The Shallow Roots of the Human Family Tree 760
An anonymous reader writes to mention an AP story about research discussing the relatively recent origins of every human on earth. Despite the age of our species, every human on earth can trace their ancestry back to someone who may have lived as recently as the Golden Age of Greece (around 500 BC). From the article: "It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors -- who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence. But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived."
Family Tree Grafting (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for isolated populations (Score:2, Interesting)
Other than that, the artocle does make sense.
Not me (Score:5, Interesting)
What native Tasmanian population? (Score:5, Interesting)
Greg Egan wrote a good short story on this in 1995 (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook918.htm [fictionwise.com]
With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement in the Ancestor Wars precisely: Saturday, June 2, 2007. That was the night Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. We'd been out to dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.
"Don't you want to discover your place in the human family?" she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. "Don't you want to find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"
The honest answer would have been: What sane person could possibly care? We'd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I wasn't yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.
"It's very late," I said cautiously. "And you know I have to work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their slaves. Lena was a communications engineer--and at 25, the same age as I was, she'd had real paid jobs for almost four years.
"You always have to work. Come on, Paul! It'll take fifteen minutes."
Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming city streets.
It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movement's wealth. ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various "culturally appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Ele'ele in Samoa) and I'd heard that the Children were working on street-corner vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.
In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainly--but her lean, symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didn't really strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: warrior, queen, goddess. And I had to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the sight of her
Well worth reading, along with the rest of the stories in the collection "Luminous" by Greg Egan. here's another link to some favourable reviews of his stuff: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/sf/books/e/e
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:5, Interesting)
Fun to think about..
Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham? (Score:3, Interesting)
There ARE hebrew and arabic Chirstians, you know.
In a way, it's too bad that Mohammad wasn't around when Christ was walking the holy land. If the Prophet of Islam had met Christ, they would probably have formed one relgion instead of two.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:3, Interesting)
Additional Startling Implication: Genetic Disease (Score:4, Interesting)
The "New York Times" gives a detailed analysis of genetic disease in Saudia Arabia [middleeastinfo.org], where more than 50% of marriages are ones between blood relatives.
Curiously, the nature of genetic disease suggests that if you want to ensure the survival of your descendants into the eons upon eons, you should marry outside of your ethnic group. The offspring of an Eskimo-African couple will typically have a stronger set of genes than the offspring of an Eskimo-Eskimo couple, a German-German couple, or a Vietnamese-Vietnamese couple.
Nice for Europeans... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it comes off as a troll or flamebait, but that's not the intent. It's just a sad fact of history that there's a lot of people disconnected from their past due to the way the world operated at a particular point. So flame away, but I'd rather hear any ideas that could work around the problem.
From TFA (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, this annoyed me. There are plenty of Sunnis and Shiites in any extended Iraqi family today living happily side by side, not caring about the difference in hand positions during prayer. Sunnis and Shiites are not mortal enemies as is so lazily portrayed in the media. They fought along side each other in the war against Iran just 25 years ago for example. This generally artificial tension is being produced as a convenient cover for the disaster that is Iraq and gives Bushco the ability to walk away from their mess and blame it on civil war. As long as they keep the oil rich areas and the new military bases civil war it would even suit them. Hence this false meme.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:5, Interesting)
I have always expected that there would be a movement where a man and woman get married and pick a new family name. It just seemed logical to me. Neither party has to take the other's name, and they also get to share a common family name which would symbolise the bond. Hasn't happened yet, but I still figure it might. Especially if gay marriage takes off. Then, how do you decide who's name to take? Flip a coin?
Silly PC Feelgoodism (Score:2, Interesting)
This is par for the course really.
The reality is there is a lot of inbreeding among most populations -- so much so that the bugaboo of "geographic race", which is supposed to be nothing more than folk taxonomy or folksonomy, is actually one of the strongest predictors of genetic makeup medical researchers can use without going to the level of an actual DNA assay. A lot of this brain noise can be traced back to a little academic slight of hand committed by Richard Lewontin when he published a peer-reviewed paper circa 1970 that studied the population structure of certain genes. He then went on to write a book which did not pass peer review but which got a lot of publicity for the claim that "there is more variation within than between races" -- an idiom that is now part of the catechism of liberal arts academia.
Well, unfortunately, this was an appealing fallacy, as shown by one of the grand old men of population genetics, AWF Edwards in Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy [goodrumj.com] published under the peer-reviewed Bioessays about 30 years after Lewontin's non-peer-reviewed popular science book posing as academic debunking of popular prejudice. Why so long before such a peer-reviewed debunking? Well, this is the clever part -- Lewontin never bothered to publish his little catechism in any peer reviewed paper so there was never any basis for answering it within academia. Edwards actually had to depart somewhat from academic convention in addressing a popular misconception posing as academic wisdom that had influenced the government and culture profoundly for an entire generation!
Thirty Ghosts (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:2, Interesting)
Another way of putting it... (Score:5, Interesting)
The cone with the point at the top represents one person (A, for ancestor) who lived X years ago and their descendants. The cone with the point at the bottom represents one person (D for descendant) who lives today and their ancestors. Any overlap is where A and D share mutual ancestors/descendants.
Using this representation, the argument here is that there exists (erm, existed) a person A, for whom every human who is alive today falls into their descendancy cone. Or more importantly, they assert that this is inevitable, and sufficient time has passed such that it has already happened. The key, according to this visual model, is that "now" is below the line where the two cones cross.
- RG>
Re:Silly PC Feelgoodism (Score:2, Interesting)
When I took physical anthropology in college, my prof. also tried feeding us this. She was a smart woman, but apparently had fallen into the "A differential equation gives us THIS" trap, and didn't know enough maths to challenge the original equation, which, to be realistic, must have a LOT more source and forcing terms than as is usually presented to measely college undergrads. The situation is complexified considerably when any of these terms are included, but the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium was taken as gospel by her. When I challenged it, she was a bit indignant.
Speaking later with a colleague who has a Ph.D. in anthro. (lithic tools development) and who also took a course from that prof., it became evident that differing experts (and professors) have different opinions as to the realism of HW equilibrium. My professor happened to be one who presented it as totally accepted in the field. Many other professors don't. I don't remember if I've ever heard of the people you mention in your post, but at least researchers in the field are aware of some difficulties with the big pictures. My own personal opinion is that things are almost unfathomably complex, and we may never have a satisfactory resolution to the issues raised by these authors. As is the case in a lot of the sciences, finding a self-consistent way to talk about certain classifications ("species"? "race"?) is horribly difficult, and the fields as a whole are having a hard time agreeing (or even settling for) upon which systems to use.
Thanks for your post. I'm going to ask my friend if he knows those names, and try to do some reading on my own.
Re:Indeed, Jewishness (Score:3, Interesting)
Surprisingly numerous, these matriarchials...
Re:Indeed, Jewishness (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:3, Interesting)
The thing is, race isn't just skin color, which both you and the replier to your original post seem to have neglected. Many features, or ranges of features define a race. Among those features are usually skeletal structure (again, size, build, etc, and also things like the shape of the skull), skin color (melonen content, levels of certain colors to make the apparant color), eye color, and hair color and texture (this is neglecting biological phenomina, such as albinism, in which case you could say that the lightest "black" person is lighter than the lightest "white" person, but these tests could also be useful to determine if you are a carrier of such recessive genes). A person's genes determine all of this, and it does so with so many different factors (I think there's something like 7 different genes that determine eye color) that it could actually make it easier to do some sort of lineage trace. We already have the human genome mapped, so it's not that much of a stretch to be able to trace back at least as far back as we can get DNA samples. Whether they've actually done it as stated in some of the links posted here is a different story, but it's definitely feasible.
It would be interesting to see, too. Maybe have an option to send a sample of blood to somewhere like National Geographic when you donate blood and a couple weeks later, you get the "results" of it: a breakdown of your DNA, basically (and in Laman's terms, of course), including genetic suseptibilities to various diseases or allergies or whatnot, and perhaps a way to track your lineage using your "profile" (much like they seem to already do on the National Geographic website). It would be beneficial, in my opinion at least, to know some of the possible genetic disorders you are at risk for passing down and it would definitely be interesting to find out who your ancestors are and where they came from. And beyond a personal level, it could also be useful in finding out when and how the different "races" came about. Everyone knows the general where and why of it (dark skin typically means tropical or sub-tropical regions and acts as natural sunblock, etc), but not necessarily the how and when (what caused the skull/skeletal structure to change in people of this region and not of that one?), especially if we all share a common ancestor.
It'd be a huge project to undertake to be able to get enough people for it to be really accurate, but it'd be fun to watch it expand and see it unfold and become more and more accurate and more and more enlightening.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an interesting mathematical trick, but their result is so obviously empirically false, so I doubt their research even after excluding the Aborigines and other populations known to have been isolated from the rest of the world for many thousands of years.
Re:Incestuous Science (Score:2, Interesting)
> I would like to see the statistics backed up with more actual genetic data, but the study is interesting, at least.
Don't mix up genetics and ancestry. The genes of a person from 100 generations ago would be entirely dissolved and not measurable today. This person could only pass on 1/2^100 of his genes to any particular person living today. That's technically nothing at all. Ancestry is an entirely different story, and really more of a mathematical concept: This person could still be 100% your ancestor, as ancestry is just defined that way.
So 1) genetic data does not help much with this at all. 2) Passing down your ancestry/family tree is much "easier" than passing down your genes. That's an important part of the reason why the result is plausible indeed, even taking isolated populations into account.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Racial differences take 10.000 years to develop (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Indeed, Jewishness (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Confederacy [wikipedia.org]
which, while founded by Shivaji Raje Bhonsle (a man) was really run by his mother, Jijabai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jijabai [wikipedia.org]
As well as the reigning queen of Jhansi, Laxmibai
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxmibai [wikipedia.org]
http://www.copsey-family.org/~allenc/lakshmibai/ [copsey-family.org]
in the 19th Century.
Matriarchial societies were aggressively discouraged by muslim rulers after they invaded and occupied large parts of India, since, according to Islamic Kanoon-e-Shariat, a woman can't take a dump without the husband's permission. Despite that, the Mameluk dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate was briefly inherited by a woman, Sultana Razia al-Din (Jalalat ud-Din Raziya), daughter of Shams-ud-Din Iltutmish (India's first and last black emperor).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultan [wikipedia.org]
Of course, the mad mullahs got their undies in a twist over that, but she did rule for 4 significant years in the Sultanate.
There is a strong matriarchial tendency in many Maratha clans in India to this day. Maratha women are aggressive and outgoing (more so than other Indian women). They bunch up their saris , wrap them around around their legs and wrap the tail over the backside and tuck it uder the small of their backs, making them more like trousers.
http://www.maharashtratourism.net/images/women-we
This way, their movements are less restrictive. They can run, walk long distances, balance themselves better while carrying heavy loads, and engage in physical labour like their male counterparts. They are addresses as 'Bai' (meaning Lady) in public, they fish, farm, sell stuff, all that. Maratha women often contribute more to the family income than Maratha men.
South Indian families (even Brahmin ones) often have the mother as the key decision-maker in the family (since males are busy working or studying) and thus has de-facto authority in family matters, even over the husband. This was true of my own grandmother, for instance (I'm Bengali), where my mother was one of 7 children, and my grandmother coached them in homework, got them to do chores, decided which schools they'd go to and so on, while my grandfather was busy at work (sometimes away from home for weeks). That's a matriarchial family right there.
If you define power roles by the breadwinner, then these families are not all matriarchial, but that's a pretty narrow criterion in my opinion. The real power of authority is in the hands of the decision maker, which, in these cases, is the female, not the male.
Plus, many South Indian Hindu Brahmins don't adopt their father's names as family names. They adopt the names of the town/village where their family originated (similar to some Arabs that way). They keep fairly detailed records of their lineage, and not much patriarchial bias exists in that process.
Faulty Logic (Score:5, Interesting)
The math only works if you assume that the ancestry never coincides with itself until it is mathematically impossible for it not to do so. This is ludicrous. Ancestry will coincide many, many times before that point. It is easy to demonstrate mathematically that it is more than possible for an ancestry to fold in on itself repeatedly, without touching other distinct lines.
The basic assumption (flawed), is that having trillions of "ancestors" means that it fold in across the entire spectrum of living people at a given time, when it can in fact fold in multiple times on a selection of that population; or that having any particular person as your ancestor is almost precisely as likely as any other arbitrary person. Historically, there are many social constrictions to make such statistics highly unlikely.
It also seems obvious to me, that were interracial marriages so common place so long ago (across the last few thousand years, even), the world would not be quite as genetically diverse a place as it currently is.
Disclaimer: IANAM(athematician). However, I do love math, and this seems like a fairly obvious and very easily provable flaw. I'm also probably misusing the phrase "fold in" above, though: but I imagine everyone can understand what I mean by that.
Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham? (Score:4, Interesting)
As the original poster said, many use Jesus' name to support their agendas, but their agendas rarely follow his teaching (see also the England/Ireland dispute; a political sovereignty dispute that many people now use as an example of how religion causes nothing but trouble).
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:1, Interesting)
What complete and utter PC BS. Race is very important, especially to biologists.
> the lightest-skinned "black" person is lighter than the darkest-skinned "white" person
But if you're talking biologically then the light-skinned black person has much more in common with a dark-skinner black person than the darker-skinned white person. Just look at organ transplants. I've worked as a volunteer to help families of children awaiting transplants at the University Hospitals in Cleveland for the past 14 years since my daughter died while waiting on a heart. As our doctor said, my decision to marry a non-Chinese woman (I'm Chinese and my wife is British) doomed my little girl to death. Race was not an arbitrary thing biologically. It was very important when looking for a matching heart. After dealing with many parents that recklessly have children with someone outside of their race, most of the doctors I know there strongly feel it is immoral to do so. If you do so and your child has serious health problems, what you did will have a serious negative consequence on your child.
> Anyone who believes that "racial purity" is either possible or desirable
You just keep spouting uninformed crap. If you have a child with someone outside of your race and they have serious medial problems, then racial purity is very desirable. Race plays a big part in your reaction to many drugs and to transplants. Just ask any cardiologist that performs transplants how they feel when dealing with a Negro patient. It is the worst of both worlds. Finding a matching heart is very difficult since as a group Negros do not donate organs nearly as often as most other races, and they usually do not respond as well to the anti-rejection drugs. It breaks my heart to see a little black girl in the hospital that needs a heart transplant. Almost always they never receive what they need. If the girl is half black and half white, finding a heart is nearly impossible. That's when it's time to call the Children Miracle Network or Make a Wish Foundation, because that child needs comfort since there is usually nothing that can be done for them.
Again, you're hurting people with your PC crap you're spouting. Differences between races are a very real thing.
If transplants and reactions to medicine are too hard for your small mind to understand, then maybe the simple example of drinking a glass of milk will be easier for you to understand. I, like almost all of my family, can not digest it. We get sick. My wife who is from Wales had never even heard of someone having trouble drinking milk before she met me. The differences are very real.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:3, Interesting)
9. What tests do you perform?
We will be performing ONE OF two tests for each public participant.
Males: Y-DNA test. This test helps us to identify deep ancestral geographic origins on the direct paternal line.
Females: Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). This tests the mtDNA of females to help identify the ancestral migratory origins of your direct maternal line.
So they will ignore all of the autosomes, and test only the tiny Y chromosome for males. Their results will only tell you about your purely paternal line (if you're male) or your purely maternal line (if you're female).
My parents didn't talk about the family tree much, but I already know a lot more than what this study would tell me. Thus, being male, they won't tell me anything about either of my grandmothers, who both spoke French (from Quebec and France).
I wonder if I'm the only one who finds this a major disappointment. They could be extracting a lot more information from the DNA of the participants by looking for markers in the other 99% of their DNA.
Fallacy of inheritance? (Score:2, Interesting)
An interesting tangent to that is, we know my brother and I share, like, a lot of the same genes. If we both have descendants, and all this mixing happens, somewhere down the line our bloodlines cross again and some future descendant carries, say, the brown-eyed bullshitter gene. But whose descendant is he, mine or my brother's? And does it matter? We know he's our father's... but it's the same gene, anyway. Kind of becomes irrelevant, by that point.
I think if you get really careful about defining what you mean by relatedness, this article will end up making a lot more sense, but will have much less sweeping implications. But underlying it is still the moral fact, if you want to call it that, that we are all human beings and as individuals, are really just different examples of the same basic thing. The fact that any two of us "could" be related really means that the similarities outweigh the differences.
Re:Yeah, it's BS (Score:3, Interesting)
--MarkusQ
Tasmania is still a problem (Score:3, Interesting)
In particular we know that the Tasmanians were truly isolated for more than 10K years and that while the pure line did not survive the British invasion, there are descendents of Tasmanians from -10K alive today, yet very clearly not everybody is descended from those Tasmanians, so Olson's supplementary claim that there is a single set of everybody's ancestors who were alive around -7K falls over.
I'd expect Tasmania is not even a unique exception, but others might be a lot harder to prove. Those outliers apart, the rest makes broad sense and the relative mobility of genes, might help resolve a few other misconceptions about recent human evolution, especially the post-modern selection pressures favouring poverty and stupidity.
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham? (Score:3, Interesting)
I take it you've never heard of the Sohei [wikipedia.org]
The perfect argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Indeed, Jewishness (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Christians claim to be children of Abraham? (Score:4, Interesting)
Christianity had already spread through the Roman Empire before Constantine's conversion.
Buddhism, in contrast, is a genuinely peaceful religion
Really? Buddhists ahve historically fought holy wars, and persecuted other religions (for example Japanese Christians were forced into hiding [biglobe.ne.jp].
Even now arson attacks on churches are frequent in Sri Lanka.
Mohammed and Jesus had met each other they would almost certainly have hated each other
Jesus fairly consistently preached against hating anyone - even when Jewish tradition permitted it.
Re:The start of a long road (Score:2, Interesting)
The assumptions may or may not be valid. However it's important to note that genetic inheritance != ancestry, and this does not necessarily have to match up with genetic data at all.
Consider two fully isolated populations A and B. At T(100 generations ago) a single individual M migrates from A to B, and causes offspring with someone from B. No further migration takes place ever until the present day. Would you expect to be able to show this genetically? Hardly. Only 1/1^100 of M's DNA would have been passed on to any single individual living in B today(*). That's absolutely nothing at all. The genetic heritage would be entirely dissolved for all purpuses of measuring much earlier than that.
In contrast, ancestry is defined to always be handed down 1:1. M would almost certainly be 100% ancestor to each an every individual living in B today. M's parents would almost certainly be 100% ancestors to the entirety of both A and B (assuming they had at least one more child that stayed in A).
Genetic models reaching this far back are not concerned about individuals at all. Using genetic data, you may be able to show there was a substantial amount of migration between two populations. Single individuals just don't give an impact, genetically. The article uses an entirely different approach, and - importantly - an entirely different concept of inheritance: family trees, not genetics.
Note the article does not just look out for the one common person. It says, every single person living in that timeframe (unless their family tree died out) would be an ancestor to every single person living today. Mind-boggling, but not entirely unreasonable once you realize it's not genetics they are talking about.
(*) Unless of course that person carried some particular gene, which happened to be extremely valuable for living in B, and got an evolutionary advantage. But that's an entirely different story.
Re:What native Tasmanian population? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure the politically-correct loonies in the 60s did go a bit overboard from time to time, but Windschuttle goes as far as implying the so-called `Stolen Generation' never took place, and Australia's well documented period of government policy against non-whites (`White Australia Policy') was falsified and exaggerated. He's a parochial, white, right, conservative tosspot of the type that Australia is unfortunately too full of, and a good example of why I got fed up and went home to Auckland where people of all races manage to live quite nicely alongside one another without lynchings or race-riots.
-Tommi =^_^=
Re:Family Tree Grafting (Score:5, Interesting)
We know, or we believe we know from genetical studies, that populations do migrate or diffuse out rapidly. Often this motion is along trade routes, or around shallow coasts; following animal migrations, rivers, or belts of arable land. As long as there are suitable links, then there will be patches of people with a common relation. In medieval times, Indian objects got to Scandinavia, and Roman glass fot to Japan. But we also know there are places like Australia which took a long time to be discovered by Europeans (they somehow managed to find Tasmania first, but miss Australia), and so are probably much more weakly connected with the rest of the world. There are also other cultural barriers that will attenuate if not prevent intercourse between races, countries, religions, tribes, and whatever. Genetic research has told us that these taboos have probably been breached throughout history, but nevertheless there will be resistance.
We do not know nearly enough about where people did and did not travel in early history to make such a model. A lot of the evidence from 5000BC has probably vanished with rising sea levels. My gut feeling is that this model makes the world too uniform, and does not have enough hard links to it, but I don't really know either.