RSS
A person named Brit Nicholson published on Medium a sensible overview of the controversy over how long ago was the Most Recent Common Ancestor of all living humans.
The first thing to keep in mind is that having any one single ancestor long ago is a largely symbolic discovery. It’s fun to know but not necessarily very significant.
Discrepancies in the Estimated Date of the Human MRCA
Do all humans share a common ancestor from a few thousand years or a few hundred thousand years ago?
Brit Nicholson
Jun 12, 2019… In his fascinating book “A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived,” Adam Rutherford makes the astounding claim that all humans alive today share a most recent common ancestor (MRCA) from somewhere between 3,400 and 3,600 years ago, i.e. at least one person lived during that time who is the ancestor of every person alive today. Rutherford even notes the frowns of disbelief on audience members’ faces when he includes this claim in his speeches. Indeed, it flies in the face of our intuition.
One of the first things that come to mind upon hearing Rutherford’s claim is that it would only take one isolated population on an island somewhere for it to be wrong. Then again, it would only take one immigrant on a boat to the island two thousand years ago to have easily become an ancestor of everyone on that island today, or one conquistador who left descendants in remote areas of the Amazon. And they may not have left any genes that survive to the present day, which would make it impossible to prove or disprove the claim. However, it seems more likely that some tribe has remained untouched than that every tribe in the world has had at least one recent immigrant.
… The main theme of Rutherford’s book is that humans have always been enthusiastic about both migration and reproduction — that no population stays in the same place, unmixed, for very long.
Adam Rutherford likes to portray his theory of a recent MRCA as a beautiful fact, but it actually seems kind of horrifying if you think of the sad fates of the Tasmanians, which is all that makes his argument plausible. The last full-blooded Tasmanian is said to have died in 1876.
People could walk from Australia to Tasmania until about 8,000 years ago when warmer weather raised sea levels. Now, the Bass Strait is about 160 miles wide, with rough seas. So, it’s unlikely that any Australian Aborigines got to Tasmania from 6000 BC onward until fairly recently.
But now the full-blooded Tasmanians are gone, so Rutherford’s theory is less implausible.
In another wonderful book, “Humans: Who We Are and How We Got Here,” David Reich similarly notes that our family “tree” is actually more like a lattice. …
Reich’s estimation of when our MRCA lived is wildly different than Rutherford’s. Part of the reason for that is that Reich’s estimation is based on genes, and the contributions of many of our ancestors disappear over the generations. Here’s an excerpt from Reich’s book:Across chromosomes 1–22, the most recent shared ancestor for all present-day people ranges mostly between 5,000,000 and 1,000,000 years ago, and nowhere is it estimated to be more recent than about 320,000 years ago.
So the estimation is ~3,000 from Rutherford and ~300,000 from Reich.
One of these figures, given by two experts in human DNA science, is very wrong. How do we reconcile the difference?
In Rutherford’s book, he says that his figure comes from a model by the mathematician Joseph T. Chang in 2003. The mathematical model, first published in 1999, is truly elegant, but it only applies to closed populations with random mating. Chang lists multiple constraints for his model, including that it can’t be used for humans because of geographical and other barriers. The results of this model show us that MRCAs for most populations occur far more recently than anyone would expect, but even when allowing for migration within the model I believe that it doesn’t apply to all populations of humans.
The figures 3,400 to 3,600 are in fact from a paper by Douglas L. T. Rohde published in 2004 with Chang as a co-author. Part of Rohde’s computer simulation takes into account Chang’s probabilistic model from 1999. Rohde’s model was an excellent idea and was well executed, but it has a lot of constraints of its own. For example, the model divides the world into ten nodes that roughly correspond to continents. Migrants are swapped between continents in each generation. The amount of migration in the model is considered a conservative estimate, but in some cases in the real world there may have been no swapping of migrants.
I wonder when the first person born in Africa set foot in South America, or vice-versa? Columbus landed in Venezuela in 1498, and he might have had an African on board.
A more remote possibility is that some Carthaginian navigators went west of the Straits of Hercules and got blown to South America. (Berbers were living on the Canary Islands a few hundred miles out in the Atlantic when Europeans got there around 1300 AD.) Stories of castaways are inherently interesting, as Daniel DeFoe showed to his vast profit, so I’ll speculate a little on the subject. (Keep in mind that our favorite shipwreck stories come with massive survivor bias.)
This is noted in the paper, and examples are given of populations that remained isolated for long periods of time, such as Tasmanians, but it’s claimed that there are no longer any populations that are known to remain isolated to the present day.
Nicholson brings up another candidate: North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands of the Indian Ocean, where the natives have killed at least intruders in this century.
Other locations where humans lived in isolation from people from other continents for longer than 4,000 years might include Tierra del Fuego at the extreme end of South America, although I don’t know whether there are any pure blooded indigenous people left of the kind Darwin met in the 1830s. (There is an old lady on Tierra del Fuego still alive who is said to be the last full-blooded member of her tribe, although she looks fairly European to me.)
There are two main ways that people on different continents could wind up with common ancestors: diffusion versus long leaps.
For example, the Pericú people of Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, who were a distinct group into the 18th Century before they were civilized into history by the Jesuits, are said to have looked and behaved quite different from American Indians (they were still using the atlatl and dart instead of the bow and arrow in the 1600s), leading to speculation that either they “were either trans-Pacific immigrants or remnants of some of the New World’s earliest colonizers.”
Two interesting questions is how often did navigators get blown by ill winds all the way to another continent? And how many of them were afforded women when they got there?
We know a little bit about Japanese sailors who washed up in North America. Cassandra Tate writes:
According to historian Frederik L. Schodt, at least 34 Japanese sailors reached the shores of North America or Mexico on disabled ships between 1806 and 1852.
There are winds frequently blowing from Japan to North America (which is how the Japanese during WWII tried to set forest fires in the U.S. by sending fire balloons across the Pacific). And 19th Century Japan had more advanced technology than most of human history before then, so their odds of surviving a long drift at sea were better.
The Japanese ships that survived drifting across the Atlantic Pacific (thanks for the correction!) had been designed and built for fairly serious ocean-going duties in the Pacific around Japan. Both ships in these the following accounts were cargo ships carrying a lot of rice, which the survivors ate, that had set off on voyages intended to be around 500 miles, so they weren’t fishermen out for a day’s jaunt.
One of the best known cases involved the Tokujomaru, which ran aground near Santa Barbara, California, in 1813, with three survivors out of a crew of 14.
These castaways were treated kindly by Westerners and two of them made it home to Japan. I presume washed-up sailors could generally make themselves useful on return voyages, so Westerners had evolved pretty humane customs for helping castaways.
But others weren’t so lucky. In the 1830s, three Japanese castaways, out of a crew of similar size (most of whom died of scurvy), were washed up on the Olympic Peninsula of the future state of Washington. They were immediately seized by Makah Indians:
Then they escorted the three hapless seafarers inland to a Makah village and held them there as slaves (a commonplace practice among coastal tribes at the time).
Fortunately, the Hudson Bay Company rescued the Japanese seafarers and set about trying to get the xenophobic Tokugawa shogunate to agree to exchange of castaways. But they were not allowed back in Japan and wound up in Macau, where one became a successful translator and married first a British woman and then a Malay woman.
So it’s hard to say from these documented cases how many prehistoric castaways were welcomed into communities on the far side of the ocean. Most would have been fishermen or sailors rather than female passengers. And most would have been in terrible shape from scurvy when they arrived. So, it’s unlikely that there have been many trans-oceanic shipwrecks in human prehistory where the survivors were numerous and healthy enough to overpower the local natives and seize their women.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
OT
It’s funny, when I was a kid in the 70s there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s (Happy Days, Grease). Maybe I’m misremembering, but that nostalgia was viewed as, at worst, harmless. But because nostalgia today inevitably involves a time when the US was whiter than it is now, the reaction to it is completely unhinged, as in the Salon piece you quote.Replies: @Lot
Hah! What a bunch of clueless self-congratulatory bunk. The most insular, ignorant people on the planet hail from New York City and environs. Just look at that feminist social critic the other day who admitted that she had grown up "in the bubble" of Upper West Side Jewishness. She and her cohorts know nothing of the world beyond their synagogues and private schools, literally having never ventured out into the wild and savage world of nature, farms, factories and small town churches. Our ruling class are traitors.Replies: @FPD72
She notes that the Hallmark channel is quite financially successful, but demands that they sacrifice for the mission of portraying sterile LGBT couples as a new norm of the American family.
For the cats.
They must have had a crystal ball when they made this movie about "The Battle of Athens" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29 ) about US war veterans shooting it out with corrupt Democrats in The McMinn County War in Tennessee in 1946.
Is this a small prelude to what's coming in Virginia?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re6CfoKwdsM
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/features/couple-has-written-30-christmas-movies-theyre-not-alone-1259157
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/96/00/1b/96001b9c6594229fb7468303c0e26157.jpg
Striker makes some good points there (about the anti-feminist, anti-consumerist, anti-cosmopolitan bias of Hallmark Christmas movies), but his gratuitous anti-Jew sentiment means it will get shared less than it would have otherwise (and presumably, there are Jews involved in making the wholesome Hallmark movies, just as there are Jews involved with making unwholesome Hollywood movies).
Hallmark movies have been more inclusive in recent years though. At least two of this year's batch had Jewish lead characters (including Holiday Date), and a main character having a black assistant/friend/wise old man has been more common. Nevertheless, Hallmark Christmas movies are implicit nostalgia for ~85% white Americana.
What's going through their heads is a very complicated mix of envy and neurosis, combined with the bubble of a narcissistic woman's fantasy bursting. Narcissists become bitter and bitchy when their fantasies don't pan out, and they retaliate by wanting to blot out everything that makes other people happy out of sheer spite.
Normal people just accommodate if life doesn't work out they way they wanted. They realize they can't have everything, and they adjust and enjoy what they have. Their egos don't get in the way and they don't seethe if the good things in live are not delivered to them in a colorful package wrapped up in a bow.
I was introduced to Hallmark movies when I would visit my father, before he died. The mean age of the audience for these movies has got to be in the high sixties, minimum.
It’s funny, when I was a kid in the 70s there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s (Happy Days, Grease). Maybe I’m misremembering, but that nostalgia was viewed as, at worst, harmless. But because nostalgia today inevitably involves a time when the US was whiter than it is now, the reaction to it is completely unhinged, as in the Salon piece you quote.
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
And Sherwood Schwartz
https://www.amazon.com/Desperate-Journeys-Abandoned-Souls-Castaways/dp/0395911508
as an enjoyable read which explores the matter thoroughly.
I would think that the most recent common ancestor must predate the wide dispersion, and must have been lucky host of a mutation that proved to be highly beneficial to humans. Maybe speculation in this area could begin with speculation on what the most recent vital mutation might be.
The view that seems to be coming from the study of autosomal DNA of differing populations and ethnic groups – and, crucially, DNA extracted from ancient human remains – is that the story of modern extant sapiens is a lot more complex and convoluted than presented by the orthodoxy a mere decade ago.
The story seems to be of extant populations being the result of the mixing of distinctive lineages of ‘pre sapien’ hominids – of which anthropologists recognise many – punctuated by the ‘homogenizing’ (no pun intended) influence of more dominating hominid groups imposing themselves on the ‘divergent lineages’.
Hence the discovery of Neanderthal ancestry in extant Eurasians, as distinct from subsaharans, the strong Denisovan influence in extant Papuans – and the recent, tantalising hint of ‘erectus’ sequences in the same Papuans.
Tasmanian Aborigines were Negritos, it’s likely that they were also on the mainland before the present day mainlanders.
The assumption is that they all walked here over the Land Bridge from Asia, but where’s the proof?
The mainlanders came from India, so they had to have come at least part of the way by boat.
Perhaps they lost their technology and regressed to survival mode?
The Polynesians made it to Easter Island. Who’s to say a group of them didn’t make it to the Coast of Ecuador or Chile forming a community that was wiped out by those peaceful, idyllic Bering Strait American invaders from the North?
Polynesians made it to Easter Island around 1,200 AD. They were expanding around Pacific Islands and discovering them the same time Captain Cook did in the 18th century. Polynesian expansion is supposed to have started from Taiwan around 2,000 BC, finding most of the islands in the AD period.
I happen to think there was a south Pacific crossing prior to Clovis but it wasn't Polynesians who maybe hadn't even made it to Taiwan by that time (11,000 BC).
Polynesians may have also made the full crossing but it was long after the indians were already there. That's probably the biggest reason why there is no evidence of Polynesians going all the way across when they made it to Easter Island, because once they got to the continent there was people already there in sufficient numbers to keep them from colonizing. There is evidence of them having trade with the South American mainland though, and spreading that throughout the pacific back to Asia, although it is controversial.
The Polynesians provide proof of concept with their very sophisticated neolithic boats, but they were much much more recent.
I’m a bit brain sizzled at the moment and I may have asked this before but isnt this what the Kon Tiki guy proposed?
That small groups of polynesians made it to S America?
They made it to Easter Island & Sala Y Gomez….
I would actually take this a few steps further. The Americas have no doubt seen visitors from every one of the world's past civilizations. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks/Romans, the Chinese...they were all here. This likely occured in small, isolated, historically insignificant episodes from which no records will ever be recovered, but it must have happened, even if very indirectly. The Silk Road gives some indication of how this is possible.
Roman well-to-dos wore silks from China and there was a steady albeit much mediated trade between them. Although there was some scattered diplomatic contact and general geographic knowledge, the two empires maintained only a vague awareness of one another and never a politically significant one---a fact which is to our eyes astonishing, given that we are so used to the entire world linking together into one giant financial and informational network.
Now, if this much can occur (and we know it did), imagine the general idea projected out past the known boundaries of the Silk Road. What would small tradesman and travellers have exchanged with each other outside the limited spotlight of history? Should there not be a few Greek coins in sub-Saharan Africa, a pot of Malaysian spices in Machu Picchu, an Egyptian measure in the wilds of North America?
The funny thing is, in the absence of the vast accessory knowledge we have of the Roman world, our anthropologists are the kind of men who would explain the appearance of silks there as the "migration" of a silk tribe from east to west. The tend nowadays to explain the movement of DNA in the same fashion, thereby missing the entire picture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga
Also, thought this was an interesting story….
I’ve spoken to Makah that are still pissed they had their aboriginal rights to slaves taken away. Downright anti-libertarian of those westerners to insist on no slaves.
Funny! You made me spew coffee!
Maybe somewhat on topic, a look at Charles Murray’s upcoming book, The Biology of Gender, Race and Class
https://marginalrevolution.com/
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/charles-murrays-human-diversity.html
Long comment thread there with a number of good comments from iSteve.
There should be a cable channel that develops made-for-TV dramas based on NYT/WaPo op-ed columns. They meets they, they loses they, they gets they …
The Aberdeen Eskimo.
http://www.strangehistory.net/2013/02/13/inuit-in-aberdeen/
You mention Tasmania, but surely Australia itself has some potential as a historically isolated population?
Not completely on topic, but Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and some crew members, after his ship was destroyed in a storm on a visit to the Florida Gulf Coast, ended up floating in a raft made from ship timber all the way to the Texas coast (they were following the coastline, but the Mississippi delta currents sent them deep into the Gulf).
Having arrived on one of the Texas barrier islands, they were promptly enslaved by Indians.
Eventually escaping with a black crew member Cabeza de Vaca travelled all through the Southwest. He and his African companion worked up an act where the African pretended to be a mute shaman who could cure any disease, and Cabeza de Vaca was his expositor. They were such a hit that their reputation preceded them, and tribe would accompany them to adjacent, eagerly waiting tribe.
Amazingly, after this unprecedented experience, when they eventually found their way to Spanish-controlled Mexico, nobody seemed interested and they were brushed off.
There’s something similar to the Francisco de Orellana story. Pizarro, in order to get rid of a troublemaking cousin, sent him with a team to reconnoiter the east side of the Andes. It’s a long story, but they took the long way back, floating all the way down the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean. Only one firsthand account remains, de Orellana’s, and it requires a certain amount of interpretation, since he was seeing everything through a European and Christian filter.
I’ve also read about a French trapper who travelled all the way up the Mississippi and into Canada, but he was illiterate and we don’t have his story.
Back to Orellana: This was his second trip to Florida, and the societies that were there before had disappeared. This was apparently because of disease, but modern thinking is that escaped, feraal pigs played a big part in transmitting European diseases, even before the arrival of Europeans to areas. Charles Mann describes similar “second visit, nobody there” stories of early America, including how de Orellana described riverside settlements and agriculture spanning hundreds of kilometers where there is only jungle now.
I read this book on Cabeza de Vaca, and it’s very good:
The guy does a good job with the information that is available.
“I presume washed-up sailors could generally make themselves useful on return voyages, so Westerners had evolved pretty humane customs for helping castaways.” – How one should understand this statement? What evolution? Utilitarian evolution of ethics?
The point of pushing the narrative of mass migration being the norm throughout humanity’s natural history?
“Shut up and enjoy mass immigration today.”
As I said in response to Chanda Chisala’s sophistry, the top fallacy afflicting the HBDers is that consensus can precede consent:
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s alternative history, The Years of Rice and Salt, the Chinese discover America when their Japan invasion fleet gets blown off course.
Supposedly, China was technologically a peer of Classical Rome, and supposedly had first class shipbuilding and navigation, and yet, in two thousand years they never ventured into the Pacific very far. It would be the Polynesians, in their canoes of tree trunks hollowed out with stone adzes, who would colonize the Pacific. I think the history of Chinese invention may be exaggerated.Leftist porn?Replies: @Dave Pinsen
As an enthusiast about all things genealogical, ancestral and genetic, I find Schlomo Sand’s work, the The Invention of the Jewish People, to be interesting along the same lines as discussions about our MRCA. While it is true there is no commonly accepted, overall, genetic profile for Jews (specifically Ashkenazi), there is the mtDNA haplogroup cluster around K1, which is found in other non-Jewish sources as well. Other than a strict matrimonial lineage, and some autosomal similarities (due to endogamy), there is no such thing as a Jewish people, outside of cultural distinctions driven by religion or perhaps very recent, shared history.
The idea of the Jewish people being X,000 years old, or unique somehow, around the world, is genetically no more ancient, unique or interesting than the prevalence of say, indigenous Irish genes found in Ireland and throughout the diaspora. It is a self-serving religio-historical claim that permits one narrow group of otherwise, Caucasians, to promote their own elitist, superior ethnicity (if that) over others, by masking it under the rubric of an ancient and shared history of a “people”.
If he did, he never mentioned it in any of his voluminous writings.
Interesting that although Columbus landed on a cape of South America, he thought this was an island, although he was aware of the probability of a lurking continent due to the vast amount of fresh water from the Orinoco that was mixed with the waters in the straight between Trinidad and whatever lay to the south. Due to a shortage of supplies, he did not have the wherewithal to further explore the area.
Columbus also sailed along the coast of Panama, but failed to discover the nearby Pacific Ocean. So really he was a nearly man. He failed to discover South American, North America, or the Pacific, but did discover the West Indies, which he actually believed were what we now call the East Indies.
Thanks to Columbus, the inhabitants of North, Central, South America and the Caribbean islands became known to Europeans as Indians.
His achievements did include the introduction of taxation to the Occident, and the settlement of Santo Domingo, which was the first European outpost in the New World. Also,
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
and in 1493 the first recorded case of syphilis in Europe turned up in Lisbon, of all places. There is no proof that the disease, which subsequently affected millions in Europe, was brought from the New World on a Columbus ship, but it is mighty suspicious all the same.
Hunter gatherers don't necessarily have taxation though--i assume--they all have some sort of socialism, where the successful hunter shares with the hunting party. (Tribes that didn't, would not be cohesive and would get wiped out.)
But as soon as we hit the neolithic and people were settled growing food ... i'd say within a year there were some dudes with bows and spears declaring that they were the "rulers" and entitled to a share of your harvest.
The Mexica tax in their empire was not just food, but some of your young people for sacrifice. Makes the 1040 extraction from the DC parasites seem mild!
Settlement and ag has enabled us to make the great accomplishments of civilization, but it also--almost immediately--enabled all the tyranny and parasitism that our history is chock full of.
The oldest smallpox victim known is the skeleton of a Mexican bear, cerca 1300 AD whose bones had the characteristic lesions of death from smallpox.
There are trillions of human bones in Europe. Not one has the characteristic smallpox lesions before about 1530AD. There were plagues measles and chicken pox epidemics in Europe, but no smallpox till European sailors brought it back from the new world. Plus, like the 1918 new type of flu that killed millions, and AIDS, smallpox, being new to Europe killed swiftly and spread fast.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
“also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism”
Hah! What a bunch of clueless self-congratulatory bunk. The most insular, ignorant people on the planet hail from New York City and environs. Just look at that feminist social critic the other day who admitted that she had grown up “in the bubble” of Upper West Side Jewishness. She and her cohorts know nothing of the world beyond their synagogues and private schools, literally having never ventured out into the wild and savage world of nature, farms, factories and small town churches. Our ruling class are traitors.
On two occasions rental car agencies refused to rent to them because they didn’t rent to “foreigners.”
You would think that somebody in New York would grasp the concept.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Lugash
May I recommend the excellent book
as an enjoyable read which explores the matter thoroughly.
Written by iSteve content generator Amanda Marcotte.
She notes that the Hallmark channel is quite financially successful, but demands that they sacrifice for the mission of portraying sterile LGBT couples as a new norm of the American family.
For the cats.
This came up over in James Thompson’s blog recently and I wrote an extended comment at
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3529295
My ending question there raises an issue with Adam Rutherford’s accuracy (understanding?). Since I have removed the context note that the IA/isopoint is where “Eventually we reach a point in the past where all humans can be divided into two groups: those who left no descendants today and those who are common ancestors of all living humans today.”
https://isogg.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#Identical_ancestors_point
This comment links the Rutherford tweet with that error:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3528967
I think it is clear that he is describing the IA date and not the MRCA date in that tweet.
Key point for the IA date question from a paper I linked in the other thread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842
It would be interesting (but unfortunately is probably unknowable) to see how the MRCA and IA dates varied over history. The big issues I see are isolated subpopulations (e.g. Tasmania as Steve notes) and increased migration over time–with the Age of Exploration and advent of modern transportation being two important points.
P.S. Adam Rutherford’s upcoming book should make for some good iSteve fodder. Some discussion of it in the other thread. See YouTube link in this comment
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3529073
I just noticed they got rid of the “master storyteller” blurb on the cover which I thought was so funny in the other thread:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3528606
Interesting that although Columbus landed on a cape of South America, he thought this was an island, although he was aware of the probability of a lurking continent due to the vast amount of fresh water from the Orinoco that was mixed with the waters in the straight between Trinidad and whatever lay to the south. Due to a shortage of supplies, he did not have the wherewithal to further explore the area.
Columbus also sailed along the coast of Panama, but failed to discover the nearby Pacific Ocean. So really he was a nearly man. He failed to discover South American, North America, or the Pacific, but did discover the West Indies, which he actually believed were what we now call the East Indies.
Thanks to Columbus, the inhabitants of North, Central, South America and the Caribbean islands became known to Europeans as Indians.
His achievements did include the introduction of taxation to the Occident, and the settlement of Santo Domingo, which was the first European outpost in the New World. Also,
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
and in 1493 the first recorded case of syphilis in Europe turned up in Lisbon, of all places. There is no proof that the disease, which subsequently affected millions in Europe, was brought from the New World on a Columbus ship, but it is mighty suspicious all the same.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Alden
The “new world” didn’t need Columbus to have taxation.
Hunter gatherers don’t necessarily have taxation though–i assume–they all have some sort of socialism, where the successful hunter shares with the hunting party. (Tribes that didn’t, would not be cohesive and would get wiped out.)
But as soon as we hit the neolithic and people were settled growing food … i’d say within a year there were some dudes with bows and spears declaring that they were the “rulers” and entitled to a share of your harvest.
The Mexica tax in their empire was not just food, but some of your young people for sacrifice. Makes the 1040 extraction from the DC parasites seem mild!
Settlement and ag has enabled us to make the great accomplishments of civilization, but it also–almost immediately–enabled all the tyranny and parasitism that our history is chock full of.
I’ve often thought a useful human GMO would be to fix the Vitamin C synthesis pathway. This could even be done somatically in adult humans. You don’t need to fix every cell. Just introduce a cohort of modified stem cells into the liver and they start enough production to satisfy the body’s requirement.
Germ line modification would need to be thoroughly vetted though. One wonders if it could have negative consequences during gestation and growth, given how long we’ve evolved without it.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-vitamin-c-14167861/A fairly superficial overview subtitled: What is vitamin C? How does it function biochemically? Why can’t humans synthesize it?Which in turn references this 1991 paper (impressive that they sorted this out in 1991): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1962571
Molecular basis for the deficiency in humans of gulonolactone oxidase, a key enzyme for ascorbic acid biosynthesisHere is their estimate for the date. I suspect the species based estimate above is more accurate, but they aren't (relatively) that far apart. But the gap is significant. 70 Mya predates the K/T boundary (~64 Mya) and is around when tree shrews split off.The relevant gene: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/2989It looks like the gene is rather broken in primates (i.e. fixing it would not just be a matter of editing a SNP or two): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23404229/
Conserved or lost: molecular evolution of the key gene GULO in vertebrate vitamin C biosynthesis.Replies: @cthulhu
A bounded, perfect model is always easier to work with than messy old reality.
Perhaps Rutherford, Rohde and Chang could collaborate with Michael Mann and determine when the MRCA first contributed to the global=warming hockey stick?
“Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.”
They must have had a crystal ball when they made this movie about “The Battle of Athens” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_%281946%29 ) about US war veterans shooting it out with corrupt Democrats in The McMinn County War in Tennessee in 1946.
Is this a small prelude to what’s coming in Virginia?
Maybe man’s understanding of DNA is incomplete?
Am I missing something here? It seems like Reich is saying that the estimate is ~3 million years (australopithecus time range). 320 thousand years is the minimal estimate.
If I understand correctly, Reich is looking at individual genetic locations (not sure if he is limiting to a set of SNPs). I wish he had given more background for that graphic. I don't know if it comes from an academic paper with more detail.
Given that, a common ancestor at a single location would be the number to use for the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). So taking the minimum of 320,000 years ago is correct.
I think the discrepancy can be explained by noting that Rutherford et al. are talking about a genealogical ancestor (who may have left no genetic trace, see deck of cards thread) while Reich is talking about an actual genetic common ancestor leaving an IBD (identical by descent) trace in every living human. Very different things.
Also see the graphic on page 2. That makes clear another important difference. Figure 5.3 only looks at chromosomes 1-22. Reich estimates 160 kya for Mitochondrial Eve (Y-chromosomal Adam is not in the graphic, but is estimated elsewhere to be between those two dates 320 - 160 kya).
P.S. Figure 5 panel 2 has an interesting look at how much the Out of Africa bottleneck affects non-African pairwise similarity (much shared ancestry dates to the 90-50 kya bottleneck).Replies: @JohnPlywood
3,600 years ago is a ridiculously short time for the MCRA. Civilization is older than this. And this Rutherford guy is supposed to be a knowledgable expert?
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3529295My ending question there raises an issue with Adam Rutherford's accuracy (understanding?). Since I have removed the context note that the IA/isopoint is where "Eventually we reach a point in the past where all humans can be divided into two groups: those who left no descendants today and those who are common ancestors of all living humans today."
https://isogg.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#Identical_ancestors_pointThis comment links the Rutherford tweet with that error:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3528967https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1116668632183005185I think it is clear that he is describing the IA date and not the MRCA date in that tweet.Key point for the IA date question from a paper I linked in the other thread.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02842It would be interesting (but unfortunately is probably unknowable) to see how the MRCA and IA dates varied over history. The big issues I see are isolated subpopulations (e.g. Tasmania as Steve notes) and increased migration over time--with the Age of Exploration and advent of modern transportation being two important points.P.S. Adam Rutherford's upcoming book should make for some good iSteve fodder. Some discussion of it in the other thread. See YouTube link in this comment
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3529073https://www.amazon.com/How-Argue-Racist-Science-Your/dp/1615196714I just noticed they got rid of the "master storyteller" blurb on the cover which I thought was so funny in the other thread:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/explaining-race-and-genetics-no-need-to-despair/?showcomments#comment-3528606Replies: @AnotherDad
Good comment res.
You’re right. Rutherford’s tweet here shows some serious confusion–or late at night, can’t figure out which end is up, sloppiness.
Those two sentences juxaposed shout “stupid” which Rutherford presumably is not. It’s not the tedious let’s-drain-this-of-its-actual-meaning tweeting that Ewan Birney was doing to Graham Coop’s “race is like the deck of cards” analogy. (Birney’s comments seemed more or less true, just pointless.) Rutherford here is just obviously–idiotically–wrong.
I gave his wiki a quick look. AFAICT, basically the guy trained as a scientist but is now a full time anti-scientist, propagandist, flak for the globalists. (At least when it comes to anything involving human genetics.)
Pop-psyche take: Rutherford is mixed race and instead of just a healthy “hey, i’m from these people and these people” he’s handling his ethnic insecurity with–the pay is good, so not silly, just intellectually embarassing–“there’s no such thing as race”, “everyone’s the same”, “we’re all one big happy family” globo-slop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYf-xNsIb2I
he reveals something quite interesting. His father was a NZer who was the best friend of a NZ teacher named Blair Peach who was killed at an anti-Nazi demonstration in London in 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Blair_Peach
His mother is Guyanese-Indian, and I suspect from his accent we can probably presume some higher caste type.
He's on a personal mission, it's pretty clear.
Good tune here from Linton Kwesi Johnson on Blair Peach's death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbqVKqgoPwReplies: @mikemikev, @Anonymous
Ah, so there was a good reason for the Indian Wars.
My rule on these subjects, whenever the person makes what strikes me as counter-factual claims about race and ethnicity, is to check the early life section of their bio. Much of the anti-science jihad is fueled by people struggling with their own identity issues.
Aren’t a lot of Hallmark movies written by jews and deliberately omit references to Christ? I know it’s the case for Christmas movies
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/features/couple-has-written-30-christmas-movies-theyre-not-alone-1259157
I recall reading a claim a paleontologist found the skull of a murdered African from 9,000 years ago in Argentina.
And “Sex in the City” is socialist propaganda?
It wouldn't work with Stalin.
Lol
Germ line modification would need to be thoroughly vetted though. One wonders if it could have negative consequences during gestation and growth, given how long we've evolved without it.Replies: @res, @Anon
I have thought that as well. Agreed about “given how long we’ve evolved without it.” That also makes it likely that we have accumulated other defects in related genetic pathways which are no longer exercised (hence detrimental mutation not selected against).
This link gives some details of what species are affected: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080320120726.htm
From Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale (a fun read I just finished) the split from human lineage occurred around 58 Mya for tarsiers and 63 Mya for lemurs so presumably the capability was lost sometime around that interval.
Also from that link (I hadn’t known this, thanks for motivating me to chase after all of this!):
Here is that Cell article: https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(08)00204-3
Some more references.
The Mystery of Vitamin C
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-vitamin-c-14167861/
A fairly superficial overview subtitled: What is vitamin C? How does it function biochemically? Why can’t humans synthesize it?
Which in turn references this 1991 paper (impressive that they sorted this out in 1991): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1962571
Molecular basis for the deficiency in humans of gulonolactone oxidase, a key enzyme for ascorbic acid biosynthesis
Here is their estimate for the date. I suspect the species based estimate above is more accurate, but they aren’t (relatively) that far apart. But the gap is significant. 70 Mya predates the K/T boundary (~64 Mya) and is around when tree shrews split off.
The relevant gene: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/2989
It looks like the gene is rather broken in primates (i.e. fixing it would not just be a matter of editing a SNP or two): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23404229/
Conserved or lost: molecular evolution of the key gene GULO in vertebrate vitamin C biosynthesis.
Hah! What a bunch of clueless self-congratulatory bunk. The most insular, ignorant people on the planet hail from New York City and environs. Just look at that feminist social critic the other day who admitted that she had grown up "in the bubble" of Upper West Side Jewishness. She and her cohorts know nothing of the world beyond their synagogues and private schools, literally having never ventured out into the wild and savage world of nature, farms, factories and small town churches. Our ruling class are traitors.Replies: @FPD72
From 1969 to 1971, my parents lived in greater NYC while my father was on a federal law enforcement detail. Since it was a temporary assignment, my parents retained their New Mexico drivers licenses.
On two occasions rental car agencies refused to rent to them because they didn’t rent to “foreigners.”
You would think that somebody in New York would grasp the concept.
E.g., I bought my '92 Barcelona tickets from Olson Travelworld's LA office. (They were shut down for a couple of days due to the Rodney King riots.)In 1996, so many New Mexicans who called the Atlanta committee for tickets were instructed to go to the licensed dealer in their own country-- which, of course, they had just done -- that the story made the front of the Wall Street Journal.There is little doubt over who was answering the phones-- or manning the rental counters in NYC. Andrew Young, mayor at the time, recently bragged in a talk here that his team had arranged "40% set-asides!"
I worked customer service at U-Haul in the late 90s. One day I had a caller from NYC call in and ask if it was safe to drive through New Mexico and Arizona, or if the Indians were still dangerous.Replies: @Jeff
Isn’t that most media programming in the “current year”?
The washed up sailor learns the rudiments of your language while he’s recuperating; he knows the language and customs of his home country and has some contacts there; so he can facilitate trade between your country and his at some point.
It’s missing meaningless tokens of admiration for the workers and calumniation of capitalists, but it does normalize rootless urban living and perpetual teenagehood, so it would work with early Bolsheviki.
It wouldn’t work with Stalin.
Having arrived on one of the Texas barrier islands, they were promptly enslaved by Indians.
Eventually escaping with a black crew member Cabeza de Vaca travelled all through the Southwest. He and his African companion worked up an act where the African pretended to be a mute shaman who could cure any disease, and Cabeza de Vaca was his expositor. They were such a hit that their reputation preceded them, and tribe would accompany them to adjacent, eagerly waiting tribe.
Amazingly, after this unprecedented experience, when they eventually found their way to Spanish-controlled Mexico, nobody seemed interested and they were brushed off.
There's something similar to the Francisco de Orellana story. Pizarro, in order to get rid of a troublemaking cousin, sent him with a team to reconnoiter the east side of the Andes. It's a long story, but they took the long way back, floating all the way down the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean. Only one firsthand account remains, de Orellana's, and it requires a certain amount of interpretation, since he was seeing everything through a European and Christian filter.
I've also read about a French trapper who travelled all the way up the Mississippi and into Canada, but he was illiterate and we don't have his story.
Back to Orellana: This was his second trip to Florida, and the societies that were there before had disappeared. This was apparently because of disease, but modern thinking is that escaped, feraal pigs played a big part in transmitting European diseases, even before the arrival of Europeans to areas. Charles Mann describes similar "second visit, nobody there" stories of early America, including how de Orellana described riverside settlements and agriculture spanning hundreds of kilometers where there is only jungle now.
I read this book on Cabeza de Vaca, and it's very good:
https://www.amazon.com/Land-So-Strange-Journey-Cabeza/dp/0465068413
The guy does a good job with the information that is available.
https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/upload/images/characters/conquistador/de-vaca-journey-map.jpgReplies: @SaneClownPosse
The Mississippi River begins at Lake Itasca short of Canada. A long portage from there to Lake of the Woods.
I remember doing this kind of simulation in a statistics course back in 1979. I don’t know the details of what the guy mentioned here did in 2003 that was so ground-breaking.
Anyway, I remember finding that in a place like Europe, where there are no isolated groups, the population 2000 years ago falls into two sets: people who are the ancestors of everyone alive today, and people who are the ancestors of no one today. It’s a remarkable result but I never understood what was driving it. Or maybe the prof explained it but I wasn’t listening, or I’ve forgotten…
Maybe she read Eric Striker’s column here on Unz?
Striker makes some good points there (about the anti-feminist, anti-consumerist, anti-cosmopolitan bias of Hallmark Christmas movies), but his gratuitous anti-Jew sentiment means it will get shared less than it would have otherwise (and presumably, there are Jews involved in making the wholesome Hallmark movies, just as there are Jews involved with making unwholesome Hollywood movies).
Hallmark movies have been more inclusive in recent years though. At least two of this year’s batch had Jewish lead characters (including Holiday Date), and a main character having a black assistant/friend/wise old man has been more common. Nevertheless, Hallmark Christmas movies are implicit nostalgia for ~85% white Americana.
https://marginalrevolution.com/Replies: @res
Thanks. Here is a direct link since it is already getting bumped down the main page.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/charles-murrays-human-diversity.html
Long comment thread there with a number of good comments from iSteve.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/844786326167678976?s=21Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Redneck farmer, @Hail
Is this from the Nation of Islam Chinese branch? We wuz sunz of hevunz.
Supposedly, China was technologically a peer of Classical Rome, and supposedly had first class shipbuilding and navigation, and yet, in two thousand years they never ventured into the Pacific very far. It would be the Polynesians, in their canoes of tree trunks hollowed out with stone adzes, who would colonize the Pacific. I think the history of Chinese invention may be exaggerated.
Leftist porn?
I bought his earlier book on the theory that it seemed to be endorsed by Dawkins. In summary, the book conveyed that because he was bullied by whites and called a “paki” in England when he was young, there is no such thing as race.
That small groups of polynesians made it to S America?
They made it to Easter Island & Sala Y Gomez....Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Intelligent Dasein, @JMcG
I thought Kon Tiki guy said Easter Island was colonized by Egyptians in reed boats.
Because Polynesian expansion happened way after the Bering Strait Clovis expansion. As in about 10k years.
Polynesians made it to Easter Island around 1,200 AD. They were expanding around Pacific Islands and discovering them the same time Captain Cook did in the 18th century. Polynesian expansion is supposed to have started from Taiwan around 2,000 BC, finding most of the islands in the AD period.
I happen to think there was a south Pacific crossing prior to Clovis but it wasn’t Polynesians who maybe hadn’t even made it to Taiwan by that time (11,000 BC).
Polynesians may have also made the full crossing but it was long after the indians were already there. That’s probably the biggest reason why there is no evidence of Polynesians going all the way across when they made it to Easter Island, because once they got to the continent there was people already there in sufficient numbers to keep them from colonizing. There is evidence of them having trade with the South American mainland though, and spreading that throughout the pacific back to Asia, although it is controversial.
The Polynesians provide proof of concept with their very sophisticated neolithic boats, but they were much much more recent.
Steve’s quote comes from Figure 5 (panel 3) on page 16. You can see it if you go to Google Books and search the book for “5,000,000”
If I understand correctly, Reich is looking at individual genetic locations (not sure if he is limiting to a set of SNPs). I wish he had given more background for that graphic. I don’t know if it comes from an academic paper with more detail.
Given that, a common ancestor at a single location would be the number to use for the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). So taking the minimum of 320,000 years ago is correct.
I think the discrepancy can be explained by noting that Rutherford et al. are talking about a genealogical ancestor (who may have left no genetic trace, see deck of cards thread) while Reich is talking about an actual genetic common ancestor leaving an IBD (identical by descent) trace in every living human. Very different things.
Also see the graphic on page 2. That makes clear another important difference. Figure 5.3 only looks at chromosomes 1-22. Reich estimates 160 kya for Mitochondrial Eve (Y-chromosomal Adam is not in the graphic, but is estimated elsewhere to be between those two dates 320 – 160 kya).
P.S. Figure 5 panel 2 has an interesting look at how much the Out of Africa bottleneck affects non-African pairwise similarity (much shared ancestry dates to the 90-50 kya bottleneck).
So, to recap, the mtDNA MRCA may be relatively young. Y-Adam appears to predate anatomically modern humans, and we inherited nuclear DNA from phylogenetically much older Nenderthals. And African nuclear ancestry my be even older. It therefore seems highly probable that our MRCA in nuclear DNA is much older than the dates for our Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial lineage. And indeed, the latest studies are pushing our common ancestor dates back well beyond 300,000 years:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw1268Since we must have DNA from at least 800,000 years ago, placing our MRCA around 300,000ya seems dubious. These dicussions are pointless without recognizing that we are a mixed-species species carrying nuclear genetic material that greatly predates our Y-DNA and especially mtDNA, and the taxonomical features of homo sapiens.
Replies: @John Achterhof, @res
Not to mention being able to help on the ship once he has recovered. Mortality on ship could be a problem, so presumably an extra hand could be useful.
I remember finding out that pirates, who had an extremely high mortality rate, would commonly offer sailors on vessels they captured the opportunity to join the pirates. Quite a few sailors, especially those impressed into service, were quite happy to join the pirates. By that time the pirates had given a trial to the officers, executing those who had treated sailors badly, thus gaining the favor of many captive sailors.Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein
At the beginning of this talk:
he reveals something quite interesting. His father was a NZer who was the best friend of a NZ teacher named Blair Peach who was killed at an anti-Nazi demonstration in London in 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Blair_Peach
His mother is Guyanese-Indian, and I suspect from his accent we can probably presume some higher caste type.
He’s on a personal mission, it’s pretty clear.
Good tune here from Linton Kwesi Johnson on Blair Peach’s death:
https://web.archive.org/web/20091029044846/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/steve-jones/6436114/Its-time-to-lay-this-race-issue-to-rest.html
Blair Peach:
A 'celebrated' case which raised the ire of British lefties - of the Corbynista persuasion.
Apparently clubbed to death by Metropolitan Police Coppers in 1979 whilst protesting a National Front meeting. There were weeks and weeks of blather about his 'unusually thin skull', Bobbies keeping lead pipes in their lockers, the SPG being disbanded, and even a bizarre theory about a 'skinhead wearing a police helmet' braining the aforementioned Peach to death.
Anyhow, a brass plaque was inserted in the sidewalk to mark the spot where Peach fell. Several years later, the Gas Board were charged in conducting urgent mains repair work. The sidewalk was dug up, and the plaque 'lost'. Now no one seems to recall the precise location of that fatal spot.
Del Fuego centers at around 55°S. The northern equivalent would be close to Belfast, Copenhagen, or Moscow. If New Guinea tribes evolved to look like Africans with no contact, why wouldn’t it be the same for those closer to the poles?
Blame the herdsmen and horsemen of the day. Had they moved into compact cities such as Çatalhöyük, their carbon hoofprint would have been much smaller, and this ecological disaster could have been forestalled. (The state with the lowest per capita carbon emissions is New York. DC’s, with no farms, is probably lower.)
They just didn’t listen to their prehistoric Greta!
Were not the New Guinean Highlanders unknown to the outside world till well into the 20th century? They must have been isolated for far longer than 3500 years.
With what we now know about Norbert Schlei (the LBJ DOJ operative author of the 1965 immigration law-disaster) and the multiple damages inflicted by mass immigration –
is it not rational to fear foreigners ? Instead of an irrational fear i.e. phobia ??
Kind of like a macro-scale of Derb’s “The Talk – Non-black Version”
The Japanese sailors could have washed ashore further north, in Kwakwakaʼwakw territory and been picked up by the Hamatsa. Not to worry, Hamatsa didn’t practice real cannibalism, just symbolic. Franz Boas said so. Must be true.
That small groups of polynesians made it to S America?
They made it to Easter Island & Sala Y Gomez....Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Intelligent Dasein, @JMcG
It does seem rather hard to believe that the same Polynesians who discovered every speck of land in the whole vast Pacific somehow failed to take note of the globe-spanning continent a little further beyond. Polynesians in South America falls into the category of “certain but unproven.”
I would actually take this a few steps further. The Americas have no doubt seen visitors from every one of the world’s past civilizations. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks/Romans, the Chinese…they were all here. This likely occured in small, isolated, historically insignificant episodes from which no records will ever be recovered, but it must have happened, even if very indirectly. The Silk Road gives some indication of how this is possible.
Roman well-to-dos wore silks from China and there was a steady albeit much mediated trade between them. Although there was some scattered diplomatic contact and general geographic knowledge, the two empires maintained only a vague awareness of one another and never a politically significant one—a fact which is to our eyes astonishing, given that we are so used to the entire world linking together into one giant financial and informational network.
Now, if this much can occur (and we know it did), imagine the general idea projected out past the known boundaries of the Silk Road. What would small tradesman and travellers have exchanged with each other outside the limited spotlight of history? Should there not be a few Greek coins in sub-Saharan Africa, a pot of Malaysian spices in Machu Picchu, an Egyptian measure in the wilds of North America?
The funny thing is, in the absence of the vast accessory knowledge we have of the Roman world, our anthropologists are the kind of men who would explain the appearance of silks there as the “migration” of a silk tribe from east to west. The tend nowadays to explain the movement of DNA in the same fashion, thereby missing the entire picture.
I’m not 100 percent convinced there’s a guy from which even a majority of us descend, in the 3600 year range. The idea there’s an MCRA from 3600 years ago, is embarrassingly stupid.
I agree that makes no sense.
For example, the greatest amount of race mixing in the history of the planet has been in the Americas since 1492. My father’s family kept very good records, having a lot of New England blood. All white New Englanders mixed, so he had multiple Mayflower ancestors. But he was 100% white. OTOH, there are still some Indians in the Americas who are 0% white. (Although in New England, every remaining tribe has 0 pure Indians left).
Given that there can be non-overlapping groups among people who have had a great deal of contact for hundreds of years, it stands to reason that isolated groups of people from different parts of the globe would remain unmixed for much longer times.
i) All white people are descended from Charlemagne (1250 years ago)
ii) 90%+ of Eurasians are descendants of Genghis Khan (800 years ago)
The purity of MRCA is not interesting, as trying to go from 99.9% to 100% pushes the MRCA date back centuries. Who cares about including the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples? 99% of humans probably have an MRCA no further back than 500 BC. 99.9% of Eurasians probably have one at 500 AD.
Trying to get that last 0.1% pushes it back centuries or even millennia.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @JohnPlywood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYf-xNsIb2I
he reveals something quite interesting. His father was a NZer who was the best friend of a NZ teacher named Blair Peach who was killed at an anti-Nazi demonstration in London in 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Blair_Peach
His mother is Guyanese-Indian, and I suspect from his accent we can probably presume some higher caste type.
He's on a personal mission, it's pretty clear.
Good tune here from Linton Kwesi Johnson on Blair Peach's death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbqVKqgoPwReplies: @mikemikev, @Anonymous
He was also a student of ex UCL head of genetics Steve Jones, here settling the race and intelligence question once and for all in a newspaper with “I know a smart black guy”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091029044846/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/steve-jones/6436114/Its-time-to-lay-this-race-issue-to-rest.html
It’s funny, when I was a kid in the 70s there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s (Happy Days, Grease). Maybe I’m misremembering, but that nostalgia was viewed as, at worst, harmless. But because nostalgia today inevitably involves a time when the US was whiter than it is now, the reaction to it is completely unhinged, as in the Salon piece you quote.Replies: @Lot
“ It’s funny, when I was a kid in the 70s there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s (Happy Days, Grease). Maybe I’m misremembering”
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.
-------
That tears it like a sofa cushion, I must see Cats. I wonder if there are no camrips, not because of security, but because the camrippers figured there'd be no market.
https://postimg.cc/JGJtrF6LReplies: @Lot
He-Man with it's craptacular animation was American animated. But G.I. Joe, while of American creation, was Japanese animated. Voltron, Thundercats, and Transformers were all Japanese.
Not that Japanese animation was all that bad (I don't know what animation you think was all that great in the 50's-70's) but in the 80's but by that point American animation was way worse and mainly outsourcing all it's successful products. Since then the Japanese have gotten far better at it and American cultural production has pretty much continued it's decline.
Still pictures with only the lips moving in Japanese anime is practically a trope. Ostensibly it is deriving it's art style from comics and manga which are all still pictures, but it also saves lots of money on animation which is it's own motive, and (in shonen anime aimed at boys) it means you can devote the whole budget to animating the epic final fight with the final form of the evil boss.
The Japanese take it way further then that. There are whole scenes of dialogue where they will show the back of someone's head, their shoes, or two people standing on a bridge from far away and nothing moves. Then there's that ingenious DBZ trick of having 2 guys fighting who are moving so fast that no one can see them and you just get splash effects and motion lines on a still background.Replies: @J.Ross
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundarr_the_Barbarian
The typical historic welcome for a male “uninvited party guest” would be quite warm, engulfing the tribe in conversation–“roast or stew?”
The arrival of uninvited female guests would start a very different, much more contentious conversation in the tribe, but was much more rare.
Might depend on population pressures. Overpopulated, hostile tribes trying to expand nearby, a new stranger is unwelcome.
But areas with low density and a man-shortage caused by higher male mortality? Maybe they’d be happy to find a new brother.
BTW: it barely makes the news anymore, but two unwanted party guests in Chicago shot 13 and critically wounded 4.
The twist? The shooters were both Polish immigrants.
.
.
.
.
Haha, Did I have anyone fooled?
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/12/22/21033684/englewood-shooting-13-wounded-may-gun-violence-lonell-irvinReplies: @AnotherDad, @J.Ross
Supposedly, China was technologically a peer of Classical Rome, and supposedly had first class shipbuilding and navigation, and yet, in two thousand years they never ventured into the Pacific very far. It would be the Polynesians, in their canoes of tree trunks hollowed out with stone adzes, who would colonize the Pacific. I think the history of Chinese invention may be exaggerated.Leftist porn?Replies: @Dave Pinsen
I wouldn’t say it’s leftist porn, as a lot of bad stuff leftists lament about Europe happens in the absence of nearly all Europeans. And some of the good stuff happens as a result of non-Europeans rediscovering European accomplishments.
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
I watched Nick at Nite; some of it was filler, time I should have spent studying, but I’m actually grateful for some of it because of the cultural literacy I got out of it. It frequently brought up references I would look up or ask my parents about, and I enjoyed the Simpsons more because of it. Alfred Hitchcock Presents is easily one of the best TV series ever aired and Dragnet is a totally essential cultural touchstone.
——-
That tears it like a sofa cushion, I must see Cats. I wonder if there are no camrips, not because of security, but because the camrippers figured there’d be no market.
https://postimg.cc/JGJtrF6L
The mostly 1958-67 shows that dominated early Nick at Nite gave me nostalgia at 10 for an America I didn’t directly experience or remember and let me better understand my parents and grandparents.
They also served to better my manners and vocabulary.
Dragnet for example shows how good Americans should interact with police officers.
My SWAG–~75000 years ago. I.e. a common ancestor from one of the initial out-of-Africa expansions (50-100k years ago) that peopled the coast all the way to Australia.
Such an ancestor would cover Andaman Islanders, and Australian aboriginals and New Guinea hill tribes, and still be ancestral to Europeans, Siberians and their New World descendants.
The main outstanding question would be whether there are any Southern Africa bushmen who are really pure 200K separated people, untouched by the Bantu expansion–the Bantu of course carrying some small lineage from out-of-Africa back flow. I’d guess there are not any left whose lineage is competely free of more modern human lineages … but just an uninformed guess.
The arrival of uninvited female guests would start a very different, much more contentious conversation in the tribe, but was much more rare.Replies: @Lot
“ The typical historic welcome for a male “uninvited party guest” would be quite warm, engulfing the tribe in conversation–“roast or stew?””
Might depend on population pressures. Overpopulated, hostile tribes trying to expand nearby, a new stranger is unwelcome.
But areas with low density and a man-shortage caused by higher male mortality? Maybe they’d be happy to find a new brother.
BTW: it barely makes the news anymore, but two unwanted party guests in Chicago shot 13 and critically wounded 4.
The twist? The shooters were both Polish immigrants.
.
.
.
.
Haha, Did I have anyone fooled?
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/12/22/21033684/englewood-shooting-13-wounded-may-gun-violence-lonell-irvin
The assumption is that they all walked here over the Land Bridge from Asia, but where's the proof?The mainlanders came from India, so they had to have come at least part of the way by boat.Perhaps they lost their technology and regressed to survival mode?Replies: @Hapalong Cassidy
The thing is, even at the glacial maximum periods Australia and New Guinea were still separated from Asia by water, albeit a much narrower expanse than now. This explains the strikingly unique flora of the area. Regardless, the ancestors of the Abos would still have to have come there by boat, and come there a long time ago, perhaps as long as 50000 years ago by some estimations. Or, as I believe Steve has posited, they could have been washed up there by tsunamis. The latter explanation solves the problem of the Abo ancestors not being sophisticated enough to develop boat technology, and it also explains the Abos’ unique look and why they look so similar to each other, which is that they had a very small founding population (the “founder effect”).
Might depend on population pressures. Overpopulated, hostile tribes trying to expand nearby, a new stranger is unwelcome.
But areas with low density and a man-shortage caused by higher male mortality? Maybe they’d be happy to find a new brother.
BTW: it barely makes the news anymore, but two unwanted party guests in Chicago shot 13 and critically wounded 4.
The twist? The shooters were both Polish immigrants.
.
.
.
.
Haha, Did I have anyone fooled?
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/12/22/21033684/englewood-shooting-13-wounded-may-gun-violence-lonell-irvinReplies: @AnotherDad, @J.Ross
This cultural appropriation of “White”–and for that matter all other white names!–must end.
The Patagons(giants feet) of or Tehuelches that so impacted Magellan, their height, and going about it in the cold with barely any clothes on, have little to do with the Yaghans like the lady you pointed out other than being neighbours.
The last pure Selknam, a group very similar to the Patagons, was https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Choquintel dead in 1999, married to an Italian, no descendants.
Virginia Choquintel recalls “We had to know how to sing the National Anthem of Chile and the Argentine, in the Mission. Maybe because there were Chilean students. And they made us make the Chilean flag.” And we sang the Mass in Latin, like the answers “. The girls of the Mary Help of Christians went to School No. 2 because they had not yet been teachers. She took us and brought us a Sister. “It saddens me the sadness of not having any of my blood. Because I need it. I sometimes convert alone. I would like to be with Ángela (Loij) (1900 – 1974) or I taking care of her or her taking care of me. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know how old she would be. She was the godmother of my baptism . ” [ 2 ]
In an interview with Margarita Maldonado, fourth-generation selknam by maternal line, she says she met Virginia a few years before her death: “With Pepe, my husband, we took her out for a car ride with Don Segundo Arteaga and that in a parade, in 1997, we took her by car, because she couldn’t walk, and she greeted the crowd … she looked like a queen … When she died we watched her in the Deliberative Council. It is buried in the cemetery of Rio Grande. She was all peace and love. She used to tell us about her dating, that she went out to dance a lot when she was in Buenos Aires … Despite having had such a sad life … she received a lot of love from us … and she felt happy with her husband, Nino
the mathematical based model sounds similar to the discussion scientists were having about rogue waves, with mathematicians suggesting that a rogue wave big enough to appear out of nowhere and sink an oil tanker would only happen by chance once every 1000 year or something like that.
then video recorders became a thing, and people started returning from blue water ocean voyages with videos of giant rogue waves hitting shipping vessels and cruise ships somewhat regularly, and all the mathematical modeling of the waves was shown to be wildly wrong.
i would go with the guy who has the evidence on this one. 300,000 years is probably much more accurate than 3000 years. 2 orders of magnitude difference.
this is probably how things like the Drake equation will turn out, once we’re making cross-galaxy distance observations with space telescopes in 100 or 200 years. huge revisions to the math based estimations of life on other planets.
People who grew up in broken families are always going to go berserk about Hallmark movies. The messed-up people with too many emotional issues will start shaking and crying when they encounter one of these films. The main reason they’re upset is because they’ve (usually the complainer is female) figured out they’re never going to live like that. They’ll never land a husband and be happy with him, and even if they do, he’ll never make enough money that the wife can leave the ratrace to be a housewife.
What’s going through their heads is a very complicated mix of envy and neurosis, combined with the bubble of a narcissistic woman’s fantasy bursting. Narcissists become bitter and bitchy when their fantasies don’t pan out, and they retaliate by wanting to blot out everything that makes other people happy out of sheer spite.
Normal people just accommodate if life doesn’t work out they way they wanted. They realize they can’t have everything, and they adjust and enjoy what they have. Their egos don’t get in the way and they don’t seethe if the good things in live are not delivered to them in a colorful package wrapped up in a bow.
Steve
You meant to write “Pacific”, not “Atlantic”.
Germ line modification would need to be thoroughly vetted though. One wonders if it could have negative consequences during gestation and growth, given how long we've evolved without it.Replies: @res, @Anon
I remember reading many years ago in an anthropology text that there were some women in India who actually do make their own Vitamin C inside their bodies, but I can’t remember the exact text that contained the information. Some googling may find it.
Might depend on population pressures. Overpopulated, hostile tribes trying to expand nearby, a new stranger is unwelcome.
But areas with low density and a man-shortage caused by higher male mortality? Maybe they’d be happy to find a new brother.
BTW: it barely makes the news anymore, but two unwanted party guests in Chicago shot 13 and critically wounded 4.
The twist? The shooters were both Polish immigrants.
.
.
.
.
Haha, Did I have anyone fooled?
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/12/22/21033684/englewood-shooting-13-wounded-may-gun-violence-lonell-irvinReplies: @AnotherDad, @J.Ross
I was ready to quip that they believed the memes. Also, Eastern Europeans were the “trouble immigrants” in North-West Europe until the New Hijira.
The last pure Selknam, a group very similar to the Patagons, was https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Choquintel dead in 1999, married to an Italian, no descendants.
Virginia Choquintel recalls "We had to know how to sing the National Anthem of Chile and the Argentine, in the Mission. Maybe because there were Chilean students. And they made us make the Chilean flag." And we sang the Mass in Latin, like the answers ". The girls of the Mary Help of Christians went to School No. 2 because they had not yet been teachers. She took us and brought us a Sister. "It saddens me the sadness of not having any of my blood. Because I need it. I sometimes convert alone. I would like to be with Ángela (Loij) (1900 - 1974) or I taking care of her or her taking care of me. It doesn't matter. I don't know how old she would be. She was the godmother of my baptism . " [ 2 ]
In an interview with Margarita Maldonado, fourth-generation selknam by maternal line, she says she met Virginia a few years before her death: “With Pepe, my husband, we took her out for a car ride with Don Segundo Arteaga and that in a parade, in 1997, we took her by car, because she couldn't walk, and she greeted the crowd ... she looked like a queen ... When she died we watched her in the Deliberative Council. It is buried in the cemetery of Rio Grande. She was all peace and love. She used to tell us about her dating, that she went out to dance a lot when she was in Buenos Aires ... Despite having had such a sad life ... she received a lot of love from us ... and she felt happy with her husband, NinoReplies: @Steve Sailer
Thanks.
How far back do you need to go to reach an “Adam and Eve” couple who are the ancestors of all the ancestors of today’s humans?
2,000,000 BC?
They would need to be the ancestors of all modern humans, and of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and of pre-modern West Africans who contributed genes to regional groups of modern humans, and of East Asian Homo Erectus who contributed genes to the Denisovans, and doubtless other regionally isolated groups of Homo Erectus who made divergent contributions to various regionally isolated groups of pre-modern humans.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/844786326167678976?s=21Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Redneck farmer, @Hail
Louis L’amour pointed out in a couple of novels when the Spanish came to California, they found Chinese coins in some of the natives’ necklaces. They said they got the coins in their grandfathers’ time.
Good point.
I remember finding out that pirates, who had an extremely high mortality rate, would commonly offer sailors on vessels they captured the opportunity to join the pirates. Quite a few sailors, especially those impressed into service, were quite happy to join the pirates. By that time the pirates had given a trial to the officers, executing those who had treated sailors badly, thus gaining the favor of many captive sailors.
I looked up some articles that claimed the MRCA is only about 1000 or so years, with 3600 being the IA.
I agree that makes no sense.
For example, the greatest amount of race mixing in the history of the planet has been in the Americas since 1492. My father’s family kept very good records, having a lot of New England blood. All white New Englanders mixed, so he had multiple Mayflower ancestors. But he was 100% white. OTOH, there are still some Indians in the Americas who are 0% white. (Although in New England, every remaining tribe has 0 pure Indians left).
Given that there can be non-overlapping groups among people who have had a great deal of contact for hundreds of years, it stands to reason that isolated groups of people from different parts of the globe would remain unmixed for much longer times.
On two occasions rental car agencies refused to rent to them because they didn’t rent to “foreigners.”
You would think that somebody in New York would grasp the concept.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Lugash
This was a problem at the Atlanta Olympics. The IOC rules give a monopoly on ticket sales to residents of the host country to that country’s committee. International visitors buy their tickets from the licensed seller in their country of residence.
E.g., I bought my ’92 Barcelona tickets from Olson Travelworld’s LA office. (They were shut down for a couple of days due to the Rodney King riots.)
In 1996, so many New Mexicans who called the Atlanta committee for tickets were instructed to go to the licensed dealer in their own country– which, of course, they had just done — that the story made the front of the Wall Street Journal.
There is little doubt over who was answering the phones– or manning the rental counters in NYC. Andrew Young, mayor at the time, recently bragged in a talk here that his team had arranged “40% set-asides!”
The war on white women has officially commenced. Maybe it began with JK Rowling being a meanie to tyrannies. We live in fun times.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/844786326167678976?s=21Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Redneck farmer, @Hail
The successful sci-fi author Orson Scott Card wrote a similar novel in the 1990s dealing with Amerindians developing a giant ocean-going fleet and discovering Europe.
The plot mechanism of this novel, Pastwatch, was that a group of 21st century scientists develop develop a past-viewing machine — kind of like the Internet Archive, but for everything that’s ever happened, anywhere. The study of history as a field is revolutionized, and archaic languages become a hot commodity for Pastwatch scholars.
A group of them eventually develops a full-on time-travel machine and go back to train the 15th-century Amerindians on the way of the world, including elements of the Christian story which they were able to reconcile with native religion and thus not be crushed by Christianity; the expert help allows the Amerindians to quickly pull equal with Europeans and even develop their huge discovery fleet. I believe the final scene of the book has this Red Man’s fleet arriving, in peace of course, at a European port city, with the white yokel locals stunned.
All the above takes on a rather different feel when one learns that Card is a Mormon.
The whole thing started in Anno Dumbo, 1957. Sputnik went up, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was new in the book stalls... but the real clincher was Hugh Everett III's mathematical thesis that paved the was for the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics. By the time Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle in the early 60s, alternative history was turning into a genre of its own.
Trouble is, if you can turn history into silly putty in your fiction and in your head... why not everywhere else?
Alternative history set us up for the soft Stalinism that's currently getting noisily hard. Fact is, the many-worlds thesis has been crushed by real scientists since the physisist John Wheeler, Everett's original sponsor, distanced himself from it.
But it's done it's damage. Now history is often as imaginary as Dick's more outrageous fiction. Rules of realism once applied. Card and others have taken it to the level of idiocy, but is it really any different from Hidden Figures, ostensibly actual history?
All the speculation over our ancient history proves two things. One is we just don’t know. Seems like every year a new discovery proves that. The other is nature can wipe us out at any time.
I remember finding out that pirates, who had an extremely high mortality rate, would commonly offer sailors on vessels they captured the opportunity to join the pirates. Quite a few sailors, especially those impressed into service, were quite happy to join the pirates. By that time the pirates had given a trial to the officers, executing those who had treated sailors badly, thus gaining the favor of many captive sailors.Replies: @TontoBubbaGoldstein
This would be a rate of 0.75 per year, or 75 per century, at a time Japan had 25 to 27 million people (stable in this range in 18th and 19th centuries before the Meiji Restoration). And that is just those who ended up on the far side of the Pacific.
With this and similar data, it would be possible to develop a formula to predict degree of accidental sea contact between any two places at any given time, incorporating variables for things such as distance, technology, number of at-least-semi-oceanworthy vessels per capita in the society, and perhaps some kind of political multiplier penalizing societies whose elite discouraged or banned ocean travel (as China famously did in the 1430s).
Maybe some scholar already has done this; if so, let’s see the results.
The formula could be applied to past civilizations make best guesses on degree of contact between any two at any time. See Intelligent Dasein’s confident assertion that
If I understand correctly, Reich is looking at individual genetic locations (not sure if he is limiting to a set of SNPs). I wish he had given more background for that graphic. I don't know if it comes from an academic paper with more detail.
Given that, a common ancestor at a single location would be the number to use for the MRCA (most recent common ancestor). So taking the minimum of 320,000 years ago is correct.
I think the discrepancy can be explained by noting that Rutherford et al. are talking about a genealogical ancestor (who may have left no genetic trace, see deck of cards thread) while Reich is talking about an actual genetic common ancestor leaving an IBD (identical by descent) trace in every living human. Very different things.
Also see the graphic on page 2. That makes clear another important difference. Figure 5.3 only looks at chromosomes 1-22. Reich estimates 160 kya for Mitochondrial Eve (Y-chromosomal Adam is not in the graphic, but is estimated elsewhere to be between those two dates 320 - 160 kya).
P.S. Figure 5 panel 2 has an interesting look at how much the Out of Africa bottleneck affects non-African pairwise similarity (much shared ancestry dates to the 90-50 kya bottleneck).Replies: @JohnPlywood
Chromosomes 1-22 aren’t inherited like sex chromosomes and mitochondria. So we can’t assume that because the MRCA dates for Y-Adam and mtEve range from 100,000-300,000, that chromosomes 1-22 will, also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam
The MRCA dates for the Y-chromosome keep bouncing around depending on the discovery of individuals with Y-DNA haplotypes that appear to be older than previously imagined; the oldest known predating the earliest known emergence of homo sapiens:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929713000736
Now that we know we have autosomal and X DNA from Neanderthals, who set the TMRCA divergence on the Y-chromosome even further back (the El Sidron Y-lineage branched off +500,000 years ago), i don’t see your reasoning for assuming the minimal MRCA date given by Reich for chromosomes 1-22. And Africans are said to have autosomal admixture from a (possibly even older) archaic human species that we know little about because we have no fossil DNA from them.
So, to recap, the mtDNA MRCA may be relatively young. Y-Adam appears to predate anatomically modern humans, and we inherited nuclear DNA from phylogenetically much older Nenderthals. And African nuclear ancestry my be even older.
It therefore seems highly probable that our MRCA in nuclear DNA is much older than the dates for our Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial lineage. And indeed, the latest studies are pushing our common ancestor dates back well beyond 300,000 years:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw1268
Since we must have DNA from at least 800,000 years ago, placing our MRCA around 300,000ya seems dubious. These dicussions are pointless without recognizing that we are a mixed-species species carrying nuclear genetic material that greatly predates our Y-DNA and especially mtDNA, and the taxonomical features of homo sapiens.
1. The common ancestors for various locations in the genome range from 320 kya to much older.
2. The minimum (aka most recent) for that set of numbers is thus 320 kya.The idea being that there if there exists a common ancestor for one location in everyone's genome with a given date then the most recent of those dates will be the MRCA (defined genetically, see below).That (and I think your comment in general) is talking about the "last common ancestor for Neanderthals and modern humans" not the MRCA of all living humans. Those are very different things. Especially given that interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals seems likely so that was not a clean evolutionary split.Three things are being conflated in this thread.1. The MRCA (genealogical) of all living humans. This is what Rutherford et al. are talking about when they cite ~3 kya dates. This is a simulation based number. I looked at the paper they referenced and it was more convincing than I expected, but as I noted in the other thread, I consider this an "extraordinary claim" and don't think that paper/simulation meets the threshold of the "extraordinary evidence" I would require to consider it proved.2. The MRCA (genetic) of all living humans. This is what we are discussing based on the Reich numbers (and to recap, we are discussing this because Steve noted the discrepancy between the 3 kya and 320 kya numbers, I think I have addressed that discrepancy adequately in my earlier comment). I take this to mean the most recent ancestor who has left an actual trace of IBD DNA in every living human. That number will be the minimum (most recent) of the autosomal numbers Reich gives and the X, Y, and mtDNA numbers.3. The last common ancestor of humans and X (e.g. Neanderthals in your comment, but the idea extends to any non homo sapiens species which ever interbred with humans, and that's not even getting into the species == "able to interbreed" argument). Not sure if it is necessary to discuss why this is different from 1. and 2. Hopefully it is obvious, but if not we can discuss it further.What I think is pointless is taking any of these estimates as gospel truth. But it is even more pointless to keep talking past each other because we are talking about different things.P.S. An important point to keep in mind is the difference between "all humans who ever lived" and "all humans alive now." Hopefully Steve's Tasmania example makes that clear.Replies: @JohnPlywood
Noah? An allele for shipbuilding
I HAVE NO HORN AND I MUST HONK
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/spongebob-violent-racist-colonizer.amp
On two occasions rental car agencies refused to rent to them because they didn’t rent to “foreigners.”
You would think that somebody in New York would grasp the concept.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Lugash
I worked customer service at U-Haul in the late 90s. One day I had a caller from NYC call in and ask if it was safe to drive through New Mexico and Arizona, or if the Indians were still dangerous.
Absolutely hilarious
The MRCA of ALL living humans is not interesting, since it is pushed back due to uncontacted people like the Sentinelese.
More interesting is the fact that :
The MRCA of all white people is as recent as 1000 AD. Thus, this includes most Hispanics and African Americans as well.
The MRCA of 99.9% of all Eurasians (i.e. excluding the Sentinelese, some remote islanders, etc.) is probably no further back than 500 AD. The likes of Muhammad, then Genghis Khan, then that Persian Sultan with 400 children, etc. made sure a lot got consolidated.
It won’t take long for all Americans to eventually be the descendants of the Duggar and Bates families.
Everyone can relax! After a long manhunt, the police have released the guy who stabbed Tessa Majors in Morningside Park. Notice the url.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7828119/Police-detain-teen-suspect-Tessa-Majors-murder.html
I would say with great confidence that :
i) All white people are descended from Charlemagne (1250 years ago)
ii) 90%+ of Eurasians are descendants of Genghis Khan (800 years ago)
The purity of MRCA is not interesting, as trying to go from 99.9% to 100% pushes the MRCA date back centuries. Who cares about including the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples? 99% of humans probably have an MRCA no further back than 500 BC. 99.9% of Eurasians probably have one at 500 AD.
Trying to get that last 0.1% pushes it back centuries or even millennia.
That small groups of polynesians made it to S America?
They made it to Easter Island & Sala Y Gomez....Replies: @Hippopotamusdrome, @Intelligent Dasein, @JMcG
Couldn’t respond on your earlier thread, but glad you’re doing well. I had my first at 37 and my youngest at 42. Nothing better than kids. Good luck to you!
i) All white people are descended from Charlemagne (1250 years ago)
ii) 90%+ of Eurasians are descendants of Genghis Khan (800 years ago)
The purity of MRCA is not interesting, as trying to go from 99.9% to 100% pushes the MRCA date back centuries. Who cares about including the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples? 99% of humans probably have an MRCA no further back than 500 BC. 99.9% of Eurasians probably have one at 500 AD.
Trying to get that last 0.1% pushes it back centuries or even millennia.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @JohnPlywood
Do we know that all Icelanders are descended from Charlemagne? Are we sure that Russians near the Urals are? How about Albanians in remote valleys?
Yes. Iceland is not far from the British isles and trade was ongoing. Plus, Iceland is just 300,000 people and if some are descendants of Charlemagne, soon all become thus.
Yes. Genghis Khan unified this with Charlemagne’s descendants. Russian nobility always interbred with other European nobility (George V and Nicholas were first cousins, and looked almost alike). The Urals aren’t that far east. They are only 800 miles east of Moscow.
The Vikings went all the way to the Urals, around the Mediterranean, and ensured genetic links to Iceland.
Albania is near enough to the central core of Europe that this, too, does not hold up.
Plus, you are specifically focusing on what I described as the least interesting aspect. Going from 99.9% to 100% pushes the MRCA back by centuries.
I worked customer service at U-Haul in the late 90s. One day I had a caller from NYC call in and ask if it was safe to drive through New Mexico and Arizona, or if the Indians were still dangerous.Replies: @Jeff
As somebody who has spent time on reservations, I hope that you warned the caller that the locals can be quite troublesome when they’re drunk. I have also noticed that many stores on the reservations will be closed after about 8 or 9 PM, gas stations included.
As an outsider a person would be an idiot for letting down their guard around a bunch of drunk Indians…
-------
That tears it like a sofa cushion, I must see Cats. I wonder if there are no camrips, not because of security, but because the camrippers figured there'd be no market.
https://postimg.cc/JGJtrF6LReplies: @Lot
I agree on Hitchcock and Dragnet.
The mostly 1958-67 shows that dominated early Nick at Nite gave me nostalgia at 10 for an America I didn’t directly experience or remember and let me better understand my parents and grandparents.
They also served to better my manners and vocabulary.
Dragnet for example shows how good Americans should interact with police officers.
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
Can confirm. I seem to remember that in He-Man scenes that involved dialogue with no action, there really was no action — the only thing moving would be the lips of the character who was speaking.
The 3,500 number is so preposterous, it gives away for everyone to see the weak wiring inside Adam’s head. Seriously, it’s hard to overemphasize how embarrassing it is. The actual number has got to be two orders or more higher and is hard, almost impossible to nail down accurately (not that it matters much for anything).
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-mystery-of-vitamin-c-14167861/A fairly superficial overview subtitled: What is vitamin C? How does it function biochemically? Why can’t humans synthesize it?Which in turn references this 1991 paper (impressive that they sorted this out in 1991): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1962571
Molecular basis for the deficiency in humans of gulonolactone oxidase, a key enzyme for ascorbic acid biosynthesisHere is their estimate for the date. I suspect the species based estimate above is more accurate, but they aren't (relatively) that far apart. But the gap is significant. 70 Mya predates the K/T boundary (~64 Mya) and is around when tree shrews split off.The relevant gene: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/2989It looks like the gene is rather broken in primates (i.e. fixing it would not just be a matter of editing a SNP or two): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23404229/
Conserved or lost: molecular evolution of the key gene GULO in vertebrate vitamin C biosynthesis.Replies: @cthulhu
Regarding Vitamin C: In the rigorous all-meat diet experiment from the late ‘20s, featuring noted Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and one other adult male, neither of the participants suffered from any vitamin deficiency, despite eating nothing but animal meat and fat for a solid year. The experiment and its results are well documented.
This looks like the most relevant passage:In particular, notice the qualifiers: "fresh meat" and "don't over cook it".
Here is what healthline says. I usually don't trust mainstream sources for vitamin C information, but this seems plausible.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-animal-foodsIt makes sense that animal meat (including all tissue, not just muscle meat) would contain vitamin C given that most animals other than primates can produce it. Presumably the problem with scurvy was the lack of fresh food of all sorts. I am guessing months old salt pork (etc.) would not contain much vitamin C even if the raw meat did.
P.S. I have a couple of Stefansson 's books, but not the ones which bear most directly on this. Do you recommend any of his books in particular?Replies: @cthulhu
Fortunately liver is delicious.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
Goofy aggregator site but linking to local news and with tweet video: black teens go wild in malls for xmas. New York Beef Jerky Barn is compromised I say again they hit the jerky barn those animals.
https://offgridsurvival.com/wild-mall-brawls-throughout-the-country/
Card makes no secret if his Mormonism, but it’s interesting that KSR also required a foreign catalyst to jump start the Indians (in his case, a Japanese refugee from the Chinese).
Ever notice “alternative history” sci-fi and political correctness developed and bloomed in tandem?
The whole thing started in Anno Dumbo, 1957. Sputnik went up, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was new in the book stalls… but the real clincher was Hugh Everett III’s mathematical thesis that paved the was for the many-worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics. By the time Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle in the early 60s, alternative history was turning into a genre of its own.
Trouble is, if you can turn history into silly putty in your fiction and in your head… why not everywhere else?
Alternative history set us up for the soft Stalinism that’s currently getting noisily hard. Fact is, the many-worlds thesis has been crushed by real scientists since the physisist John Wheeler, Everett’s original sponsor, distanced himself from it.
But it’s done it’s damage. Now history is often as imaginary as Dick’s more outrageous fiction. Rules of realism once applied. Card and others have taken it to the level of idiocy, but is it really any different from Hidden Figures, ostensibly actual history?
A lot of the “Hrmm, well we really can’t say…” from eggheads who should know better is that they’re terrified of being called racist for daring to contradict Out of Africa, despite tools being found earlier in Europe than anything out of the Rift Valley. So they keep on back dating the OOA event while hedging their bets on the multiple location theory. This is so that perhaps if sanity returns in their lifetime they can say “Told you so” to the True Believers.
Furthermore you won’t hear anything about pre-Columbian European cultures in mainstream history either. Torpedoes the entire “we stole this land ” blood libel the Left gets so much mileage out of. So the moon eyed people, the Celts discovered by the Spaniards in the Ozarks, all that goes against The Narrative it’s all myth.
Anyone want to mention the giant skeletons the Smithsonian used to display?
Was this Syncro-Vox? That truly bizarre system was used on Space Angel (not to be confused with the later Space Ghost) and its sister programs in the early ’60s.
It was proprietary, but needn’t have been. Who would be stupid enough to steal it? But, hey, it paved the way for “motion capture”.
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-live-action-lips-of-syncro-vox/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYf-xNsIb2I
he reveals something quite interesting. His father was a NZer who was the best friend of a NZ teacher named Blair Peach who was killed at an anti-Nazi demonstration in London in 1979:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Blair_Peach
His mother is Guyanese-Indian, and I suspect from his accent we can probably presume some higher caste type.
He's on a personal mission, it's pretty clear.
Good tune here from Linton Kwesi Johnson on Blair Peach's death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTbqVKqgoPwReplies: @mikemikev, @Anonymous
I sincerely doubt that any ‘Indo Guyanese’ are of the higher castes, since that population was imported by British colonialists purely to grow and harvest sugar cane.
Blair Peach:
A ‘celebrated’ case which raised the ire of British lefties – of the Corbynista persuasion.
Apparently clubbed to death by Metropolitan Police Coppers in 1979 whilst protesting a National Front meeting. There were weeks and weeks of blather about his ‘unusually thin skull’, Bobbies keeping lead pipes in their lockers, the SPG being disbanded, and even a bizarre theory about a ‘skinhead wearing a police helmet’ braining the aforementioned Peach to death.
Anyhow, a brass plaque was inserted in the sidewalk to mark the spot where Peach fell. Several years later, the Gas Board were charged in conducting urgent mains repair work. The sidewalk was dug up, and the plaque ‘lost’. Now no one seems to recall the precise location of that fatal spot.
If all whites are descended from Charlemagne, aren’t we all also descended from his father?
The point is in choosing someone famous who was known to have had a large number of children, and who has traced lineages to other European lines. For example, William the Conqueror was also a descendant of Charlemagne.Replies: @Martin Spencer
Many think most Asians and E Europeans are descended from Genghis Khan’s father. His brother impregnated quite a few women.
Y DNA haplogroup C, the haplogroup customarily attributed to Genghis Khan is exceedingly rare to non existent amongst men in European Russia, and the nations commonly described as comprising 'eastern Europe'.
Instead, the typical European Y haplogroups of R and I predominate.Replies: @res
So, to recap, the mtDNA MRCA may be relatively young. Y-Adam appears to predate anatomically modern humans, and we inherited nuclear DNA from phylogenetically much older Nenderthals. And African nuclear ancestry my be even older. It therefore seems highly probable that our MRCA in nuclear DNA is much older than the dates for our Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial lineage. And indeed, the latest studies are pushing our common ancestor dates back well beyond 300,000 years:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw1268Since we must have DNA from at least 800,000 years ago, placing our MRCA around 300,000ya seems dubious. These dicussions are pointless without recognizing that we are a mixed-species species carrying nuclear genetic material that greatly predates our Y-DNA and especially mtDNA, and the taxonomical features of homo sapiens.
Replies: @John Achterhof, @res
Fascinating post, but I don’t see that interbreeding by the lineage of modern humans with lineages now extinct such as Neanderthals that are estimated to have diverged at very early dates (such as 800,000 years ago) sets back the date for MRCA of the contemporary human population. The consideration taken up in the sciencemag.org article is MRCA (LCA) of modern humans and Neanderthals.
i) All white people are descended from Charlemagne (1250 years ago)
ii) 90%+ of Eurasians are descendants of Genghis Khan (800 years ago)
The purity of MRCA is not interesting, as trying to go from 99.9% to 100% pushes the MRCA date back centuries. Who cares about including the Sentinelese and other uncontacted peoples? 99% of humans probably have an MRCA no further back than 500 BC. 99.9% of Eurasians probably have one at 500 AD.
Trying to get that last 0.1% pushes it back centuries or even millennia.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @JohnPlywood
You state with great confidence, out of your ass. Genetics on the other hand has said nothing about Charlemagne and a lot to indicate that Genghis Khan has few living descendants.
Please see this link and then swiftly eject yourself through the nearest window.
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/02/03/perhaps-the-genghis-khan-modal-haplotype-is-not-genghis-khans/
The fact that Hallmark movies are mostly about Whites is a good thing…if they were all about Whites it would be a great thing.
If you are curious, there are He-Man clips available. They were by Filmation, not Synchro-Vox. Filmation was nothing to brag about, but they weren’t as obvious as Synchro-Vox. I’m surprised you used Space Angel as your example when their most famous cartoon was Clutch Cargo.
Their third series, Captain Fathom, seems to have been better received in Italy than at home. Never heard of it until now.
Space Angel's lead was one Scott McCloud. That made me curious-- is that the noted carrier's real name? Turns out the answer is "yes, and no". He was born McLeod, so only had to change the spelling.
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
It’s funny that you use those as your examples because those cartoons were blatant commercials for their line of toys. He-Man was specifically invented by Mattel because they missed the boat on Star Wars toys, which were made by Kenner.
So, to recap, the mtDNA MRCA may be relatively young. Y-Adam appears to predate anatomically modern humans, and we inherited nuclear DNA from phylogenetically much older Nenderthals. And African nuclear ancestry my be even older. It therefore seems highly probable that our MRCA in nuclear DNA is much older than the dates for our Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial lineage. And indeed, the latest studies are pushing our common ancestor dates back well beyond 300,000 years:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaaw1268Since we must have DNA from at least 800,000 years ago, placing our MRCA around 300,000ya seems dubious. These dicussions are pointless without recognizing that we are a mixed-species species carrying nuclear genetic material that greatly predates our Y-DNA and especially mtDNA, and the taxonomical features of homo sapiens.
Replies: @John Achterhof, @res
Right. Mitochondria and the Y chromosome are special given that they are always passed intact (modulo mutations). The X chromosome is kind of a hybrid because it is passed intact from father to daughter, but can crossover (like the autosomes, aka chromosomes 1-22) when passed from the mother to her children.
I was not assuming. I was just noting the dates I saw.
Thanks for the link. I had not seen (as indicated by the dates I gave) that there was an estimate for Y-Adam that far back. Any thoughts on why the mtEve date seems more stable?
The reasoning is simple.
1. The common ancestors for various locations in the genome range from 320 kya to much older.
2. The minimum (aka most recent) for that set of numbers is thus 320 kya.
The idea being that there if there exists a common ancestor for one location in everyone’s genome with a given date then the most recent of those dates will be the MRCA (defined genetically, see below).
That (and I think your comment in general) is talking about the “last common ancestor for Neanderthals and modern humans” not the MRCA of all living humans. Those are very different things. Especially given that interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals seems likely so that was not a clean evolutionary split.
Three things are being conflated in this thread.
1. The MRCA (genealogical) of all living humans. This is what Rutherford et al. are talking about when they cite ~3 kya dates. This is a simulation based number. I looked at the paper they referenced and it was more convincing than I expected, but as I noted in the other thread, I consider this an “extraordinary claim” and don’t think that paper/simulation meets the threshold of the “extraordinary evidence” I would require to consider it proved.
2. The MRCA (genetic) of all living humans. This is what we are discussing based on the Reich numbers (and to recap, we are discussing this because Steve noted the discrepancy between the 3 kya and 320 kya numbers, I think I have addressed that discrepancy adequately in my earlier comment). I take this to mean the most recent ancestor who has left an actual trace of IBD DNA in every living human. That number will be the minimum (most recent) of the autosomal numbers Reich gives and the X, Y, and mtDNA numbers.
3. The last common ancestor of humans and X (e.g. Neanderthals in your comment, but the idea extends to any non homo sapiens species which ever interbred with humans, and that’s not even getting into the species == “able to interbreed” argument). Not sure if it is necessary to discuss why this is different from 1. and 2. Hopefully it is obvious, but if not we can discuss it further.
What I think is pointless is taking any of these estimates as gospel truth. But it is even more pointless to keep talking past each other because we are talking about different things.
P.S. An important point to keep in mind is the difference between “all humans who ever lived” and “all humans alive now.” Hopefully Steve’s Tasmania example makes that clear.
Thanks for bringing Stefansson up. That was a great dietary experiment (and yes, I was aware of it). Here is an article where he talks about Vitamin C: http://www.comby.org/documents/documents_in_english/stefansson-diet-adventures.htm
This looks like the most relevant passage:
In particular, notice the qualifiers: “fresh meat” and “don’t over cook it”.
Here is what healthline says. I usually don’t trust mainstream sources for vitamin C information, but this seems plausible.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-animal-foods
It makes sense that animal meat (including all tissue, not just muscle meat) would contain vitamin C given that most animals other than primates can produce it. Presumably the problem with scurvy was the lack of fresh food of all sorts. I am guessing months old salt pork (etc.) would not contain much vitamin C even if the raw meat did.
P.S. I have a couple of Stefansson ‘s books, but not the ones which bear most directly on this. Do you recommend any of his books in particular?
You have to eat the organ meat if you’re going to do that, not just muscle and fat but especially the liver.
Fortunately liver is delicious.
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
By the 80’s most of those cartoons were actually Japanese.
He-Man with it’s craptacular animation was American animated. But G.I. Joe, while of American creation, was Japanese animated. Voltron, Thundercats, and Transformers were all Japanese.
Not that Japanese animation was all that bad (I don’t know what animation you think was all that great in the 50’s-70’s) but in the 80’s but by that point American animation was way worse and mainly outsourcing all it’s successful products. Since then the Japanese have gotten far better at it and American cultural production has pretty much continued it’s decline.
Still pictures with only the lips moving in Japanese anime is practically a trope. Ostensibly it is deriving it’s art style from comics and manga which are all still pictures, but it also saves lots of money on animation which is it’s own motive, and (in shonen anime aimed at boys) it means you can devote the whole budget to animating the epic final fight with the final form of the evil boss.
The Japanese take it way further then that. There are whole scenes of dialogue where they will show the back of someone’s head, their shoes, or two people standing on a bridge from far away and nothing moves. Then there’s that ingenious DBZ trick of having 2 guys fighting who are moving so fast that no one can see them and you just get splash effects and motion lines on a still background.
In the case of ‘east Europeans’, this cannot possibly be true.
Y DNA haplogroup C, the haplogroup customarily attributed to Genghis Khan is exceedingly rare to non existent amongst men in European Russia, and the nations commonly described as comprising ‘eastern Europe’.
Instead, the typical European Y haplogroups of R and I predominate.
Y DNA haplogroup C, the haplogroup customarily attributed to Genghis Khan is exceedingly rare to non existent amongst men in European Russia, and the nations commonly described as comprising 'eastern Europe'.
Instead, the typical European Y haplogroups of R and I predominate.Replies: @res
Remember that “descended from Genghis Khan through the paternal line” is very different from “descended from Genghis Khan.” Assuming a year of 1200 for Genghis Khan and 25 years per generation we have about 32 generations. 2^32 = 4.3e9
On another note, some authorities now claim that Genghis Khan and the Mongolian 'nobility' were of European type 'R' y DNA lineages, ultimately descending from Steppe Sintashta type male lines.
Could you elaborate on this? Are you talking about Y chromosome descent or autosomal? What about the difference between genealogical and genetic descent given that we are about 32 generations from Genghis Khan?
It is a certainty that at least 2 billion people today (maybe 4 billion, i.e. all of Eurasia) are descendants of Genghis Khan. It is also a mathematical certainty that virtually all white people, and people with any white ancestry, are descendants of Charlemagne.
Of course. Even more people are descended from his father’s father.
The point is in choosing someone famous who was known to have had a large number of children, and who has traced lineages to other European lines. For example, William the Conqueror was also a descendant of Charlemagne.
If all whites are descended from Charlemagne, but even more people are descended from his grandfather, mustn't that mean that some non-whites are descended from Charlie's Grandfather, but not from him?
How exactly did that happen?Replies: @Thomm
That is stunningly ignorant, on your part.
You are actually saying that people known to have had a lot of children, and known to be direct ancestors of people today through a traced line, have ‘few living descendants’.
Genghis Khan literally impregnated hundreds if not thousands of women. He is known to be an ancestor of Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, the Persianid Qajar Sultans, the Mughals, and many Ottoman rulers. It is a mathematical certainty that he is the ancestor of at least 2 billion people alive today.
Yet, you claim he has ‘few living descendants’.
Absurd.
He doesn’t understand the difference between genealogical and genetic descent.
It is a certainty that at least 2 billion people today (maybe 4 billion, i.e. all of Eurasia) are descendants of Genghis Khan. It is also a mathematical certainty that virtually all white people, and people with any white ancestry, are descendants of Charlemagne.
Fortunately liver is delicious.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
Eating some livers can be hazardous to your health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A
(And tangentially, 20% of US liver poisoning is caused by dietary supplements like green tea capsules – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5502701/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45971416)
Kids at my elementary school circa 1990 watched nick at nite shows from the 1955-65 era, plus Brady Bunch and Lucy reruns ran in syndication every day after school.
For cartoons, half of Saturday morning television was made in the 40s to 70s. 1980s cartoons (transformers, He-Man, and many ripoffs of them) had the worst production quality of any decade.Replies: @J.Ross, @James Forrestal, @ScarletNumber, @Lars Porsena, @Kevin O'Keeffe
People tend to think all those similar shows were a rip-off of “He-Man” (presumably because “He-Man” was the most commercially successful of them all), But “He-Man” didn’t premiere until 1983, and was a rip-off of (the far superior) “Thundarr the Barbarian” from 1980.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundarr_the_Barbarian
But, surely, Y haplotype C would have a substantial presence in European Russia, by the law of averages, and Genghis Khan’s reputed fecundity, purely by the binomial type of distribution, (that is C or not C), as passed down through both pure paternal and mixed maternal/paternal lines of descent. And founder effects have been found to be dominant in the modern distribution of Y lineages cf the dominance of R1b in the British Isles, which is undoubtedly attributable to the progeny of a ‘relatively’ recent ‘King’ type patriarch.
On another note, some authorities now claim that Genghis Khan and the Mongolian ‘nobility’ were of European type ‘R’ y DNA lineages, ultimately descending from Steppe Sintashta type male lines.
Lots of people seem to be confusing MRCA (Most Recent Common Ancestor) and IA (Identical Ancestry). I had to look them up because I wasn’t sure.
MCRA is just 1 common ancestor I think, just related to one another. IA is the point past which, all ancestors are the same because the tree fully converges.
So if you and I were half brothers, and you were half black, our MCRA would be our dad, and our IA point might be millions of years in the past. Neanderthal admixture wouldn’t effect MCRA unless you were including someone who was pure 100% Neanderthal.
99.9% of Eurasians have an MCRA as recent as 500 AD
99.9% of humans have an MRCA as recent as 500 BCGoing from 99.9% to 100% could push each date back centuries, and the outlier cases (like the Sentinelese or other uncontacted peoples) are not particularly interesting for this particular subject.To go from 99.9% to 100% thus pushes the MRCA back from 500 BC to probably 10,000 BC, again, because of people like the Sentinelese, etc.Replies: @Lars Porsena
This looks like the most relevant passage:In particular, notice the qualifiers: "fresh meat" and "don't over cook it".
Here is what healthline says. I usually don't trust mainstream sources for vitamin C information, but this seems plausible.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/10-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-animal-foodsIt makes sense that animal meat (including all tissue, not just muscle meat) would contain vitamin C given that most animals other than primates can produce it. Presumably the problem with scurvy was the lack of fresh food of all sorts. I am guessing months old salt pork (etc.) would not contain much vitamin C even if the raw meat did.
P.S. I have a couple of Stefansson 's books, but not the ones which bear most directly on this. Do you recommend any of his books in particular?Replies: @cthulhu
Agree with you and that an all-meat diet must include the organ meats to be healthy. I haven’t read any of Stefansson’s original material (although I have read a couple of the journal papers that came out of it; they’re online), but learned about the experiment via Gary Taubes’ fascinating Good Calories, Bad Calories.
I only put this information out there because I care, I refuse to ever accept a single cent for knowing as much as I know about what is best for the body and soul of my beloved contemporaries, for whom I only want the best!Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !Replies: @Anonymous
He-Man with it's craptacular animation was American animated. But G.I. Joe, while of American creation, was Japanese animated. Voltron, Thundercats, and Transformers were all Japanese.
Not that Japanese animation was all that bad (I don't know what animation you think was all that great in the 50's-70's) but in the 80's but by that point American animation was way worse and mainly outsourcing all it's successful products. Since then the Japanese have gotten far better at it and American cultural production has pretty much continued it's decline.
Still pictures with only the lips moving in Japanese anime is practically a trope. Ostensibly it is deriving it's art style from comics and manga which are all still pictures, but it also saves lots of money on animation which is it's own motive, and (in shonen anime aimed at boys) it means you can devote the whole budget to animating the epic final fight with the final form of the evil boss.
The Japanese take it way further then that. There are whole scenes of dialogue where they will show the back of someone's head, their shoes, or two people standing on a bridge from far away and nothing moves. Then there's that ingenious DBZ trick of having 2 guys fighting who are moving so fast that no one can see them and you just get splash effects and motion lines on a still background.Replies: @J.Ross
The best animation I ever saw was in the half hour Bloom County Christmas Special (Opus the Penguin, bemoaning his flightlessness, saves Santa, whose sleigh has fallen into water, and therefore needs swimming and cold tolerance more than flight). It was on TV once and then I’ve never heard of or seen it again, but the movement was so consistently smooth and lifelike (better even than rotoscope!) it leaves a permanent impression. It’s clear that Berke Breathed was insisting on a certain quality.
https://boingboing.net/2016/12/22/watch-this-bloom-county-christ.htmlReplies: @J.Ross
It’s what I remember. Clutch was before my time. We lived on Oahu and Long Island during Space Angel’s run, and that’s what the local stations showed. (These were syndicated, right?) Also, our dad worked for an aerospace contractor, so we watched the spacy stuff– Fireball XL5, Astroboy, Lost in Space (when mom allowed it.)
Their third series, Captain Fathom, seems to have been better received in Italy than at home. Never heard of it until now.
Space Angel’s lead was one Scott McCloud. That made me curious– is that the noted carrier’s real name? Turns out the answer is “yes, and no”. He was born McLeod, so only had to change the spelling.
Of course. That is why the MRCA of huge pools of people is surprisingly recent.
All white people have an MRCA as recent as 1000 AD (that is why it is very safe to say Charlemagne, 250 years further back still, is the ancestor of all white people alive today)
99.9% of Eurasians have an MCRA as recent as 500 AD
99.9% of humans have an MRCA as recent as 500 BC
Going from 99.9% to 100% could push each date back centuries, and the outlier cases (like the Sentinelese or other uncontacted peoples) are not particularly interesting for this particular subject.
To go from 99.9% to 100% thus pushes the MRCA back from 500 BC to probably 10,000 BC, again, because of people like the Sentinelese, etc.
If Eurasians all have a common ancestor as recent as 500 AD, that doesn't mean they are all direct descendants of Julius Caesar does it? It seems having A common ancestor is different from saying everyone is your common ancestor by that date.Replies: @Thomm
The point is in choosing someone famous who was known to have had a large number of children, and who has traced lineages to other European lines. For example, William the Conqueror was also a descendant of Charlemagne.Replies: @Martin Spencer
“Of course. Even more people are descended from his father’s father. ”
If all whites are descended from Charlemagne, but even more people are descended from his grandfather, mustn’t that mean that some non-whites are descended from Charlie’s Grandfather, but not from him?
How exactly did that happen?
Just because ALL whites are descended from Charlemagne and SOME African Americans are, does not mean zero African Americans are.
Why is this so hard to understand?
99.9% of Eurasians have an MCRA as recent as 500 AD
99.9% of humans have an MRCA as recent as 500 BCGoing from 99.9% to 100% could push each date back centuries, and the outlier cases (like the Sentinelese or other uncontacted peoples) are not particularly interesting for this particular subject.To go from 99.9% to 100% thus pushes the MRCA back from 500 BC to probably 10,000 BC, again, because of people like the Sentinelese, etc.Replies: @Lars Porsena
I get that and I can buy it. I don’t get why, if all white people have a common ancestor as recently as 1000 AD, why would everyone before that date all be common ancestors of everyone? Or someone famous?
If Eurasians all have a common ancestor as recent as 500 AD, that doesn’t mean they are all direct descendants of Julius Caesar does it? It seems having A common ancestor is different from saying everyone is your common ancestor by that date.
If all whites are descended from Charlemagne, but even more people are descended from his grandfather, mustn’t that mean that some non-whites are descended from Charlie’s Grandfather, but not from him?
I want to know: how many are descended from Charlie’s Aunt?
For the record, it is very easy to develop near-fatal diverticulitis, difficult to cure anal fissures, and very uncomfortable hemmorhoids within a week of starting an “all-meat” diet.
Not within a year, not within a month, within a week.
And I Guarantee you that you do not know enough about the human body to be sure that, in your case, I am wrong —– unless you are one in a million.
And trust me, I have read these guys like Taube and his ilk, and they – and the Keto guys , and the Paleo guys, are almost never one in a million.
I only put this information out there because I care, I refuse to ever accept a single cent for knowing as much as I know about what is best for the body and soul of my beloved contemporaries, for whom I only want the best!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !
I only put this information out there because I care, I refuse to ever accept a single cent for knowing as much as I know about what is best for the body and soul of my beloved contemporaries, for whom I only want the best!Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !Replies: @Anonymous
Owsley Stanley of Grateful Dead and LSD manufacture fame ate nothing but meat for decades. He eventually did die.
I still think very few people are equipped with the information and common sense needed to safely experiment with unusual and extreme diets.
There are many people who figure out unusual diets that work for them, and this guy Owsley apparently started his meat diet when he was already a chemist/scientist,
not as an easily influenced young person who does not really know much about the human body and is easily swayed by dietary fads.
If all whites are descended from Charlemagne, but even more people are descended from his grandfather, mustn't that mean that some non-whites are descended from Charlie's Grandfather, but not from him?
How exactly did that happen?Replies: @Thomm
er…they are. All Hispanics and African Americans are also descendants of Charlemagne, since they have white ancestry.
Just because ALL whites are descended from Charlemagne and SOME African Americans are, does not mean zero African Americans are.
Why is this so hard to understand?
If Eurasians all have a common ancestor as recent as 500 AD, that doesn't mean they are all direct descendants of Julius Caesar does it? It seems having A common ancestor is different from saying everyone is your common ancestor by that date.Replies: @Thomm
Not everyone. It would have to be someone who reproduced.
Plus, a monarch naturally had a lot more offspring than the average man, so pinging them as the ancestor of a huge number of people today is easy. All white people today are descendants of Charlemagne, but also of many other monarchs and millions of ordinary peasants.
No. But the fact that he had 3 children and was far enough in the past makes that quite probable. Ultimately, it is a function of those two variables.
If you go even further back, then almost everyone who had children is the ancestor of almost everyone today.
Yes, these are two different things.
Euros are extremely homogeneous compared to the other ethnic groups. Supposedly Japanese are more distinct from their nearest relatives (South Koreans) than English are distinct from Greeks. So it would follow that the MRCA for all Japanese and Koreans might be longer by itself than it is for all English and Greeks, and then how much longer until MRCA between Japanese and Greeks?Granted, let's ignore dead ends.Granted, but the question is how far back?
That point, while not necessarily complete IA if you're saying 'everyone in this group is your direct ancestor but not all your ancestors are from within that group', but it would be much more than MRCA. It would be a type of bottleneck, or ethnogenesis.
Eventually you get to total IA for everyone and then it's fully true without qualification. But that is probably millions for everyone. What would be IA for Europeans only? Maybe not any less, due to introgression from other places. Depends, does IA require a total convergence of the tree into 1 or only a total convergence of the components, in different mixes?
But I don't know much about what the geneticists precisely mean when they say MRCA either. In 1000 years we (partial or full Europeans) all have a common ancestor, but do they really mean all Europeans are related through the same guy? That should axiomatically take longer than different MRCAs would.
Let's say you and some guy named Bob have a MRCA in Geoffrey Chaucer (700 years ago), me and Bob have a MRCA in an illegitimate child of Copernicus (500 YA), and me and you in Barberossa (900 YA). That's all of us having an MRCA with each other within 1000 years or less, but it's not through the same guy for all of us.
So go back further, eventually you'll hit a same guy. But say Copernicus and Chaucer are both related through Erik the Red's dad Thorvald Asvaldsson (1100 YA is 600 Y Before That), Chaucer and Barberossa in Charlemagne (300 Y BT) and Barberossa and Copernicus in Heraclius (600 Y BT). So they are all also within 1000 years of each other to start with, but not with same individual guy still.
I don't know if it is that way but it seems that it could. Would that count as MRCA for a group when everyone in the group is linked to everyone, but through different people? Eventually you would hit everyone through the same guy. But to get the whole of England alone coming from the same guy might take centuries by itself, or more depending on how endogamous and clannish it is. It's a question of how far a clan is able to differentiate without getting slipped an introgression into the pool. And then once that happens, how long it takes to saturate the pool.Replies: @Thomm
That show is called A Wish For Wings That Work. It’s online here:
https://boingboing.net/2016/12/22/watch-this-bloom-county-christ.html
1,000 years for Europeans I find believable. 1500 years for all eurasians I find much more incredible. But not totally impossible. But a single introgression event I’m not certain can even percolate through all of China that quickly once it’s there. Seems to short for too great of a distance. Proportionally Chinese are much more than 1.5x more distinct from Europeans than Europeans are from each other, and quite possibly Chinese are more than 1.5x more distinct from each other than Europeans are from each other.
Euros are extremely homogeneous compared to the other ethnic groups. Supposedly Japanese are more distinct from their nearest relatives (South Koreans) than English are distinct from Greeks. So it would follow that the MRCA for all Japanese and Koreans might be longer by itself than it is for all English and Greeks, and then how much longer until MRCA between Japanese and Greeks?
Granted, let’s ignore dead ends.
Granted, but the question is how far back?
That point, while not necessarily complete IA if you’re saying ‘everyone in this group is your direct ancestor but not all your ancestors are from within that group’, but it would be much more than MRCA. It would be a type of bottleneck, or ethnogenesis.
Eventually you get to total IA for everyone and then it’s fully true without qualification. But that is probably millions for everyone. What would be IA for Europeans only? Maybe not any less, due to introgression from other places. Depends, does IA require a total convergence of the tree into 1 or only a total convergence of the components, in different mixes?
But I don’t know much about what the geneticists precisely mean when they say MRCA either. In 1000 years we (partial or full Europeans) all have a common ancestor, but do they really mean all Europeans are related through the same guy? That should axiomatically take longer than different MRCAs would.
Let’s say you and some guy named Bob have a MRCA in Geoffrey Chaucer (700 years ago), me and Bob have a MRCA in an illegitimate child of Copernicus (500 YA), and me and you in Barberossa (900 YA). That’s all of us having an MRCA with each other within 1000 years or less, but it’s not through the same guy for all of us.
So go back further, eventually you’ll hit a same guy. But say Copernicus and Chaucer are both related through Erik the Red’s dad Thorvald Asvaldsson (1100 YA is 600 Y Before That), Chaucer and Barberossa in Charlemagne (300 Y BT) and Barberossa and Copernicus in Heraclius (600 Y BT). So they are all also within 1000 years of each other to start with, but not with same individual guy still.
I don’t know if it is that way but it seems that it could. Would that count as MRCA for a group when everyone in the group is linked to everyone, but through different people? Eventually you would hit everyone through the same guy. But to get the whole of England alone coming from the same guy might take centuries by itself, or more depending on how endogamous and clannish it is. It’s a question of how far a clan is able to differentiate without getting slipped an introgression into the pool. And then once that happens, how long it takes to saturate the pool.
Genghis Khan made this possible. While he was only 800 years ago, his reproduction was remarkable for both the wide geographical area of pregnant women he left in his wake as well as the sheer number of them. His children and grandchildren also had a huge number of children, and this empire stretched from Poland to Iran to the Pacific coast of China. For example, Genghis’ grandson Kublai had so many children, all in China, that it is certain that all Chinese people today are descended from him. 750 years was plenty of time.
Also note that it is exponential, not linear. 1500 years for 99.9% of Eurasia is no more implausible than 1000 years for all of Europe, given that the additional 500 years is a *lot* more slack in exponential terms.
Yes, it does. But only the most recent one was 1000 years ago. They are also all related through another person 1005 years ago, and another 1006 years ago, etc. So all Europeans today are descendants of most of the Europeans of 900 AD with the most recent being perhaps 1000 AD (ignoring the dead ends, as we discussed). Hence, someone fecund like Charlemagne, who was also safely before even 900 AD, is a guarantee.
The simpler way to look at it is :
10 generations back = 1024 ancestors (say 1000 for simplicity)
20 generations back = 1 million ancestors (but now we get into major pedigree collapse, i.e. the same people appear in multiple slots).
30 generations back = 1 billion ancestors, which of course is far more than what the population of the world was at the time, let alone the population of white people. Pedigree collapse is huge by this point.
40 generations back = 1 trillion, which just means *anyone* who has descendants is the ancestor of everyone today. 40 generations x average of 25 years/generation is still just 1000 years.
Now you see how 1500 years is vastly, vastly more slack than 1000 years, and hence pretty safe. If not 1500 years for 99.9% of Eurasians, then 1600 years (4 generations = 16x more slots).
On the point of pedigree collapse, note that Queen Elizabeth and her husband are second cousins through one route, and third cousins through another. This is very, very common in European royalty, and example of how much pedigree collapse there is.
1 person has 2 parents so 2 parents have 4 grandparents who have 8 great grandparents.
That's what the numbers do but with people, you can have 4 great-grandparents. Great grandpa Bob and G. grandma Sue have Bill and Brenda, Jerry and Susan have Jake and Jeanie. Bill and Jeanie have your father and Jake and Sue have your mother. You have 4 great grandparents. As you noted about the royalty.
It can be less extreme with a larger population. Or worse, the Bob generation could have been all cousins to start with. But the situation with Elizabeth and her husband may be way more common than is realized because commoners don't usually track family trees out to 3rd cousins (that certainly isn't the worst royalty has been guilty of). Huge numbers of people we could expect to be married to 4th or 5th cousins.
The numbers are distinct so you have a distinct number of slots that accord with the numbers, but the people are not distinct. They keep doubling up on the tree, the further back you go, the more they double. There are 50 million people in England today, however there were not 1.6 billion people in England at the start of the 20th century. Nor a trillion googleplex in the bronze age. There are 1.6 billion slots on the family tree but those are a bunch of doubles (and decatouples or whatever it would be).
Historically speaking the doubles are not evenly distributed across wide geographic areas as if by hydrostatic repulsion, they tend to clump. The issue is people are isolated or segregate from one another and reproduce in discreet pools. Like I said, it matters the rate of introgression into a specific pool and time until saturation, and it depends on breeding habits and social barriers. The rate of introgression mixes the pools.
Having more slots in your family tree does not give you more chances to be descended from the Ming dynasty if your ancestors were not mating Chinese people. Introgression happens and always has happened, more than is probably historically appreciated, and after it happens it eventually saturates whatever pool it's in genealogically speaking. But it takes time and how much time would depend. And then there is the issue of their being so many people and pools that not all the pools may ever directly intermix with each other.
Consider a population of 4 million people today, there is no mathematical definite amount of time by which all their descendants necessarily must be also descended from Katy Perry or Barrack Obama. Although they probably won't do so, Australia could feasibly stay in a separate pool from Katy Perry forever and it would not cease being sustainable.
If they kept it up for a million years or more the ozzies and the poptarts might speciate, as our hominid ancestors have done in the past. At any rate, even with introgression, with assortative mating you may still get genealogically isolated subpopulations.
Separation from the MRCA can increase or decrease over time and doesn't necessarily follow the numeric math.Replies: @Thomm
https://boingboing.net/2016/12/22/watch-this-bloom-county-christ.htmlReplies: @J.Ross
Nice. Thank you.
Euros are extremely homogeneous compared to the other ethnic groups. Supposedly Japanese are more distinct from their nearest relatives (South Koreans) than English are distinct from Greeks. So it would follow that the MRCA for all Japanese and Koreans might be longer by itself than it is for all English and Greeks, and then how much longer until MRCA between Japanese and Greeks?Granted, let's ignore dead ends.Granted, but the question is how far back?
That point, while not necessarily complete IA if you're saying 'everyone in this group is your direct ancestor but not all your ancestors are from within that group', but it would be much more than MRCA. It would be a type of bottleneck, or ethnogenesis.
Eventually you get to total IA for everyone and then it's fully true without qualification. But that is probably millions for everyone. What would be IA for Europeans only? Maybe not any less, due to introgression from other places. Depends, does IA require a total convergence of the tree into 1 or only a total convergence of the components, in different mixes?
But I don't know much about what the geneticists precisely mean when they say MRCA either. In 1000 years we (partial or full Europeans) all have a common ancestor, but do they really mean all Europeans are related through the same guy? That should axiomatically take longer than different MRCAs would.
Let's say you and some guy named Bob have a MRCA in Geoffrey Chaucer (700 years ago), me and Bob have a MRCA in an illegitimate child of Copernicus (500 YA), and me and you in Barberossa (900 YA). That's all of us having an MRCA with each other within 1000 years or less, but it's not through the same guy for all of us.
So go back further, eventually you'll hit a same guy. But say Copernicus and Chaucer are both related through Erik the Red's dad Thorvald Asvaldsson (1100 YA is 600 Y Before That), Chaucer and Barberossa in Charlemagne (300 Y BT) and Barberossa and Copernicus in Heraclius (600 Y BT). So they are all also within 1000 years of each other to start with, but not with same individual guy still.
I don't know if it is that way but it seems that it could. Would that count as MRCA for a group when everyone in the group is linked to everyone, but through different people? Eventually you would hit everyone through the same guy. But to get the whole of England alone coming from the same guy might take centuries by itself, or more depending on how endogamous and clannish it is. It's a question of how far a clan is able to differentiate without getting slipped an introgression into the pool. And then once that happens, how long it takes to saturate the pool.Replies: @Thomm
See above response about MRCA.
20 generations back = 1 million ancestors (but now we get into major pedigree collapse, i.e. the same people appear in multiple slots).
30 generations back = 1 billion ancestors, which of course is far more than what the population of the world was at the time, let alone the population of white people. Pedigree collapse is huge by this point.
40 generations back = 1 trillion, which just means *anyone* who has descendants is the ancestor of everyone today. 40 generations x average of 25 years/generation is still just 1000 years. Now you see how 1500 years is vastly, vastly more slack than 1000 years, and hence pretty safe. If not 1500 years for 99.9% of Eurasians, then 1600 years (4 generations = 16x more slots). On the point of pedigree collapse, note that Queen Elizabeth and her husband are second cousins through one route, and third cousins through another. This is very, very common in European royalty, and example of how much pedigree collapse there is.Replies: @Lars Porsena
Ah but there’s the rub. It is not exponential. Numbers are exponential.
1 person has 2 parents so 2 parents have 4 grandparents who have 8 great grandparents.
That’s what the numbers do but with people, you can have 4 great-grandparents. Great grandpa Bob and G. grandma Sue have Bill and Brenda, Jerry and Susan have Jake and Jeanie. Bill and Jeanie have your father and Jake and Sue have your mother. You have 4 great grandparents. As you noted about the royalty.
It can be less extreme with a larger population. Or worse, the Bob generation could have been all cousins to start with. But the situation with Elizabeth and her husband may be way more common than is realized because commoners don’t usually track family trees out to 3rd cousins (that certainly isn’t the worst royalty has been guilty of). Huge numbers of people we could expect to be married to 4th or 5th cousins.
The numbers are distinct so you have a distinct number of slots that accord with the numbers, but the people are not distinct. They keep doubling up on the tree, the further back you go, the more they double. There are 50 million people in England today, however there were not 1.6 billion people in England at the start of the 20th century. Nor a trillion googleplex in the bronze age. There are 1.6 billion slots on the family tree but those are a bunch of doubles (and decatouples or whatever it would be).
Historically speaking the doubles are not evenly distributed across wide geographic areas as if by hydrostatic repulsion, they tend to clump. The issue is people are isolated or segregate from one another and reproduce in discreet pools. Like I said, it matters the rate of introgression into a specific pool and time until saturation, and it depends on breeding habits and social barriers. The rate of introgression mixes the pools.
Having more slots in your family tree does not give you more chances to be descended from the Ming dynasty if your ancestors were not mating Chinese people. Introgression happens and always has happened, more than is probably historically appreciated, and after it happens it eventually saturates whatever pool it’s in genealogically speaking. But it takes time and how much time would depend. And then there is the issue of their being so many people and pools that not all the pools may ever directly intermix with each other.
Consider a population of 4 million people today, there is no mathematical definite amount of time by which all their descendants necessarily must be also descended from Katy Perry or Barrack Obama. Although they probably won’t do so, Australia could feasibly stay in a separate pool from Katy Perry forever and it would not cease being sustainable.
If they kept it up for a million years or more the ozzies and the poptarts might speciate, as our hominid ancestors have done in the past. At any rate, even with introgression, with assortative mating you may still get genealogically isolated subpopulations.
Separation from the MRCA can increase or decrease over time and doesn’t necessarily follow the numeric math.
But if one accepts that the MRCA of Europeans is at 1000 AD, then I think it is pretty safe to say that the MRCA of 99.9% of Eurasians is no further back than 500 AD. If you want 16x more slack, fine, 400 AD. I mean, we do know that all Europeans AND all Muslims are descendants of Muhammad, whereas we also know that all Chinese, all Persians, and all Eastern Europeans are descendants of Genghis Khan, despite him being relatively recent.
Individuals like Genghis Khan were a huge factor in unifying the various parts of Eurasia.
See this for more :
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
Thank you sir.
I skimmed the book in high school. Tbh, I dont recall much from it besides je wanted to recreate the Polynesian way of life. Or some such.
1. The common ancestors for various locations in the genome range from 320 kya to much older.
2. The minimum (aka most recent) for that set of numbers is thus 320 kya.The idea being that there if there exists a common ancestor for one location in everyone's genome with a given date then the most recent of those dates will be the MRCA (defined genetically, see below).That (and I think your comment in general) is talking about the "last common ancestor for Neanderthals and modern humans" not the MRCA of all living humans. Those are very different things. Especially given that interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals seems likely so that was not a clean evolutionary split.Three things are being conflated in this thread.1. The MRCA (genealogical) of all living humans. This is what Rutherford et al. are talking about when they cite ~3 kya dates. This is a simulation based number. I looked at the paper they referenced and it was more convincing than I expected, but as I noted in the other thread, I consider this an "extraordinary claim" and don't think that paper/simulation meets the threshold of the "extraordinary evidence" I would require to consider it proved.2. The MRCA (genetic) of all living humans. This is what we are discussing based on the Reich numbers (and to recap, we are discussing this because Steve noted the discrepancy between the 3 kya and 320 kya numbers, I think I have addressed that discrepancy adequately in my earlier comment). I take this to mean the most recent ancestor who has left an actual trace of IBD DNA in every living human. That number will be the minimum (most recent) of the autosomal numbers Reich gives and the X, Y, and mtDNA numbers.3. The last common ancestor of humans and X (e.g. Neanderthals in your comment, but the idea extends to any non homo sapiens species which ever interbred with humans, and that's not even getting into the species == "able to interbreed" argument). Not sure if it is necessary to discuss why this is different from 1. and 2. Hopefully it is obvious, but if not we can discuss it further.What I think is pointless is taking any of these estimates as gospel truth. But it is even more pointless to keep talking past each other because we are talking about different things.P.S. An important point to keep in mind is the difference between "all humans who ever lived" and "all humans alive now." Hopefully Steve's Tasmania example makes that clear.Replies: @JohnPlywood
Neanderthals branched off from the same ancestors of modern humans several 100ka, and were more or less isolated. Since they were phylogenetically older, much of the autosomal and X chromosomal ancestry we inherited from them comes from well over 500,000y ago.
I don’t think that’s correct. The ages given are just a range. It is highly unlikely the most common recent ancestor lies at the minimal estimation.
If we have the ancestry, it’s there. Our most recent common ancestor is obviously somewhere in our nuclear DNA. Extremely ancient Homo lineages (possibly homo antecessor) or even australopithecus ancestry is apparently present in Neanderthals, and by extension, modern humans. This ancestry has survived the extinction of multiple Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial lineages; a kind of genetic stoway which is nevertheless still here in us, despite the “extinction” of the multiple species who carried it.
But I don't think your second sentence makes sense. Neanderthal ancestry is interesting only where it differs from the pre-branch line (or humans fixed another allele in the interim). Otherwise the Neanderthal ancestry is indistinguishable from the ancestral alleles.
One thing I find a bit non-intuitive here is that if you have a human population with a MRCA then the MRCA does not change if another species interbreeds with someone from that population. The child of that union still shares the same MRCA through the human side of their lineage.Not sure what you are trying to say here. Especially since we are talking about the MRCA - most recent common ancestor (note the word order, it matters). If there are dates for the most recent common ancestor based on each genetic location then the overall MRCA is the most recent of those. When we talk about different estimates for each genetic location (did you look at Figure 5 panel 3 in Reich's book when I mentioned it above?) those are specific estimates (there is of course uncertainty, but Reich does not quantify that) for each distinct genetic location.No. Given the numbers of ancestors involved after only about 15 generations no specific IBD trace remains for almost all of our ancestors. See this page: https://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/
https://gcbias.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/prob_zero_blocks_vs_theory.png
It's still not clear to me that you understand the difference between genetic and genealogical ancestry. If you aren't willing or able to understand that then this conversation is not worth continuing.Replies: @Thomm
Interesting.
I still think very few people are equipped with the information and common sense needed to safely experiment with unusual and extreme diets.
There are many people who figure out unusual diets that work for them, and this guy Owsley apparently started his meat diet when he was already a chemist/scientist,
not as an easily influenced young person who does not really know much about the human body and is easily swayed by dietary fads.
Was homo Sapiens always a mixed species? The genetic evidence pushes our Y-chromosome so far back that it is difficult to see how it could be anything other than homo Heidelbergensis or whatever archaic species was in Africa at the time. If we carry an ultimately Heidelbergensis lineage, that means early anatomically modern humans were closer to Heidelbergs genetically, and they may have been more compatible with Neanderthals than previously believed. Only our mitochondrial lineage (over 150,000 years younger) can be assumed as potentially fully Sapiens. Many early sapiens fossils (such as Skuhl and Qafzeh) have too many archaic features to be considered pure, although that might be attributable to Neanderthal admixture.
1 person has 2 parents so 2 parents have 4 grandparents who have 8 great grandparents.
That's what the numbers do but with people, you can have 4 great-grandparents. Great grandpa Bob and G. grandma Sue have Bill and Brenda, Jerry and Susan have Jake and Jeanie. Bill and Jeanie have your father and Jake and Sue have your mother. You have 4 great grandparents. As you noted about the royalty.
It can be less extreme with a larger population. Or worse, the Bob generation could have been all cousins to start with. But the situation with Elizabeth and her husband may be way more common than is realized because commoners don't usually track family trees out to 3rd cousins (that certainly isn't the worst royalty has been guilty of). Huge numbers of people we could expect to be married to 4th or 5th cousins.
The numbers are distinct so you have a distinct number of slots that accord with the numbers, but the people are not distinct. They keep doubling up on the tree, the further back you go, the more they double. There are 50 million people in England today, however there were not 1.6 billion people in England at the start of the 20th century. Nor a trillion googleplex in the bronze age. There are 1.6 billion slots on the family tree but those are a bunch of doubles (and decatouples or whatever it would be).
Historically speaking the doubles are not evenly distributed across wide geographic areas as if by hydrostatic repulsion, they tend to clump. The issue is people are isolated or segregate from one another and reproduce in discreet pools. Like I said, it matters the rate of introgression into a specific pool and time until saturation, and it depends on breeding habits and social barriers. The rate of introgression mixes the pools.
Having more slots in your family tree does not give you more chances to be descended from the Ming dynasty if your ancestors were not mating Chinese people. Introgression happens and always has happened, more than is probably historically appreciated, and after it happens it eventually saturates whatever pool it's in genealogically speaking. But it takes time and how much time would depend. And then there is the issue of their being so many people and pools that not all the pools may ever directly intermix with each other.
Consider a population of 4 million people today, there is no mathematical definite amount of time by which all their descendants necessarily must be also descended from Katy Perry or Barrack Obama. Although they probably won't do so, Australia could feasibly stay in a separate pool from Katy Perry forever and it would not cease being sustainable.
If they kept it up for a million years or more the ozzies and the poptarts might speciate, as our hominid ancestors have done in the past. At any rate, even with introgression, with assortative mating you may still get genealogically isolated subpopulations.
Separation from the MRCA can increase or decrease over time and doesn't necessarily follow the numeric math.Replies: @Thomm
I think the exponential factor gets us to 99.9% relatively quickly. The difference between 99.9% and 100% is what pushes the MRCA date out a lot, as I described upthread.
But if one accepts that the MRCA of Europeans is at 1000 AD, then I think it is pretty safe to say that the MRCA of 99.9% of Eurasians is no further back than 500 AD. If you want 16x more slack, fine, 400 AD. I mean, we do know that all Europeans AND all Muslims are descendants of Muhammad, whereas we also know that all Chinese, all Persians, and all Eastern Europeans are descendants of Genghis Khan, despite him being relatively recent.
Individuals like Genghis Khan were a huge factor in unifying the various parts of Eurasia.
See this for more :
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
That branch timing sounds reasonable (I am not as up on the Neanderthal details as some). As I understand it there was then Neanderthal-human interbreeding with the out of Africa human population.
But I don’t think your second sentence makes sense. Neanderthal ancestry is interesting only where it differs from the pre-branch line (or humans fixed another allele in the interim). Otherwise the Neanderthal ancestry is indistinguishable from the ancestral alleles.
One thing I find a bit non-intuitive here is that if you have a human population with a MRCA then the MRCA does not change if another species interbreeds with someone from that population. The child of that union still shares the same MRCA through the human side of their lineage.
Not sure what you are trying to say here. Especially since we are talking about the MRCA – most recent common ancestor (note the word order, it matters). If there are dates for the most recent common ancestor based on each genetic location then the overall MRCA is the most recent of those. When we talk about different estimates for each genetic location (did you look at Figure 5 panel 3 in Reich’s book when I mentioned it above?) those are specific estimates (there is of course uncertainty, but Reich does not quantify that) for each distinct genetic location.
No. Given the numbers of ancestors involved after only about 15 generations no specific IBD trace remains for almost all of our ancestors. See this page: https://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/
It’s still not clear to me that you understand the difference between genetic and genealogical ancestry. If you aren’t willing or able to understand that then this conversation is not worth continuing.
Interesting that although Columbus landed on a cape of South America, he thought this was an island, although he was aware of the probability of a lurking continent due to the vast amount of fresh water from the Orinoco that was mixed with the waters in the straight between Trinidad and whatever lay to the south. Due to a shortage of supplies, he did not have the wherewithal to further explore the area.
Columbus also sailed along the coast of Panama, but failed to discover the nearby Pacific Ocean. So really he was a nearly man. He failed to discover South American, North America, or the Pacific, but did discover the West Indies, which he actually believed were what we now call the East Indies.
Thanks to Columbus, the inhabitants of North, Central, South America and the Caribbean islands became known to Europeans as Indians.
His achievements did include the introduction of taxation to the Occident, and the settlement of Santo Domingo, which was the first European outpost in the New World. Also,
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue
and in 1493 the first recorded case of syphilis in Europe turned up in Lisbon, of all places. There is no proof that the disease, which subsequently affected millions in Europe, was brought from the New World on a Columbus ship, but it is mighty suspicious all the same.Replies: @AnotherDad, @Alden
One of Columbus’s ships doctors, Dr Bernal diagnosed a brand new never before known STD on some of the sailors on the voyage back to Europe. Pimples rash etc first European medic to see syphillis.
The oldest smallpox victim known is the skeleton of a Mexican bear, cerca 1300 AD whose bones had the characteristic lesions of death from smallpox.
There are trillions of human bones in Europe. Not one has the characteristic smallpox lesions before about 1530AD. There were plagues measles and chicken pox epidemics in Europe, but no smallpox till European sailors brought it back from the new world. Plus, like the 1918 new type of flu that killed millions, and AIDS, smallpox, being new to Europe killed swiftly and spread fast.
I have read a number of books about Columbus and never seen any mention of this doctor, nor can I find anything online.
There is a list of the entire crew of each of the three ships on the first voyage here:
http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm
https://www.livescience.com/17643-columbus-introduced-syphilis-europe.html
I remember him. He came from a prominent family Kentucky I think. He made a fortune from his LSD manufacture. Dangerous stuff.
But I don't think your second sentence makes sense. Neanderthal ancestry is interesting only where it differs from the pre-branch line (or humans fixed another allele in the interim). Otherwise the Neanderthal ancestry is indistinguishable from the ancestral alleles.
One thing I find a bit non-intuitive here is that if you have a human population with a MRCA then the MRCA does not change if another species interbreeds with someone from that population. The child of that union still shares the same MRCA through the human side of their lineage.Not sure what you are trying to say here. Especially since we are talking about the MRCA - most recent common ancestor (note the word order, it matters). If there are dates for the most recent common ancestor based on each genetic location then the overall MRCA is the most recent of those. When we talk about different estimates for each genetic location (did you look at Figure 5 panel 3 in Reich's book when I mentioned it above?) those are specific estimates (there is of course uncertainty, but Reich does not quantify that) for each distinct genetic location.No. Given the numbers of ancestors involved after only about 15 generations no specific IBD trace remains for almost all of our ancestors. See this page: https://gcbias.org/2013/11/11/how-does-your-number-of-genetic-ancestors-grow-back-over-time/
https://gcbias.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/prob_zero_blocks_vs_theory.png
It's still not clear to me that you understand the difference between genetic and genealogical ancestry. If you aren't willing or able to understand that then this conversation is not worth continuing.Replies: @Thomm
He does NOT understand the difference. I guarantee it.
The oldest smallpox victim known is the skeleton of a Mexican bear, cerca 1300 AD whose bones had the characteristic lesions of death from smallpox.
There are trillions of human bones in Europe. Not one has the characteristic smallpox lesions before about 1530AD. There were plagues measles and chicken pox epidemics in Europe, but no smallpox till European sailors brought it back from the new world. Plus, like the 1918 new type of flu that killed millions, and AIDS, smallpox, being new to Europe killed swiftly and spread fast.Replies: @Jonathan Mason
Can you post a reference to Dr. Bernal? Which voyage was this? Bernal is listed as a servant on the Pinta on the first voyage, but no mention of a Dr. Bernal.
I have read a number of books about Columbus and never seen any mention of this doctor, nor can I find anything online.
There is a list of the entire crew of each of the three ships on the first voyage here:
http://www.christopher-columbus.eu/ships-crew.htm
https://www.livescience.com/17643-columbus-introduced-syphilis-europe.html