Research Suggests One To Three Men Fathered Most Western Europeans

Taco Cowboy writes "'While the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups in Africa took 12 thousand years to spread, those in Europe started from around 3rd millennium.' The speed of spread of the European haplogroups was totally astounding, to say the least. 'There was no R1b found in Europe before a Bell Beaker site from the 3rd millennium BC and today many Europeans (most in western Europe) belong to this haplogroup. 'We used coalescent simulations to investigate the range of demographic models most likely to produce the phylogenetic structures observed in Africa and Europe, assessing the starting and ending genetic effective population sizes, duration of the expansion, and time when expansion ended. The best-fitting models in Africa and Europe are very different. In Africa, the expansion took about 12 thousand years, ending very recently; it started from approximately 40 men and numbers expanded approximately 50-fold. In Europe, the expansion was much more rapid, taking only a few generations and occurring as soon as the major R1b lineage entered Europe; it started from just one to three men, whose numbers expanded more than a thousandfold.'"

Comments

Proof!

[Anonymous Coward]

This proves it! Noah and his sons have been found through genetics.

What now atheists? You better hope it doesn't flood again.

Re:Proof!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So did most Europeans. It's one of the reasons that European history is such an unmitigated meatgrinder from about the moment the Roman Empire started to lose it, right up until the US and USSR got serious about stocking up on nukes. (or, um, I mean, the humanitarian ideals of the UN and EU ushered in a new era of peaceful cooperation. I, um, must have made typo there. Or maybe my keyboard firmware is misanthropic.)

Re:Proof!

[Anonymous Coward]

You jest, but you're actually closer than you think. Japheth was the son of Noah that moved north into Europe. Shem moved east. Ham moved south. All of them left roots in areas at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

Also, if you had read the Bible's account of the flood, you'd know that there won't be another flood. God concluded a "rainbow covenant" with Noah and his family, promising that he would never bring that kind of destruction on the earth again. All future destruction the Bible speaks of will be of people only. The flora and fauna will be left intact.

Re:Proof!

[maxwell demon]

So up to two sons of Noah's wife weren't actually his?

Re:Proof!

[SuricouRaven]

That always struck me as a bit of an empty promise. God said he'd never destroy the world by flood - but he still has fire, massive tectonic activity, meteor impact, quantum vacuum collapse, wandering microsingularity, atmopheric poisoning, extreme heat...

Re:Proof!

[GrumpySteen]

Except that this gene is primarily found in Western Europeans and is non-existent in Asians and other races on the planet. The flood that supposedly took out everyone on the planet would have left everyone sharing the same genetic code which is absolutely not the case here.

Re:Proof!

[ShanghaiBill]

So did most Europeans.

So did most humans. Throughout history, nearly all tribes and nations have felt themselves superior to their neighbors. There was nothing particularly "European" about tribalism and war. In fact, tribalism isn't even a specifically human trait. You can see the same behavior in a pride of lions, a troop of chimpanzees, or even between anthills. It is a predictable emergent behavior of social Darwinism.

Re:Proof!

[swillden]

So did most Europeans. It's one of the reasons that European history is such an unmitigated meatgrinder

Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" (which also thoroughly discusses the demons of our nature) argues that the idea that a belief in God's favor caused the violence is false. Tribalism and lack of empathy (the evolution of empathy, especially empathy for people outside of your closest circle, is fascinating and non-obvious) were the cause of the unmitigated meatgrinder, and it wasn't just Europe, it was everywhere. In fact, recorded European history is mild compared to the pre-history archaeology shows us came before it.

I could try to summarize the arguments, but I wouldn't do them justice. I highly recommend the book.

Re:Proof!

[maxwell demon]

Of course that only applies for monotheistic religions. In polytheism, it's easy: Our god favours us, and the other tribe's god favours them.

Re:Proof!

[swillden]

a belief in God's favor... Tribalism and lack of empathy

If god favors my group, then the other groups are not favored and are therefore inferior and unworthy of my concern. His reasoning why a belief in god's favor does not cause violence is the reason why it causes violence.

No. Seriously, read the book.

What it boils down to is that such logical deduction isn't how people work at the level where what sort of violence we're comfortable with is decided. The logical arguments are a veneer laid over the top to justify the lizard-brain reactions to "otherness", and the psychological infrastructure that's been built up to determine who is "other", which is based primarily on familiarity. At the end of the day, whether god was invoked or not, the same evaluation of otherness occurs and the same impact on empathy or the lack thereof.

For a modern example which easily cuts out the religious question, look at discussions on immigration. I often have a very different perspective on it from others around me, and I can see exactly where that perspective arose, my own life experiences. I spent years living and working in southern Mexico, with people from all walks of life, and specifically trying to build empathic rapport with them. As a result, my attitude about immigration and global competition in general is that all of the people in other countries have just as much right to my job as I do, and if they can do it better, or cheaper, or faster, then they should. Because to me they're not "other". This is not the case for the majority of Americans, at least, so I often get blank stares of complete incomprehension when I make such statements, and a response of "their lives aren't my problem, and my government should be protecting me". It boils down to foreigners being perceived as "other".

Now, I'm not holding myself up as any kind of paragon. I fully recognize that there are groups around me that I perceive as "other", and my reactions to them are much less empathic than they should be. Of late I've become strongly aware of this as my daughter has moved herself to such a group, and it's difficult for me to reconcile my conflicting reactions. Rationally, I recognize that they are not "other", and she certainly isn't, but my brain isn't wired to think that way, and at 45 years of age it's hard for me to re-program (particularly, when I am both emotionally and rationally quite certain that her choices will lead to unhappiness, but that's just a complication, not the core issue).

Re:Proof!

[swillden]

Of course that only applies for monotheistic religions. In polytheism, it's easy: Our god favours us, and the other tribe's god favours them.

A very valid point... and one that highlights the fact that it's not the religion that generates the violence. Whether the argument is that my god favors me and not you so I'll kill you, or that my god hates your god, so I'll kill you, or you oppose the rise of the proletariat, so I'll kill you, or you're a dirty thieving gypsy, so I'll kill you, or... the rational justifications are endless, but they're only justifications. The real issue is tribalism and lack of empathy for others.

One of the points that Pinker really pounds on in the book is that lack of empathy was endemic in the past (in the future they'll probably say the same of our age; we say it of times just a few generations past). For example, a few hundred years ago I might not only have thought nothing of murdering the heathen, even torturing him to death in order to save his soul, but I would also have thought nothing of brutal punishments and tortures for people of my own village who I perceived to have done wrong, or to have offended me or my family. In the past, governments routinely used horrific tortures like breaking on the wheel for relatively minor crimes, or even just political disagreements, even though the tortured was part of the torturer's "tribe".

Re:Proof!

[swillden]

The reason I'm pointing you at the book is that the ideas are not simple, and the very thorough research supporting them is something I cannot reproduce in a slashdot post. Not everything can be reduced to simple language in a few paragraphs.

Re: Proof!

[femtobyte]

The experiment quoted only indicated the breakdown of social structures after straining resource availability through sufficiently high population density. Prior to this, the "culture" wasn't in a state of war and turmoil.

Human social structures may be an order of magnitude bigger, but we've also got a few orders of magnitude bigger brains. This includes the critical ability to intellectually analyze the functioning of social structures and make changes, rather than rolling along with instinct until all hell breaks loose. Those who consider a state of war and brutality to be inevitable among humans are those who want to deny the existence of human minds, and their ability to analyze and alter social arrangements (denial of which is usually prompted by the brain-denying party profiting from a current state of violence and dysfunction).

On The Female Side It Was Just One

[JohnPerkins]

...your mother.

2, maybe 1 or 3?

[jovius]

Must have been quite a night!

Re: Noah

[ScentCone]

The more interesting thing is the number of people who think "alot" is a word, perhaps being the opposite of "alittle."

Doubt it.

[Chalnoth]

The problem with claiming that all Europeans came from a small number of people based upon a Y-chromosome study is that such a study, by design, misses many men who failed to leave male descendants. If, for example, I have four children, but they are all daughters, then my Y chromosome dies with me, even though many other of my genes will still live on in my daughters (in aggregate, if I had four children, around 94% of my genes would survive into the next generation).

This means that over time, we lose the Y chromosomes of many ancestral men just due to random chance. Those 1-3 men might well have been traveling in a group of 200 or so, and Europeans may still carry many genes from many of the other men in that group. But because the other members of the group didn't leave behind Y chromosomes, we don't see them in a Y-chromosome analysis.

The study seems to have found good evidence that Europeans are all descended from a small group, but 1-3 men seems to be stretching it.

Re:Doubt it.

[Arker]

Sure, that's exactly why Y-DNA is useful. It's not a problem that a lot of Y gets lost along the way, as long as this happens uniformly you still wind up with a good sample. The prehistoric group that bore these genes was obviously larger than 1-3 men, but it may well have been a few dozen closely related men, so the ones that left no YDNA are still effectively represented by a cousin who did.

(The same thing happens with MDNA as well - a woman who has only sons disappears from that readout and wont be part of either the male or female sample here - but more than likely a close relative of hers will.)

Re:thanks for the feedback

[Pulzar]

I make my words a bit grating precisely for that reason. I *want* people to pay attention...I am not making the same point everyone else has made. I **DO** believe we can all agree and move forward and I have had some very interesting conversations this way.

That doesn't make any sense. The conversation ended up being about spelling instead of your point, which is completely opposite from what you wanted it to be.

You don't make your words "grating" by misspelling them, you make them irrelevant... unfortunately.

Following that up with an argument that you did it on purpose certainly doesn't help your cause. It only leads it us even further astray from the topic.

Illiterate press

[Alomex]

I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.

A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.