The idea of a “folk wandering” was once a well accepted idea in history, in particular for the phase of the Late Roman Empire, and the subsequent fall of the Western Empire. It’s a rather simple concept: the collapse of the Pax Romana occurred simultaneous with a mass ethnic reordering of Europe, primarily via the migration of Germanic peoples across its frontiers and beyond. The most extreme depictions of this can be found in the works of the British cleric Gildas: German hordes literally drove the British into the sea, until they only retained their redoubts around the “Celtic Fringe.”

This was an extreme understanding of the dynamics of post-Roman Europe. It was, and has been, succeeded by another extreme model: that the ethnic change in the post-Roman world was more illusion than substance, a manner of shifting nomenclature, than lineage. For example, I have commonly read in this literature that the Germanic tribes which crystallized as “federates” to the Romans, or on occasion as antagonists (or vassals to hostile powers such as the Huns) were ad hoc collections of mercenaries who created an identity de novo.  In some cases it is posited that masses of Romans simply assimilated to the identity of a small cadre of warriors whose demographic impact was trivial. This is the scenario that is posited for the transformation of Celtic Britain into Germanic England. But let’s shift away from that extreme case, and look at another one: the 5th and early 6th century kingdom of the Vandals in Norh Africa.

 

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Because of scheduling conflicts* I can’t make ScienceOnline2012 (I had planned to make it). But I thought I would put in an announcement here that in a month and a half I’ll be at the Moving Secularism Forward conference put on by the Center for Inquiry. I’m going to be on a political panel on Saturday afternoon, the 3rd of March. There are going to be representatives of the progressive, liberal, conservative, and libertarian, positions. I’ll be the conservative, and make a 20 minute presentation. There will be a Q & A. My time in the “spotlight” should be no more than a few hours.

My current plan is that I’ll be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. It’s in Orlando, Florida. I have no idea as to the overlap between the audience for that sort of conference and the readership of this weblog, but I assume that there is some intersection. I don’t really do the reader meetup thing anymore, but if you see me feel free to say hello. I won’t give you a weird look. My only current “social” plans are to meet up with Ron Bailey, who’s going to give the libertarian perspective on the panel, and whose work I’ve been a great admirer of for years.

* Where x = r, E(x) = 0.50, Var(x) = 0.0

After the second Henn et al. paper I did download the data. Unfortunately there are only 62,000 SNPs intersecting with the HGDP. This is somewhat marginal for fine-grained ADMIXTURE analyses, though sufficient for PCA from what I recall. That being said, the intersection with the HapMap data sets runs from ~190,000 SNPs, to the full 250,000 SNPs (this makes sense since the Henn et al. #2 data set has some HapMap populations in it). So I’ve been experimenting a fair amount in the past few days, and I thought I would post on one issue which was clear in the original paper, but which I have replicated.

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Michelle points me to this article in The Lost Angeles Times, The Colors of the Family:

I was holding my 1-year-old, ambling about downtown with some friends. White friends. She must have thought my boy belonged to one of them.

There’s a simple explanation: I’m black but my son, Ashe, is white. At least he looks it.

But things are more complicated than that.

I’m actually half black and half white. It should come as no surprise, though, that even as sophisticated as we’ve become about people of mixed parentage, I’m pigeonholed as black. If someone asks and I don’t have time to go deeper, that’s what I call myself.

Ashe is mixed too. His mother, my wife, Vanashree, is half white and half South Asian, with roots in India. She has olive skin, and Ashe is slightly lighter than she is.

This surprised us. When Ashe was born, one of the first things I said to Vanashree was, “Honey, he’s so light!” We chuckled, poking fun at our assumptions.*

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Dienekes and Maju have both commented on a new paper which looked at the likelihood of lactase persistence in Neolithic remains from Spain, but I thought I would comment on it as well. The paper is: Low prevalence of lactase persistence in Neolithic South-West Europe. The location is on the fringes of the modern Basque country, while the time frame is ~3000 BC. Table 3 shows the major result:

Lactase persistence is a dominant trait. That means any individual with at least one copy of the T allele is persistent. As Maju noted a peculiarity here is that the genotypes are not in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium. Specifically, there are an excess of homozygotes. Using the SJAPL location as a potentially random mating scenario you should expect ~7 T/C genotypes, not 2. Interestingly the persistent individual in the Longar location also a homozygote.

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The New Atlantis has a nice piece, The Global War Against Baby Girls. It’s relatively heavy on charts and maps, so I recommend it (yes, it has a particular ideological perspective, but that’s really not consequential, as I assume most readers do not favor skewed sex ratios either). There’s nothing too surprising in it (assuming you won’t be surprised by the finding that in many societies there is a correlation between economic development and higher rates of sex selective abortion). But it’s thorough and highlights the complexities of social dynamics well.

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In the near future I will be analyzing the genotype of an individual where all four grandparents have been typed. But this got me thinking about my own situation: is there a way I could “reconstruct” my own grandparents? None of them are living. The easiest way to type them would be to obtain tissue samples from hospitals. This is not totally implausible, though in this case these would be Bangladeshi hospitals, so they might not have saved samples or even have a good record of hem. Another way would be to extract DNA from the burial site. This is not necessarily palatable. But assuming you did this, if you have access to a forensic lab it might be pretty easy (though I think most forensic labs using VNTRs, rather than SNP chips, so I don’t know if they’d touch every chromosome), I’m not sure that the quality would be optimal for more vanilla typing operations, especially for older samples which are likely to be contaminated with a lot of bacteria.

For me the simplest option is to look at relatives. Each of my grandparents happens to have had siblings, so there are many sets of relatives related to just each of those individuals of interest. I also have many cousins, so pooling all the genotypes together and using the information of a pedigree one could ascertain which chromosomal segments are likely to derive from a particular grandparent. To give a concrete example, my mother has a maternal cousin to whom she is quite close. By typing my mother and her cousin one could infer that the segments shared across the two individuals derive from the common maternal grandparents. Of course there’s a problem that cousins have a coefficient of relatedness of only 1/8th, so there is going to be a lot of information missing. But, if you had lots of cousins you could presumably reconstruct the genotypes far better.

 

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Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World:

For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.

Instead of being pristine forests, barely inhabited by people, parts of the Amazon may have been home for centuries to large populations numbering well into the thousands and living in dozens of towns connected by road networks, explains the American writer Charles C. Mann. In fact, according to Mr. Mann, the British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished on his 1925 quest to find the lost “City of Z” in the Xingu, one area with such urban settlements.

In addition to parts of the Amazon being “much more thickly populated than previously thought,” Mr. Mann, the author of “1491,” a groundbreaking book about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, said, “these people purposefully modified their environment in long-lasting ways.”

…

“If one wants to recreate pre-Columbian Amazonia, most of the forest needs to be removed, with many people and a managed, highly productive landscape replacing it,” said William Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who is part of a team studying the Acre geoglyphs.

“I know that this will not sit well with ardent environmentalists,” Mr. Woods said, “but what else can one say?”

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Shah Ismail I

The BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time just had an episode on the Safavid dynasty. If you want to understand how Iran as we understand it came to be, and you know nothing about the Safavids, this program is essential. Because of its outsized role in Western antiquity the pre-Christian Achaemenids are well known, while Iranian nationalists may look to the pre-Islamic Sassanians immortalized in the Shahnameh. Obviously these dynasties are important, just as the House of Wessex and the Plantagenets are essential in understanding how Britain came to be. But to truly comprehend England as a Protestant nation with a distinctive identity in relation to the continent the England of the Tudors and Stuarts, who happen to be contemporaneous with the Safavids, are much more important.

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Zinedine Zidane, a Kabyle

There is a new paper in PLoS Genetics out which purports to characterize the ancestry of the populations of northern Africa in greater detail. This is important. The HGDP data set does have a North African population, the Mozabites, but it’s not ideal to represent hundreds of millions of people with just one group. The first author on this new paper is Brenna Henn, who was also first author on another paper with a diverse African data set. Importantly the data was posted online. Unfortunately though most of the populations didn’t have too many markers. This isn’t an issue in an of itself, but it becomes a big deal when trying to combine it with other data sets. If you limit the markers to those which intersect across two data sets you start to thin them down a lot, to the point where they’re not useful. Though the the results of the paper are worth talking about, the authors claim that they’ll be putting the data online. This is important because they used a large number of markers, so the intersections will be nice (I can, for example, envisage exploring the relationship between the North Africans and the IBS Iberian sample in the near future).

As for the paper itself, Genomic Ancestry of North Africans Supports Back-to-Africa Migrations:
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