For DNA Ethnic Estimates and Heritage Calculators, Ancestry.com Just Stole the Thunder!

Long-time readers of this blog know that we have reminded our readers that ethnic calculators or heritage estimates based on DNA tests are not accurate.  We've posted about the concept here, here, here, and here. 

MyHeritage's algorithms remain an utter joke.  Horrid, just garbage results.

We've been particularly critical of Ancestry.com for being just awful for anyone from the center of the European continent (Italy, Germany, France, etc.) and been very critical of 23andme too, even though at least 23andme disclosed that it couldn't spot German or French heritage >80% of the time! 

Well, Ancestry just changed the dynamic.  As we've posted before, we consult for a number of different people with well-documented German heritage, dating to the 1600s in small, obscure, out of the way towns.  They have photos, all German cousins, etc.  One of them was previously told by Ancestry that he was 50% Swedish, 25% Italian, and 15% British, and 10% We Don't Know.  This person, again, is 100% German.  This was a bad result before, to say the least.

Well, Ancestry just notified this client that his estimates have changed.  This person that they previously told was Swedish and Italian was just changed to: 96% German ("Germanic Europe" which is Germany, Alsace-Lorraine in France, Austria, Switzerland, and far western Poland). This is impressive.  Another one of our clients experienced a similar change.

Ancestry.com has stolen the thunder from all the other DNA testing companies.  It has found the holy grail of European DNA testing: be able to identify central Europeans.  

There are two take aways:

1.  Many companies still have it wrong, and the fact that one individual saw such an enormous change in the estimates -- well, as we've said, you should take any result with a grain of salt until the science is 100% ready for prime time.

2.  But, as of now, if you're north-central European and want an accurate result, Ancestry.com has rocketed to the top of our list.

Now if only they could improve French and Italians...

Northern Italian Researcher Puts Out Another Study Trying to Hair Split Italy

Europeans are not that diverse genetically.  There is less genetic diversity from Sweden to Spain than there is within any given African village.  This is the result of genetic bottlenecking in Europe.  Europeans are very similar when it comes right down to it.

That similarity is even higher within any given country in Europe.  This is one of the reasons why so many DNA tests can't tell the difference between say, a Frenchman and a German.  We're all pretty similar.  And even more so, within any given country.

Is there anyone besides me then, who is sick of Northern Italian researchers putting out YET ANOTHER study that attempts to draw fine line distinctions between the populations of Italy?  I mean, yet another study that splits hairs amongst the Italians?

The latest comes from Alessandro Raveane, whose family originated in the far north of the Veneto.  He attends the University of Pavia.  His Twitter profile emphasizes (in case you don't know) that it's Pavia, Lombardy -- not Pavia, Italy.  Other tweets by Raveane praise the recently deceased genius, Luca Cavalli Sforza, who had a bit of a complex about Italians.

Near Northern Italians: we get it.  We understand that the mafia stereotypes that the world has foisted on Southern Italians embarrass you.  We understand that you are proud of your industrialized North and think the rural south can do better, in terms of education and development.  We agree, and are equally embarrassed about the stereotypes.

But for the love of God and all things holy, can you please stop the duplicative, derivative, (almost) racist, wedge-splitting, divisive, self-effacing, destructive papers where you attempt to draw fine-line but ultimately arbitrary distinctions between Italian populations?

I love the rather subjectively colored pie charts on page 29 of the BioRXIV pre-print.

But the most laughable of all is this quote:

"Populations in natural crossroads like the Italian peninsula are expected to recapitulate the overall continental diversity, but to date have been systematically understudied."

LOLOLOLOL.  NO.  I know of at least 30 other studies just like this, and that's not even from a systematic search.  Coincidentally every one comes from a Northern Italian author, with an agenda, studying at a Northern Italian university.  Raveane et al had something they wanted to find, and they found it.  What's next, a trip to Costa Smeralda to tell us how unique Sardinians are?  LOL; never seen that before.

Media Starts to Gets Home DNA Testing for Ancestry Right -- Thank God!

Kristen V. Brown is back with an excellent piece for Bloomberg, on home DNA testing, that is remarkably astute for a piece in the popular media.  

It confirms much of what readers of this blog have seen posted here repeatedly.  It's so good, it's worth quoting at length:

DNA is great at identifying familial relationships like parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and even second and third cousins. Beyond that, it gets fuzzy.

The genes that make you a superfast runner or that identify you as Irish are less well-studied. The accuracy of any one test depends on the data your DNA is being compared to. One 2009 journal article said consumer DNA tests were akin to horoscopes exploiting the human tendency to hunt for patterns in meaningless data.

So what does it mean when a test says I’m 25 percent Irish?

It’s a misconception that these tests can tell you where your DNA was in the past. 

If a test tells you that you’re 25 percent Irish, what it actually means is that you are genetically similar to other people who are a part of the reference data set of Irish DNA that the company has collected. 

Because each company uses a different algorithm and data set, your results may vary based on which company you use. 

In other words: Take all this with one very large pinch of salt!

Meanwhile, in Slate, appeared another excellent piece by John Edward Terrell.  Here's the quote for you to read for yourself:

Whatever the motivations, the current popularity of commercial genetic profiling worries me for two reasons. One is that these companies may be promising results they can’t actually deliver. 

The notion, for example, that our genes can be used to trace our personal ancestry far back into the past—say, to Genghis Khan, the Emperor Charlemagne, or one of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt—makes little statistical sense. You may disagree, but to me this comes across as selling something more akin to snake oil than science.

What worries me most, however, is that companies offering personal genetic testing customarily seem to report back to those sending along a sample of their spit that they are a mix of different “ethnicities.” This is more than simply statistical nonsense.

We are happy that the mainstream media is finally getting it right, instead of publishing starry eyed pop-sci nonsense about DNA tests.

Don't ever forget: if you come from Central Europe (France, Germany, Italy, or nearby countries), or if you come from a country where there are simply insufficient samples (much of the rest of the world), these DNA tests will wipe your heritage off the map, by telling you that you are something else.  Basically, they're most accurate at the Continental level, unless you happen to come from an island in Europe with massive amounts of people getting tested, i.e., the U.K.

Italy in Roman Times - The Genetics of the Ancient Romans, Part II

Here's a great graphic that I was made aware of.  It shows Italy's ancient borders, during the Classical Era, basically the dawn of recorded history through Greco-Roman times.

Sure, the ancient borders have been shaded within modern Italian provincial borders, and thus are rough or "rounded to the nearest modern border."  But I've checked this with other maps, and found that it quite accurately depicts Italian borders on the dates it covers.

There are two takeaways, one which is directly related to genetics:

1.  Metternich's oft-repeated slur that Italy is just a geographic expression is nonsense.  There is a 2000+ year history of the peninsula being unified, and 1800 years of Italy even including the islands, like Sicily.

2.  So who then has a claim on being more Italian?  You often hear Northern Italians say they do.  

Well, surely it is the provinces that have been known as Italy the longest, those which were romanized first.  And those are, in order, the ones in teal, green, and magenta on the map.  

(As the map notes but doesn't make clear: Caesar crossing the Rubicon was so significant because that was the border of Italy!)

If one mentally superimposes on this geopolitical map an actual demographic map showing Roman colonies...

...one can rather easily see that the current genetic clines of Italy are at least partly explained by which regions were first unified as Italian / Roman.  

This brings me to what any college-level history student can tell you: for hundreds of years, Rome was an exporter of humans.  Romans and Latins were wealthy compared to others in the world, and had lots of children, and their dominant political situation meant they could settle colonies at will.  

It's time to consider that the genetic "southernness" of certain parts of Italy and the Mediterranean could easily be due to Roman colonies causing people there to resemble south-central Italians -- as opposed to the common yet misguided theory that more recent "invasions" to isolated Italian mountain towns by Saracens caused the people there to genetically resemble the latter.

Read This If You're Curious About Your MyHeritage Ethnicity Results And You're Italian

MyHeritage ethnicity estimates seem to be THE WORST of all the major testing companies.

We've received dozens of emails from people of 100% document Italian heritage where MyHeritage says they are 0% Italian.  We've received three screenshots, which we will not share due to privacy concerns.

Something is amiss.  These people showed us documented Italian heritage, 100% Italian cousins, and some were born in Italy.  They show up on MyHeritage as Sardinian, Middle Eastern, Spanish, West Asian -- anything BUT Italian!!!

MyHeritage ain't getting it done.  We would demand a refund kind readers.  It's OK to come close.  As we've noted, all ethnic calculators are pseudo-science.

But MyHeritage isn't hitting the dart board in the bar next door.

Ancestry DNA Issues Revised Ancestry Estimates, Finds that Germans Exist

Judy G. Russell, the Legal Genealogist, is out with a fantastic new post on AncestryDNA's new ethnicity estimate percentages.

As she wryly notes in the opening, she is delighted to find out that they have discovered that Germans exist.

We've wrote about this before, as have others.  The major testing sites -- some of which are run by people who seem hostile to Germans (America's biggest ethnic group) -- have written Germans off the map.  23andme is particularly bad at identifying German DNA.  They disclose it too, but they bury it in the fine print.

We have been repeatedly depressed by newbies, who know from good paper records that they are a quarter German (or Swiss, or French, or Austrian) say, "duh, gee, duh, this unscientific website tells me I am really 21.2% English wow gee duh am I adopted?"  NO!  The science isn't there yet.  As Judy Russell says, "it's not quite soup."

And it STILL isn't quite soup.  This post focuses on Germans, but the major testing services have an equal problem with Italians, another major American ethnic group.  Poor Italians who get tested often end up with anything but Italian.  (Spare me your pseudoscience on how Italy has been invaded.  EVERY country has been invaded.)  Italy is a long country with many peaks and valleys, and for much of its history was an exporter of population to surrounding areas.  The testing sites need more samples to identify all the different permutations of Italians.

Bottom line, as we've said before, and as every credible scientist says - DO NOT TRUST the ethnicity estimates of the testing services.

Reminder to Eurogenes and Davidski: You ARE NOT Your Y Chromosome, and Your Manhood Isn't Tied to It!

A great study just came out that confirms what many of us have noticed.  Increasingly, instead of dude being proud of their ethnic group (and risk being called racist) or even their soccer team (and risk being called a hooligan), many misguided men, especially in online forums, are tying their identity to their Y chromosome haplogroup!  

Yes, you laugh, I laugh, but any quick read of any of the worst offenders (Maciamo May at Expedia, Davidski at Eurogenes), will reveal this concept, as well as some very fragile male egos, redefined with junk pop-science.

The study is called:

Constructing Masculinity through Genetic Legacies: Family Histories, Y-Chromosomes, and “Viking Identities"

Some highlights:

The practice of searching for a Viking ancestor is, on one level, an exercise in redundancy. At a distance of a millennium, simple mathematics demonstrates that everyone, at least in Western Europe, and most probably further afield, has Viking ancestry (Rutherford 2016).

Rather, this kind of texture was what the participants in our research were interested in: the majority were seeking confirmation of Viking ancestry, for which they already had amassed a certain amount of (usually genealogical) evidence. For such individuals, to be told “yes, you are descended from Vikings, because everybody is”, is seemingly psychologically insufficient.

Critiques from population geneticists likening such claims to “genetic astrology” are widespread (e.g., Balding et al. 2010; Thomas 2013), while the problematic potential of such narratives to essentialise ethnic identities based on biology have also been highlighted (Fortier 2012; Morning 2014; Nash 2004a; Nelson 2008; Nordgren and Juengst 2009). To a lesser extent, how the forms of evidence used to access the remote past create gendered versions of history (usually favouring a patrilineal line of descent) has also been a cause for concern.

The problematic nature of relying on direct-line Y-chromosome tests for insights about “who you really are” is highlighted by the example of African-American users of DTC genetic testing seeking more information about their African ancestry, but regularly receiving results characteristic of European ancestry due to the grim realities of the sexual exploitation of female slaves by European owners (Tyler 2008; Nelson 2016). By way of contrast, discovering that one has a Y-chromosome characteristic or not of Viking ancestry may be seen as less of an existential challenge to one’s sense of self, and more of a form of recreation. However, as Sommer (2012) cautions, recreational genomics cannot necessarily be separated from wider political contestations of identity, culture, and gender.

In a similar vein, Nash (2012, 2015) argues that the cultural focus on “founding fathers”, such as Genghis Khan, to explain patterns of Y-chromosome variation (and genetic variation more broadly) draw on and simultaneously naturalise a patriarchal understanding of kinship. 

She also argues that popular accounts of such research tend towards a nostalgia for an imagined “heroic” past of simpler gender roles: one that represents men as warriors, women as passive, or even as possessions, and can “conjure up images of a harsher and simpler world of unlimited and often violent sex enjoyed by powerful men” (Nash 2015, p. 149).

Such a patriarchal “heroic” past chimes in with what Halewood and Hannam (2001, p. 566) have referred to as the “Anglo-American stereotypical representation of Viking heritage”: that of “sea-faring, sexist, and blood thirsty men raping and pillaging”. 

Even when Vikings are disassociated from violence and rape, they are still represented as somehow essentially masculine, and that this is encoded biologically. For instance, Kroløkke (2009) analysed the success of the Danish sperm bank, Cryos International in marketing its product as “Viking sperm”, and thereby as representing a genetically encoded masculine ideal.

Within this context, for an individual man to seek to establish his “Viking ancestry” is to situate himself, deliberately or otherwise, within a certain historical–cultural discourse of masculinity. 

LOL: Davidski, they've got you down buddy!  Substitute "Viking" in that sentence with "R1b" or "R1a" and half the "Bronze Age Studs" at Eurogenes will be crying in their soup.

DNA Testing for Heritage and Ancestry Is, Simply Put, Inaccurate

You go to take a cholesterol test, and your doctor, very thorough, sends you to four different labs.  One reports your cholesterol is 200, one says it's 180, one says 150, and one says 130...

After a car accident, you get go to four different body shops for quotes.  One says your car's paint color is taupe; one says it's sea blue; one says its ocean blue; and one calls it sea green...

You whip out four different rulers to measure your foot.  One says it's 12 inches; one says its 6; one says 8; and one says 9...

In all of these scenarios, you would make two conclusions:

1.  These test results (or body shops, or labs, or measuring sticks) are not that scientific!

2.  At least three -- and likely all four -- of these results MUST be wrong.

These parables sum up the world of DNA testing for heritage or "admixture."

We've said it before, and we'll say it again.  But today, Kristen V. Brown, a writer for Gizmodo, published an excellent piece discussing the snake oil that Ancestry.com, 23andme, Gencove, FTDNA, and other labs are selling.

Simply put, these labs cannot tell your ancestry.  I repeat, they cannot tell your heritage, or racial or ethnic admixture.  The science just isn't there yet.  And it might never be.

Brown details how she got four different results from four labs.

She also alludes to, but doesn't state um, confidently enough, about the concept about being confident about your known results.

It's what I jokingly (and longwindedly) call the:

"I was born in a tiny isolated village in the Swiss Alps that has never been invaded.  I know my mom and dad, and there's a video of my birth.  I DNA tested them and they are my parents.  I DNA tested my grandparents too, and they are my grandparents.  There were no affairs and no invasions in my town.  I know my great grandparents too and I am their spitting image.  The church records state I am Swiss going back to 1400.  But HELP, this DNA testing service said I'm British.  Am I British?"  (Or Indian or French or Dutch or whatever) problem.

NO, dummy, you're Swiss...

I for one, always read the fine print.  23andme, for example, states clearly that it cannot spot German (or French) heritage 92% of the time!  Germans make up the LARGEST PLURALITY of Americans.  Americans make up the LARGEST MAJORITY of those getting DNA tests done.  Thus, and I only say this half facetiously: these companies are engaging in the virtual ethnic cleansing of ethnic groups, wiping them off the genetic map, with their statements on people's heritage percentages, that are simply inaccurate.  

And 23andme, is, as far as we can tell, the most accurate lab!

Anyway, kudos to Kristen V. Brown and the people she interviewed for explaining it in her Gizmodo piece.  We suggest reading it.

Are Ethnicity Percentages and Ancestry Calculators from DNA Tests Accurate?

The media has blasted headlines this week that show an incredible ignorance of DNA testing for ethnic percentages.  One, which could have been pulled out of a 1980s tabloid for its ridiculousness, screeched, "Neo-Nazis are taking genetic tests and are deeply upset by the results!"

Neither of the two writers delved too deeply into the subject, and that is because shorthand reporting is easier.  As we've posted, again and again, most of the three major DNA testing sites disclose quite openly that their science is far from perfect.  For example, that if one is German, French, Dutch, Belgian, Austrian, or Swiss, that they cannot discern your ancestry 92% of the time.  (With the US having more people of German ancestry than even English or Irish -- that's a big deal).

In fact, it's quite common for someone taking a test from three different websites to receive three different results!  And as the post beneath this one shows, trying the 40 or so other "ethnicity calculators" available for free on Gedmatch produced...40 different results.

As I often say: if 5 different scales produced 5 (vastly different) weights, you would know that at least four of 'em don't work!  :-)

Anyway, for those looking for perspective, we shouldn't highlight the bad, so we've decided to highlight the good -- or the excellent, rather.

One of the best posts we have seen on the topic comes courtesy of a blog called The Legal Genealogist.  It's called, "Those Percentages If You Must" -- and is a Must Read for people curious about whether ancestry calculations from DNA tests are accurate.

It first, rather hilariously, goes into the various myths and misperceptions about DNA and human history.  Concepts like, "black Irish" or "I have some Native American in me."  Concepts that plague the world of pop-DNA-testing.

After it goes through the science (in easy to understand terms), it reveals what I have posted here time and time again:

DNA testing IS GREAT and REMARKABLY PRECISE for finding you cousins.  It CAN tell you if you are a third-cousin, once-removed (with that kind of precision).  If you don't know your heritage, and that cousin is, for example, 100% Native American -- then it follows that you too have a pair of Native American great-great-great grandparents.

DNA testing IS NOT good at ethnicity percentages and ethnic calculation.  As if anything could be so precise as to tell you that you are "4.2% Jewish."  The science is still just not ready for prime time, and many underrepresented populations, even in Europe, still confound the tests.

(As an aside, ancestry calculators should all produce nice and even results when people get back to the pre-travel era."  In other words, if you had 64 ancestors that were alive in 1500 AD, you should only see multiples of 1.56% chunks, right?  Since no one is half a human!)

The article succinctly concludes with:

DNA testing is a wonderful tool. It can connect us with cousins we’d have never found otherwise to help us reconstruct our family histories.

But in terms of “am I Native American?” “what tribe did I come from in Africa?” “am I 25% Irish?” No. No, no, no.  That’s the absolute weakest aspect of DNA testing. 

Indeed.  Well said.

AND THE WINNER IS... (Comparing Admixture/Heritage Tests on Gedmatch)

Methodology:

• We ran exhaustive tests of several commercial and free DNA-testing labs and ethnicity calculators.  
• To test the sites, we used only individuals with well-documented, double confirmed, 100% known ancestry.  
• We tested multiple males from multiple lines to assure as much as humanly possible no extra-parental events (bastardy) occurred.  
• We even tested minor nobility with documented ties to geographic locales.  
• We used individuals who do not come from cities or places of cosmopolitanism (influx of foreigners).  
• We tested only people with all four grandparents from the same locale.  
• We tested multiple people from different countries in Europe.

As we've posted before, of the commercial labs, 23andme takes first prize, and Ancestry.com is the worst.  23andme provides the most conservative and accurate ethnic ancestry approximations.

We have also completed our testing of all of the ancestry composition tests available on GEDMATCH.  Below is a summary, the results, and the rankings.

• First of all, the specialty labs, Ethiohelix, Gedrosia DNA, puntDNAL, etc. do not even come close to being accurate, at least for individuals of European heritage.
• None of MDLP's tests passed our accuracy gauntlet and correctly called west European DNA.

1. The overall winner, and the clear winner of all the tools currently available on Gedmatch, is the Eurogenes K13 test.  It was pretty darn good at distinguishing DNA from various western European lands, for people of "purebred" ancestry.

2. Coming in second was Eurogenes EUtest K15 v2, which also had a pretty darn good record of accurate calls.

3. An honorable mention, and a close third, with accurate calls roughly as close to the second-place finisher, was Dodecad's K12b test.

• No other tests besides those three were even close to "often accurate."
• No tests, including those three, were much use for accurately calling the ancestry of European "mutts."  We found that the same tests that were accurate with individuals with 100% heritage from one country, were of limited value for serving as an oracle (predicting accurately) the ancestry of individuals of mixed European heritage.

Will Tim Sullivan and Ancestry.com Continue Its VIRTUAL Ethnic Cleansing of Germans?

23andme discloses right off the bat that it cannot identify German or French ancestry 92% of the time.

Ancestry doesn't seem to be able to discern German ancestry too well either, but it doesn't tell its customers that.

Noted: Yet another reader of this blogger just wrote in and shared her experience.  She is 100% German, born in Germany, from a small town, not a big city.  Her ancestors are documented in the region she's from for the last 400 years.  Several of them were well-known and documented.

Ancestry.com called her ancestry as about 50% Scandinavian, 25% Italian, and 25% generic European.  What an epic fail.

How many "white bread" regular Americans, with German ancestry take one of these tests, and misleadingly, their German ancestry is literally wiped away?

We note Germans are America's LARGEST ethnic group, but their ancestry is also often hidden, because German surnames Americanize so well.  For example, Kohl becomes Cole; Schmidt becomes Smith, etc.

As an experiment, with our reader's permission, we ran her raw data through Gedmatch.  Both MDLP (the Magnus Ducatus Lituaniae Project) and Eurogenes were able to call her likeliest ancestry as German.   Dodecad, which specializes in Mediterraneans, was able to call her as German in about half of its tests.

So the question remains:

1.  If the amateurs can call German DNA with reasonable regularity, why the heck can't Ancestry.com?

2.  If Ancestry.com is so bad at identifying America's biggest ethnic group, why doesn't it do the decent thing and tell people?

The Genetics of the Ancient Romans

As we've noted before, there are a bunch of charlatans in the world of Ancient DNA.  The worst offender, perhaps, is a pseudonymous Belgian named Maciamo Hay, who runs a site called Eupedia.  This uneducated man knows just enough to sound knowledgable, and to delude himself and some of the similarly ignorant.  In the world of Ancient DNA, he is probably the best example of Dunning-Krueger effect out there.

Many of these Ancient DNA practitioners spend their time trying to digest the most recent DNA studies, but don't ever come close to picking up a history book, much less to acquiring the deep, big-picture understanding of ancient history that is needed to explain the population movements that have occurred in places like Rome and Italy over time.

In this post, we go over those population movements, to review claims made by fools like Maciamo on Eupedia.

Let's start with his baldest misstatement: "In all logic, the ancient Romans, from the original founders of Rome to the patricians of the Roman Republic, should have been essentially R1b-U152 people."  This laughable statement was directly pulled from Eupedia on the same day that this post is dated, and as far as I can tell, it's still up.  (I just refuse to link to it, lest any more misinformation be circulated).

As Maciamo's own maps show! -- the distribution of U152 in Italy is centered in the ALPS, and radiates outward to all the parts of Italy that were previously inhabited by CELTS.

So: Where to begin?  How does one even start to explain history to someone so uneducated?

Let's start with something most people know.  The saying, "he's crossed the Rubicon" is a reference to Caesar crossing the Rubicone river.

Why was that so significant?  Because the Rubicon was the traditional BORDER of Italy at that time.  (49 BC.)  In other words, it was an act of war for Caesar to cross that border.  Where is the Rubicone river?  It's just south of modern Ravenna!

For 700 years, the "Italy" of Roman times -- that which was populated by Italians (versus Gauls) -- was the true peninsula parts (sticking out).  Never forget that.  The distribution of U152 clearly corresponds to where the population was Gaulish versus Roman!  U152 is the OPPOSITE of a Roman marker.

Southern Italy, on the other hand, was considered the most desirable real estate for much of the Roman Republic and early empire.  When Cicero listed the most beautiful and prosperous cities in Italy, most were in Southern Italy.  Places like Reggio Calabria and Capua.  When Mark Antony and Augustus' veterans demanded land, they demanded it in Southern Italy.

Furthermore, Rome devastated places like Samnium (modern Molise/Campania) and modern Cosenza, destroying most of the inhabitants, and then seizing the territory for Roman citizens.  Anyone who knows Roman history knows this.

Rome planted dozens (almost a hundred) of colonies (of Roman citizens) in Southern Italy.  Entire towns (like Vibo Valentia) were populated by tens of thousands of transplanted Romans.  These colonies were stocked BEFORE Rome became an empire, i.e., before it became cosmopolitan.  The people who founded these towns were of "pure" Roman stock.

Why does this matter?  Well, this blog is no Southern Italy apologist.  Southern Italy was a backwater for years.  Isolated and insignificant.  But from a genetic standpoint, those qualities ARE significant.

If you wanted to study the genetics of the Romans, would you go to a place where lots of people had passed through?  A place that was a successful and world port in the Middle Ages?  A place where people wanted to move to from elsewhere?  OF COURSE NOT.

You would WANT a backwater; a place unchanged over millennia.  The towns of South Italy (many of which who have never been invaded by anyone, thank you very much), are where you can find the descendants of Romans, unadulterated.

Well before modern genetic studies, very intelligent, very thorough researchers did large-scale demographic studies on Rome.  These folks, mostly British historians from Oxford, scoured records in churches and cemeteries, in abbeys and books -- everywhere, -- to estimate the population demography of Rome.  This much we know: at the dawn of the empire, "Italy" was Italy south of the Rubicon, well south of the Po.  The population was a mix of the local Italic tribes and Roman Latins, placed there as colonies.

Want to know the genetics of the Romans?  Look at which towns started out as Roman (not Gaulish, Maciamo!) and which towns have largely been untouched since.

Professor Chris Wickham produced exhaustive studies of Italy from 400-1000 AD.  He provides real numbers of the "others" in Italy.  He concludes the Goths and Lombards (German tribes who ruled large parts of Italy from 476 AD - c. 1000 AD) never were more than 2%-9% of the Italian population, and he believes aside from pockets in the South, they were clustered mostly in the North.  Again, it's the NORTHERN Italians with the non-Roman influences, not the Southerners.  Again, this skews the DNA of the North.  Don't assume the Southern differences from the North are from Southern exoticness.

Chances are, Northern Italian DNA is different because it started with a large dollop of Gaulish (Celtic) genes, and they received a small smattering of Germanic genes.  This is why northern Italians appear, well, more "northern."  Southern Italian DNA, for the most part is not different because of subsequent influences or invasions.  Southern Italians are generally darker (although not by much) because of the absence of Gaulish and Germanic influences.  But those southerners more closely represent Roman DNA as it was around the years 200 BC - 50 AD.

Wickham also studied the Byzantine (Eastern Roman empire, Greek-speaking), Norman (French Viking) and Saracen (Arab or North African) occupying forces in Italy, and concluded that for peninsular Italy, these forces were tiny, much less than 1% of the population, and that they left no real permanent traces.  Again, this is because these were occupying armies not settlers.  Please note contrary to popular belief, much of the towns and villages of Southern Italy were never physically occupied by ANY of these groups, even though suzerainty and tax payments did change hands.  Was Paris after the Nazis any less French?

Folks like Maciamo also greatly UNDERESTIMATE the effect of Roman colonies throughout the Mediterranean.  Rome, through much of its thousand-year history, was a population EXPORTER.  Romans bred like crazy -- there was never enough land to go around -- and they, as the most powerful people of their era, felt it was their prerogative to seize lands of the conquered and place their citizens' families there, to live long and prosper.  It wasn't like now, where middle class families have 2.5 kids.  Then, (aside from the patricians), a family had as many kids as it could afford -- as many kids as it could feed.  Romans had many kids...

A look at the map of Roman colonies shows just how widespread this practice was.   Note the concentration in Italy and Spain, followed by France and Romania.  Yes folks, there's a reason why the Latin language survived in those regions, and why Romance derivatives are still spoken there today.

Despite the Romans exporting so many people, I have never seen one of these modern, unschooled-in-history geneticists raise the question as to whether the similarities between South/Central Italian DNA and that of say, Greece,or North Africa is due to Roman OUTFLOW of genes.  These idiotic (and perhaps racist?) people only repeat the Quentin Tarantino-esque claims that the similarity between such genes must be from exotic INFLOWS into the population of Italy.

It's really idiotic if you think about it.  Rome locates a colony of 25,000 Italian FAMILIES in some town in backwater Greece (or North Africa), and the town prospers for 1000 years and still exists today.  A Byzantine (or Saracen) garrison of 1000 men holds an Italian town for 100 years and then departs.  But many dummies online ascribe the similarity between Italian and Greek (or North African) genes to the latter?  Incredibly myopic.

Anyway, in conclusion:

Maciamo Hay is an idiot.  He should read some JB Bury, some Sir Ronald Syme, and some Chris Wickham.

Geneticists should realize if they want to find Roman genetics, they should try to discern the similarities between backwater (untouched/remote) towns in Southern Italy and Spain, which were settled around the same time with Roman colonists.  There, you can detect and isolate the signal of Roman genetics.

And genetic similarities between Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean could just as easily be due to pre-Roman factors or Roman OUTFLOWS as they are to post-Roman inflows into Italy.

Related Posts: The Genetics of the Ancient Romans, Part II

Banned from Anthrogenica, Censored by Eurogenes, Laugh at Eupedia

Several posters at Davidski's Eurogenes blog have noted that they've been banned from Anthrogenica for challenging the Kool-Aid drinking orthodoxy that infects that website.

The pattern almost always goes as follows.  A regular Anthrogenica poster says something like, "Isn't the Kool-Aid grand?"  A newcomer says, "I don't want to drink your Kool-Aid."  The Anthrogenica regular says, "I'm right, you idiot."  And then the newcomer says, "You're the idiot" -- and yep, you guessed it, only one of them gets banned.

It's gotten so bad that some of the best citizen-scientist minds, and almost all contrarian voices, are gone from that website.  In the old days, the orthodoxy sought to excommunicate Galileo from the Catholic faith.  Now they excommunicate posters from the major discussion websites.  No dissent allowed.

With Dienekes inactive, Eurogenes is where many go for discussion.  But Davidski has been very heavy with the censorship button there too.  Post something he disagrees with?  He removes your comment.  It's really sad.

I myself have tried to post my most recent thread, about applying simple demographics to his "Conquest and Warfare" fantasies, and he always removes my comments asap.

What does that leave?  Eupedia?  Maciamo is a reductio ad absurdem idiot, who also doesn't hesitate to ban people with any contrarian viewpoint.

So, this is it.  This is your thread.  This thread (and this website) is for anyone Banned From Anthrogenica, or Censored by Eurogenes.

Post away.  You will not be censored here.

When Is A "Conquest" Not A Conquest?

When Is A Conquest Not A Conquest?

You are a scientist living in the year 4017, specializing in the ancient civilizations that existed between 1492 and 2200 A.D.  Various cultures came and went, but alas, most written records were lost in the intervening centuries.  So you study DNA.

Your fellow scientists know that in many different regions, the DNA record shows profound change over time, both in autosomal percentages and uniparental markers (Y-Chromosome, mtDNA).

Unfortunately, arrogant bloggers still exist in 4017, and three of them, one called Davidski Futurski (who blogs at Eurogenes-ski), a fellow named Maciamo-Futuriamo, and another named Rocca Futura, are examples of "a little knowledge can be dangerous."  

They blindly state that all changes in DNA indicate evidence of conquest by some superior culture of badass men.  (Nevermind that they all believe they descend from the people they assert to be superior; that's irrelevant, we're sure).

Your boss at the university, someone who sees nuance better than the bloggers, asks you to model the record and various types of human interactions, and answer the question:

"When Might A 'Conquest' Not Really Be A Conquest?"  

So you come up with the following four models, and re-create as best as you can some historical examples for the clueless:

1.  Refugees from a war-torn area flood into a nearby land (and even some faraway lands), overwhelming the demographics.  The bloggers post that a people called the Syrians conquered the Lebanese, starting in 2011, but you're not so sure.  Your research finds the opposite: that there was a horrendous war in Syria, causing 11 million people to lose all their belongings and flee.  Therefore, you don't think these people were conquerors, but refugees.  Nevertheless, the stubborn bloggers point out how the record shows a massive DNA shift in Lebanon, where the Syrian markers went from 5% to 25% of the population in just three years.  

"It had to be conquest" they write, of powerful, rich, sophisticated men conquering the weak Lebanese.  

Alas, you tell them: it was the opposite: a beaten-down people streaming into a nearby land (and also places like Sweden), altering the gene pool.  In fact, Lebanon started with 5 million people, and absorbed an influx of 2.5 million refugees.  Thus, the autosomal genetics and uniparental frequencies were both significantly changed.  It's really as simple as that.

2. Disease.  In 1598, slaves from Africa were brought to a place called Puerto Rico.  They brought with them Yellow Fever, something the native American inhabitants did not have exposure or antibodies to.  

Although the natives were, under the caste system at the time, a couple of rungs higher than the African slaves, and although the natives had better sources of food and systems for dealing with the native landscape, they were killed off in the thousands simply because they didn't have antibodies to the new disease.  

But all the bloggers see is that Puerto Rico went from showing Native American DNA patterns to showing African (and European) DNA patterns.  And they cry, their must have been a conquest, led by the African newcomers!  You LOL, pointing out that these newcomers were slaves and vectors.

3.  Economic Opportunity.  The bloggers now discuss Los Angeles.  They point out that the DNA record shows that in the 1950s, Los Angeles was 80% inhabited by an ancient culture called, "whites."  By 2020, it was 60% Hispanic.  The record thus showed profound shifts in autosomal frequencies and Y-chromosome patterns.  

"There must have been a conquest!" the bloggers shout from the rooftops!  War!  Destruction!  A supreme powerful tribe of men, with better tools!  

No, you quietly assert.  Your research shows that poor Hispanic immigrants simply migrated to Los Angeles, looking for better economic opportunities than what existed back home.  Alas, the bloggers still don't grasp this example either.

4.  Simple Cultural Differences in Birthrates.  Palestinian women have vastly greater birthrates than their neighbors.  In the 1960s, it was 8 children per every female.  Even now, it's above 4.0 children for every woman.  The Israeli birthrate, while still relatively high at 3.0, is not as high.  By 2045, Palestinians may outnumber Israelis.  

Our future bloggers, looking at this from the perspective of the year 4017, may try to argue that there was a conquest by the Palestinians.  They must have had superior technology, they claim!  Better weapons!  

But again, your research (and history) shows this NOT to be the case.


Taking these four examples, you explain to the bloggers that many changes in DNA frequency, cannot be explained as "conquest" even though it's tempting for the simple-minded to do so.  

There are even examples of multiple of the above factors explaining demographic shifts.  For example, the Catholic Irish replacement of Anglo Saxons in many East Coast cities in the 1800s.  That was due to the Irish being refugees, seeking greater economic opportunity en masse, and having higher birthrates.  

Somewhere in the future, the intellectual heirs of Maciamo, Davidski, and many on Anthrogenica, are arguing that the Irish immigrants of the 1800s were in fact a technologically and militarily superior, overwhelming force of wealthy males who clearly conquered the British Americans of the time.

And you, and anyone with any degree of a nuances understanding of history, is still LOL'ing.  

On the Need for More Interdisciplinariness in "Interdisciplinary" Studies

Ah, if they were all as good as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  The pioneer of interdisciplinary studies, and a Renaissance man, he would thoroughly immerse himself in genetics, demography, history, archaeology, and linguistics -- or find collaborators who could augment his knowledge.  Thus, his work SAW THE BIG PICTURE. 

A new paper out shows that modern "interdisciplinary" studies aren't so interdisciplinary at all.

It's called Mapping European Population Movement through Genomic Research by Patrick J. Geary and Krishna Veeramah.  You can read it by clicking here.

The authors show that many geneticists writing about history simply pick up some bogus two-bit history book.  That is why you get so much pseudo-science out there.

I once talked to a guy, a fairly educated scientist from another discipline, who felt he saw some marker in European genes.  So he did some google searches as to which tribe had ever moved in the rough place where he found the markers.  He then published a paper claiming he found a Cimbri-specific marker.  But he didn't read the rest of the history; had he done so, he would have grasped perhaps that that tribe was wiped out by Gaius Marius in the first century BC....

The paper also points out that there isn't enough precision in genetics, because geneticists don't bother to understand that different regions have different histories.  What good is knowing some person was French, without logging if that person is Provencal or Norman?  Very little....

Best quote from the paper: "The Ralph and Coop study, while highly rigorous at the level of the population genetic analysis, included no historians or archaeologists, and the only historical literature cited, presumably to »identify« the Hunnic contribution to European population, was a general history of Europe, a survey of Slavic history, and two articles in the New Cambridge Medieval History. The Busby et al. study also included no historians or archaeologists on its team, and the only historical literature cited was a Penguin History of the World, Peter Heather’s survey of the Early Middle Ages, and a survey of Muslims in Italy. Unlike these studies, designed and executed  exclusively by geneticists who then look through a few general historical handbooks to try to find stories that might explain their data..."

In other words, many scientific papers suffer from the same thing that plagues the Anthrogenica or even worse, Maciamo's horrifically bad Eupedia: "a LITTLE knowledge is dangerous."  They don't bother grasping the big picture in genetics, demography, history, archaeology, and linguistics...

We Are Our Brother's Keeper: Are All Men Cousins? And Is This The Root Of Prejudice?

Many of you already know the following concepts.  Humans intuit a sense of community and family with those with whom they are related.  This has been confirmed in study after study, on child abuse, on ingroup-outgroup dynamics, and on racial prejudices.

The percentages of relatedness to trigger that feeling of kinship need not be large.  As the following chart shows, many of us have folks over to Thanksgiving dinner with whom we only have 1-3% of identical DNA with.  But that identical DNA is hugely significant.  It's identical.  And that of course makes one much more "related" than this "we share most DNA with all humans and even chimpanzees."  Indeed, it's the margins that seem to count.  And again, studies on stepfathers in particular, have confirmed this time and time again.

Parent / Child
Full Sibling       50%

Grandparent / Grandchild Aunt / Uncle Niece / Nephew Half Sibling	25%
1st Cousin	12.5%
1st Cousin once removed	6.25%
2nd Cousin	3.13%
2nd Cousin once removed	1.5%
3rd Cousin	0.78%

The weird quality of the Y-Chromosome makes what I am about to post intriguing:

A human genome, including the X and Y chromosomes, is about 3771 cM long.

The Y Chromosome makes up about 2% of that, by length, and about 1% by SNPs. 

Because men in certain haplogroups have IDENTICAL Y-Chromosomes (except for tiny combining parts), and because unlike the rest of DNA, those genes are passed on IDENTICALLY, then all men in the same haplogroup share as much DNA as, say, 2nd Cousins Once Removed.

Could this be the explanation why, for example, Western European males, which do not have much Y-chromosome diversity, exhibit a powerful ingroup dynamic with each other?

Fascinating, to be sure.

How DNA Ancestry Testing Works and How Can I Know It's Accurate

When a commercial DNA testing site like Ancestry.com or 23andme or FTDNA tests your DNA, they do not know which snippet came from which of your parents.

For example, if at a given point (a gene, in popular parlance), you have a "C" from your dad and a "T" from you mom (meaning you have brown eyes, but carry the blue-eyes gene), the testing service doesn't know which "letter" came from which parent.

What they then do is try to guess, stringing your DNA out into small chunks or strings of letters.

They then compare these to DNA in their reference database.  23andme's reference database, which is one of the best, if not the best in the world, only has about 11,000 samples in it.  To represent the whole world!


So if you have ancestry from a big country (like France or Germany) or a country that has pockets of deep isolation (like Italy), the odds -- that they have someone from your corner of the country, or your little isolated craggy valley in some mountain chain -- are small.

They then compare the little strings of letters and come up with a likelihood that you have ancestry from one of those reference populations.

23andme has the most scientific test in the business, but it gets French/German/Belgian/Dutch/Swiss/Austrian/Luxembourgisch ancestry wrong 92% of the time.  It most often shows up as "generic Northwest European."  Similarly, 23andme -- the best in the business -- can't identify Italian ancestry 50% of the time.  It often shows up incorrectly as Middle Eastern or Generic Southern European.

The moral of this story is to be patient with the science.  It's not 100% there yet.

If you have documented ancestry from one region, trust your documents.

If you don't have any cousins from a pool you were identified as, then chances are it was a miscall.  (For example, if you have documented Italian ancestry, but it says you are 1/8 Middle Eastern or 1/8 Spanish), then unless you have a known great-grandparent that is 100% such, it's probably a miscall.  (This would mean your parent would test as 1/4, by the way).

Finally, there is a series problem with testing sites, particularly FTDNA's, with the issue of timing.  If you go back far enough, we are ALL Africans, right?  Yet a DNA test telling you that you were African would not be too useful.  Do they mean recently or in the past?

Similarly, as has been well-documented, most European ancestry can be broken down into 3 big chunks: ancient hunter gatherers (Ancient Western Europeans, most similar modern population = Lithuanians); ancient farmers (Ancient Near Easterners, most similar modern populations include Greeks, Sardinians, others); and ancient pastoralists/horse rearers (Ancient Eurasian Steppe Dwellers, most similar modern populations include Ukrainians). But the migrations were really, truly all over the place.

Ancient Near Easterners are NOT modern Near Easterners.  Ancient hunter gatherers in France are NOT the modern French, etc.

If a test tells you that you have some Near Eastern blood, it often is sensing this ancient signal.

It doesn't do you much good for them to say that 6000 years ago, you had some ancestry in the Near East.  Everyone did.

Neandertals Never Died; Just Their Direct Sirelines and Matrilines

From a piece by Faye Flam in none other than Bloomberg, comes this wonderfully succinct nugget that expresses something that readers of this blog know I ascribe to:

"Scientists have also revised their view of Neanderthal extinction – long attributed to some deficit on their part.  Maybe nothing dramatic happened at all, said Hawks. They would have made up a small fraction of the world’s population, and when larger groups of modern humans joined them in Europe they might have simply been absorbed."

(emphasis added)

This is what I coined the "Demography not Drama" explanation.

It is likely the Neandertal population was tiny, and when modern humans entered Europe, they simply absorbed them, perhaps even absorbed multiple sub-populations (which the genetics data now supports too).

With each generation, there is a great chance that a male line or a female line will disappear.  All it takes is for a man to have only daughters, or a woman to have only sons.  Older lines (which have been around for more generations) face longer odds of appearing to have survived, because each generation increases the chances a line will appear to have died out.  The patrilines and matrilines from a group starting with a smaller population size will also appear to have died out over time.

We have seen this occur in the modern world, both in the example of surnames on isolated islands (the families didn't die out, but the surnames eventually greatly reduced in numbers because of the randomness of males having male children) and with thoroughbreds (the original thoroughbred founding population included 30+ male horses, but only 3 sirelines (akin to surnames or Y-chromosome haplogroups) have survived.

This doesn't mean the others "died out."  Like Neandertals, their genes live on among us.

The Sad Case of the Orthodoxy and the Posth Article on Pleistocene Demographics

Just a couple months ago, in the context of the peopling of Ireland, I emphasized on Eupeida (and here) how important it is to put all the Theories Du Jour that are based on modern uniparental distributions through a model based on population demographics and sound logic.

Specifically, I emphasized that ancient population sizes were minuscule compared to modern ones, and that if a population started a long long time ago, with a size that was way way small -- compared to subsequent waves -- that it would give a false signal that the original population was "conquered" or "outcompeted" or "never existed" or originated somewhere incorrect.   I cautioned against those four errors.  

This engendered quite the debate on Eupedia forums.  When backed into a corner and shown the weakness of his "R1b Were Studly Conquerors Theory," the "blindly following the current orthodoxy" folks react badly.
 
Many "Interwebz Scientistz" fail to grasp these concepts.  They favor their own wacky, biased theories based on what they see today only.  If a land is populated by one people, they must be all conquering studs, right?

Today, Posth et. al put out an extensive paper on Pleistocene demographics.  

Its shocking discovery?  Just like Y DNA Hg C existed in Europe in tiny numbers among the very first Europeans, so did mtDNA Hg M.

M disappeared eventually, due to the simple fact that its initial population size was tiny, and that because it had been there so long, the odds that certain women didn't have daughters, each generation, eventually meant it was not passed on.  Remember, we're talking uniparental markers here.  

The authors commented exactly as I did: up to now, people mistakenly believed that Hg M never set foot in Europe -- or that if it did, it was killed off or whatever by a new wave.  Sorry, both theories are wrong.

It is WONDERFUL to see another peer-reviewed, scholarly paper making this exact same point, and backing it up with newfound data.

As the paper indicates:

-These first hunter gatherers started with a TINY initial population size.

-There is a loss every generation of males having males or females having female offspring.

-I've calculated the approximate odds of a male not having a male child or a female not having a female child (i.e. looking like their uniparental marker was "conquered") at 12.5%, each generation, totally random.

-The longer a population has existed in a locale (and being free of mutations), the more generations go by, the greater the chance that random happenstance, chance, etc. will make it appear that a Hg either never existed or was slaughtered in a mass killing/enslavement/mate preference.

Now you have further proof of it.

I'm waiting to hear how Hg M died out because of some studly new more beautiful females who moved in.  Oh woops, Maciamo doesn't post here.  And he doesn't himself bear Hg M.  And M is not linked to R1b...

In Praise of Roberta Estes and DNAeXplained.com

In a world of pseudo-science and echo chambers, a few blogs stick out for being mostly in touch with reality.  In the world of Ancient DNA, Dienekes, although less active than before, has pioneered much in the field of DNA, and still has many serious scientists who comment there.

In the world of DNA for Genealogy, one blog sticks out.  It is Roberta Estes' DNAeXplained.com.  Of all the blogs and websites dedicated to disseminating information about DNA, hers is consistently factual, science-based, and yet easy to understand. 

This scientist came across a few of her posts, and I daresay they are mandatory reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of their DNA.  Below are links and highlights:

"Determining Ethnicity Percentages"

Step 1:  Creation of the underlying population data base.
Don’t we wish this was as simple as it sounds.  It isn’t.  In fact, this step is the underpinnings of the accuracy of the ethnicity predictions.  The old GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) concept applies here. . . .

The third way to obtain this type of information is by inference.  Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe do some of this.  Ancestry released its V2 ethnicity updates this week, and as a part of that update, they included a white paper available to DNA participants.  In that paper, Ancestry discusses their process for utilizing contributed pedigree charts and states that, aside from immigrant locations, such as the United States and Canada, a common location for 4 grandparents is sufficient information to include that individuals DNA as “native” to that location.  Ancestry used 3000 samples in their new ethnicity predictions to cover 26 geographic locations.  That’s only 115 samples, on average, per location to represent all of that population.  That’s pretty slim pickins.  Their most highly represented area is Eastern Europe with 432 samples and the least represented is Mali with 16.  The regions they cover are shown below. . .

No matter which calculations you use relative to acceptable Margin of Error and Confidence Level, Ancestry’s sample size is extremely light. . . .
 

"Are You Native American?"

"having Haplogroup Origins and Ancestral Origins indicating Native American ancestry does not necessarily mean you are Native American or have Native American heritage. This is a very pervasive myth that needs to be dispelled. . . .

The good news is that more and more people are DNA testing.  The bad news is that errors in the system are tending to become more problematic, or said another way, GIGO – Garbage in, Garbage Out.

....

There are a very limited number of major haplogroups that include Native American results.  For mitochondrial DNA, they are A, B, C, D, X and possibly M.  I maintain a research list of the subgroups which are Native.  Each of these base haplogroups also have subgroups which are European and/or Asian.  The same holds true for Native American Y haplogroups Q and C.
In the Haplogroup Origins and Ancestral Origins, there are many examples where Non-Native haplogroups are assigned as Native American, such as haplogroup H1a below.  Haplogroup H is European...

One of the problems we have today is that because there are so many people who carry the oral history of grandmother being “Cherokee,” it has become common to “self-assign” oneself as Native.  That’s all fine and good, until one begins to “self-assign” those haplogroups as Native as well – by virtue of that “Native” assignment in the Family Tree DNA data base.  That’s a horse of a different color.

Calculating Matches on Gedmatch: Why CentiMorgans (cM) are more important than SNPs

I have discovered that very very very few people know this, so it is worth posting.

The different testing companies, 23andme, Ancestry, FTDNA, etc. all test slightly different SNPs.  In other words, the "points" on the genome, the "genes" that are tested vary from company to company.

I have seen some people on Gedmatch dismiss a match because "it doesn't have enough SNPs."  Or because "it's not above the SNP threshold."

Gedmatch itself uses a 7 cM and 700 SNPs match to qualify someone as a cousin.

The SNP part is faulty thinking.

Because the testing companies don't test the same SNPs, you can have long stretches that match with a low number of SNPs.

Case in point: Someone who tested on 23andme like I did matched me for 10.0 cM and 1024 SNPs.  That same person on FTNDA matched me for 10.0 cM but just 510 SNPs.  FTDNA tested half of the SNPs that 23andme did (or half of the same set). 

This is key to grasp.  Expect closer matches to you on Gedmatch if your kits start with the same letter (i.e. M for 23andme, F for FTDNA, and A for Ancestry.)  DO NOT DISMISS LOW SNP MATCHES.

The Cassidy Earthquake: Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome

Lara Cassidy et al. just put out a paper that injects a bit of welcome science into the world of R1b fantasy theories.  Those theories, of marauding bands of R1b warriors, are popular on online messenger boards.  (One prominent board even maintains that most of Western Europe -- millions and millions of men -- are R1b because they are descended from royalty).

Here are the findings from this recent paper:

1.  The very derived downstream clades of R1b like R1b1a2a1a2c were well-established in Ireland by 3750 before the present.  There is no evidence the ancient specimens in the paper were the first generation in Ireland, so it is likely they were present by 2000 BCE.

2.  The population of the Central European migrants to Ireland, who were herders, and had some Steppe-derived ancestry, were MUCH higher, compared to hunter gatherers.  In other words, R1b is so common in Ireland because of massive migration of such people.

3.  This is emphatically NOT consistent with pioneer colonization and elite dominance.

4.  The current distributions in many parts of Western Europe are due to a LACK of invasions since (no Anglo-Saxon or Roman penetration.) In other words, this was a second but more prounounced founder effect of sorts.

5.  This is consistent with comparisons to more centrally located, easy to reach locales, like Italy, where the genomes show greater variability in both autosomes and Y DNA, due to introgressions that occurred after the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age migrations.  (Cavalli-Sforza's admonishment to understand the difference between an expansion and an "impansion" come to mind.)

6. In Western Europe, Bell Beaker culture is the most likely candidate for the spread of R1b and related autosomal genes.

7.  R1b and this Western European expansion is strongly scientifically correlated to lactose persistence, which likely provided the demographic advantage to propagate in larger numbers in places like Hibernia.

8.  As an addendum, the megaliths of Western Europe are indeed likely linked to early cardial cultures, who bore of mix of HG and farming genes, which correlate to I-M26 in Ireland and Sardinia.

WOW!