Slashdot Mirror
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."
You might be able to trace your geneology, but the process assumes that all your ancestors were entirely forthcoming when it came to their nuptial reltaions. Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name?
May the Maths Be with you!
Other than that, the artocle does make sense.
I've never been able to trace back any further than 1650 or so. Not that I've tried all that hard - it's at that point where I have to leave the US and travel to England to find more, and that's way beyond my budget. My ancestor arrived in the US not only broke, but in debt - he had to pay for his passage with several years of indentured servitude. Not much has changed...
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
What population? The were white settlers hunted the Tasmanians down like animals, then herded the last few survivors to a Christian-themed labor camp on a desert island where they succumbed to starvation and disease. The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876. Her skeleton was put on display in the Tasmanian Museum (as an example of "primitive human") and was finally cremated, over the museum's vehement objections, in 1976.
here's the beginning, taken from:
... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow "ennobled" me and all her descendants ... as if the "character" of the entire species, our potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.
g an.htm
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook918.htm
With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, June 2, 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We'd been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.
"Don't you want to discover your place in the human family?" she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. "Don't you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"
The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We'd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn't yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.
"It's very late," I said cautiously. "And you know I have to work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer--and at 25, the same age as I was, she'd had real paid jobs for almost four years.
"You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It'll take fifteen minutes."
Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.
It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement's wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various "culturally appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele'ele in Samoa) and I'd heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.
In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: warrior, queen, goddess. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her
Well worth reading, along with the rest of the stories in the collection "Luminous" by Greg Egan. here's another link to some favourable reviews of his stuff: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/e/e
I never heard of a group of Christians claiming to be children of Abraham.
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.
In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.
The "New York Times" gives a detailed analysis of genetic disease in Saudia Arabia, where more than 50% of marriages are ones between blood relatives.
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.
But if you're one of the races that may have been dislocated due to the depradations of colonialism or slavery, you're pretty much denied any chance of a family tree dating back to the "Golden Age of Greece".
Yes, it comes off as a troll or flamebait, but that's not the intent. It's just a sad fact of history that there's a lot of people disconnected from their past due to the way the world operated at a particular point. So flame away, but I'd rather hear any ideas that could work around the problem.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Sorry, this annoyed me. There are plenty of Sunnis and Shiites in any extended Iraqi family today living happily side by side, not caring about the difference in hand positions during prayer. Sunnis and Shiites are not mortal enemies as is so lazily portrayed in the media. They fought along side each other in the war against Iran just 25 years ago for example. This generally artificial tension is being produced as a convenient cover for the disaster that is Iraq and gives Bushco the ability to walk away from their mess and blame it on civil war. As long as they keep the oil rich areas and the new military bases civil war it would even suit them. Hence this false meme.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
This is par for the course really.
The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.
Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!
Seastead this.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
A way to visualize what he is saying would be to take two overlapping cones/triangles, one with the point aiming up, one with the point aiming down, like a star-of-david, or an angular hourglass.
The cone with the point at the top represents one person (A, for ancestor) who lived X years ago and their descendants. The cone with the point at the bottom represents one person (D for descendant) who lives today and their ancestors. Any overlap is where A and D share mutual ancestors/descendants.
Using this representation, the argument here is that there exists (erm, existed) a person A, for whom every human who is alive today falls into their descendancy cone. Or more importantly, they assert that this is inevitable, and sufficient time has passed such that it has already happened. The key, according to this visual model, is that "now" is below the line where the two cones cross.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Yeah. Matrilineal and matriarchial societies exit among Tamils, Meghas (in North-Estern India), communities in Andhra Pradesh (specially Telegu Jews, who keep strict records of their matrilineage) etc.
Surprisingly numerous, these matriarchials...
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
This may be off-topic, but I wanted to bring this in context. It's not just "other" peoples who have been matrilineal. The Celts were matrilineal as well, and some notable families in Europe remained matrilineal even past the Middle Ages. Many, many Native American tribes are matrilineal. What changed this? Christianity brining decidedly Roman attitudes. So, if you have Native American and/or Celtic ancestry, your ancestors were matrilinral. That covers most people in the Americas and Western Europe.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
> I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.
Don't mix up genetics and ancestry. The genes of a person from 100 generations ago would be entirely dissolved and not measurable today. This person could only pass on 1/2^100 of his genes to any particular person living today. That's technically nothing at all. Ancestry is an entirely different story, and really more of a mathematical concept: This person could still be 100% your ancestor, as ancestry is just defined that way.
So 1) genetic data does not help much with this at all. 2) Passing down your ancestry/family tree is much "easier" than passing down your genes. That's an important part of the reason why the result is plausible indeed, even taking isolated populations into account.
AFAIK these differences take less than 10000 years to develope. Anyway, from this set of ancestors, not all have to look the same. Imagine half look black, half white. And if you look white, maybe your white ancestors appear each 5000 times as on your family tree, and the black ones only once...
I disagree with you that matriarchial societies are rare. In my country (India) matriarchial families (where women held positions of power) are not uncommon. They have been even more common in the past. Example is the Maratha Confederacy
a r.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Confederacy
which, while founded by Shivaji Raje Bhonsle (a man) was really run by his mother, Jijabai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijabai
As well as the reigning queen of Jhansi, Laxmibai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxmibai
http://www.copsey-family.org/~allenc/lakshmibai/
in the 19th Century.
Matriarchial societies were aggressively discouraged by muslim rulers after they invaded and occupied large parts of India, since, according to Islamic Kanoon-e-Shariat, a woman can't take a dump without the husband's permission. Despite that, the Mameluk dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate was briefly inherited by a woman, Sultana Razia al-Din (Jalalat ud-Din Raziya), daughter of Shams-ud-Din Iltutmish (India's first and last black emperor).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultan
Of course, the mad mullahs got their undies in a twist over that, but she did rule for 4 significant years in the Sultanate.
There is a strong matriarchial tendency in many Maratha clans in India to this day. Maratha women are aggressive and outgoing (more so than other Indian women). They bunch up their saris , wrap them around around their legs and wrap the tail over the backside and tuck it uder the small of their backs, making them more like trousers.
http://www.maharashtratourism.net/images/women-we
This way, their movements are less restrictive. They can run, walk long distances, balance themselves better while carrying heavy loads, and engage in physical labour like their male counterparts. They are addresses as 'Bai' (meaning Lady) in public, they fish, farm, sell stuff, all that. Maratha women often contribute more to the family income than Maratha men.
South Indian families (even Brahmin ones) often have the mother as the key decision-maker in the family (since males are busy working or studying) and thus has de-facto authority in family matters, even over the husband. This was true of my own grandmother, for instance (I'm Bengali), where my mother was one of 7 children, and my grandmother coached them in homework, got them to do chores, decided which schools they'd go to and so on, while my grandfather was busy at work (sometimes away from home for weeks). That's a matriarchial family right there.
If you define power roles by the breadwinner, then these families are not all matriarchial, but that's a pretty narrow criterion in my opinion. The real power of authority is in the hands of the decision maker, which, in these cases, is the female, not the male.
Plus, many South Indian Hindu Brahmins don't adopt their father's names as family names. They adopt the names of the town/village where their family originated (similar to some Arabs that way). They keep fairly detailed records of their lineage, and not much patriarchial bias exists in that process.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
The math only works if you assume that the ancestry never coincides with itself until it is mathematically impossible for it not to do so. This is ludicrous. Ancestry will coincide many, many times before that point. It is easy to demonstrate mathematically that it is more than possible for an ancestry to fold in on itself repeatedly, without touching other distinct lines.
The basic assumption (flawed), is that having trillions of "ancestors" means that it fold in across the entire spectrum of living people at a given time, when it can in fact fold in multiple times on a selection of that population; or that having any particular person as your ancestor is almost precisely as likely as any other arbitrary person. Historically, there are many social constrictions to make such statistics highly unlikely.
It also seems obvious to me, that were interracial marriages so common place so long ago (across the last few thousand years, even), the world would not be quite as genetically diverse a place as it currently is.
Disclaimer: IANAM(athematician). However, I do love math, and this seems like a fairly obvious and very easily provable flaw. I'm also probably misusing the phrase "fold in" above, though: but I imagine everyone can understand what I mean by that.
Read up on the history of the Crusades, and you'll find a different picture. Yes, some of the crusaders thought they were doing the right thing. Most were doing it because crusaders got benefits in this world (like indulgences for any sin committed while crusading). But beyong the actual crusaders, look at the people who actually called the crusades. They were all called for political reasons, not theological. The important thing to remember when considering the Roman Catholic Church, particularly during the time of the Holy Roman Empire, is that it is not a religious body, it is a religious body and a political one, possibly the most powerful political body of its time.
As the original poster said, many use Jesus' name to support their agendas, but their agendas rarely follow his teaching (see also the England/Ireland dispute; a political sovereignty dispute that many people now use as an example of how religion causes nothing but trouble).
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
There seems to be some kind of a fallacy operating here, which I don't quite understand, between this formal or mathematical notion of being somebody's ancestor or being descended from them, and the biological concept of inheritance in which you actually carry someone's genes (or they carry yours). I mean, my first generation of offspring has half my genes, the next generation has a quarter, then an eighth; if there are finite boundaries, then it must go effectively to zero. So, given that we have a finite number of genes, it would seem that there is a finite number of generations in which one set of genes is likely to be extinguished among at least some fraction of the descended population. So if I contribute my genes to a community -- say I fly to another continent by prehistoric rocket sled ten thousand years ago or whatever, and mate with one of the ones I find attractive, then her family decides to cook and eat me, really eager to show off this fire thing -- how many generations before most of my so-called "descendants" no longer carry any of my genes, even though some of them do carry some? Must happen eventually. But, this article considers all the formal descendants of Anonymous Prehistoric Coward the First to be actual biological descendants of Anonymous Coward -- or at least, it conflates the two notions into one -- as if we are related because my gene touched a gene that touched your gene, or something like that, just the same as if you actually have my freckles.
An interesting tangent to that is, we know my brother and I share, like, a lot of the same genes. If we both have descendants, and all this mixing happens, somewhere down the line our bloodlines cross again and some future descendant carries, say, the brown-eyed bullshitter gene. But whose descendant is he, mine or my brother's? And does it matter? We know he's our father's... but it's the same gene, anyway. Kind of becomes irrelevant, by that point.
I think if you get really careful about defining what you mean by relatedness, this article will end up making a lot more sense, but will have much less sweeping implications. But underlying it is still the moral fact, if you want to call it that, that we are all human beings and as individuals, are really just different examples of the same basic thing. The fact that any two of us "could" be related really means that the similarities outweigh the differences.
--MarkusQ
I'd go a bit further in support of Olson's findings being able to coexist with m-Eve, y-Adam and the Toba bottleneck, but with the disclaimer that the planet is big enough and complex enough for outliers that his model misses.
In particular we know that the Tasmanians were truly isolated for more than 10K years and that while the pure line did not survive the British invasion, there are descendents of Tasmanians from -10K alive today, yet very clearly not everybody is descended from those Tasmanians, so Olson's supplementary claim that there is a single set of everybody's ancestors who were alive around -7K falls over.
I'd expect Tasmania is not even a unique exception, but others might be a lot harder to prove. Those outliers apart, the rest makes broad sense and the relative mobility of genes, might help resolve a few other misconceptions about recent human evolution, especially the post-modern selection pressures favouring poverty and stupidity.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
> Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion, and has never succeeded in displacing Hinduism.
...
I take it you've never heard of the Sohei
While there are other clues that any notion of extended periods of genetic isolation of Australia in recent millenia is misguided, the dingo argument puts that to rest. By the time of the British invasion, dingos had spread through out mainland Australia, but not Tasmania, which does at least provide an exception to Olsen's supplementary claim.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I have cited a society. A very large society. The population of Maharashtra (as of 2001) is 96,752,247. That's a lot of people, and this type of matriarchy is not uncommon among them. That's 2% of the world's population, 30% of the population of North America. hardly a small enough number to dismiss so casually.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Christianity had already spread through the Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion.
Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion
Really? Buddhists ahve historically fought holy wars, and persecuted other religions (for example Japanese Christians were forced into hiding.
Even now arson attacks on churches are frequent in Sri Lanka.
Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other
Jesus fairly consistently preached against hating anyone - even when Jewish tradition permitted it.
The assumptions may or may not be valid. However it's important to note that genetic inheritance != ancestry, and this does not necessarily have to match up with genetic data at all.
Consider two fully isolated populations A and B. At T(100 generations ago) a single individual M migrates from A to B, and causes offspring with someone from B. No further migration takes place ever until the present day. Would you expect to be able to show this genetically? Hardly. Only 1/1^100 of M's DNA would have been passed on to any single individual living in B today(*). That's absolutely nothing at all. The genetic heritage would be entirely dissolved for all purpuses of measuring much earlier than that.
In contrast, ancestry is defined to always be handed down 1:1. M would almost certainly be 100% ancestor to each an every individual living in B today. M's parents would almost certainly be 100% ancestors to the entirety of both A and B (assuming they had at least one more child that stayed in A).
Genetic models reaching this far back are not concerned about individuals at all. Using genetic data, you may be able to show there was a substantial amount of migration between two populations. Single individuals just don't give an impact, genetically. The article uses an entirely different approach, and - importantly - an entirely different concept of inheritance: family trees, not genetics.
Note the article does not just look out for the one common person. It says, every single person living in that timeframe (unless their family tree died out) would be an ancestor to every single person living today. Mind-boggling, but not entirely unreasonable once you realize it's not genetics they are talking about.
(*) Unless of course that person carried some particular gene, which happened to be extremely valuable for living in B, and got an evolutionary advantage. But that's an entirely different story.