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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.

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.

A blogger on Eupedia's genetics forum has deduced the haplogroups of many European kings and queens from living descendants who have been tested. It has long been known that mtDNA haplogroup H dominated the lines of Europe's aristocracies, while Y chromosomal R1b was the most common male lineage. Prince Phillip exhibits the stereotypical genes in this regard. More interesting than the royal personages listed are those that haven't yet made the list, like Elizabeth I or Charlemagne. It would be interesting to know what the mitochondrial DNA was of Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn or what Charlemagne's male lineage was.

One fascinating observation of the blogger is, "All kings of France supposedly belonged to haplogroup G2a3 (Y-DNA)." G2a makes up 5 to 10% of Mediterranean Europe but is rare in Northern Europe. It is believed to have originated with metalworking peoples from the Caucasus or Anatolia who accompanied the R1b-dominant Indo-Europeans on their conquest of Europe in the 3rd millennium BCE.

See "Geographic Spread and Ethnic Origins of European Haplogroups - Eupedia."

Using mitochondrial DNA to test the hypothesis of a European post-glacial human recolonization from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge

O García^1,4, R Fregel^2,4, J M Larruga², V Álvarez³, I Yurrebaso¹, V M Cabrera² and A M González²

Abstract

It has been proposed that the distribution patterns and coalescence ages found in Europeans for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups V, H1 and H3 are the result of a post-glacial expansion from a Franco-Cantabrian refuge that recolonized central and northern areas. In contrast, in this refined mtDNA study of the Cantabrian Cornice that contributes 413 partial and 9 complete new mtDNA sequences, including a large Basque sample and a sample of Asturians, no experimental evidence was found to support the human refuge-expansion theory. In fact, all measures of gene diversity point to the Cantabrian Cornice in general and the Basques in particular, as less polymorphic for V, H1 and H3 than other southern regions in Iberia or in Central Europe. Genetic distances show the Cantabrian Cornice is a very heterogeneous region with significant local differences. The analysis of several minor subhaplogroups, based on complete sequences, also suggests different focal expansions over a local and peninsular range that did not affect continental Europe. Furthermore, all detected clinal trends show stronger longitudinal than latitudinal profiles. In Northern Iberia, it seems that the highest diversity values for some haplogroups with Mesolithic coalescence ages are centred on the Mediterranean side, including Catalonia and South-eastern France.

Mitochondrial testing specialists better get busy revising their haplogroup theories! Another Western European, Atlantic-facing prejudice has been disproved.

Discussion is accelerating in the United States and European Union to regulate private genomic testing that provides consumers medical information, according to Science magazine and the European Journal of Human Genetics. No mention is made in the reams of white papers about ancestry testing, but some of the pitfalls and bureaucratic morasses in the thinking about true genetic/medical testing are fairly ominous, if not silly.

"Although there has been speculation about the potential psychosocial harms of testing [that is, genomic medical testing], such as an increase in anxiety or encouragement of fatalistic behavior, there are, to date, few studies addressing these concerns," writes the reporters for Policy Forum in the Oct. 8 issue of Science. "The limited evidence tends to be reassuring, even for risk information associated with relatively serious ailments...however, the scope for potential harm from unnecessary or unproven treatment after genetic risk assessment is an important unstudied question" (pp. 181f.).

We commend scientists and physicians for finding a new field of study divorced from reality but have to wonder what they will do about ancestry testing once they have conquered and tamed Frankenstein's elder monster. We suggest the following guidelines:

• Labeling on Internet sites and Zen Shopping Carts that explicitly states, "The claims for this ancestry product have not been evaluated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), House Energy and Commerce Committee, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes for Health or Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA 98195 USA."
• Predictive ancestry information may be hazardous to your progeny.
• No animal has been harmed in the production or clinical evaluation of this ancestry test.
• If you discover you have ancestry you did not expect, take a deep breath. Then take a healthy dose of skepticism, followed by two aspirins and a glass of water.