Actually, intermixture between Polynesians and Melanesians dated back in 1000 BC and were few in numbers. The founder of Polynesians were at maximum 300 east Asian females, 100 East Asian males, 200 Melanesian males, 50 melanesian female. It had also been suggested Asian mtDNA had evolved in Papuan speaking regions since 6000-8000 years ago so much of the Asian mtDNA in Polynesians would have come from Papuan females. This explains why Polynesians have even higher frequencies of mtDNA B4a1 ( austronesian ) marker than Austronesian themselves because the intermixture happened in small numbers that it caused a founder effect and genetic drift.

As usual Peter, you have got it right. Just a slight modification of the argument.

People who burn off energy through heat generation in their mitochondria are wasting energy, which does not matter if there is enough food or bodyfat (energy supply).

Assuming European hunter gatherers had mitochondria that were adapted to using a high proportion of the energy in food for heat generation and they took up agriculture. Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists. The famines would kill off those with the mtDNA that tended to waste more energy in generating heat.

The early farmers in Europe would have crops that were poorly adapted to northern climes. Moreover, farmers would be expending a lot of energy months in advance of harvesting; working on their fat reserves if the harvest had failed last year. Most hunter gatherers who took up farming would have mtDNA very badly adapted to their new mode of existence. One can easily imagine most common lines of hunter gatherer mtDNA in farmers disappearing very fast in famines.

By robust I don't mean tall and heavy necessarily. I mean morphology.

I don't think modern studies like Karen Baab's or Lahr's find statistically detectable cranial robusticity differences between Northern and Southern Europeans, or greater robusticity related variation in Northern Europeans.

I also don't think they find a clear pattern of "Mediterranean" long facial indexes connecting to lower robusticity.

One note here is that bioanthropologists tend to denote robusticity as particular features of crania, such as the brow ridge, or a robust shape to the zygoma, whereas I've noticed that some lay folks outside bioanthropology seem to describe a broad face itself as robust (which seems an odd idea to me, because thereby such a definition children's faces would be more robust than adults).

By robust I don't mean tall and heavy necessarily. I mean morphology.

Anonymous I don't think north Europeans are very robust. From my own experience most are about 5'10-6'0 and about 170-200Ibs. I have not seen many southern Europeans but from the ones I have seen they have the exact same body builds. Maybe anthropologist can notice little differences.

Guide to Spainish phenotype.

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?106927-Guide-to-Spanish-phenotypes-%28by-regions%29

Here are Google images results of the most farmer(Sardinians) and most hunter gatherer(WHG+ANE) Europeans(Finnish but some Baltic people may be more).

Finnish
https://www.google.com/search?q=finnish+people&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=GswPU5nfC-PayAHTq4DICQ&sqi=2&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=651

Sardinians
https://www.google.com/search?q=finnish+people&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=GswPU5nfC-PayAHTq4DICQ&sqi=2&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=651#q=Sardinian+people&tbm=isch

Maybe you can't see it in a comparison of Sardinians and Finnish, but I have always noticed a similar look in all Europeans and it must come from the same source. Is it from EEF, is it from WHG, is it from ANE, is it from hunter gatherer-farmer mutts? I am very undecided on how it all developed right now.

There seems to be physical continuity between the Magdalenians through the Ertebolle people to modern day Phalians. Clearly there was more admixture than some might let on, though natural selection means that phenotype can be misleading as to the overall genetic relationships between populations.

I have also heard(no sources) that modern north Europeans(who are mainly blue eyed)are more robust than mainly brown eyed southern Europeans and near easterns. I have heard the phrase gracile Meditreaen body build many times.

Good point. Don't northern Europeans tend to be more robust than southern Europeans? The Mediterranean type tends to be gracile. There is the "bleached Mediterranean" type among northern Europeans, but there is also the wider face, thicker boned robust type common among northern Europeans. I think Coon said it was Upper Paleolithic admixture and the Borreby type.

The wrestler Brock Lesnar would be a good example:

http://stiriwrestling.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/brock-lesnar.jpg

Honestly Peter's theories anger me and seem very raciest. That doesn't mean I will be biased though, trust me. Does Peter consider anything besides female selection? I read "Female face shape and sexual selection" and "Eye color, face shape, and perceived personality traits" multiple times.

What Peter says about climate and lifestyle helping determine whether males or females are sexually selected makes sense, but you can't generalize the lifestyle of stone age hunter gatherers who lived in north Eurasia(WHG and don't forget about ANE) from around 50,000-10,000BP and say the same rule stood for all of the different people over ~40,000 years of time.

Also why would pale women over thousands and thousands of years always be the ones who are selected? I don't understand why faces would become more female like because of selection of pale skinned, light eyes, and light haired females(maybe separately). That is probably why Peter mentioned that light haired or eyes boys receive more estrogen in the womb, which feminizes the face. Besides that I don't why the faces would be more feminine.

I am not even a nube in anthropology(haven't started researching at all). I do have some very basic knowledge like I can tell differences between Caucasian skulls shape and others and the difference between archaic and modern human skulls. I have heard multiple times that Mesolithic/Upper Palaeolithic Europeans were very robust while the near eastern farmers were gracile(skinny?). We now know through ancient DNA the hunter gatherers were likely mainly blue eyes and the farmers brown eyed. Also WHG/ANE(simply Upper Palaeolithic north Eurasian) is over 50% in northern Europe while in southern Europe EEF(any near eastern ancestry goes in this category) is over 70%. This contradicts what Peter has said about blue eyed men having less robust faces.

I have also heard(no sources) that modern north Europeans(who are mainly blue eyed)are more robust than mainly brown eyed southern Europeans and near easterns. I have heard the phrase gracile Meditreaen body build many times.

I have also noticed that light haired men tend to grow less body hair(no sources).

I think modern culture could also be a reason why light hair and eyes are associated with females. I have read(and saved links) of studies that tested this. Men are constantly more blue eyed than women, women are much more green eyed than men, and women are more brown eyed than men. I couldn't find a study that showed a higher percentage of light hair in women. One from the 1930's(in Sami) said men were more light haired than the women.

Many women want to be blonde haired in our culture SO TONS OF THEM DYE IT. I can name many in my own family who naturally have dark hair(like most of the men) but dye it bright blonde. Also northern-eastern-central European children are primarily blonde haired and most of them become dark haired as adults. Look at small town school year books(where no one leaves) compare hair color between high school students and pre school, there is a big difference. Maybe women's hair color doesn't darken as much as men with age, or women who had blonde hair as children dye it and make themselves believe its their natural hair color.

Increased intrinsic mitochondrial function in humans with mitochondrial haplogroup H
Increased "mitochondrial respiratory capacity per mitochondrion."

Review article Mitochondrial DNA: more than an evolutionary bystander

Correct link for Nick Lane paper

There you go again: thinking you have explained traits by saying they came from some geographical area.

If white skin is not for enhanced skin synthesis of vitamin D, then Peter must be more or less right. Vitamin D has been quite well studied and it is pretty well established that white skin does not provide any advantage, the differences between groups are due to metabolism. I got as bored posting about this as everyone became while reading about it, but the spokesman for the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies panel that reported on vitamin D explains here. If light skin would not have been any use to HG (or farmers), in relation to vitamin D, then it must have evolved as a result of the kind of thing Peter suggests.

Interpretation of the recent genetic data is still uncertain, but I think it follows from the facts the IoM have established about vitamin D that this idea farmers were the first white skinned people is wrong.

Face shape and Eye color link to face shape. So light skin blue eyes and feminine face shape all came form the same place.

As for mtDNA, Nick Lane full paper on Mitonuclear match shows optimizing ?tness is requires 'respiratory
stoichiometry to be calibrated locally to need, tailoring supply to demand'. Farming would have different requirements, sustained effort on a substantially different major substrate. There would be far less protein and vastly more starch. And the stress on the mitochondria would be combined with the energy expenditure demands of farming, which appear to have been selected for in muscle . If there has to be a close match between mtDNA and nuclear DNA, as Lane says, then farmers who had HG mothers could could have been under strong selection for optimisation of the match.

(Mild poisons, like other stresses, can have a hormetic effect. But that is a different issue.)

I meant to say were living in the near east 10,000 years ago, not Europe or somewhere else in north Eurasia.

Also Sean, eye color is directly connected with hair color. light eyes existed in Mesolithic Europeans so there is a good chance light hair also existed or it evolved in their descendants. If light hair did not exist in the Mesolithic it probably evolved in Europeans during the Neolithic who had mainly North Eurasian(mainly WHG not ANE) ancestry which could explain why light hair-eyes-skin correlate so well with WHG.

Possible it was just luck that 2/2 Mesolithic Europeans so far tested(or whatever) have light eyes and light eyes were actually a small minority. I don't understand how light eyes could have been popular In a dark skinned black haired WHG people, while today is connected with light hair and light skin and happens to also be connected with WHG. If light hair and skin originated in the farmers why are Sardinians and southern Europeans in general much more dark haired and also have tanner skin? I understand crazy stuff can happen but I think there is a possibility that some region of Europe(i.e., east) the hunter gatherers were pigmented like modern Finnish.

Sean, what face shape in Europeans are you talking about? Can you please give evidence? The whole female selection thing to me is not convincing.

We now know(unlike in 2006) that Europeans can be very different from each other genetically and that there are two main sources of ancestry in Europe: near eastern(mainly from early farmers) and North Eurasian hunter gatherer(WHG and ANE). When Peter talks about the evolution of white skin in Europe he forgets that.

Near eastern ancestry may be as high as 40-50% in north-west Europe and east Europe, 80% in southern Europe, and 30% in north-east Europe and Scandinavia. Most Europeans are about as much or more near eastern than they are North Eurasian(WHG and ANE). It is very important to remember a large percentage of modern Europeans ancestors were not living in the near east 10,000 years ago.

One event did not create the difference we see in farmer and hunter gatherer mtDNA in Europe today. We are talking about thousands of years of migrations, hundreds of different cultures and ethnic groups, gazillions of different individual stories, etc, etc, etc, etc.

Also it seems you guys are treating a mtDNA haplogroup the same why as a mutation that creates light eyes. mtDNA is a maternal line, so it is all about female giving birth to another female who gives birth to another female and so on. For some reason farmer females reproduced much better than hunter gatherer females. I don't understand why likely hunter gatherer decended mtDNa and farmer mtDNA is so evenly distributed in Europe and doesn't show any correlation with hunter gatherer Y DNA. Hunter gatherer Y DNA and mtDNA does not correlate really at all with hunter gatherer ancestry which is also very confusing.

A lot of mtDNA in Europe we now consider as descended from farmers(like H3) are very exclusive to Europe and most diverse in Europe, meaning they look like they originated in Europe. Before ancient mtDNA many people thought that those haplogroups were native to Europe like they thought U5 was. There may be mtDNA we think of as farmer mtDNA that is actually hunter gatherer mtDNA.

If, as seems likely, farmers had bettter genes for farming, then with only a little intermarriage the useful farmer genes would have spread through the HG population.

All our mitochondial DNA is inherited from our mother. The offspring of farmer males and HG women would have the useful nuclear genes and hunter gatherer mtDNA. As I understand it Gregory Cochran says it couldn't have been selection within the hunter gatherers that removed their old hunter gather adapted mtDNA because the mtDNA disappeared too fast.

Invaders usually marry the local women, but it seems to me it follows from the aforemention assuptions of Cochran that there there was little or no intermarriage between HG women and farmers (otherwise the HG mtDNA would have persisted for a very long time). I find it difficult to believe that HG women would not have found their way into a flourishing farming community. As Duke Nukem said "Damn it!, Why do they always take the hot ones?"

Barak, The trouble with you, and not only you, is you think if you say a trait came from somewhere, you think it's explained. That is just recursion, and evades the question of what the selection pressure that caused the trait to evolve actually was. How did Europeans get to look so different from people who live at the same latitude. The skin colour is not the only difference, look at the face shape.

In a comment here several years ago, I raised the possibilty that the evolution of blue eyes may have preceded the evolution of white skin. Peter replied that he had also thought about that.

I don't pretend to know exactly what selection pressure caused white skin to evolve in Europeans, but it had nothing to do with vitamin D; I am absolutely certain of it. And something along the lines of what Peter has been suggesting is the only other possibility.

Sean
"Anon, everyone can make their own mind up. Naysayers may object that the turnover in mtDNA was far too abrupt to be a product of selection."

Yeah I'm not saying it was all selection just that if the farmers had some particularly good genes that were strongly selected for – if that is what happened – then by definition the percentage of farmer dna must have gone up over time – perhaps dramatically – and so if true this gives us a clue as to what happened.

Sean, European eye color had diversified by the Mesolithic both La Brana-1 and Loschbour had light eyes also we know some Mesolithic Europeans must of had brown eyes. I think many people assume European light pigmentation has to be very young(however your measuring it). When it was found Copper age people of the pontaic steppe "are inferred to have light skin pigmentation" they highlighted that they had darker eyes than modern Europeans(which ones). Many people took that information and assumed this means light eyes were less popular back then.

Peter suggested that Loschbour got his blue eyes from farmer admixture(in article brown man with blue eyes). Right there is an assumption the young invasive farmers were the light pigmented ones in every way and that the old native hunter gatherers were dark in everyway.

I think the biased assumption light pigmentation is very young(however your measuring it) hurts peoples chances of discovering how it evolved. Loschbour and La Brana-1 may have had anything from snow white to dark dark brown skin. I have given my reasons many times. I think it is more likely they had dark skin, but who knows life is very complicated and there are a lot of possibilities. I hate it when people go mainstream and ignore the evidence that there are undiscovered factors to human skin color. The only thing I am pretty certain about La Brana-1 and Loschbour is they had dark hair and light eyes.

Peter frost I see no reason to argue this. Modern Europeans have very high amounts of near eastern(mainly from early farmers) ancestry that has been proven not just through mtDNA. 75% North Eurasian(including ANE) hunter gatherer ancestry may be accurate for north-east Europeans.

Anon, everyone can make their own mind up. Naysayers may object that the turnover in mtDNA was far too abrupt to be a product of selection. However, and as Peter points out in this post, those all knowing critics are tacitly positing an incredibly intense degree of selection for skin pigmentation, hair and eye colour, skeletal, and especially craniofacial characteristics (the delicate features).

Possibly a factor in HG mtDNA vanishing was the agricultural diet, which may have imposed tough selection on most mtDNA from HG, because of the the different metabolic demands and altered supply of substrates .

Peter, apart from the mtDNA issue, is the selection of DNA caused by agriculture which you suggest, similar to what is called a 'soft sweep'?

FWIW, my husband, from N. Europe, starts sweating at 70 degrees. It kind of amazes me that it isn't obvious that people might run hotter or colder due to the temperatures their ancestors lived in.

@barak

"I think Indo Europeans and Uralics from east Europe are mainly responsible."

What you think of as "Uralic" extended from France to Siberia and into North America.

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/6525/7dt9.png

It's the mammoth steppe not Siberia. The labeling is misleading people.

Once you see ANE as mammoth steppe rather than Siberian it all fits neatly.

"Current north Europeans must be at least 50% from the ice age hunter gatherer population of north Europe, my eyes tell me. So does the mirror."

No one can really argue with that kind of evidence, especially when the cut-off is as specific as "at least 50%."

Sean, north European's hunter gatherer ancestry is not necessarily native to the region. I think Indo Europeans and Uralics from east Europe are mainly responsible.

Peter doesn't have an answer for all the arguments, yet.

What percentage of current north Europeans came from Indo Europeans who were a bit of a mix of ice age Euro HG that wandered off and got mixed with other people, I don't know, and don't much care.

The essential point is not guesswork about who contributed what exotic strain, where they acquired it, or when they brought it back to north Europe; it's what is the continuity from the ice age to modern times in north Europe.

Current north Europeans must be at least 50% from the ice age hunter gatherer population of north Europe, my eyes tell me. So does the mirror.

'IT would be interesting to get data from fertility clinics to see if there are any groups or populations that struggle to conceive,” he says, “and if any of this can be put down to incompatibilities between mitochondria and nuclear backgrounds. Around 40% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and we don’t know why.”'

Mitonuclear match: optimizing fitness and fertility over generations drives ageing within generations

"IT would be interesting to get data from fertility clinics to see if there are any groups or populations that struggle to conceive,” he says, “and if any of this can be put down to incompatibilities between mitochondria and nuclear backgrounds. Around 40% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and we don’t know why.”"

Mitonuclear match: Optimizing ?tness and fertility over generations drives ageing within generations

Peter Frost there is prove in ancient autosomal DNA European hunter gatherers and farmers were two different populations, and that modern Europeans have a very high amount of farmer ancestry. Have you read the study Laz 2013? They had very different mtDNA because they were two different populations NOT because of drift. Referencing sources from before the modern DNA era is not good for your argument.

In WHG-ANE-EEF admixture from laz 2013 southern Europeans come out overwhelmingly EEF(including early European farmer or other forms of near eastern ancestry), north-west Europeans are about 5-10% more EEF than WHG, east Europeans(Balkans-) have pretty equal EEF and WHG but EEF is usually higher, only in far north-east Europe is WHG higher than EEF and even then WHG only reaches above 50% in Sami(one north Norwegian Sami sample). There is a lot of near eastern ancestry in Europe, and overall is higher than European aka hunter gatherer ancestry.

I don't understand why there is no correlation between hunter gatherer ancestry and hunter gatherer mtDNA and Y DNA. Whatever the source of this is it effected almost all Europeans.

Peter, modern people in certain regions of Europe today may not be full blooded descendants of ones that lived there in the Neolithic. It seems you never consider that idea. Genomes from Mesolithic and Neolithic Swedes prove they are not the main ancestors of modern ones, that is just one example. In my opinion Indo Europeans brought more WHG and ANE to Europe and that there was modern like near eastern admixture in Europe especially Balkans and Italy after the Neolithic. High amount of WHG in north Europeans is probably because of migrations of Indo Europeans and Uralics from east Europe not because of native north European hunter gatherer ancestry.

meant to add,

so some continuity, some replacement but mostly continuity by cousin.

I'm currently thinking

->HGs
->HGs mostly but not completely displaced by east med. farmers
->reconquista including wandering Cucuteni types displaced by PIE
->actual IE layer

complicated by first farmer DNA surviving and increasing through the female line.

but my view changes by the day as new papers come out.

After all the discussion, there will be at least three follow up posts. The second will be a (very simple) video explaining what the mtDNA ancestor means, and why she was not alone.

Japan is notable for an extraordinarily small gap in life expectancy between men and women.
East Asians in general show little sexual dimorphism. I think that is due to the men's lack of prenatal tesosteronisation. That could also explain a lack of interest in the culture of sexual adventure that is dominant in the West.

Do young Western women primarily want sexual adventures nowadays, or are they just in a culture where sex is expected and contraception means there is no longer fear of pregnancy as an excuse?

The Japanese adopted the female tanning fad from the Western world but then dropped it about thirty years ago. I suspect it has more staying power here because (a) traditional notions of feminity are weaker and (b) many if not most young men and women are locked into a culture of sexual 'churning'.

Japan is also notable for pretty high drops in birthrates and sexual desire among the young.

Women have lighter skin than men for one very obvious reason. Women are responsible for building the baby's bones in the womb. If the mother doesn't get enough Vitamin D through her skin and there's not enough in her diet, there isn't going to be a next generation. Thus women have had greater natural selection for lighter skin. Lighter skinned women were the ones who produced the healthiest offspring.

One query about this would be whether the same dimorphism is present in chimpanzees, who are mostly covered with hair.

That's not what Systematic review of first-trimester vitamin D normative levels and outcomes of pregnancy found. Moreover, a large scale association study of the genetic determinants of vitamin D insufficiency in Caucasians found no links to skin pigmentation, See here.

Women have lighter skin than men for one very obvious reason. Women are responsible for building the baby's bones in the womb. If the mother doesn't get enough Vitamin D through her skin and there's not enough in her diet, there isn't going to be a next generation. Thus women have had greater natural selection for lighter skin. Lighter skinned women were the ones who produced the healthiest offspring.

Papuan polygyny would leave some men without wives; they would not have land either (in a female farming system) so they would be disruptive. Papuan society could export the problem by encouraging unmarried males to move into areas inhabited by Austronesian communities to acquire their women and land.

Women with infant traits, like light skin, are supposed to be particularly desirable. Yet these traits are said to be non-erogenous in adult females, to the extent that women apparently choose a tanned appearance as a way of improving their sexual attractiveness. So light skin is sexual, but at the same time it is not.

Infant traits in babies induce maternal feeling (mother love) which is not entirely dissimilar to romantic love. The mental pathway whereby infant traits induce a certain love (the motherly caring type) is already there.

Under selection for eliciting care, provisioning and monogamy infant traits could have been adapted to the telenomic function in adult women of inducing romantic love in men.

There are examples from history of polygynous non-European men buying European girls as sex slaves and then becoming entranced by them to the extent that the slaves were given unprecedented social position.

In the modern WEIRD environment where men are not expected be immediately serious, the romantic love inducing trait of light skin may get in the way of eliciting sufficient male approaches to give females a choice of suitors. Tanning becomes favoured by young women as a superficial cue to men immediately interested in a casual relationship.

Gigerenzer:"Paradoxically, in these situations a more noncompensatory environment may lead to examining cues in increasing order of validity […] With sexual selection, it could often be that particular traits evolve as signals because of the stage of the assessment process in which they can be examined, rather than that the cue informativeness of preexisting signals has favored an order of inspection".

I think the light skin cue for romantic love and monogamy, having been initially suppressed, would become more important once a stable relationship was established. A prediction would be that women are far less interested in tanning, or even avoid it, in a serious relationship.

"Some ethologists have argued that light skin is one of several infant traits that the adult female body has adopted to calm aggressive impulses in men and induce caring behavior."

This suggests the possibility that it changes over the monthly cycle.

They show some sort of intinctive disgust at the sight of cheese. I did not teach that to my daughter since I am a heavy cheese eater

jb: It is something like that. Here’s the problem as I see it: When complete human sequences are compared to a European one (CRS), they have many differences which are NOT mutations mixed in with actual mutations. The ratio is pretty high. When compared to the CRS, an A2a sequence, for instance, has 13 differences (43%) which are not mutations mixed in with 17 mutations (57%). A reference sequence which is closer to the root human one will alleviate most of that.

I’m not entirely sure I understand what is going on here, so let me ask directly in simple language: Is the “Reconstructed Sapiens Reference Sequence” basically an attempt to reconstruct the mitochondrial sequence of the famous “Mitochondrial Eve”, using Neanderthals as an outgroup?

The revision is called Copernican because it represents a shift to a more natural frame of reference just as Copernicus shifted from a geocentric to a heliocentric model. Its not Copernican in the sense of being a massive scientific revolution and the authors do not imply that it is.

At first glance, this looks like a sound revision. My only quibble is rhetorical. It takes a fair amount of gall to label your own revision “Copernican” even if it is in fact Copernican, and this clearly is not. It’s a high bar, no? Scientists tend to be looser with their metaphors than are English majors. Some things are iconic enough to deserve not to be used metaphorically.

Hello ohwilleke,

Could you please clarify your previous comment?

Thanks.

It is hard to tell what is going on in the Native American paper.

Previous Y-DNA and mtDNA studies have shown that there are some Y-DNA phylogenies (e.g. Q-M3 and its descendants) and some major mtDNA haplogroups (A2, B2, C1b, C1c, C1d, and D1) that are very old and found throughout the Americas.

There are other Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups that are found predominantly only in certain North American groups (Y-DNA Q-M242 (xM3), R1 -M127, C3b, mtDNA X2a, D2a1, A2a. A2b) that seem to be traceable to later migrations (the case of R1-M127 being absent from the first wave or part of a serial founder effect in early first wave Native American migrations is less than clear). Na-Dene and Circumpolar populations tend to have lots of atypicality, Northeast North American populations are rich inY-DNA R1 -M127 and mtDNA X2a but not necessarily some of the other atypical New World Y-DNA haplogroups like Q-M242 (xQ-M3) and C3b that are pretty specific to the Na-Dene and Circumpolar populations. The indigeneous American form of R1 sometimes called R1* splits off before the R1a v. R1b break and is also associated with Indonesia and the Phillipines (arguing for its presence in the first wave indigneous population followed by serial founder effects as that population spreads out, as does the presence of R1* in indigeneous people of South America).

A link between the Na-Dene and Circumpolar Q-M242(xQ-M3) populations and South Altaian populations at a recent date would make sense and could plausibly be refined by an improved South Altaian phylogeny of Y-DNA haplogroup Q (Q-M3 is basically a private American haplogroup so new phylogenies in Siberia should have much of an impact on it to show linkage). A link between all Native Americans via Q-M3 and South Altaian populations makes less no sense at pedigree mutation rates which tend to be more accurately calibrated to historical dates (although the whole Y-DNA dating scheme is fundamentally problematic) but could fit the evoluationary dates.

An interesting methodological feature of Reich, D., et al. “Reconstructing Indian Population History” (doi:10.1038/nature08365) was the following:

“The idea of fitting allele frequency differentiation to historical models was first explored by Cavalli-Sforza and Edwards [35], and here we extend it to trees with mixture. This approach contrasts with the STRUCTURE algorithm, which fits data without a tree [36], or a tree in which many groups split simultaneously from an ancestral population followed by mixture [37]. Although STRUCTURE is accurate for estimating individual mixture proportions in recently mixed groups, it is not clear whether its estimates of ancient mixture are biased because it does not model hierarchical relationships among groups, which could lead to inaccurate estimates of allele frequencies in ancestral populations. In contrast, we use a more realistic tree model, and provide a test of fit.”

Supplemental notes 3 and 4 to the study flesh out the idea. Phylogenetic trees yield demonstrable phylogenetic inferences it would seem to me. My 2c.

As I think you noted the problem is that where the genes are today may not clearly tell you who lived where in the past and that thinking it does can lead to staggering errors. Plus you only draw blood from survivors who may not be all that closely related to population that lived in a given region in the past. Evidence of major population replacements among modern humans is starting to stack up.

pcconroy

I reckon we are still pretty far from being able to for example name an exact Celtic nation as the vector which spread a particular R1b clade. I know people want it to happen. It would be fascinating!

But it is hard for me to imagine what kind of data could actually lead to a strong conclusion about such things, unless it be from ancient DNA?

On the other hand it is dangerous to predict that science will not work out a way! 🙂

#6 – yes, in the genetic genealogy community, some branches of R1b1b2, especially R-L21 – which is dominant in Ireland and Britain may only be 5,500 years old and R-L21 M222+ (Ui Neill) may be 2,500 yo.

Incidentally a new SNP DF23 has just been found, which lies between R-L21 and M222 downstream. So this is good news for people like me, as it should finally bring us nearer to determining the source population of M222. The betting is almost equally Ireland and Scotland, but some like the R-L21 list owner think England. I think it’s going to be among the Belgae in the Low Countries…

“R1b1b2. That’s a Y chromosomal haplogroup which was once presumed to be Paleolithic but now seems likely to be Neolithic.”

I’d say every few months the peer reviewed literature gets closer to saying it is post-Neolithic, or at least not in the first one or two waves of the Neo-lithic. Amongst some of us in the genetics genealogy crowd, it has for some time been considered likely to be Bronze Age, and associated with Indo European. (This hypothesis was not even one of the 3 tested in the most recent article you have very recently covered. But it seems consistent with the findings.)

Of course this is a clade that hobbyists have a lot of resources for, because most have European ancestry, and this was acknowledged in one recent paper. The data sets are bigger than any normal academic study, made up of volunteers, and commercial testing looking for new clade defining SNPs is now becoming standard.

Best Regards
Andrew

I wonder, if you look at a good number of lineages but with relatively few mutations, to what extent different ratios of synonymous versus non-synonymous will just naturally occur by chance, without invoking selection processes.

I find the use of “different mutation rates” confusing in the paper when the authors really mean bottlenecks and expansion and different population sizes.

As to R1b1b2 being neolithic, that is far from being settled.

Footnote: Ancient DNA data here. mtDNA J first appears in Neolithic Germany ca. 5400 BCE. Not one of the 50 paleolithic mtDNA samples (even those from societies that made the Paleolithic-Neolithic transition very late) that could be types were J. Nor were any of the 22 early Neolithic mtDNA samples from Syria, Turkey, Italy, or Portugal. The only cases of J prior to 3300 BCE are in the LBK where it is a minor component of a hetrogeneous mix, with a wider range and more prominent inclusion in the mix thereafter. Thus, not only is it not found in pre-Neolithic samples, the ancient DNA suggests that hg J was not part of the Cardial Pottery Neolithic and instead came in a later wave to that part of Europe.

The timing and distribution is suggestive of the idea that J may not only have spread into Europe with farmers, but that it may have spread specifically with dairy farmers.

mtDNA hg R had to be at least 45,000 years old because it has descedants in the aboriginal Australians and in Papua New Guinea. An estimate of 54,500 years isn’t far off from reasonable calibrations based on that point.

The notion that “[t]his lineage played a major role in migration “out of Africa””, however, doesn’t pass the smell test. Essentially everyone of ancesteral Eurasian descent alive today are matriline descendants of someone who had mtDNA L3, and there are a lot of mutations from that point to the most basal of the mtDNA haplogroups in R. You need to go from L3 to N to R to descendant mtDNA hgs at a time when the population level production of new mutations would have been limited by a much smaller effective population than the one seen post-Neolithic.

Also, the TMCA date for mtDNA hg J is very likely not the date when it arrives in Europe in any meaningful frequency. Paleolithic European hunter-gatherer mtDNA from ancient is predominantly U4 and U5, and I can’t recall any instance of Paleolithic European hunter-gatherers having with mtDNA hg J of any kind. We can infer from its presence in the Americas, the mtDNA hg X must have been present in Siberian Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, probably (unlike other mtDNA hgs in the Americas) by a “Northern route.” We can pin some mtDNA M hgs to the Paleolithic by their island isolations (Andamanese; Japanese). But, there are really very few mtDNA hgs that we can definitively calibrate as Paleolithic in anything approximating their modern geographic distribution.

Moreover, we also have pretty convincing evidence from a growing number of separate lines of evidence that there was immense population genetic upheaval in Europe with limited continuity from era to era first between the pre-LGM and post-LGM when Europe was repopulated from Southern refugia (and possibly new influxes of people from outside Europe), then in the Neolithic, and to a lesser degree later.

J may have “brewed” and diversified in the Near East for tens of thousands of years, but there is very little evidence to suggest that it is a Paleolithic arrival in Europe. If anything, this study tells us most importantly that mtDNA mutation rate clocks aren’t reliable. We can rely on the phylogeny, but other means of calibrating dates are almost always going to be more trustworthy.

Even if it is an ancient hg, the distribution and other evidence point to a fairly recent (i.e. predominantly Neolithic) arrival in Europe.

There has been genetic exchange between Somalia and the Arabian peninsula (Yemen or Saudi) within recent historical times. The Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton noted that Somali nobles sometimes had ‘Arabian’ wives. I don’t know how quantitatively important this would be, but if it has been the practice for centuries it would be bound to have some impact.

Thank You Meng Bomin,

I am not a native English speaker.

Razib’s Blog gives me true enjoyment, though I
understand many topics only partially.

Above he used a particular population indicator as “Yemenise”
and I did not know if it was on purpose or a
slight oversight.

Very respectfully,
Steve

How does a population’s name derive from the country name?
(English language question)

There isn’t a straightforward answer to that. There are multiple systems of different origins. For some Arab demonyms, the “i” ending comes as a result of the Arabic:

Yemeni
Iraqi
Saudi
Omani
Emriti
Qatari
Bahraini

All those are simply loan words from Arabic. We took the Arabic place name and also the Arabic demonym, which follows the above pattern.

Usually, the “ite” ending refers to ethnic groups rather than nationalities. An Israeli would be someone from the current state of Israel, while an Israelite (typically used in a biblical context) is Jewish. A Yemeni is someone from Yemen, while a Yemenite Jew is a group of Jews that have lived in Yemen historically.

Obviously there are other relationships between place names and demonyms:

Tunisia → Tunisian
Canada → Canadian
Iran → Iranian
Brazil → Brazilian

Portugal → Portuguese
China → Chinese
Japan → Japanese

Germany → German
Mexico → Mexican

Iceland → Icelander

Spain → Spaniard

Great Britain → Briton

There are patterns, but for the most part you have to learn each demonym individually. There aren’t universal rules determining their construction.

How does a population’s name derive from the country name?
(English language question)

Sudan – sudanese
Taiwan -taiwanese
Yemen – yemenites -yemenis yemenese (?)
Israel -israelites -israelis
Oman – omanis

[…] as a function of geography, but there are also suggestions that this is not simply a function of isolation by distance (i.e., populations at position 0.5 on the interval 0.0 to 1.0 would presumably exhibit equal […]

[…] East Africa, Ethiopia, mtDNA, Yemen by Razib Khan in Anthroplogy, Genomics, History | 4 comments | RSS feed | […]

I don’t know what that’s supposed to prove? Some of the historical connections they make are dubious at best.

They do mention the same “gender bias” you alluded to regarding J1-M267 and the great “discrepancy” between Amharas and Oromos observed in Semino et al. (2004). But, again, that was in comparison to an Oromo subgroup with a typical southern Oromo profile, highly different to Amharas in other ways than just J (very high E-M78, for example). As the simple composite chart I posted above shows, which includes many Ethiopian Cushitic samples, that was not a relevant comparison.

Not that I don’t appreciate Kivisild’s study, the mtDNA data is great! 🙂

See, e.g., Am J Hum Genet. 2004 Nov;75(5):752-70. Epub 2004 Sep 27. “Ethiopian mitochondrial DNA heritage: tracking gene flow across and around the gate of tears.”, Kivisild T, Reidla M, Metspalu E, Rosa A, Brehm A, Pennarun E, Parik J, Geberhiwot T, Usanga E, Villems R..

ohwilleke, could you please elaborate on the supposed “distinctive signature closely aligned with language” and the “fairly good historical documentation of when it happened and how”?

The so-called clear gender bias (I would guess you’re referring to a paternal bias of Eurasian admixture, as people often do) is a common misconception. As I have mentioned on this blog before, people often base their conclusions about Ethiopian Semites/Cushites on data that is inadequate or irrelevant. Ethiopian Cushitic speakers have a lot of variation genetically, and the Oromos who trace their ancestry to far southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya are often quite different from Oromos from areas closer to central Ethiopia.

Here is an actual composite chart of Ethiopian Y-DNA (not made by me) comparing Cushitic speakers to Semitic speakers. Rather similar, no?

Another thing you must realize is that not all Cushitic speakers are representative of the Cushitic ancestors of Semitic Ethiopians; the closest to that are Ethiopian Agew populations, many of whom have disappeared recently due to the spread of the Amharic language. The Oromos, who underwent a northern expansion from areas in the far south long after the entrance of Semitic, certainly aren’t the most representative, especially the southern ones.

If anything, the gender bias of Eurasian admixture in the whole Horn of Africa is maternal more than anything else. This seems to be especially true of the Tigray people of the far north of the country.

“The autosomal and uniparental data from Ethiopia and Somalia strongly leans us toward the proposition of admixture of two very distinct populations, one in East Africa (“Ancestral East Africans”), and Eurasian group which are likely to have been intrusive.”

At the very least you have three inputs: Ethio-Semitic (a very distinctive signature closely aligned with language, a clear gender bias in admixutre, and a fairly good historical documentation of when it happened and how), and a pre-Ethio-Semitic layers that has both an African and Eurasian component.

The HV1 distributions bear a fair amount of similarity in both age relative to other Eurasian hgs (i.e. old but not pre-LGM), and distribution with NRY-DNA hg T – which like HV1 peaks in Somolia.

A lot of Vendramini’s arguments seem to be pure speculation without solid basis. But one thing struck my mind: Do the hard tissue based parts (e.g., position and size of the eyes) of Vendramini and Balseiro’s Neanderthal reconstruction have any scientific validity? I am asking this as, unlike genetics, I am pretty uninformed about facial reconstruction.

To Razib Khan: You’re quite right, mate. You did point it out! However, lots of people – including several famous paleoanthropologists – have disregarded this simple fact for thirty years! As more fossils are analyzed, we should expect to see lots of mtDNA lines that are lost today. These lines will be found not only in Neandertals and Denisovans, but also in ‘modern’ Homo Sapiens, in Africa as well as elsewhere. By no means does this mean that those people have no living descendents!

Several years ago, an Australian team published their results from research on fossils from Lake Mungo – perfectly ‘modern’ specimens, I should add. The mtDNA they found fell outside the accepted tree rooted in the famous ‘African Eve’, and as a result, their research was largely disregarded. Whether or not their results were caused by contamination, as some critics claimed, such a result is exactly what one should expect – on purely statistical grounds.

At 4:13 he holds the skull so it’s looking at the ceiling and says it’s got a protruding face. Not if you hold it properly so the eyes are looking forward.

Entertainment, yes. Science, no.

Please do the statistics, folks. mtDNA lines disappear – not because of natural selections, and not because the people carrying the lines didn’t reproduce, but because of random statistical effects. A personal example: My paternal grandmother has approximately fifty living descendents, all carrying fractions of her DNA. However, her mtDNA line is gone forever. That’s because she had five sons and two daughters. Those two daughters didn’t have any daughters, just sons! On the other hand, my maternal grandmother has only ten living descendents. She had one daughter, who had one daughter, who had two daughters. Her mtDNA line lives on!

In a stable population, one where each reproducing female leaves exactly two reproducing children, 90 % of the original mtDNA lines will be broken in just 34 generations. That’s less than 1.000 years. So if you start with 1.000 female Neanderthals in a mixed population, less than 100 Neanderthal mtDNA lines will survive after 1.000 years. After another 1.000 years, less than 10. After yet another 1.000 years… You can do the same type of calculation regarding Neanderthal Y chromosome lines. All taken together: If Neanderthals were a small minority of our common ancestors, it is extremely unlikely that any two Neanderthal genes would survive after 30.000 years. (In effect, mtDNA and the Y chromosome are inherited as just one gene, since they’re inherited in one piece.) Conclusion: We don’t have to construct intricate theories of marriage customs or patterns of reproduction in order to explain the lack of Neanderthal mtDNA or Neanderthal Y chromosomes today; we only have to do some reasonable math.

For thirty years, the ruling orthodoxy – the ‘Recent out of Africa’ school – has been leaning heavily on just one gene, out of our 25.000. In reality, each gene has its own tree of ancestry! The total picture will be incredibly complex, and we’ve just started to put together a few pieces of the jigsaw. What we do know is that the average person carries approximately 1.000 genes inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors. (My own ‘Neanderthal bun’ at the back of my skull confirms my mixed ancestry!) Most of the rest of our genes in all likelyhood are of recent African origin (‘recent’ meaning 100.000 years or less), but we don’t KNOW this yet. We’ll know much more once we start seeing DNA from Asian Homo Erectus, and I’m convinced we’re in for a lot of surprises. There’s a revolution going on in the way we perceive who we are and where we come from.

@# 3 Justin Giancola,

“geeze dialects!” . Don’t you speak with a dialect?

The video is definitely for entertainment only.

The consumption of homo sapiens flesh, particularly the brain, probably gives a clue to the eventual extinction of homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Look to a prion condition like kuru in the central New Guinea highlands that, in the late 1940’s and through the 1950’s, nearly exterminated the tribes that had lived there for tens of thousands of years. Our ancestors did not hunt the neanderthals to extinction. Our brain prions killed them off. Kind of a poetic justice, that!

Talk to a midwife. I’ve been quoting for years online now one who looked at the robust Neanderthal pelvis- which does not crack wider during birthing- saying they would not have been able to safely deliver a hybrid, but a Cro Magnon woman would.

This adds a whole new meaning to one of my late father’s favorite expressions to describe bratty kids or otherwise out-of-control people “as wild as a raped ape.” Seriously, though, I agree with the advisory under the video “For entertainment purposes only.” I was, indeed, entertained.

“selective mating of Neanderthal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently”

Can’t be. The Africans must have been the aggressors, and they got the women. Otherwise we would be Neanderthals wondering what happened to the Africans.

[…] a little bit Neanderthal and we didn’t replace them, we absorbed them with some interbreeding (interesting theory as to how). Perhaps not so completely as that but definitely some admixture going on. As Razib of Gene […]

Um, does Vendramini know that gorillas aren’t bipedal? I don’t think chimps are really all that bipedal. He says neanderthals are primates, but doesn’t note that they’re more specifically hominids. And it’s interesting how his voice echoes the same when he’s ostensibly outdoors as when he’s indoors.

“I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to them that the Neandertal mtDNA type was probably lost because of natural selection.”

While this is possible, there doesn’t seem to be particularly strong evidence of natural selection playing a strong role in modern human mtDNA variation. The mtDNA variation looks like is a better fit for selective neutrality with it coming along for the ride of trends driven by other genetic and/or cultural drivers of natural selection that happen to coincide with mtDNA variants.

Hawks recent findings that the Neanderthal DNA found in East Eurasians is mostly different than the Neanderthal DNA found in West Eurasians also argues for the case that most of our Neanderthal DNA legacy, while not decisively counterproductive from a selective perspective, also didn’t provide decisive selective advantages. The case for selective advantage can only be made if the number of genes found in both West and East Eurasian Neanderthal DNA legacies are a larger share of the total than one would expect from random chance.

The selective factors related to mtDNA would probably relate to metabolic rate, as mitchondria are intimately involved in regulating metabolism. This is a trait that one would expect Neanderthals in colder climes to have better adapted to for colder climates than modern humans who would be more recent African expatriots where it is warmer, at least for those modern humans migrating to colder areas as many were doing in the era of Neanderthal-modern human interaction. Thus, it would be quite surprising that modern human mtDNA would have selective advantage relative to Neanderthal DNA.

I also don’t think that Eze @14 is correct that a random DNA test has much of a chance of discovering a Neanderthal Y or mtDNA lineage in a modern human in the next 5-15 years. The aggregate sample size of all Eurasians who have had uniparental DNA haplogroup typing already is on the order of tens of thousands if not the hundreds of thousands, with atypical relict populations mostly oversampled, with not a single such case identified so far.

Given the amount of population expansion (something on the order of ten thousand fold) that the world has seen in the last 30,000 years (the youngest possible origin for Nenaderthal DNA), it is very hard to imagine that a gene with a thousand plus generations of age in a period of profound population expansion would have stayed in the population, but be so rare that it or a phylogenetic descendant of it, wouldn’t have shown up in a sample as large as the one that already exists.

When DNA testing becomes commonplace in another 5-15 years, I envision that a Neanderthal Y or MT-DNA lineage will be found in a modern Hs. at random.

FWIW, John Hawks, who should be an expert at this, said this a year ago:

“I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men mating with modern human women, and not the other way around.

You see, they’re fixated on the idea that the mtDNA showed no signs that the Neandertal clade survived into the present-day population. That result really convinced some people that interbreeding was impossible. They’re flummoxed that some of the rest of the genome has significant signs of intermixture. It’s like their world is spinning out of control. I’m not naming any names, but if you’ve followed much of the press around the Neandertal genome, you’ve probably seen this suggestion.

I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to them that the Neandertal mtDNA type was probably lost because of natural selection.”

I like a more balanced approach though, such as in the post as I read it.

@ dave chamberlain:

Don’t you think Vendramini, a movie producer/writer/director, haven’t thought about that? From the beginning, perhaps.

[Ouch! He turned up in the ads too.]

At first glance, the Amerindian example seems questionable, since that pattern reflects not only contact, but the power differential between coloniser and colonised. But OHWilleke’s comment (#11) got me thinking – just because humans eventually displaced Neanderthals doesn’t mean that they got the upper hand in encounters between the two groups.

What if Neanderthals had the upper hand in these interactions? Hunter-gatherers can’t steal material possessions, but they can steal women. If you’re talking about a prolonged tributary relationship, it’s also conceivable that the Neanderthals were able to recognise (and claim) hybrid sons. (It wouldn’t be such a stretch to imagine Neanderthal society prizing sons more than daughters – it would fit well within what we find in many modern human societies.)

I’m thinking of the Island Caribs as a (partial) model. Men and women spoke different languages – the men reportedly spoke the Carib language, while the women spoke an Arawakan language (presumably reflecting the long-term import of captive Taino women).

There’s a weakness to such a model – if most hybrid sons were recovered by their fathers, then the contact would have to be prolonged. If there was prolonged contact, then the human-to-Neanderthal introgression would probably be more pronounced than in Neanderthal-to-human. The paucity of putative hybrid fossils might argue against this…though, on the other hand, despite the lack of fossils, we know that hybrids existed.

I’ve been beating this drum for months now. I’m glad to see that someone else is starting to accept it as well.

Also, there is a pretty easy way to solve the question of why all Neanderthal admixture in modern humans comes from Neanderthals males, which is the missing link in the analysis above. All you need is a scenario in which Neanderthal-human relationships are in the nature of rape/flings/seasonal meetups rather than being stable long term marriages, or (probably less plausibly) with Neanderthal-human relationships being matrilocal (which seems to be at odds with the very little that we know about Neanderthal social structure). Either way, the hybrid kids end up with their mother’s tribes.

In the case of modern human mothers (who were pregnant from Neanderthal fathers) those hybrid kids join the modern human gene pool. In the case of Neanderthal mothers (who were pregnant from modern human fathers) those hybrids end up in the Neanderthal gene pool.

The trouble is that the Neanderthal gene pool is a pond that goes dry when the Neanderthals go extinct, so that mixed species kids with Neanderthal mothers go extinct along with their Neanderthal maternal extended families, leaving only the hybrid kids of modern human mothers in the modern gene pool.

Very Entertaining indeed.

To back up Miko’s point about degree of genetica relatedness and similarity of appearance, Papaun tribesmen are more closely related to Han Chinese then West Africans were appearances would indicate quite the opposite.

I’ve got one doubt only: What’s a “comment ancestor”? 🙂

“…but the fact that the genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern Europeans is greater than the distance between modern Europeans and Africans suggests that the difference in appearance was probably also greater.”

It doesn’t. The phenotypes that make up gestalt “appearance” are highly labile. One could argue (I’m not, necessarily) that adaptation for living in Europe (which apparently includes bathing aversion and love of fluorescent clothing) led to broadly convergent changes in facial features in Neandertals and European Hs. Selection on many traits related to physiology are likely to secondarily affect appearance due to the shared developmental origin of craniofacial, endocrine and enteric nervous system tissues in the neural crest.

That’s all hand-waving, but I don’t think genetic distance is necessarily a good proxy for what we would experience as facial samey-ness, particularly between populations, whereas the selective environment might be under-appreciated as a systematic source of variation in facial features.

That said, I don’t really think any of those reconstructions look much like Europeans, except for the one that looks like Bill Maher.

And Danny Vendramini is my new Erich von Daniken. What a nut! I wonder if it’s optioned yet.

You just know some producers over at the Discover Channel are going to run with Neanderthals, Vicious Ape Rapers from the North. They have exhausted UFO’s, Nostradamus, Hogs Gone Wild, Ghosts and Big foot. Poor little timid humans, all they did was go looking for new food sources and what happens when they are all snuggled up around the night fire, ape rape attack.

I’ve always felt that reconstructions of Neanderthals generally looked far too much like modern Europeans. We don’t need to go all the way to slit-eyed killer apes (!), but the fact that the genetic distance between Neanderthals and modern Europeans is greater than the distance between modern Europeans and Africans suggests that the difference in appearance was probably also greater. I wonder what they really looked like! (I do think it’s at least possible they had fur!!!)

As I’ve suggested in a comment here before, I suspect Haldane’s rule is a plausible contributor to the patterns of gene flow between Neandertal and non-Neandertal human populations. I’m less convinced by the paper’s attempt to link the Y and mitochondrial data though – that makes no sense. Haldane’s rule does not pose any barriers to mitochondrial gene flow.

Although 250,000 years is indeed comparatively short, it’s a similar ballpark to the divergence between Mus musculus subspecies (500,000 yr), and these clearly show hybridisation effects. Depending on exactly which populations you look at, hybrids between domesticus and musculus subspecies can either show full fertility, male sterility, or even non-reciprocal male sterility depending on which subspecies contributes the X / Y chromosomes. If you look at hybrid zones between musculus and domesticus populations, there is evidence for sex ratio skewing depending on which sex chromosomes are present on which genetic background, again supporting the contention that sexually antagonistic genes are contributing to speciation.

It’s worth pointing out that it needn’t be complete hybrid sterility: hybrid breakdown over the course of a few generations would also form an effective barrier to gene flow. This is what you see in crosses of molossinus and laboratory mouse (predominantly domesticus). In the F1 generation, both males and females are fertile, but male fertility is lost as you back-cross the molossinus X onto the domesticus background. There’s reasonable transcriptional evidence for a genomic conflict between X and Y-linked genes, with interacting autosomal modifiers.

Obviously there are differences between rodent and human: generation time and metabolic rate, for a start. 500,000 years is also substantially longer than the interval between the Neandertal / non-Neandertal split and the subsequent gene flow. On the other hand, we don’t know when the diverging mouse populations started to show hybrid breakdown / sterility, all we know is that it took less than 500,000 years.

gen-Ome! geez dialects!

One thing I think he’s on the right track on is Neanderthals looked like bad-asses! 😉

I liked the slit pupils!

Consider me entertained.

If the Chinese fleet under Zheng He could sail across the Pacific in 1421, down the coastline of the Americas, along Antarctica, then split up and half of them circumnavigate the rest of the globe, it’s far from impossible that there was kayak and longship traffic back and forth over much smaller distances by northern populations used to the weather and ocean currents, from the earliest times of habitation. The minutiae of DNA strands and cladistics may be fascinating to some, but let’s not lose sight of the big picture. Besides, it makes for better barroom discussion.

What is no C1e is found in America? What´s the meaning of the way they use the word “extinct”. How can scientist use the word “extinct” when they are talking about hundred of test or even thousand of tests compared with millions of human living now in those areas. We forget that. Sure we are now missing thousands of people with C1e that never were made a dna-test.

Anyway, in my opinion, if C1e mt-dna came to Iceland in medieval ages, most of the today population of the island must have c1e mt-dna not just 80 (2010) or 4 (1710). At least more extended in the island geography.

Genetic genealogy is a newborn science…maybe now we can´t make this kind of valorations.

Anyway is very interesting…

@Andrew Oh-Willeke

“German’s hypothesis regarding an Asian origin for C1e doesn’t ring true among other reasons because C1a, the only C1 hg in both Asia and America has several mutations before splitting into an Asian and American branch and several more after the Asian branch comes into being, suggesting significant periods of in Asia mutation. The Icelandic branch has lots of shared mutation from the root C* hg, and then just one defining mutation into the subhgs found in Iceland, suggesting that the diversification upon arrival in Iceland is relatively recent.”

There are 12 mutations on the Icelandic C1e branch before it splits into two. These mutations are not found in either Asian or Amerindian populations. C1 splits into a large Amerindian cluster and two small clusters, one Icelandic, the other one Asia. How can arrival in Iceland be recent? The data suggests, instead, that C1e-carrying population stayed in long-term isolation from the others. Overall, of course, it’s hard to argue anything definitive on the basis of such limited data. It’s possible, however, that geneticists focus on haplogroups that are large enough to detect in modern samples but are also too recent to accurately describe Pleistocene realities of tribal microdifferentiation.