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Archiver > GENEALOGY-DNA > 2009-07 > 1248210760


From: "Bryan Cook" <>
Subject: Re: [DNA] Who "killed" the men of Britain (not England)
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:12:40 -0400
References: <000001ca0a1a$63619f10$2a24dd30$@cook@rogers.com><SNT115-W45CB5C6272D07635C21CD2CC1A0@phx.gbl>
In-Reply-To: <SNT115-W45CB5C6272D07635C21CD2CC1A0@phx.gbl>


Thanks Steven, balanced and informative as usual. Bryan

-----Original Message-----
From:
[mailto:] On Behalf Of Steven Bird
Sent: July 21, 2009 2:11 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: [DNA] Who "killed" the men of Britain (not England)


It may not be the X chromosomes that are most useful in this context, nor
that of any putative Romano-Celtic ancestry. Rather, it may be that the
Romano-British Y chromosomes originating from the central Mediterranean
region that don't typically appear in Celtic speaking regions at high
percentages (E1b1b and its subclades, G2a, J2b1, etc.) are much more
indicative of a population displacement by the Anglians (specifically, the
kingdom of Mercia) of the Romano-British from central England.



There is now a general consensus among the most recently published Y DNA
studies concerning the central Mediterranean region (Cruciani 2007,
Battaglia 2009) that the most common subclade of E1b1b (namely E-V13) did
not expand from the Balkan peninsula to the rest of Europe until the Bronze
Age at the earliest. This finding eliminates Oppenheimer's contention that
"Eshu" arrived as part of the Neolithic wave entirely. It is simply wrong.
A Bronze Age arrival date for E-V13 in Britain remains a possibility,
however. The dating of E-V13's arrival in Britain may be greatly clarified
by the combined Univ of Sheffield Study of northern Wales (being actively
conducted as I write) and the current Oxford genetic survey of Britain,
which has collected nearly 4000 samples in rural Britain and northern
Ireland at present. These samples, combined with Weale, Capelli, and Sykes
(OGAP) ought to provide a much more highly resolved genetic map of Britain.
The large University of Dublin studies from 2006 of Ireland help complete
the picture for all of the Isles.



Mark Thomas' study and apartheid theory, based on the earlier 2002 Weale
study, presented good evidence of genetic differences in Wales when compared
to central England. The differences were not especially due to the R1b
groups found. I addressed his findings directly as part of this study in
2007:



http://www.jogg.info/32/bird.pdf







On to a more generalized discussion of the merits of the collaboration now
under way between Harvard, MIT and UC-London; all studies of populations,
living or otherwise, are a statistical exercise. The genetic evidence from
living donors is just as "real" as that from "ancient" DNA and statistically
more useful, since typically we have the ancestral lines for several
generations among the living samples. That cannot be said for any ancient
DNA burials from the BA or earlier. Even within Grave Circle B, at
Mycenaea, in a high-value (probably royal) burial, it was only possible to
establish that two of the individuals MAY have been related (perhaps a
brother and sister) based on mtDNA evidence. No Y DNA was extracted from
any of the skeletons; the Greek climate was just too hot for any of the Y
DNA to have survived from 1650 B.C. to the present.



The common practice of using long-established families in rural areas as
proxies for ancient populations is based on the assumption that these
families have been in a paticular vicinity for a very long time (hundreds of
years) and therefore reflect the underlying genetic substrate of the
surrounding area in question. Consider this: how many list members have
parents and grandparents who were born in the same place that they were? Of
that small fraction, how many were there several generations prior to the
grandfather's generation? I'm not in that group. I have to go back to the
mid 1700's to find anyone in my Y line who was born in the same place as
their grandfather. We have moved around a lot. Even though we have the Y
line now from Thomas Bird (1595??-1662) confirmed among several Bird
cousins, we don't really know exactly where or when Thomas Bird was born
(although it was somewhere in Britain, since he came to Ipswich, MA in
1638-9 and was found in Hartford in 1644.) So he isn't much help in
establishing the 17th century distribution of V13, for example.



However, I also have a distant cousin, surname Wadsworth (Y hap G2), who
lives today in the house built by his ancestor John Wadsworth of Farmington,
CT in the 1660's. (It has had a few updates since 1660, such as electricity
and indoor plumbing.)

:-) John Wadsworth settled in Farmington in about 1645. John's father was
William Wadsworth, one of the founders of Hartford. This (living)
individual represents a part of the genetic substrate of Farmington, CT from
its earliest settlement. What is the problem with using his Y haplotype to
study that 400 year old population, for example? Or for that matter, since
we have proof now that he matches the Wadsworth G2 line described in the
Turi King/Mark Jobling study of British surnames from 2009, using William
Wadsworth's descendants as representative of the region of the West Riding
of Yorkshire from which that family originated (dating back at least to the
Domesday book)? The principal is essentially the same for the Oxford and
Sheffield studies and is why, I think, Mark Thomas is willing to say that
there was a displacement of the Romano-British population by the
Anglo-Saxons from central England. The genetic evidence itself points to a
significant difference statistically; only the explanation is debatable.



With regard to aDNA, it is very interesting, but there never will be a
decent sized sample of aDNA to work with, because relatively few bones,
teeth, etc. have survived to the present in any form that is useful for that
purpose. A given burial might tell you something about an individual, but
probably will never tell you anything about the population generally. The
burial could always be an exception, genetically speaking. The single male
R1a burial found in Germany recently simply informs us that this person's
haplogroup made it further west than we thought previously. That is
interesting, but one cannot, for example, extrapolate that R1a was the
dominant haplogroup in that region based upon the one sample. I would guess
that the next few samples found might be R1b instead. Even with one R1a and
5 R1b's, it would be completely erroneous to assume that 80% of mesolithic
or Neolithic males in what is now southern Germany were R1b. There isn't
nearly enough evidence and I doubt that there ever will be. The bones
generally don't survive with any Y DNA intact.



OTOH, we do have increasingly sophisticated ways to link the disciplines of
genetics, archaeology, and linguistics. I for one will be awaiting the
outcome of the Harvard-MIT-UC London collaboration with anticipation.

Steven Bird, DMA



>
> What studies have been done which allow the comment attributed to Reich:
> "But in fact, X-chromosomes in MedellĂ­n are mostly European." What are
these
> European identifiers and have we yet reached the sophistication to
> distinguish between Anglo Saxon identifiers on the X and Romano Celtic? A
> reference for me to go to would be useful.
>

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