The big new paper on European origins is out (by Wolfgang Haak, Iosif Lazaridis, Nick Patterson, David Reich, etc) .
The Corded Ware population is quite different from the preceding Neolithic farmers: it is about 75% descended from a Yamnaya-like population (the Yamnaya being steppe herders from the Ukraine and thereabouts). The Yamnaya themselves are another fusion product: they’re a mix of farmers from the Middle East (a different population than the one that originally settled Europe, something like Armenians) and a population similar to ancient hunter-gatherers from Russia (somewhat like ancient Karelians). This population also introduced R1a and R1b chromosomes into Europe, now extremely common.
In northern Europe, the newcomers didn’t tax the neolithic farmers: mostly, they killed them. Razib Khan compares this to the original Mongol plan ( kill them, kill them all), before that Khitan bureaucrat explained the joys of taxation. In the Corded Ware/Single Grave/Battleaxe culture, there’s no sign that the farmers are around as serfs: there are almost no buildings, almost no sign of agriculture. Jim, comment on this.
My guesses:
The Karelian-like population is mostly from further east than Samara: the guys that domesticated the horse.
The Karelian-like poulation conquered the Armenian-like farmers: they account for about half the autosomal ancestry of the Yamnaya, but far more of the Y chromosomes.
it would be interesting to see if the Yamnaya picked up neolithic farmers ancestry through the female line: could you look at X-chromosomes?
In places like Italy, people are autosomally mostly neolithic farmers while the old Neolithic-farmer y-chromsomes are almost gone. Conquest, rather than extermination: younger sons go forth to conquer again. Some of the old Y chromosomes lingered in the hills – a bit like Vlachs after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Did the ur-IndoEuropeans have the European lactose-tolerance mutation? Probably. And they had the common CF mutations, too.
Archaeologists should read more Conan: Robert E. Howard was way closer to the mark than they were or are. Even good guys like David Anthony were influenced: but I’ll bet he’s over that now.
West Hunter 
The Corded Ware herders didn’t slaughter the farmers because there was a bounce back in farmer ancestry after the Corded Ware period. That’s why the Corded Ware remains are up to 80% Yamnaya-like, but modern Czechs, Germans etc. are around 50%.
See these scientists almost always test the remains from very typical, usually elite burials of each culture. As a result they miss everyone else who was stil around, and managed to pass on their genes, even though they were basically thown in a ditch when they died.
Complex stuff, I know.
Total population density in that area dropped by something like a factor of three with the advent of the Corded Ware. Suicide?
They estimate that the Corded Ware was 79% Yamnaya-like, 4% WHG, and 17% early neolithic farmers.. “mitochondrial DNA haplogroup N1a and Y chromosome haplogroup G2a, common in early central European farmers14,23, almost disappear during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age.” The Yamnaya may have mixed with farmers before entering northern Europe: thus, “we cannot exclude a scenario in which the Corded Ware arriving in today’s Germany had no ancestry at all from local populations.”
Modern populations in northern Europe have more LBK-like and WHG autosomal
ancestry than the Corded Ware did. Has to be gene flow: from EEF remnants somewhere in North Europe, and/or from Southern/western Europe.
There could have been class ancestry differences – maybe the chiefs were purer Yamnaya – but the old uniparental markers characteristic of the LBK farmers are down by a factor of something like 50 today
They became enlightened and practiced birth control. Seeing the corded ware people were obviously deeply moved by their tourism and multicultural exposure.
“Has to be gene flow: from EEF remnants somewhere in North Europe, and/or from Southern/western Europe.” is a euphamism for “Bell Beaker warriors”? Would be consistent with your model for Indo-European migration (and the y-dna turnovers that did not either start, nor stop with Corded Ware in European history). Euphamisms would be unusual from Greg Cochran if so.
In this study Bell Beakers show up 200 years later and as close on the map as this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quedlinburg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperstedt genetically pretty discontinuous with Corded Ware already (and with much more resemblance to a modern German).
One of the things here about the Yamnaya’s region is that here we go straight from the 6th Millenium BC to the late 4th Millenium BC, straight from EHG to these admixed Yamnaya.
So there are no Armenian like people actually “caught in the act” of mixing, or getting conquered in our evidence yet.
I think it’s still pretty speculative, at this stage, a pure farmer culture even existed in the region (rather than admixture from the start).
Samples from the Samara Culture and Dnieper-Donets Culture, which would bridge the time periods, are probably needed to actually understand what happened. The DDC seem like apprently pretty much pure pottery using hunter gatherers. Perhaps women could have exchanged across a frontier from the Caucasus to sophisticated hunter-gatherer groups from the beginning without particularly much more than was usual for the Neolithic happening in terms of getting conquered.
Greg, what’s your thinking on the “resurgence” of hunter gatherer ancestry in Europe? As if I recall you made some pretty strong statements about this in the past, with the effect that it happened through the Indo-Europeans and no other means. If that was your opinion was not “crazy” to use your favourite term but does seem to be wrong. What’s your thinking about how this matched with your ideas of how Centum / Satem division came to exist in Europe?
“There could have been class ancestry differences – maybe the chiefs were purer Yamnaya – but the old uniparental markers characteristic of the LBK farmers are down by a factor of something like 50 today”
LBK wasn’t followed by Corded Ware. It was followed by a number of cultures which turned out to become TRB, funnel beaker culture. Uniparental markers of these were far more diverse than LBK: The article you refer to has a Y-DNA F* and a R* for Baalberge finds in Quedlinburg, e.g.
To remain in style of this blog: Does this mean that those hardy Yamna warriors seeking to expand their harems sent out scouts and waited patiently for a thousand years for his return before the onslaught. Or the story might be.. well.. complicated.
All true; unfortunately no one cares about this stuff, only about how “Robert E Howard was right god dammit! Now get off my lawn!”.
Who’s Jim? Or is it an idiom I don’t know?
Yeah, who’s Jim, Greg?
I thought about this blog as I watched a lecture in the Great Course on ancient Greece the other day. The professor preferred an ancient socialist uprising to explain a certain bronze-age transition rather than an invasion by another people. Invasion seemed to make a whole lot more sense to me, but I know nothing.
Re: David Anthony – Is Horse, Wheel, Language that Razib had up on his post worth reading?
It’s a good book.
I think JB you will appreciate this lecture by Anthony here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HliaR2Ep24s. I think that the discussion will soon turn to not that this great replacement in population occurred but why. In this lecture by Anthony he emphasizes the great expansion that this horse culture had not followed immediately after the domestication of the horse but after the technology of a cart that allowed them to wonder far from the water sources they had earlier been restricted to stay near. In goes on at length as to why this was such an advantage and since the link is provided I will defer to the real expert.
I have noticed that there is a lot of questioning as to why there was not a greater signature left from the conquered people in the conquering population, our modern minds cannot conceive that take they did not at the very least save the pretty young things from the battle axe. In primitive cultures you don’t want another wife who hasn’t been trained from birth to be useful. There are numerous examples of dominate cultures rolling over an out matched one with very little wife taking from the old one IF the women in the old culture had useless skills.
“our modern minds cannot conceive that take they did not at the very least save the pretty young things from the battle axe.”
Shouldn’t be too hard when we have the European conquest of North America to look to.
With the pretty young things it’s always hard.
“Shouldn’t be too hard when we have the European conquest of North America to look to.”
Good point. But, i think that’s a very different scenario. First off, the native cultures were not just being conquered but collapsing with disease. Whites weren’t continually doing hands on conquest but very often pushing into–settling–areas of collapsed population where the natives skirmished (a little or a lot) but tended to just flee. Also there was a very stark technological\civilizational divide and racial\religious divide. And –most important–it was settlers (civilized farmers\craftsmen) with a hard religious\cultural monogamous tradition replacing mostly hunter gatherers.
Generally for farming people–land scarce and the source of wealth–will be monogamous. Marriage is family joining and dowry not uncommon. For nomadic hunter gatherers and herders, people and livestock are wealth. Women are like livestock, polygamy quite common and there’s often a “bride price”. Particularly if your group is on the move into new areas, picking up additional women from conquered peoples would seem to be quite reasonable.
Note, that overall in the Americas lots of native women were taken as sex partners of European men. Most Latin American populations are mestizo. Only in North America–where it was not really extractive “colonization” but individual farmer settlement was this more rare.
I’d argue that is harder for farmer\settlers to make productive use of a conquered hunter-gatherer woman who doesn’t know how to be a farm wife. Than it is for hunter gatherer men to make use of a conquered farm woman (wife\daughter) who probably has simpler skill set to learn. (And there were plenty of white women taken captive by Indians, even though the Indians were on the losing side so it was rare. The white women were able to adapt.)
For the non-farming white men really on “the fringe”, who had contact with the natives–the mountain men, the Canadian voyagers–taking Indian women as wives was routine. Those guys weren’t farming and didn’t need trained “farm wives”. The native girls are women, providing the comforts of women … so take them they did.
That’s only the Anglo-American perspective. Frenchmen and Spaniards were more willing to look to the native population for women. French Canada was significantly more mixed than English Canada; even Scots mixed more – hence the Metis, who are essentially Cree, French and Scottish. And the mestizo nature of Mexico is obvious: it’s like India must have been in late Vedic times, and still is to a lesser degree – socioeconomic status varies inversely with native genetic component.
I would have thought that the Quebecers had noticeable Amerindian ancestry, but it doesn’t seem to exist.
@ David Chamberlin
That lecture by David Anthony was terrific. Thanks for linking to it.
Could you comment of the possible effects of the cooling/drying trend that occurred during the IE expansion? Could this by itself have reduced the Neolithic farming population by reducing crop yields and openned their territory to pastoralism?
Did IE pastoralists manage to cross the English Channel in high numbers, bringing their cattle and horses with them? If so, it was no mean feat.
Insofar as anyone can tell, Irish prehistory is dominated by horsey-cattley people. Who were the Cruithne whom the Gaels killed/enslaved/ethnically cleansed? I know that their name meant that they were Britons, but how did they differ economically? Less pastoralism, more ploughing?
I think there were two groups originally from the same source: an early one which came by sea via Iberia but got steam rolled later by the La Tene one coming overland.
Just a guess though.
Just what benefit did those mutations provide? More mucus production?
This population also introduced R1a and R1b chromosomes into Europe, now extremely common.
Chromosomes…?
Y chromosomes.
There is no direct connection between Yamna and Corded Ware IMO. This was already proven by cranometrical studies decades ago.
Wrong: the genetics makes it clear that the Corded Ware population is A. very different from what preceded and B. > 75% descended from a population very similar to Yamnaya.
I am not sure how much old school “skull gazing” is regarded here but fact is that the skulls from the Corded Ware people show no significant connection to the “Kurgans” and the Yamnaya(s?). Instead, they represent an ancient look that reminds one of famous, and now re-dated (but still pretty old) high-skulled and rather narrow Combe Capelle skull, while the Kurgans were broad-faced and low-skulled (similar to the Mesolithic Western Europeans in fact, – interestingly enough, modern Western Europeans are low-skulled, in opposition to modern Eastern Europeans. I think archaeological evidence points into the same direction.)
Yes, I know, perhaps this kind of approach is dated (I studied it in the early-80s and have since moved on to something entirely else) but this was proven by multivariate statistics and not intuition, so I think that being a coincidence is highly unlikely. I know that phenotype can change but this still does not explain it.
It is true that Corded Ware seems to be mostly disconnected from its geographical successor (which the bones also told us decades ago) but I think that they are still mostly “autochthon”, perhaps some sort of “survival” right within the LBK that later replaced them in some way.
I am not sure about the genetics itself, I have re-discovered this discussion a few months ago and since I am old I have a hard time adapting to it (back then we mostly did blood groups and that stuff), so do not be so hard on me. But I think that the Corded people were not descendants of anything but Mesolithic Europeans – but so were the r1b people IMO (I know, no real proof so far) and thus they are simply relatives, divided by Neolithic invaders.
As a long term student of human pre history you should welcome that a very powerful new tool has been developed that gives us an unprecedented look into our long lost past. Old theories that were always highly speculative that directly contradict the new evidence that comes from DNA libraries (translation- that’s a shit ton of hard evidence) ought to be discarded. Of course that won’t happen but for us fans in the west hunter peanut gallery it ought to be a really good show watching the stubborn old fools getting exposed for what they really are.
But am I getting this wrong? Those Yamna samples are r1b, Corded Ware is commonly associated with r1b. I stand by it, Corded Ware is not derived from Yamna. This shared ancestry must have come from somewhere else, probably way older.
It seems like it is you who is caught in his opinion and tries to squeeze everything into it to make it fit. This Kurgan thing is just a minor part of a much bigger Indo-European picture and way overrated.
The people that we call Corded Ware were genetically quite different from the previous occupants ( who had no R1b or R1a, as far as we can tell) and are genetically similar to the Yamnaya.
This is what pre-war physical anthropologist thought: they were right. Oddly enough, they also thought that the Corded Ware skulls looked like Yamnaya.
Fourteen comments to date, and the best by far is eurogenes’ “these scientists almost always test the remains from … elite burials of each culture.” It’s a profound problem: if your sample isn’t representative, what can you securely deduce from it?
Is the use of horse milk an independent event from the domestication of cattle? You say that it is probably the case that this Yamnaya-like population had lactose persistence. Did the gene for lactose persistence enter the Yamnaya-like population from cattle herders? If cattle herders existed for a few thousand years before the Yamnaya-like population, then the Yamnaya-like population could pick up a copy of lactose persistence and use it for horse milk.
Is there a good summary on the web of the Conan books’ anthropological universe?
The Hyborian Age, by Robert E. Howard.
I think after that was written Howard later added the Empire of Acheron, conquered by the Hyborian migrations in a fall-of-Rome analogue.
‘I think after that was written Howard later added the Empire of Acheron, conquered by the Hyborian migrations in a fall-of-Rome analogue.”
Yeah, the Empire of Acheron was added later when REH wrote “{The Hour of the Dragon.” De Camp (REH’s posthumous editor and “collaborator”) shoe-horned in the notion that the Acheronians were a northern branch of the proto-Egyptian Stygians.However, REH planned for them to be a Hyborian people, albeit one that was more “civilized”:
From Howard’s synopsis:”The mummy (of Xaltotun) was that of a sorcerer of long ago, an Hyborian of a kingdom which had been destroyed by the Nemedians, Aquilonians and Argosseans. The name of this kingdom was Acheron, and its capital city was called Python. Many centuries before the people of Acheron, Hyborians more highly civilized than their neighbors to the east and the west, had been lords of an empire which had included what was later southern Nemedia and Brythunia, most of Corinthia, most of Ophir, western Koth and the western lands of Shem, northern Argos and eastern Aquilonia. With the overthrow and destruction of Acheron by its ruder western neighbors, their greatest sorcerer fled to Stygia, living there until poisoned by a Stygian priest of Set the Old Serpent.” (p.335, The Bloody Crown of Conan)
Of course, that just makes the Roman comparison more apt:
IE Germanics conquering IE Rome
Primitive Hyborians conquering Hyborian Acheron
The edition that Cochran linked to was pretty tough (at least to my eyes) to read.Here’s another:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42182/42182-h/42182-h.htm
RE: Robert E Howard,
My vote for best REH tale goes to “Beyond the Black River”
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42254/42254-h/42254-h.htm
Hi Syon, Good to meet you here. Which story by REH would you recommend to someone who’s never read anything by him? I guess it’s more entertainment than high literature, but I’m at least moderately interested.
It’s not high literature for sure but another aspect which may add to the entertainment value is Hyboria is starting to sound a lot like recent academic papers (I assume because he based a lot of his world on the anthro theories of the time).
Cimmeria would fit Corded Ware, the Nordic regions to the north split into two peoples, the civilized farmer realm to the south and – probably my relatives – the dark savage Picts along the Atlantic Coast.
“Which story by REH would you recommend to someone who’s never read anything by him? I guess it’s more entertainment than high literature, but I’m at least moderately interested.”
Yeah, it’s not high literature by any means (for my money, Lovecraft was the best of the Weird Tales authors), but REH can be a lot of fun.
So, best story by REH? Well, as I mentioned above, “Beyond the Black River” is quite good.It was certainly my favorite when I was 14, and it seems to be the consensus pick as the best Conan tale:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42254/42254-h/42254-h.htm
Other good ones:
“Queen of the Black Coast” (Conan’s doomed romance with the Shemitish pirate Belit)
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42183/42183-h/42183-h.htm
“People of the Black Circle”( As you can see, REH had a rather excessive fondness for using “Black.” This one has my vote as the best candidate for being turned into a film):
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42259/42259-h/42259-h.htm
“The Hour of the Dragon” (Howard’s only full-length novel featuring Conan):
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42243/42243-h/42243-h.htm
“Wings in the Night” (This one features Solomon Kane, a 16th century Puritan swordsman, and has my vote for the best of the Kane tales):
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600881.txt
“The Shadow Kingdom” (the first of REH’s tales of King Kull of Atlantis):
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0603491.txt
“Archaeologists should read more Conan: Robert E. Howard was way closer to the mark than they were or are.”
More broadly, what was believed in 1935 about human origins and human history was much closer to the truth than what was believed post-WW2, for a very long time and in many respects still today. Huge amounts of knowledge were lost, deliberately lost. Inconvenient truths were buried and overwritten with fantasies and lies.
That sounds all too likely.
That doesn’t speak very well of the “liberators”…
GC Did the ur-IndoEuropeans have the European lactose-tolerance mutation? Probably. And they had the common CF mutations, too.
Re: lactase, a person who went to a conference given by Reich in Oxford has stated that it was absent in the “Early Neolithic” , “slight” in the “Late Neolithic” populations then increased around either 4000 BC or 4000 BP (she could not remember which Reich gave exactly).
Since they have no actual samples from around 4000 BC and their early Neolithic samples are approx 5500 BC and late Neolithic (Corded Ware and Bell Beaker) 2500 BC, I would assume that the samples who show up with high LP alleles are the Unetice Culture from around 2000 BC who are a very modern European culture who seem to have replaced the Corded Ware (outside the range of modern Europeans).
The Yamnaya samples here are around 3000 BC.
If this is all correct, likely some support for the “cow boys” idea that keeps coming up in variations and mutations from Greg, with the more major story of strong selection on LP possibly being what later populations who were better at producing a dairying culture did with the ability to genetic ability to digest milk sugar.
The phenotype information is getting its own paper for this one. So this is all hearsay for now.
better at producing a dairying culture did with the ability to genetic ability to digest milk sugar
That is, you have middle European Neolithic populations who seem to produce a lot of cheese, and then you have steppe guys who sometimes have a lactase persistance allele because they don’t drink a lot of milk but sometimes it helps them not die, then the allele meets the dairy culture and away you go.
In terms of evolutionary success is genocide a better strategy than taxation?
Depending how useful the conquered. If conquerd people are very talented, smart and highly productive, they are more likely taxed, assimilated (or even reverse similation like those in ancient China). If conquered people are less productive, less intelligent, then extinction is the outcome (no need to genocide actually). Pure economical competition can severely reduce survival rates of less talented people which lead to extinction.
If the conquer even could not figure this out, then this `conquer’ is more than likely to extinct (or eventually defeated). Mongols never killed craftsman who show talents. In fact, mongols and Manchurian conquering of China were heavily depending on recruiting Chinese themselves. Meanwhile, Han Chinese are not exactly ethnocentric or patriotic to the national states. Han Chinese believe mericratic system. So they have no problem joining side which offers the best outcome, even against their own people.
Just think about what kind of Nazi officers who were spared of war criminal charges and recruited in Nato or Warsaw pact with high commanding positions.
Large scale of indiscriminated genocide mostly happens in primitive tribal wars. This might happen in IE history with guess. If the conquered people are really useless, the odd is bad for the conquered.
When Dutch defeated Portuguese in Taiwan and made it their own colony, Dutch pretty much pushed indigenous people (more resembling Philipino in looks) near extiction without genocide. These native people were pushed into refuge in unproductive mountain lands which Dutch care less. But Dutch used their trade boats to ferry Han Chinese to Taiwan to settle with promising lower tax than Chinese govement and free fertile land (which was cleared by Dutch) to own. Dutch functions like conuers for Han China instead of Holland. Han Chinese immigrants were not slave like African with Dutch in Formosa. The Dutch source said: “Chinese are only bee that produce honey”. The East Indian company adviced its employees and soldiers treat Chinese well. Dutch East Indian company was about making profit. The profit is more important than ethnocentrism in pure capitalist sence. If you have large share holding in a company, you are more interested to hire people who can do job better than hire people who simiply looks like you. Your profit outvalue any thing else.
The native Taiwan people are really minority now in their land, bordering extinction. Thousands years later, historians might think they have been genocided.
Also when Norman conquested Aglo-Saxon in England, what happened to conquered people? After thousand years, Norman are reversed assimilated into English culture mostly.
I think all your examples point to the fact that taxation is an evolutionary dead end except if the natives are inferior (or can be forced into an inferior economic position for several centuries on end without intermingling with them), in which case they will slowly disappear anyway. It was obviously advantageous to the Dutch to employ Chinese in the ordinary sense of the word, but from an evolutionary point of view eventually it was the Chinese and not the Dutch who were the real beneficiaries, just as you write.
If a conqueror is concerned about spreading his genes, he should go and smite the conquered, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass. OK, maybe the ox and sheep, camel and ass part is a bit of an exaggeration.
“If a conqueror is concerned about spreading his genes, he should go and smite the conquered, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not”
Most animals and primitive tribes behave like that. But high IQ people from sophisticated societies are not like that. It is never late to join a primitive tribe if you think those tribal behavior superior to civilized people.
I give up.
How does what you write change the fact that taxation is worse than useless from an evolutionary point of view?
“If a conqueror is concerned about spreading his genes, he should go and smite the conquered, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling,ox and sheep, camel and ass. OK, maybe the ox and sheep, camel and ass part is a bit of an exaggeration. ”
Well, that was the policy that the Hebrew Bible laid out for the conquest of Canaan:
“23 And the king of Ai they took alive, and brought him to Joshua.
24 And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword, until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai, and smote it with the edge of the sword.
25 And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai.
26 For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
27 Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey unto themselves, according unto the word of the Lord which he commanded Joshua.”
Mind you, they did keep the cattle for themselves
But that’s not actually what the Jews do. Taxation instead of killing everyone works out okay for the Jews, with neither the Jews nor their hosts getting vanquished or assimilated, especially in European host countries; this strategy was perhaps at its most successful in Poland between the Statute of Kalisz and the Partitions.
That’s where I got my comment:
1 Samuel 15:3
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
@peppermint7889: That might be what the Jews do in the Galut, but that’s not what they did in ancient times. That’s also not what they did to the Palestinians. If we still lived in a Malthusian world (as we’re wont to do in the long run), the Palestinians would have had much less offspring, with some of them possibly displacing some neighboring folks. The net effect would have been a new population in Palestine with the old population mostly just disappearing from the face of the Earth.
@peppermint7889: I thought a bit longer about this Jewish thing in Poland. I think it didn’t work out so well for them. Does anyone disagree?
Anyway, Jews never conquered Poland, so never had the option of exterminating the Slavs.
“But that’s not actually what the Jews do. Taxation instead of killing everyone works out okay for the Jews, with neither the Jews nor their hosts getting vanquished or assimilated, especially in European host countries;”
Do bear in mind that Ashkenazi Jewry have not kept their bloodlines pure:
“They concluded Ashkenazi Jews were about 50% Middle Eastern and 50% European. In the 2013 abstract, they were pretty specific: they estimated the European ancestry fraction at 55% , plus or minus 2%. ( In our book, we had a crude estimate of about 40% European ancestry.) They estimated the split between Europeans and Middle Easterners at about 9000 BC: which sounds about the right date for the entry of the Sardinian-like farmers. From other data (mtDNA) , and from the fact that you see almost zero WHG or ANE in Ashkenazi autosomal genes, one can conclude that the European admixture was mostly Italian, with some southern French. Very little German or Slavic – by that time serious endogamy had set in..”
“this strategy was perhaps at its most successful in Poland between the Statute of Kalisz and the Partitions.”
The Polish elite were quite keen on using Jews as middle management.Cf their role as estate managers and tax-framers in Ukraine.
They did. They didn’t mix much with the locals since arriving Poland.
Ashkenazi Jewry have not kept their bloodlines pure
“They did. They didn’t mix much with the locals since arriving Poland.”
They did in Poland, yes, but the original stock had already been mixed with European genes by that point:
“They concluded Ashkenazi Jews were about 50% Middle Eastern and 50% European. In the 2013 abstract, they were pretty specific: they estimated the European ancestry fraction at 55% , plus or minus 2%. ( In our book, we had a crude estimate of about 40% European ancestry.) They estimated the split between Europeans and Middle Easterners at about 9000 BC: which sounds about the right date for the entry of the Sardinian-like farmers. From other data (mtDNA) , and from the fact that you see almost zero WHG or ANE in Ashkenazi autosomal genes, one can conclude that the European admixture was mostly Italian, with some southern French. Very little German or Slavic – by that time serious endogamy had set in..”
reiner, if you say that the Dutch in Taiwan promoted Han genes more than their own, then you could also say that the French in Haiti worked for the Africans and Scotts in New Zealand for the diffusion of Ovis genes. That point of view is debatable. The Dutch in East Asia were so few that alone could not stand against the natives, and the French would have died off without African labor in tropical Haiti.
It might be so. Or it might not. For all I know Haiti could really have been too difficult for the French without African slaves. They could have spent the resources that went into colonizing Haiti (and populating it with Africans) into colonizing a friendlier climate, like Algeria.
Also, it might have taken the Dutch much longer to colonize Taiwan without the help of Han Chinese settlers. It might have been impossible at all. But maybe they could have transported far more Dutchmen (and -women) to the Far East than they eventually did. Or maybe they could have spent the resources that went into the futile colonization effort in Taiwan into something else.
I’m sure as hell the Dutch wouldn’t be any poorer or have less descendants in CE2500 if they never went into the trouble of colonizing lands at all. I think an evolutionary rule of thumb is that if you need slaves or serfs from another ethnic group to colonize a land, it probably doesn’t make evolutionary sense to do at all. (Maybe I’m wrong. Haiti is still governed by a mulatto elite, who are part French. I’m willing to bet the mulattoes are there to stay. So French genes did permanently settle Haiti, at least.)
Now of course people don’t directly maximize their evolutionary outcomes, but I didn’t imply people were unhappy for what they did. I merely stated it didn’t raise their evolutionary fitness, and might actually have depressed it.
“They could have spent the resources that went into colonizing Haiti (and populating it with Africans) into colonizing a friendlier climate, like Algeria.”
Quebec and Louisiana.Had the French managed to build a genuine Francophone Empire in mainland North America…..Well, history would have gone a little differently.
Of course, France’s main problem in colonizing mainland North America was numbers .Unlike the British, the French simply did not have large numbers of people who were interested in the pioneer’s life (cf how roughly 20,000 English Puritans emigrated to New England from 1630-1640).
For a good book on the Anglo demographic expansion, read Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939 by James Belich
http://www.amazon.com/Replenishing-Earth-Revolution-Angloworld-1783-1939/dp/0199297274
In ancient Mesopotamia (4th millennium BC) where you had thickly settled horticultural villages along the river valleys, if a pastoral people were to conquer a village or series of villages and instead of killing the inhabitants, putting them to work twice as hard as before, the result would be a larger agricultural surplus which could be used to keep a larger army in the field. Hence the origin of political states in a relentless competition for power, leading to larger and larger states (empires). There is a very good book called The Parable of the Tribes which describes the logic of this process. The notion that peasants have to be smart in order to be worth preserving is false: they just have to be strong and prefer life in bondage to death. In my opinion anyway.
Luke, you’re probably correct in that these empires needed to grow ever larger and needed to keep the populations because exterminating the populations was impracticable and they would have collapsed well before the conquering tribe would have managed to repopulate the area. But the question is, was starting an empire actually increased the fitness of the average (or even elite) members of the core ethnicity or tribe of the empire?
For example in the case of the Achaemenid Persian Empire we know that the Persian language (I read about it in I think one of John McWhorter’s books) underwent significant changes (mostly simplifications) in the two centuries before Alexander the Great’s conquest. It was because a lot of non-Persians were imported to do work (slave work or as paid laborers) in the central provinces, and essentially the Persians got assimilated to them. Similarly the Assyrian Empire a few centuries earlier spread not its own language, but Aramaic.
Let me go out on a limb now and propose that when these empires fell and the elites lost their status, these ethnic groups essentially were worse off then before they started their empires, and we cannot really think they managed to spread their genes too far and wide. The opposite might have happened, because for example when Assyria fell, its elite was massacred and even the majority population might have sustained huge losses. If you read Azar Gat’s books (Nations, War in Human Civilization) you’ll find descriptions of how empires always relied on their core ethnicities to man their armies, which probably also meant that they sustained the brunt of military losses. Being the core ethnicity of an empire meant creating peaceful conditions for other populations, inviting them into one’s own land (i.e. ceasing to be the majority even in one’s own land), and then being massacred en masse when the empire fell. Maybe that wasn’t always true, the Persian dynasty had descendants in later (Parthian and Sassanid) empires, but even if it was beneficial to the elite, I’d question how beneficial it was to the rest. Probably the benefits to the elite came at the expense of those below, and the tribe as a whole lost. At least that’s what I’d suspect, but maybe my judgment is clouded by what I can see in the cases of more modern empires like that of the French or Dutch (where actually the elites didn’t get much fitness benefits from empire building either). Also there’s Greg Clark’s data on medieval England where the nobility (military elite) didn’t have much genetic fitness compared to the richer commoners. The core ethnicities of these empires essentially became the military elite, too, and I’d suspect they had similar fitness (i.e. not much compared to non-military elites).
Empires are good for fitness when one’s own ethnicity colonizes a previously uninhabited or barely inhabited land, or exterminates or chases away the previous tenants. For example I’d suspect the Russian Empire was good for the average fitness of its core ethnicity, since Russians (especially if we count Ukrainians who colonized present-day Southern Russia and are now thoroughly Russified) managed to colonize huge areas in Eastern Europe and Siberia.
So my thinking is that these empires are most sustainable when they are not concerned with the genetic fitness of their core ethnicities at all, but this also means that they might actually be actively harmful to their fitness. Let me note that as far as I know Russian ethnic nationalists (like Solzhenitsyn) were often opposed to imperial expansionism.
@ reiner Tor -m thanks. Yes, I hadn’t thought of it that way. The groups that drive history aren’t necessarily the fittest in the end.
elite dominance + taxation over a Clarkey enough time scale would mean you got their genes which were better than yours.
Yes, the problem is how to ensure that you’ll be in a position to dominate the natives over a Clarkey time scale.
yes
“The Karelian-like poulation conquered the Armenian-like farmers: they account for about half the autosomal ancestry of the Yamnaya, but far more of the Y chromosomes.”
This makes sense, but why then would the Yamnaya not mix with the conquered peoples (to the same extent) in the west as the Karelian-like population had done with the Armenian-like farmers? Perhaps because the Yamnaya population was comparatively larger than the Karelian-like population had been.
Taxation and other forms of exploitation always turns against the exploiters. The Mongols taxed Russians till they defeated them, the Manchu exploited the Han till they absorbed them. Genocyde is safer.
I wouldn’t say “always”, there are some exceptions. But overall I do agree with you.
Not that I couldn’t imagine a more moral universe.
The history of civilizations says otherwise.
FWIW, V. Gordon Childe appears to have been well ahead of the pack when he hypothesized in 1926 that the Yamna culture were where it began:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743045
It is impossible to explain advanced calculus to people with marginal grade school math ability.
Advanced evolution mechanism with advantage of genetic recombination, recombination hotspot, effective breeding population, availability of advantage allele, ect, are impossible for people with primitive mental ability to handle. They only can understand primitive Darwin theory.
Low g associated with racist ideology/dunning-kruger effect indicates impossible task for these people.
Yes, that Dunning-Kruger metacognitive inability must be a problem for some.
@Syon:
The Ashkenazi population was founded with the admixture of Near Eastern Jewish males and Italian (or similar) females. After that, they were endogamous, and it took them probably a full millennium or more to reach Poland. “Pure-blooded Ashkenazi” means someone who can trace all of his ancestors to this population, regardless of the fact that two thousand years ago this population didn’t yet exist and was created by an admixture event.
So I still think it’s a good example regarding no admixture with the locals.
But the example is otherwise totally wrong, the Jews didn’t conquer Poland, they weren’t in charge of the country, they weren’t in a position to decide what to do with the local population.
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