BAMAD-123

Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update (21 September, 2014, 26 Elul, 5774)

Contents:
1. Article About Nial
Ireland's most prolific high king - you may be descended from him  - IrishCentral.com
2. Political attitudes derive from body and mind: 'Negativity bias' explains difference between liberals and conservatives
3.  Central Italians from Lydia in Turkey?  A  Genome-Wide Study of Modern-Day Tuscans: Revisiting Herodotus's Theory on the Origin of the Etruscans 
Pardo-Seco et al
4. Ashkenazi Jews
Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins, Nature 
5.  Environmental Influence. A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?
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1. Article About Nial
Ireland's most prolific high king - you may be descended from him  - IrishCentral.com
http://www.irishcentral.com/roots/niall-took-no-hostages-43038522-237784201.html#at_pco=smlwn-1.0&at_si=53de41ea64376256&at_ab=per-12&at_pos=0&at_tot=1
Extracts:

When it came to the bedroom, it seems that Niall of the Nine Hostages was even more fearless and energetic than he was on the battlefield.

This warlord was responsible for the very common Irish surname 'O'Neill' ('Ui Neill' in Gaelic) - which literally means 'descendant son of Niall' ' also the name of Irish pubs all over the world.)

The researchers also found that as many as one in 12 men in Ireland have the same DNA as the Irish king, and in Ireland's northwest, that figure rises to one in five.

"We sampled 60 people with these names and found the strongest association was with them,' Bradley told the London Independent. 'Before this, everything was mythology, but now there does seem to have been a single male ancestor of this group of powerful dynasties."

"In many countries, powerful men historically have more children, and it's not that hard to believe that it happened in Ireland too.

"We estimate there are maybe two to three million descendants in the modern age, with a concentration in Ireland, obviously. Then there are Scotland and New York  - you find the particular chromosome in reasonable frequency in New Yorkers of European descent."

That means that around one in 50 New Yorkers who have European roots, with surnames such as O'Connor, Flynn, Egan, Hynes, O'Reilly and Quinn, have the same genetic signature as Niall of the Nine Hostages, Bradley said.

Which prompted Peter Quinn, the renowned Irish-American author from the Bronx, to tell the New York Times, "I hope this means that I inherit a castle in Ireland."
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2. Political attitudes derive from body and mind: 'Negativity bias' explains difference between liberals and conservatives
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140731145935.htm
Date: July 31, 2014
Source:
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Summary:
Neither conscious decision-making or parental upbringing fully explain why some people lean left and others lean right, researchers say. A mix of deep-seated psychology and physiological responses are at the core of political differences.

Do people make a rational choice to be liberal or conservative? Do their mothers raise them that way? Is it a matter of genetics?

Two political scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a colleague from Rice University say that neither conscious decision-making nor parental upbringing fully explain why some people lean left while others lean right.

A growing body of evidence shows that physiological responses and deep-seated psychology are at the core of political differences, the researchers say in the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

"Politics might not be in our souls, but it probably is in our DNA," says the article written by political scientists John Hibbing and Kevin Smith of UNL and John Alford of Rice University.

"These natural tendencies to perceive the physical world in different ways may in turn be responsible for striking moments of political and ideological conflict throughout history," Alford said.

Using eye-tracking equipment and skin conductance detectors, the three researchers have observed that conservatives tend to have more intense reactions to negative stimuli, such as photos of people eating worms, burning houses or maggot-infested wounds.

Combining their own results with similar findings from other researchers around the world, the team proposes that this so-called "negativity bias" may be a common factor that helps define the difference between conservatives, with their emphasis on stability and order, and liberals, with their emphasis on progress and innovation.

"Across research methods, samples and countries, conservatives have been found to be quicker to focus on the negative, to spend longer looking at the negative, and to be more distracted by the negative," the researchers wrote.

The researchers caution that they make no value judgments about this finding. In fact, some studies show that conservatives, despite their quickness to detect threats, are happier overall than liberals. And all people, whether liberal, conservative or somewhere in between, tend to be more alert to the negative than to the positive -- for good evolutionary reasons. The harm caused by negative events, such as infection, injury and death, often outweighs the benefits brought by positive events.

"We see the 'negativity bias' as a common finding that emerges from a large body of empirical studies done not just by us, but by many other research teams around the world," Smith explained. "We make the case in this article that negativity bias clearly and consistently separates liberals from conservatives."

The most notable feature about the negativity bias is not that it exists, but that it varies so much from person to person, the researchers said.

"Conservatives are fond of saying 'liberals just don't get it,' and liberals are convinced that conservatives magnify threats," Hibbing said. "Systematic evidence suggests both are correct."

Many scientists appear to agree with the findings by Hibbing, Smith and Alford. More than 50 scientists contributed 26 peer commentary articles discussing the Behavioral and Brain Sciences article.

Only three or four of the articles seriously disputed the negativity bias hypothesis. The remainder accepted the general concept, while suggesting modifications such as better defining and conceptualizing a negativity bias; more deeply exploring its nature and origins; and more clearly defining liberalism and conservatism across history and culture.
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3.  Central Italians from Lydia in Turkey.  A Genome-Wide Study of Modern-Day Tuscans: Revisiting Herodotus's Theory on the Origin of the
Etruscans
Pardo-Seco et al
.
Abstract
Background: The origin of the Etruscan civilization (Etruria, Central Italy) is a long-standing subject of debate among scholars from different disciplines. The bulk of the information has been reconstructed from ancient texts and archaeological findings and, in the last few years, through the analysis of uniparental genetic markers.

Methods: By meta-analyzing genome-wide data from The 1000 Genomes Project and the literature, we were able to compare the genomic patterns (.540,000 SNPs) of present day Tuscans (N = 98) with other population groups from the main hypothetical source populations, namely, Europe and the Middle East.

Results: Admixture analysis indicates the presence of 25-34% of Middle Easterrn component in modern Tuscans. Different analyses have been carried out using identity-by-state (IBS) values and genetic distances point to Eastern Anatolia/Southern Caucasus as the most likely geographic origin of the main Middle Eastern genetic component observed in the genome of modern Tuscans.

Conclusions: The data indicate that the admixture event between local Tuscans and Middle Easterners could have occurred in Central Italy about 2,600-3,100 years ago (y.a.). On thhe whole, the results validate the theory of the ancient historian Herodotus on the origin of Etruscans.
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4. Ashkenazi Jews
Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins, Nature 

Extract:
Reconstruction of recent AJ history from such segments confirms a recent bottleneck of merely ≈350 individuals. Modelling of ancient histories for AJ and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines AJ to be an even admixture of European and likely Middle Eastern origins.

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5.  Environmental Influence. A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/
Two new studies show that the effects of a mother's early environment can be passed on to the next generation.
By Emily Singer on February 4, 2009

Extracts:

Silencing DNA: Adding methyl groups to specific spots in the genome can alter the expression of marked genes. The process, known as DNA methylation, is one mechanism of epigenetic change, heritable change that does not alter the sequence of DNA itself. In this image, colored bars represent the bases that make up a strand of DNA, while the green circles represent methylation.

The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring, according to two new studies. If applicable to humans, the research, done on rodents, suggests that the impact of both childhood education and early abuse could span generations. The findings provide support for a 200-year-old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring.

'The results are extremely surprising and unexpected,' says Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist at MIT who was not involved in the research. Indeed, one of the studies found that a boost in the brain's ability to rewire itself and a corresponding improvement in memory could be passed on. 'This study is probably the first study to show there are transgenerational effects not only on behavior but on brain plasticity.'

'Give mothers chemicals, and it can affect offspring and the next generation,' says Larry Feig, a neuroscientist at Tufts University School of Medicine, in Boston, who oversaw part of the research. 'In this case, [the environmental change] happened way before the mice were even fertile.'

In Feig's study, mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were raised in an enriched environment - given toys, exercise, and social interaction, for two weeks during adolescence. The animals' memory improved, an unsurprising finding, given that enrichment has been previously shown to boost brain function. The mice were then returned to normal conditions, where they grew up and had offspring. This next generation of mice also had better memory, despite having the genetic defect and never having been exposed to the enriched environment.

'If the findings can be conveyed to human, it means that girls' education is important not just to their generation but to the next one,' says Moshe Szyf of McGill University, in Montreal, who was not involved in the research.

In a second study, researchers found that rats raised by stressed mothers that neglected and physically abused their offspring showed specific epigenetic modifications to their DNA. The abused mice grew up to be poor mothers, and appeared to pass down these changes to their offspring.