Last week Spencer and I talked about chromosomes and their sociological import on The Insight. It was a pretty popular episode, but then again, my post on the genetics of Genghis Khan is literally my most popular piece of writing of all time which wasn’t distributed in a non-blog channel (hundreds of thousands of people have read it). Thanks to everyone who left a review on iTunes and Stitcher (well, a good review). We’re getting close to my goal of 100 reviews on iTunes and 10 on Stitcher so that I won’t pester you about it.
Of course the reality is that the heyday of chromosomal population genetic studies was arguably about 15 years ago, when Spencer wrote The Journey of Man. I have personally constructed Y phylogenies before…but as you know from reading this weblog, I tend to look at genome-wide autosomal studies. There is a reason that why Who We Are and How We Got Here focuses on autosomal data.
All that being said, Y (and mtDNA) still have an important role to play in understanding the past: sociological dynamics. The podcast was mostly focused on star phylogenies, whether it be the Genghis Khan haplotype, or the dominant lineages of R1a and R1b. Strong reproductive skew does have genome-wide effects, but unless it’s polygyny as extreme as an elephant seal’s those effects are going to be more subtle than what you see in the Y and mtDNA.
Submitted for your approval, two recent preprints on bioRxiv: The role of matrilineality in shaping patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA sequence variation in southwestern Angola and Cultural Innovations influence patterns of genetic diversity in Northwestern Amazonia. The future is going to be in understanding sexual dynamics and culture.
The linguistic exogamy practice of NW Amazonia has got to be one of the most remarkable marriage practices on Earth. Making a marriage work is hard enough. Making a marriage work when you are guaranteed as a matter of social mandates not to speak the same language as your spouse is just nuts!
I can see the reasons that it could have come to be in order to avoid inbreeding, but still!
OTOH, brides from distant places were common place in early Bronze Age IE communities in Europe, based upon chemical studies aimed to the childhood diets of people that can be discerned from human remains, and this has been fairly common for royal families as well historically. Likewise, newcomer communities from Jews everywhere to Parsis in India to Europeans in Latin America to waves of migrations into Europe by IE people have frequently involved exogamy with local women who often would have been linguistically different in early generations of admixture.
I think it is hard to understand what all this really means in concrete terms without either ethnography or historical fiction.
I wonder about Haplogroup Q in Britain. There are some subclades not associated with the Vikings:
https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_Q_Y-DNA.shtml
https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/britain_ireland_dna.shtml
Given the claim by Bede that the Anglo-Saxons were partly derived from the Huns, I wonder if those subclades may be an indicator, as the Huns are usually associated with Haplogroup Q:
http://www.caitlingreen.org/2015/07/were-there-huns-in-anglo-saxon-england.html
Do you have any good sources on Anglo-Saxon Y-DNA?