Europe in the Year 3000 BCE

The archeogenetics of Europe and transition from hunter-gatherers to Neolithic agricultural societies made a quantum leap forward with the publication of an article investigating haplogroup H, the type carried by about half of Europeans today. But you may have trouble accessing the research in the new journal Nature Communications. I haven't found one ordinary mortal who has actually read the article, because few libraries and hardly any individuals can afford the crushingly expensive subscription to Nature Communications. 

So here is an abstract. 

Were Neanderthals capable of creating art? The idea seems shocking to us. After all, we learned in school that these were brutish savages without higher thinking and symbolic thought or expression. The picture of a Neanderthal making hand prints in Spanish caves or making shell necklaces is odd indeed because art is largely “considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, [and] has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe some 40,000 years ago” according to the recent Wired Science article, “First Painters May Have Been Neanderthal Not Human.” (Left:  Panel of Hands in the El Castillo Cave, Spain, dated to 37,300 years old, photo by Pedro Saura.)

A recent Daily News and Analysis article, “Neanderthals Learned to Make Jewelry and Tools from Modern Humans, “ says an international team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany suggests there was a “cultural exchange” between the two species and there is evidence that Neanderthals “learned how to make jewelry and sophisticated tools” from the early ancestors of humans. The reasoning behind this is based on the fact that artistic relics were found near Neanderthal remains but the artwork was “clearly” indicative of human hands. So the conjecture is that it must have been learned.

Whether this is true or not, Neanderthals were creative.  According to Kate Wong, in her recent Scientific American article, “Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Creations of Neanderthals , Not Modern Humans,” according to archeological evidence, Neanderthals  not only wore feathers but “painted their skin” and “made jewelry from teeth and shells.”

 
But was their artistic expression learned? There are those that do not think so. According to Eric Wayner, in a recent Smithsonian article, “Do Feathers Reveal Neanderthal Brain Power?” Neanderthals wore feathers as personal adornments which showed them to be “capable of symbolic expression.”  And Wong says, there are Spanish and French caves thousands of years old with cave paintings long thought to be the artwork of early humans that are now thought to be the work of Neanderthals. Why? She says because of recently refined techniques of radiocarbon dating, that these paintings are “significantly older” than once thought. In fact, some may be older than the date when the first humans arrived in Europe around 41,500 years ago. When there were thought to be only Neanderthals.  “A large red disk” on one of the Spanish caves, El Castillo, is “at a minimum 40,800 years old, making it some 4,000 years older than the Chauvet paintings which were previously thought to be the oldest in the world.”  This and a “stretch of limestone wall with dozens of hands” in the same cave are both thought to possibly be the handiwork of Neanderthal painters because the “estimates” are considered to be at best a conservative “minimum.” According to Ker Than, in the recent National Geographic Daily News article, “The new dates raise the possibility that some of the paintings could have been made by Neanderthals who are thought to have lived in Europe some 30,000 or 40,000 years ago.” 

So if Neanderthals were painters where did they get their creative expression if not from humans? Wong says that both “modern humans and Neanderthals might have inherited their capacity for symbolic thinking from their common ancestor.”  And she says, if that is the case, “the roots of our symbolic culture go back half a million years.”

Authentic sequences from the ancient human past are a rarity in the world of DNA testing. But when a team of archeologists put the mummies of King Tut and his immediate family on the operating table in 2010, they were successful in deriving almost complete DNA profiles for the boy king and others in the Amarna dynasty that ruled Egypt more than three thousand years ago. Now three of the DNA signatures of Egyptian pharoahs from that famous forensic study by Zahi Hawass and the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo--plus others newly discovered--are available as part of a commercial direct-to-the-consumer autosomal DNA testing panel.

In October 2012, DNA Consultants launched its Rare Genes from History Report. Based on a customer's DNA fingerprint or autosomal profile, the additional analysis sells for $289. It compares your laboratory results with 26 rare alleles or ancestry markers whose trail has been traced through world history and evolving population changes by the company's statisticians. 

Take the Thuya Gene, for instance. Like most of the other Rare Genes from History, it has an African origin in deep time. But it experienced its greatest expansion in ancient Egypt, where it was carried by the queens of Upper and Lower Egypt and High Priestesses of the temples. It was reported in the profile of Queen Thuya's mummy, and we can see that she passed it to her children, grandchildren and descendants. King Tut was a great-grandson and has it, according to the new forensic evidence.

Today, as many as one-fourth of all people on earth would test positive for the Thuya Gene. It is twice as common in Somalia as outside Africa and is found in 40% of Muslim Egyptians.

That's not so rare after all, but unsurprising. Egyptian civilization lasted for three thousand years and sowed the seed of its peoples and ideas throughout the world. We can imagine that Autosomal Thuya started out in East Africa about 100,000 years ago, and that her descendants were prominent in the first out-of-Africa group as well as in the Middle Easterners who helped spread agriculture, animal husbandry, religion and settled town life to Europe. 

The spirit of Thuya lives on in 27% of Jews who have been tested in academic studies. Extrapolating to world population figures, that's nearly 400,000 people, about evenly divided between the United States and Israel.

See also "Prelaunch of New Autosomal Products" (August 26, 2012)
"Rare Genes from History" (webpage)
"Rare Genes from History Panel Now Available for $289.00"

The classic DNA study by the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt is: Hawass Z, Gad YZ, Ismail S, et al. Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun's Family. JAMA. 2010;303(7):638-647. The feat by scientists has also been featured on Discovery Channel. 

According to a news report in the current issue of Science Magazine, four massive volcanic eruptions in the tropics caused a sudden cooling of the earth between 1275 and 1300. The report is titled:

A Volcanic Trigger for Europe's Little Ice Age

Gene surfing is a process in population expansion whereby certain variations become prominent and dominant in a short time, appearing to skip the slow, steady, uniform accumulation of variegation and diversification. According to a study of the population structure and genealogies of Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean in Quebec, this type of drastic change accompanied the immigrant wave front that spread over the area in the 17th century. "Deep Human Genealogies Reveal a Selective Advantage to Be on an Expanding Wave Front" in Science magazine describes the resulting demographics.

Abstract
Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than one million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.

So gene surfing in an expanding colonization phase can produce a genetic revolution whose effects will be felt for hundreds or thousands of years downstream in history.

We wonder if the same wave front demographics might explain some of the following population phenomena:

• Large scale triumph of Norman male lineages following the conquest of England in 1066.
• Selective expansion of Middle Eastern genes in Tennessee (including Cherokee families, Jewish male and female lines and Melungeons)
• Relatedness among Jews and "Jewish diseases"
• Diversity-within-uniformity of Polynesians
• Population replacement of Old European (U, N) by Middle Eastern genes (T, J)  in Europe as a result of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution

Many students of history are puzzled why old populations have the allele frequencies and heterozygosity clines they have. Genetic drift is only part of the answer. Gene surfing and selection in deep history are the rest of it.

More information about Melungeons
Toward a Genetic Profile of Melungeons in Southern Appalachia
Melungeon Studies
Melungeon Match

A Missing Link from Kent's Cavern in Devonshire

A prehistoric maxilla (upper jawbone) fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, and named Kents Cavern 4. The specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum.

Although previous radiocarbon dating suggested the bone was about 35,000 years old, a new study in Nature redates it securely to 44.2-41.5 kyr. The article by Tom Higham et al., "The Earliest Evidence for Anatomically Modern Humans in Northwestern Europe," also claims that on the basis of dental comparisons it is "human" rather than "Neanderthal."

The Kent's Cavern fragment "therefore represents the oldest known anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe, fills a key gap between the earliest dated Aurignacian remains and the earliest human skeletal remains, and demonstrates the wide and rapid dispersal of early modern humans across Europe more than 40 kyr ago."

A related article in the same issue of Nature is "Early Dispersal of Modern Humans in Europe and Implications for Neanderthal Behavior," by Stefano Benazzi et al. It attempts to place the so-called Cavallo fossil from southern Italy in a timeframe of about 44,000 years ago, thus suggesting a "rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals."

Neither study considers that the evidence they are examining may be the result of hybridization between "humans" and "Neanderthals." Like most geneticists the authors have rigid categories and do not consider that our definitions of species and sub-species and transitions in technocomplexes and traits are in flux as new discoveries are made.

One man's Mede may be another man's Persian, and we note that the "fossil race" is not devoid of scientific jingoism pitting one country's news-making finds against another's. So far England seems to be winning.

However, the British still have to live down Piltdown Man, a fraud of biblical proportions that fooled the world for almost half a century until the 1950s. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery combining the lower jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The editors sum up the two new studies by writing, "The reanalysis of findings from two archaeological sites calls for a reassessment of when modern humans settled in Europe, and of Neanderthal cultural achievements." We wish that the paleontological community would think more out of the box and reassess how, when and where "humans" and "Neanderthals" interbred. 


Location of Kent's Caverns in Devon.

"There are already many fine books on the history of the Jews in the Middle Ages," writes Theodore L. Steinberg, an English professor at State University of New York, in the preface to his Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages (Wesport:  Praeger, 2008). So why another one?

"All of those other studies, as excellent as they are, presume a certain degree of knowledge on the part of the reader--knowledge of Jewish customs and traditions and beliefs, as well as a general knowledge about the Middle Ages," he continues.

If you have never been to a synagogue service, don't know many observant Jews and perhaps just discovered an interest in Judaism after finding Jewish ancestry in your family tree, this is the book for you. Beginning with the first chapter, "Jews and Judaism, What Are They? and continuing with "Talmud and Midrash," Steinberg skilfully guides the reader through a crash course on Jewish history since the advent of Christianity. He introduces us to the rabbinical traditions of Judaism, Mishan, Gemara and all the flowering branches of halakah or Jewish law. We learn why Jews were blamed, and tolerated, by the Church. We learn about everyday life in cities where Jews, Christians and Muslims mixed, Jewish occupations, their literature, philosophy and the Cabala, all major areas of intersection with Christian society. 

Appendix I has a good chronology of important events, from the life of Rabbi Akiva, which overlapped with that of Saul/Paul to the infamous date of 1492.

Singular Figure of Joseph Jacobs

Another masterwork on Judaism intended primarily for non-Jewish readers is Joseph Jacobs' Jewish Contributions to Civilization. An Estimate (Philadelphia:  Jewish Publication Society of America, 1919). This began life as the Australian Judaic scholar's Studies in Jewish Statistics, published in an anthropology journal in 1891, at the height of his fame. It was to be the first volume in a trilogy, the second book devoted to individual, rather than collective, contributions to European culture, the third a philosophical answer to anti-Semites about the value of Jews in the modern secular state. Alas, Jacobs died in 1916, leaving only notes for the second book and nothing at all of the third.

For Jacobs the watchword is always "judicious." He never exaggerates Jewish influence, emphasizing again and again that the number of Jews at no time, probably, rose above one-half of one percent in Western Europe, outside of countries where Jews were tolerated such as Moorish Spain and Poland/Lithuania under the Jagellon dynasty.

Did Jewish thinkers transform medieval philosophy from the stale dogmas of the theologians into more modern ideologies? Maybe, but they were only part of the movement.

His considered assessment of the Jewish contribution to medieval fables and folklore, one of his academic specialties, is "about one-tenth" of the material. There are those today, however, who would go so far as to say all of troubadour poetry and half of courtly love romances were inspired by the Judeo-Arabic tradition of Spain and southern France, with deeper roots in Arabia, Egypt and Babylon.

Did the Radanite ("From Persian rah dan, knowing the way") merchants plying the Silk Road in the early Middle Ages introduce all the choice import goods and enlightened ideas we associate with the East?

Europe owes to the Jewish Radanites the introduction of oranges and apricots, sugar and rice, Jargonelle pears, and Gueldre roses, senna and borax, bdellium and asafoetida, sandalwood and aloes, cinnamon and galingale, mace and camphor, candy and julep, cubebs and tamarinds, slippers and tambours, mattress, sofa, and calabash, musk and jujube, jasmine and lilac " (p. 203)

But their influence was limited. Beginning in the twelfth century, Venice took away the monopoly on the Levantine trade, just as Lombard merchants replaced Jews as bankers and moneylenders throughout most of Europe. The transition to a moneyed economy, according to Jacobs, was not due to Jews.

On the subject of Jews and capitalism, including stock exchanges and paper money, Jacobs takes a Ciceronian position. He denies that any Jews were involved with the South Sea Bubble, Mississippi Scheme of John Law or other experimental business models of the day. He does not even think that Jews fostered acceptance of bills of exchange or letters of credit. He points out that even with the Dutch East India Company, Jews had only very moderate ownership (although we wonder if like the silent partner behind the usurious kings of medieval times the partners named Coen and Hendricks and the like chose rather to have their names out of it), while the Jewish presence was absent at the first exchanges in Antwerp and London, and later minimal.

We think he might be too circumspect here. The Jewish role in the discovery, exploration and development of the American colonies is set forth in detail in Elizabeth C. Hirschman and Donald N. Yates, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America (Jefferson:  McFarland, forthcoming this fall). 

Jacobs is particularly harsh toward his contemporary Werner Sombart, who wrote an enthusiastic and eulogistic apology for the Jews in economic history (Die Juden und das Wirschaftsleben, Leipzig, 1911, trans. by M. Epstein, 1913, The Jews and Modern Capitalism). Jacobs calls the European professor of economics' work a "farrago of fantasies about Jewish life and religion" (259). The dour Victorian explicitly rejects Sombart's equation of the American way of business with Jewish practice and influence ("what we call Americanism is nothing else than the Jewish spirit distilled"). Again, however, we think Jacobs is bending over backward not to appear partisan. His objections to Sombart's arguments seem academic and petty if Sombart was on the right track, as most people concede today.

Prudent or Prudish?

In the same way, we feel that Jacobs' inability to detect any Jewish influence in the Puritans, or indeed the entire Reformation, is willfully blind.  "It cannot be by chance," he writes, "that the three most prominent voices among the Politiques [advisors to French king Henri IV], who laid down the principles which were to result in the Edict [of Nantes, granting toleration to Protestants, 1598]-- Michel de l'Hopital, Jean Bodin and Michel de Montaigne--were all partly of Jewish race" (p. 281). But what he gives with one hand Jacobs takes away with the other, for he goes on to say that the influence of these men stopped with the borders of France, while "freethinkers" in other countries like Spinoza certainly did not meet with much success.

And of course, looking ahead to the eventual playing out of these policies, we cannot attribute either the American Bill of Rights or French Revolution to Jews, can we?  Jacobs has a bowdlerized version of Jewish influence. He is willing to take modest credit for the good things Jews introduced, while letting their Christian imitators line up in the limelight and get the glory, but he doesn't want to admit that Jews might have been responsible for or at least complicit in some evils in modern society, such as communism, the militaristic state and free love ("the sexual vagaries of Enfantin," p. 308).

Over a year ago, there appeared one of the few studies of autosomal DNA in Ireland and Britain. If you have English/Welsh, Irish, northern Irish, Highlands Scottish, Lowlands Scottish or Swedish matches, you will want to read this post. Here is the original article and abstract.

Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain.

Two reports in the European Journal of Human Genetics underline how specific autosomal DNA can be in revealing the geographical structure among populations. One uses genome-wide data from the Illumina Human Hap300 project to predict the village of origin of a person's four grandparents given European origins. The other used genotyping from 3,367 individuals from seven different European, mostly British Isles populations to lay bare the detailed population structure and linkage disequilibrium patterns of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales.

Both studies have Colm O'Duschlaine of Trinity College, Dublin as their lead author and highlight how genotyping with autosomal DNA dominates genetics today (and DNA testing), eclipsing in many respects the older style of tests known as sex-linked haplotyping or lineage analysis, which focused on the male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial lines only.

Colm O'Duschlaine et al., "Genes Predict Village of Origin in Rural Europe," Eur. J of Hum. Genet. (2010) 18, 1269-1270. Abstract.

Colm O'Duschlaine et al., "Population Structure and Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation in Ireland and Britain," Eur. J of Hum. Genet. (2010) 18, 1248-1254. Abstract.

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to give an overview and discuss the relevant regulations in place, or under consideration, regarding healthcare-related personal genetics services in Europe – this is a rapidly evolving field and in most European Union (EU) countries the regulatory framework is not yet clear. The review will be framed from the perspective of potential service providers (companies, health services and practitioners, including medical, nutritional, complementary, etc), the growing number of which will need to be aware of potential regulatory hurdles existing now and that may arise in the future. The main conclusion from the survey is that strict regulations regarding practitioner-delivered personal genetic-testing services are unlikely to be enforced over the next 5 years in most EU countries, with the exception of Germany. There is broad-based, but by no means universal, support for a strong voluntary code of practice as an alternative to government regulations to protect consumers and to enable all stakeholders to recognise serious and reputable service providers. On the other hand, there are influential bodies calling for strict regulation. As genotyping costs rapidly fall, it is likely that it will become routine and a major challenge that does not seem to be addressed by current debate on regulations is the emergence of companies offering/selling personal genetic services based on a customer's pre-existing genetic results and therefore no actual laboratory testing involved.