The Continued Silliness of R1b & R1a Chauvinists: Lineages were NOT Conquerors or Kings

 We've discussed this before.  A certain chauvinism (we won't call it ethno-nationalism or racism) of online idiots who believe that the "male-mediated" prevalence of R1b and R1a in certain lands make those people the "descendants of conquerors."  You see such drivel all the time on blogs like Eurogenes, but it infects the thinking event of Razib Khan.  

We've pointed out that many things could have caused such migrations.  We've shown how in modern times, the haplogroup percentages of places like Lebanon have changed dramatically from the large numbers of Syrian males migrating there -- and how such males are far from conquerors, but are refugees.  

We've cited historical examples: the Goths who had to leave Eastern Europe because the Huns conquered them, and then they, in turn, due to mass migrations and chaos, upended parts of the Roman Empire.

But this "R1b males are the descendants of conquering studs" simply won't die.  So today we raise two examples.  The first is more direct.  The second is a bit of a historical parable.

1.  We often read posts on how the ethnic groups who have less prevalence of R1b and R1a are somehow inferior, because they have less of the genes of the "conquerors."  But doesn't this just mean that those people were stronger?  More advanced?  More capable of holding off the hordes?  I mean, people, think about it...

2. Now we'll give yet another example from history.  But this time, we'll do so like Socrates did, in a parable, asking your brains, dear readers, to make the logical leaps.

Three tribes exist, and each is more or less 100% homogenous.  

At Year 500:

In nation state / tribe #1, the dominant haplogroup is S

In nation state / tribe #2, the dominant haplogroup is G

In nation state / tribe #3, the dominant haplogroup is E.

Now it's year 900:

In nation state / tribe #1, the dominant haplogroup is still S.

In nation state / tribe #2, the dominant haplogroup is ALSO now S

In nation state / tribe #3, the dominant haplogroup is still E.

Some people online assert that Nation #2 are the descendants of mighty conquerors. Awesome studly men who were sexually selected.

Some people online assert that Nation #3 are weaker, because they have far less of Haplogroup S.  "No conquerors there."  "Must have been weak."

However, these nations are:

1. Spain

2. Guatemala

and

3. England

In other words, contrary to the exceedingly weak and illogical "models" these people circulate on the internet:

The people in #2 are descendants of the conquered.  Spain was able to inflict horrible things on them.

The people in #3 are descendants of a people who, although Spain tried many times, were strong and organized enough to beat back any invasion.

Perspective?

What Is a Y-Chromosome Haplogroup?

 At first glance, this may seem like a basic, tutorial post.  Like one of those you see on a genealogical DNA website, designed to help people understand what a Y-chromosome haplogroup is.  However, we seek to explain the term another way.

We've remarked before that there has been a trend in the Ancient DNA and Genealogical DNA community to transfer the 1950's brain and its thoughts on ethnic supremacy to a 2020s version of the same, which is this notion on haplogroup supremacy.  The worst practitioner of the same is Davidski, who publishes Eurogenes blog, who simply cannot wrap his brain around this.  He is a R1 supremacist, to be sure.  There are many others on Anthrogenica and Eupedia, notably Maciamo Hay.

We've tried explaining that the expansion of R1 could be from refugees not conquerors, or simply just population growth from having more babies, a demographic trait that usually accompanies the poor, not the elite.  

We've tried explaining that the expansion of R1 does not correlate with Steppe autosomes, which means that the expansion was not only male mediated, but included many females too, who mated with non R1 males.

And finally, we've tried explaining that if under the Davidski "R1 Conqueror" fantasy model, the notion that people in locations with much R1b or R1a are descendants of conquerors cannot be accurate, because by definition the conquerors conquered someone.  Wouldn't they be descendants of the conquered?  And similarly, while those folks appear to look down at European lands without much R1a and R1b, doesn't that mean that those places simply weren't conquered?  I.e., were stronger?

So you see why we think all of these R1a and R1b theories you see online are silly. It is just pointless to think like many folks do.

But today, we try to expand brains further, by simply explaining what a Haplogroup is.  Spoiler: it's not just biological.  They are manmade.

What do we mean by that?  Well, of course the SNP mutations that indicate a haplogroup come from nature.  But the names and dividing lines are completely arbitrary.

Imagine a ruler with 12 lines, one for every inch.  You can place a letter at any inch you want.  Remember that many of the inches are "descendants" of other stops on the line.

When haplogroups were "discovered," they were originally the results of research done on Europeans, so the initial names for these groupings were Eu1, Eu2, Eu19, etc.  The researchers simply wanted to delineate the 25 or so Y chromosome haplogroups they had found in Europe at that time, in the infancy of the research.

Those groups, by sheer chance, ended up getting the "named letter."  There is no special SNP that marks where a letter was placed!

In other words, HUMANS decided to place the Haplogroup I designation at the M170 SNP mutation.  We humans could have placed the "I" designation (or any other haplogroup) higher upstream or lower downstream, and it would skew the statistics.

Why is this relevant?  Well, idiots online love to say, "Haplogroup R accounts for X% of European lineages..."  Great.  That tells you nothing.  Or very little.  It's just where we happened to assign a letter.

I and J are closely related.  Had scientists placed the "letter" designation at their point of common origin, calling what we now call "paragroup IJ" or "paragroup IJK" as simple "Haplogroup I" (Or H or J -- whatever), then the numbers of those with that designation in Europe would double.

Then, maybe you'd have idiots like the people above trying to explain why this randomly assigned letter accounted for such large percentages of the European population.

Think this isn't accurate?  Don't grasp it?  Think again.  What we call "Haplogroup R" split off from the others around 27,000 years ago.  A 2008 estimate suggested that the most recent common ancestor of haplogroup IJ could have lived 30,500 years ago. This difference is insignificant on the human scale, because it so far predates any historical movement of peoples.

Because our haplogroups are NOT calibrated to be when the mutation occurred, the groupings mean nothing.

We see this in the ISOGG tree being rewritten every year, and overhauled every 5 years or so.  Many designations, for example I1b from 20 years ago which is now I2a1, have been assigned and reassigned.  The letters mean nothing.  They're arbitrary.  The numbers mean little.  The lower number is not ancestral or older!!!  (Witness I1 versus I2).  It's awful.

And so are the people trying to draw profound conclusions from large, prehistoric groupings.  It's arbitrary.

If you can't wrap your brain around this, feel free to ask questions in the comments section below.

Thoughts on "POPULATION GENOMICS OF STONE AGE EURASIA" the Allentoft Paper Taking the Internet by Storm

 A delightful new paper came out recently by Morten Allentoft et al., entitled, "POPULATION GENOMICS OF STONE AGE EURASIA". 

Before we start on the main discussion, we note that the study conclusively refuted many of the ridiculous theories by the "R1a Steppe conquerors" (those annoying guys posting from their mom's basements, ever present on Eurogenes, Anthrogenica, Eupedia, Apricity etc. forums), by noting three things:

1. The steppe people, who the fantastists envision to be conquerors, were themselves often REPLACED by other prehistoric cultures, in places like Scandinavia, and were DRIVEN OUT of other places, to places like Ireland and other parts of the Celtic Fringe.

2. The genes for lactase persistence (milk digestion) started to spread BEFORE the Steppe genes.

3. The genes for white skin were NOT sexually selected.  They simply correlate with latitude.

This proves the point, made here for years, that each European population group might be thought of as a snapshot of different blends in time, as opposed to some being conquered and some being conquerors.  Everyone was each, at some point.  

ANYWAY, let's now talk about the main findings.

The POPULATION GENOMICS OF STONE AGE EURASIA paper focused on 5 ancestral populations:

1. Farming ancestry

2. Steppe Ancestry

3. The original hunter gatherers who populated Western Europe (WHG)

4. Eastern Hunter Gatherers (EHG)

5. Caucasian Hunter Gatherers (CHG).

The paper detailed which European populations have the most such ancestry (never a majority; always a plurality) and which populations have the least.

Here are the findings and my notes:

For Farming ancestry, the Mediterranean cultures have the most: Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece.  Finland and Estonia have the least.

This is a surprise, since previous papers indicated a clear peak in EASTERN Mediterranean cultures, and this paper seemed to infer that Spain had the most farming ancestry. Could farming also have been simply selected by latitude?

For Steppe ancestry, the paper conflicted with previous finding that the peak was in Scotland and NW Europe generally, finding the highest proportion of Steppe Ancestry in Ireland.  It was hard to tell the lowest, likely Italy.

If you're keeping track at home, this surprising finding means that the people furthest away from the Steppe, and separate by seas, have the most Steppe Ancestry!  Think about that.  Because we know the history of the Celtic Fringe, and how the people there got there, we thus know that those populations represent European populations that saw the steppe influx and then were themselves pushed out of other regions, before they could be further admixed.  

This mirrors Cavalli-Sforza's findings from decades ago too.

It also shows that certain populations stood their ground against steppe refugees, notably Italy, which makes sense given the state of advanced cultures there around the time of the steppe transition.

Finally, we note that this distribution reflects better Cavalli Sforza's notion of a (later) Celtic impansion, more than an (earlier) steppe expansion.

As for WHG ancestry, as has been reported in previous papers, this paper confirmed that the highest ancestry is in Estonia and Lithuania and the lowest is in Italy.

Again, this is counterintuitive.  The groups that populated Western Europe originally were very dark-skinned, yet the highest frequencies are in the fringes of NE Europe, amidst the fair Lithuanians.  

One may again think of this as simply the Baltic lands, isolated for long stretches, simply served as a reservoir of the alleles.  

And also: Italy, with its many population movements, serves as a sort of pan-European blend, with NO numbers being able to reach a high frequency, because there are so many source inputs.

As for EHG ancestry, it showed a pole in Europe where Finland was highest and apparently Spain was the lowest.

Again, Cavalli Sforza picked up on this DECADES ago, proposing a Finland to Spain pole for a certain Principle Component analysis.

Interesting here is that the paper found huge EHG ancestry in Mongolia.

I wonder if Allentoft et al considered that this so-called EHG component reflects almost exactly the movement of Y Chromosome Haplogroup N, and the spread of Ural Altaic and/or Finno Ugric languages.  It is striking.

Finally, CHG ancestry peaked in Europe in Turkey and Greece, and everywhere else had minor levels.  The highest levels were found in Pakistan however.  

Again, Allentoft would be wise to notice that this distribution mirrors the distribution of Dravidian languages.

A fascinating paper.  Perhaps what's old is new again.  These new "components" of Eurasian ancestry (WHG, EHG, ANE, EEN, EEF, whatever) represent the older notions of expansions and impansions, and linguistic-correlated population movements.

Serena Aneli, Matteo Caldon, Luca Pagani, et al. Put Out Another Hairsplitting, Borderline Racist Paper on Italy: "Human Presence in Southern Europe, the Italian Case Study"

We and others have noticed and posted about a recurring phenomenon in academic papers.  Authors, often Northern Italians, issue quibbling, hairsplitting papers about the "differences" in Italy.  In each, they pretend to break new ground.  As if Italy hasn't been studied enough.  As if such themes had not been explored ad nauseam.  

Nevermind that over a generation ago, legendary geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, himself a (cough) proud Northern Italian, showed that there is more genetic distance and variation in any one village in Africa than there is in the entire continent of Europe -- We have yet another paper aiming to measure that Northern Italians and Southern Italians are different.

These papers wouldn't be so god-awful if they weren't by and large ignorant of history.  They wouldn't be so god-awful if they didn't cherry pick which academic papers they cite.  But because of both traits (a lack of historical knowledge, selective citation), they come across, as, well, having an agenda.  When you realize that much of the research is NOT coming out of Southern Italy, you understand that any perspective that doesn't seek to "other" Southern Italians can get at best lost and at worst covered up.

Why do we say such papers are borderline racist.  Two reasons.  First of all, the world is a big place, and there are thousands of areas much less poorly studied than Italy.  Instead of writing the fiftieth paper trying to point out differences among Italians, go study another part of the world.  Secondly, Northern Italians often have a desire to explain why their Southern brethren are a little darker, a little less educated, etc.  They don't do a deep dive into it (isolation, poor government).  They don't grasp that for long periods in history, it was reversed: the South was where the smart people and commerce were.  No, they just desire to show the world that Northern Italians are good Caucasians, and damn the southerners.  Genetic hairsplitting is just the latest tool.

From this paper, "Through 40,000 years of human presence in Southern Europe: the Italian case study" comes some real gems of this theme. 

Again, we and others have posted before two principles:

-For a millennia, Rome was an exporter of people.  It sent colonies all around the Mediterranean, especially to places like Greece.  Many of the genetic similarities are due to enormous Roman population growth and genetic outflow -- not the other way around.

-Recent studies have shown that Southern Italians are genetically more similar to the Romans than Northern Italians.  Why?  Well, the barbarian (Germanic) invasions were land-based.  Unlike previous mass movements, they came by land.  They came from continental Europe and moved south, instead of by sea, moving north.  When the sea ceased to be the only superhighway, the south became a backwater.  Thus, you may think of Northern Italians as Southern Italians, with a little bit of German blood.

Oh but despite these concrete principles, we get "studies" like this one, which rather than just relaying the DNA data, they delve into ahistorical speculation:

-Southern Italians appear "more Mediterranean," according to the paper.  Hmm.  DUH!  Yes, the peninsula juts into the Mediterranean, while places like Milan, don't.  But the authors say "this is probably" because of Greek influence.  No!  Southerners just don't have as much German influence.

-Then we get, drumroll please, a long tirade featuring the same tired cliches as every other stinking paper like this.  "We don't know where the Etruscans came from."  No, that has been solved.  They were indigenous.  "The Roman empire was cosmopolitan, in particular with emigrants from the Near East."  No, there is absolutely nothing in history to back up the latter half of that statement.  There is nothing in genetics to show that Roman slaves had offspring.  And there is nothing to show that free immigrants from say, Egypt, were more numerous than free immigrants from Gaul or Britain. 

-But the biggest stinker -- the biggest ahistorical statement of some time -- is the paper's notion that any serious genetic contribution can be attributed to the "Byzantines."  Byzantium (The Eastern Roman Empire) could barely post garrisons in Southern Italy.  Barely fight off the Lombards in Calabria.  Barely hold any land, from all the different military countervailing forces, including Franks, Saracens, Normans, etc.  The idea that there was mass population movement from east to west during a time of depopulation, plague, stagnation, and crisis, is something that no serious historian would ever assert.

What an awful piece of drivel.  

Perhaps scientists like this would be best to take their own maxims:

-Don't discuss things you're not an expert on

-Try to DISprove a hypothesis.  Don't just accept something as true.

-Be different. Don't conform. Put out something that truly breaks new ground.

This paper ain't it folks.

Y Chromosome Haplogroup I-M26 Found Again in Prehistoric MAINLAND Italy

 From the 2021 paper, "Ancient genomes reveal structural shifts after the arrival of Steppe-related ancestry in the Italian Peninsula", a male skeleton from a Chalcolithic (Copper Age) graveyard in Emilia Romagna has been verified to bear M26 on his Y-Chromosome.  The skeleton was likely buried around 2800 B.C.

More proof that M26 was present in the Italian mainland during prehistoric times, and is NOT indicative of a historical Sardinian origin.

Ancestry.com Continues to Be Best In Class for DNA Ancestry Ethnic Composition

I've been very kind to 23andme in the past because of it's easy-to-use interface and it's candor when it comes to disclosing the weaknesses in its algorithm.  Nothing was worse than the other testing companies representing to people that their ethnic calculators were accurate, only to discover that the science was really just a guess.  Many authors have written entire chapters in books (this one quite funny!) that discuss these concepts.

But as 23andme prepares for its exciting and certainly in-demand upcoming IPO, it needs an update.  It needs to offer X chromosome searching, for one example.  

 And it's DNA ancestry has been lapped now, twice, by Ancestry.com.  Ancestry.com, who we've been harsh on before, now features INCREDIBLY accurate DNA ancestry estimates.  To tell you how far they've come, so fast, it'd be like going from horse and buggy to the space shuttle.  Their new tool is that accurate.

One user wrote me who hired a genealogist to complete a full pedigree.  That's 64 ancestors!  That user has a complete 64 ancestor pedigree now, well-documented with church and family records.  Of her 64 ancestors, 62 come from northeast Bavaria in Germany, 1 comes from Sweden, and 1 from the Czech Republic.  In other words, she's 96.8% German, from the Bavarian forest, and she's about 1.56% Swedish and Czech.

She got her ancestry results from Ancestry.com, and would you believe it said she is 96% German, from the Bavarian forest, and 2% Swedish, 2% Eastern European?  I mean, WOW.  Impressive.  Doubly impressive because, as we've posted before and many of you know, German and French ancestry is the hardest to call.

23andme still says this woman is German, Italian, British, Northwest European, etc.  In other words, it's pretty far off.  It has a ways to go.

Kudos to Ancestry for getting best-in-class and for cracking the German ancestry code.  We give major kudos to Tim Sullivan and everyone there for their hard work to become the absolute best.

Julius Caesar: Basis for the Gospels, Model for Christ?

 I've posted before about the eerie similarities between the life of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ.  They are too numerous to mention again.  Suffice to say that there are too many coincidences in their life stories for there not to be something else afoot, things like their friendship with a Nicomedes of Bithynia / Nicodemus of Bethania; their work in the land to the north, Gallia / Galilee, etc.

The main proponent of the theory is Italian scholar Francisco Carotta, an Italian scholar.  Acceptance of his theories ranges from "as groundbreaking as the Theory of Relativity" to extreme defensiveness from Christian apologists.

I recently read his landmark book on the subject, and frankly it seems to stretch things too far.  I almost feel like he could have stopped halfway through most of his claims (which he details with precision and specificity), and just pointed out things with greater generality.  

In other words: After reading his theories, it seems abundantly clear to anyone with a brain that of the Gospel of Mark (and the other Gospels, which drew heavily from Mark), were based at least in part on the "Life of Julius Caesar," and that many of the stories contained therein result from a mis-translation of Latin into the Koine Greek spoken in the Holy Land at the time.  

We can start this with an analogy so you get what I mean.  Imagine you are reading a story told on a Martian colony in the year 2120.  It goes like this:

"Once there was a great Martianball player named Beef Bryan.  He figured numbers using flowers.  They died when their spaceship crashed."

Now the original text:

"Once there was a great basketball player named Kobe Bryant.  His accountant's name was Flores.  They died when their helicopter crashed."

In this little example, you can see how the Martians translated the story to make more sense in their world (spaceship crash versus helicopter crash, etc.) and also how they transliterated the Spanish surname "Flores" into something that didn't really make sense (the flowers part).  Similarly, they took Kobe's first name and turned it into "beef," and misspelled his last name.  Now, imagine that these Martians Internet connection doesn't connect to Earth's (isolation), and that paper is super expensive on Mars, so they pass down everything verbally, and you can really see how the story would have evolved.

Turns out the Gospels are full of things just like this.  And such errors, mis-translations, poorly understood puns, etc. are waaaaaaaay too coincidental to support any other conclusion other than the somewhat disturbing fact to some, that many stories about Jesus's life were simply borrowed from the Life of Caesar.

Let's go through some of the biggest ones:

1) The most widely read book about Caesar's life, circulated among those who could read in Israel at the time, and repeated in verbal tales throughout the empire, was by an author named Asinius Pollio.  (Indeed one of the first references to Christians is graffiti from a Roman soldier joking that they worship a donkey's colt.) 
Asinius Pollo was also with Caesar during his adventures. 

Anyway, his name roughly translates into "donkey's colt."  One can imagine a native Aramaic speaker, reading a text translated from Latin into Koine Greek, coming across this proper name and saying, "hmm...donkey's colt."  Are there odd references to a "donkey's colt" in the gospels?  Yep!  Caesar entered Rome with Asinius Pollio.  Mark and Matthew say that Jesus entered Jerusalem with a donkey's colt... 

2) The bible very clearly says that Jesus sailed on a salt-water sea to a location called Dalmanutha.  They indicate that this happened when Jesus was done preaching in Galilee.  He went there and cattle was running down the hills.  He fed the thousands.

Despite exhaustive searches, and well-documented records, no place name Dalmanutha has ever been found, now, or in antiquity.  Moreover, the Galilee lakes are freshwater.

Does this story make sense if it was a poorly translated tale from the Life of Caesar?

Well, Caesar crossed a saltwater sea and landed in Dalmatia.  He went there, and his legions, who were starving, caught cattle running down the hills.  Caesar miraculously fed his starving legions.  It is very easy to see how this story was transposed.  Indeed, in the bible, Jesus heals a man named, "Legion" after crossing the sea!  (In case you're wondering, in ancient times, just like now, men didn't have the name, "Legion.")  

Dalmanutha (which doesn't exist) = Dalmatia.  The protagonist crossed the sea, fed thousands and healed the legions.  It's hard to draw any other conclusion here folks.

3. After Caesar died, a life-size, life-like effigy of this body was hung up on a cross.  Few people know this.  But it's very well-documented. (See here for images).  

Most importantly, they hung Caesar's battlefield decorations on the effigy.

Caesar had won Rome's highest military decoration.  It was like 10 Medals of Honor.  This award was given for military men who saved an entire army under siege.  It could only be awarded if the besieged men voted to do so.  It was called the "Corona Gemina."

What was the Corona Gemina?  Well, unlike other medals and decorations, the besieged army would make it at the battlesite to commemorate their lack of resources.  Victors in the ancient world often got laurel wreaths to wear on their head, but a besieged army had no laurels.  

No, instead, the Corona Gemina -- Rome's highest honor -- and the one mounted on Caesar's crucified effigy -- was a crown of thorns.

Do you have chills yet?

3. Coins of Caesar circulated in the Holy Land, and his adopted son, confusingly also called, "Caesar" [Augustus] call them the "Son of God."  

Take all those coincidences above.  Now know that there are hundreds more.  Too many to list.  Let's do one more, then recap.

4. It's well know that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he said, "Alea Ilacta Est."  (The die is cast).  Would you believe this phrase appears mis-translated in the bible?  See, the word "dice" (alea) is very similar to the word fisherman (halea), and thus, in the bible, we have the story of the fisherman casting...

The list goes on and on.  A quick recap:

Once upon a time, a great man lived whose initials were J.C. He was born quite poor, and lived among the common people, even though he was descended from the great, foundational King Romulus/King David. His aunt/his mother was named Maria. Some claimed for him a miraculous birth/a birth by Caesarian section. When he was still young, he was almost killed by the tyrant Sulla/Herod.

His deeds gained him significant fame during the early part of his public career, when he was operating in the province just to the north, called Gallia/Galilee. Everywhere he went, he was accompanied by his 12 faithful Lictors/disciples. He spoke in proverbs often, for example, “I came, I saw, I conquered/I came, I saw, I washed.” He was close to a promiscuous woman named Cleopatra/Magdalene and a righteous, powerful man named Nicodemus of Bithynia/Nicodemus of Bethany.

Eventually, his fate forced him to make a momentous decision and cross the Rubicon/Jordan river. On the way, he was tested at and performed miraculous deeds at a city called Corfinium/Cafarnaum. Then, he was operational in the capital, Rome/Jerusalem.

There had been a very similar man who he was close with, who had a similar following and career. Eventually though, Pompey/John the Baptist was beheaded by an Egyptian, and the head presented to him.

Does this mean Carotta's theory is perfect?  No, far from it.  Does it mean that a holy man named Jesus, who changed the world for the better with his revolutionarily good ideas, did not exist?  NO! 

But it is abundantly clear that large swathes of the gospels are either mis-translated stories from the life of Caesar, or are borrowings, to make the new cult figure (Jesus) similar to the old.

Now let's look at the most likely mechanism: Remember, Caesar settled his veterans in Judea.  These were rural Italians, mostly illiterate.  They were allowed to marry local Jewish women.  Their descendants lived in colonies.  The soldiers worshiped Caesar as a God.  Each colony had churches set up to him, plus priests, etc.  Same for his son Augustus.

One can imagine in an illiterate society how memories fade and get transposed over the years.  Caesar died in 44 BC.  Imagine now it's 50 AD, and the colonies are populated by his veterans' great grandkids.  They speak Aramaic and some Greek now; the Latin of their great grandfathers is a distant memory.  Someone pulls out a book by Asinius Pollio, which they still revere (for some reason), and they stumble through tales re-told by the one literate guy in town.

Does he personalize these stories for the children?  Make Gallia into Galilee?  Change the Rubicon river (which they never heard of) into the Jordan river?  Simply refer to the "big city" (Rome --> Jerusalem)?  Absolutely.  All of this is likely.  

Now imagine a local kid is doing well.  He is Jesus.  He is teaching profound things that mean a lot to a poor and repressed population.  His followers desperately want him to become revered.  Do they borrow some stories from the lives of someone else who is worshiped?  Likely.

More troubling would be the theory that Jesus of Nazareth never really existed in the form we know him.  That ALL of the gospels represent the fading memories of a people who told and re-told stories of Caesar, like a game of "Telephone" spanning 120 years, using three languages.  Backers of this theory point out that there are no records of Jesus at all: that all contemporaneous references that are close to "Christus" don't really use that term, which means "Anointed" in Greek, but instead use the far more common "Chrestus," which simply means "good."  

Some go so far as to say that the Anno Domini dating was forged to hide the Caesarian beginnings of the church, noting that the church father assigned to date the life of Christ coincidentally listed him as being born exactly 100 years after Caesar, as if almost to say, "it was too far after, so it wasn't the same guy."  (Side note, we know that Christ wasn't born in the "year zero" because even the gospels make that date impossible, based on what they say about Herod).

The fascinating evidence for the "Jesus never existed/He was just a transmogrified memory of Caesar" theory is actually pretty solid.  For one thing, the Dead Sea scrolls, ancient Jewish religious manuscripts that were found in the Qumran Caves in the Judaean Desert.  There are 981 of these documents, all dating from right after the time of Christ.  Not one mentions him.  You'd think that if a messianic figure was put to death by the unpopular rulers at the time, at least a couple documents would mention him, if even to decry him as a false messiah.  Nope.  

Additional evidence for this theory is that contemporary Roman records don't mention Jesus, and therefore the first written text we have about him, the Gospels, date to about 150 A.D. -- about 120 years after Jesus died.  Were the Gospels just a twisted retelling of Caesar stories, with several mistranslations?  Did Jesus as we know him never exist?

We needn't go that far.  And therefore we can conclude that Carotta likely goes too far, ascribing just about everything in the Gospel of Mark to a story about Caesar.

Do we have a history of Christianity and Judaism borrowing from other faiths?  Absolutely.  It is possible that the date of Christmas was chosen to supplant the dominant montheistic faith of the time, that of Sol Invictus.  And much of the Old Testament, from the flood narrative, Ecclesiastes, the Garden of Eden, etc. has been shown to be a borrowing (or ancient game of "telephone") from the earlier mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.  

We can safely conclude that the bards and storytellers who told and re-told great verbal stories of Caesar's life profoundly affected what eventually got written down into the Gospels.  Several of the stories in the Gospels, particularly those that seem strange, or odd, or out-of-place, were just mistranslations of actual tales from the life of Julius Caesar. 

Epilogue: The text of Asinius Pollio's work on Caesar has been lost to time.  If and when it is ever rediscovered, if, as some suspect, it matches the Mark gospel almost word-for-word, Christianity will have a lot of explaining to do -- a profound identity crisis.  Some speculate copies were purposefully destroyed.

Book Review -- Mezzogiorno Mistaken: The Top 10 Myths About Southern Italians

Readers of this blog know that we like science.  That we hate popular-culture fairy tales and stereotypes.  And that we love to correct awful claims made by DNA testing companies and amateurs on the Interwebs, especially as they pertain to Italians.

Along comes Dr. John De Luca with a truly incredible book.  It's called "Mezzogiorno Mistaken: The Top 10 Myths About Southern Italians."  It made me LOL a dozen times.  It's an instant classic.

Chapters are devoted to:

-Debunking the idea that Italy isn't a unified nation with common history

-Debunking bogus claims about "exotic" blood in Southern Italians 

-Debunking the notion of Northern superiority

-Debunking the "Guido" myth and the "mafia" myth

It does it all with humor and mirth, backed up by science, in a way that is not intrusive.  This is our new favorite book.  One of the most readable we have enjoyed in a while, and a must-have for any Italian you know.

This blog has no financial interest in the book, and we weren't paid anything for this review.  It's simply a REALLY good book on the myths that Southern Italians face.  You can buy it here.

R1b, the Lineage of Kings?

Thought of the day: So many men (who coincidentally bear R1b) love to think that R1b is the lineage of kings and conquerors.  In reality, the data shows it is the lineage of immigrants and commoners. 😂

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