Ethnicities

[DekuTrash]

Just a quick Q before I head to class.

How long does it take to develop an ethnicity?

[Angrychris]

Lol, depends who you ask and where they are from.

[sumskilz]

The problem is that ethnicity is a social construction; it's not something that has any foundation in hard science.

[bushbush]

it's due to the geographical separation of humans around the globe mainly in history. Over time they develop their own customs, language, culture and shared history and today they identify with each other for those similarities.

[Copperknickers II]

it's due to the geographical separation of humans around the globe mainly in history. Over time they develop their own customs, language, culture and shared history and today they identify with each other for those similarities.

That's about the size of it. It can also be picked up in certain Genetic markers whether you are Celtic, Germanic, Basque, etc. It takes about 1000 years for there to be 2 clear-cut ethnic markers where there was one before, if that helps.

[sumskilz]

That's about the size of it. It can also be picked up in certain Genetic markers whether you are Celtic, Germanic, Basque, etc. It takes about 1000 years for there to be 2 clear-cut ethnic markers where there was one before, if that helps.

Haplotypes don't really tell you much about ethnicity.

Haplotypes only trace your genetic heritage along two single branches, your direct male heritage and your direct female heritage. With an average generation span of 25 years, in 1000 years you will have 109,951,162,776 lineages (not accounting for inbreeding) of which your haplotypes tell you about only those two. So getting your haplotypes tested tells you about 0.0000000000009 percent of your ancestry from 1000 years ago, at least according to the math. Though the number is a bit higher because there is inbreeding, but again your haplotypes won't tell you how much.

In addition, the correlation between haplotypes and linguistic groups is really dodgy science. For it to actually work, people throughout history would have had to never have had sex with people outside of their ethno-linguistic group.

Still you are correct that some generalizations can be made about the origin of specific haplogroups. But take a look at this haplogroup map of Europe and tell me which one is Celtic:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Ethnicity is at its core about identity. Even race is a cultural construction. It is true that traits exist that are the result of people in different parts of the world adapting to their environments, but the distribution of these trait groups (clades) is in a smooth continuum.

EDIT: I read an article several years back about some work by an anthropologist and a statistician who determined that 80% of all people living 2000 years (regardless of race) are the direct ancestors of every living person today (regardless of race). The other 20% have no living descendents because their lines have died out. This is such a high statistical probability that it is nearly impossible that it is not true. I know that might sound outlandish but consider that at 80 generations back each of us has 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 potential ancestors when the world population was only an estimated 200,000,000.

[Gauvin]

Technically Palestinians are relatively new ethnicity... before Israel was created, everyone who lived in the manndate of Palestine were referred to as "Palestinians" including Jews.. Arabs designated themselves as Arab, not Palestinian, but they're now considered an ethnicity. So, it can be a pretty short period of time.

[Ima Farmathar]

R1a

[sumskilz]

R1a

R1a is believed to have originated in the Ukraine about 18,000 years ago. Linguists believe that the Proto-Celtic language developed about 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. R1a is however associated with the spread of the Indo-European languages though it pre-dates Proto-Indo-European as well. It is the most common haplotype in India and Eastern Europe. If you were just looking at the map, I wonder why you didn't guess R1b based on distribution. That would be wrong as well though because it is considerably older than R1a. There is no Celtic haplotype.

[Henrik]

People who have their own nation with their own history (defined by language and culture).

[Dodge]

People who have their own nation with their own history (defined by language and culture).

And also people who don't.