More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and
mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world.
My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South India and eventually thousands of years later to Australia. My ancestors are from the west coast of India. About 5% of Indians carry this mutation (shared with indigenous australians) according to the data that was available at that time.
As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features: Aryan invasion, Dravidian etc. Human migration appears to be much richer. There have been many migrations of humans groups both in and out of the Indian subcontinent going on for more than 50K years.
In terms of progress in DNA sequencing this is quite an old news. Quite a lot of studies have been conducted since then with better sequencing techniques. David Reich, a well known researcher in the field, a student of Svante Pääbo who was awarded the Nobel Prize[1] for pioneering this field and technique, has authored a terrific book[2] synthesising all these findings.
The details are fascinating a nuanced, highly recommend this book if you would like to pursue this rabbit hole.
The book from Svante Pääbo [3] is equally fascinating which goes into the details of how DNA sequencing works to determine ancient ancestry. In a way it takes off from where the Y-chromosome study ends.
That there is some Indian introgression into Aborigibal genomes is completely not surprising based on phenotypic characteristics of their faces as well as other aspects of their cultures like language. It was remarked upon by "previous simplistic pre-scientific" British settlers, who it turns out were quite right. Many other older theories have turned out to get support from the genetic evidence.
The study above argues convincingly for later contact though. There were probably several waves, theres other (disputed) circumstantial evidence for this. When we sequence more (if allowed) we will find richer picture as the OP alludes to.
If you have the raw sequence, services like yfull.com can help provide more detailed information. At this point, new haplotypes are being called every month. When I sequenced my own haplotype about 20 years ago (I was in the Indian lab partner of the Genographic Project at the time), the best we could do was call a few handfuls of mutations by hand (I used to run the gels myself) and my own haplotype was characterized out to maybe 3 mutations - the current haplotype is perhaps out to 20?
I don't have the raw sequence. The project handled DNA data in total privacy.
I did send my DNA swab a second time about 5-6 years later, this time to look at my maternal line (mitochondrial dna). The report had changed quite a bit possibly because the project had gathered more data in the intervening years. .
I've stopped looking into this further - I really don't care about my ancestors or genetics. More interested in humans as a whole - and for that we need more data.
The field has advanced incredibly since then - uniparental markers like mitochondria or Y are a helpful clue, but we have so much genome wide information now. Indian population genetics is still in its infancy, though, since Indian government rules around the export of biomaterial means only Indian labs can work on them, and honestly most of them have strong biases they're looking to confirm. So much of the Indian population information in databases is simply extrapolated from tiny, non-representative samples collected from Indians abroad.
> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism
It's funny you should mention this, as I saw the documentary and I seem to remember some North American indigenous tribes refusing to participate. Their reasoning was the Nat Geo was just trying to prove they were immigrants like everyone else.
You probably know this having watched the documentary, but I'm just adding context for others.
It's primarily because many American tribes try to maintain religious beliefs in conflict with an immigrant identity. Although, evidence points to most of the earliest American humans immigrating across the Bering Land Bridge ~20,000 years ago. The religious stories tribes tell depict that they came from American caves, soil, water sources or other nature-related points of origin.
It's religious-based denialism, no different than what other major religions do when their beliefs conflict with reality.
> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features
Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from geography, and the simplistic categorization of humans into ~5 races corresponds well to clusters on a genetic map. See:
Yes, ppl in the same country have more similar genomes. But modern population genetics has found that 1. There is more similarity than difference between any 2 humans on earth (there are africans and europeans who share more dna than with others of their own ancestry. And, 2. People move around, a lot! We knew this already but there are a huge number of undocumented migrations that are being revealed by these studies. Turns out 20th century multiculturalism is just an acceleration of what we already did.
Man, it’s kinda scary hearing the “more similarity between any two humans” line here on HN. That one’s up there with the “we only use 10% of our brains” line, for me. My understanding is that’s a pretty well documented misconception about genetic diversity which doesn’t really apply here.
> But modern population genetics has found that 1. There is more similarity than difference between any 2 humans on earth
It's not even that modern. A human shares over 98% of the DNA of a pig, and about 50% of the DNA of a tree. Anything much closer to us than a tree has "more similarity than difference" to humans on a genetic level.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." - Orwell
> there are africans and europeans who share more dna than with others of their own ancestry
You're probably referring to the "greater variation within than between races" argument. But it's only true when looking at single genes, not collections of genes - that is how genetic tests can accurately determine race. And most traits are polygenic, so it does not even make sense to compare using only individual genes.
That's the reason Asian couples don't spontaneously give birth to European-looking children, and vice versa. And genes not expressed in superficial appearance were exposed to selection pressure just as much.
Whenever you see a theory so obviously contradict the evidence of your eyes, you should be at least skeptical of it (though not dismissive - e.g. quantum mechanics are true, however counterintuitive)
Yes you are right about the greater variation being localised. But I thought it was localised at the level of linkage disequlibrium blocks which can encompass many thousands of genes at their largest.
Regardless the genetic distance between any two people remains tiny compared to the distance between even closely related species or sub-species elsewhere.
You're talking about averages. The idea that "genetic tests can accurately determine race" kind of falls apart when you apply it to an individual with mixed ancestry. You can probably detect and quantity the extent of the mix (which is why 23andme or ancestry can make money), but labelling a bunch of averages as "race" and arguing that there is an innate and immovable property of biology seems like there's something you're missing in drawing these correlations. You can start at a conclusion and show all sorts of correlations given enough data, but it doesn't give validity of how this is somehow the right way to look at it.
And that's not even getting into how you're giving off creepy eugenicist vibes.
Lewontin came to that conclusion by examining exclusively blood type alleles, which was kind of asinine because they have no apparent geographic distribution pattern at all. Other genetic markers tell a much clearer story, as the principal component analysis shows. It couldn't really be any more obvious - the PCA makes a map. You can literally see each of the continents represented in a projection of genetic data.
Something like 30-50% of all human genetic variants are shared across continents. It's hardly asinine to say that a significant proportion of genetic variation is shared with everyone. Depending where you are talking about, ~20% of variation is unique to a given continent.
I don't think PCA plots really tell us much beyond there being distinct genetic clusters? One could do a PCA only on people with european ancestry, or people living in a small town, and there would be plenty of interesting structure to look at.
> and the simplistic categorization of humans into ~5 races corresponds well to clusters on a genetic map
Are you familiar with principal component analysis? That’s what was used to generate the very clearly clustered charts that you linked to. It’s useful for analysis because it exaggerates the density and distinctness of clusters based on major features. But what that means is precisely that those clusters are not real! You’re mistaking a visual/analytical aid for raw data. A bit like looking at a false-color diagram of the human body and concluding based on it that blood is blue.
> it exaggerates the density and distinctness of clusters
It does the opposite - the PCA graph shown is 2D, meaning points in the N-dimensional space are projected onto a single plane. In this projection, information is lost - i.e. point-clouds that are distinct in 3D may overlap in 2D. While we are shown the axes along which the data is most distinct, the true clusters are even more distinct, as every added dimension would contribute additional 'distinctness'.
No, sorry, you’re just wrong here. You can run PCA with pretty much any set of genetic samples and get a very nicely clustered graph, because that’s what PCA is for. See this PCA graph [0] on population groups present in Brazil. Should Xavante people be the sixth race in your taxonomy? They sure look distinct from other Amerindians and very distinct from the rest of the world!
(No, of course they shouldn’t. It’s just that extracting features to artificially cluster points along the most characteristic axes is what PCA is for.)
I believe I described PCA accurately, so could you elaborate which part of my statement is wrong?
> extracting features to artificially cluster points along the most characteristic axes is what PCA is for
How is the clustering "artificial"? Because if you generate data without clusters (e.g. points evenly distributed within a sphere), applying PCA to it won't show clusters either.
It might support the prescientific racial classifications, but it definitely undermines the idea of a nationally pure identity for any country. The "Aryan race" comes from the mixture of several different ancient cultures. The same can be said for north Indians, and other groups which claim to have some pure ancient genetic lineage.
> most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries
I'm surprised that anyone would really think otherwise. There is so much obvious similarity between people in different countries (well, the old countries, I mean, such as in Europe and Asia) that sometimes I wonder if each country has a relatively recent common ancestor.
> I'm surprised that anyone would really think otherwise
Usually they disprove a much stronger, extreme claim (e.g. some sort of racial purity, or the idea of entirely discontinuous, clearly-delimited races), then imply this means peoples are entirely interchangeable, and that the weaker, obviously-true claim of closer kinship within countries/regions is somehow false and/or meaningless.
Yep, it is a motte-and-bailey argument[1]. The motte is that the popular notion of race does not map completely accurately onto the spectrum of actual human genetic diversity, which of course is true. The bailey is that the idea of race is completely meaningless and that anyone who buys into it to any degree whatsoever is a racist. The bailey is often presented using the thought-terminating cliche of "race is an unscientific/pseudoscientific concept".
> that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries
These charts don't show what you apparently think they do. The samples in the larger datasets (like the HGDP) are chosen for their differentiation, often from indigenous groups, with admixture samples usually removed (the first adds in a few admixture types for the specifics of their study).
Your statement was "people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries"
The first chart shows a direct counterexample with "African American", "Mexican American" and "North America" groups more separated from each other than from other groups and yet many of them live in the same country. These are also not the only groups of people you'd find in North America, they're just the ones used in the study of Northwestern american indigenous groups that this is screenshotted from. This is, again, poor evidence for your claim.
Countries that had recent significant immigration are an exception, and their population will reflect the genetics of their geographic origins. I.e. African-Americans are closer related to Africans than to Italian-Americans. I thought this was obvious enough to not require a disclaimer.
I was speaking off the top of my head, hence the ~ preceding the 5. That said, more clusters may be visible on a 3D graph. The data itself has many more dimensions, and we see only a projection.
Sorry, I forget that I have to explain when I'm being sarcastic on Hacker News. The actual number of clear clusters I found was zero, maybe 2. The four groups I colored on the chart seem to follow the cleavages just as well as the ones shown originally, but they don't map to our culture's understanding of race at all. If we lived in a culture that believed that Europeans and Indigenous Alaskans were part of the same race, they could support that idea using that chart.
Perhaps more dimensions would reveal five or so clear clusters that correspond exactly to the races listed in the US census, but I suspect what it would actually reveal is that population genetics is really complicated and has lots of counter-intuitive cases that defy most people's naive expectations.
Your first graph is surprising. In general, people from across Africa have the greatest genetic diversity. Mostly thanks to founder effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect from what I heard.
But your first graph shows all of their African samples clustered relatively tightly together.
That's because the x-axis is "pairwise allele-sharing distance" ie: we munged the data every which way to find something that we could use k-means clustering to write a paper.
A better graph would be a "pairwise interracial-fucking distance" with the y axis
the percentage of healthy babies born. That would be just one cluster.
And it doesn't matter, because if you have mixed-race children then it's not true anymore. Past statistical distributions are not evidence of future statistical distributions.
As an only child raised far away from all family I find ancestry hugely interesting. Wanting to be part of a tribe is an inherently human trait. Finding jewish ancestry and that those that didn't leave eastern Europe were wiped out GREATLY changed my motivation to protect all people. Finding out that my quite unassuming grandfather (who made a huge difference in America's 80s farm crisis at the cost of his entire career in the 70s and was blacklisted from employment forever) descended from basically every European nobile and was more royal than my ex's side (who are very proud of their silver set handed down from their nobility) was so, so gratifying.
You should try talking to people with interesting ancestors (or views of their ancestors).
I won't go into too much detail here to avoid doxing myself, but I've had a few decent discussions about some of my and my friends' ancestors/likely ancestors as historical figures.
Depending on who you're (un)fortunate enough to be descended from, you might find yourself viewing certain historical events in a different light.
Personally as a child it helped me humanize these historical figures and view them as I would an uncle or grandfather, as opposed to the sometimes one-dimensional treatment notable figures would get from the educational system or culture you learn about them from.
Now as an adult it's perhaps less interesting, but I still know significantly more random trivia about historical figures I'm distantly related to compared to others.
It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective.
The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived.
There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did appreciate Dr Yuval Noah Harari's summary of the phenomenon in his book Sapiens.)
If it turns out that the original population was partly / mostly replaced (linguistically, culturally, genetically) relatively recently, that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning.
As I say, it's a shame, as the migration (including ethno & linguistic) paths over the past ~100k years are just amazing.
> the original population was partly / mostly replaced
Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.
You're right. I should have chosen better phrasing - perhaps gene pool instead of population, and diluted (but that still seems awkward) rather than replaced.
Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations? I don't know, TFA doesn't hint, and I suspect we don't have an abundance of natural experiments to compare with.
> Is an 11% genetic incursion a lot for ~ 150 generations?
I am not sure either. However, we do have a lot of natural experiments (and lab experiments) to explore this.
The 11% number comes from a clustering analysis. The user supplies k = number of ancestry groups, and the algorithm estimates proportion of genetics specific to each of k ancestry groups. So basically fancy k-means clustering. I don't know how robust it is and I would suspect a biased estimate.
As for over time... also complex. But I would imagine the best models would use exponetial distributions or similar as their basis (i.e. initially fast decrease in percentage followed by a slower rate of loss until equilibrium is reached).
>The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived.
This theory went down the drain when Europeans discovered Aboriginal shields (i.e. very fast). Spears and clubs are useful for hunting, shields only help against homo sapiens. They were fighting over resources just like anybody else, and their everyday lives were violent as hell, evidenced by parry fractures and skull cracks on fossil bones.
Also "living in harmony with the land" means watching your children starve to death after a dry spring.
It’s my understanding that while Harari’s books are fascinating and entertaining reads they’re mostly pop-science and lack much actual science. He’s a good storyteller but he presents his stories as though they’re fact when they are, at best, conjecture.
Agreed, and for no good reason too. All these notions of "purity of the blood" and that nonsense are shown up to be completely false when studied. We all collectively share lots of genetic code from many diverse ancestors, so I don't see why folks get all worked up about it.
I think the gap between Asia and PNG (then connected to AU) has got down to 90km. Doable with bamboo rafts? Viewing a mountainous island from an elevated position would give them reason to attempt it. Timor to PNG is suggested as the water crossing needed.
While there is considerable genetic diversity between Aboriginals as a whole, the diversity of individual communities is often quite low, and in response many communities evolved elaborate kinship systems to avoid too much intermarriage.
> The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived.
I thought it was generally accepted that IVC was an outside people too, from modern middle east, who emigrated less than 10,000 years ago (But much prior to Indo-European migrations).
> That potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning.
It should not. Most of the today's Indian culture formed in India despite some PIE roots.
> emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate [...] The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative [...] that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning. [...] it's a shame
Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.
What they're talking about is a very active debate in Australia.
The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived
Is absolutely what a lot of, if not the majority of people, believe.
From the article: a legacy of distrust about biological research among Aboriginal groups means that genetic studies are viewed suspiciously and samples are hard to come by
He's talking about the fact that Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans, reject any attempt to explain their origin via science as they stick to the story of their origin that comes from their religion, and see the science based origin as disrespectful.
> Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans, reject any attempt to explain their origin via science as they stick to the story of their origin that comes from their religion, and see the science based origin as disrespectful.
No, they do not all do this, and I'd caution you on speaking for a people that aren't a monolith within their mobs in the first place.
Would assume you're of or closely affiliated with Aboriginal heritage given the phrasing. My assessment of this is that if this were to become part of the established history of indigenous Australians, quite a bit of the narrative around 'ownership' changes dramatically.
For the international audience, that UK assumption of "Terra Nullus" was knocked back and overturned by the Mabo decision of 1992:
In Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2), judgments of the High Court inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law.
The High Court recognised the fact that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs.
Ahh, sweet gotcha you found there fella.
I don't think I need to explain to you the difference between members of the British government declaring Australia Terra-Nulius (with approximately 0 outcry from their citizens) and some bozo deciding that all Indigenous Australians don't believe in science. If you cant see the difference it's only because you choose not to.
It doesn’t, though. It doesn’t matter if they’re genetically intermixed with Indians at some point in the last few thousand years. They were still here before White Australia was. And where I live, we still fought wars to eradicate the local mobs. We still stole children from them, not that long ago.
Haha hows it going mate! There's a lot of sweeping generalisations in this thread. Should be expected considering the audience, I guess, but it's still disappointing
Right, so you're allowed to spout whatever idiocy you want, but others aren't allowed to call you on it. Sounds about right.
You grew up in Aus apparently, but seem to have very little understand of ATSI culture and how diverse it is. Come work with my partner at IUIH and then generalise the way you have been.
Generalise disparate groups of people elsewhere. And shove off with your thought terminating cliches: it's not pearl clutching, it's educating you, because you apparently require it.
Your point was hardly "real" either bucko, you ascribe a large group of people with a specific belief (without any citations) and then try to skip out of any culpability by saying its a generalisation.
You seem like one of those insecure types who need to have the last word, so it's all yours buddy. Enjoy, and I hope you get whatever feeling it is you're seeking by doing so.
Got a source for this fact? Generalising opinions to a whole race is rarely wise. Perhaps like anyone else with religious beliefs, those who are offended simply want their culture respected.
some of them may not want their legal privileges backed by historical narratives compromised by scientific findings; this is very common with native american tribes, for instance the lipan apaches in texas. additional science can only hurt their position with respect to the BIA.
The (only recently created) legal privileges of native title are severely limited and can be effortlessly extinguished. These limited privileges are based on (belated) recognition of prior occupation, but irrespective of how long people were here before colonisation.
on the other side of the ledger, significant legal harms are imposed on predominantly Indigenous regions, including apartheid-style laws that are applied on the basis of race, and lower standards of basic services provided through dedicated streams again predicated on race.
there are reasons to believe that some groups with legal claims have no legitimate grounds and only point to fragmentary records of prior occupants that they can provide no evidence of connection with. perhaps if you can manage to think past the scary words you can recognize that some people exploit systems to their advantage.
what reasons, what legal claims, and most of all: what advantage do you imagine Indigenous Australian people might gain on the basis of the extent of their heritage?
the sustained deficit of public housing? the lack of safe drinking water? the big blue signs slandering entire communities as drunken perverts? the mass sackings to force people onto quarantined welfare? the draconian star-chamber powers granted to the ACC? the systemic theft of hard-won social infrastructure?
because all of these 'advantages' are granted to anyone living in predominantly Indigenous postcodes of the NT, regardless of how long you dare to admit their ancestors were here.
I just read your comments, and you seem to be saying your subjective experience amounts to evidence (for you, which is fine)
But the argument was that this was an emotionally charged topic and you displayed that while appearing to argue the opposite.
As a fellow Australian, I understand the over sensitivity, especially due to the Voice crap that's going on atm.
As for generalizing racially, I agree, it makes no sense. Which is why the voice thing sounds stupid to me.
I feel like there are two groups of indigenous peoples growing in Australia. What I call the 'technically aboriginals' and 'actual aboriginals' and I realize this might marginalize those with partial ancestry.
I often wonder if the voice is just being pushed by super liberal very light skinned aboriginals (that to me probably never suffered real discrimination) or outback dark skinned tribal bush aboriginals (that are discriminated against on site). I feel like the more bush you go, the more conservative you get...idk
No, I'm not talking about subjective experience at all.
ALL that happened was that I made a generalization, and other people wanted to contest it because, well, they could. It's not more complicated than that.
It's basically if I said most action movies have a car chase or gun fight, and someone wanted to die on the hill claiming that that generalization is inaccurate and not all action movies have to have a gun fight or car chase.
I agree though that the discrimination of aboriginals is politicized though, and it shouldn't be.
Based on my (very) subjective experience, a lot of the noise around the Voice + Invasion Day is being created by people with extremely tenuous links to indigenous heritage - which I think is maybe shifting away from what could be much more positive outcomes for truly marginalised Aboriginals.
So just so I understand, your source is growing up in one of the several hundred separate Aboriginal nations of Australia, most of whom have completely different languages and are dispersed across a vast nation as big as the continental United States and he speaks for all of them. Got it.
Trying to map natural language statements to formal logic doesn't work well, unless you make a ton of assumptions as you have here...and then it still doesn't work well.
>He's talking about the fact that Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans...
They presumably asked for a source for both claims, your only provided one says you lived among them. Either you grew up among both populations or have provided no source for one of your claims.
Just curious, but are you on the spectrum? Or an ESL speaker?
Context makes it clear which claim they were asking for.
In any case, I'm not providing a source. This is a somewhat commonly known thing, and I was speaking from personal experience. If you're still really unsure where I grew up, you can probably figure it out from my other comments.
Feel free to search for whatever you find sufficient to corroborate my claims, or continue to be skeptical (as you should). I don't mind either way.
And I'm saying the place to have that fight is with the putative Aboriginals and not here on HN where everyone is just talking about the science.
I mean, I get it. People are mean. People are unreasonable. Lots of good discussion can't happen because people are mean and unreasonable. But you're not making things better by assuming bad faith and throwing shade at everyone else preemptively. That's just being mean and unreasonable.
No reason to say that though. The person you replied to was saying it is a shame it is an emotionally charged discussion and he is right. That one particular discussion on HN might not be emotionally charged doesn't negate his point.
The best way to get an emotionally charged discussion on Hacker News is to put a caveat that it's unfortunate that a topic is emotionally charged. It's a lightning rod and discussion bridge for people who just want debate controversial issues. I certainly have been on both sides of it.
It was very insightful for me to know that its common amongst Aboriginals there to have that view. I will corroborate it elsewhere now what I know what to look for.
> Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans, reject any attempt to explain their origin via science as they stick to the story of their origin that comes from their religion, and see the science based origin as disrespectful.
I mean, if we are going to make these kinds of broad generalizations and comparisons, could we at least change “Native Americans” to “Christian fundamentalists”.
It doesn't seem difficult to find groups that reject science when it conflicts with their beliefs. Doesn't this make a stronger case for the person to whom you're replying? Humans are far from avoiding appeals to emotion, and that's doubly true for politically charged topics, which this very much is.
Ok, I give up. That's about the 20th mocking, insulting comment of yours I've read on this page, while you pretend to occupy the high ground. Sickening stuff. HN deserves way better.
Please refresh on the guidelines. There aren't many in the first 10 paragraphs of the "In comments" guidelines you haven't broken on this page, multiple times. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No problem, I'm sure it's not just me who felt that. Also, please consider that even if you were totally right about everything and everyone you interacted with totally wrong, that would be no justification at all for the way you've carried on on this page.
what I've noticed in my lifetime is that the attempted narratives of mainstream science continue to edge towards original local knowledge.
if locals abandoned their knowledge and accepted the 40,000ya story told when I was a kid, they'd be out by just as much given the 80,000ya now indicated by artefacts at M2, Madjedbebe; the oldest site of continual human habitation.
If I'm understanding you correctly, there are some things revealed by science that seem to match some kinds of ancient knowledge, but that could easily just be coincidence.
I enjoyed the book, though I used the audio version which I suspect skews my opinion upwards. Thoroughly enjoyed it, but I understand some HNers have cause to argue with some of his conclusions.
Anyway, I looked up the author's name as I didn't trust my memory.
No it's on my list to read, I was just curious if you had looked it up or memorized the name. Just a random passing thought I decided to turn into a comment. Thanks for answering!
I recommend too. This is the documentary created by Spencer Wells who led the National Genographic project. This was created using data about 15 years ago - I've been looking forward to an update that accounts for recent data.
Looks like this is quite old...they will probably find even more introgression. Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago), so there basically had to be a substantial amount of gene flow as well. Only a minority of the aboriginal languages come from an earlier substrate. It would be surprising if there doesn't also emerge evidence of substantial conflicts around this time.
> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)
I'm assuming you're referring to the Pama-Nyungan family, which predates the dingo by nearly 2000 years?
I can't find any documentation of the Indian language families connection, do you have any?
This reminds me of the Tamil nationalists who, like some Serbs, like to claim that their language is the ur-language.
both dingo and the spread of this family are around 5000 years give or take and roughly contemporaneous with this introgression in OP. None of the dates are known with that much precision afaik. It seems the theory that the languages are indian is disputed, so lets just say a lot of new stuff was happening around that time.
There is disputed circumstantial evidence for other waves of migration. For example the Bradshaw paintings have long been thought to be the work of newer peoples (maybe from papua). Some people dispute this and say it discounts the abilities of the natives there, and that may be true, there could be just one group always there who did them and then stopped. But the art bears little resemblance to earlier art there or in other regions of australia, which is often little more than handprints or slightly cartoonish looking things. The bradshaws are quite different and it at least makes sense to ask if there wasnt some new wave of peoples with unique tools and art style. Or otherwise some kind of "golden era" where there was more population and other interesting things happened. Something to look for in future. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings)
Most of the claims Im making come straight from the nature article at the top. First paragraph:
"Northern Aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a new study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants <may?> also have brought more advanced tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo."
The pama-nyungan proto-language has been estimated to be around 5,000 years old, roughly. There are sources for this claim in the wikipedia article, and also for the claim that 306/~400 aborginal languages are in this family. The "out of india" theory is more disputed than I thought (corrected this elsewhere), but is a proposed theory. There are several theories here, but the paper argues for basically what Ive said elsewhere: https://langev.com/pdf/442ac40068c1d8a67a561d0d7f0fcd95c429c...
I talked about the bradshaw paintings somewhere else, the wikipedia article on these has good sources i also have some papers somewhere. Notnsure what else you want to get started.
Theres a lot of speculation around all of this. It is still a source to back up this theory and leads you to others about the archeology. Here is a genetic study from 2016 that disputes the one in this article: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)....
No one really knows until we sequence way more people and more bones.
> 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago)
Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.
It only took 200 years for 200 of those 260 languages to be lost or brought to the edge of extinction. It's at least plausible and to me quite believable that the arrival of a group with a technological advantage 4,000 years ago could have had a substantial impact on the existing languages.
The same set of languages definitely will not have survived for 60,000 years. Tribes come and go, merge and split. Outside influences bring in new words and grammatical structures. Oral tradition is a low fidelity carrier of language and culture, and easily accommodates change in language.
Your article doesn't provide any evidence that Pama–Nyungan languages are from India. You'd think the Wikipedia article on Dravidian wouldn't say "The Dravidian family has defied all of the attempts to show a connection with other languages" if there was some evidence of the language families relation.
Especially only 4,000 years ago. I’m under the impression that the culture is much much older than that. Why would it change so quickly? Especially for a people’s that are quite traditional. At least as I understand it.
I also understand that the native languages are mostly spoken and not written, are these Indian languages written?
There is compelling but rare evidence of habitation back as far at 60,000 years. But there is zero reason to assume the continent was sealed to migration at any point. In fact it was disconnected and reconnected by land bridges more than once over that period. Culture is a process not an artifact. Regarding the speed of change, tally the vocab contribution of Norman French, Anglo Saxon, Roman and Brittonic languages to modern English -- the 'place' has almost forgotten the contributions made beyond about 1,600 years ago even if there are living residents that are genetically linked to inhabitants from thousands of years before.
Australasia has not been joined to the rest of the world by land bridges for tens of millions of years. That's why so much of the fauna is strange and unusual. Humans are one of the few mammalian species that have managed to cross the deep water barriers on our own.
True, you've never been able to just walk it like you could to Tasmania. I mean millions of years ago, Australia was further south -- it's been inching north[1]. Sea levels around the last glacial maximum[2] made the distances much more 'canue-able'. I would consider that at least 'more connected', but you are correct.
Various aboriginal cultures (there isnt just one) have elements which are much older but over 300 of the ~400 languages are from one family (pama nyungyan). This family's common ancestor is traced to a region in North Australia around 5000 years ago. These languages suddenly exploded and spread across the continent at around the same time other technologies and techniques seem to change. This was around the time of the Dingo introduction and this considerable Indian introgression discussed in paper--the dingo was probably brought by these people. I may have misremembered that these languages have some relation to south indian ones, it seems this is disputed, but this is all happening around the same time. There is a lot that isn't known about Aboriginal peoples and the genetic studies once they are performed (if allowed) are likely going to show a more complex picture than the usual narrative. To the person who called me a tamil nationalist or something i can only laugh.
Linguistic displacement can occur without genetic displacement. This has happened many times in history -- usually when a society's elite are displaced by a linguistically distinct foreign elite and their language is gradually adopted down the ranks of society as people seek advancement. Many branches of Proto-Indo-European (eg. Anatolian) are thought to have spread in this manner ie. with elite but not whole-population displacement.
I wasn't aware of this Australian language family example, but it may not be as surprising as it sounds at first.
My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following:
spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).
This is true but is also something there would be reason to doubt in Australian context. It seems more likely that peoples in northern australia had some contact with outsiders around the time discussed in article, got some technological advances and small degree of genetic mixing from absorbing the outsiders, and then spread out, probably helped by some new techniques. But this is just one conjecture.
I have no idea if its true or not, but it doesn't sound totally impossible. Look at how the language make up has changed over the last 300 years in north america.
The entire country of India doesn't speak only Dravidian languages. You can understand where the confusion comes from right? The person I was replying too didn't say Dravidian, it says Indian languages.
I was saying this based on what Ive read previously. It seems the theory is more disputed than I remember but it is consistent with this genetic introgression and other things happening at the time. Whatever the case a lot of things changed circa 5000 years ago.
> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families
This is wrong. No known relationships exist between any Australian Aboriginal language and any language from India. For much of far northern Australia, no known relationships exist between even neighbouring languages! (The non Pama-Nyungan languages, to be specific.)
>An expansion [ of the family from the Gulf of Carpentaria] at this time is consistent with evidence from early genetic studies for gene flow into Australia from India ~4–5 ka21, but more recent work has called these findings into question
It doesn't talk about Indian languages specifically. The Gulf of Carpentaria is on the Australian side of the gulf between Australia and Indonesia.
it seems the theory is more disputed than i remember, so lets say around 5000 years ago there was perhaps significant indian introgression into aborginal genetics (as per article above), the introduction of new tools, the arrival of the dingo (speculated by some to be introduced by these indian peoples) and the spread of this language family from a small progenitor language to the dominant language on the continent. So something significant was happening at that time. There are other hints there couldve been previous waves of new peoples from art and so on (these are disputed, from memory). The story of the aboriginals will wind up being more complex and interesting than "showed up 60,000 years ago and were unchanged until the first fleet".
Well it is dominant in that >300/~400 languages are bow in this family. This paper argues for a mid-holocene origin from a proto language around the time we are discussing, and also mentions some other theories w sources (https://langev.com/pdf/442ac40068c1d8a67a561d0d7f0fcd95c429c...)
"Thus, the f4 statistics indicate a signal of gene flow from India to Australia and, furthermore, that the source population is more closely related to present-day Dravidian-speaking Indian groups than to Onge."
The only interesting thing I know about Aborigines is they're the only known people who didn't invent the bow and arrow. As a hobbyist archer this is fascinating to me.
They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.
It's the wood. You can rank woods by the amount of strain energy per unit of mass that they can take before breaking. The higher this figure, the better the bow, because it'll store more energy for a lower mass in the limbs before it breaks, and the differences can be fairly significant.
The best bow woods are all at the top of this list, along with a few that should be good in theory but aren't used likely for other reasons (i.e. the plant just doesn't produce the kind of limbs you need to make a bow). The best Australian woods are fairly ordinary by comparison. On average they're hopeless. This isn't to say you can't do it (people do with spotted gum, which isn't a good bow wood), just that there are better ways of going about it if you want to hunt.
I'd be surprised if northern Australians at least didn't know about the bow, because there was frequent contact with Indonesia and people from PNG, all of whom practiced archery. There are oral traditions in places like Arnhem land testifying to this contact going back generations.
Most Australian wood is also ultra-hard, you can't have a bendy bow from there. People used to build streets from blocks of Jarrah wood [1]. A much more popular Australian weapon was the combination of spear thrower and spear; that'll take your head off clean.
What's more intriguing is that we know for sure that Polynesians did know about the bow, and at least some of them even knew how to make it - but, for whatever reason, it wasn't used for anything "serious" like warfare.
It's tempting to chalk it down to some kind of strong cultural taboo, e.g. to keep the wars at a "manageable" level of destruction. But then why did Maori eagerly adopt firearms once they got access to them, and used them in warfare between themselves?
Huh! I have a locally made wood bow made from red oak and it's an absolute bastard to shoot. I think the bowyer wanted to one-up my 55# Samick sage so he made it a 56# draw weight. And even with a thick leather armguard it hurts quite a lot to shoot because the brace height is barely over 5" and it doesn't have a trigger grip being a piece of wood. I wonder where red oak ranks on the strain/mass chart. I'm used to hearing about yew being a really good wood for bows, but I'm more into shooting them than making them.
Yeah that page is a decent start. Dividing modulus of rupture by the density of the wood gives you the Joules/kg that the material will take before breaking. Yew is quite good. Osage, lemonwood, black locust, hickory etc. are all very good. Elm works but it's worse than yew. Bamboo should also be very good, but its properties vary widely and aren't really captured on that site.
Australian river red gum is theoretically decent, and I know that people have made serviceable bows from it. I think merbau backed with bamboo is about as good as it gets for Aussies, and merbau is an import.
Hunting boomerangs didn't return to the thrower. Picture a symmetrical returning boomerang you're used to, now massively shorten one of the "legs": that's the hunting boomerang I've been shown
To be a bit more specific returning boomerangs were used to hunt birds. While the non returning boomerangs you refer to were used for land animals and warfare.
Although traditionally thought of as Australian, boomerangs have been found also in ancient Europe, Egypt, and North America. There is evidence of the use of non-returning boomerangs by the Native Americans of California and Arizona, and inhabitants of South India for killing birds and rabbits.
As others have commented, boomerangs didn't work for hunting like the way they're culturally depicted. Thinking about it I have no idea how it'd even be possible to kill an animal and have the missile return given the necessary collision.
>Here’s a scenario. A ship from some Indian civilization about 4000 years ago [maybe Indus] loses its way and ends up crashing on the shore of Arnhem Land. Like most ships, its crew is all male. They survive the landing, and end up warring with a local tribe. Eventually, they kill off most of the men and annex the sobbing women. The new tribe has 5x higher carrying capacity, essentially due to better technology, and they’re militarily superior as well – better weapons and tactics. They expand and expand, picking up more and more old Australian genes as they do so. Not as an empire – they’re too simple for that – but the tribes that descend from them keep winning. They speak the ancestor of the Macro-Pama-Nyungan languages, which originates as a mix between their old-Dravidian language (from the men) and some local Australian tongue (from the women).
>One funny thing about this scenario: the sailors lose almost all of their civilization, and probably thought they were descending into savagery. On the other hand, the locals probably thought of the castaways as incredibly advanced, magicians or gods. They were both right.
I understand how the theory of dna ancestry works, but it’s not so clear cut. We still don’t have a good understanding of how these things work over the time scales of Australia (60,000 years of inhabitation).
Saying that one boat accidentally crashed and took over Australia culturally is technically possible but completely without evidence, “11%” or not.
Maybe this is why I thought Maddeline Madden from Wheel of Time was South Indian when I saw her, as I hadn't paid attention to cast names, only to discover she's Australian Aboriginal
My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South India and eventually thousands of years later to Australia. My ancestors are from the west coast of India. About 5% of Indians carry this mutation (shared with indigenous australians) according to the data that was available at that time.
As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features: Aryan invasion, Dravidian etc. Human migration appears to be much richer. There have been many migrations of humans groups both in and out of the Indian subcontinent going on for more than 50K years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genographic_Project