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The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree
An anonymous reader writes to mention an AP story about research discussing the relatively recent origins of every human on earth. Despite the age of our species, every human on earth can trace their ancestry back to someone who may have lived as recently as the Golden Age of Greece (around 500 BC). From the article: "It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors -- who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence. But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived."
Their 2004 Nature paper. (May require a subscription to view the full text, I'm not sure. I might have institutional access.)
There is also a relevant Wikipedia entry on the most recent common ancestor.
Curiously, the nature of genetic disease suggests that if you want to ensure the survival of your descendants into the eons upon eons, you should marry outside of your ethnic group. The offspring of an Eskimo-African couple will typically have a stronger set of genes than the offspring of an Eskimo-Eskimo couple, a German-German couple, or a Vietnamese-Vietnamese couple.
That is patently false. Humans, before we had modern technology that allowed us to travel great distances in short periods of time, had very little contact outside of our own tribes. To put, humans lived within their own tribes for hundreds of thousands of years.
Mixing does not create a "stronger" result. If anything, it creates a weaker result, depending on how different the two parents are. Why do you think the traits of various ethnic groups were selected? Do you think they are randomly arranged? No, they were selected based on adaptations to the environment of that group of people. Mixing in differnet traits that do not fit well into that environment will result in those traits being removed.
Its nice to see that some people are aware of world history. Truganini was the last Tasmanian.
Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name?
Not really. For those averse to reading, the Netherlands section is probably the funniest.
But while we're on the subject, I do wonder why a woman asserting her independence by refusing to take her husband's name when getting married feels perfectly comfortable carrying her father's name. According to the Wikipedia article, the practice is generally in decline, but for those of us old enough to remember the shrill "I'm no one's property" arguments before the notion became politically correct and commonplace, the irony lingers. Even funnier if you've been through divorce court.
In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree.
You mean like this?
This guy's the limit!
Walking just 100 yards a day would allow a population to reach the entire earth in about 1000 years or 30 generations. Do it at the right time and there was a permanent ice/land bridge between asia and alaska.
In a couple decades somebody is going to start a great project to just check people's DNA and plug them into a world family tree. The Y and mitochrondial dna would be great, we could probably trace anybody right to their family. Similar things are being done between species where DNA tests are providing actual relationships between animals as such.
The entirety of the population of Iceland has been DNA-sampled and indexed according to their lineage. DNA studies are already used to determine how populations moved and intermixed in the past, on a population-wide scale (where a few people from a population are sampled, rather than everyone).
There even a (if somewhat shaky) DNA test to determine racial descent. I saw it on a TV show once, where they had some school kids find out they had DNA from basically another race. I.e. a black guy turned out to have some asian genes, a white girl with blonde hair turned out to have some black genes etc. Possibly a bullshit test, possibly not.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Richard Dawkins writes in The Ancestors Tale (page 43, "The Tasmanian's Tale") that roughly 80 percent of all invidiviuals of a current population will be universal ancestors to all living decendants a certain number of generations later. How many generations? That depends on the populations size: roughly the base 2 logarithm of the population size number of generations. This is more true for small, isolated populations, especially on islands (Tasmania is given as example) - you can not take the current population of people on earth today (6 billions) and trust this number.
"... it is not the natural children who are God's children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham's offspring." - Romans 9:8
Not the acutal decendents of Abraham, but the "Spiritual" children of Abraham.
is passed through the female line. As the Roman author had it, mater certus, pater semper incertus est (The mother is certain, the father always uncertain.)
Pining for the fjords
That was never intended to be a genetic claim but a spiritual one. Think of it something like adoption.
If you knew anything about Iraq & Iran, you'd know that Iraq is an Arab country and Iran is a Persian country.
The Arabs have a long running grudge against the Persian empire, which Saddam used to unite the Iraqi people during that war.
Maybe 30% of Iraqi families are mixed Sunni-Shia. To pretend that the sectarian violence in Iraq isn't religiously motivated is ignorance in the extreme.
It's exactly the thing that Bush Sr. predicted would happen if he invaded Iraq. So he didn't. If you honestly believe that "This generally artificial tension is being produced as a convenient cover" then i suggest you go read a book or two, because Civil War is exactly what most political scientists expected would happen.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Genealogists discover royal roots on every family tree
In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.
What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
then there is this old link to the notion of the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Mankind.
The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.
It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.
We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.
Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.
Atlantic Magazine, among others, had a story on this a few years back.
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That said, the religious status (priest/Levite, Cohain), tribe, and inheritance are all passed through the father. For instance, David was the scion of Saul. His mother was irrelavent to his being King of Isreal.
"Some idiot with a PhD in molecular genetics (not population genetics) while debating me once blurted out that the human race is in a "Hardy-Wienberg Equilibrium", which is essentially the impression intended by the referenced article."
The "idiot" was wrong, but so are you: the article makes no reference to Hardy-Weinburg equilibria, nor does it need to -- it doesn't discuss allele frequencies.
"What HRE means is that there is no "population structure" such as "races" -- which plays very well with the PC Feelgoodism that has been elevated to a state of theocratic dogma by the current zeigeist pervading not just media and academia but governmental circles."
Whoa...settle down, there, Cletus. The liberals aren't coming to get you today!
Incoherent, vaguely conservative ranting about "dogma" and "zeigests" aside, you don't understand the definition of Hardy-Weinburg equilibria (perhaps that's why you're so upset!) Simply put, HRE tells us how to predict the stable frequencies of dominant and recessive alleles within a closed population. It's a fundamental theorem of population genetics, not a wedge issue in the Culture War.
This article is about ancestry, and makes a simple mathematical argument that human beings are all related. It doesn't make a commentary about race or geographical diversity. Get a grip.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/analysis_an
ok, it seems to vary from about 5%, but rates of 20% - 30% are common. So... Guys... have you had a DNA test?
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the childrens last name is a combination of the parents name.
same in the Vietnamese culture. Children take both their parents name. Married people don't take their partner's name.
Their children take the father's last name for the combination.
So, say father Huynh, mother Vo.
Children would have the last name Huynh Vo.
Say, children marries someone whose father and mother were Nguyen and Quan respectivelly, then their children would have the last name Huynh Nguyen.
This practice has gone out of use though, especially for people who grew up in the Western world (most of the people I know living in the US or Europe basically decided on a family name, like Huynh, and kept it "simple")
Je ne parle pas francais.
The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, did exactly this when he got married. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Villaraigosa
Iranians called their land Iran beginning around 226 AD/CE
Yes, I wrote that correctly. 1,780 years of calling themselves Iranians.
Before 226 AD, the Persians referred to themselves as Aryanam, which the word "Iran" is a spinoff of. The earliest written self-reference of the Persians as Aryanam was in 486 BC. That stretches the Iranian timeline back another 712 years.
Iran (the Persian Empire) started out roughly 700 BC when several Aryan tribes united.
Iran literally means "the land of Aryans"
Culturally and linguistically they're Aryans.
Ethnically, Iran (the Persian Empire) is a mix, which includes Caucusians.
It's a bit confusing to discuss since the 'Iranian (Persian) people' covers more than just the people inside Iran's current border.
P.S. Aryan, as I'm using it, has nothing to do with the racial supremecists or Nazis. In the 1900's they confused & bastardized the word.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Nobody does family history like the LDS church. Check out www.familysearch.org. You can even download free software. It is interesting some of the changes they are doing such as scanning in petabytes of microfilm and indexing it through thousands of volunteers. They are also going to try to make some sort of a world tree using a wiki-like format. I also believe they are going to incorporate GIS data so you can see where people have moved around.
In other words, the conclusion is false for entire individuals, but true for single genes or very tightly linked clusters.
Questions?
The aborigines were not genetically isolated. Australia was visited by Indonesians at least 4000 years ago. We know this because that is when dingoes (dogs) arrived in Australia.
As Richard Dawkins said, it's true indeed there was an 'ancestral Adam (and Eve)', but he could have lived ten or a hundred thousand years ago. The calculations they performed works with arbitrary variables they input and then wait what number comes out. Might be fun, like Google Trends, but ultimately inconsequential.
Not likely. The typical white supremecist's ancestors would not have been able to afford slaves.
Um, not. Great-granddaddy was poor white racist trash, coming from probably your typical subsistence farming South Carolina background, and his family owned slaves (just a few) before the war. This was normal - even the slightly better-off poor had slaves.
Also, need I mention Trent Lott or Strom Thurmond?