What DNA Says About Aryan Invasion Theory -2

[Husky]

1. About this:

[quote name='Husky' date='18 March 2014 - 09:42 PM' timestamp='1395158672' post='117136']

BTW: [color="#0000FF"]from memory, Stephen Oppenheimer said that migrations could be dated with genetics.(IHJ-4-24)[/color] But no mention of the degree of accuracy/amount of leeway for dates: 100s of years, 1000s? (May paste a literal quote eventually.)[/quote]

In the following excerpt, SO stands for Dr Stephen Oppenheimer. And Dr AR is the anatomist/medical doctor and anthropologist who is the narrator. Oppenheimer and Bradshaw foundation - or one Paul(?) Bradshaw certainly - were mentioned in the credits, with the latter being instrumental in commissioning this, I think.



(In the excerpt below, AR is the narrator where none is mentioned. At this point she's looking at how and when the Semang of Malaysia got there, as part of a larger story of how and when the native Australians got to Australia.)

Amazingly, through their DNA, it might be possible to trace that first great journey through Malaysia.



Genetics expert Stephen Oppenheimer has flown in from Oxford. His work is helping revolutionise the story of our human journey.

[Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, University of Oxford:] "I guess it's something tile a detective story where you've got a very specific trail that you can measure, just like traditional trackers will follow a trail no one else can see."



Combining genes and geography, Stephen has mapped out a route from Africa, across the Red Sea and around the edge of the Indian Ocean.

By looking at the DNA of the Semang [ancient natives of Malaysia], Stephen hopes to find evidence of that early migration towards Australia.



[color="#0000FF"]SO: "The new genetics is extraordinarily powerful for looking at ancient migrations, because not only can you trace very specific migrations, but you can actually attempt to date them as well."[/color]

[color="#800080"](Again, I can't work out the degree of precision with the dating. How far off can they be, max? For such early migrations, being off by a few 1000 years is not a terrible deal. E.g. "60,000 years +/- 5000". But in proving or disproving post/neolithic migrations at a certain date, such large margins can hardly be helpful.)[/color]



Stephen has been looking for unique genetic markers that will tell him when the ancestors of the Semang first arrived here.



AR: "What about dates?* Because they certainly think they've been here forever. You know**, they think they're ancient."

SO: *"Well..."

SO: **"Yes, well, I agree with them."

AR: "You do?"

SO: "Yes." [SO laughs good-naturedly.]

[color="#800080"](Comments after this blockquote.)[/color]



AR: "So they've been here 60,000 years? Their ancestors have been here..."

SO: "At least 60,000. I suspect it was much much more."

AR: "I mean that's amazing, because if their uniqueness goes back that far and if they, you know, if we can say that they have probably been here in this sort of area for 60,000 years, that means they were very close to the wave of colonisation, doesn't it?"

SO: "They were part. They were part of it. They were the vanguard. They were just a colony dropped along the way as the vanguard advanced (*) towards New Guinea and Australia.

[color="#800080"][* Can't make out the (1 or 2) words here, because she interrupts him with a "yeah" and he therefore takes down the volume of what he is saying to allow for her interjection. The missing word may be "then", but sounded like 2 syllables. (?)][/color]



AR: It's incredibly frustrating that the first family groups pushing through these new lands left so little for us to find. But genetics has come to the rescue.



Stephen's research tells us that the ancestors of the Semang were probably amongst the first Modern Humans to come through here. And not only that: the genetics suggests that that vanguard

moved surprisingly rapidly, getting all the way from Africa to Malaysia in a space of just a few thousand years.

[color="#800080"][Map showing arrow incoming from African direction into India into the SE coast where 3 sites (of early settlement) are marked in Red (one labelled Jwalapuram). Another site in red in Sri-Lanka and then Red dots in SE Asia incl. Malaysia.][/color]



There are other tribes thought to have ancient roots as well. Together, they're the distant echoes of that first migration, a journey that began in Africa, continued through India* and round the coast to Malaysia.

[color="#800080"][*Map shows Modern Humans/ancient Africans' entry from NW into SE coast of India - where the original settlements were marked in red - with subsequent movement up India's E coast, into the coastal areas of neighbouring SE Asian lands (what was human movement via I think Burma and S Thailand, in the direction of Malaysia).][/color]

Note, in an exchange between Oppenheimer and AR in the middle somewhere above, Stephen starts responding to AR's questions at the points marked with * and **. The timing of his responses matter IMO, because they show exactly what question by AR he is responding to at each point:

That is, she asks "What about dates?" ("Well") "Because they certainly think they've been here forever." And it is then at this point that the Dr Oppenheimer answers rather genially - and not remotely insincerely - with "Yes well, I agree with them". And then he repeats "Yes" to her subsequent question to confirm the view he just expressed yet again, with the aforementioned good-natured laugh. If he'd been a heathen, I'd have said it was a heathen response by Oppenheimer.



Of course, in doing so he's talking about the larger picture of the Semang's ancientry being indeed so ancient in their Malaysian homeland - in terms of Modern Humans - that, where human history is concerned, it could reasonably be expressed as sort of "forever". But I liked the quickness and eagerness of his response, because you could really see he was very consciously and willingly chiming in with their self-perceptions and their view of their history in the place. It was just a few brief moments but I really liked that about him.

I've not read either of his books - I so should buy them hereafter - but when reading his articles for ProspectMagazine.uk and Spiegel.de, his advocacy for the ancient nativeness of the current population of the British Isles seemed even then to indicate someone who was pleased to discover that the locals were indeed largely local - even if they've been brainwashed out of it - and have long been natives together. People don't seem to realise not just the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions but that "IE" invasions themselves make lots of Europeans non-natives and set up indigenous vs alien strifes and offer little in return for the theory. Well, owing to IE-ism there was a last boost to white supremacism and a 'respectable' looking one at that - to give it the definition of all of Europe including the Irish, the Slavs and even the Serbian Slavs now, but not Yesterday - but little else that Europe got out of IE-ism as far as I can tell. Even most of their ancient religions are dismissed as IE-derived, and with that the seal is forever placed on heathenisms in Europe.





2. Back in post 589, excerpts were posted from the Wacky Talk Page for the PCT (Palaeolithic Continuity Theory for PIE). Concerning this statement from the excerpts:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkaleolithic_Continuity_Theory/Archive1

The consensus in genetics is now fairly solid that 80% of the population is pre-farming and if you study the models of diffusion advanced e.g. by Zvelebil, then you come to the clear conclusion that it was very much a piecemeal process. Hence, as Alinei points out, Renfrew has a real problem in explaining why there's no substrate in the last areas to be neolithicised e.g. Norway, why there's a long-standing linguistic boundary in N Latvia (i.e. why don't the farmers manage to impose IE on the "Estonians", etc.

Estonians are no less Baltic than their Lithuanian and Latvian counterparts (and my childhood book of Baltic folk tales - many of which are pre-Christian, IIRC showed what looked like common pre-Christian traditions - common themes and patterns - which perhaps indicates kinship), BUT Estonians are Finno-Ugric speakers unlike modern Lithuanians and Latvians. Personally, I suspect that IE languages are not the native/ancestral languages of any of the Baltic population, but that the two more southern populations did adopt IE languages unlike Estonians. The alternative is less likely IMO: Finno-Ugric does seem native to at least the Estonian region as these do seem somewhat related to the Finns, besides, unless they are next going to claim that farming (or some other major early technological innovation) dispersed with Finno-Ugric, why would Estonians have "adopted" Estonian? It seems far more likely to wonder why Lithuanians and Latvians gave up their own ancestral tongues to adopt the languages of others.





3. About these 2 statements stolen from comments at that blog entry on the La Brana man:

Tobus said...

[...]

It's certainly possible (probable even) that further genes will discovered in the future that will give us a better picture of La Brana's skin colour than we do now, but given what we know at this point we have to accept the possibility (and perhaps I should stress possibility) that La Brana had the same skin colour as modern Papuans and Australian Aborigines - he certainly has the same genetic profile as these populations in terms of skin colour alleles known to science today. If this DNA was from a murder weapon recovered in NY this morning, the police would definitely be looking for a black man, it's only our presupposed notion of Europeans being "white" that makes us question these results in regard to La Brana.



Tobus said...

@Terry: It's not just SLC24A5, La Brana also has the ancestral alleles of SLC45A2 and TYR as well. There may well be other undiscovered factors to European light skin, but based on what we know about the genetics of skin pigmentation at this point in time we'd expect him to have dark skin. He has the same genetic skin pigmentation profile that we see in Australian Aboriginals, Papuans and Sri Lankans.

(I think his Sri Lanka reference as implied in his sequence is to the Veddas alone and not any other kinds of Sri Lankans.)



It's really disturbing to think that the KKK and other early slave-holder types (and all extant white-supremacists too, since the phenotypic descriptions of La Brana and other such are quite recent) would have lynched their own recent ancestors in European space living around say 7000 years ago, after first screeching various racial slurs at them. Which would prove my contention that Africans - if they're ever in the mood to annoy just for the hell of it - should claim European populations right until (the rather recent time) these turned homogeneously white. After all, Africans didn't invent the one-drop rule, but to the KKK etc, "if it looks African, it's an African", right? Hold them to it.





4. A pity the following doesn't sound like it will be very effective in conclusively or at least further narrowing down the phenotype of comparatively very ancient human remains, else it may have helped resolve the lay-level controversy surrounding La Brana man's appearance (the "was he or wasn't he" dark in an uncharacteristically European sense):



huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/dna-hair-color-eye-human-remains_n_2475208.html

DNA Reveals Hair, Eye Color Of Centuries-Old Human Remains, Researchers Say

Posted: 01/15/2013 8:22 am EST



By analyzing genes from a tooth of Polish Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, researchers confirmed he had the blue eyes and blond hair seen in portraits painted many years after his death in 1943.



By: Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

Published: 01/14/2013 03:58 PM EST on LiveScience



The color of the eyes and hair of ancestors dead for hundreds of years can now be revealed from their DNA alone, researchers say.



These findings suggest investigators not only can uncover new details from centuries-old human remains, but can also help identify crime victims, scientists added.



By comparing genomes across thousands of people, researchers identified genetic variations at 24 different points in the human genome that are linked with eye and hair colors, which past studies used to help determine the appearance of people who had died relatively recently. Now a team of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands have developed this system further to reveal the appearance of people long dead.



"We were able to look at the appearance of people who died several hundred years ago," researcher Wojciech Branicki, a geneticist at the Institute of Forensic Research and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, told LiveScience.



For instance, the researchers analyzed DNA from Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, who was born in 1881 and died in 1943. During World War II, Sikorski was commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces and was also prime minister of the Polish government in exile. He died in an airplane crash at Gibraltar. By analyzing genes from one of his teeth, the researchers confirmed he had the blue eyesand blond hair seen in portraits painted many years after his death.



"This system can be used to solve historical controversies where color photographs or other records are missing," Branicki said.



The researchers say their system, called HIrisPlex, can predict either blue or brown eye colors with about 94 percent accuracy. When it comes to hair color, it has accuracies of 69.5 percent for blond, 78.5 percent for brown, 80 percent for red and 87.5 percent for black.



For medieval samples, where DNA is relatively degraded, [color="#0000FF"]this system was still capable of predicting eye and hair color from remains about 800 years old.[/color] For instance, the researchers identified one mysterious woman from between the 12th and 14th centuries A.D. who was buried in a crypt of the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec near Kraków, where only remains of male monks were expected. The results hint that she had dark blond or brown hair and brown eyes. [Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt & Beyond]

[color="#800080"](So, is it merely that the above method has not yet been tried out on 7000+ year old remains such as La Brana - or even various mummies - or that its accuracy goes to below a point where it ceases to be useful when applied to earlier and/or more degraded samples?)[/color]



Although this research can help reveal what ancient human ancestors might have looked like based on their DNA alone, Branicki thinks the most practical aspect of their work is how it can help identify corpses for forensic analysis. For instance, "some of our samples were from unknown inmates of a World War II prison," he said. "In these cases, HIrisPlex helped to put physical features to the other DNA evidence."



In the future, the system may look at more than 24 points in the human genome — "from research carried out on the mouse, we estimate that 127 genes may be involved in human pigmentation," Branicki said. Still, "although research on eye and hair color prediction is ongoing, and we may expect some new predictors, it seems that the main predictors have been already identified, and especially in case of eye color, we should not expect any breakthrough in prediction in the near future."



The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 13 in the journal Investigative Genetics.