There’s a new paper in BMC Biology, Patterns of African and Asian admixture in the Afrikaner population of South Africa, which confirms some of what I found years ago with a much smaller data set, The Genetics Of Afrikaners (Again). The PCA above and Treemix to the right I generated from the data in the new paper.
Here are their results:
To investigate the genetic ancestry of the Afrikaner population today (11–13 generations after initial colonization), we genotyped approximately five million genome-wide markers in 77 Afrikaner individuals and compared their genotypes to populations across the world to determine parental source populations and admixture proportions. We found that the majority of Afrikaner ancestry (average 95.3%) came from European populations (specifically northwestern European populations), but that almost all Afrikaners had admixture from non-Europeans. The non-European admixture originated mostly from people who were brought to South Africa as slaves and, to a lesser extent, from local Khoe-San groups. Furthermore, despite a potentially small founding population, there is no sign of a recent bottleneck in the Afrikaner compared to other European populations. Admixture amongst diverse groups from Europe and elsewhere during early colonial times might have counterbalanced the effects of a small founding population.
Afrikaner ancestry is overwhelmingly Northern European. But as you see in the PCA above they are notably African and Asian shifted when compared to their potential ancestral populations (I used Dutch and German individuals above). For me this is the part that is important, if not surprising:
The individual with the most non-European admixture had 24.9% non-European admixture, and only a single Afrikaner individual (out of 77) had no evidence of non-European admixture…Amongst the 77 Afrikaners investigated, 6.5% had above 10% non-European admixture, 27.3% between 5 and 10%, 59.7% between 1 and 5% and 6.5% below 1%.
So about 87% of Afrikaners in their sample had between 1 to 10 percent non-European ancestry. As suggested by genealogical evidence, genetics indicates this is a relatively recent admixture, occurring during the 17th and 18th-century. The early decades of the Cape Colony. It’s a mix of diverse Asian and African components. In some ways, it seems that the non-European ancestry in modern Afrikaners is just the same phenomenon which gave rise to the Cape Coloured population, which is a mix of European, Asian (Indian and Austronesian) and African (Bantu and Khoisan).
Honestly, I think the individuals with more than 10% non-European ancestry, or 0% non-European ancestry, may have recent non-Afrikaner ancestry, and so are not representative (Hendrik Verweord was Dutch and immigrated to South Africa, so he would not have had non-European ancestry). Arguably, the fact that Afrikaners are only ~5% non-European is rather surprising in light of the conditions of the Cape Colony during its early years.
But, this result is more interesting in light of how it contrasts with another case. Also in the 17th-century, there emerged another European settler society on the edge of a vast ocean rooted in a deeply Calvinist faith. By this, I mean the colonies of New England. Though New England has been reshaped by later migrations, between 1640 and 1790 30,000 English settlers expanded and grew into a region with 750,000 Americans. In the early 19th-century, New England spilled out over much of the northern swath of the United States of America, in part due to the fact that the fertility of New Englanders was quite high (the early Mormons were fundamentally a New England-derived subculture).
And yet unlike the Afrikaners or the whites of Latin America, the scions of New England have no non-European ancestry. One might argue here that this is due to the lack of opportunity, as the number of slaves in New England was always very low, and there were no native peoples. King Philip’s War falsifies the latter contention. There were numerous native people. At least initially. But the New Englanders were very efficient and effective at marginalizing and exterminating the native peoples of the region. To a far greater extent than occurred in the South.
There was no New England “Trail of Tears,” because New Englanders eliminated most of the local tribes. There are even records New England militias in the 17th-century drowning native children in the Connecticut River as an ultimate solution (to the chagrin and concern of some ministers who wished these children to be baptized and raised as Christians).
Of course, another distinctive aspect of the New England settlement is that it was the transplantation of a whole English society, men and women, rather than simply men seeking fortune and opportunity. This sex balance from the beginning meant that there was no necessity of looking for partners in the local population, as often occurred in other colonial contexts.
The lack of any local imprint on New England’s genetics, in contrast with almost all other settler and colonial societies, is in keeping with the other peculiarities of the region’s cultures. By the latter portion of the 18th-century New England was unique because it was beginning to see itself as not just a complement of the metropole, but a potential rival.* A potential that would be realized with the intellectual (the emergence of Harvard) and economic (industrialization) developments of the 19th-century.
Today when talking to Patrick Wyman of Tides of History, I suggested that genetics can only be understood in a broader context, even if it is to answer specific questions. Though European settler societies are all predominantly European, both culturally and biologically, New England’s uniqueness genetically in having almost no native input reflects I think a broader cultural reality of the region’s history: it is peculiarly European without much synthesis with the local substrate.
* The South was a traditional commodity-exporting colony. The Mid-Atlantic, focused on New York City, was the center of mercantile activity that operated as a transaction hub of a global trade system.
It’s interesting that the non-European admixture in Boers is not predominantly from Bantu groups. Several other groups contributed as much or more. Is this a reflection of the demographics of the Dutch Cape Colony in the 17th century or so having been quite different from today’s South Africa?
Albion’s Seed describes New England Puritanism quite vividly as unusually educated, unusually hierarchial, and (in an odd way) unusually matriarchial.
Scott Alexander’s ‘summary’: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed
As an English South African with some Afrikaner in me, I have 2% Bantu ancestry, but it likely comes from slaves taken from Tanzania or Mozambique.
Full disclosure:
Western Europe: 72.59%
Ashkenazi Jew: 15.01%
Southern Asia: 8.91%
Southern African Bantu: 2.07%
Eastern Africa: 1.41%
So Afrikaners are basically Southern Brazilian whites.
The parish books of the early settlers are well preserved and describe marriages to slave women from Asia and Africa (both Guinea and Mozambique) in perfect detail. The marriages to native locals aren’t mentioned with perhaps a handful of exceptions. The standard explanation of the reasons why, nonetheless, there is about as much old Khoe-San ancestry as Bantu ancestry is that the stigma of marrying free locals was quite substantial, and the parishes used an euphemism, van den Kaap (“Cape’s local”) for the Khoe-San brides.
All instances where non-European ancestry shoots above 10% are due to a much more recent intermarriage, generally dating back to earlier XX c. when it wasn’t uncommon to marry lighter-skinned Coloureds after having them “reclassified as whites”.
Perhaps New Englanders had a similar stigma associated with marrying local, and thus tribally connected, free women (slave brides didn’t have influential in-laws, unlike free locals, perhaps?)
Interesting that New England genocide/plagues were fast enough to prevent introgression, but slow enough to allow settlers to adopt geographic names from the indigenous groups that they virtually eliminated. I wonder if that’s relevant elsewhere in the world (I understand that name adoption is pretty common).
Perhaps New Englanders had a similar stigma associated with marrying local, and thus tribally connected, free women (slave brides didn’t have influential in-laws, unlike free locals, perhaps?)
but the stigma has to be CRAZY to be ~0%. i’ve talked to ppl who have had these old new england pedigrees genotyped (though i guess few of them are ‘pure’) anymore, and no native in theem.
i think a better explanation is that when you have 30,000 ppl migrate in 10 years it obviates the need for intermarriage. the early new englanders clearly saw themselves as a people apart…
Hot take: women promote genocide
I wonder if this has to do with particularities of Anglo, Protestant cultural norms. For example, do Anglo-Canadians and Australians have significant amounts of indigenous ancestry? And additionally, it would be interesting to compare these Puritan descendants to French-Canadians, as they settled in North America around the same time and also descend from a significant bottleneck, although they belonged to a very different sect of Christianity.
I yield to no man in my disdain for the Yankee Puritans and their arrogant self righteousness. But, I think the difference between African and North American pre-European populations may be a confounding factor.
The latter were devastated by infectious diseases that came with the Europeans. I would hazard that Africans Having more communication with the Middle East and India via the trade routes, had some degree of immunity to the common diseases of the Europeans.
I would suggest that a better control group for New England Yankees would be Quebecois Canadiennes françaises, particularly those who lived between the Saint Lawrence River and the US border as it is contiguous with Yankee territory, and some of the tribal groupings would have overlapped.
I note that you wrote an article about them in Discover 9 years ago. “The genomic heritage of French Canadians” By Razib Khan on January 24, 2011 at:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-genomic-heritage-of-french-canadians
From Giliomee’s book about the Afrikaner people:
“The Huguenots made a difference in another important respect. Previously the shortage of European women prompted many man to take half-caste slaves as brides or mistresses. The Huguenots were generally already married, young as well a fecund. As the girls in these large families grew up, men’s stable liaisons with non-European women declined and a clearer pattern of endogamy became established”
The main issue is clearly sexual and marriage moral, with a strong position of the own women. In a more patriarchal and less puritan (in a literal sense of word) environment, many men would have taken local Indian women as mistresses or slaves. Not necessarily as their main wife.
By doing so, by having sexual intercourse in such a manner, even if they were not fully integrated in the community, half-breeds would have came into existence and would have themselves procreated until some would have passed, even in a fairly ethnocentric and race conscious environment.
So the main factor was obviously the presence of many, probably even “more than enough” young, fertile women of the own European stock and the absense of a indigenous “working class”, which would have given the Indians or mixed ones a fix social position in the New Englander society.
But the second is the strong religious and sex morals, with the fairly high status of women in the community. This made “offshoots” with second wives and mistresses almost impossible. So even if one of the English males would have had sexual intercourse one way or another, there was no place for the Indian mistress and the mixed kids in this community.
My guess is that, in such a situation, if mixture, one way or another, took place, most would have flown back to the Indians. Which is something you see quite often if there is a clear social and cultural hierarchy, even if the subdominant peolpe are still free, the dominant ones spill genes into the subdominant one. Another example, even if in a quite different environment, would be South Asian tribals or African Pygmies.