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The filament across Eurasia

silkroad51u0BtDlYJL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_Several people have asked me about this article in Foreign Policy, Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt? It’s interesting in terms of cultural commentary, and what it say about open-mindedness among the Chinese public and academy. In many ways the Chinese are much less open-minded than Westerners after decades of Marxism…but in other ways, they are surprisingly liberal in the classical sense. Willing to entertain crazy ideas out of left field.

The hypothesis that the roots of Chinese civilization diffused from ancient Egypt via the vector of a Hyksos migration is definitely a bridge too far. There’s no strong evidence for it from what I’ve seen. But there are different forms of diffusion. As highlighted in the article itself there is good evidence of cultural diffusion of specific elements of Shang technology, such as chariots. The chariot was the weapon of mass destruction of the Bronze Age. Once invented, it spread rapidly from one end of Eurasia to the other (and, into Egypt as well).

But there are still elements of uncertainty as to how it spread. One model is that it was transmitted from one society to another, in a process akin to how guns or influenza might have spread among Native Americans. Then, there is the leapfrog model, whereby long distance migration and travel serve to facilitate diffusion of culture (and genes).

k8882In the late 2000s I read Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present Reprint Edition, a sprawling and idiosyncratic book which makes the case for the centrality of the Eurasian “Heartland” to world history. The author suggests as an aside that the progenitors of the Shang themselves may have been from the steppe, perhaps Indo-Europeans. At the time I dismissed that as lacking evidence.

But the past half a decade or more has shown us that populations moved a long more in the past 10,000 years than we’d have been led to believe. I am probably more open to an Indo-European influence on early Chinese civilization than I was in the late 2000s. This is where Y chromosomes are helpful. Below are Y chromosomal distributions of some ethnic minorities from northern and western China today:

Screenshot 2016-09-04 19.31.00

And here’s a table of a more diverse set of East Asian groups:

Screenshot 2016-09-04 19.32.30

The question of timescale is important. The Chinese Tatars arrived only in the last few hundred years from the Volga region of Russia. They have a lot of haplogroup I, which seems to be carried over from Pleistocene era West Eurasian populations. In contrast, we know that haplgroup R1a1a, and in particular the Z93 subclade common among South and Central Asians, was present in the Altai region during the Bronze Age because of ancient DNA. And we see R1a1a across many populations in these data. Unfortunately though there isn’t a breakdown between European and Asian subclades, because there has been a long movement back and forth on the steppe in the last 4,000 years (the Uyghurs also carry H, which is typical more of South Asian groups, indicating movement across the Pamirs, as has been historically attested). But the high frequency among the Uyghurs, the low frequency of other West Eurasian Y haplogroups, such as R1b and I (as well as the presence of J), are suggestive (along with autosomal work) of pre-Mongol West Eurasian heritage.

This is obvious to anyone who knows the history of the Silk Road and the European features of the mummies of Xinjiang (not to mention the cave paintings). The ancient DNA and history indicate that very early on a mixed population of western and eastern origins emerged in the heart of Eurasia. The question then is what role did they play in Chinese history? Almost certainly at minimum they were the vector by which the knowledge of the construction of chariots and other aspects of the West Eurasian military-industrial system were transmitted (just as later they were instrumental in the transmission of Buddhism). At maximum, they may have been the seeds around which chariot elites emerged in the Shang period.

The genetic data suggest that if there was a demographic impact, it was very small. The Han Chinese in the data which carry West Eurasian haplogroups are invariably sampled from the far north and west. Regions where assimilation of non-Han minorities to a Han identity has been common. Unlike Europe and South Asia, and like the Middle East, the Y chromosomes in East Asia do not as a whole seem star-shaped. This suggests that the demographic basis of the elites probably dates to the Neolithic, and was indigenous, as opposed to migrants from elsewhere. The role of Indo-Europeans was probably stimulative, rather than directive.

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