Original link found by Viren (I think) on Stephen Oppenheimer's Myths of British Ancestry has now got a follow up page. Apparently, questions came in and Oppenheimer answered.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article...ls.php?&id=9639
Among the questions:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâRegarding your statement that <b>75-95 per cent of paternal genes in Britain are of Iberian origin</b>, is this genetic material distinct and specific only among Basque-type peoples, or does some of it share features with other, non-Basque Europeans? If the latter is true, why is it omitted from your findings?
Timothy Burton
AâI do discuss the questions you raise, but in chapters 3 and 4 of my book The Origins of the British, not in the more condensed Prospect article. Part of the answer to your query is in my answer to Douglas Forbes above, but allow me to expand a little more here.
As you suggest, the re-expansion of paternal group R1b and maternal group H from the Basque Ice Age refuge spread up the coasts of all the countries facing the Atlantic, after the ice melted. The British Isles retained higher rates than the other countries, for several reasons related specifically to early movements directly from the Basque country rather than from general diffusion from western Europe. First, as a result of lower sea levels, the British Isles, in particular Ireland, were connected and at the furthest edge of the extended Ice Age European continent, and thus received the bulk of early coastal migration. Then, as sea levels rose, first Ireland then Britain became islands, relatively insulated from further migration from elsewhere in Europe, thus preserving their high rates of R1b and similarity to the initial settlements.
The means by which I could separate the R1b types in the British Isles from those on the other side of the channel is by the use of "Founder Analysis." That is, looking at the detail of their gene types (so-called STR haplotypes). These revealed 21 founding clusters, which could only have arrived direct from the Basque country. Their descendant twigs are unique to the British Isles. Furthermore I was able to date the arrival of these individual clusters using their diversity.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Oppenheimer's statement: "75-95 per cent of paternal genes in Britain are of Iberian origin." WitSSel will reason that those all-important "paternal oryan lines were just too busy invading India. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> <i>That's why</i> their lines were missing in action in the oryan land" of the christobritish colonials who invented them. Hence, Therefore and Ergo: AIT - proof by .... (electrical) induction. Finally.
(I'm just playin' around, but then so is linguishticks/languagesticks/languishticks/lipsticks. Liposuction? Anyway. It's fun. You try!)
Of course, the real question is not about the they-must-be-made-of-vapour-since-they're-so-invisible Oryans at all. It's rather about the surprisingly small contribution W mainland Europe's genetics seems to have made into Angleterre, especially compared to the even more surprising large Iberian input (SW Europe, Basque territory).
This one I found interesting:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâIt is true that, "The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago." This is the R lineage group and most European males have an R Y chromosome. But it is rather silly to say that, "Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons; in fact, neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands." Angles, Saxons, Celts and Basques are not lineage groups. They are ethnic groups that developed within the last 2,000 or 3,000 years. Like most Europeans, they probably belonged to the R lineage. Most Germans, Poles, French, Spaniards and Russians also belong to the R lineage group. None of this negates the established history of the British Isles.
Has Oppenheimer read the research of Weale et alâ"Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration" (2002)âwhich shows that the male populations in two central English towns were genetically very similar, whereas those of two north Welsh towns differed significantly both from each other and from the English towns? Using novel population genetic models that incorporate both mass migration and continuous gene flow, they concluded that this was best explained by a substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into central Englandâbut not into north Wales.
Douglas Forbes
AâI cannot claim responsibility for your second quotation, which is from the article's standfirst. As you must realise, authors of magazine articles rarely have control over these. I cannot disagree with your complaint, but hopefully you read the whole article.
On your second point, it is misleading for you to talk about frequencies of the R male lineage in different European countries as if this constituted a uniform genetic background, since there are actually two main R groups, which split tens of thousands of years ago outside Europe and had completely different modes of spread and present distributions in Europe. R1b expanded from the Basque Ice Age refuge and predominates in extreme western Europe, being found at only 20 per cent or less in Russia and the Baltic states. R1a1, on the other hand, predominates in eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia. I deal with the spread of both major R lineages at length in chapters 3 and 4 of my book The Origins of the British.
I have indeed read the research of Weale et al. I discuss it and similar papers at length in chapter 11 of my book, where I register my disagreement with their method of reconstruction from relative gene group frequencies, presenting instead my own phylo-geographic re-analysis of their data, based on fine detail of individual founding lineages.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And this one:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâWhat about the genetic make-up of the Man Islanders? Did it suffer few modifications from its origins because of geographical remoteness, or is it very different from the rest of the British Isles because of the impact of invasions (such as the Vikings) on a small population?
Alexandre Cogan
AâThe simple answer is that your first suggestion is closer to the truth than your second. <b>The Isle of Man received more Norwegian gene-flow than anywhere else in the British Isles, except for Shetland and Orkney, which received the most. This does not, however, account for more than 20-25% of the male Isle of Man gene pool.</b> Fig 11.4b in my book gives a very approximate genetic distance map, illustrating this in more detail.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Isle of Man has among the highest Norwegian gene flow in the British Isles and even so it still comes to only 20 to 25%? Where's them oryans when you need 'em, eh?
Or maybe I should wait for them to repeat their old pattern and declare the Basques to be oryans as well. The Irish and Slavs got in more recently. There was a time when WASPy supremacists reasoned that Gaelic was "obviously" not an IE language and resorted to pointing to such things like agglutinative(?) stuff, while the christonazis of Germany used their confused 'scientifics' to argue that the Russians were separate and supposedly "untermenschen".
Now that they've both been let/pushed in, the Basques, among the last remaining excluded European groups, can't be too far behind. Have faith. And prey ("salva nos deus..."). Then gawd, jeebus and his oryans - sorry, I meant angels - will make the miracle, via their earthly representatives. As miracles go, it would be small: Just publish some papers, and then, a few tv programs and school textbook editions later, one could canonise them and then the Basques too will finally be worthy of an oryan halo.
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article...ls.php?&id=9639
Among the questions:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâRegarding your statement that <b>75-95 per cent of paternal genes in Britain are of Iberian origin</b>, is this genetic material distinct and specific only among Basque-type peoples, or does some of it share features with other, non-Basque Europeans? If the latter is true, why is it omitted from your findings?
Timothy Burton
AâI do discuss the questions you raise, but in chapters 3 and 4 of my book The Origins of the British, not in the more condensed Prospect article. Part of the answer to your query is in my answer to Douglas Forbes above, but allow me to expand a little more here.
As you suggest, the re-expansion of paternal group R1b and maternal group H from the Basque Ice Age refuge spread up the coasts of all the countries facing the Atlantic, after the ice melted. The British Isles retained higher rates than the other countries, for several reasons related specifically to early movements directly from the Basque country rather than from general diffusion from western Europe. First, as a result of lower sea levels, the British Isles, in particular Ireland, were connected and at the furthest edge of the extended Ice Age European continent, and thus received the bulk of early coastal migration. Then, as sea levels rose, first Ireland then Britain became islands, relatively insulated from further migration from elsewhere in Europe, thus preserving their high rates of R1b and similarity to the initial settlements.
The means by which I could separate the R1b types in the British Isles from those on the other side of the channel is by the use of "Founder Analysis." That is, looking at the detail of their gene types (so-called STR haplotypes). These revealed 21 founding clusters, which could only have arrived direct from the Basque country. Their descendant twigs are unique to the British Isles. Furthermore I was able to date the arrival of these individual clusters using their diversity.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Oppenheimer's statement: "75-95 per cent of paternal genes in Britain are of Iberian origin." WitSSel will reason that those all-important "paternal oryan lines were just too busy invading India. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo--> <i>That's why</i> their lines were missing in action in the oryan land" of the christobritish colonials who invented them. Hence, Therefore and Ergo: AIT - proof by .... (electrical) induction. Finally. (I'm just playin' around, but then so is linguishticks/languagesticks/languishticks/lipsticks. Liposuction? Anyway. It's fun. You try!)
Of course, the real question is not about the they-must-be-made-of-vapour-since-they're-so-invisible Oryans at all. It's rather about the surprisingly small contribution W mainland Europe's genetics seems to have made into Angleterre, especially compared to the even more surprising large Iberian input (SW Europe, Basque territory).
This one I found interesting:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâIt is true that, "The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago." This is the R lineage group and most European males have an R Y chromosome. But it is rather silly to say that, "Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons; in fact, neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands." Angles, Saxons, Celts and Basques are not lineage groups. They are ethnic groups that developed within the last 2,000 or 3,000 years. Like most Europeans, they probably belonged to the R lineage. Most Germans, Poles, French, Spaniards and Russians also belong to the R lineage group. None of this negates the established history of the British Isles.
Has Oppenheimer read the research of Weale et alâ"Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration" (2002)âwhich shows that the male populations in two central English towns were genetically very similar, whereas those of two north Welsh towns differed significantly both from each other and from the English towns? Using novel population genetic models that incorporate both mass migration and continuous gene flow, they concluded that this was best explained by a substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into central Englandâbut not into north Wales.
Douglas Forbes
AâI cannot claim responsibility for your second quotation, which is from the article's standfirst. As you must realise, authors of magazine articles rarely have control over these. I cannot disagree with your complaint, but hopefully you read the whole article.
On your second point, it is misleading for you to talk about frequencies of the R male lineage in different European countries as if this constituted a uniform genetic background, since there are actually two main R groups, which split tens of thousands of years ago outside Europe and had completely different modes of spread and present distributions in Europe. R1b expanded from the Basque Ice Age refuge and predominates in extreme western Europe, being found at only 20 per cent or less in Russia and the Baltic states. R1a1, on the other hand, predominates in eastern Europe, and to a lesser extent in Scandinavia. I deal with the spread of both major R lineages at length in chapters 3 and 4 of my book The Origins of the British.
I have indeed read the research of Weale et al. I discuss it and similar papers at length in chapter 11 of my book, where I register my disagreement with their method of reconstruction from relative gene group frequencies, presenting instead my own phylo-geographic re-analysis of their data, based on fine detail of individual founding lineages.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->And this one:<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->QâWhat about the genetic make-up of the Man Islanders? Did it suffer few modifications from its origins because of geographical remoteness, or is it very different from the rest of the British Isles because of the impact of invasions (such as the Vikings) on a small population?
Alexandre Cogan
AâThe simple answer is that your first suggestion is closer to the truth than your second. <b>The Isle of Man received more Norwegian gene-flow than anywhere else in the British Isles, except for Shetland and Orkney, which received the most. This does not, however, account for more than 20-25% of the male Isle of Man gene pool.</b> Fig 11.4b in my book gives a very approximate genetic distance map, illustrating this in more detail.
Stephen Oppenheimer<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Isle of Man has among the highest Norwegian gene flow in the British Isles and even so it still comes to only 20 to 25%? Where's them oryans when you need 'em, eh?
Or maybe I should wait for them to repeat their old pattern and declare the Basques to be oryans as well. The Irish and Slavs got in more recently. There was a time when WASPy supremacists reasoned that Gaelic was "obviously" not an IE language and resorted to pointing to such things like agglutinative(?) stuff, while the christonazis of Germany used their confused 'scientifics' to argue that the Russians were separate and supposedly "untermenschen".
Now that they've both been let/pushed in, the Basques, among the last remaining excluded European groups, can't be too far behind. Have faith. And prey ("salva nos deus..."). Then gawd, jeebus and his oryans - sorry, I meant angels - will make the miracle, via their earthly representatives. As miracles go, it would be small: Just publish some papers, and then, a few tv programs and school textbook editions later, one could canonise them and then the Basques too will finally be worthy of an oryan halo.
Death to traitors.