I'd really like to know how you reach the conclusion of "most families" when we are talking about two ethno-religious minorities, that allegedly were victims of indiscriminate killings, and mass deportations to the Low Lands, North Africa and to the Americas, but end up leaving a gigantic genetic footprint.
> They have largely Visigoth ancestry, but are from North Africa.
The berbers do not have "largely visigoth" ancestry. The berbers are descendents of Numidians and Mauri, and they have a north african origin and the majority of north africans (algeria, morocco, tunisia) regardless of language (arabic or berber) can be identified genetically by the "berber marker." Recent population studies prove the despite numerous military conquests of north west africa there was not a population replacement.
Both of these events happened outside of Africa. Are they saying that the descendants of these interbreedings propagated back into Africa afterward? Or are they saying not everyone has this in their DNA?
I would say the parent author has been too polite in their response.
Your comment is offensive and nonsensical. Why on earth would genetic relations matter in any way for something like this? As far as I know basically nowhere on Earth is it possible to trace direct genetic lineages back thousands of years to some specific ancient population living in the same area.
Perhaps things are different in Australia, or other isolated places, but I think pretty much anywhere in Eurasia + Africa you will get an endless flow and mixing of populations, cultures, religions etc. With this in mind, it's safe to say that your view would justify all kinds of imperialist atrocities.
I think at any given moment in time what matters is whether the population currently inhabiting that place voluntarily and democratically decided to relinquish/sell certain artifacts. Whether that population is genetically related to the people who created the artifacts is irrelevant.
> the last generation of pure-blooded people and holders of possibly the only untampered gene pool left in the world.
I'm no geneticist but I wonder if such statements have any scientific value or even meaning.
What is an "untampered" gene pool? The article mentions that they are likely to have migrated there from somewhere. Their existence was a secret to no one in the region. That they may have had a high rate of intermarriage for centuries due to relative seclusion seems likely. But is that tantamount to being "pire blooded"...
> the original population was partly / mostly replaced
Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.
Out of Africa feels less PC to me, but I won't pretend to understand the rationale behind what is and isn't considered PC a lot of the time. But I agree with GP: we have relatively few DNA samples and try to draw pretty big generalizations between them. Ituitively, I would expect patterns of migration in and out of Africa and all the continents to be far more complex than 1-time events from which entire populations then developed complete independently.
edit: On a related note, my siblings' DNA test results say that they're something like 4% Native American, yet we have very reliable documentation of pure British genealogy back on all lines almost all the way back to the 1500s. Very unlikely to actual have a modern link. I'm sure the companies are likely overplaying the similarity more than anthropologists would, but am I to conclude that I have a closer link to Native Americans than other random samples from Europe?
Doesn't seem contradictory to me tbh. If the person in Spain descended from someone who left Sub-Saharan Africa 50k years earlier, they wouldn't necessarily be closely related to a genetically distinct population in North Africa (especially since IIRC there's evidence of people from Eurasia migrating to North Africa, it wasn't a one-way exodus where people left Africa and only expanded outward)
Beards answer points out among other things that there are exceedingly few traces of Normans in the genetic record as well, and gives a plausible suggestion that most might simply have left, like the Normans did. She also points to more examples than a single Ethiopian conscript.
So the reality is that we know there has been people here that are poorly reflected in the genetic record, and that makes it rather pointless to point to the genetic record to demonstrate the family in question is implausible.
In any case, what troubles me much more than whether or not the depiction is plausible is just how incredibly unprofessional and rude Talebs reaction was. If he wants honesty and a focus on the science, he should grow up and act professionally.
Yes, but don't you get it? AFTER the exodus from Africa, the two populations were living in the same region (europe), but did not inter-mix at all anymore. Otherwise there would be more DNA in the europeans.
Why mix when in the middle east and then refuse to mix when in Europe?
It seems to be the scientific consensus. I personally don't think genetics carry any hereditary claim to a thousand years old culture but it always bothers me to see people go against state of the art scientific conclusions (unless they have good evidence of their own).
>Copts share the same main ancestral component than North African and Middle East populations (dark blue), supporting a common origin with Egypt (or other North African/Middle Eastern populations). They are known to be the most ancient population of Egypt and at k = 4 (Fig.3), they show their own component (dark green) different from the current Egyptian population which is closer to the Arabic population of Qatar.
> since they include ancient Greek and old-time islamic ancestry (as far as I know)
AFAIK most of the genetic variation in Italy dates back from ancient times. Everyone thinks "of course, it was the Islamic invasions in Sicily and the Germanic invasions in the North", but the genetic impact of those was surprisingly small. The variation was there before.
The Greek colonization of southern Italy is the one historical migration that _did_ have significant impact, according to the article.
You make a good point that the emigrants did mix in a peppering of genes from their early-arriving distant cousins. But overall, only a tiny fraction of the available gene pool made it out of Africa.
> In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas
The latest genetic evidence suggests there was actually a very high level of replacement of the indigenous inhabitants of a large part of central/southern Africa, e.g.
Despite a gap of 5,000 years in some cases, all four of the children’s genomes were remarkably similar to one another. But compared with the DNA of modern Africans, their genomes were more closely related to those of the hunter-gatherer groups in west central Africa that are sometimes known as Pygmies than they were to those of contemporary Cameroonians or other Bantu-speaking populations.
The researchers also used the genomes to understand even older events in human history. The four children seem to descend from a group of Homo sapiens that branched off from the common ancestors of our species more than 200,000 years ago — perhaps even earlier than the ancestors of distinct Indigenous southern African groups known collectively as Khoesan peoples. Previous studies of modern human genomes had suggested that these groups descended from the oldest distinct lineage of Homo sapiens.https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5
So populations who'd been living in Africa for 200k years were displaced and replaced just recently, in fact the tale seems quite familiar - original hunter gatherer populations replaced by agriculturalists. Europe and Asia are much the same, nearly everywhere.
> For example it's not uncommon that a group conquers another group, imposing their language and culture over them but the conquered group remains relatively unmixed (non-intermarried) with the conquerors.
You refer to those few cases where language does not correspond to DNA ?
There is one massive clue pointing to Africa: more genetic diversity there. This doesn't rule out interesting additions from other populations that left earlier than others, went further than we thought, etc; but it is the elephant in the room.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24984772
At least be coherent.
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