Europeans Came From Three Ancestry Groupings 85
Taco Cowboy writes A recent study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Tübingen in Germany has found that present day Europeans are descendants of three different groups of people — A near east farmer group, an indigenous hunter gatherer group, and an ancient North Eurasian group from Siberia. "Nearly all Europeans have ancestry from all three ancestral groups," said Iosif Lazaridis, a research fellow in genetics in Reich's lab and first author of the paper. "Differences between them are due to the relative proportions of ancestry. Northern Europeans have more hunter-gatherer ancestry — up to about 50 percent in Lithuanians — and Southern Europeans have more farmer ancestry." The most surprising part of the project, however, was the discovery of the Basal Eurasians. Before Australian Aborigines, New Guineans, South Indians, Native Americans and other indigenous hunter-gatherers split, they split from Basal Eurasians. The study also found that Mediterranean groups such as the Maltese, as well as Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated, while far northeastern Europeans such as Finns and the Saami, as well as some northern Russians, had more East Asian ancestry in the mix.
Jews (Score:1, Insightful)
"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
Re:Jews (Score:4, Informative)
This is somewhat more complicated. http://www.livescience.com/402... [livescience.com]
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"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
I would have expected close to but not quite 100% German and Polish. Considering most Ashkenazi look in every way Polish and German and spoke a German dialect, the original semetic genes are likely thin.
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Is this a bot posting?
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"Ashkenazi Jews, had more Near East ancestry than anticipated" What!? Off the cuff I'd think they would have 100% Near Eastern ancestry. How much did they anticipate? Apparently a number less than 100.
After living in Eastern Europe for so many centuries as a minority, with continuous gene flows, no, I would expect them to have a significant amount of Northwestern Eurasian genes in them. I mean, just look at them (and I don't mean it in a derogatory manner) and compare them with some other ancient-yet-living Middle Eastern populations (Assyrians, Chaldean, Samaritans, Yemenite Jews, Arabs, and pretty much any other Semitic group that has not migrated out of the Levant, Mesopotamia and/or the Arabic Penins
Finnish (Score:4, Interesting)
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You don't need to learn languages to do linguistics. You need to learn about languages. It helps to know the languages involved, but if that was required comparative linguistics would get nowhere. Comparative linguistics works by building on the data gathered about the target languages, often by researchers who went to study them.
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You don't need to learn languages to do linguistics. You need to learn about languages.
While working on a linguistics minor for my CS degree, I heard a number of versions of the quip that a linguist is someone who knows 100 words in each of 100 different languages. Of course, this should be followed with the observation that the main focus of linguistics is understanding the structures of languages, and vocabulary is interesting only in that it shows relations between languages. This doesn't generally require having a large enough vocabulary to be fluent. Most of the actual linguists I've
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Welcome to Wikipedia.
The most monomaniacally insane rule over it, because nobody else can match their (literally) mad devotion to their individual obsessions. 24 hours a day, all their remaining lives, they will work to retain authority over their topics. They'll create and burn on-line personalities endlessly, or drive for hours to reach a new IP address that the
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They make mobile phones with awesom cameras,
Used to......
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I almost wonder if it was ever knowledge... Consider that the most effective way of spreading religion is to have children and indoctrinate them into the same religion.
You can imagine 10 different sects popping up with different versions of the dietary rules. The ones that happened to align with health and reduced death would have an evolutionary advantage, and ultimately become dominant.
Teaching/Learning machanism (Score:5, Insightful)
You can imagine 10 different sects popping up with different versions of the dietary rules. The ones that happened to align with health and reduced death would have an evolutionary advantage, and ultimately become dominant.
That's basically how teaching/learning mechanism on the whole did evolve. That's why lot of mammal have youngs observe the adult and copy behavious. That's why in some mammal species, the parent actively teach the young. That's why some mammals (humans, dogs, etc.) from very strictly hierarchical societal organisation, with the underling strongly following the alpha, etc.
That's also why memes work on the internet.
"Religion" itself, is just a side phenomenon, that happens to hi-jack this transmission of knowledge methode and packs together useful information ("Things to avoid eating not to get sick") with complete non-sensical mythology/legends. That all still gets perpetuated because "that what we've always been doing".
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You can imagine 10 different sects popping up with different versions of the dietary rules. The ones that happened to align with health and reduced death would have an evolutionary advantage, and ultimately become dominant.
That's possible, but it involves a very weird assumption: that human intelligence only evolved about 2000 years ago, and before that we were utterly moronic.
Dangerous foods become painfully obvious painfully quickly. Nowadays we may have a sophisticated understanding of why they are dangerous, but "Montezuma is unhappy you ate the day old prawn" is still a theory based on the observation of the guy doubling over and vomiting his guts up.
Some of the weirder laws are clearly born out of coincidence, the same
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What if those 3 interbreed?
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What if those 3 interbreed?
Socialists are produced.
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Tell that to Mitt Romney and the "47 percent who are with him(Obama), who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it"
Hmmm (Score:1)
Is there a connection with the adjacent story? [slashdot.org]
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Is there a connection with the adjacent story? [slashdot.org]
Yeah; if you look back a couple of million years, we're all related to chimpanzees.
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Aliens.
Great film. Well written, and very cleverly avoided the trap many monster-stalker sequels fall into whereby they attempt to be monster-stalker again when the monster's already been seen. The switch to "monster horde" was well judged and well executed.
Not only in Midgard (Score:2)
We know that warlike once-nomadic Aesir mingled with settled farmer Vanir.
Which speaks heaps about their worshippers.
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Not to mention the peredhil.
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If you want to post goatses as a surprise to people, don't do it in slashdot, because
1. We have all seen him enough times to find him a bit trivial,
2. The way slashdot presents links gives it away by attaching [goat.cx]
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Speaking of things we've "seen enough times"... these markov chain posts appear at least once in nearly every single /. story and have done so for my entire time on the site, surely you've noticed them before?
If they stopped appearing then we could truly say the site had died. :)
Not True, I Saw It Online: (Score:1)
There's no measurable genetic differences. There's only one race: the human race, and that's all that ever was and ever will be.
Re:Not True, I Saw It Online: (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no measurable genetic differences. There's only one race: the human race, and that's all that ever was and ever will be.
It's not an all-or-nothing situation. There are statistical genetic differences between various groups of people (though superficial features like skin color are often not closely related to ancestral groupings). One of my favorite such statistics was the calculation that some time in the late 1980s, the US population passed the mixing point where more than 50% of Americans now have sub-Saharan African ancestors. Most such people look "white", of course, since they have only a small fraction of African genes.
I recently read that the accumulated DNA data shows that between 20% and 25% of the US population has "Native American" genes, though again in most of that population is primarily "white". I'm part of that population, with an Ojibwa great-grandmother, though nobody would ever guess by looking at me that I'm not of pure European ancestry.
One thing I've found difficult to discover is what fraction of the US is purely European. If you try googling the topic, it mostly teaches you one thing: Most people don't understand even such simple statistics. You find lots of matches for the part of the population that's "white" or "of European ancestry", but the phrasing implies that they're talking about people who are predominantly European. There's data on the small populations that are purely African or purely Asian or whatever, but it's hard to find any information on the (probably small) population that's purely European.
Of course, for most purposes this all qualifies as idle curiosity. But there are at least a few medical reasons for studying it, in addition to general curiosity about where we all came from.
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One thing I've found difficult to discover is what fraction of the US is purely European.
I don't think you read the article. Since 0% of Europeans are purely European, it seems unlikely the fraction of the US that is purely European would be any larger than that. In general, the only cases where there are persons who are 100% purely a member of any genetic group are identical twins (and triplets, etc.)
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There's no measurable genetic differences. There's only one race: the human race, and that's all that ever was and ever will be.
Nope, there's no race... because it's not a competition.
Re:Fair and darker skin (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fair and darker skin (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.
The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.
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* This was before the Romans brought chimneys and window glass.
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Because all wildlife dies in winter? No? I guess you are wrong then.
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Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.
The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.
I did and it is interesting, especially the part where it says that Northern Europeans are more strongly related to the original European hunter gatherers who presumably were the population that absorbed the original eurasian Neandertahl and Densiovian populations. It's gotten me even more interested in getting my DNA analyzed for archaic human ancestry. It would be ever so cool to find out I'm in the high range with 4-5% or more Neanderthal DNA or perhaps even coolest of all, Neandertahl mtDNA.
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It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.
That's one possibility. Another is that raiding parties captured and raped their women. That worked pretty well for Genghis Khan.
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But that is perhaps less likely - a farming culture is more sedentary, and therefore less like to go out on raids - although they could be looking for more farming land, of course. Interesting. Good point.
Study says... (Score:1)
Europeans product of menage a trois.
This study generates more questions than answers (Score:1)
First of all, what about the highly confirmed hypothesis of the Indo-Europeans' migrations from the Caucasus since the 5th millennium BC, that later split into several groups (italic tribes, greek tribes, celts, slavs, germanic tribes, etc...) ? Most modern-day europeans have been supposed to descend from them. How does this study renconcile with it? Maybe the Indo-Europeans carried the genes of what the study calls "farmers from the Near East"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Secondly, the study says th
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I think the wording is just off. The 'basal Europeans' are most likely descendants of the Cro Magnon with a sprinkling of Neaderthal. The original stock most likely was from an earlier migration out of Africa.
Pan-Racial Future (Score:2)
Please do not rely too much on projection (Score:3, Interesting)
Here we are, in year 2014, talking about a society some 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, and we project the society then, using what we have now
Dear Sir, I would hope you realize that even in our society today we still have barbarians enjoying slitting other people's throats and cutting off people's heads, and in societies 7 to 8 millennia before us, I reckon there would be even bigger proportion of human population who enjoyed cutting off other people's heads
In other words, the so-called "intermarriage", if occu
And (Score:1)
> A near east farmer group, an indigenous hunter gatherer group, and an ancient North Eurasian group from Siberia
I knew German Summer Glau had some Asian in her!
1984 (Score:2)
Eurasia is at war with Oceania. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.