I was delighted with this post at The Harvard Gazette by Alvin Powell:
Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.
More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.
Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.
since it’s what I’ve been saying for decades. Here are some examples:
In Africa, studies have shown that different tribal and language groups have moved over time, displacing others and mixing genetically. Cameroon, an area associated with Bantu languages, for example, was occupied by an entirely different people 3,000 to 8,000 years ago, Reich said.
and
But ancient DNA doesn’t rule out culture change occurring without mixing. Carthaginians were long associated with sea-faring Phoenicians, but ancient DNA shows them more closely related to the Greeks with whom they competed economically.
“The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before,” Reich said. “Human movements have occurred at multiple timescales, often disruptive to the populations that experience them, and these patterns were not possible to predict and anticipate without direct data.”
Another example is the Navaho and Apache in the American Southwest who originated in the Northwest in historic times. My own Swiss ancestors include in their own DNA inheritances from Near Eastern farmers, West Asian herders, and Western hunter-gatherers from more than 10,000 years ago.
The article also provides a little support for my belief that the Neanderthal and Denisovans are actually subspecies of Homo sapiens rather than distinct species.
It wasn’t mentioned in the article but I thought I should add that I suspect that Homo erectus was a subspecies rather than a species, too. I look forward to the discovery of remains that allow more analysis to be done.
Sounds what Henry Gates found on the show “Finding your roots” on the ancestry of various African American’s can be extended to much of the world, and humanity has been doing this since time immemorial.