A COMMON SOURCE FOR THE ENGLISH AND CORNISH
14 May 2012
During the last ice age our ancestors were thought to have huddled in two European refuges, one in what is now Basque country and the other in what is now the Ukraine, spreading out into Europe as the ice retreated. A recent study [American journal of human genetics 4 May 2012] led by Maria Pala suggests that the repopulating of Europe was boosted by an influx of people from the middle east. Indeed, they may be our predominant ancestral group. Archeogenetics a science that advances remarkably and challenges our previous views.
What struck me about this was a comment from Pala, as significant as the research. She said that archeogenetics had important lessons to teach us:
“It helps us to revaluate the perception of our identity. We are highly focussed on identifying ourselves as Italians, British or whatever, but by analysing DNA we discover that originally, not such a long time ago, we came from a common source.”
Indeed.
I have argued this point several times in the blog in answer to those who see not only constructed and changing cultural but also significant and inherent racial differences between people who call themselves different names. We have a common source.
This post may serve as a short introduction to some that I shall be putting up on identity.
Notes
The full study in the American journal of human genetics (linked above) is paid-access though there is a free abstract there. Accounts of the study are freely available here and here and here.
NEANDERTHALS AGAIN
11 February 2012
Ah, our Neanderthal relatives again. Here is a brief account of the oldest paintings yet discovered; and possibly made by Neanderthals and not our Homo sapiens sapiens ancestors. For comparison paleolithic cave art in the Cresswell Crags, and perhaps the Gower peninsula, the oldest in Britain, are dated around 12 000 BC.
HOW THE CORNISH BEGAN
28 January 2012
…And all the others too.
This is an article by Chris Stringer in the Edge which gives an excellent roundup of his present thinking and our present knowledge of our human origins. No, I don’t mean the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon stuff but our far back origins. The last six paragraphs are a summary.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE
Hat tip: Dienekes
TRAVELLERS
15 December 2011
It’s a puzzle for us clever homo sapiens sapiens. How did we get from our original home in Africa to Camborne?
This was long before there were metalled roads or railways or Channel ferries; before there was even a Channel. Our migrating ancestors failed to pass on memories of savannah life so that until very recently we had no knowledge of where we started from; or at any rate the memories did not survive long. That’s another puzzle. They remembered arks and floods and gods and minotaurs, but not lions in the tall grass.
I think we might now be able to pinpoint a stopping off place on the human trek to the corners of the world.
Tool discoveries in Oman suggest that when some of us left Africa we went to the Arabian Peninsula, then rich grasslands. This was about 100 000 years ago and gives an earlier than usual date for leaving Africa. I think these early travellers were probably not the people who eventually trekked into Europe.
Read the research article here (ROSE Jeffrey I et al (2011) ‘The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia’ in PLOS ONE) and a good account here.
MY COUSINS, THE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS. YOURS TOO.
24 September 2011
There’s a revelatory article in Popular archaeology about research on a 100 year old lock of hair from a young Aboriginal man from Western Australia. The research team extracted enough DNA from the lock to sequence a complete genome of the man. This shows that Aboriginal Australians are directly descended from a very early migration of modern humans to leave east Africa. They left Africa about 62 000 to 75 000 years ago, arriving in Australia about 50 000 years ago.
The full text of the research article is online at Science here but requires payment for access.
The supporting materials for the research are online with free access
here. Note the opening section of the supporting materials (Definition of terms) which looks briefly at ways of categorising humans into classification units and says: “The fluid and complex nature of human variation means that any set of units will be imperfect” (page 3). Let’s remember that when talking easily about the English and Cornish and Arabs … We are all related, we are all family.
The Dienekes blog has a post on the research, as ever informative.
RASMUSSEN Morten et al ‘An Aboriginal Australian genome reveals separate human dispersals into Asia’ in Science 23 September 2011
A CORNWALL OF NEWCOMERS
29 July 2011
We are immigrants, settlers, incomers, all of us. We are not the originals, the indigenous. Whatever ethnic or national labels we give ourselves, others were here before us and ours. I explored this last year in the post Indigenous and have previously mentioned the Ancient Human Ocupation of Britain (AHOB) project.
Now have a look at this report in Science. The article costs but the brief abstract is free to read. There are also longer free online account here and here.
The report is another look at what happened to the Neanderthals. We homo sapiens sapiens migrated into Europe about 40 000 years ago. Looking at Perigord in southwest France, the report suggests that our species overwhelmed by numbers, along with cultural and technological advantages, the Neanderthals already here.
Indigeneity, a political construct, did not begin in Britain with a relatively recent Celtic-speaking people; that does not look far enough back. There were humans in Britain about 800 000 years ago at Happisburg in Norfolk. Inconstant settlement in our country has a long, long history with humans coming and going as circumstances changed. The last human occupation began about 12 000 years ago.
We are newcomers, all of us, and largely here by specific conquest. The predecessors as an identifiable group are gone, extinct or absorbed into us or massacred by our ancestors.
Hmm. I’m not sure the title of this post delivered what some might have expected.
Notes
‘Tenfold population increase in western Europe at the neandertal-to-modern human transition’ by Paul MELLARS and Jennifer C FRENCH in Science 29 July 2011
Where do the Cornish come from? 22 June 2011
There are two spellings in English of Neanderthal/Neandertal
EDIT: the reference to sciencedaily.com added 30 July 2011 and to For what they were, we are added 10 August 2011.
WHERE DO THE CORNISH COME FROM?
22 June 2011
Where do the Cornish come from?
And the English, French, Albanians…
Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London has written an up-to-date account of our human origins; that is, the origins of homo sapiens. It’s out-of-Africa plus.
Oh, and the Cornish could have 2.5 percent of Neanderthal DNA in their genetic make-up. And that goes for the English and other Europeans too.
You can read an excellent account by Stringer here.
The Cornish nationalist telescopes can see only a few hundred years back. Look farther back and see how we are all one race, the human race, and all of us here today are descendants of immigrants to Europe and this place.
STRINGER Chris The origin of our species (published at the end of this month)
Earlier posts
Puny boundaries 19 May 2010
The first Cornishman 1 May 2010
Cornwall 5460 years ago (The Balaresque study) 31 January 2010
Blue eyed Cornish and English are brothers 31 January 2008
English and Cornish are sisters under the skin 20 July 2007
English and Cornish have the same milk gene 10 March 2007
Ethnicity and Cornwall 5 January 2007
And…
A walrus, a mouse, and a man went into a bar… 18 May 2010
To see oursels as ithers see us 17 May 2010
A wondrous mixture 8 May 2010
The Cornishman, the Englishman, and the frog 2 May 2010
NOT SWINGING IN THE TREES BUT WALKING
29 January 2011
When did you and I come down from the trees to walk on the east African savannah? Well, not you and me but our common ancestors?
An article in the journal Folia primatologica suggests that it was about 3.5 to 4.2 million years ago. The argument is based on changes in the wrist and hand comparing two hominids, Australopithecus anamensis and Australopithecus afarensis. The latter is widely seen as transitional between apes and humans. This drop from the trees may have coincided with a change in the climate.
Of course we, Homo sapiens sapiens, were ages away. There was a lot of walking the savannah and evolving first.
You can read an accessible account of the research in Discovery news. A short abstract of the original research is in here.
NOTE
MACHO Gabriele A et al ‘An exploratory study on the combined effects of external and internal morphology on load dissipation in primate capitates: its potential for an understanding of the positional and locomotor repertoire of early hominins’ in Folia primatologica volume 81, number 5, 2010, pages 292-304, published online 15 January 2011
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER
10 January 2011
From time to time I have put up posts which discuss findings in the origins of humans and our ways. The point is to suggest that we all have much more in common than our differences, which are often constructed, and to remind us of our journey from our undistinguished origins in primeval slime and our cousins on the road.
First there are two new posts
‘Origin of clothing lice indicates early clothing use by anatomically modern humans in Africa’ by TOUPS MA et al in Molecular biology and evolution for 1 January 2011. This dates the origin of the use of clothes by modern humans from 83 000 – 170 000 years ago based upon the divergence of clothing lice from ancestral clothing lice.
‘Dual origins of dairy cattle’ by EDWARDS MJ et al in
Plos One for 6 January 2011. This explores the two divisions of European dairy cattle (Y1 and Y2) and how their present distribution coincides with cultural and historic boundaries in western Europe.
Now let remind you of posts already on the blog
English and Cornish have same milk gene 10 March 2007
Blue-eyed Cornish and English are brothers 31 January 2008
Cornwall 5460 years ago 31 January 2010
The first Cornishman 1 May 2010
The Cornishman, the Englishman, and the frog 2 May 2010
A wondrous mixture 8 May 2010
To see oursels as ithers see us 17 May 2010
A walrus, a mouse, and a man went into a bar 18 July 2010
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THE FIRST CORNISHMAN
1 May 2010
My inexpert foray into anthropology and genetics continues.
Okay, let me confess straight away: my post title is overdone. This isn’t about the first Cornishman. It is an occasional layman look at issues in our common human origin and at the contended evidence and theories about those origins and the subsequent human divisions. This is mired in difficulty. Knowledge and technology advance in anthropology, genetics, archeology, and history; and provisional truths rationally change in consequence. I am making the point that what we are unsure of and do not surely know about our origins is vast, much is uncertain, much is contended, and the first Cornishman is eternally elusive and unreachable but humans are remarkably genetically homogeneous. This latest post is prompted by two recent studies about events 2 million and 35 000 years ago. I have put below earlier posts about more recent events.
Australopithecus sediba
In 2008 two partial skeletons were found found in Malapa, southern Africa and dated from about two million years ago. Details were published last month in Science. One partial skeleton was of an adolescent male, one an adult female; and their place in the stew that is early humans is disputed. Questions abound. Do they represent a new species, Australopithecus sediba, a primate with both apelike and human characteristics? Should they be categorised as Australopithecus or Homo or are they, as claimed, transitional? Are they a descendant of Australopithecus africanus? Or are they a direct ancestor of our Homo genus and thus of you and me?
The human genus is reckoned to have arisen about two million years ago. Anatomically modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, evolved much later of course and is the only surviving species from several. Behaviourally modern humans emerged about 50 000 years ago from a cultural explosion.
Here are a couple of interesting comments on the event
‘Close to Homo?’ in Laelaps blog of Brian Switek
‘Claim over “human ancestor” sparks furore’ in Nature 8 April 2010
The origins of modern Europeans: paleolithic, neolithic
Another study of European origins was published last month: ‘A comparison of Y chromosome variation in Sardinia and Anatolia is more consistent with cultural rather than demic diffusion of agriculture,’ Laura MORELLI et al, in PloS ONE 29 April 2010.
Put simply, the people of Europe are largely descended from paleolithic colonisers who arrived here around 35 000 years ago and from neolithic farmers, directly or indirectly from the Middle East, who began to move into Europe about 8 000 years ago. That much is agreed. The proportions of these two groups in the present European and British population is contended.
Linked to these ideas and also contended is the explanation of how agriculture came to Europe from its origins in the Middle East. There are two theories. First, it spread by cultural diffusion, without a significant migration of people into Europe, the original paleolithic hunter-gatherer inhabitants acculturating to the new farming ideas. Second, it spread by demic diffusion, by a significant migration into Europe by Middle Eastern farmers who brought their new farming ideas with them.
In addition to the Morelli study, here are two articles that discuss these various arguments and the balance of paleolithic and neolithic input
‘A predominantly neolithic origin for European paternal lineages,’ Patricia BALARESQUE et al, in PloS BiologyJanuary 2010.
‘Origins and evolution of the Europeans’ genome: evidence from multiple microsatellite loci,’ Elsie MS BELLE, in Proceedings of the Royal Society 7 July 2006.
This website is an excellent guide and portal into these tigerish waters:
Gene expression.
Additamentum 4 May 2010
This website offers an interesting discussion of the paleolithic/neolithic issue. See the post on it for 2 May 2010.
And here are my earlier posts which look at these issues in Cornwall
Cornwall 5460 years ago (The Balaresque study)
Blue eyed Cornish and English are brothers
English and Cornish are sisters under the skin
English and Cornish have the same milk gene
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