DNA Study: First Farmers Were Also Sailors

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "When hunter-gatherers in the Middle East began to settle down and cultivate crops about 10,500 years ago, they became the world's first farmers. But two new papers suggest that they were at home on both the land and the sea: Studies of ancient and modern human DNA, including the first reported ancient DNA from early Middle Eastern farmers, indicate that agriculture spread to Europe via a coastal route, probably by farmers using boats to island hop across the Aegean and Mediterranean seas."

Comments

More and more data

[ColdWetDog]

Coming out about early humans via mitochondrial DNA sequencing. This is a hugely difficult undertaking and long thought to be impossible in any useful sense. If you are interested in how this particularly technology took off, Svante Paabo, one of the pioneers of this field, has an interesting, albeit someone self aggrandizing book Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes that is remarkably readable and reasonably technical at the same time.

Re:More and more data

[hey!]

Well, I haven't read the book either, but most of the meat of your question is in the presumptions it makes. Let me address them respectfully.

The main thrust of your post is that race is an objective reality but that studying it is politically incorrect. It is true that racial theories will tend to be dismissed as crackpottery. But there's more to it than just the bad aftertaste of Nazi pseudoscience. First, race as a scientific concept is too squishy to become a useful theory; it generates too many intuitively attractive hypotheses that can't be tested empirically; and that invites us to interpret myth as fact.

Case in point: the Germans. My sister married into a family from Germany, and my daughter lived for awhile in Hamburg and made many friends there, and guess what? That's an awful lot of blue eyes and fair hair. The temptation is to think this is the genetic heritage of the "German Race"; that it comes down to them from a small group of fair haired, blue-eyed proto Germans in the far distant past. But there's no *evidence* to support that; it's just a satisfyingly simple myth.

There are nomads in very "Yellow race" looking Central Asian steppe tribes that have blond hair and blue eyes. Aha! Some adventuring proto-German probably spread his wild oats on the Silk Road! But that's the *myth* speaking. The facts are *equally* consistent with the genes flowing the other way, or flowing to both places from a third source, say the Slavs. Even if we presume that the sharing of these features is due to interbreeding, the facts don't support one scenario over the other. Julius Caesar doesn't mention the appearance of Germans in his account of the Gallic Wars in 51 BC; they might have been light-skinned, fair skin and blue eyed as many Germans are today. But they *equally likely* might have been none of those things. A few hundred years would easily suffice for such features to go from rare to very common in such a small population.

But the idea of "race" as we have received it is very definite on the matter. Take the case of one Frederic Austin Ogg, an otherwise intelligent and educated historian writing at the height of the respectability of "racial science":

For my own part, I agree with those who think that the tribes of Germany are free from all trace of intermarriage with foreign nations, and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed race, like none but themselves.

Yes, but *why* did he believe this? What evidence did he have?

Well, we now have genetic information now to address the question of how racially pure of the Germans are. The answer is, "not very". There was plenty of "intermarriage" (or at least inter-boinking) going on between Germans and others, even apparently *Africans*, although not necessarily *directly*. But the genes don't care, they just spread themselves as far and wide as they can. And that's the norm with humanity: populations are too genetically permeable for pure-bred peoples or "races" to exist.

If you go beyond a few superficial features to the whole spectrum of genes, the various three and five race divisions of the human race that were concocted in the 19th and early 20th C all fall apart, and a more complicated picture of extensive interbreeding emerges.

That should be a final nail in the coffin of "race", but science provides one more, a painful rejection for advocates of racial purity and self-love: Most of the genetic diversity in the human race resides within black Africans. So if you were to start with the *genes* and divided humanity into five "great races", what you'd end up with is four somewhat arbitrarily grouped African races and one catch-all race for everyone else in the world (e.g. Germans and Celts would be in the same category as Dravian Indians and Australian Aborignes).

Now any one can see dividing humanity up into "races" this way is useless, but in fact there's actually *more* factual support for this than any of the three race or five race schemes of 19

Re:Is that where the pre-Clovis culture came from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling Clovis a "culture" when its sole defining characteristic is a common utilitarian lithic assmblage is akin to saying the Chinese and Europeans are the same culture because we both use hammers. And by extension, it makes zero sense to say that any given population was exterminated because new technologies became commonplace. Did the Japanese culture simply disappear after adopting Western technologies following Perry's visit to Tokyo Harbor? The pre-conquest settlement of the New World was accomplished through several waves of eastern migrations from the Asian continent with possible lesser contributions via Oceania. As new settlers arrived, they were absorbed into the populations already existing there, adopting existing lifeways and/or making contributions of their own. Clovis technology was particularly well-adapted to the ecology of the American continents at the time, since Pleistocene megafauna were still abundant at the time, presenting an abundant and relatively easily exploited protein source. Of course it became ubiquitous across the many culturally distinct groups that doubtlessly lived in the Americas at the time. As the megafauna disappeared, so did the big-game lifeway and its corresponding tech. No "exterminaton" hypotheses necessary.

There is also absolutely ZERO credible evidence, archaeological or genetic, that Africans or Mediterraneans made any forays into the New World prior to the age of exploration, or that any large-scale population extermination occurred prior to the arrival of Europeans. While smaller-scale massacres are attested, these only occurred long after the continent was fully settled and represent the results of conflicts between established societies, all of whom are genetically related to today's "Native Americans."

Yes, I am an archaeologist.