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Thread: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

  1. #1
    Tiro
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    Default Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Ancient DNA from the skeletons of Roopkund Lake reveals Mediterranean migrants in India
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11357-9
    Abstract
    Situated at over 5,000 meters above sea level in the Himalayan Mountains, Roopkund Lake is home to the scattered skeletal remains of several hundred individuals of unknown origin. We report genome-wide ancient DNA for 38 skeletons from Roopkund Lake, and find that they cluster into three distinct groups. A group of 23 individuals have ancestry that falls within the range of variation of present-day South Asians. A further 14 have ancestry typical of the eastern Mediterranean. We also identify one individual with Southeast Asian-related ancestry. Radiocarbon dating indicates that these remains were not deposited simultaneously. Instead, all of the individuals with South Asian-related ancestry date to ~800 CE (but with evidence of being deposited in more than one event), while all other individuals date to ~1800 CE. These differences are also reflected in stable isotope measurements, which reveal a distinct dietary profile for the two main groups.
    I am a bit of a democratic hobbyist when it comes to anthropology and archaeology. What a large group of Mediterranean derived people were doing around a lake in the Himalayas, in the 19th Century, is quite curious.

    Actually, I need some vocab help. Would "~1800 CE" mean the century after Christ, or 1800 years from the present?
    Last edited by Bob69Joe; August 20, 2019 at 06:39 PM.
    Gornahoor|Liber esse, scientiam acquirere, veritatum loqui
    Crow states: "If you would be a great leader, then learn the way of the Tao. Relinquish the need to control. Let go of plans and of concepts. The world will govern itself. The more restrictive you are, the less virtuous people will be. The more force you display, the less secure they will feel. The more subsidies you provide, the less self-reliant they become. Therefore the master says: Un-write the law, thus the people become honest. Dispense with economics, thus the people become prosperous. Do without religion, thus the people become serene. Let go all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass." ~ Lao Tzu - Tao te tching
    MONARCHY NATION TRANSCENDENCE

  2. #2

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    We know there was trade between the Mediterranean world and China and China. This group could have been part of the silk road travel. It is not too hard a stretch to see a group of people going from first the Mediterranean to India and then on through the the Himalayans as part of some trade group. and then onto IVC as part of a trade route. Likely they were a group of merchants who settle in the area with their families and servants as part of some trade route, much like how Marco Polo went all the way to China. The Silk Road did not entirely disappear when the Europeans pioneered the sea routes to the East.

    As for the South Asian, they also could have been part of some trade route as well, . Or perhaps they were a group of Buddhist religious piligrims from South Asia seeking training or knowledge at so e Buddhist learning center or temple long since forgotten.

    Do we know if there are any minerals in the area that might have been valuable to distant traders, precious stones, and such?

    PS - I misread 1800 CE as 1800 BCE. I updated to reflect that fact
    Last edited by Common Soldier; August 21, 2019 at 02:05 PM.

  3. #3
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    CE means Common/Current/Christian Era, it can be used instead of AD.
    Cause tomorrow is a brand-new day
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    Because tomorrow is a brand-new day


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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    So "East Mediterranean" ancestry could indicate Arab Muslims (not sure if the Caliphate penetrated as far as that region c. 800), or the descendants of Hellenes, or East Roman slaves from Anatolia traded across the Iranian plateau etc etc, still very low resolution on this evidence. Fascinating tidbit nevertheless.
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

  5. #5

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    The individuals with Eastern Mediterranean ancestry are all from about 1800. One looks to be an Anatolian Greek, the rest appear pretty much identical to modern people from Crete and mainland Greece, with most tending more toward the former than the latter. The isotope analysis gives a pretty good idea of what they had been eating the last ten to twenty years of their lives, and it seems to indicate they hadn't been eating seafood. None are closely related to each other.

    The Southeast Asian dates to about the same time as the Greeks. It's not clear what modern population he is most closely related to. He is more Malay-like than Vietnamese like, but probably something in between.

    The South Asians are from ~800. They appear to be a diverse group, or at least collectively don't match closely to any particular group today. Some are similar to Tiwari Brahmins. Some are similar to Bania, who as I understand it are more an occupational group than a caste, but clearly semi-endogamous. Some are similar to people from the Mala caste. None are similar to modern Himalayan people.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  6. #6
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Typical of you to be so unhelpfully vague .

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    ... None are similar to modern Himalayan people.
    So if I understand the implication you're saying they were lured into a Thuggee temple (persistent in the region for over a millennium) and had their hearts ripped out by a B grade Hollywood actor yelling bad Hindi?

    On a serious note I hadn't realised the caste were so clearly gene-defined. I was taught the caste system was more fluid prior to the British regularisation to the point it was (exaggeratedly) declared almost the invention of John Company.
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

  7. #7

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    On a serious note I hadn't realised the caste were so clearly gene-defined. I was taught the caste system was more fluid prior to the British regularisation to the point it was (exaggeratedly) declared almost the invention of John Company.
    Yeah, I think that theory falls into that category of ideas that were emotionally appealing to scholars like the view that Neolithic technology was spread primarily via cultural diffusion rather than extermination and replacement. Post WWII, a lot of scholarship was trending toward a view of prehistory that was more optimistic regarding human nature. It was seen as a corrective to simplistic thinking, and of course there was for obvious reasons a desire to undermine anything that could be used to promote Social Darwinist type ideology. So in some cases, new evidence has shown that the corrective was in fact an extreme over-corrective. The reality was in between in these cases, but factually turned out to be closer to the early Twentieth Century view than the late Twentieth Century view. Which is not to say that the arguments didn't seem plausible based on the knowledge at the time. All this appears to have broken the brains of sociocultural anthropologists who now live in an antipostivist world of make-believe, while physical anthropogists have become biocultural anthropologists fusing the work of old school sociocultural anthropologists with the evolutionary perspectives and hard sciences of their own field.

    The genetic evidence for the caste system is pretty clear. It looks like the caste system was well established by about 2,000 years ago and by 1,500 years ago it became so fixed that India's population structure was basically frozen in time at that point due to endogamy. Castes vary in their degree of Ancestral North Indian and Ancestral South Indian ancestry. The higher the caste, the more ANI, the lower the caste, the more ASI. ANI is basically a 50/50 mix of Yamnaya and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. ASI is basically a 75/25 mix of South Asian Hunter Gatherers and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. Indo-European male haplogroups range from 25% in the northwest to 14% in the south, whereas they range from 50% in the highest castes to near 0% in the lowest castes. Within India, genetic ancestry tends to have a greater correlation with caste than with language group or geography (though all factors correlate to some degree).

    Here are a few important papers:

    A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

    Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India

    Reconstructing Indian Population History

    EDIT: Looking at these radiocarbon dates, probably best to consider 800 and 1800 to be ±130 years. The individuals within each time-frame aren't necessarily contemporaneous.
    Last edited by sumskilz; August 22, 2019 at 12:04 AM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  8. #8
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Thanks for parsing that info. I'd like to be a bit more knowledgeable on how to read these "groupings" in the research papers, but I fear I'd have to go through hundreds of studies and only be able to loosely apply these terms to match correlations between related peoples.

    I admire the work of guys like the Greek man, Dienekes, over at https://dienekes.blogspot.com

    Dienekes' recently researching modern humans earlier than what is held in large of current Out-of-Africa. Use the archives on the side of the blog. He's been on "vacation" for a while, but he has tons of work going back to 2005 posted on the blog. https://dienekes.blogspot.com/2018/0...in-crisis.html
    Gornahoor|Liber esse, scientiam acquirere, veritatum loqui
    Crow states: "If you would be a great leader, then learn the way of the Tao. Relinquish the need to control. Let go of plans and of concepts. The world will govern itself. The more restrictive you are, the less virtuous people will be. The more force you display, the less secure they will feel. The more subsidies you provide, the less self-reliant they become. Therefore the master says: Un-write the law, thus the people become honest. Dispense with economics, thus the people become prosperous. Do without religion, thus the people become serene. Let go all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass." ~ Lao Tzu - Tao te tching
    MONARCHY NATION TRANSCENDENCE

  9. #9

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    Yeah, I think that theory falls into that category of ideas that were emotionally appealing to scholars like the view that Neolithic technology was spread primarily via cultural diffusion rather than extermination and replacement. Post WWII, a lot of scholarship was trending toward a view of prehistory that was more optimistic regarding human nature. It was seen as a corrective to simplistic thinking, and of course there was for obvious reasons a desire to undermine anything that could be used to promote Social Darwinist type ideology. So in some cases, new evidence has shown that the corrective was in fact an extreme over-corrective. The reality was in between in these cases, but factually turned out to be closer to the early Twentieth Century view than the late Twentieth Century view. Which is not to say that the arguments didn't seem plausible based on the knowledge at the time. All this appears to have broken the brains of sociocultural anthropologists who now live in an antipostivist world of make-believe, while physical anthropogists have become biocultural anthropologists fusing the work of old school sociocultural anthropologists with the evolutionary perspectives and hard sciences of their own field.

    The genetic evidence for the caste system is pretty clear. It looks like the caste system was well established by about 2,000 years ago and by 1,500 years ago it became so fixed that India's population structure was basically frozen in time at that point due to endogamy. Castes vary in their degree of Ancient North Indian and Ancient South Indian ancestry. The higher the caste, the more ANI, the lower the caste, the more ASI. ANI is basically a 50/50 mix of Yamnaya and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. ASI is basically a 75/25 mix of South Asian Hunter Gatherers and Neolithic Iranian Farmers. Indo-European male haplogroups range from 25% in the northwest to 14% in the south, whereas they range from 50% in the highest castes to near 0% in the lowest castes. Within India, genetic ancestry tends to have a greater correlation with caste than with language group or geography (though all factors correlate to some degree).

    Here are a few important papers:

    A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals

    Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India

    Reconstructing Indian Population History
    Those studies seem to support an Aryian Invasian Theory, although not necessarily the violent one proposed by the 19th century scholars.


    Out of curiosity, has any gentic studies been done on the Indus Valley Civilization tonsee how they compared?

    EDIT: Looking at these radiocarbon dates, probably bes itt to consider 800 and 1800 to be ±130 years. The individuals within each time-frame aren't necessarily contemporaneous.
    Yes, but the 1800 CE Eastern Mediterranean bodies would more sense if they died as a group at the same time, than as individuals at different times. If the bodies represented different times, then where are bodies of South Asian and locals that one would expect to see? Unless this was a cemetery reserved for the very rare eastern Mediterranean group that happened to die in the area, and that seems unlikely.

    The article said the area was a traditional pilgrimage sure for Hindus, that it was not near any major trade route. It thought these eastern Mediterraneans were unlikely to be religious pilgrims, but what if these were people originally from the Eastern Mediterranean who had gone native and adopted local religion while at an extended stay in India? These bodies indicated a mostly land diet, not marine, which could support the idea of an extended stay in India. Merchants might have come to India with h their servants and stayed, eventually adopted the local religion. They might have been killed during a pilgrimage to the area, in what I can think could have been a rock slide or a flash flood. Other articles talked about possibly being killed by hail stones, but a rock slide seems to me that if make more sense. Or drowning while crossing some local River in a storm.

    The 9th century CE South Asian/Indian bodies were more likely to have been separate events, given the diversity of backgrounds of the bodies. But it too could have been a single event as well. If the Eastern Mediterranean were not religious pilgrims, perhaps they were travelling with a group of pilgrims initially and then later join up with majornSilk Road routes later on.
    Last edited by Common Soldier; August 22, 2019 at 12:38 AM.

  10. #10
    Tiro
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Don't discount the frost giants hurling massive boulders for Odyssey's late trespasses, nevertheless Himalayan hailstones must be huge.
    Gornahoor|Liber esse, scientiam acquirere, veritatum loqui
    Crow states: "If you would be a great leader, then learn the way of the Tao. Relinquish the need to control. Let go of plans and of concepts. The world will govern itself. The more restrictive you are, the less virtuous people will be. The more force you display, the less secure they will feel. The more subsidies you provide, the less self-reliant they become. Therefore the master says: Un-write the law, thus the people become honest. Dispense with economics, thus the people become prosperous. Do without religion, thus the people become serene. Let go all desire for the common good, and the good becomes as common as the grass." ~ Lao Tzu - Tao te tching
    MONARCHY NATION TRANSCENDENCE

  11. #11

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Quote Originally Posted by Bob69Joe View Post
    Thanks for parsing that info. I'd like to be a bit more knowledgeable on how to read these "groupings" in the research papers, but I fear I'd have to go through hundreds of studies and only be able to loosely apply these terms to match correlations between related peoples.

    I admire the work of guys like the Greek man, Dienekes, over at https://dienekes.blogspot.com

    Dienekes' recently researching modern humans earlier than what is held in large of current Out-of-Africa. Use the archives on the side of the blog. He's been on "vacation" for a while, but he has tons of work going back to 2005 posted on the blog. https://dienekes.blogspot.com/2018/0...in-crisis.html
    Yeah, I read Dienekes. I have some comments on the issues with Out-of-Africa, but it probably deserves its own thread in the science section.

    I know the lead author of that paper he cites. He's at Tel Aviv University. A lot of shenanigans going on over there:

    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

    Quote Originally Posted by Common Soldier View Post
    Those studies seem to support an Aryian Invasian Theory, although not necessarily the violent one proposed by the 19th century scholars.

    Out of curiosity, has any gentic studies been done on the Indus Valley Civilization tonsee how they compared?
    So far, all that has been published are samples taken from the periphery - the Swat District of Pakistan. There are a lot of samples from the Harappan cemetery at Rakhigarhi, but there has been a lot of problems preventing them from being published. Problems revolving around the fact that the Indian government and a large segment of the population won't like the results. That said, I know the results from Rakhigarhi are basically the same as from the Swat District. Most of the ancestry of the Indus Valley Civilization came from the farmers who expanded eastward out of the Zagros Mountains, which are usually referred to as Neolithic Iranian farmers (Iranian in the regional sense). A minority of their ancestry came from the local South Asian hunter gatherers.

    Excerpts from 4500-year-old DNA from Rakhigarhi reveals evidence that will unsettle Hindutva nationalists:

    As the dust of the petrous bones of a 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Haryana, settles, we may have the answer to a few questions that have vexed some of the best minds in history and science -- and a lot of politicians along the way:

    Q: Were the people of the Harappan civilisation the original source of the Sanskritic language and culture of Vedic Hinduism? A: No.

    Q: Do their genes survive as a significant component in India's current population? A: Most definitely.

    Q: Were they closer to popular perceptions of 'Aryans' or of 'Dravidians'? A: Dravidians.

    Q: Were they more akin to the South Indians or North Indians of today? A: South Indians.

    All loaded questions, of course. A paper suggesting these conclusions is likely to be online in September and later published in the journal Science.

    These revelations are part of the long-awaited and much-postponed results of an excavation conducted in 2015 by a team led by Dr Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice chancellor of Pune's Deccan College.

    Why did it take so long? One answer was on offer exactly a year ago when this writer spoke to Shinde who was then holding out the promise of publishing the findings in September 2017. "It's a very politically sensitive issue," he said.

    The archaeologist was referring to the fact that any research dealing with the Harappan civilisation would have to confront the Hindutva agenda of the government of India -- whose politics demands a genuflection to Vedic Hinduism as the origin of Indian civilisation...

    On the face of it, the single most startling revelation of the Rakhigarhi research may be what it doesn't talk about: the complete absence of any reference to the genetic marker R1a1 in the ancient DNA retrieved from the site.

    This is significant because R1a1, often loosely called 'the 'Aryan gene', is now understood to have originated in a population of Bronze Age pastoralists who dispersed from a homeland in the Central Asian 'Pontic steppe' (the grasslands sprawling between the Black Sea and the Caspian) some 4,000 years ago. The genetic impact of their migrations has left a particularly strong and 'sex-biased', (i.e. male-driven) imprint on the populations of two geographically distant but linguistically related parts of the world: Northern India and Northern Europe.

    "We are not discussing R1a," says Niraj Rai, the lead genetic researcher on the Rakhigarhi DNA project. "R1a is not there." The admission came wrapped in some prevarication but was all the more telling given that the Rakhigarhi data presented in this paper are derived primarily from the genetic material of 'I4411', a male individual -- R1a is a mutation seen only in samples of the male Y chromosome.

    The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today...

    In March this year, the Harvard population geneticist David Reich published an overview of the state of research in his field, the surprise bestseller Who We Are and How We Got Here, including an account of how the extreme sensitivity of leading Indian scientists about earlier evidence suggesting an ancient migration of Eurasian people from the Northwest into the subcontinent had nearly scuppered an important scientific collaboration in 2008.

    The Indian scientists Lalji Singh and K. Thangaraj "implied that the suggestion of a migration would be politically explosive", Reich writes. The issue was ultimately resolved by means of a terminological sleight-of-hand -- using the nomenclature 'Ancestral South Indian' (ASI) and 'Ancestral North Indian' (ANI) to obscure the revelation that ANI represented a population with a significant genetic contribution from outside the subcontinent.

    But the same dynamic appears to have emerged this year around a paper involving both Reich and his team at Harvard on the one hand and the scientists leading the Rakhigarhi project on the other. Entitled, rather flatly, The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia, this paper (usually referred to by the shorthand 'M Narasimhan et al') -- made public as a 'pre print' in April -- would make headlines in the Indian press and social media and reveal some more of the political pressures that colour research on ancient Indian history today.

    Shinde said that he had complained to Reich about an earlier draft of that paper, and insisted that any reference to 'migrations' into South Asia be avoided. Or else. He suggested the more ambivalent term 'interaction' be used instead.

    Given that Shinde controlled access to the Rakhigarhi samples which Reich was keen to work on, this would have been a potent threat, and indeed the paper manages to eschew the term 'migration' entirely while ultimately making more potent statements about the impact of post-Harappan 'Middle to Late Bronze Age' (MLBA) Steppe populations on the Indian gene pool.

    However, the timing of the paper remains curious to say the least, given that it would have benefitted from the Rakhigarhi data which it seemed to pre-empt -- despite the fact that several of its co-authors, including Rai, Shinde, Thangaraj, Narasimhan and Reich now share credit for the mysteriously delayed paper.

    The official word on this was that the Rakhigarhi research was behind schedule due to the 'contamination of one sample', but at the time the geneticist community was abuzz with rumours that the slowdown was because of the Indian team's discomfort with politically inconvenient results.
    Also, here is the paper with samples from Pakistan: The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia

    Quote Originally Posted by Bob69Joe View Post
    Don't discount the frost giants hurling massive boulders for Odyssey's late trespasses, nevertheless Himalayan hailstones must be huge.
    Supposedly up to the size of a baseball.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  12. #12
    Praeses
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Sad when politics interferes with what could be interesting and useful science.

    Currently indigenous groups in Australia are seeking greater political recognition (they have been shafted as a group for a couple of centuries, I am a supporter of this worthy movement) but some of the "wordsmiths" love to deploy tags like "world's oldest continuous culture" and 'we have been here for 40,0000 years" which makes me squirm like a MF. My vague recollections of 1980's Australian archaeology is that there's been a couple of massive tech shifts, eg c. 3000 BP when dogs and some "proto-agricultural" tools appear. Surely there have been waves, replacements, invasions? Simple language suits slogans not truth.

    There were some bodies exhumed from Lake Mungo that were returned to traditional owners, a respectful act but I'd want to se the DNA results before I said they were family. Thirty millennia is a looooong time.

    On the matter of hailstones https://thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/...ters-rautahat/ (gumboot added for scale, what were there no bananas?)

    As for the samples from Swat:

    Did they drill the bones and sequence the genes?
    Did their answers amount to a hill of beans?
    Was permission asked or granted
    OR GOT
    From the Akond of Swat?
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

  13. #13

    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Quote Originally Posted by Cyclops View Post
    Currently indigenous groups in Australia are seeking greater political recognition (they have been shafted as a group for a couple of centuries, I am a supporter of this worthy movement) but some of the "wordsmiths" love to deploy tags like "world's oldest continuous culture" and 'we have been here for 40,0000 years" which makes me squirm like a MF. My vague recollections of 1980's Australian archaeology is that there's been a couple of massive tech shifts, eg c. 3000 BP when dogs and some "proto-agricultural" tools appear. Surely there have been waves, replacements, invasions? Simple language suits slogans not truth.

    There were some bodies exhumed from Lake Mungo that were returned to traditional owners, a respectful act but I'd want to se the DNA results before I said they were family. Thirty millennia is a looooong time.
    Heh, a search immediately turned up two, seven years apart - DNA confirms Aboriginal culture one of Earth’s oldest and Genetic Testing Reveals That The Earth’s Oldest Civilization Is The Aboriginal Australians.

    It's just the typical problem with journalists translating scientific studies for their audiences. What those studies are really indicating is that Aboriginal Australians, prior to European arrival, were one of the oldest population isolates. That doesn't mean zero inward geneflow, but it does indicate that inward geneflow was so low relative to the population size that it isn't detectable. Most Papuan ancestry seems to be from the same initial migration as Aboriginal Australians, but Papuans also have a small amount of ancestry from the people who apparently introduced the Austronesian languages, pigs, and various technologies. I'm pretty sure in the case of Australia there was some cultural diffusion from New Guinea. I'm sure it also involved a migration element, but it would have been small relative to the total Aboriginal population and by people who were already genetically similar. That said, there were probably all sorts of population shifts within Australia in that amount of time, local extinctions, replacements, migrations, etc. Due to all those possibilities, those people from Lake Mungo could have been no more closely related to the local people today than Papuans are.

    Related:

    The introduction of dingoes to Australia remains enigmatic. Although molecular date estimates have raised the possibility of a late Pleistocene introduction of dogs to Australia13,18 there is, as yet, no archaeological evidence for dingoes prior to c. 3,500 years ago. In addition, divergence dates may relate to events that predate the arrival of dingoes to Australia, so have limited application to understanding the introduction timing and process. Recent genetic analyses of modern dingoes and NGSDs [New Guinea Singing Dogs] show a geographical distribution of dingo mtDNA lineages that distinguishes populations from the northwest and southeast of Australia18,30, which we also see in the modern dingo sequences we generated (Fig. 1). This population structure is also observable in results from nuclear and Y-chromosome analyses30–33. In addition, the two dingo groups, while more closely related to the NGSDs than to any other dogs, diverge from the NGSD sequence, which may indicate a period of isolation between the two groups of dogs. The only genetic data from NGSDs has been obtained from the captive population derived from only eight dogs34. Village dogs in New Guinea however possess many, if not all, of the behavioural and phenotypic characteristics ascribed to NGSDs35 and it is possible that sampling from isolated village populations on the New Guinea mainland, and highland NGSD populations if found to still exist, may also be informative about NGSD and dingo ancestral history.

    The process of human settlement expansion across the western Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia may have facilitated the dispersal of dogs/dingoes from New Guinea to Australia. Evidence of this human expansion appears in the archaeological record from around 3,800 years ago, but to date no dog remains have been found from this period36. Balme and O’Connor37 hypothesise that increasing numbers of small game animals observable in the archaeological record in the mid-Holocene may be indicative of the arrival and use of dingoes by people to assist with hunting. These chronometrically dated changes in faunal composition in archaeological sites, along with molecular evidence indicating at least two introductions to Australia and a close genetic relationship between dingoes and NGSDs, suggest that by the mid to late Holocene deliberate dog translocations were taking place between New Guinea and Australia. Securely dated archaeological material, along with further molecular data, would assist with the refining the date of introductions, routes and possible origins of the dingo.

    Interestingly, one sequence we generated from a dog bone excavated from an Iron Age archaeological site in Taiwan, MS10133, is located on the network between these two groups of dingoes (Fig. 1). A similar link to modern Taiwanese dog lineages has been observed in dingo Y-chromosome markers32. Sacks and colleagues raise the possibility of a separate dispersal event from Taiwan, or the movement of dogs with Austronesian language speakers both out of China to the south through the Tonkin Gulf and to Taiwan, to explain this observation32.

    The appearance of the Neolithic in ISEA [Island Southeast Asia] and its extension out into the western Pacific, characterised by the presence of pottery in archaeological sites dated to between 3,800 and 3,300 years ago, involved the spread of new languages, ideas and identities alongside migration and recruitment from local communities38. Molecular analyses of dog remains from MSEA [Mainland Southeast Asia] archaeological sites during this critical period of human expansion could greatly assist with tracking the translocations of dogs as part of this movement. What is known archaeologically is that dogs are absent from MSEA hunter gatherer sites. It was only with the expansion of rice and millet farmers into Southeast Asia from Chinese domestication centres that dogs made their appearance about 4,000 year ago, and from this point onwards, dog remains are commonly found. Archaeological excavation at An Song, in Southern Vietnam, has provided dog bones39 and at Khok Phanom Di, a central Thai site, dog bones and canid faeces containing rice chaff and fish bones were found40. The time period between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago in MSEA and ISEA is central to tracking the movement of dogs across Southeast Asia and out into the islands of Oceania. It is likely that as more samples of dogs from archaeological sites across the region become available, a more detailed picture of the history of ISEA dogs will be revealed.
    Quote Originally Posted by Enros View Post
    You don't seem to be familiar with how the burden of proof works in when discussing social justice. It's not like science where it lies on the one making the claim. If someone claims to be oppressed, they don't have to prove it.


  14. #14
    Praeses
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    Default Re: Southeast Asians and Eastern Mediterraneans discovered in lake in Himalayas, 800 CE and 1800 CE respectively

    Quote Originally Posted by sumskilz View Post
    Yeah its depressing. Apparently they extracted "culture" from a finger bone, and palaeolithic tech qualifies as "civilisation" now.

    The population isolation is bloody interesting, there's a possible split into a rough north/south lineages (the north being taller and thinner, "classic" broad shouldered aborigines) and dumpier southern types but the data sets aren't there yet. It may just be the sunshine but you rarely see blonde aborigines in the south (thats not from European DNA, a lot of Top End kids have blonde hair that goes dark as they mature: I've even seen a redheaded aborigine, bloody wild).

    The third major grouping (if the north/south thing is accepted) is the Melanesians of the Torres Strait Islands who get lumped in with the aborigines because racism!, but they have PNG style languages and DNA, with trade languages share with aboriginal mainlanders. They would be the likely conduit for stone tool tech, yam tech and dingoes as they are medium range sea farers.

    In the putative north/south dichotomy the northern types adopted dingoes as hunting companions, but the southerners (including the double-isolates in Tasmania) never did-how the hell would you prove that though? Less bitten fingers among the children's remains?.
    Jatte lambastes Calico Rat

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