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The Greeks in the mountains

The New Yorker has a long feature that explores the strange results from the paper last year, Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India. Basically, they found a bunch of Indians who died 1,000 years ago, and, a bunch of Greeks who died a few centuries ago. They were buried naturally in a very isolated lake high in the Himalayas. There are all sorts of hypotheses regarding the Greeks, whose bones indicate a Mediterranean diet, and the closest match to individuals in Crete. My personal experience is that “mainland Greeks” tend to be a bit Northern European shifted, so these individuals may have been Anatolian or Aegean Greeks.

Stuart Fidel, who sometimes comments on this weblog, suggests these were Armenian traders. But David Reich correctly points out Armenians are very distinct genetically from Greeks (though the two are not entirely different obviously!). Another hypothesis is a bone mix-up, but the issue here is there are a lot of individuals who are of the same population and seem to have lived in the same region. How could bone mix-ups produce so many systematic errors?

Ultimately there’s no final answer in the piece, though hopefully, someone will present a reasonable conjecture.

Because the piece has Reich and his lab spotlighted, they allude to the controversy around him. This is ultimately going to be the legacy of the hit-piece from a few years back. He’s now a “controversial figure,” which is, to be frank not a bad thing in the eyes of some of the Reich lab’s scientific rivals. Most media treatments that aren’t purely about his research (i.e., Carl Zimmer’s column in The New York Times covering the Reich lab publications) will mention this now.

Here’s why he’s a mensch:

Still, some anthropologists, social scientists, and even geneticists are deeply uncomfortable with any research that explores the hereditary differences among populations. Reich is insistent that race is an artificial category rather than a biological one, but maintains that “substantial differences across populations” exist. He thinks that it’s not unreasonable to investigate those differences scientifically, although he doesn’t undertake such research himself. “Whether we like it or not, people are measuring average differences among groups,” he said. “We need to be able to talk about these differences clearly, whatever they may be. Denying the possibility of substantial differences is not for us to do, given the scientific reality we live in.”

This is, in 2020, is an old-fashioned view. There are now young American researchers who frankly express disquiet and discomfort at the idea of studying human population genetic variation, period.  Including people who themselves have studied topics such as polygenic adaptation in humans. This would be a very strange view for older researchers, but it’s not totally out of the norm today, so expect someone like Reich to be viewed as quite the dinosaur in a decade. It seems ridiculous to say, but I do wonder if we’re seeing the end of the “humans as a model organism” era. Lots of ppl are not happy with the new atmosphere, but lots of people just keep quiet and go along.

20 thoughts on “The Greeks in the mountains

  1. Fascinating. How could Anatolian Greeks end up in such an isolated place? My hypothesis is that they were merchants fascinated by tales of Alexander’s conquests and so may have decided to do a little bit of exploration.

  2. I thought that the woke version is that all differences among humans are differences in their geist* and that genetics has nothing to do with nothing.

    *Geist is a German noun with a degree of importance in German philosophy. Its semantic field corresponds to English ghost, spirit, mind, intellect. Some English translators resort to using “spirit/mind” or “spirit” to help convey the meaning of the term. Wikipedia

  3. Do “substantial differences across populations” exist?
    Well, what is substantial?
    But (of course) genetic differences exist between populations
    and it is trivially easy to distinguish genetically between Han Chinese, British and Yoruba Nigerians with very small error rates — and the errors
    will mostly be with recent immigrants to Britain from Nigeria or
    similar. And is there any doubt that for example mean levels of
    lactose tolerance differ among human groups? Often when the
    Reich group is criticised I can’t tell if the complaint is that
    we are wrong, or that we are right, but shouldn’t have said what we
    said.

  4. Nick, I understand if you don’t want to divulge too much information but would you say there’s been any change in perception of the Reich group around campus since that silly NYTimes article from a year or two ago? I would still imagine most people in Cambridge don’t even know who David Reich is (no offense! Probably for the best anyway) but I’m curious if you’ve detected any, not necessarily even hostility, but perhaps just general awareness of your group, among the greater Harvard community over the past few years?

    Also, are you still the best person to reach out to regarding general questions on Admixtools (as far as questions on best practices running the different programs like Dstats, F4-Ratio, qpGraph, etc.), or is there someone else on your team who’s considered the go-to contact?

  5. ) but I’m curious if you’ve detected any, not necessarily even hostility, but perhaps just general awareness of your group, among the greater Harvard community over the past few years?

    a lot of the hostility predates the hit-piece and was a function of professional jealousy + issues with indigenous rights

  6. One possibility (but very far out): those “Greeks” were slaves/servants in the Ottoman Empire sent by whoever the Sultan was during 1600’s/1700’s to the Mughal Empire as a personal gift/diplomatic exchange. Unfortunately their cartographic guidance was off, and they made a fatal detour into the Himalayas. The article didn’t mention any historians poring into Ottoman or even Safavid archives spanning from 1500 to 1800 AD.

  7. @Mick
    Sure: forward me questions on ADMIXTOOLS etc.
    I can always pass them on as appropriate

  8. It may be that with large scale open datasets to study medical genetics, continued development of selection and structure models in at least non-human animals, then a lot of the current and future cutting edge in studying selected and functional genetic variation may becomes easily replicable well outside the labs of large, wealthy countries like the US. At that point then it may become uncancelable and possibly inevitable, as the world at large will likely(?) not see the same cultural shift.

  9. Does anyone have a link to the bone measurements which were made well before the DNA was tested? It was said that there was enough of a difference to make different groups of the skeletons. I have only read the qualitative descriptions so far.

  10. Eurogenes has included most of the samples (11/13?) in his dataset. Among contemporary populations, most are closest to Aegean Greeks but a couple are closest to mainland Greeks, and one to Anatolian ones, all at low enough distances which might be an indication that something else isn’t going on instead, especially since they all seem to come from the same traveling group and apparently ethnic background despite decent distances between the ‘northernmost’ mainland ones and ‘southernmost’ Anatolian one. Would be a weird coincidence otherwise. Nothing Armenian-like among them though.

    I’d be interested to know what Fiedel is referring to regarding their Y-DNA and mtDNA. For example, you have more typically European kinds of R1a and G as far as I can tell and the mtDNA seems very non-diagnostic overall to me but it’s understandable the article wouldn’t expand on the point.

    There were Greek merchant communities working in India since at least the 18th century, even if not in great numbers. Perhaps the presence in the particular area is mysterious but not completely unexplainable.

  11. Razib et al.,

    My argument has several strands.
    1) The wiggles of the 14C calibration require a date of EITHER ca. AD 1700 or AD 1800 for the B skeletons–not earlier, not later, not in-between.
    2) There is no record of island or mainland Greeks in northern India at either time. East India Company records report only 6 Greek merchants in southern India in the 1790s, and they were far outnumbered by Armenians and Portuguese. There were Sephardic Jews in southern India already in the 16th century, but no significant colony in northern India.
    3) In contrast, Armenian merchant communities (which included traders and their wives) are reported in northern India (Lahore) and in Lhasa, Tibet in the late 17th century.
    4) The Armenians in Tibet were derived from the New Julfa community in Persia (Iran), which in turn was linked to the community in Cilicia (on the Mediterranean, in southeastern Anatolia). The latter had been an Armenian kingdom until 1375, with a polyglot population including Greeks, Jews, and Western Europeans.
    5) Here are the Y chromosome and mtDNA clades reported for the B people. None of these are found in any appreciable %s in published samples from Crete, Cyprus, or mainland Greece:
    Y clades:
    J1a3a Armenian
    R1a1a1b1a2b Caucasus, Hungary AD 900, Proto-Slavic, Slovenia, Austria, Italy
    G2a2b2a1a1c1a2 closely related clades in Sweden, Armenians, Ashkenazi
    R1b1a (largest Armenian clade is R1b1a2a)
    T1a2 Kurdish and Iraqi Jews, Armenians
    E1b1b1b2 ancestral Eastern Mediterranean/Levantine
    K Assyrians; Armenians; also in India
    mtDNA clades
    H6b1 Turkish Armenian, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece
    H1 ubiquitous
    H60a Tuscan, Swiss
    W1 high density in northern Caucasus
    X2d Iran, Armenian, Turks, Italian, Adygei, Roma
    H12 Sicily; Macedonia; 8.8 % of Albanians
    K1a ubiquitous
    H12a Italy, Bulgaria, Croatia
    T1a
    H1c
    J1b very common in Iran
    HV ubiquitous
    6) On the question of differentiating Greeks from Armenians, Razib stated here, with respect to the autosomal DNA
    http://www.razib.com/wordpress/category/armenians/

    “One of the major problems is that the Armenian sample and the Anatolian Greek/Cypriot sample are genetically very close.”

    There were once Armenian villages on Crete. And some 30,000 Armenians are said to have settled on Cyprus after the collapse of the Cilician kingdom.

  12. @Stuart Fiedel

    With all due respect, there is no way on God’s green earth that the Roopkund B samples were Armenians. They don’t cluster anywhere NEAR Armenians. Of the samples that made it into the Eurogenes’ G25 PCA (a wonderful tool for open science), most of the cohort clearly clusters with Aegean Greeks. Two of the samples were probably Balkan Greeks. And one of them was very likely a Cappadocian Greek. Granted, this last one is closer to Armenians than the others, but Cappadocian Greeks are still easily distinguished from Armenians.

    Below is an annotated West Eurasian PCA illustrating what I’m talking about. Roopkund B samples in aqua, Armenians in orange, mainland Greek samples in gold, Aegean Greeks in indigo, Cypriots in maroon, Western Anatolian Greeks in hot pink, Cappadocian Greeks in chartreuse, and Pontic Greeks in turqouise. I removed Southern Italian and Western Jewish samples from the PCA for better visualization. These genetically East Med groups strongly overlap with Aegean Greeks due to shared ancestry (much of that affinity very likely mediated by ancient Greek gene flow into the ancestors of Southern Italians and Jews, actually).

    https://i.imgur.com/tNReaRU.png

    And here are the distances of each sample compared to modern averages:

    https://i.imgur.com/o9MmrW1.png

    That’s as close to an open and shut case you’re ever going to see. So I don’t know why you’d push for an Armenian origin here when it’s complete non-starter autosomally. These guys were East Meds, not Transcaucasians. You can make an argument that some of these individuals MIGHT have been Southern Italians or Western Jews (as these groups overlap strongly with Greek islanders, like I said), but assuming they were all Greek is a far more parsimonious option. I don’t know why these intrepid East Meds trekked to Roopkund either, but they were clearly related to people like me, not to Armenians.

  13. Michalis,

    1. Using your own results, I see that 3 of the 8 individuals are a bit closer to Southern Italians than to Cretans (as you have noted). Now, if you want to pursue an explanation that has some historical plausibility, you might posit that some Italian Jesuits were in the party (there were Jesuits in Tibet in the late 17th century). 2. What do we know about the genomes of specifically Cilician and Iranian Armenians? What is the possibility that someone culturally “Armenian” in 1700 could be genetically “Greek”? 3) How would you explain the non-Greek uniparental lineages in the B group? Do you think island Greeks haven’t been adequately sampled for these clades?

  14. Stuart,

    1.) Greek islanders show substantial variation. Look at the range on that PCA. Some of the Rhodians are practically Cypriots, while some North Aegean individuals lean closer to the Peloponnesus than Koans and most Cretans do. The reason why Western Anatolian Greeks from Izmir/Smyrna (hot pink) plot in between the Aegean and Balkan Greeks is because there was strong insular and mainland Greek migration to this very rich part of the Greek world; it was a cosmopolitan melting pot of different types of Greeks.

    As for the Italian/Jewish ambiguity, the closeness of ancient and modern East Mediterranean groups to each other is well established at this point. We have an enormous thread on Anthrogenica dedicated to the subject. It is not uncommon for a person who is 100% Greek genealogically to show close distances to Romaniotes, other Western Jews, or Southern Italians (in fact my own Greek father’s results behave this way). This underlines how similar these groups are to each other; their basic ancestral elements are so close that they require deeper analysis to untangle. We don’t entirely understand the historical basis for this yet, but there are pretty good theories. There is a mega-thread on AG about the ethnogenesis of Western Jews which posits substantial Greek ancestry in the proto-Western Jewish population (basically Romaniotes).

    In the case of Southern Italians, this affinity to Greeks is almost certainly due to their Magna Graecian heritage. I’m not going to go so far as to say Southern Italians are Latinized Greeks, but they are damn close to it– especially Calabrians. Sure, it’s possible some of the Roopkund guys were Italian Jesuits, but it’s not really necessary to assume that. More than likely they were just Greeks, too.

    2.) We have little reason to believe Armenians with roots in Cilicia would have been significantly different from other Armenians. Maybe there would have been more of a pull toward Alawites or Cappadocian Greeks among them, but not anything to write home about. I would speculate groups in Cilicia were more likely to be shifted toward Levantines like Druze than to Southern Euros, especially the closer you got to Hatay. There does seem to be some ancient Aegean ancestry in Nusayri/Alawites (based on personal results I’ve seen), but that pull doesn’t even get you to Cypriot territory, let alone Crete. Again, you’d require some extreme Mediterranean dilution to get Armenians to plot as these Roopkund guys do.

    3.) I’m not a haplogroup anorak so I’m not equipped to explain any mysteries there; you’ll find a lot of people on Anthrogenica who might help you understand that. It is indeed possible that the Greek islands have not been adequately sampled for uniparentals. All I can say is that the autosomal DNA is very clear here: these were Greek-like people, with a range of profiles typical of Greeks living today. Perhaps an even stronger case can be offered here by others (using formal stats), but if these were Armenians I’ll eat my bouzouki.

  15. @ Stuart Fiedel

    The G and R1a are under typically European clades as far as I know and the rest seem pretty non-diagnostic to me, also taking into account the relative undersampling of some populations in those internet Y trees. The mtDNA seems even more non-diagnostic to me and they all are pretty ubiquitous in the area.

    All that combined with the fact that those samples cluster among different Greek sub-groups, that is you have representation from almost every corner that a rather geographically expansive at the time, specific ethnic group inhabited, makes the identification much more convincing than positing some mixed group of Armenians (who are nothing like them overal), South Italians (who are very similar in the first place and only slightly closer to a minority of the samples despite having much better representation in that datasheet) and the like.

    Of course it’s true that you could have theoretically have 18th century ethnic Armenians that are genetically even Balkan or Aegean like (let alone Central Anatolian like considering Greek and Armenian speakers met around Kayseri in historical terms) but when you put all the samples together, it stretches plausibility.

    In fact, it’s quite cool that we have all those _together_ because if we only had samples from the northernmost or southernmost range of their variation, the case would have likely been much less clear.

  16. @ Stuart Fiedel

    The G and R1a are under typically European clades as far as I know and the rest seem pretty non-diagnostic to me on their own, also taking into account the relative undersampling of some populations in those internet Y trees. The mtDNA seems even more non-diagnostic to me and they all seem to be pretty ubiquitous in the area.

    All that combined with the fact that those samples cluster among different Greek sub-groups, that is you have representation from almost every corner that a rather geographically expansive at the time, specific ethnic group inhabited, makes the identification much more convincing than positing some mixed group of Armenians (who are nothing like them overal), South Italians (who are very similar in the first place and only slightly closer to a minority of the samples despite having much better representation in that datasheet) and the like.

    Of course it’s true that you could have theoretically have 18th century ethnic Armenians that are genetically even Balkan or Aegean like, let alone Central Anatolian like considering Greek and Armenian speakers solidly met around Kayseri in historical terms (otoh we’d probably expect Iranian Armenians to be even more distant from these samples than ones from further west), but when you put all the samples together, it stretches plausibility.

    In fact, it’s quite cool that we have all those _together_ because if we only had samples from the northernmost or southernmost range of their variation, the case would have likely been much less clear.

  17. The biological/sociological sciences are dying in woke America. Some are dead and needing burial. One hopes that the Chinese take an interest once their domination is established.

  18. I don’t think it’s tremendously surprising that there would be Greeks in South Asia in the 18th or 19th century.

    In particular there was a reasonably large Greek trading community in Bengal during this time period, with Greek churches in Calcutta and Bengal, see below. We thus don’t need to assume that the traders were Armenian when genetic evidence is to the contrary!

    http://hellenicgenealogygeek.blogspot.com/2016/04/greek-migration-to-india-in-mid.html
    https://elinepa.org/three-centuries-of-hellenic-presence-in-bengal/

    If people were adventurous enough to make it from the Aegean to Bengal, it’s reasonable that they may have been foolhardy enough to end up dead in the Himalayas. Monasticism would be a typically Greek reason to end up in remote mountains, but this seems less likely given that the party included both men and women.

  19. I wonder if the term ‘anatomically modern humans’ actually makes much sense given the variety that exists between different groups. Maybe it just means any variety still alive.

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