The social and demographic dynamics of Al-Andalus

Posted on March 31, 2019April 4, 2019 by Razib Khan

A slight detour from Rulers, Religion, and Riches took me to Brian Catlos’ Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain. I’ve enjoyed Catlos’ work before, and he has an engaging narrative style. His books are quick reading and I recommend them, incuding his monographs.

But, there is always a weird aspect to his work and analysis that has always struck me: his overall narrative often works at cross-purposes with specific assertions he makes in passing. As an example, Catlos rightly points out that in Spain under the rule of the Muslim Arabs particular and specific religious confession was not a major issue, since most people lived lives not dominated by religion. But as you keep reading you notice that the overall arc of history is strongly shaped by confessional identities.

The population turnover in westernmost Europe over the last 8,000 years

Posted on March 20, 2019April 4, 2019 by Razib Khan

The figure above is from The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years. If you had seen something like this five years ago, you’d be gobsmacked. But today this is not atypical, especially in light of the fact that Spain seems to harbor many good sites in relation to the preservation of ancient DNA. In the figure above you see an excellent representation of the different streams of ancestry and settlement within Spain over the last 8,000 years. You can conclude from it, for example, that only a small proportion of the ancestry of modern Spaniards derives from people who were residents of the peninsula during the Pleistocene. Similarly, you can also conclude that a minority, though non-trivial, proportion of the ancestry of modern-day Spaniards derives from people who arrived during Classical Antiquity and the Moorish period.

The sons of Japeth divide the world between them

Posted on September 29, 2018September 30, 2018 by Razib Khan

Most “old hands” in the discipline of historical population genetics remember when grand narratives were constructed out of Y chromosomal haplogroup distributions. One of the most distinctive ones is that of haplogroup R1b, which exhibits very high frequencies in the west of Europe, as high as more than 80% among the Basques. Because the Basques are the only non-Indo-European population which exists today in Western Europe, it was presumed that they are more ancient than other groups. And, their high frequency of R1b (along with other peculiarities such as a high frequency of Rh-), was taken to indicate that they reflected the genetics of Europe’s aboriginal hunter-gatherers when farming arrived.

This turned out to be wrong in a lot of details. Genetically the Basques are quite like the European farmers from Anatolia who replaced the original hunter-gatherers. Less so than the Sardinians, as they have more hunter-gatherer ancestry. But instead of being the language of European hunter-gatherers, it seems plausible that the Basque language descends from that of the Cardial culture.