streaming consciousness…

World Populations and Human Genomes: Haplogroups and Happenstance…

Now that world genome research has been underway for a solid decade or so, it’s re-writing history with every passing day. So it is now possible to come to some tentative conclusions, even if the details are a long way from final, and the devil is certainly in the details. The most obvious tentative conclusion is that a country’s identity—best expressed in language—does not always correspond to the DNA genetic profile of the place, for example:

Thailand is not predominantly of the ‘Tai-Kadai’ genome, though another closely related O haplogroup, probably best described as ‘Khmer’, but Turkey has few or none of any of the North Asian ‘Turkic’ genes, in fact more ‘Arab/Semitic’ J haplogroup than any other. Likewise is Germany almost bereft of the I ‘Nordic’ genome, more of which is to be found in Scandinavia…

But no country has a predominant ‘Nordic’ I haplogroup, in fact, not Norway nor even Sweden, though it likely originated in the Balkans and is found even in Iran in sizable percentage. But the ‘Aryan’ genome, a word cognate with ‘Iran’ and claimed by Germany, is in fact identical to the Slavic genome, R1a haplogroup, found in its largest percentages in Poland, Russia and the faraway Altai mountains, in addition to ‘Aryan’ north India, and synonymous with Vedic religious advancement and general civility and nobility…

The related ‘Celtic’ R2b genome is most often found in the British Isles, and Spain, especially the Basque area, but still predominant in Germany, not the R1a ‘Slavic’ genome nor the ‘I’ Scandinavian haplo-group. That ‘R’ genome likely began in Armenia, before it came to define the European race, and before it found its back to Chad in north central Africa, presumably…

N, C, and Q haplogroups are all based in Northernmost Asia, and the C is also found in far east Polynesia—an ancient Denisova-related genome perhaps—AND native America. But the island of New Guinea has two entire haplogroups on that one small island, to be found nowhere else in the world, M and K, specifically, in addition to the C gene…

Aboriginal Australia is predominantly of the C gene, also, as are Mongolia and Buryatia, far to the Asian north, and presumably the likely area of origin. The Amerindian gene is predominantly of the Central North Asian ‘Q’ variety, but the information is obviously sketchier there. Japan and Tibet are very similar, also, to each other, for some reason, and NOT Chinese, or even other East Asians with the ‘O’ haplogroup, genetically…

Germany, Turkey, Iran and Thailand have some of the most mixed genomes in the whole world, with the farthest reaches generally the purest—Spain, the British Isles, North Asia, far east Polynesia, and America, before the Conquest—maybe. Iceland is more Celtic than Scandinavian and almost as much Slavic. It almost seems like languages are migrating around and establishing kingdoms, and occupying land, with or without the permission of the original inhabitants, or the folks back home…

And that just might be the case, given the information we have so far, especially from the Y-DNA haplogroups, handed down un-recombined through the male sex chromosome. The MT-DNA which is passed along un-recombined through maternal lineages tell a quite different story, though, oftentimes appearing to be an alternate history of the same group—the men who went a-traveling and the women who stayed behind? I don’t know…

And in many cases, after a war, the men were all killed while the women and children were reincorporated into the victor’s blood line. Regardless of the reasons, MT-DNA seems much more mixed, with the ‘Celtic’ genome one of the few showing a close correspondence between both types, and heavily dominating European MT-DNA, any ‘Nordic’ MT-DNA almost nonexistent, and the Slavic also reduced and far to the east…

A ‘Dravidian’ MT-DNA seems to not only dominate India, but also is heavily present in much of SE Asia, where the male Y-DNA counterpart is rarely found. What it all means will take years to understand, of course, at the same time that pure stable long-term populations are increasingly hard to find…

Participants for genome study are generally selected by their deep roots in an area, and that is disappearing, something like reverse synchronicity, or inverse proportion, I guess, something becoming known at the same time that possibilities for any future knowledge of it is being reduced, tick-tock. Of course, the real work of using world genomes to reconstruct history is in the remotest past, in conjunction with archaeology and fossil finds…

But for us amateurs, political sleuths and conspiracy theorists, reconstructing the near past can be more rewarding, that which is just before the realm of recorded history, and with world-beat percussions and repercussions to this present day. We’re only talking about a few thousand years, after all…

p.s. BTW I have a 2007 DVD of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The words ‘haplogroup’ and ‘Denisova’ are not to be found there…