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From:
Subject: Re: [DNA] J2 HG in Scotland
Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 05:01:40 +0000


-------------- Original message --------------

Which brings us back to the
> question: How would one differentiate so-called
> Samartian J2 from that of the Neolithic Farmers?

********* The Neolithic farmer concept is a construct built upon sheer speculation. One can never know if cultural diffusion or migration of farmers brought agriculture to Northern Europe. It has become dogma that these hyothetical people brought J2 and E3b to Southern Europe and it in turn percolated up to Britain and other locations. The archaeological assemblage does not support the Neolithic theory, nor does it refute it. Using Occham's Razor or the Law of Parsimony, the simplest explanation is that the historically documented groups recruited from the fringes of the Roman Empire and sent to the far flung reaches of the Empire like Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland England have left their genetic stamp on the present population. J2 was not found in a large study of Gaelic surnames. The evidence is consistent with a scattering of incomers sent as Legionnaires from the Lower Danube to keep order in Britain, or peoples crossing the English Channel to Britian bringing !
with them their haplotypes which originated in the Middle East during the zenith of the Roman Empite. There reason why there is little haplotype difference between J2 in England and in Armenia is that, according to this conceptualization, the time scale is such that significant differences are not expected.
The above argument also applies to R1a. About 40% of R1a in Scandanavia does not at all resemble that of Eastern Europe, but is virtually identical to that from Kazakhstan - why, because there is only a 1600 year separation between the two groups, permitting only slight differences in the modal values for each and explaning why my uncle has absolutely no matches with Eastern Europeans, but is a close match to 2/3 of a sample of 54 R1a from the Altai and other Central and South Asian locations - to repeat, zero matches with Poland or the Ukraine where R1a is alleged to have originated - but this point is also debatable. Pakistan shows more R1a variability than the Ukraine, so why would it be assumed that the Kurgan culture of the Ukraine was the spawning ground of R1a. It makes more sense to look to Pakistan and India as the ancestral homeland.
The point of all this...................take nothing for granted. The explanations for the present distribution of haplogroups in Eurasia is not carved in stone. It is time for a fresh look in light of new DNA evidence, archaeology and history.
David.

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