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Europeans Came From Three Ancestry Groupings

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.

55 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. Jews by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Jews by anatoli · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is somewhat more complicated. http://www.livescience.com/402...

      --
      Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
    2. Re:Jews by Carewolf · · Score: 1

      "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.

    3. Re:Jews by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 1

      Well, the thing is that this study did not compare the genetic makeup of Ashkenazi Jews to that of Germans and Poles. It looked at how much of it came from three ancestral groups which Germans and Poles also descended from. I am going to assume that you would have expected Ashkenazi Jews to have the same proportion of those three groups as Germans and Poles. In order to know if that is a reasonable expectation one would need to know if the Germans and Poles have the same, or close to the same, distribution of genes from those three groups. However, even if they do, I would expect Ashkenazi Jews to have at least twice the percentage of DNA from the Near East group as either the Germans or the Poles.
      Having written the above, I just realized that in order to get a decent idea what percentage of the DNA from the Near East group one would expect in the Ashkenazi, one would really need to know what percentage of the DNA of modern Arabs comes from that group. I would expect Ashkenazi Jews to be somewhere between Arabs and Germans or Poles (whichever of the latter is higher), with it being closer to the Arabs than the European(not more than 50% of the distance and not less than 15% of the difference).

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    4. Re:Jews by luis_a_espinal · · Score: 1

      "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 Peninsula.)

      OTH, I (we) have to acknowledge that outward, superficial looks do not equate pure genetic profiles.

    5. Re:Jews by shokk · · Score: 1

      Is this a bot posting?

      --
      "Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
  2. Finnish by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe Finnish really is related to Korean, then

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Finnish by colordev · · Score: 1

      Another study suggest finns are mostly related to... finns

    2. Re:Finnish by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      It's a question I don't claim even begin to understand, and I doubt I will ever learn all the languages needed to understand it.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Finnish by grouchomarxist · · Score: 2

      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.

    4. Re:Finnish by ilguido · · Score: 2

      I did a bit of work on the Altaic language page of wikipedia in the past and I can say it's utter garbage, thanks to the pet theory of one user.

    5. Re:Finnish by jc42 · · Score: 2

      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 met are fluent in only a few languages. These are often languages that are radically different from each other, though, since radical differences in how to express something would be interesting to a linguist.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    6. Re:Finnish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I did a bit of work on the Altaic language page of wikipedia in the past and I can say it's utter garbage, thanks to the pet theory of one user.

      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 they'll only use for a few minutes.

      These disturbed minds are often recruited by political and economic powers in order to shape public perception of national or corporate entities. But sometimes (as in the case of Israel, or Macedonia, or Sanskrit) the obsessives actually recruit themselves.

      No sane person can match the devotion of one of these poor fools, because they will forgo family, friendship, hygiene, and even food in order to "win" whatever war they are fighting inside their own heads.

    7. Re:Finnish by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      What is wrong with it?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    8. Re:Finnish by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      They make mobile phones with awesom cameras,

      Used to......

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    9. Re:Finnish by ilguido · · Score: 1

      It tends to support more some fringe theories than the mainstream theory and it's written in a slightly misleading way. As an example, the Korean and Japanese languages are generally _not_ included in the Altaic family, while they're overwhelmingly considered isolated languages, but the article fails to emphasize that their inclusion is frowned upon by the experts of both languages. Another fact that is almost overlooked by the article is that many proponents of this language family think that it is a useful classification, but are agnostic about its origin: apart a small hardcore group, most linguists think that the similarities between Turkic, Mongol and Tungusic dialects are adequately explained by their historical proximity and are very dubious about the possibility to even demonstrate their genealogical relations. Here comes the pet theory: the hardcore proponents of the Macro-Altaic language family need the inclusion of some other language to demonstrate that genealogical link, some language that is both old and distant, so to hint at an ancient relation and to discard the idea of a more recent mutual influence; if you can demonstrate that Mongol/Tungusic are related to Japanese and Korean you can say that their relations, not only between those two groups, but even between Mongol, Turkic and Tungusic are probably due to an ancient genesis and not to documented centuries of common life in the steppe. The problem is that none, so far, has given an accepted demonstration of that link, while many have given reasons to believe it's not valid (the more you go back in Japanese and Korean, the more those languages diverge). All these difficulties are overlooked in the article, so to lean toward a Macro-Altaic point of view.

    10. Re:Finnish by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Interesting, thanks

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  3. Hmmm by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    Is there a connection with the adjacent story?

    1. Re:Hmmm by jc42 · · Score: 1

      Is there a connection with the adjacent story?

      Yeah; if you look back a couple of million years, we're all related to chimpanzees.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  4. Re:Of course by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    What if those 3 interbreed?

  5. Not only in Midgard by KiloByte · · Score: 1

    We know that warlike once-nomadic Aesir mingled with settled farmer Vanir.

    Which speaks heaps about their worshippers.

    --
    The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    1. Re:Not only in Midgard by skine · · Score: 1

      Not to mention the peredhil.

  6. Re:Of course by Sique · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Luckily, most US-Americans are in one way or another descendants of the Euros, thus they fall in the same categories.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  7. Not True, I Saw It Online: by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    1. Re:Not True, I Saw It Online: by jc42 · · Score: 3, 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.

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    2. Re:Not True, I Saw It Online: by mjm1231 · · Score: 1

      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.)

      --
      Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
    3. Re:Not True, I Saw It Online: by Half-pint+HAL · · 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.

      Nope, there's no race... because it's not a competition.

      --
      Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  8. Re:Of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    What if those 3 interbreed?

    Socialists are produced.

  9. Re:Fair and darker skin by Sique · · Score: 3, Informative

    Supposed to be surprising is that there is a third component, people from the Northeast, who are directly related to Native Americans.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  10. Re:fuck a bgn^aa by jandersen · · Score: 1

    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]

  11. Re:Fair and darker skin by jandersen · · Score: 4, 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.

  12. Study says... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Europeans product of menage a trois.

  13. Re:Didn't we already know this? by Your.Master · · Score: 1

    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.

  14. Re:fuck a bgn^aa by righteousness · · Score: 1

    I have personally never seen that goatse image I keep reading about. Either that, or my mind has been extremely successful at repressing those particular memories of seeing the goatse images, gruesome as they are based on the descriptions I've read.

    --
    Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
  15. Re:fuck a bgn^aa by mister_playboy · · Score: 1

    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. :)

    --
    Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
  16. This study generates more questions than answers by Anonymous Coward · · 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/...

    Secondly, the study says that there is a new, extremely ancient group, that it calls "basal eurasians", of "non-African ancestry". Oh, really? Are they really saying that mankind, AKA "Homini Sapientes Sapientes", didn't come from modern-day Ethiopia? This is either a massive revolution in the history of anthropology, or a huge, embarrassing error.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    I think that AT LEAST the wording used in the study (and in the article) is quite confused and imprecise.

  17. Re:Fair and darker skin by Sique · · Score: 2

    Farmers are more productive, given a certain amount of land, as they exclusively breed those plants and animals they are actually using, and throw everything else out. Hunterer and gatherers need much more vast lands to get the same amount of food. (As an example: The territory of the indigenous Yamomami in South America is comparable to Austria and Switzerland in size, but only about 25,000 persons live there, compared with the several millions living in Austria or Switzerland.)

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  18. Re:This study generates more questions than answer by Sique · · Score: 1

    Look at the time frames! The article talks about the genetic influences until 7000 years ago, while the spread of the indo-european tribes started about 5000 years ago. So we are talking about populations in different times eras. And then it's quite sure that the spread of the Indo-Europeans was not so much a complete elimination of the old Europeans but rather an assimilation. The Indo-Europeans came with new social structures and technologies, intermixing with the local population and assimilated them into their indo-european clans and tribes. Thus the local languages died out, but the genetic traits were preserved in their descendants.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  19. Re:Of course by haruchai · · Score: 1

    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"

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  20. Teaching/Learning machanism by DrYak · · Score: 4, 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".

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:Teaching/Learning machanism by NemoinSpace · · Score: 1

      I am certainly willing to observe the continuing evolution of science as well as religion. I don't hold contempt for a people that used to worship the Sun, nor do I despise the idea that we used to think the Sun was made of coal. What I find irreconcilable are pseudo intellectuals whose entire mathematical model of the universe depends on discounting 1/0. Especially, as I have been told by every instructor i ever had, there is no way to justify infinity, (or undefined). You just have to accept the answer and "take it on faith" Look, Mr. Neil i-have-two-last-names-Tyson, any man that hates God AND Pluto has got an axe to grind in my book. Stick to physics, and leave metaphysics to the experts. ok?
      Now, science is not all bad, I happen to think the double slit experiment is one of the coolest things I've ever done and that is about as empirical AND mystical as it gets. See, if you can believe in a photon that exists outside of your light cone, God is not that much of a leap.

  21. Re:This study generates more questions than answer by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

    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.

  22. Re:Fair and darker skin by theVarangian · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. Re:This study generates more questions than answer by Sique · · Score: 1

    According to my sources (e.g. the german version of Wikipedia), the first sources of an indoeuropean language date much later, between 3000 and 2500 BC.

    --
    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  24. Pan-Racial Future by retroworks · · Score: 1

    On an evolutionary time scale, this is a snapshot. "Europeans" meant something for several thousand years, but the intermarriage and population growth and travel will commingle DNA in a century or two (evolutionarily known as an "instant"). I'm white and have native American DNA, most black / African Americans are dark skinned and have loads of European DNA, etc etc. These DNA results are interesting but it's like trying to follow a weather pattern, the geographical barriers are toast.

    --
    Gently reply
  25. > 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!

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  26. Please do not rely too much on projection by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... but the intermarriage and population growth and travel will commingle DNA in a century or two ...

    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 occurred at all, did not happen like what we are enjoying today

    Most of the events that led to the "exchange of genetic materials" and the "commingle of DNA sequences" most probably happened via brutal wars and gang rapes

    In other words, all of us, no matter which racial background we came from, we are the descendants of those who were strong, intelligent, or lucky, or the combination of 2 or even all three of the above, for the weak, the low-minded and/or the unlucky, didn't get the chance to pass on their genetic material down through the millennia

    --
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  27. Re:Fair and darker skin by tomhath · · Score: 1

    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.

  28. Re:Fair and darker skin by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1
    Here in the UK, hunter-gatherers would have to leave in the winter, and would probably have the good sense not to come back, or else they died*. Farmers might manage to store food to last them through the winter.

    * This was before the Romans brought chimneys and window glass.

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  29. 1984 by BlackHawk-666 · · Score: 1

    Eurasia is at war with Oceania. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.

    --
    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  30. Re:Fair and darker skin by HornWumpus · · Score: 1

    Because all wildlife dies in winter? No? I guess you are wrong then.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  31. Re:Didn't we already know this? by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

    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 as any other superstition. But that doesn't mean that the ban on pork isn't down to seeing what pig-borne diseases can do to humans.

    --
    Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  32. Re:French are from by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

    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.

    --
    Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  33. Re:Fair and darker skin by Half-pint+HAL · · Score: 1

    Horde nuts (like a squirrel) then throw a few spears at deer and geese. I don't see the problem.

    --
    Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
  34. Re:Fair and darker skin by jandersen · · Score: 1

    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.