Most recent common ancestors

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Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 15 jan 2006 16:29:50

(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. In my voiew it is by far the most interesting of
the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys
(http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html) on this topic. Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.

Reading through his paper, it seems clear to me that his conclusions
are too modest; that in fact it is entirely likely that the most recent
ancestor of all humanity lived around 2,000 years ago. I have several
reasons for thinking this:

1) Rohde admits that he is using unrealistically low rates of
inter-country migration, simply so as not to get results that are too
startling. If the real rate of migration between countries and
continents is higher than the one he used, the time to the most recent
common ancestor decreases.

2) His models assumes that women have an equal probability of bearing
children every year between the ages of 16 and 40, thus giving an
average age difference between mothers and their children of 28. I
reckon this flattens out the natural bump (!) at the lower end of that
age range, and my suspicion (without any proof) for most of human
history is that most children were born to women aged between 14 and
30. That too will decrease the time to our most recent common ancestor,
as the time between generations will be shorter.

(A digression: female-female lines are much harder to trace, which is
odd given that there is never any doubt about who a child's mother is.
For instance, little is known of Mary Garritt, the wife of Thomas Webb,
a surveyor in Stow-on-the-Wold in the mid-18th century. Her daughter
Frances (1775-1862) married Thomas Salisbury, landlord of Marshfield
House in Yorkshire. Their daughter Anne (1806-1881) married another
gentry type, Edwyn Burnaby of Baggrave Hall in Leicestershire. Their
daughter Caroline (1832-1918) married a widowed clergyman who was the
grandson of a duke. Their daughter Nina (1862-1938) managed to bag an
earl as her husband. Her daughter Elizabeth (1900-2002) did rather
better than a mere earl. Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was born in
1926 and is still alive; those of you in the UK and Canada will find
her depicted on certain useful everyday objects, ie money. But her
direct female line ancestry can be traced back only six generations
before it is lost in the Gloucestershire middle classes.)

3) Rohde leaves out the effect of occasional exceptional individuals
(what in homage to Asimov we might call the "Mule effect"), in this
case those with vast numbers of children all of whom produce
descendants, such as Genghis Khan. Zerjal et al demonstrated that
Genghis Khan's Y-chromosomes are present in large proportions of the
male population of his former empire.

That of course only measures the direct male-line descent of the
individuals concerned. It must be pretty certain that if you take all
lineages into account, Genghis Khan is an ancestor, quite likely the
most recent common ancestor himself, of everyone between the Aral Sea
and the Pacific north of the old boundary line. If he had not fathered
the immense number of children he appears to have done, that would
surely have added another couple of centuries to the time since the
most recent common ancestor of the people of the region.

I've argued at http://explorers.whyte.com/muhammad.htm that most of us
are descended from the Prophet Muhammad. Someone living in the first
few centuries AD, probably in East Asia, probably a man with children
by several different women (quite possibly in different places), is the
most recent person who is the ancestor of us all.

Of course, while this is a nice concept, it's not quite as strong as it
seems. Rohde points out one reason for this, which is that at the
distance of 50 generations the likelihood that we have inherited any
genetic material at all from this one particular ancestor is pretty
minimal unless you happen to be fairly close in geographical proximity
to them.

There is another reason as well, which is that family ties are not just
about genetics but are also about how you feel. By emphasising the
arrival of children in a family as the product of procreation between
married couples of opposite sexes, the Most Recent Common Ancestry
model leaves out all the messiness of real life - adoptions, most
obviously, but various other possibilities are all around us. It's an
attractive mathematical concept, but we have to bear in mind that it
isn't the whole story.

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 04:08:46

Very simply, "all humanity" was far too spread out and well beyond the
Eastern Hemisphere 2000 years ago. My father's Hopi ancestors, for
example, were nowhere near any European or Asian people 2000 years ago
but were exactly where he was born in north-central Arizona and the
immediately adjacent areas in present-day Utah, New Mexico, Colorado
and southern Nevada.
Be careful when you throw around such enormous concepts as "all
humanity". Bronwen

Denis Beauregard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Denis Beauregard » 16 jan 2006 04:37:44

On 15 Jan 2006 07:29:50 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote in
soc.genealogy.medieval:

(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. In my voiew it is by far the most interesting of
the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys
(http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html) on this topic. Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.

Must be junk ! If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes. Since these features survived because
of separated cultures (i.e. in a world where there is no racism, I
think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings). So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

Moreover, Americas were isolated from Asia at least 15,000 years ago.

We don't need that kind of pseudo-science... The model is obviously
wrong.


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La Jemmerais)

Rob

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Rob » 16 jan 2006 04:53:59

Bonjour Denis,

What artefacts of 3000 years ago conclusively prove that colour of skin, eye
shapes were already defined? I can think of none off the top of my head.
Remember 3000 years ago we are talking the end of the Bronze age beginning
of the Iron Age (in the UK). Likewise what do you mean by separated
cultures? There is sufficient evidence thanks to archaeology to show that
there was inter marriages taking place from as early as the Neolithic period
some 5000-6000 years ago. For example 3 bodies were excavated 3 years ago
in England and a sample of tooth was analysed and it was discovered that the
woman was in fact of Asian descent yet one child was English ( I use the
term loosely because England as we know it today didn't exist) Likewise in
London a female was excavated and found to be of Syrian descent yet she had
it is presumed married a rich Roman Trader which is why and how she ended up
in England. Before anyone screams out how they could say she was rich, this
as been postulated because of the fine textiles and grave goods that had
survived with her body in the lead coffin.

Finally you say we don't need that kind of Pseudo science here, the model is
obviously wrong yet you make no argument to back this decision up. Whilst I
don't agree with the arguments put forward, because they haven't taken into
account the possibilities of inter humanoid births, for example homo sapien
sapien and Neanderthals. Yes there is evidence to suggest this.

A reason for not accepting the theory that as been presented is Cheddar man
discovered in 1903. DNA was extracted from the skeleton and this was
compared with a class of boys in or around Cheddar. The teacher also had
DNA taken. Upon examination there was ( apparently) enough markers to
suggest that the teacher was a descendent of this early man who if memory
serves me right dated to the Mesolithic period or some 9000 years ago. That
said I am sceptical of these results as they were carried out for a TV show.
See http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9707/31/cheddar.man/

So before we knock the theories lets present the evidence which will shut
people like this up

Rob


"Denis Beauregard" <no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:mo4ms15t5bs77ev0ds8bhs690882gdmb15@4ax.com...
On 15 Jan 2006 07:29:50 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote in
soc.genealogy.medieval:

(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. In my voiew it is by far the most interesting of
the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys
(http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html) on this topic. Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.

Must be junk ! If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes. Since these features survived because
of separated cultures (i.e. in a world where there is no racism, I
think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings). So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

Moreover, Americas were isolated from Asia at least 15,000 years ago.

We don't need that kind of pseudo-science... The model is obviously
wrong.


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 -
http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La
Jemmerais)

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 16 jan 2006 06:19:28

On 15 Jan 2006 19:08:46 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

Very simply, "all humanity" was far too spread out and well beyond the
Eastern Hemisphere 2000 years ago. My father's Hopi ancestors, for
example, were nowhere near any European or Asian people 2000 years ago
but were exactly where he was born in north-central Arizona and the
immediately adjacent areas in present-day Utah, New Mexico, Colorado
and southern Nevada.
Be careful when you throw around such enormous concepts as "all
humanity". Bronwen

There is a hole in the theory, but not the one you think.

It's very unlikely that the Hopi, nor any other Native
American culture, retains even a single member today
whose male and female ancestors were /all/ descended
from the first tribe who unknowingly chased a herd of
wooly mammoths from an "Asian" tundra to an "American"
tundra and headed south into an unpeopled paradise.

The first Europeans there reported seeing red-haired
natives with fairer skin in what is now Florida. This raises
the possibility that genetic mixing between Europe and
the Western Hemisphere began much earlier, possibly
with survivors of Viking explorers 900 years ago.

Even if we set the first genetic mixing at 1510, we must
remember that the offspring were more resistant to the
Euro diseases which wiped out (by some estimates)
19 out of every 20 Native Americans living near Euro
colonies from 1500 to 1900. Such depopulation forced
native villages to find spouses further afield, which thus
increased the rate of intermixing among Native Americans,
which therefore increased the rate at which half-Euros
and their children were assimilated into the genepool.

The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery. The only female outsiders they've ever
seen are anthropologists who would not sleep with
them for reasons of professional standards (or for
reasons of personal hygiene!)

The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans. The most remote
tribes we know of say "oh yeah, there's people to the
West, but we only run across one of them in the forest
every 20 years or so."

Stone-age tribes in Borneo might branch from the rest
of us even earlier, up to 2,000 years owing to the
difficulty of the terrain and cannibalistic relationships
with neighboring villages. This also precludes Eurasian
genetic elements.

So, the great likelihood is that humans are alive in South
America today, people whose common ancestor with
the rest of us lived at least 15,000 years ago. Some
corners of Australasia have populations which are only
descended from pioneers in humanity's great expansion
50,000 years ago.

There might only be 10,000 people alive today who are
not descendants of <insert historical figure here>, but
they /are/ out there, so setting a date of one or two
thousands years ago is eurocentristic folly.

SL

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 07:30:33

Regarding your thoughts about the peopling of the Americas, you mention
all of the wackiest myths around without citing a shred of evidence or
even a reference. You are wrong about virtually everything you said.
Mixing between groups occurred everywhere in the world, including the
most isolated areas and certainly including the land of my father's
ancestors. How this relates to the population there 2000 years ago
escapes me. What is the original documentation for "red-haired" Native
Americans in Florida? I've heard all of the myths about such people in
Indiana and Illinois and Minneapolis, etc. Florida is a new one. As for
mixing with the Vikings, not likely for the simple reason that the
Viking settlement in eastern Canada did not last long and was probably
ended precisely because of the failure of its inhabitants to get along
with the "Skraelings". Even if there was intermarriage or, more likely,
rape of Native women there, the genetic influence would be very slight
and possibly no longer represented among the living. Evidence does
exist for cross-Pacific contact (with the Ainu & the Northwest Coast
and with the voyages of Hoei-Shin around 400 CE. Again, however, the
Ainu influence does not appear to have been biological (based on
genetic comparisons between the two groups today) and Hoei-Shin sailed
well after the 2000 year mark.

When you cite the mixing of Europeans and Native Americans since the
16th century, you make several errors: first, the offspring of these
unions were not more resistant to European diseases; second, there had
been mixing among Native Americans for thousands of years. They did not
require a European presence to be aware of distant groups and choose
partners from among them (nor were such unions necessarily the result
of peaceful relations - it was traditional among many groups to take
war captives for this purpose). I have many friends from the various
Pueblos of New Mexico who speak of their "Plains" ancestors as having
arrived there in that way; virtually every Eastern Pueblo person with
whom I have discussed these things has spoken of their war-captive or
purchased ancestors. It should be recalled that the Pueblos were the
people who were responsible for spreading the use of horses to the
Plains Indians. Your statement about the Amazon is also untrue. It is
an entertaining Euro-American myth that there are pockets of people so
isolated that they have never seen an outsider. No such people exist
and, if you exclude the Europeans from discussion, no such people have
existed in that way for a very long time, if ever. Every group knew of
people unlike themselves and had occasional dealings with them over
very large areas. The trade networks in the Americas spanned thousands
upon thousands of square miles and involved the traveling of people as
well as the passing along of trade goods. Where on earth did you get
this baloney about unknown tribes and the anthropologist women who
would not sleep with them!? And as for hygiene, how do you think all of
these "primitive" people compared to 16th century Europeans? As for all
of this pseudo-anthropology, where is your documentation, your
references for all of these wild statements? You make the usual mistake
of underestimating the history and culture of such people. Finally,
you need to bone up on the current theories about the peopling of the
Americas: sites such as Pedra Furada in Brazil and Monte Verde in Chile
show that there were people living there 40,000 years ago; the
Brazilian site is tentatively dated at 48,000 years. Even the old
Bering Strait Theory has undergone a great deal of rethinking recently:
were Asian hunters walking across the land "bridge" (it was a very
large area, more like a subcontinent) the ancestors of Native Americans
everywhere, or did some people come by boat from other places? Ancient
skulls from South America suggest a Melanesian possibility while
ancient skulls from northwestern North America suggest relations with
the Ainu that went beyond cultural influence (of course, the most
famous of these was someone who ended up with an arrow in his butt
although it did not kill him). It is all being re-thought. And, of
course, most the Native accounts never included the Bering Strait
anyway although some were quite specific about geographic origins and
subsequent migrations. Best, Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 07:39:43

First of all, the physical features you mention are not "racial" but
simply the result of gene pools. There is more variation within a given
"race" that there is between that group and another "race" (i.e., more
variation among Europeans, for example, than between Europeans and
Africans). "Race" is an idea, not a biological fact. The Human Genome
Project has shown us that we are remarkably alike physically; we are
just one genus or species, but a single subspecies as well. Finally,
Asia and North America were never actually separate. The Eskimo people
in Alaska (properly Inuit) called the tensions between the USA & the
USSR the "Ice Curtain" because it prevented them from traveling back
and forth between Alaska & Siberia in their umiaks (large versions of
kayaks). There are people on both sides who are of a single culture,
single language, and actually members of the same families. When the
USSR fell and the Ice Curtain came down, there were enormous parties
with a lot of publicity in Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Greenland. The
rise of sea level would only have affected the means of travel, not the
travel itself. Otherwise, I agree with the substance of your message. -
Bronwen

Todd A. Farmerie

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Todd A. Farmerie » 16 jan 2006 07:41:50

Rob wrote:

A reason for not accepting the theory that as been presented is Cheddar man
discovered in 1903. DNA was extracted from the skeleton and this was
compared with a class of boys in or around Cheddar. The teacher also had
DNA taken. Upon examination there was ( apparently) enough markers to
suggest that the teacher was a descendent of this early man who if memory
serves me right dated to the Mesolithic period or some 9000 years ago.

They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.

Anyhow this misses the point. As has already been pointed out,
virtually all North American 'natives' probably also descend from
post-Columbus Euros, even if only through a single
great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandfather. The fact that
they are members of tribes that predate Columbus does not negate this.
In other words, there is nothing to stop the schoolteacher in question
from being descended from BOTH the Cheddar man AND Ghengis Khan.

That being said, I also find the model flawed, but because it ignores
inbreeding and isolated populations. Inbreeding was extensive, not so
much on the level of first-cousin marriage, although that did happen,
but in terms of most rural villages, where after a couple of hundred
years with minimal migration they were all descended from the same
people and no marriage within the community expanded the genetic
heritage in the slightest. It also means that once a fresh lineage is
introduced, it too becomes saturating within a couple hundred years.
The key, then, is isolation, and there are populations so isolated that
it is unlikely they have acquired European ancestry, and certainly all
of Europe has not acquired descent from them. In short, such
statistical approaches require dramatic over-simplification to produce
results, but these same simplifications that make the analysis possible
likewise doom the results to represent nothing more than a statistical
exercise.

taf

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 16 jan 2006 08:53:43

On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 22:37:44 -0500, Denis Beauregard
<no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:

On 15 Jan 2006 07:29:50 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote in
soc.genealogy.medieval:

(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. In my voiew it is by far the most interesting of
the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys
(http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html) on this topic. Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.

Must be junk ! If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes. Since these features survived because
of separated cultures (i.e. in a world where there is no racism, I
think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings). So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

Three genetic expansions explain it: from Africa 80,000
years ago, from SW Asia 50,000 years ago and from
Central Asia 1,500 years ago. Read on to find out why...

Moreover, Americas were isolated from Asia at least 15,000 years ago.

We don't need that kind of pseudo-science... The model is obviously
wrong.


Denis


No, it's not wrong, and it's not "junk". Up until about 7,000
years ago, the progression of human gametes across the Earth
proceeded only as fast as their legs could carry them.

Disease and genocide in the Americas led to a 95% reduction
in native american population during the European conquests.
The remaining Native Americans faced racial pressure to breed
with half- or 3/4-NA's who were more more resistant to Euro
diseases and fit their ideologically-instilled concept of beauty.

Domesticating the ox increased human population, and since
time immemorial humans prefer to breed outside of their own
family (before, it was 'tradition' but now science explains why).

Domesticating the horse provided better means to get spouses
outside of one's family group and then we developed weapons
and the rest is history... literally.

Sure, there are likely to be people in remote areas whose
branch of the human tree juts out at 60,000 years ago, but
as for the rest of us (6,602,803,418 on 2006-01-16), we are
descended from a single person who lived as little as a few
thousand years ago, and quite possibly only several hundred
years ago.

The theory is sensational-sounding, but the math is solid.
We can't say that "everyone" is a descendant of <insert
historical figure>, but the spread of human gametes increases
in direct proportion to developments in transportation.

It's an extreme case, but Icelandic genealogy points out how
a large modern population there can all trace back to a handful
of people, plus the hundreds of millions of people who are
descended from all the men and women who *left* Iceland
over the last thousand years.

Taking into account modern 'isolates' in the Amazon, Arctic
and the Australasian islands, the probability is that *all* humans
are descended from someone who lived about 70,000 years
ago.

But *most* humans living today have a common ancestor
who lived as recently as a few thousand years ago. Two
facts indicate that this is true:

* Humans prefer to breed outside of their own family, and
have a proclivity to breed with those from outside their village
whenever transportation is available to enable this urge.

* The domestication of the horse not only enabled
widespread gamete travel, but ensured it. Our trains
and planes and cars only speeded up the mixture in
the last 150 years.


The trick is Africa. With 890 million folks, how fast has
genetic interplay spread southwards there? We know
that Nubian chicks were wild for Egyptian guys in ancient
times, but were the Egyptians of 3,000 years ago descended
from someone common to a woman on the frontier of China
4,000 years ago?

That question determines whether our "99% ancestor" was
born in Africa, the Near East, or Central Asia. The same
uncertainty times our "99% ancestor" anywhere from 7,000
years ago to 1,000 years ago.

The central assumption is that villages homogenically arise
at geographic intervals, dictated by areal food production.
Most villages throughout the last 4,000 years have known
about the "next village over" in all directions.

Since a genetic exchange between neighboring villages
is bound to happen once a year per hundred people,
and even more often with better transportation, there
is no other conclusion: we can *all* trace ourselves back
to someone born 70,000 years ago, and 99% of us
descend from someone born less than 7,000 years ago.

SL

Rob

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Rob » 16 jan 2006 10:08:08

Isn't it the case though that Native Americans have Mongolian blood? What
about the possible Viking connections as well? The model fails on numerous
accounts not only its simplification.

I don't understand though how you can say physical appearances are not
racial. Osteo-archaeologists and osteopaths can tell what race a skeleton
is from through the length and appearances of certain bones. DNA allows
thanks to the gene pool to show race. If we were all of one genepool and a
single sub species as well how would you argue the fact that sickle cell is
only found in certain afro Caribbean's? I am sorry but your arguments don't
hold up well neither.

As for Alaska and Siberia they were at one time all European the Americans
buying Alaska from the Russians for one Dollar.

Rising sea levels did affect travel if only for a short period of time until
new technology came along. This is seen quite extensively in the
archaeological record. The stand still in advancement until a new form of
travel was acquired.

Finally do you have a link to the Genome project please

Rob
<lostcooper@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1137393583.764351.82280@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
First of all, the physical features you mention are not "racial" but
simply the result of gene pools. There is more variation within a given
"race" that there is between that group and another "race" (i.e., more
variation among Europeans, for example, than between Europeans and
Africans). "Race" is an idea, not a biological fact. The Human Genome
Project has shown us that we are remarkably alike physically; we are
just one genus or species, but a single subspecies as well. Finally,
Asia and North America were never actually separate. The Eskimo people
in Alaska (properly Inuit) called the tensions between the USA & the
USSR the "Ice Curtain" because it prevented them from traveling back
and forth between Alaska & Siberia in their umiaks (large versions of
kayaks). There are people on both sides who are of a single culture,
single language, and actually members of the same families. When the
USSR fell and the Ice Curtain came down, there were enormous parties
with a lot of publicity in Siberia, Canada, Alaska and Greenland. The
rise of sea level would only have affected the means of travel, not the
travel itself. Otherwise, I agree with the substance of your message. -
Bronwen

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 16 jan 2006 10:19:47

On 15 Jan 2006 22:30:33 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

Regarding your thoughts about the peopling of the Americas, you mention
all of the wackiest myths around without citing a shred of evidence or
even a reference. You are wrong about virtually everything you said.

Err, i thought i had the best info available. Let's find out.


Mixing between groups occurred everywhere in the world, including the
most isolated areas and certainly including the land of my father's
ancestors.

Yes, but the mixing has historically been limited by the
economic cost of travel. Extremely insular places like
the deep Amazon and Australasian islands have only
recently been opened to scrutiny, and their genetic
makeup indicates a far older ancestry than 1,000 years.

How this relates to the population there 2000 years ago
escapes me. What is the original documentation for "red-haired" Native
Americans in Florida? I've heard all of the myths about such people in
Indiana and Illinois and Minneapolis, etc. Florida is a new one.

I haven't read about such reports in the South Great
Lakes Area, please eleborate. We might be onto
something there after all. Can you at least provide
a weblink supporting your claims abot Indiana, Illinois
and Minnesota?

As for mixing with the Vikings, not likely for the simple reason that the
Viking settlement in eastern Canada did not last long and was probably
ended precisely because of the failure of its inhabitants to get along
with the "Skraelings". Even if there was intermarriage or, more likely,
rape of Native women there, the genetic influence would be very slight
and possibly no longer represented among the living. Evidence does
exist for cross-Pacific contact (with the Ainu & the Northwest Coast
and with the voyages of Hoei-Shin around 400 CE. Again, however, the
Ainu influence does not appear to have been biological (based on
genetic comparisons between the two groups today) and Hoei-Shin sailed
well after the 2000 year mark.

No significant genetic interchange is implied, nor should
be inferred from, extant reports of Viking involvement at
L'Anseaux Meadows, which is presumably the "Vinland"
reported by Leif Eriksson. But we should remember that
Viking culture was tied to the boat as a unit of social
organization, and no boat was found at L'Anseaux.

If you think all the Vikings perished like lambs to
"skraeling" spears, you're underestimating the
resourcefulness of a culture that spread from China
to Baghdad. They kept their boat in good repair as
a matter of survival and depending on the season,
they either fled north or south.

When you cite the mixing of Europeans and Native Americans since the
16th century, you make several errors: first, the offspring of these
unions were not more resistant to European diseases; second, there had
been mixing among Native Americans for thousands of years. They did not
require a European presence to be aware of distant groups and choose
partners from among them (nor were such unions necessarily the result
of peaceful relations - it was traditional among many groups to take
war captives for this purpose).

Yeah, i had hoped to allude to mankind's history of
societal rape without direct reference to it, but you
are correct: rape has been a genetically signifiicant
mechanism for gamete dispersal for many centuries
before it became a political liability.

But, including the factor of rape only bolsters my points,
rather than invalidate them. Genetic transfer increases
more quickly when armies with an advantage in
transportation conquer slower nations. The modern era
has shown us the Rape Of Nanking and Nazi "warbabies"
popping up in France and Benelux in early 1942.

I have many friends from the various
Pueblos of New Mexico who speak of their "Plains" ancestors as having
arrived there in that way; virtually every Eastern Pueblo person with
whom I have discussed these things has spoken of their war-captive or
purchased ancestors. It should be recalled that the Pueblos were the
people who were responsible for spreading the use of horses to the
Plains Indians.

Yes, the traditions are the same, but the genetic stew
has changed over the years. Intrusion of half-Euros and
quarter-Euros into the Native American cultures was swift
from 1800 to 1900. The number of North Americans who
can claim certain "pure" descent from the original invaders
of an uninhabited North America is now zero.

Or perhaps you have proof otherwise?


Your statement about the Amazon is also untrue. It is
an entertaining Euro-American myth that there are pockets of people so
isolated that they have never seen an outsider. No such people exist
and, if you exclude the Europeans from discussion, no such people have
existed in that way for a very long time, if ever. Every group knew of
people unlike themselves and had occasional dealings with them over
very large areas. The trade networks in the Americas spanned thousands
upon thousands of square miles and involved the traveling of people as
well as the passing along of trade goods.

Whoa there boy, i'm talking about occasional contact
with 'outsiders' among the most remote tribes we know
about in the Amazon. There are certainly villages we
haven't been to, ones whch retain the genetic line of
the first asiatic land-bridgers.


Where on earth did you get
this baloney about unknown tribes and the anthropologist women who
would not sleep with them!? And as for hygiene, how do you think all of
these "primitive" people compared to 16th century Europeans?

But i was speaking of 20th-Century female anthropologists,
which you seemed to overlook.


As for all of this pseudo-anthropology, where is your documentation, your
references for all of these wild statements? You make the usual mistake
of underestimating the history and culture of such people. Finally,
you need to bone up on the current theories about the peopling of the
Americas: sites such as Pedra Furada in Brazil and Monte Verde in Chile
show that there were people living there 40,000 years ago; the
Brazilian site is tentatively dated at 48,000 years.

I'm aware of these reports, but chose a conservative
date of American inhabitation so as not to upset the
Kansas school boards... and other folks who want to
argue a goofy point.


Even the old
Bering Strait Theory has undergone a great deal of rethinking recently:
were Asian hunters walking across the land "bridge" (it was a very
large area, more like a subcontinent) the ancestors of Native Americans
everywhere, or did some people come by boat from other places? Ancient
skulls from South America suggest a Melanesian possibility while
ancient skulls from northwestern North America suggest relations with
the Ainu that went beyond cultural influence (of course, the most
famous of these was someone who ended up with an arrow in his butt
although it did not kill him). It is all being re-thought. And, of
course, most the Native accounts never included the Bering Strait
anyway although some were quite specific about geographic origins and
subsequent migrations. Best, Bronwen

The theory of immigration across the Bering is the
only theory which holds water. The timing is the
sole bone of contention. I support the date 25,000
years ago. Many more sites are coming to light in the
Americas which push the inhabitation of America back
from one interglacial period to the previous one. We
just can't say for sure yet.

SL

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 13:16:06

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
Very simply, "all humanity" was far too spread out and well beyond the
Eastern Hemisphere 2000 years ago. My father's Hopi ancestors, for
example, were nowhere near any European or Asian people 2000 years ago
but were exactly where he was born in north-central Arizona and the
immediately adjacent areas in present-day Utah, New Mexico, Colorado
and southern Nevada.

And they had absolutely *no* intermarriage with neighbouring tribes?
What Rohde demonstrates is that it really takes quite a low rate of
intermarriage for lineages to spread pretty fast.

Be careful when you throw around such enormous concepts as "all
humanity". Bronwen

Be careful when you tell people to "be careful". It sounds patronising.

Nicholas

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 14:23:17

Denis Beauregard wrote:
On 15 Jan 2006 07:29:50 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote in
soc.genealogy.medieval:

(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. In my voiew it is by far the most interesting of
the numerous pieces of research cited by Mark Humphrys
(http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html) on this topic. Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.

Must be junk ! If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes. Since these features survived because
of separated cultures (i.e. in a world where there is no racism, I
think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings). So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

Because their genetic inheritance is diluted. Read the paper, you may
be surprised.

Moreover, Americas were isolated from Asia at least 15,000 years ago.

What, completely isolated? The Russians claim to have been settling
Alaska since 1648. You're telling me not a single tribesman made it
across the stratits in the previous 14600 years?

Nicholas

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 16 jan 2006 15:01:11

Todd A. Farmerie wrote:
Rob wrote:

A reason for not accepting the theory that as been presented is Cheddar man
discovered in 1903. DNA was extracted from the skeleton and this was
compared with a class of boys in or around Cheddar. The teacher also had
DNA taken. Upon examination there was ( apparently) enough markers to
suggest that the teacher was a descendent of this early man who if memory
serves me right dated to the Mesolithic period or some 9000 years ago.

They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.

Anyhow this misses the point. As has already been pointed out,
virtually all North American 'natives' probably also descend from
post-Columbus Euros, even if only through a single
great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandfather. The fact that
they are members of tribes that predate Columbus does not negate this.
In other words, there is nothing to stop the schoolteacher in question
from being descended from BOTH the Cheddar man AND Ghengis Khan.

Absolutely.

That being said, I also find the model flawed, but because it ignores
inbreeding and isolated populations. Inbreeding was extensive, not so
much on the level of first-cousin marriage, although that did happen,
but in terms of most rural villages, where after a couple of hundred
years with minimal migration they were all descended from the same
people and no marriage within the community expanded the genetic
heritage in the slightest. It also means that once a fresh lineage is
introduced, it too becomes saturating within a couple hundred years.
The key, then, is isolation, and there are populations so isolated that
it is unlikely they have acquired European ancestry, and certainly all
of Europe has not acquired descent from them. In short, such
statistical approaches require dramatic over-simplification to produce
results, but these same simplifications that make the analysis possible
likewise doom the results to represent nothing more than a statistical
exercise.

Are there really such isolated populations? With nobody ever coming in
from the next island, the next patch of forest, the next valley? Where?

The most literally insular communities of all, in the Pacific Islands,
were settled from elsewhere only in the last thousand years, never mind
the considerable intermixture with Europeans in the last 200. And I'm
not sure if you meant to also include pre-industrial Europe, where
there seems to me to have been quite a lot of movement due to trade,
slavery, war, etc.

Nicholas

Rob

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Rob » 16 jan 2006 15:08:50

"Todd A. Farmerie" <farmerie@interfold.com> wrote in message
news:dqff7p$afe$1@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu...
They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.
Actually no it shows they had the same paternal lineage because they didn't

carry out MtA sequencing as far as I know. After all the Y chromosome is
the only one that doesn't become altered birth after birth.

Anyhow this misses the point. As has already been pointed out, virtually
all North American 'natives' probably also descend from post-Columbus
Euros, even if only through a single
great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandfather. The fact that they
are members of tribes that predate Columbus does not negate this. In other
words, there is nothing to stop the schoolteacher in question from being
descended from BOTH the Cheddar man AND Ghengis Khan.

Thats very argumentative with little or no evidenc eto back it up. It is
based on a weak set of guidlines.
That being said, I also find the model flawed, but because it ignores
inbreeding and isolated populations. Inbreeding was extensive, not so
much on the level of first-cousin marriage, although that did happen, but
in terms of most rural villages, where after a couple of hundred years
with minimal migration they were all descended from the same people and no
marriage within the community expanded the genetic heritage in the
slightest. It also means that once a fresh lineage is introduced, it too
becomes saturating within a couple hundred years. The key, then, is
isolation, and there are populations so isolated that it is unlikely they
have acquired European ancestry, and certainly all of Europe has not
acquired descent from them. In short, such statistical approaches require
dramatic over-simplification to produce results, but these same
simplifications that make the analysis possible likewise doom the results
to represent nothing more than a statistical exercise.

taf

Couldn't agree more. Yet again the simplification of how the data is read

Rob

Todd A. Farmerie

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Todd A. Farmerie » 16 jan 2006 16:02:56

nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote:

Are there really such isolated populations? With nobody ever coming in
from the next island, the next patch of forest, the next valley? Where?

No, but when you take into account the amount of time necessary for the
newly introduced line to reach saturation in the new population and the
time it took for it to have reached saturation in the neighboring
population the infusion is coming from, it becomes questionable that the
500 years since Columbus is sufficient to achieve complete European gene
flow into the most isolated South American tribes (many, yes, but all?).

In Europe, taking this into account simply bumps back the time to most
recent common ancestor. In the New World, you have a hard date beyond
which you cannot bump it without having to go _way_ back.

taf

steven perkins

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av steven perkins » 16 jan 2006 16:03:02

Cheddar man reference(mtDNA):

Cheddar Man was U5a
and had low resolution mutations at 16169A, 16192T, 16235G, 16270 T, and 16304C.

http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/GE ... 1112070204

Regards,

Steven C. Perkins


On 1/16/06, Rob <madbadrob@robburns.wanadoo.co.uk> wrote:
"Todd A. Farmerie" <farmerie@interfold.com> wrote in message
news:dqff7p$afe$1@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu...
They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.
Actually no it shows they had the same paternal lineage because they didn't
carry out MtA sequencing as far as I know. After all the Y chromosome is
the only one that doesn't become altered birth after birth.



--
Steven C. Perkins SCPerkins@gmail.com
http://stevencperkins.com/
http://intelligent-internet.info/
http://jgg-online.blogspot.com/
http://stevencperkins.com/genealogy.html

Todd A. Farmerie

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Todd A. Farmerie » 16 jan 2006 16:58:42

Rob wrote:
"Todd A. Farmerie" <farmerie@interfold.com> wrote in message
news:dqff7p$afe$1@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu...
They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.
Actually no it shows they had the same paternal lineage because they didn't
carry out MtA sequencing as far as I know. After all the Y chromosome is
the only one that doesn't become altered birth after birth.

But it _was_ mtDNA. At the time, in the late 90s, mtDNA (a thousand or
more copies per cell) was almost always used when working with ancient
samples because the techniques were not well enough refined to
effectively sample nuclear DNA such as the Y chromosome (one copy per
cell) with any sort of reliability (and without being overwhelmed by
contamination, particularly with samples handed around for a century).


Anyhow this misses the point. As has already been pointed out, virtually
all North American 'natives' probably also descend from post-Columbus
Euros, even if only through a single
great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandfather. The fact that they
are members of tribes that predate Columbus does not negate this. In other
words, there is nothing to stop the schoolteacher in question from being
descended from BOTH the Cheddar man AND Ghengis Khan.

Thats very argumentative with little or no evidenc eto back it up. It is
based on a weak set of guidlines.

Huh? I was pointing out that a Devon school teacher having the genetic
markers of a 9000 year old man need not invalidate him sharing a more
recent common ancestor with all of humanity, as you seemed to be
suggesting. It is rather self-evident, given the number of possible
ancestors the man would have had 100 generations ago - his connection to
Cheddar man being known to represent just one of these 2^100 (roughly
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) ancestral lines.
Cultural/population stability and low-level gene flow are two different
issues, particularly given the increasing evidence for extensive
networks of stone-age interaction (for example the skeleton found at
Stonehenge being of, what was it, Swiss extraction, and one of the
recently reported Irish bog-men having continental hair gel).

taf

Doug McDonald

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Doug McDonald » 16 jan 2006 17:00:56

Denis Beauregard wrote:
On 15 Jan 2006 07:29:50 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com wrote in
soc.genealogy.medieval:


(Also published at http://www.livejournal.com/users/nhw/563512.html )

Doug Rohde's paper on the most recent common ancestor of all humanity
(http://tedlab.mit.edu/~dr/Papers/Rohde-MRCA-two.pdf) is, I think, well
known to most here. ... Rohde's computer
simulations gave results of between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago for the
lifetime of the most recent common ancestor of all humanity.


Must be junk ! If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes.

This is immaterial. The amount of mixing proposed by Rhode is
so tiny that no obvious feature would be visible. In fact, it is
so small that in many people today there would not even be any
DNA derived from the common ancestor, even though they descnd from him.



Since these features survived because
of separated cultures (i.e. in a world where there is no racism, I
think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings). So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

Rhode proposes only a teensy bit of mixing.


Moreover, Americas were isolated from Asia at least 15,000 years ago.

No, not at all. There has always been some communication across
the Bering Strait. In fact, there is a substantial DNA
component in Siberia that CLEARLY comes from America. The
communication surely went in both directions.

We don't need that kind of pseudo-science... The model is obviously
wrong.


It's not wrong. It just may be miscalibrated.

Doug McDonald
Denis

Denis Beauregard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Denis Beauregard » 16 jan 2006 17:08:01

Le Mon, 16 Jan 2006 08:02:56 -0700, "Todd A. Farmerie"
<farmerie@interfold.com> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.medieval:

No, but when you take into account the amount of time necessary for the
newly introduced line to reach saturation in the new population and the
time it took for it to have reached saturation in the neighboring
population the infusion is coming from, it becomes questionable that the
500 years since Columbus is sufficient to achieve complete European gene
flow into the most isolated South American tribes (many, yes, but all?).

In Europe, taking this into account simply bumps back the time to most
recent common ancestor. In the New World, you have a hard date beyond
which you cannot bump it without having to go _way_ back.

What about using actual genealogy data ?

There is a list of early Quebec immigrants with the most descendants
at http://www.genealogie.umontreal.ca/en/lespionniers.htm

Let's take the champion: Zacharie Cloutier (and his wife, Sainte
Dupont). http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/000/032.php
for details about their married children and early descendants.

Married descendants until 1800: 10,850. Estimated population of
Quebec in 1800 is 68,000. Let's presume half of the descendants are
born in the few years before 1800 and still alive, so about 200
years after the marriage, about 5000 married descendants are alive and
they are about 8% of the Quebec population. At the same rate, after
400 years (roughly now), they would have 2,500,000 married descendants
(and this figure is a bit more than the living married population).

So, you can't compute the descendants in 1600-1800 like you compute
them in 1800-2000. Rules are not the same. More children are
surviving but families are smalled. The land inhabited by the
descendants is not the same (from 1850 to 1920, there was a massive
emigration, while before 1800, the emigration is quite small).

And anyway, is it possible that all Quebec inhabitants with French
stock are descendants of Zacharie ? I know at least one who was not.
I rebuilt his family tree and he was right. So even if there was
no isolated population, there are individuals who escaped the one
leading ancestor.


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La Jemmerais)

Doug McDonald

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Doug McDonald » 16 jan 2006 17:12:35

Scaly Lizard wrote:

The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother
goes west and does teh same thing. A few generations later,
a descendant of each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach
the Bering Strait and Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion
continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid.
The only question is the input numbers for the probability of
mixing for the tuly isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon,
south-central Africa, and Oceania. Rhode specifically does
exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald

MLS

RE: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av MLS » 16 jan 2006 17:56:02

In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself!
There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to think that we are
ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..
Historically speaking, is fully proved that individuals coming from some
upper classes EVER married between his same class, like aristocrats
married others aristocrats etc.
So, I can't see any reasons to imagine (or to dream...) that the today
miner working in a Great Britain carbon mine is the descendant of
William the Conqueror or the Prophet Muhammad...! Ok, It COULD be
possible, (just in theory) if we like to imagine some potential descent
from a natural son but... It's most unlikely! It VERY most probable that
he descend from a miner in the XII century England etc. Why cannot
consider that not only aristocrats or famous people can have a long and
ancient genealogy? Millions of peoples, today, can descend from a stable
boy that took cares of Alexander the Great horses!

And, if we want to remain on the same speculative plan, It is MOST
probable that SOME present King or Queen today, descend from... him!
(the stable boy of Alexander the Great)! As you know, Latins used to
say: "mater semper certa est, pater numquam".

Differents opinions are welcom

Marco Lupis

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:13 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Scaly Lizard wrote:

The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother goes
west and does teh same thing. A few generations later, a descendant of
each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach the Bering Strait and
Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid. The only
question is the input numbers for the probability of mixing for the tuly
isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon, south-central Africa, and
Oceania. Rhode specifically does exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald



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Doug McDonald

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Doug McDonald » 16 jan 2006 18:04:51

MLS wrote:
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself!
There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to think that we are
ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..

Your argument applies only to recent times, essentially post Charlemagne
(and his contemporaries in China.)

Rhode's thesis goes MUCH farther back. And it does indeed take
into account the probabilities of low inter-class mixing.

What you fail to see in this case is that royal dynasties come and go.
They are even approximately isolated from the peasants only
for times short on the scale of his proposed MRCA. Before that
they WERE peasants (cf. the Conqueror's mother, who was not quite
a peasant, but still ...) and after their dynasty loses power,
their descendants go downard.


You should read Rhode's paper before making such claims,
which are of a much longer term than "all Europeans are
descendants of Charlemagne". The idea is the same, but
the much longer time makes a big difference. NOBODY
would claim that 18,000 years ago there was not some
person in central Asia that was the ancestor of all
humankind everywhere except Africa. Nobody would claim that
there was not some person in Africa 50,000 years ago that
was the ancestor of absolutely everyone.

The quibble is the period from Clovis to about 2000 years ago.

Doug McDonald

Michael LaForest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Michael LaForest » 16 jan 2006 19:04:02

When I consider that the number of ancestors increases exponentially with
each generation, and if I allow 25 years to a generation, and I consider
that just 1500 years ago the number of my ancestors is represented by the
number 2 to the 60th power, and that number represents more than the number
of people that have ever lived, it seems reasonable that we all are
descended directly from a goodly number of them - many more than once.
Mike


on 1/16/06 1:04 PM, Doug McDonald at mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu wrote:

MLS wrote:
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself!
There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to think that we are
ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..

Your argument applies only to recent times, essentially post Charlemagne
(and his contemporaries in China.)

Rhode's thesis goes MUCH farther back. And it does indeed take
into account the probabilities of low inter-class mixing.

What you fail to see in this case is that royal dynasties come and go.
They are even approximately isolated from the peasants only
for times short on the scale of his proposed MRCA. Before that
they WERE peasants (cf. the Conqueror's mother, who was not quite
a peasant, but still ...) and after their dynasty loses power,
their descendants go downard.


You should read Rhode's paper before making such claims,
which are of a much longer term than "all Europeans are
descendants of Charlemagne". The idea is the same, but
the much longer time makes a big difference. NOBODY
would claim that 18,000 years ago there was not some
person in central Asia that was the ancestor of all
humankind everywhere except Africa. Nobody would claim that
there was not some person in Africa 50,000 years ago that
was the ancestor of absolutely everyone.

The quibble is the period from Clovis to about 2000 years ago.

Doug McDonald

jlucsoler

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av jlucsoler » 16 jan 2006 19:21:34

Marco

if you could see all the lines of my provencal genealogist groups.. you
could see that my 500 teammates are all descendants of êasant till 1600....
but we all link to charlemagne thanks to little nobility then greater
etc....

most lines are proven by (non familial but contemporaneous) documents


jl
""MLS"" <cannalonga@email.it> a écrit dans le message de news:
!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAAA3f5bNGbf2kaYgr2971HcX8KAAAAQAAAAtkhKESAnjUaMNjJyNP+74QEAAAAA@email.it...
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself!
There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to think that we are
ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..
Historically speaking, is fully proved that individuals coming from some
upper classes EVER married between his same class, like aristocrats
married others aristocrats etc.
So, I can't see any reasons to imagine (or to dream...) that the today
miner working in a Great Britain carbon mine is the descendant of
William the Conqueror or the Prophet Muhammad...! Ok, It COULD be
possible, (just in theory) if we like to imagine some potential descent
from a natural son but... It's most unlikely! It VERY most probable that
he descend from a miner in the XII century England etc. Why cannot
consider that not only aristocrats or famous people can have a long and
ancient genealogy? Millions of peoples, today, can descend from a stable
boy that took cares of Alexander the Great horses!

And, if we want to remain on the same speculative plan, It is MOST
probable that SOME present King or Queen today, descend from... him!
(the stable boy of Alexander the Great)! As you know, Latins used to
say: "mater semper certa est, pater numquam".

Differents opinions are welcom

Marco Lupis

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:13 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Scaly Lizard wrote:


The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother goes
west and does teh same thing. A few generations later, a descendant of
each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach the Bering Strait and
Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid. The only
question is the input numbers for the probability of mixing for the tuly
isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon, south-central Africa, and
Oceania. Rhode specifically does exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald



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MLS

RE: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av MLS » 16 jan 2006 19:36:02

I'm sorry Mike but - in my opinion, this is a totally wrong assert.
The number of our ancestor CANNOT increases exponentially each
generations or - to be more precise - IT increase exponentially, of
course- Mathematically speaking, but we CAN't descend from ALL different
peoples every generations! It is quite impossible BECAUSE - as you wrote
- "1500 years ago the number of my ancestors ... represents more than
the number of people that have ever lived". But this assert don't means
that "we are all related" but that every individual have a list of
ancestors that became from a SMALL group of families, family the resides
in the LIMITED area: from the ancestral village and few neighbouring
villages, for examples or, in the case of aristocratic family, this
group can be even smaller because can be originated from the FEW noble
family IN THE SMALL AREA when our ancestor used to live.
Marco


-----Original Message-----
From: Michael LaForest [mailto:mlaforest05@comcast.net]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:51 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


When I consider that the number of ancestors increases exponentially
with each generation, and if I allow 25 years to a generation, and I
consider that just 1500 years ago the number of my ancestors is
represented by the number 2 to the 60th power, and that number
represents more than the number of people that have ever lived, it seems
reasonable that we all are descended directly from a goodly number of
them - many more than once. Mike


on 1/16/06 1:04 PM, Doug McDonald at mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu wrote:

MLS wrote:
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself! There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to
think that we are ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors
etc..

Your argument applies only to recent times, essentially post
Charlemagne (and his contemporaries in China.)

Rhode's thesis goes MUCH farther back. And it does indeed take into
account the probabilities of low inter-class mixing.

What you fail to see in this case is that royal dynasties come and go.

They are even approximately isolated from the peasants only for times
short on the scale of his proposed MRCA. Before that they WERE
peasants (cf. the Conqueror's mother, who was not quite a peasant, but

still ...) and after their dynasty loses power, their descendants go
downard.


You should read Rhode's paper before making such claims, which are of
a much longer term than "all Europeans are descendants of
Charlemagne". The idea is the same, but the much longer time makes a
big difference. NOBODY would claim that 18,000 years ago there was not

some person in central Asia that was the ancestor of all
humankind everywhere except Africa. Nobody would claim that
there was not some person in Africa 50,000 years ago that
was the ancestor of absolutely everyone.

The quibble is the period from Clovis to about 2000 years ago.

Doug McDonald




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MLS

RE: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av MLS » 16 jan 2006 19:49:01

Bonjour Jean Luc!

What you wrote it is quite possible. But you told about "little
nobility" that can trace is genealogy to Charlemagne.
In other words, the "enlargement" of the social group from (even little
but) noble families to peasants families it is more recent. And it can
be explained by the social evolution of Society in the recent centuries
etc. etc (you know what I mean) whit increasing inter-classes marriages
etc.
But if we look at the ancient times(and more and more when we look
further in the Time) inter-classes marriages (of course the "official
ones"...) they where just ... Impossible ! or VERY MOST UNLIKELY cause
of the "social barriers".

Marco

-----Original Message-----
From: jlucsoler [mailto:jlucsoler@modulonet.fr]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 7:22 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Marco

if you could see all the lines of my provencal genealogist groups.. you
could see that my 500 teammates are all descendants of êasant till
1600....
but we all link to charlemagne thanks to little nobility then greater
etc....

most lines are proven by (non familial but contemporaneous) documents


jl
""MLS"" <cannalonga@email.it> a écrit dans le message de news:
!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgAAAAAAAAA3f5bNGbf2kaYgr2971HcX8KAA
AAQAAAAtkhKESAnjUaMNjJyNP+74QEAAAAA@email.it...
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself! There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to
think that we are ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..
Historically speaking, is fully proved that individuals coming from
some
upper classes EVER married between his same class, like aristocrats
married others aristocrats etc.
So, I can't see any reasons to imagine (or to dream...) that the today
miner working in a Great Britain carbon mine is the descendant of
William the Conqueror or the Prophet Muhammad...! Ok, It COULD be
possible, (just in theory) if we like to imagine some potential
descent
from a natural son but... It's most unlikely! It VERY most probable
that
he descend from a miner in the XII century England etc. Why cannot
consider that not only aristocrats or famous people can have a long
and
ancient genealogy? Millions of peoples, today, can descend from a
stable
boy that took cares of Alexander the Great horses!

And, if we want to remain on the same speculative plan, It is MOST
probable that SOME present King or Queen today, descend from... him!
(the stable boy of Alexander the Great)! As you know, Latins used to
say: "mater semper certa est, pater numquam".

Differents opinions are welcom

Marco Lupis

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:13 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Scaly Lizard wrote:


The real hole in the theory is that there are still people living in
the Amazon who have never had contact with Euros. This is also
possible for places in the islands between Asia and Australia. At
the very least, there are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who
have only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother
goes west and does teh same thing. A few generations later, a
descendant of each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach the
Bering Strait and Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion
continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid. The only

question is the input numbers for the probability of mixing for the
tuly isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon, south-central Africa,

and Oceania. Rhode specifically does exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald



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Gordon Banks

RE: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gordon Banks » 16 jan 2006 20:26:02

I'll bet that at least 90% of the miners of English ancestry are
descended from William the Conqueror. My line from him goes through
poor New York farmers who probably were illiterate (the spelling of
their name was different at different times for the same individual,
which I think is a sign of that). People don't all stay in the
aristocracy over generations. There are younger sons, daughters, and
plenty of bastards to spread the DNA far and wide. Also a lot of people
get booted from the aristocracy for being on the losing side or
committing some crime.


On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 17:53 +0100, MLS wrote:
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself!
There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to think that we are
ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..
Historically speaking, is fully proved that individuals coming from some
upper classes EVER married between his same class, like aristocrats
married others aristocrats etc.
So, I can't see any reasons to imagine (or to dream...) that the today
miner working in a Great Britain carbon mine is the descendant of
William the Conqueror or the Prophet Muhammad...! Ok, It COULD be
possible, (just in theory) if we like to imagine some potential descent
from a natural son but... It's most unlikely! It VERY most probable that
he descend from a miner in the XII century England etc. Why cannot
consider that not only aristocrats or famous people can have a long and
ancient genealogy? Millions of peoples, today, can descend from a stable
boy that took cares of Alexander the Great horses!

And, if we want to remain on the same speculative plan, It is MOST
probable that SOME present King or Queen today, descend from... him!
(the stable boy of Alexander the Great)! As you know, Latins used to
say: "mater semper certa est, pater numquam".

Differents opinions are welcom

Marco Lupis

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:13 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Scaly Lizard wrote:


The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother goes
west and does teh same thing. A few generations later, a descendant of
each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach the Bering Strait and
Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid. The only
question is the input numbers for the probability of mixing for the tuly
isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon, south-central Africa, and
Oceania. Rhode specifically does exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald



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Rob

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Rob » 16 jan 2006 23:12:32

Taf the body found at Stonehenge was suggested to be of Swiss descent
because he was buried with a Swiss made bow and had the arms of an archer
that was uncommon at that time in Britain. All the analysis could tell was
that he was of European birth

Rob
"Todd A. Farmerie" <farmerie@interfold.com> wrote in message
news:dqgfrv$hsa$1@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu...
Rob wrote:
"Todd A. Farmerie" <farmerie@interfold.com> wrote in message
news:dqff7p$afe$1@eeyore.INS.cwru.edu...
They do not show that he was a descendant, they show that he belonged to
the same maternal lineage.
Actually no it shows they had the same paternal lineage because they
didn't carry out MtA sequencing as far as I know. After all the Y
chromosome is the only one that doesn't become altered birth after birth.

But it _was_ mtDNA. At the time, in the late 90s, mtDNA (a thousand or
more copies per cell) was almost always used when working with ancient
samples because the techniques were not well enough refined to effectively
sample nuclear DNA such as the Y chromosome (one copy per cell) with any
sort of reliability (and without being overwhelmed by contamination,
particularly with samples handed around for a century).


Anyhow this misses the point. As has already been pointed out,
virtually all North American 'natives' probably also descend from
post-Columbus Euros, even if only through a single
great-great-great-great-great-great-(etc)-grandfather. The fact that
they are members of tribes that predate Columbus does not negate this.
In other words, there is nothing to stop the schoolteacher in question
from being descended from BOTH the Cheddar man AND Ghengis Khan.

Thats very argumentative with little or no evidenc eto back it up. It is
based on a weak set of guidlines.

Huh? I was pointing out that a Devon school teacher having the genetic
markers of a 9000 year old man need not invalidate him sharing a more
recent common ancestor with all of humanity, as you seemed to be
suggesting. It is rather self-evident, given the number of possible
ancestors the man would have had 100 generations ago - his connection to
Cheddar man being known to represent just one of these 2^100 (roughly
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) ancestral lines.
Cultural/population stability and low-level gene flow are two different
issues, particularly given the increasing evidence for extensive networks
of stone-age interaction (for example the skeleton found at Stonehenge
being of, what was it, Swiss extraction, and one of the recently reported
Irish bog-men having continental hair gel).

taf

MLS

RE: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av MLS » 17 jan 2006 02:36:01

The misspelling of the names cannot be usually considered like a sign of
illiteracy. To be honest, cannot be sure about USA, but in Italy it is
very frequent and it was caused by the illiteracy of the officials in
charge to compile the birth and death registry who frequently are
....semi-illiterates!
By the way, your post ringed on my head two bells:

1 You wrote about those ancestor that are "poor" farmers.. Are you sure
they really are be so poor?
2 You line from The conqueror is based on documents? In other words, are
you really sure that those "poor" farmers descend from the Conqueror?
In my knowledge, there area lot of line of descents from British
aristocrat to American people that today are proved as fake...

Marco


-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon Banks [mailto:geb@gordonbanks.com]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 8:25 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: RE: Most recent common ancestors


I'll bet that at least 90% of the miners of English ancestry are
descended from William the Conqueror. My line from him goes through
poor New York farmers who probably were illiterate (the spelling of
their name was different at different times for the same individual,
which I think is a sign of that). People don't all stay in the
aristocracy over generations. There are younger sons, daughters, and
plenty of bastards to spread the DNA far and wide. Also a lot of people
get booted from the aristocracy for being on the losing side or
committing some crime.


On Mon, 2006-01-16 at 17:53 +0100, MLS wrote:
In my (modest) opinion the real bug in this theory is .... The whole
theory itself! There are no logical, scientific or othes reasons to
think that we are ALL descendants from Prophets, Kings, Emperors etc..
Historically speaking, is fully proved that individuals coming from
some
upper classes EVER married between his same class, like aristocrats
married others aristocrats etc.
So, I can't see any reasons to imagine (or to dream...) that the today
miner working in a Great Britain carbon mine is the descendant of
William the Conqueror or the Prophet Muhammad...! Ok, It COULD be
possible, (just in theory) if we like to imagine some potential
descent
from a natural son but... It's most unlikely! It VERY most probable
that
he descend from a miner in the XII century England etc. Why cannot
consider that not only aristocrats or famous people can have a long
and
ancient genealogy? Millions of peoples, today, can descend from a
stable
boy that took cares of Alexander the Great horses!

And, if we want to remain on the same speculative plan, It is MOST
probable that SOME present King or Queen today, descend from... him!
(the stable boy of Alexander the Great)! As you know, Latins used to
say: "mater semper certa est, pater numquam".

Differents opinions are welcom

Marco Lupis

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 5:13 PM
To: GEN-MEDIEVAL-L@rootsweb.com
Subject: Re: Most recent common ancestors


Scaly Lizard wrote:


The real hole in the theory is that there are still people living in

the Amazon who have never had contact with Euros. This is also
possible for places in the islands between Asia and Australia. At
the very least, there are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who

have only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother
goes
west and does teh same thing. A few generations later, a descendant of
each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach the Bering Strait and
Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion continues.

Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid. The only
question is the input numbers for the probability of mixing for the
tuly
isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon, south-central Africa, and
Oceania. Rhode specifically does exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald



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Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 17 jan 2006 02:37:24

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 10:12:35 -0600, Doug McDonald
<mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:

Scaly Lizard wrote:


The real hole in the theory is that there are still people
living in the Amazon who have never had contact with
Euros. This is also possible for places in the islands
between Asia and Australia. At the very least, there
are known tribes in the Indonesian jungles who have
only been known for a few decades and who are
known to not have mixed genetically since their
discovery.


The genetic isolation of some Amazonian isolates
likely goes back to a branching in the tree 400 years
ago and thus includes no Europeans.

Rhode does not propose European mixing. He proposes
Asian mixing and diffusion. That is, he proposes that somebody in
Central Asia moved a little east and interrmarries there. A brother
goes west and does teh same thing. A few generations later,
a descendant of each goes a bit farther. Eventually they reach
the Bering Strait and Suez and cross. Once there, the slow diffusion
continues.

Yes, i don't dispute the method of gamete travel that
is proposed. The timeline is shorter in some places,
and longer in others. A person of village A may have
gone to village B in year X and their offspring made it
to village C in year X+20. In another place, genes from
village A may have gone to B in year X, but required
3 generations of broadening in village B before making
it to village C in the year X+70.

In some cases, as in Greenland, no intermarriage took
place between the Norse settlers and Inuit aboriginals
sharing the island. Also, extreme hostility towards
outsiders (think cannibals and headhunters in Amazonia
and Australasia) drastically reduced the spread of genes.

I maintain that there exist today as many as 50,000
people in remote locations who have never bred
with anyone of Euro or Asian stock, and thus do
not share a common ancestor with the remaining
6.6 billion of us. BUT, 99.999% of us do have a
common ancestor (either male or female, the point
is moot), and that ancestor lived a fairly short time ago.


Thus the isolated Amazon tribe got it's "recent" Asian input not from
Asia, but from a tribe only 100 miles away. Ditto the Bantu in Africa.

If you go to the deepest reaches of the Amazon,
the "primitive" people will tell you that there are
more people living farther back in the jungle, and
that they only come across one of them every
decade or longer. It is most reasonable to think
that no genetic mixing has occurred in such cases
for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years...
which would preclude these isolates from having
even one ancestor who came from anywhere but
down the Sierras and Andes from Alaska.

This case is almost certainly true, and thus pushes
back the lifetime of humanity's "100% Ancestor"
to 15,000 or 20,000 years ago. Our "99% Ancestor"
is almost certainly much more recent, in the range
of 1,000 BC to 1,500 AD.

Rhode's idea and methodology and computer programs are valid.
The only question is the input numbers for the probability of
mixing for the tuly isolated places in, as you say, the Amazon,
south-central Africa, and Oceania. Rhode specifically does
exempt parts of Oceania.

Doug McDonald

Yes, the assumptions are valid, the methods are valid,
and the results are correct, BUT only for 99.999% of
humanity. There are definitely populations in New
Guinea and Borneo which are wholly (and solely)
descended from the first colonizers of 80,000 years
ago. Females snatched from a neighboring village
might have been "bred", but no offspring would come
because the unfortunate girl would be ritually roasted
and eaten at the next full moon. Any intervillage
mixing there (and in places in South America as well)
certainly happened, but at such a slow pace that
the interbreeding occurred *only* with other peoples
who were also of pure aboriginal descent.

Depending on the date of the 99% Ancestor, portions
of southern Africa may also be excluded from the
99.999%. If it is indeed the prolific Chingis Khan from
as late as the 1200's, not enough time exists for
his genes to reasonably diffuse to the whole of Africa.
On the other hand, if the 99% Ancestor lived 3,000
years ago, then we see ample time for their genes to
make it to all corners of Asia, Africa and Europe, even
at the slow pace of 150 miles per century.

Perhaps the hairiest part of this conjecture is the fact
that not all movements of genes happened "outwards".
In fact, just as many people in village B sought mates
out in village C as sought mates backwards in village A.

With the rise of towns and cities, the movement of
human genes was (and continues to be) a tsunami
/away/ from the hinterlands, thus dampening the
genetic spreading.

There are so many other considerations, from pathogen
spreading to warfare and even to dietary customs, that
we will likely never know whether our 99% Ancestor
lived 700 years ago, or 7,000 years ago. And we must
accept the possibility that such a person could logically
have hailed from ANYWHERE in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Central Asia is a decent guess, and logically increases
the rate of pentration into China, but it is equally possible
that a Zulu woman in 4,500 BC had descendants who
reached Egypt by 2,000 BC, Armenia by 1,500 BC, and
Mongolia by 500 BC. The same scenario can easily be
transferred to a woman born in Lapland in 4,500 BC, or
to a Hmong man from 3,900 BC or a Berber or a Scot or
an Ainu or a Hebrew or a Sinhalese or a Magyar or ........

Rhode only proves that it is Very Likely that 99.999%
of us share a common ancestor as recently as 1,500 BC.
On the other hand, it is Extremely Likely that to find the
common ancestor of 100% of humans alive today, we
are talking about the period from 100,000 to 50,000
years ago.

In no case can Rhode confirm a Central Asian origin,
as plausible conjectures can place our 99% Ancestor
ANYWHERE in Eurasia or Africa. The only thing we
can conclude is that the 99% Ancestor was /not/
a Native American or Australasian aboriginal.

SL

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 17 jan 2006 09:56:53

When you speak of "race mixing" among Native Americans and Europeans,
you need to remember that there is no single genetic "type" of Native
American and there probably never was, just as there has never been a
single language group or physical type. For discussions on alternative
entry points to North America, review the academic journals and even
popular science magazines that have been published since about 1998.
Native populations along the coast between Alaska and northern
California may have either arrived by water and/or traveled along the
coast rather than an ice-free corridor further east. The Native people
along the coast of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile are regarded
similarly as having most likely arrived by boat. Regarding the 20th
century female anthropologists that I apparently, according to you, did
not consider, I happen to be one and retired three years ago from a
long teaching career at the university level. I have been privy to all
sorts of private discussions as well as published materials . The
allusion to 16th century hygiene was intended as a reminder that the
Native people of the Americas have always paid close attention to
hygiene and health. There are solid reasons why more than 60% of
modern medicines were developed from Native American usage. In regard
to red-haired "Natives" in the Midwest, these relate to myths about the
journeys of Vikings to Minnesota, a Welsh Prince to the Midwest in
general, and the Irish "Culdees" fleeing as far as the Midwest to
escape the Vikings. THese are quite well known as folklore and I
continually hear various versions from people who think there are 12
foot human burials in the Americas being hidden by a conspiracy of
archaeologists. Finally, when you speak of "proof" - I am citing very
recent studies and excavations. If you are aware of the South American
archaeological sites to which I referred, you know where to find
discussions about them and what they imply. - Bronwen

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 17 jan 2006 12:35:22

On 17 Jan 2006 00:56:53 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

When you speak of "race mixing" among Native Americans and Europeans,
you need to remember that there is no single genetic "type" of Native
American and there probably never was, just as there has never been a
single language group or physical type.

No, but European people of 1500 - 1900 predominantly
came from the "caucasoid" group, while Native Americans
predominantly came from the "mongoloid" group. People,
just like all other animals, experience speciation, or diversity
in appearance. In animals, we call these "subspecies".
In humans, we call these "races".


For discussions on alternative
entry points to North America, review the academic journals and even
popular science magazines that have been published since about 1998.

I am aware of the likelihood of contact between South
America and Oceania. There is the question of how corn
ended up in the Phillipines long before the arrival of
Europeans in both Mesoamerica and Indochina with boats
capable of making the transit.

There are archaeological sites in the Andean coastal
plains which show stronger correlation to Polynesian
physical characteristics than to Incan ones. If one takes
a broad survey of 'indigenous' Native Americans, there
is a clear trend of decreasing mongoloid physical traits
as one moves to the south and east of Alaska. Whether
this is due solely to speciation from mutation, or due to
intermixing with another racial group, we cannot say for
certain yet.


Native populations along the coast between Alaska and northern
California may have either arrived by water and/or traveled along the
coast rather than an ice-free corridor further east. The Native people
along the coast of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile are regarded
similarly as having most likely arrived by boat.

Uhh, Tierra Del Fuego is an island, so there's the proof
of that right there, eh? Either by boat, or they were carried
there by giant birds, right?

And yes, there were almost certainly other contacts before
Columbus. Easter Islanders, as previously mentioned, Vikings
in the northeast, Haosin and St. Brendan in the middle of the
first millennium, and another Chinese visitor whose name
escapes me from early in the second millennium. There were
multiple southward migrations by various Aleuts and Inuits
from a wide arc between Alaska to Baffin, and there are
many other historical "irregularities" which are very intriguing.

Such as pre-Basque Iberians in Roman times showing up
with pelts from American animals and a guy with caucasoid
features showing up in British Columbia with a spearpoint in
his hip. The first visitors to New Zealand reported the Maori
natives (who were incapable of smelting, let alone casting
metal) using a bronze bell as a cooking pot. Pioneers in
Tasmania reported a partially submerged shipwreck which
predated Capt. Cook by centuries. Spanish explorers in
California reported a shipwreck in the San Francisco Bay
long before Russian explorers headed south.

Some of the historical oddities will prove to be mistakes,
and some will be outed as hoaxes. But some, such as the
indisputable excavation of Scandinavian burials in China
point to a far greater mobility of ancient human populations
than we were taught in school.

We're not ready to write the definitive history of mankind's
spread to the Western Hemisphere yet, not without much
more digging at many more sites. In fact, the only neighbors
of the Americas that seem to /not/ have made the crossing
in antiquity were the Africans.

But none of this invalidates my point about the deep Amazon,
specifically that the terrain, climate and low nutritional density
per square km severely dampens interchange between tribes
by keeping populations low and scattered. Some tribes may
have only contacted the "next village over" once a century
or less in post-Columbian times, which points to a high probability
that humanity's "100% Ancestor" must have lived before the
end of the last Ice Age.


Regarding the 20th
century female anthropologists that I apparently, according to you, did
not consider, I happen to be one and retired three years ago from a
long teaching career at the university level. I have been privy to all
sorts of private discussions as well as published materials .

OK, so let's re-ask my question... how likely is it that any
anthropologist in 20th Century Australasia mixed genetically
with their native subjects? It's vanishingly small, right?

Did any of your "private discussions" reveal lusty liasons
with natives in the steamy Sumatran night? I didn't think
so, but had to ask.

For reasons of professional conduct (of which you are
apparently well aware) and for simple cultural reasons
such as differing standards of hygiene and ideologically
instilled ideas of 'beauty', i'm certain that the chances of
any scientist studying a 'primitive' tribe in Indonesia who
was *male OR female* actually having sex with their
study's subjects is.... zero percent chance.


The allusion to 16th century hygiene was intended as a reminder that the
Native people of the Americas have always paid close attention to
hygiene and health. There are solid reasons why more than 60% of
modern medicines were developed from Native American usage.

At that point in my previous post, i was speaking of
natives in the islands between Maylaysia and Australia,
but yes, we can extend the discussion to America. I was
not implying that any 'native' people were dirty, only that
20th Century Western scientists are very unlikely to
find their subjects sexually appealing, for a range of
reasons including bathing frequency, toilet customs,
and cultural standards of beauty. And also there's
that pesky professional conduct thing too.


In regard
to red-haired "Natives" in the Midwest, these relate to myths about the
journeys of Vikings to Minnesota, a Welsh Prince to the Midwest in
general, and the Irish "Culdees" fleeing as far as the Midwest to
escape the Vikings. THese are quite well known as folklore and I
continually hear various versions from people who think there are 12
foot human burials in the Americas being hidden by a conspiracy of
archaeologists.

Riiiiiight, well it takes all kinds, eh? We both know that
the Kensington Runestone was a hoax, and not a shred
of evidence exists for pre-Columbian penetration of
Europeans into the Plains. When you say that your Pueblo
ancestors introduced the horse to the Great Plains, you
are certainly talking about escaped and redomesticated
Spanish horses, as we both know that the horse is not
native to the Western Hemisphere.

As for the Welsh Prince and Culdees, we both know that
the probability of truth is very small, yet we are constantly
being suprised at the mobility of ancient people, so the
possibility does exist, although it is very very small.

Also, there is the fact that red hair and paler skin are
two mutations that go hand-in-hand, being dependent
on the expression of the same gene. We believe now
that this mutation has occurred in Africa and Europe
independently, and possibly occurred spontaneously
in America as well. Not all redheads come from North
Europe after all, but it would be as disservice to science
to dismiss all 'folklore' as flapdoodle.


Finally, when you speak of "proof" - I am citing very
recent studies and excavations. If you are aware of the South American
archaeological sites to which I referred, you know where to find
discussions about them and what they imply. - Bronwen

No, i don't know; please illuminate me. One weblink at
least? I think the only place we disagree is my estimate
of genetic diffusion in the Amazon basin: i think that there
are still people there today who hail solely from previously
Siberian emmigrants, thus pushing the date for our "100%
Ancestor" back to 15,000 years ago, and that similar
isolation in Indonesia pushes that 100% person back
further, to 40,000 ot even 60,000 years.

SL

Doug McDonald

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Doug McDonald » 17 jan 2006 19:17:02

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
When you speak of "race mixing" among Native Americans and Europeans,
you need to remember that there is no single genetic "type" of Native
American and there probably never was, just as there has never been a
single language group or physical type.

Not an exact single type, but Y-chromosome haplogroup Q3 really
truly DOES mean "American". True, some Siberians are Q3,
but they are clearly back-migraters. Y-Haplogroup Q* is
present in both America and northern Eurasia, but there are
quite clear haplotypes within it that distinguish American
Q* from Eurasian Q*. And the vast majority of native
American men were, in 1491, Q* or Q3. True, some were and are
C, and that muddies things since C is common in Siberia and
Oceania, but again the haplotypes distinguish fairly well.

The mitochondria are a different matter since A, B, C, and D
are quite sommon in both America and east Asia, and X is present
at low rates in America and Europe.

It is quite clear now that the autosomes, in aggregate, quite
clearly distinguish Asian from American.

Doug McDonald

Jo Taylor

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Jo Taylor » 17 jan 2006 19:41:30

Huh? I was pointing out that a Devon school teacher <snip

Cheddar is not, nor ever has been, in Devon.
This is a fact...

Jo Taylor

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 17 jan 2006 22:52:04

On the other hand, there are many that are proven to be correct - at
least as far as documentation is concerned. I have every confidence
that if you were to ask, most American members of this list would be
happy to privately send you their particular lines with their evidence.
However, you would have to take cover to avoid being drowned in email
attachments! We all say we don't take pride in documenting our royal
ancestors but, hey!, we have to admit to a little excitement as the
information surfaces. I think most of us, however, are equally excited
to uncover information on our more numerous common ancestors; royal and
noble lines are simply more likely to exist on documents. For me,
finding a royal or noble line is exciting because it leads to numerous
other lines that add more poundage to my genealogy file. Three reasons
why these pedigrees seem to exist more in America and other European
post-colonial areas outside of Europe: first, immigrants tended to
raise their children as if there had been no ancestral past elsewhere,
often refusing to teach them their ancestral language or give them
information about their original home - this has caused subsequent
generations to actively search for that which their well-meaning recent
ancestors denied them. That is why, for example, you may find more
emphasis on events like Highland Games in America than in Scotland. The
most alienated Americans sometimes turn to racism and fabricated
"racial" pride in order to fill the hole where healthy ancestral
connection should exist. Second, in the case of the USA, it became
nearly treasonous to support the idea of hereditary privilege. In later
generations, this created a fascination with royalty. It seems that
when ancient traditional means of separating classes of people into
privileged and non-privileged do not exist, new criteria will emerge
that produce the same effect. Perhaps there is a basic urge in humans
to feel superior to others - this may be what became the particular
American brand of racism that has plagued us for so long, as damaging
to the racist as to the target of racism. Third, it was common for
younger sons of royalty and nobility to travel to colonial holdings to
make their fortune. As recently as the 19th century, there were members
of European aristocracy who enjoyed expeditions to North America (as in
Prince Maximilian who traveled up the Missouri River for adventure).
Some of these people stayed while others returned to Europe. A number
of immigrants were also from debtors prison and found travel to a
colonial area a more pleasant alternative. Some percentage of these
people were noble and, possibly, royal. The fortunes of some noble
families fell and some found their way to America and elsewhere to try
to rebuilt their assets. I have a great-great-great-grandfather from
Scotland who was a descendant of King James IV and Margaret Tudor who
established a home in Canada in 1840 after slavery was abolished in the
British Empire; he was angry that he was forced to give up the slaves
who worked his plantation in the British West Indies (Carriacou). His
daughter married a man who had migrated from Ireland to Canada in 1830
and the two of them went to the goldfields of California in 1849. The
Irish man was descended from Edward I - and so it goes. This is all
documented and much of it appears down to the level of my mother on
Genealogics. My case is far from unique. So while many lines have been
disproved and some have been found to have been intentionally
fabricated at some point in the past, many others are solid and
genuine. Best, Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 17 jan 2006 23:34:43

I am not sure what you mean by "Mongolian blood" unless you are
referring to the recent tracing of some Native American genotypes to a
particular valley in Mongolia. It is also true that the blood types of
Mongolians and that of Native Americans are completely different. What
Viking connections? There are many Scandinavian-Native American
communities today in the Western Subarctic but they do not derive from
the time of the Vikings.

"Race" is a social construct not a biological fact. When a skull, for
example, is identified as "Caucasian" or "African" forensically, the
reference is to which modern gene pool the skull most closely resembles
rather than to "race" - especially since skulls from racially mixed
people may favor one genetic line over the other. A recent controversy
has existed over the "racial" identity of "Kennewick Man", found in the
state of Washington. Because the skull was different from those of
modern Native Americans, the press ran off with the incorrect
assumption that it was "Caucasian" (therefore, "white" people were in
American earlier than "Indians"). In fact, the skull did not resemble
that of Modern Europeans, either. It most closely resembled the Ainu,
aboriginal populations of Japan and Sakhalin Island. The Ainu and the
"Indians" of the Northwest Coast were known to be in contact prior to
the arrival of Europeans in the area.

As for sickle cell trait, you are incorrect to restrict the population
to the Caribbean area. The cell is found among all African groups,
inside and outside of Africa, and, as well, is found in some American
Indians, Europeans and South Pacific Islanders. It appears to have
conferred some degree of protection against malaria originally. Of
course, it might also appear in people with mixed ancestry and could
lead to illness if both parents have ancestors from an affected grouo
and carry the trait. I never suggested that all humans are of a single
gene pool; a gene pool is more local and accounts for the existence of
specific traits (think of Huntington's chorea for example). I only said
that humans are a single species and subspecies - if you believe that
is untrue, tell me what human subspecies you know about?

How do you figure that Siberia and Alaska were ever European? Europeans
have had a notoriously difficult time establishing any sort of foothold
in either place. See my earlier post about the connection between
Siberian and Alaskan Inuit people and the *ancient* boat technology
that they used. There is a reason why the umiak, kayak and shark-bowed
Aleut watercraft are still around and are the still the best technology
for their areas. The USSR used to complain about how it was able to
assimilate non-Russian ethnic groups throughout their claimed territory
except in the Siberian region. It seems that when they put up their red
tents on the tundra in the middle of an aboriginal community, they
would get up one morning and find themselves alone. They never
successfully assimilated these people. If you go to the Native villages
in Arctic and Subarctic US and Canada, you will find that while many
foreign objects and ideas have been accepted by the Native people, they
are generally less assimilated than Native people elsewhere in North
America. At the time the US "bought" Alaska from Russia, neither
government would have been capable of governing it without the help of
aboriginal people. In World War II, Inuit women worked in factories to
make parkas for the US military because it was the most effective
outerwear in the climate. Just google the genome project - it's not a
secret. Most of it is dedicated, however, to the medical benefits of
mapping the human genome and only incidentally to the geographic
mapping of traits. - Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 17 jan 2006 23:42:55

In fact, Inuit people have traveled back and forth across the Bering
Strait from time immemorial. When the Cold War cut off that connection,
the Inuits called it the "Ice Curtain" (I suppose the USSR and the USA
thought the Inuit were hiding bombs in their umiaks). There were great
celebrations that spanned the Asian, American-Canadian & Greenland
Arctic regions after the Ice Curtain came down. Families that had been
split apart, some "Asian" and some "Alaskan", reunited for the first
time in decades. "Inuit" trumped "US" or "Russia" as far as identity
went. - Bronwen

Don Aitken

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Don Aitken » 18 jan 2006 02:39:27

On 17 Jan 2006 14:42:55 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

In fact, Inuit people have traveled back and forth across the Bering
Strait from time immemorial. When the Cold War cut off that connection,
the Inuits called it the "Ice Curtain" (I suppose the USSR and the USA
thought the Inuit were hiding bombs in their umiaks). There were great
celebrations that spanned the Asian, American-Canadian & Greenland
Arctic regions after the Ice Curtain came down. Families that had been
split apart, some "Asian" and some "Alaskan", reunited for the first
time in decades. "Inuit" trumped "US" or "Russia" as far as identity
went. - Bronwen

In fact, the majority of Alaskan Eskimos are *not* Inuit; some
positively object to being so described, and some don't care, but it
is still not accurate. Canadian Eskimos *are* all Inuit, and that is
the preferred description in Canada, but *only* in Canada.

See http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/inuitoreskimo.html for a good short note
on this.

--
Don Aitken
Mail to the From: address is not read.
To email me, substitute "clara.co.uk" for "freeuk.com"

Rob

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Rob » 18 jan 2006 03:18:00

Bronwen,

Do not Inuit's come from Iceland? Is Iceland not a part of Europe?

As for Vikings in America's there is a growing belief due to artefactual
recovery that the Vikings more by error than attempts landed in the US there
are also a few claims that the Romans did but we scotch on that idea.

Yes I knew about the Skull that was believed to be from Early Japanese
tribes.

As for sickle cell I stand corrected.

Yes I was referring to the recent discoveries of Mongolian geno types found
in some native Americans.

Rob

<lostcooper@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1137537283.462245.280940@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I am not sure what you mean by "Mongolian blood" unless you are
referring to the recent tracing of some Native American genotypes to a
particular valley in Mongolia. It is also true that the blood types of
Mongolians and that of Native Americans are completely different. What
Viking connections? There are many Scandinavian-Native American
communities today in the Western Subarctic but they do not derive from
the time of the Vikings.

"Race" is a social construct not a biological fact. When a skull, for
example, is identified as "Caucasian" or "African" forensically, the
reference is to which modern gene pool the skull most closely resembles
rather than to "race" - especially since skulls from racially mixed
people may favor one genetic line over the other. A recent controversy
has existed over the "racial" identity of "Kennewick Man", found in the
state of Washington. Because the skull was different from those of
modern Native Americans, the press ran off with the incorrect
assumption that it was "Caucasian" (therefore, "white" people were in
American earlier than "Indians"). In fact, the skull did not resemble
that of Modern Europeans, either. It most closely resembled the Ainu,
aboriginal populations of Japan and Sakhalin Island. The Ainu and the
"Indians" of the Northwest Coast were known to be in contact prior to
the arrival of Europeans in the area.

As for sickle cell trait, you are incorrect to restrict the population
to the Caribbean area. The cell is found among all African groups,
inside and outside of Africa, and, as well, is found in some American
Indians, Europeans and South Pacific Islanders. It appears to have
conferred some degree of protection against malaria originally. Of
course, it might also appear in people with mixed ancestry and could
lead to illness if both parents have ancestors from an affected grouo
and carry the trait. I never suggested that all humans are of a single
gene pool; a gene pool is more local and accounts for the existence of
specific traits (think of Huntington's chorea for example). I only said
that humans are a single species and subspecies - if you believe that
is untrue, tell me what human subspecies you know about?

How do you figure that Siberia and Alaska were ever European? Europeans
have had a notoriously difficult time establishing any sort of foothold
in either place. See my earlier post about the connection between
Siberian and Alaskan Inuit people and the *ancient* boat technology
that they used. There is a reason why the umiak, kayak and shark-bowed
Aleut watercraft are still around and are the still the best technology
for their areas. The USSR used to complain about how it was able to
assimilate non-Russian ethnic groups throughout their claimed territory
except in the Siberian region. It seems that when they put up their red
tents on the tundra in the middle of an aboriginal community, they
would get up one morning and find themselves alone. They never
successfully assimilated these people. If you go to the Native villages
in Arctic and Subarctic US and Canada, you will find that while many
foreign objects and ideas have been accepted by the Native people, they
are generally less assimilated than Native people elsewhere in North
America. At the time the US "bought" Alaska from Russia, neither
government would have been capable of governing it without the help of
aboriginal people. In World War II, Inuit women worked in factories to
make parkas for the US military because it was the most effective
outerwear in the climate. Just google the genome project - it's not a
secret. Most of it is dedicated, however, to the medical benefits of
mapping the human genome and only incidentally to the geographic
mapping of traits. - Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 18 jan 2006 08:45:17

Rob wrote:
Bronwen,

Do not Inuit's come from Iceland? Is Iceland not a part of Europe?

There are no inuits in Iceland but Iceland is part of Europe.
Inuits live in Greenland, a North American country.

As for Vikings in America's there is a growing belief due to artefactual
recovery that the Vikings more by error than attempts landed in the US there
are also a few claims that the Romans did but we scotch on that idea.

Yes I knew about the Skull that was believed to be from Early Japanese
tribes.

As for sickle cell I stand corrected.

Yes I was referring to the recent discoveries of Mongolian geno types found
in some native Americans.

Rob

lostcooper@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1137537283.462245.280940@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I am not sure what you mean by "Mongolian blood" unless you are
referring to the recent tracing of some Native American genotypes to a
particular valley in Mongolia. It is also true that the blood types of
Mongolians and that of Native Americans are completely different. What
Viking connections? There are many Scandinavian-Native American
communities today in the Western Subarctic but they do not derive from
the time of the Vikings.

"Race" is a social construct not a biological fact. When a skull, for
example, is identified as "Caucasian" or "African" forensically, the
reference is to which modern gene pool the skull most closely resembles
rather than to "race" - especially since skulls from racially mixed
people may favor one genetic line over the other. A recent controversy
has existed over the "racial" identity of "Kennewick Man", found in the
state of Washington. Because the skull was different from those of
modern Native Americans, the press ran off with the incorrect
assumption that it was "Caucasian" (therefore, "white" people were in
American earlier than "Indians"). In fact, the skull did not resemble
that of Modern Europeans, either. It most closely resembled the Ainu,
aboriginal populations of Japan and Sakhalin Island. The Ainu and the
"Indians" of the Northwest Coast were known to be in contact prior to
the arrival of Europeans in the area.

As for sickle cell trait, you are incorrect to restrict the population
to the Caribbean area. The cell is found among all African groups,
inside and outside of Africa, and, as well, is found in some American
Indians, Europeans and South Pacific Islanders. It appears to have
conferred some degree of protection against malaria originally. Of
course, it might also appear in people with mixed ancestry and could
lead to illness if both parents have ancestors from an affected grouo
and carry the trait. I never suggested that all humans are of a single
gene pool; a gene pool is more local and accounts for the existence of
specific traits (think of Huntington's chorea for example). I only said
that humans are a single species and subspecies - if you believe that
is untrue, tell me what human subspecies you know about?

How do you figure that Siberia and Alaska were ever European? Europeans
have had a notoriously difficult time establishing any sort of foothold
in either place. See my earlier post about the connection between
Siberian and Alaskan Inuit people and the *ancient* boat technology
that they used. There is a reason why the umiak, kayak and shark-bowed
Aleut watercraft are still around and are the still the best technology
for their areas. The USSR used to complain about how it was able to
assimilate non-Russian ethnic groups throughout their claimed territory
except in the Siberian region. It seems that when they put up their red
tents on the tundra in the middle of an aboriginal community, they
would get up one morning and find themselves alone. They never
successfully assimilated these people. If you go to the Native villages
in Arctic and Subarctic US and Canada, you will find that while many
foreign objects and ideas have been accepted by the Native people, they
are generally less assimilated than Native people elsewhere in North
America. At the time the US "bought" Alaska from Russia, neither
government would have been capable of governing it without the help of
aboriginal people. In World War II, Inuit women worked in factories to
make parkas for the US military because it was the most effective
outerwear in the climate. Just google the genome project - it's not a
secret. Most of it is dedicated, however, to the medical benefits of
mapping the human genome and only incidentally to the geographic
mapping of traits. - Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 18 jan 2006 08:48:55

Don Aitken wrote:
On 17 Jan 2006 14:42:55 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

In fact, Inuit people have traveled back and forth across the Bering
Strait from time immemorial. When the Cold War cut off that connection,
the Inuits called it the "Ice Curtain" (I suppose the USSR and the USA
thought the Inuit were hiding bombs in their umiaks). There were great
celebrations that spanned the Asian, American-Canadian & Greenland
Arctic regions after the Ice Curtain came down. Families that had been
split apart, some "Asian" and some "Alaskan", reunited for the first
time in decades. "Inuit" trumped "US" or "Russia" as far as identity
went. - Bronwen

In fact, the majority of Alaskan Eskimos are *not* Inuit; some
positively object to being so described, and some don't care, but it
is still not accurate. Canadian Eskimos *are* all Inuit, and that is
the preferred description in Canada, but *only* in Canada.

There are Inuit in Greenland as well.

See http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/inuitoreskimo.html for a good short note
on this.

--
Don Aitken
Mail to the From: address is not read.
To email me, substitute "clara.co.uk" for "freeuk.com"

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 18 jan 2006 09:19:02

Yes, I could have been more specific and spoken of the Inupiaq,
Sugpiaq, Yupiq, etc. Having spent a little time in Fairbanks with young
people from the Arctic villages, I am well aware that "Eskimo" is the
term used by the people themselves in Alaska. I am also aware that
"Inuit" is the now-official term in Canada and very much aware of the
Greenland Inuit. I was speaking of the families that were separated by
the Bering Strait and the 20th century Ice Curtain, none of which are
in Greenland or Canada. When the Greenland and Canadian Inuit people
united with the Alaskan Eskimos to celebrate the dissolution of the Ice
Curtain, it was more in a supportive role than in a personal one. I
will grant that, however, that it is more correct to use the
French-derived term "Eskimo" than "Inuit" in terms of how Alaskan
Arctic people (other than the Aleut) describe themselves. I also note
that their first-line description of themselves is village or cultural
group (Inupiaq, Yupiq, etc.) and only secondly "Eskimo". They also
increasingly identify as "indigenous", linked in today's world to other
indigenous people living under non-native governments. Best, Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 18 jan 2006 09:22:13

Please return to my earlier post and re-read it. You will see that I
included Greenland as Inuit country. I also recall someone's earlier
post suggesting that the Greenland Inuit and Scandinavian people did
not intermarry and I know that this is not true. Such intermarriages
between Greenland Inuit and (mainly) Danish people have been occurring
for a very long time. - Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 18 jan 2006 09:42:44

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
Please return to my earlier post and re-read it. You will see that I
included Greenland as Inuit country. I also recall someone's earlier
post suggesting that the Greenland Inuit and Scandinavian people did
not intermarry and I know that this is not true. Such intermarriages
between Greenland Inuit and (mainly) Danish people have been occurring
for a very long time. - Bronwen

I was not replying to your post.

Floyd L. Davidson

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Floyd L. Davidson » 18 jan 2006 14:14:16

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
In fact, Inuit people have traveled back and forth across the Bering
Strait from time immemorial. When the Cold War cut off that connection,
the Inuits called it the "Ice Curtain" (I suppose the USSR and the USA
thought the Inuit were hiding bombs in their umiaks). There were great
celebrations that spanned the Asian, American-Canadian & Greenland
Arctic regions after the Ice Curtain came down. Families that had been
split apart, some "Asian" and some "Alaskan", reunited for the first
time in decades. "Inuit" trumped "US" or "Russia" as far as identity
went. - Bronwen

Ahem... there are no Inuit people in Eastern Siberia.

All of the Eskimos there are Yupik.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

Steve Hayes

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Steve Hayes » 18 jan 2006 18:34:11

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 02:18:00 -0000, "Rob" <madbadrob@robburns.wanadoo.co.uk>
wrote:

Bronwen,

Do not Inuit's come from Iceland? Is Iceland not a part of Europe?

Inuit are a sub-group of Eskimos, and the furthest easty they normally lived
was Greenland.


--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: hayesmstw@hotmail.com (see web page if it doesn't work)
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7783/

Denis Beauregard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Denis Beauregard » 18 jan 2006 18:52:27

Le Wed, 18 Jan 2006 19:34:11 +0200, Steve Hayes
<hayesmstw@hotmail.com> écrivait dans soc.genealogy.medieval:

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 02:18:00 -0000, "Rob" <madbadrob@robburns.wanadoo.co.uk
wrote:

Bronwen,

Do not Inuit's come from Iceland? Is Iceland not a part of Europe?

Inuit are a sub-group of Eskimos, and the furthest easty they normally lived
was Greenland.

Inuit is how they call themselves and means something like "us".
Eskimo is how they are called by Crees and means "raw meat eaters".


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La Jemmerais)

Brant Gibbard

Re: Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Brant Gibbard » 19 jan 2006 00:24:29

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 12:52:27 -0500, Denis Beauregard
<no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:

d.
Inuit is how they call themselves and means something like "us".
Eskimo is how they are called by Crees and means "raw meat eaters".


Denis


This has been the received wisdom for many years, but does not appear
to be accurate. I gather no one has ever been able to find a phrase in
Cree or any other northern Indian language that actually does mean
"eaters of raw meat" that sounds remotely like "eskimo".

For a possible alternative origin of the word as Ojibwa for "to net
snowshoes" see the Alaska Native Language Center at
http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/inuitoreskimo.html.

Brant Gibbard
Toronto, ON
bgibbard.ca/genealogy/

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Floyd L. Davidson

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Floyd L. Davidson » 19 jan 2006 00:33:40

Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:
Inuit is how they call themselves and means something like "us".
Eskimo is how they are called by Crees and means "raw meat eaters".

That sure sounds good eh? Makes your little Western heart feel good...

Of course none of that is true, other than the term probably does
derive from the Algonquin language spoken by the Cree. Some think
it came from "snowshoe netter" others think it came from "people
who speak a different language".

Inuit doesn't mean "us" either. It makes reference to a person
with a genuine human spirit. That is as opposed to a non-human
masquerading as a human and still with its own non-human spirit.

(That is a difficult concept for Christians to understand. But
consider that some women commonly maquerade as a shrew and some
men commonly masquerade as a bear. Well, shrews and bears can
masquerade as humans too! And in fact, some humans you think
are masquerading as animals might actually *be* animals
masquerading as humans...)

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

Denis Beauregard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Denis Beauregard » 19 jan 2006 00:57:50

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:33:40 -0900, floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote in soc.genealogy.medieval:

Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:

Inuit is how they call themselves and means something like "us".
Eskimo is how they are called by Crees and means "raw meat eaters".

That sure sounds good eh? Makes your little Western heart feel good...

Of course none of that is true, other than the term probably does
derive from the Algonquin language spoken by the Cree. Some think
it came from "snowshoe netter" others think it came from "people
who speak a different language".

So many web sites say it comes from raw meat eater that I will
ask your source.

For example:

http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/pr/pub/wf/tr ... asp?term=9


Eskimo

"Eskimo" is the term once given to Inuit by European explorers and is
now rarely used in Canada. It is derived from an Algonquin term
meaning "raw meat eaters," and many people find the term offensive.
The term is still frequently used in the United States in reference to
Inuit in Alaska.

The Crees were initially the "continental" natives living not too
far from Inuits. They were around Hudson Bay's where the English
had their forts when France was still controlling the St.Lawrence
valley. Because of that proximity, they increased their power and
were later present in a wider area.

While Algonquins and Crees were speaking similar languages, they
are not the same. The language family is called Algonquian.
See for example:
http://www.native-languages.org/famalg.htm


Inuit doesn't mean "us" either. It makes reference to a person
with a genuine human spirit. That is as opposed to a non-human
masquerading as a human and still with its own non-human spirit.

From the same source:

http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/pr/info/info114_e.html


Obviously, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada is not a relevant
site...


Denis


(That is a difficult concept for Christians to understand. But
consider that some women commonly maquerade as a shrew and some
men commonly masquerade as a bear. Well, shrews and bears can
masquerade as humans too! And in fact, some humans you think
are masquerading as animals might actually *be* animals
masquerading as humans...)

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La Jemmerais)

Floyd L. Davidson

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Floyd L. Davidson » 19 jan 2006 02:13:02

Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:33:40 -0900, floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote in soc.genealogy.medieval:

Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid> wrote:

Inuit is how they call themselves and means something like "us".
Eskimo is how they are called by Crees and means "raw meat eaters".

That sure sounds good eh? Makes your little Western heart feel good...

Of course none of that is true, other than the term probably does
derive from the Algonquin language spoken by the Cree. Some think
it came from "snowshoe netter" others think it came from "people
who speak a different language".

So many web sites say it comes from raw meat eater that I will
ask your source.

They said it on the Internet, so it has to be true? ;-)


Regardless of my snickering above, you have cited an excellent
example, because it *should* be a credible source. Shame on
them for posting misinformation that has been known false for
decades!

In fact the "snowshoe netter" interpretation comes from Ives
Goddard at the Smithsonian Institute. He is of course a
linguist who studies Algonquian languages.

Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 5 (Arctic), p6.

The "speaks a different language" interpretation (which I
personally find more credible) is from Jose Mailhot, a Canadian
anthropologist who speaks fluent Cree, is from Quebec and
publishes in French and therefore is little known on the
Internet or in the US. She did a definitive study some years
ago, and no part of it has ever been questioned or refuted.

Mailhot, Jose, L'etymologie de *esquimau' revuew et
corrigee. In: Etudes/Inuit/Studies 2(2): 59-69.

For more discussion, see:

<http://linguistlist.org/issues/7/7-300.html>

Here is a URL that has more discussion of Goddard's theories,
however I would caution that some of the information about
various other terms given is clearly in error.

<http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxeskimo.html>

Eskimo

"Eskimo" is the term once given to Inuit by European explorers and is
now rarely used in Canada. It is derived from an Algonquin term

They got the first two lines correct. I've snipped the rest,
which was not correct.

The Crees were initially the "continental" natives living not too
far from Inuits.

Crees were no less "continental" than Inuit people. And they
lived literally adjacent to each other. Of course so did
several other Indian tribes...

....
While Algonquins and Crees were speaking similar languages, they
are not the same. The language family is called Algonquian.
See for example:
http://www.native-languages.org/famalg.htm

My mistake. The language family is Algonquian, and Algonquin is
one of those languages, as is Cree. I said

the Algonquin language spoken by the Cree

and it should have been

the Algonquian language spoken by the Cree

Inuit doesn't mean "us" either. It makes reference to a person
with a genuine human spirit. That is as opposed to a non-human
masquerading as a human and still with its own non-human spirit.

From the same source:

http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/pr/info/info114_e.html

Actually that URL says,

"means 'the people' in their own language, Inuktitut."

Which is almost correct. Literally translated it would be
"genuine people". The problem is that neither of those words
necessarily has the same connotation to an English speaker as
the term Inuit has to a fluent speaker of Inuit.

Which is why I have more than just a literal definition.

Whatever, my sources for the meaning are personal communications
with many fluent speakers of Inupiaq and Yup'ik, along with the
research papers to define Proto-Eskimo, such as

"PE /inuy/ or *inuy* 'human being' [for Inu forms inuk, etc.,
compare /innar-/ and /inaluk/, and for Yup yuk, etc., compare
/ina(va)-/ and /inay-/; in possessed form (yua, /inyua/, etc.)
this base, the original Eskimo ethononym, is everywhere
attested also in the senses 'resident spirit', 'core of
boil' and 'chick in egg'; cf. also perhaps Aleut /inisxi-X/
'owner', ... ]

See "Comparative Eskimo Dictionary With Aleut Cognates", 1994,
by Fortescue, Jacobson, and Kaplan. Alaska Native Language
Center, Univ. of AK. Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska

PE stands for Proto-Eskimo, and /inuy/ is the base word from which
both "Yupik" and "Inuit" was derived for the two Eskimo languages.

Obviously, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada is not a relevant
site...

That's a fact. And you have discovered the biggest problem with
trying to understand anything about Eskimos (Inuit or otherwise)
whether it is language or culture. There is so much false
information floating around that it takes an expert to sort
through it. One problem now being seen is that even Eskimos are
repeating a lot of it! They've now been educated in Western
schools for two or three generations, and for many of them their
cultural history is known only through the Western education
system, flaws and all.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 19 jan 2006 05:20:37

My source for the French derivation of the word "Eskimo" [Esquimeaux]
is a combination of "common knowledge" in the Native American community
where I grew up (Oakland, Calif.) and what I was taught as a cultural
anthropology major at the University of Calif. in Berkeley (where I
later taught Native American Studies). I will, however, also
acknowledge that this was more than 40 years ago and I have no doubt
that the experts you cite have done their work well. Thank you for
sharing the information, Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 19 jan 2006 05:23:07

Sorry - I was on a roll. Bronwen

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 19 jan 2006 05:28:02

In speaking of the most precisely correct terms, yes, of course. The
trans-Bering Strait families are Yupiq. In my first post on the topic,
I was using the term in its broadest sense, based on the Inuk language,
to mean everyone who is part of the circumpolar swath of Arctic peoples
from northeastern Asia to Greenland. Is the weather up there as strange
as we've been told - not enough snow, warmer than normal, etc.? Best,
Bronwen

Steve Hayes

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Steve Hayes » 19 jan 2006 06:36:33

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:57:50 -0500, Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid>
wrote:

"Eskimo" is the term once given to Inuit by European explorers and is
now rarely used in Canada. It is derived from an Algonquin term
meaning "raw meat eaters," and many people find the term offensive.
The term is still frequently used in the United States in reference to
Inuit in Alaska.

Are there Inuit in Alaska?

But even if there are, not all Eskimos are Inuit.


--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: hayesmstw@hotmail.com (see web page if it doesn't work)
Web: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/stevesig.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7783/

Floyd L. Davidson

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Floyd L. Davidson » 19 jan 2006 07:55:41

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
In speaking of the most precisely correct terms, yes, of course. The
trans-Bering Strait families are Yupiq. In my first post on the topic,

That is Yupik.

I was using the term in its broadest sense, based on the Inuk language,

"Inuk" is one individual Inuit person, not the name of the language.
The language is "Inuit". Interestingly, when using the terms they
use, Inupiaq is the name of the language, and that also just happens
to be the word for an individual person.

to mean everyone who is part of the circumpolar swath of Arctic peoples
from northeastern Asia to Greenland.

Ouch. That's a *bad* idea. There are more Chakotkan people in
northeastern Asia than there are Eskimos. There are also Aleut
people in Alaska, and of course several different Athabaskan
people (Gwich'in, Dig Hitan, Koyukon) in Arctic Alaska not to
mention those in Canada.

Inuit is a very poor word to use as term for either all Eskimos
or worse yet for any pan-Arctic grouping.

Is the weather up there as strange
as we've been told - not enough snow, warmer than normal, etc.? Best,
Bronwen

Well, I wouldn't say not enough snow (Barrow may be getting
more), but there is *no* question that it has been progressively
getting warmer for at least the 4 decades that I've been an
Alaskan. It also certainly seems to have become significantly
warmer in just that past decade. For example, I first came to
Barrow in 1997, and we used to see -40 F/C some time in late
November or early December every year. I doubt that it has been
-40 for two whole days in the past 3 or 4 years now. It
probably did not get that cold at all last year, even for a
minute, and do date this year our coldest has only been about
-28F/-33C. (January and February are the coldest months here,
so it might still get colder than that.)

Prior to living in Barrow I lived very close to Fairbanks,
and it is positively *mild* there now compared to what it was
30 or 40 years ago. (The Interior of Alaska gets *much* colder
than the coastal areas, even for the Arctic Ocean coast.)

Global warming is certainly very real. Just exactly what is
contributing to it seems to be very controversial though.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

Floyd L. Davidson

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Floyd L. Davidson » 19 jan 2006 08:00:55

Steve Hayes <hayesmstw@hotmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:57:50 -0500, Denis Beauregard <no@nospam.com.invalid
wrote:

"Eskimo" is the term once given to Inuit by European explorers and is
now rarely used in Canada. It is derived from an Algonquin term
meaning "raw meat eaters," and many people find the term offensive.
The term is still frequently used in the United States in reference to
Inuit in Alaska.

Are there Inuit in Alaska?

The people in Alaska known as Inupiat are the same people that are
called Inuit in Canada and Greenland. None of those in Alaska much
care for the term Inuit though, and I've never heard it used here
by an Alaskan.

But even if there are, not all Eskimos are Inuit.

In Alaska and Siberia that is true. Years ago most Yupik people
took some offense at being called Inuit. Today they don't seem
to care much, though I'm positive that most of them are annoyed
when somebody tries to lecture them that they are actually
Inuit, not Eskimos.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@apaflo.com

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 19 jan 2006 10:30:32

On 18 Jan 2006 00:22:13 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

Please return to my earlier post and re-read it. You will see that I
included Greenland as Inuit country. I also recall someone's earlier
post suggesting that the Greenland Inuit and Scandinavian people did
not intermarry and I know that this is not true. Such intermarriages
between Greenland Inuit and (mainly) Danish people have been occurring
for a very long time. - Bronwen

You've said this before, but i have always thought that
it is not true. My understanding has been that the Norse
held such a dim view of the Inuit, so low as not to consider
them "human", that there was no intermarriage between
Greenlanders before the medieval colony was abandoned.

Is that not the case? Can you point me towards info
supporting your statement?

SL

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 19 jan 2006 10:36:07

We may have a misunderstanding. I was not thinking in terms of the
colony founded by Erik the Red. I am not aware of any references to
intermarriage that long ago. Sorry for the confusion, Bronwen

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 19 jan 2006 10:41:08

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 21:55:41 -0900, floyd@apaflo.com (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:
In speaking of the most precisely correct terms, yes, of course. The
trans-Bering Strait families are Yupiq. In my first post on the topic,

That is Yupik.

I was using the term in its broadest sense, based on the Inuk language,

"Inuk" is one individual Inuit person, not the name of the language.
The language is "Inuit". Interestingly, when using the terms they
use, Inupiaq is the name of the language, and that also just happens
to be the word for an individual person.

to mean everyone who is part of the circumpolar swath of Arctic peoples
from northeastern Asia to Greenland.

Ouch. That's a *bad* idea. There are more Chakotkan people in
northeastern Asia than there are Eskimos. There are also Aleut
people in Alaska, and of course several different Athabaskan
people (Gwich'in, Dig Hitan, Koyukon) in Arctic Alaska not to
mention those in Canada.

Inuit is a very poor word to use as term for either all Eskimos
or worse yet for any pan-Arctic grouping.

Is the weather up there as strange
as we've been told - not enough snow, warmer than normal, etc.? Best,
Bronwen

Well, I wouldn't say not enough snow (Barrow may be getting
more), but there is *no* question that it has been progressively
getting warmer for at least the 4 decades that I've been an
Alaskan. It also certainly seems to have become significantly
warmer in just that past decade. For example, I first came to
Barrow in 1997, and we used to see -40 F/C some time in late
November or early December every year. I doubt that it has been
-40 for two whole days in the past 3 or 4 years now. It
probably did not get that cold at all last year, even for a
minute, and do date this year our coldest has only been about
-28F/-33C. (January and February are the coldest months here,
so it might still get colder than that.)

Prior to living in Barrow I lived very close to Fairbanks,
and it is positively *mild* there now compared to what it was
30 or 40 years ago. (The Interior of Alaska gets *much* colder
than the coastal areas, even for the Arctic Ocean coast.)

Global warming is certainly very real. Just exactly what is
contributing to it seems to be very controversial though.

Excuse the tangent, but...

I noticed a change in the color of the sky after
Pinatubo blew up. It's only recently that the sky
on a totally clear day looks the same shade of
blue that it used to in the 1980's. Anyone else
notice that?

SL

Scaly Lizard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Scaly Lizard » 19 jan 2006 11:32:29

On 19 Jan 2006 01:36:07 -0800, lostcooper@yahoo.com wrote:

We may have a misunderstanding. I was not thinking in terms of the
colony founded by Erik the Red. I am not aware of any references to
intermarriage that long ago. Sorry for the confusion, Bronwen

Ahh, then that does make sense now. Certainly,
since Greenland came under Danish control, there
has been limited genetic mixing, but i was not aware
of any at all in the Norse period.

I had been reticent to pipe up about it, but that's the
thing i most disliked about Rohde's model C. He allows
100 migrants between Iceland and Greenland from
1000 to 1400 AD, and allows for 10 migrants between
Greenland and Baffin for all dates after 2500 BC.

According to his model's rules, for 400 years the various
denizens of Greenland are allowed to mate, and if this
had not happened (as i believed), then Rohde's results
are seriously skewed as far as Eurasian ancestry
spreading so fast into the Americas. I believe such
diffusion occurred quickly, but can only be reasonably
timed to 1500 and thence.

SL

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 20 jan 2006 14:06:33

What about using actual genealogy data ?

Hard to prove anything with it. Consider for example the Icelandic
genalogy database. It has pretty much the complete family trees for
every inhavitant of that country, as far back as records exist.

If I exclude recent immigrants, with no Icelandic ancestry and adopted
people where information on biological parents is not available, I can
make a few interesting observations.

The current population is a little over 300.000. If I pick any two
currently living people at random, I have to go back 6.5 generations on
the average to find a common ancestor. I have never had to go back
more than 10 generations. This means that *a* common ancestor for any
two people in this population can be found 200-300 years ago. If I
look for the most recent ancestor, I have to go back only 500 years to
find one - a Catholic bishop, who had 5 or 6 children with his
mistress.

While this is slightly interesting, it is also fairly irrelevant for
this discussion - here as elsewhere genalogical records simply do not
go back far enough to actually prove anything about the original
subject.

Gjest

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Gjest » 21 jan 2006 11:42:48

frisk@complex.is wrote:
What about using actual genealogy data ?

Hard to prove anything with it. Consider for example the Icelandic
genalogy database. It has pretty much the complete family trees for
every inhavitant of that country, as far back as records exist.

If I exclude recent immigrants, with no Icelandic ancestry and adopted
people where information on biological parents is not available, I can
make a few interesting observations.

The current population is a little over 300.000. If I pick any two
currently living people at random, I have to go back 6.5 generations on
the average to find a common ancestor. I have never had to go back
more than 10 generations. This means that *a* common ancestor for any
two people in this population can be found 200-300 years ago. If I
look for the most recent ancestor, I have to go back only 500 years to
find one - a Catholic bishop, who had 5 or 6 children with his
mistress.

While this is slightly interesting, it is also fairly irrelevant for
this discussion - here as elsewhere genalogical records simply do not
go back far enough to actually prove anything about the original
subject.

Not at all - I think you are much too modest in your claims. The fact
that the common ancestor for a population of 300,000 (roughly 2^18)
lived 500 years ago (roughly 18 generations) is a very interesting data
point.

Denis Beauregard

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av Denis Beauregard » 21 jan 2006 17:29:19

Le 21 Jan 2006 02:42:48 -0800, nicholas.whyte@gmail.com écrivait dans
soc.genealogy.medieval:

While this is slightly interesting, it is also fairly irrelevant for
this discussion - here as elsewhere genalogical records simply do not
go back far enough to actually prove anything about the original
subject.

Not at all - I think you are much too modest in your claims. The fact
that the common ancestor for a population of 300,000 (roughly 2^18)
lived 500 years ago (roughly 18 generations) is a very interesting data
point.

Exactly my thoughts.

Another point: Quebec, with roughly 6 millions of descendants of the
French colony founded in 1608, is close to saturation in 400 years.
So, that 500 years to saturated completely a sizeable local population
with a common ancestor can be a point to consider. If you need 500
years for the most recend common ancestor in a somewhat local and
monolithic colony (same language, same religion, relatively small
area), then you need a lot more so that any living person of that
time be an ancestor of every living persons. It could be 700 or
even 1000 years.

You add to that the fact that large migrations were not common. You
have the barbars at the end of the Roman empire, for example, the
crusades, the expansion of the Muslim lands, the invasion of the
New World. I found that about half of Quebec immigrants had
descendants after 200 years. I don't know if this is a constant,
but if it is, after about 700 years, 1 person out of 10 would
have a descendant. For 2000 years, it would be 1 person out
of 1000 if we don't account for the saturation and population's
growth. So, you must have a sizeable migration if you want to
have a common ancestor to many persons from remote places.


Denis

--
0 Denis Beauregard -
/\/ Les Français d'Amérique - http://www.francogene.com/genealogie-quebec/
|\ French in North America before 1716 - http://www.francogene.com/quebec-genealogy/
/ | Mes associations de généalogie: http://www.SGCF.com/ (soc. gén. can.-fr.)
oo oo http://www.genealogie.org/club/sglj/index2.html (soc. de gén. de La Jemmerais)

James Dow Allen

Re: Most recent common ancestors

Legg inn av James Dow Allen » 23 jan 2006 07:49:20

Denis Beauregard wrote:
... If you check artefacts from 3000 years ago, you will
see that "racial" features were already defined at that time, i.e.
color of skin or shape of eyes. ...
I think those differences are vanishing after many interracial
weddings[.] So, if those features already existed 3000 years ago, how
can you explain the common ancestors are so late.

An interesting paper
http://harpend.dsl.xmission.com/Documents/prize.pdf
points out that some ethnic groups are not as isolated genetically as
they
appear. For examples:

Basques are often thought of as an isolated gene pool
because of the high incidence of Rh- blood factor,
but in fact other Basque genes are typical European.
The Basques did mate outside their group (perhaps
foreign gene input of .01 per generation), but retained
the Rh- factor by natural selection because mixed
Rh infants are less viable.

Similarly, the Kalahari Bushmen have genes typical for
other Africans, but retain distinct skin color and other
visible features because, when selecting foreigners
as mates, they chose ones attractive to Bushmen.

* * * * *

Regardlss of the correctness of the Recent Common Ancestor hypothesis,
I wonder which ethnic outliers pose the most trouble.
Amazon? Papua? African populations like Pygmy/Bushman?

James D. Allen

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