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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.
Maybe Finnish really is related to Korean, then
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is somewhat more complicated. http://www.livescience.com/402...
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
Supposed to be surprising is that there is a third component, people from the Northeast, who are directly related to Native Americans.
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.
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.)
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 ]
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.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !