been trying to learn some political history recently. I'm not looking for a fight, but I do appreciate being able to bounce my half-baked ideas off of you.</p> <p>What I see from Brazil is that it is racially stratified because there's so little class mobility -- the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. But what you don't see is much racial estrangement <i>within</i> economic classes. The handful of rich blacks feel quite at home among the majority of rich whites, and the handful of poor whites likewise get along just fine with poor black majority. That's not just pop culture; check out any news footage of street violence in the favelas -- it's like that 1980s movie fantasy of integrated street gangs, but with real blood. There are more poor blacks and more rich whites, but within economic classes there's no where near the level of self-segregation you find in North America. </p> <p>I don't think it's fair to say that "the cream rises to the top" in Brazil, because the cream started at the top, and generations of fascist* and militaristic economic policies have guaranteed that the cream doesn't have to go anywhere if it doesn't want to.</p> <p>* Please note that I am not using "fascist" in the generic "people I don't agree with" sense. I mean a system of government based on the ideology of Franco, Mussolini, and the Estado Novo in Portugal in the mid-20th century, i.e., fascism proper.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166864&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="ri2YvAokiQhrXXY3kSAUs1RjXqKYRKvvF-r9_tRsn5g"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">HP (not verified)</span> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166864">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166865" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253045511"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p><i>What I see from Brazil is that it is racially stratified because there's so little class mobility -- the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.</i></p> <p>i'd be interested in quantitative data on this. or the impressions of brazilians.</p> <p><i> The handful of rich blacks feel quite at home among the majority of rich whites, and the handful of poor whites likewise get along just fine with poor black majority. That's not just pop culture; check out any news footage of street violence in the favelas -- it's like that 1980s movie fantasy of integrated street gangs, but with real blood. There are more poor blacks and more rich whites, but within economic classes there's no where near the level of self-segregation you find in North America.</i></p> <p>it is different from north america. but there is a large literature on the reality that black middle and upper class individuals are routinely assumed to be hired help in their apartment complexes. or, there was an instance of a black dentist who was shot because it was assumed he was stealing a car (his car was way too nice for a black man to own). e.g., see <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813523656/geneexpressio-20">Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil </a>.</p> <p><i>I don't think it's fair to say that "the cream rises to the top" in Brazil, because the cream started at the top, and generations of fascist* and militaristic economic policies have guaranteed that the cream doesn't have to go anywhere if it doesn't want to.</i></p> <p>this isn't really true. many of the european immigrants who arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century arrived with little, but ascended up the class hierarchy. e.g., italian &amp; japanese laborers and such. this may not be due to racism (in many social indices the japanese come out on top, not the whites), but, it is a real phenomenon which mirrors what occurs with immigrants in the USA.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166865&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="ulwTa043_7uQZiTaNZMvJMoCWqEYl3Ey2g61fLvXabg"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp" lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib (not verified)</a> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166865">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166866" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253067760"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Z,</p> <p>You have to read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Race-Another-America-Significance-Brazil/dp/0691118663">Race In Another America</a>. It's the most data-packed book there is on the sociology of race in Brazil. Really good.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166866&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="3bArRHU_7tKq4J4WDKXIPptd_ch8x8liPchvmHfrfu8"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Jason Malloy (not verified)</span> on 15 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166866">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166867" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253100759"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>The actual Estado Novo of Portugal which had African colonies promoted a conception of the nation as of blended race. The stormfronters condemn them for that to this day. I think Franco gets off easier, though they still complain about him bringing North African troops to Spain during the Civil War.</p> <p>A progenitor of Nazi racial theories thought Prussians were the perfect race precisely because they were a mixture of German and Slav (Nietzche, not quite in the same category, thought the marriage of Prussian officers and Jewesses should be promoted).</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166867&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Wn7zf4tn9iybbPVwhWg1cwZPDZOjOPPOWnv8iArWR_k"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">TGGP (not verified)</span> on 16 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166867">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166868" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253110615"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Interesting. I wonder if this study would work for North Africans who are generally 10-20% Black in much the same way. But N. Africans seemed to absorb blacks.</p> <p>Unlike Brazil, North Africans are pretty uniformly brown. It's true that black Moroccans are marginalized and called "abid" or slaves...okay, maybe that's not a good example...I can't speak this geneticist language...</p> <p>Razib, there should be some way to compare the situation in Brazil with that of North Africa as they both have significant sub-Saharan African percentages among those considered "white." But they are also both kind of racist. Maybe Islam has something to do with North African absorption of blacks.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166868&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="yv-VUOH9mXKJ5ANMDPAJWgnDZ9KLNeV8P2Z3uLBZ-os"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">norama (not verified)</span> on 16 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166868">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166869" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253189912"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Very interesting study, though the results are unsurprising to anyone familiar with Brazil. A few comments on the comments before I have the time to read the study itself, to help the discussion:</p> <p>1 - <i>* Please note that I am not using "fascist" in the generic "people I don't agree with" sense. I mean a system of government based on the ideology of Franco, Mussolini, and the Estado Novo in Portugal in the mid-20th century, i.e., fascism proper. (/i&gt;</i></p> <p>In this case you have to brush up on your Brazilian history. The one government we had which adopted some Fascist ideas (e.g. in labor relations) was Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship of 1937-1945. That, however, would be the same Getúlio Vargas who crushed the actual Fascists we had (the Integralista movement) after they tried a coup in 1938, and the same Getúlio Vargas who sent 30,000 men to fight Fascism in Europe. Not a paragon of democracy for sure, but no fascist either; his political outlook was positivist of the Comtean variety. </p> <p>2 - On the Japanese in Brazil<br /> They are a large community, but concentrated in the state of São Paulo. I don't have the numbers at hand, but their social indicators (education, income, etc) are better than those of the "white" population by the same amount as those of the "whites" are better than the "blacks".</p> <p>3 - <i>What I see from Brazil is that it is racially stratified because there's so little class mobility -- the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor (/i&gt;</i></p> <p>You'll find wide disagreement among Brazilians about this. My opinion is that from c. 1870 onwards, the Southern region of Brazil has had relatively high levels social mobility, while this has not been true of the northern and northeastern regions until... today. </p> <p>4 - <i>the admixture certainly predates the period you're talking about. most certainly for the amerindian element, which seems relatively equally distributed, but probably for the others too </i></p> <p>Indeed, the admixture is old. The first government to officially promote miscenegation wasn't Vargas; it was... the Portuguese colonizers, from the mid-18th century onwards (google "marquis of Pombal"), though they wanted only white-Indian miscegenation.</p> <p>When Brazil became independent in 1822, the rough distribution of the population (then around 3 million) was 1 million "whites", 1 million "free people of color", and 1 million black slaves. (I'm obviously giving just the general idea). The basic structure of the population was already very well set; the subsequent immigration rush only skewed the balance towards "whites", without altering the general situation.</p> <p>5 - <i> There is a large literature on the reality that black middle and upper class individuals are routinely assumed to be hired help in their apartment complexes. or, there was an instance of a black dentist who was shot because it was assumed he was stealing a car (his car was way too nice for a black man to own). </i></p> <p>This is true, but it's hard to disentangle the cumulative effects of race and social class. (And, nowadays, the rewards to be had from victimhood). This is not to deny that racism full and simple also occurs, as any Brazilian will tell you, but the picture is more complex. Appearance of being rich is everything, and being white is an element of it, but this can - and is - immediately overlooked if other elements are present (like, say, an expensive watch). This means that rich white Brazilians have more latitute not to look rich and keep their social status (among people who don't know who they are) than rich nonwhite Brazilians. Poor people of all races are discriminated against with no particular bonus for white skin color.</p> <p>And this is not from today. Two anecdotes from the past for you to have an idea how odd have Brazilian race relations been: </p> <p>i) when slavery was being abolished in Brazil (1880s), its last diehard defender was the Baron Cotegipe, who was a mulatto (son of a freedwoman) - not that that difficulted his social rise and political career (he was Prime Minister of Brazil).</p> <p>ii) when the Baron Jequitinhonha, one of the most radical politicians of the independence era (1820s), head of Brazilian freemasonry and founder of the Brazilian Bar Association, visited the United States in the 1830s, he was not accepted in the hotel... because he was black. (I imagine biracial, but I don't actually know the proportions of his ancestry).</p> <p>Finally, for disclosure, I'm socially white in Brazil, though with one black great-grandparent. (I think you call that an octoroon?)</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166869&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="RLd2Pb9-fd5YB4ln-Oy-GEHXpzvY2ylo2c60gsA9eQM"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">A_Brazilian (not verified)</span> on 17 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166869">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166870" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1253289180"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I read something in a book on the history of the Spanish New World (I realize that Brazil is not Spanish) which stated that men had access to any woman who had darker skin than them. The result being children of mixed background who were often loved and helped by their lighter skinned fathers. </p> <p>A Venezuelan friend, in 1969, told me there was no racial predjudice in Venezuela--it just happened that the poor were dark skinned and the rich light skinned. Back down there in the late 80's - early 90's. I noted a good many light skinned poor whom I had not seen in 1969.I wonder what drove that change.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166870&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="Oc6tKx9xrxxsEW0ZXNGtdNRspMY9EBS3ThSzfMT8ySE"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">Jim Thomerson (not verified)</span> on 18 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166870">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2009/09/15/brazil-the-case-of-triracial-w%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:15:57 +0000 razib 100909 at https://www.scienceblogs.com Obesity & ancestry in African Americans https://www.scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/09/07/obesity-ancestry-in-african-am <span>Obesity &amp; ancestry in African Americans</span> <div class="field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field--item"><p>Another study on obesity &amp; Africans, with a slight twist, <a href="http://www.nature.com/oby/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/oby2009282a.html">Admixture Mapping of Obesity-related Traits in African Americans: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>Obesity is an important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the United States, the prevalence of obesity is higher in African Americans than whites, even after adjustment for socioeconomic status (SES). This leads to the hypothesis that differences in genetic background may contribute to racial/ethnic differences in obesity-related traits. We tested this hypothesis by conducting a genome-wide admixture mapping scan using 1,350 ancestry-informative single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 3,531 self-identified blacks from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. We used these markers to estimate the overall proportions of European ancestry (PEAs) for each individual and then scanned for the association between PEA and obesity-related traits (both continuous and dichotomous) at each locus. The median (interquartile range) PEA was 0.151 (0.115). PEA was inversely correlated with continuous BMI, weight, and subscapular skinfold thickness, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors.<b> In contrast, PEA was positively correlated with BMI-adjusted waist circumference....</b></p></blockquote> <p>BMI is a coarse measure. The positive correlation between European ancestry and waist circumference shows how genes can shape your body type, even if we're interested in only slices of information.</p> <p><b>Related:</b> <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2009/05/obesity_inversely_correlated_w.php">Obesity inversely correlated with European ancestry among African Americans </a></p> <p>H/t <a href="http://dienekes.blogspot.com/">Dienekes</a></p> <p><b>Citation:</b> <i>Obesity</i> (2009) doi:10.1038/oby.2009.28</p> </div> <span><a title="View user profile." href="/author/razib" lang="" about="/author/razib" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">razib</a></span> <span>Mon, 09/07/2009 - 08:25</span> <div class="field field--name-field-blog-tags field--type-entity-reference field--label-inline"> <div class="field--label">Tags</div> <div class="field--items"> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetics" hreflang="en">genetics</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/genetic-structure" hreflang="en">genetic structure</a></div> <div class="field--item"><a href="/tag/obesity" hreflang="en">obesity</a></div> </div> </div> <section> <article data-comment-user-id="0" id="comment-2166762" class="js-comment comment-wrapper clearfix"> <mark class="hidden" data-comment-timestamp="1252328364"></mark> <div class="well"> <strong></strong> <div class="field field--name-comment-body field--type-text-long field--label-hidden field--item"><p>I wonder if we have a bad combo of environment and genes. I remember seeing a map of the US here that highlighted obesity among whites; the giant red areas were in the South. Given that 80% of African Americans live in those same areas and that sugar intake is much higher in the south than elsewhere, the genetic component may just be a secondary indicator of susceptibility to a particular environmental toxin.</p> </div> <drupal-render-placeholder callback="comment.lazy_builders:renderLinks" arguments="0=2166762&amp;1=default&amp;2=en&amp;3=" token="KjJm4kn7ktnl-0_1PRznVqoxuCKL2HiAqjvuQngMSXo"></drupal-render-placeholder> </div> <footer> <em>By <span lang="" typeof="schema:Person" property="schema:name" datatype="">elambend (not verified)</span> on 07 Sep 2009 <a href="https://www.scienceblogs.com/taxonomy/term/27527/feed#comment-2166762">#permalink</a></em> <article typeof="schema:Person" about="/user/0"> <div class="field field--name-user-picture field--type-image field--label-hidden field--item"> <a href="/user/0" hreflang="und"><img src="/files/styles/thumbnail/public/default_images/icon-user.png?itok=yQw_eG_q" width="100" height="100" alt="User Image" typeof="foaf:Image" class="img-responsive" /> </a> </div> </article> </footer> </article> </section> <ul class="links inline list-inline"><li class="comment-forbidden"><a href="/user/login?destination=/gnxp/2009/09/07/obesity-ancestry-in-african-am%23comment-form">Log in</a> to post comments</li></ul> Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:25:23 +0000 razib 100889 at https://www.scienceblogs.com