Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update (27 March 2016, 17 Adar-B, 5776)
Contents:
1. Red Hair and R1b YDNA: Environmental Influence?
2. Irish DNA and History
Irish history being upended by bones found under a bar
3. Viking Graves Yield Grisly Find: Sacrificed Slaves
4. Bronze Age war in northern Germany
5. Division is in Northern Ireland genes as scientists find there really are two distinct tribes
By Linda Stewart
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1. Red Hair and R1b YDNA: Environmental Influence?
http://www.eupedia.com/genetics/origins_of_red_hair.shtml
A comparison of the maps of red hairs in Euriope and of R12b shows a certain correspondence between the two.
If the incidence of YDNA and of red hair are influenced by environment then it may be that the same factors influence both of them.
Extracts:
What is immediately apparent to genetic genealogists is that the map of red hair correlates with the frequency of haplogroup R1b in northern and western Europe. It doesn't really correlate with the percentage of R1b in southern Europe, for the simple reason that red hair is more visible among people carrying various other genes involved in light skin and hair pigmentation. Mediterranean people have considerably darker pigmentations (higher eumelanin), especially as far as hair is considered, giving the red hair alleles little opportunity to express themselves. The reddish tinge is always concealed by black hair, and rarely visible in dark brown hair. Rufosity being recessive, it can easily stay hidden if the alleles are too dispersed in the gene pool, and that the chances of both parents carrying an allele becomes too low. Furthermore, natural selection also progressively pruned red hair from the Mediterranean populations, because the higher amount of sunlight and strong UV rays in the region was more likely to cause potentially fatal melanoma in fair-skinned redheads.
At equal latitude, the frequency of red hair correlates amazingly well with the percentage of R1b lineages. The 45th parallel north, running through central France, northern Italy and Croatia, appears to be a major natural boundary for red hair frequencies. Under the 45th parallel, the UV rays become so strong that it is no longer an advantage to have red hair and very fair skin. Under the 41th parallel, redheads become extremely rare, even in high R1b areas.
The 45th parallel is also the traditional boundary between northern European cultures, where cuisine is butter-based, and southern European cultures, preferring olive oil for cooking. In France, the 45th parallel is the also limit between the northern dialects of French and the southern Occitan language. In northern Italy, it is the 46th parallel that separates German speakers (in South Tyrol) from Italian speakers. The natural boundary probably has a lot to do with the sun and climate in general, since the 45th parallel is exactly halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.
Even as far back as Neolithic times, the 45th parallel roughly divided the Mediterranean Cardium Pottery culture from the Central European Linear Pottery culture. It is entirely possible, and even likely, that the European north-south divide, not just for culture and agriculture, but also for phenotypes and skin pigmentation, go back to Neolithic times, when the southern expansion of agriculture was carried out mostly by the migration of farmers from the Near East to Iberia, following the Mediterranean coastlines, while the northern Danubian diffusion of farming was achieved by native Mesolithic Europeans who acquired Neolithic techniques by contact with farmers from Thessaly and Albania (Sesklo culture), and only blending to a small extent.
Slavic, Baltic and Finnish people are predominantly descended from haplogroup R1a, N1c1 and I1. Their limited R1b ancestry means that the MC1R mutation is much rarer in these populations. This is why, despite their light skin and hair pigmentation and living at the same latitude as Northwest Europeans, almost none of them have red hair, apart from a few Poles or Czechs with partial German ancestry.
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2. Irish DNA and History
Irish history being upended by bones found under a bar
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/03/17/irish-history-being-upended-by-bones-found-under-a-bar.html
By Peter Whoriskey
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/17/a-mans-discovery-of-bones-under-his-pub-could-forever-change-what-we-know-about-the-irish/
[forwarded by Claudia Homer]
Extracts:
Geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and archaeologists from Queens University Belfast have sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish humans. (Trinity College Dublin)
From as far back as the 16th century, historians taught that the Irish are the descendants of the Celts, an Iron Age people who originated in the middle of Europe and invaded Ireland somewhere between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C.
That story has inspired innumerable references linking the Irish with Celtic culture. The Nobel-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats titled a book 'Celtic Twilight.' Irish songs are deemed 'Celtic' music. Some nationalists embraced the Celtic distinction. And in Boston, arguably the most Irish city in the United States, the owners of the NBA franchise dress their players in green and call them the Celtics.
Yet the bones discovered behind McCuaig's tell a different story of Irish origins, and it does not include the Celts.
'The most striking feature' of the bones, according to the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal, is how much their DNA resembles that of contemporary Irish, Welsh and Scots. (By contrast, older bones found in Ireland were more like Mediterranean people, not the modern Irish.)
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Exactly where this leaves the pervasive idea that the Irish and other people of the area are 'Celtic' is unclear. It depends on the definition of Celtic.
There are essentially two definitions, and two arguments.
The first revolves around language. The Irish language is, like Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, part of a group that linguists have labeled Celtic. The languages share words and grammar. They seem to have emerged after a similar evolution from Indo-European. They are indisputably related, and indisputably a well-defined category.
What is unclear is whether the term 'Celtic' is an appropriate name for that group of languages.
To be sure, some think that Celtic languages originated with the Celts on continental Europe and subsequently spread to Ireland, Wales and Scotland. This is the traditional view, and it dovetails with the idea that the Celts moved into Ireland during the Iron Age.
But over the last decade, a growing number of scholars have argued that the first Celtic languages were spoken not by the Celts in the middle of Europe but by ancient people on Europe's westernmost extremities, possibly in Portugal, Spain, Ireland or the other locales on the western edges of the British Isles.
Koch, the linguist at the University of Wales, for example, proposed in 2008 that 'Celtic' languages were not imports to the region but instead were developed somewhere in the British Isles or the Iberian Peninsula, and then spread eastward into continental Europe.
His doubts about the traditional view arose as he was studying inscriptions on artifacts from southern Portugal. The inscriptions on those artifacts strongly resembled the languages known as Celtic, yet they dated as far back as 700 B.C. This placed Celtic languages far from the Celt homelands in the middle of Europe at a very, very early date.
'What it shows is that the language that became Irish was already out there, before 700 B.C. and before the Iron Age,'Koch said. 'It just didn't fit with the traditional theory of Celtic spreading west to Britain and Iberia.'
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The second line of argument arises from archaeology and related sources.
Numerous digs, most notably in Austria and Switzerland, have traced the outlines of the Celts. The artifacts offer evidence going back as far as about 800 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans also left written accounts of the Celts, and probably knew them well, Â the Celts sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and attacked Delphi in Greece in 279 B.C.
It seemed plausible that this group that had invaded Rome had invaded Ireland as well, and in the standard view, it was this people that eventually made it to Ireland.
For decades, however, archaeologists and other scholars have noted just how flimsy the evidence is for that standard account and how broad, nonetheless, is the application of the word.
In a 2001 book, Cunliffe, the Oxford scholar, argued on the basis of archaeological evidence that the flow of Celtic culture was opposite that of the traditional view, it flowed from the western edge of Europe, what he calls 'the Atlantic zone,'' into the rest of the continent. In many places of the Atlantic zone, he notes, people were buried in passages aligned with the solstices, a sign that they shared a unified belief system.
The famed American anthropologist Daniel Garrison Brinton, for example, described the Celts in 1890 as having conspicuous mental traits: "turbulent, boastful, alert, courageous, but deficient in caution, persistence and self-control, they never have succeeded in forming an independent state, and are a dangerous element in the body politic of a free country. In religion they are fanatic and bigoted, ready to swear in the words of their master rather than to exercise independent judgment."
The new evidence from genetics, however, undermine notions of a separate Irish race, describing them instead as one sliver of the European spectrum.
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3. Viking Graves Yield Grisly Find: Sacrificed Slaves
OCT 31, 2013 04:30 PM ET // BY TIA GHOSE, LIVESCIENCE
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/viking-graves-yield-grisly-find-sacrificed-slaves-131031.htm
Viking graves in Norway contain a grisly tribute: slaves who were beheaded and buried along with their masters, new research suggests.
In Flakstad, Norway, remains from 10 ancient people were buried in multiple graves, with two to three bodies in some graves and some bodies decapitated. Now, an analysis reveals the beheaded victims ate a very different diet from the people with whom they were buried.
"We propose that the people buried in double and triple burials might have come from very different strata of society, and that slaves could have been offered as grave gifts in these burials," study co-author Elise Naumann, an archaeologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, wrote in an email.
Viking age
From about the 790s until about A.D. 1100, the Vikings were fierce, sea-faring raiders and often took slaves as booty. But this vicious lifestyle wasn't a full-time job. In everyday life, many Vikings were actually farmers, relying on slaves, or thralls, for agricultural work. Though some thralls were treated well, many were forced to endure backbreaking physical labor, Naumann said. Women were often used as sex slaves, and any children who resulted could either be considered the master's children or treated as slaves themselves.
The Viking burials were first discovered in the early 1980s, but only partially excavated at the time. The ancient graves were partly damaged by modern farming and contained just a few grave artifacts, such as an amber bead, some animal bones and a few knives. At the time, archaeologists noticed that four of the bodies were beheaded whereas the rest were intact.
That led many to conclude that the decapitated bodies were those of slaves sacrificed and buried with their masters.
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4. Bronze Age war in northern Germany
http://dienekes.blogspot.co.il/
Extracts:
About 3200 years ago, two armies clashed at a river crossing near the Baltic Sea. The confrontation can't be found in any history books, the written word didn't become common in these parts for another 2000 years, but this was no skirmish between local clans. Thousands of warriors came together in a brutal struggle, perhaps fought on a single day, using weapons crafted from wood, flint, and bronze, a metal that was then the height of military technology.
Ancient DNA could potentially reveal much more: When compared to other Bronze Age samples from around Europe at this time, it could point to the homelands of the warriors as well as such traits as eye and hair color. Genetic analysis is just beginning, but so far it supports the notion of far-flung origins. DNA from teeth suggests some warriors are related to modern southern Europeans and others to people living in modern-day Poland and Scandinavia. 'This is not a bunch of local idiots,' says University of Mainz geneticist Joachim Burger. 'It's a highly diverse population.'
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5. Division is in Northern Ireland genes as scientists find there really are two distinct tribes
By Linda Stewart
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/division-is-in-northern-ireland-genes-as-scientists-find-there-really-are-two-distinct-tribes-31080769.html
PUBLISHED20/03/2015
Extracts:
Northern Ireland is a land of two tribes - and it looks like that split is encoded in our very genes.
A new DNA study has revealed that genetically there is no distinct group of Celtic people spreading from Cornwall through Wales and into Ireland. But it has found that people in Northern Ireland are divided into two tribes - and both of them spread across the Irish Sea into Scotland.
The study, published in the journal Nature, examines a detailed DNA analysis of 2,000 Caucasian people living across the UK, all of whom had four of their grandparents living close by in a rural area.
This allowed the researchers, led from Oxford University, to filter out 20th century migration and examine migration patterns dating back more than 1,000 years.
Co-author Dr Garrett Helenthal of University College London told the Belfast Telegraph that the study contradicts the notion of a Celtic relationship between people in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. In fact, there are big genetic differences between these areas.
However, it found two distinct genetic groupings in Northern Ireland. One of these included people living across the Irish Sea in western Scotland and the Highlands, while the other shared genetic links between people in southern Scotland and southern England.
It's thought the former tribe reflects the kingdom of Dalriada 1,500 years ago; while the latter descends from the settlers of the Ulster Plantation.
The two tribes in Northern Ireland also show genetic similarities to modern-day populations in Belgium, north west France and parts of Germany, suggesting they share common ancestors. The study has also found that people in south Wales are quite distinct from people in north Wales; while the culturally Celtic people of Cornwall are much more similar to people in England than those in Scotland.
It's the first genetic evidence to confirm the archaeological theory that Celts represent a tradition rather than a genetic or racial grouping.