No population’s DNA is ‘pure’ says Harvard geneticist

Dr Strange · 05-03-2019 08:07PM #1

Interesting and informative.

I wonder how those who buy the commercially available genealogical DNA tests will come to terms with that they are not pure Celtic, Germanic, Viking, Slavic or whatever you are having yourself. 😉

Professor David Reich wrote:

One important takeaway from this study, he said, is that humans inherently derive from mixed ancestry.

“No population is, or ever could be, pure,” he said. “Ancient DNA reveals that the mixing of groups extremely different from each other is a common feature of human nature. We do not live in unusual times; profound events have occurred in our past. We should learn and feel more connected from that.”

Full text here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/harvard-geneticist-no-populations-dna-is-pure/

05-03-2019 08:10PM

They're pure mule in the midlands.

Junkyard Tom · 05-03-2019 08:12PM

Brundlefly.

mistress_gi · 05-03-2019 08:14PM

The purest humans could have been Egipcian royalty and look at what happened to them.
Personally I am super happy to be a genetic mutt

Also Is it just me or is it extra sweet because his last name is Reich?

tylercheribini · 05-03-2019 08:14PM

Sure we all originated from modern day East Africa if you want to go back far enough. Defining what genetic markers dictate an ethnicity really depends on when one wants to start.

Ipso · 05-03-2019 08:14PM

Pure would be inbred.

Wibbs · 05-03-2019 08:26PM

While it makes sense I'm not sure his pronouncements do, or at least it attracts a bit of head scratching.

EG:
A similar prehistory occurred in the Iberian Peninsula where a third population, also arrived from the Steppes, joined the hunter-gather and farmer groups. In this case, DNA research shows that the third population was exclusively male: While only 40 percent of the population about 6,000 years ago comes from the Steppes, 100 percent of the Y chromosomes do.

Eh wut? No it doesn't ya eejit. It means that the surviving DNA shows other lines died out, it doesn't show that an exclusively male bunch came(missus) over the horizon and the local men ran away or vanished. In the UK what remains of Anglo Saxon DNA is almost exclusively male lineages, yet we know Anglo Saxon women migrated too.

“No population is, or ever could be, pure,” he said. “Ancient DNA reveals that the mixing of groups extremely different from each other is a common feature of human nature.

Eh wut? Part two. Extremely different from each other? I thought the "accepted consensus" was that all modern humans were essentially the same out of Africa type with only tiny very recent mostly phenotypical differences and that we're more genetically distinct within populations than between populations? Apparently not so much(though I would be more in agreement with him here).

Reich “reshaped our understanding of human prehistory,” according to a New York Times profile last year, with the publication of DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in the field combined.

Eh Wut? Part three. Under a thousand individuals? Just because it's more than others in the field, it's still a minuscule number of samples from even a single ancient population, never mind multiples of them, to be extrapolating much beyond extremely broad strokes.

Some of these guys are in dire need of a tap on the shoulder and a proof read before they rush to the media, scientific or otherwise, with broad strokes and a tad contradictory pronouncements.

Phileas Frog · 05-03-2019 08:31PM

Travellers would be mostly "pure" - settled people wouldn't go near them

The Rape of Lucretia · 05-03-2019 08:36PM

True, except for pure Aryans who as a result are a master race.

Wibbs · 05-03-2019 08:38PM

tylercheribini wrote: »

Sure we all originated from modern day East Africa if you want to go back far enough.

Not quite TC. Yes we're mostly made up of a population of East Africans that spread out fro there in a couple of waves, but if you're of European and near Eastern origin going on what we know so far you will have archaic subspecies human Neandertal DNA in your mix, if you're East Asian you will have both Neandertal and Denisovan DNA in your mix(and we only discovered the Denisovan folks a couple of years ago). If you're African you'll have neither(though you'll have more Africa local archaic in the mix. It's hard to pin that down as ancient DNA is hard to find there, or we've not been looking in the right places. The area of science is very much First World based and often biased). And these are genes that are active, not "junk" DNA. Involved in things like cholesterol levels, arthritis, schizophrenia, addiction, tissue healing, blood levels of vitamin D and a few others. And with more Neandertal DNA being sequenced(which is so far a small number of individuals) more matches are being found. We've only found just one tooth and finger bone from a couple of Denisovans in one cave, so lord knows what more is to come. Every time a new individual is sequenced we find more going on.

Ted Johnson · 05-03-2019 08:39PM

Phileas Frog wrote: »

Travellers would be mostly "pure" - settled people wouldn't go near them

It's disgusting how they refuse to embrace diversity. Compulsory race mixing for travellers now!

Your Face · 05-03-2019 08:42PM

Obviously the work of aliens.

Wibbs · 05-03-2019 08:43PM

Phileas Frog wrote: »

Travellers would be mostly "pure"

Don't get me started on that guff. Yes Travellers show a couple of familial connections in their genetics. So? If your male and your surname is O'Donnell, or O'Neill and a couple of others that hail from the North West of this island you'll also show a familial connection in your Y chromosome, the "Niall of the Nine Hostages" gene. Doesn't make Donegal blokes a genetically ethnic minority. Well...

Ipso · 05-03-2019 08:45PM

Wibbs wrote: »

While it makes sense I'm not sure his pronouncements do, or at least it attracts a bit of head scratching.

EG:
A similar prehistory occurred in the Iberian Peninsula where a third population, also arrived from the Steppes, joined the hunter-gather and farmer groups. In this case, DNA research shows that the third population was exclusively male: While only 40 percent of the population about 6,000 years ago comes from the Steppes, 100 percent of the Y chromosomes do.

Eh wut? No it doesn't ya eejit. It means that the surviving DNA shows other lines died out, it doesn't show that an exclusively male bunch came(missus) over the horizon and the local men ran away or vanished. In the UK what remains of Anglo Saxon DNA is almost exclusively male lineages, yet we know Anglo Saxon women migrated too.

“No population is, or ever could be, pure,” he said. “Ancient DNA reveals that the mixing of groups extremely different from each other is a common feature of human nature.

Eh wut? Part two. Extremely different from each other? I thought the "accepted consensus" was that all modern humans were essentially the same out of Africa type with only tiny very recent mostly phenotypical differences and that we're more genetically distinct within populations than between populations? Apparently not so much(though I would be more in agreement with him here).

Reich “reshaped our understanding of human prehistory,” according to a New York Times profile last year, with the publication of DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in the field combined.

Eh Wut? Part three. Under a thousand individuals? Just because it's more than others in the field, it's still a minuscule number of samples from even a single ancient population, never mind multiples of them, to be extrapolating much beyond extremely broad strokes.

Some of these guys are in dire need of a tap on the shoulder and a proof read before they rush to the media, scientific or otherwise, with broad strokes and a tad contradictory pronouncements.

There also seems to be an autosomal change around the same time as the change in the YDNA, this happened after the Yamnaya spread from the Pontic Caspian Steppe.

SEPT 23 1989 · 05-03-2019 08:46PM

Phileas Frog wrote: »

Travellers would be mostly "pure"

Pure thieves

Wibbs · 05-03-2019 08:50PM

Ipso wrote: »

There also seems to be an autosomal change around the same time as the change in the YDNA, this happened after the Yamnaya spread from the Pontic Caspian Steppe.

Lactose tolerance being one IIRC?

tylercheribini · 05-03-2019 09:23PM

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/

"In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim."

Ipso · 05-03-2019 09:32PM

Wibbs wrote: »

Lactose tolerance being one IIRC?

I think so, here's a good website that deals with ancient DNA and focuses on the Bronze Age steppe movements. There is also a paper due out next month that looks at ancient samples from Ireland, early word is that Munster people are special.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.com/

El_Bee · 05-03-2019 09:57PM

Dr Strange wrote: »

Interesting and informative.

I wonder how those who buy the commercially available genealogical DNA tests will come to terms with that they are not pure Celtic, Germanic, Viking, Slavic or whatever you are having yourself. 😉

Full text here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/harvard-geneticist-no-populations-dna-is-pure/

Reminds me of something I read a year or two back about people at these testing places deliberately putting 1% african in everyone's results as an effort to fight racism. Also I hope you're alright with big pharma buying your genome from these crowds (in the instances where they don't already own the testing company already).

Ipso · 05-03-2019 10:00PM

El_Bee wrote: »

Reminds me of something I read a year or two back about people at these testing places deliberately putting 1% african in everyone's results as an effort to fight racism. Also I hope you're alright with big pharma buying your genome from these crowds (in the instances where they don't already own the testing company already).

I didn’t get any African in mine, must have been a racist person that processed mine. Or some people in d’internet don’t understand statistical noise.
Anyway George Soros promised me they wouldn’t sell my results to big pharma, but he wouldn’t make any promises about medium pharma.

tylercheribini · 05-03-2019 10:15PM

Personally I hope "Big Pharma" use my DNA to find cures to diseases for the betterment of humanity.

Three More Big Sleeps · 05-03-2019 10:26PM

Coincidently, I'm reading Dave Eggers's "The Circle" at the moment (which I'd recommend if you fancy a butt-clenching description of an all-powerful Facebook-esque dystopian future.)

Anyway, there's a bit where he explains that Iceland is purportedly the most homogeneous, genetically pure area on earth due to little immigration over the last millennium (since its original settlement).

El_Bee wrote: »

Also I hope you're alright with big pharma buying your genome from these crowds.

And yep, there has been some pushback to Big Pharma's somewhat manipulative attempt to map the whole Icelandic population:

https

/www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27903831

Cabaal · 05-03-2019 10:36PM

Ipso wrote: »

Pure would be inbred.

Exactly.
Purebred in any species means they are inbred and defective. It's no different to humans.

Want to sure an example of "pure" humans, look at royal family's throughout history and how messed up they were and how many genetic issues they had

Tuco88 · 05-03-2019 10:46PM

Lies, my t-shirt says pure cork...

Its on a Teeee Shhhirtt...

Facto my friends, keep your fake news.

Wibbs · 05-03-2019 11:02PM

tylercheribini wrote: »

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/

"In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim."

There's a problem with such pronouncements on the matter when they come from the US TC. That culture has a deadweight of serious issues around "race" since the get go and all the way down to today and culture regularly influences the sciences and biases can be all over the place. Not that much has changed there. Show two people with different biases the same results and you will quite likely find different interpretations. The "right thinking" are very understandably eager to swing the pendulum away from the race and racist thinking in "science" of the past. All to often the problem can be with a rebound from any hardline thinking in one direction is an overswing to a hardline position in the other direction.

Take their example: "Two famous American scientists of European ancestry". Right away there's a problem. Colonies, even those with racial segregation in the past(and some remaining) tend to have quite the bit of admixture between populations and in a shorter timeframe compared to "old world" non colonies. I recall watching an American version of one of those "who do you think you are" genealogy TV shows. The subject was an African American chap and when his DNA results came back the researcher who did the test noted that he was "unusually African" and that most African American samples come back with other populations in the mix like European and/or Native American. "White" American samples are often similar.

Secondly, which sequences were they looking at? EG if they were looking at eye colour sequences the chances are high that the European population sequences would show a difference to the East Asian. Ditto for other phenotypical sequences. Whereas general things like I dunno bone growth sequences are going to show far more commonality.

Thirdly, like I mentioned earlier if one was to look at archaic human admixtures you're going to get differences. For example, even with Neandertal DNA admixture that's shared between non African populations, even if it's the same percentage, the genes involved are different between European populations and Asian populations. One hypothesis being that there were a couple of fairly major let's get jiggy with each other events after modern humans left Africa. One in the Middle East and another in Europe and the Near East. Asian populations got the earlier mis, but not the later European mix. And they got at least one other in the mix with Denisovans and possibly another(could be late Homo Erectus, or yet another human cousin we haven't found yet). And as I also noted earlier these are genes that are expressing. EG in folks from Nepal and Tibet they have genes from Denisovans that have adapted them to live more successfully at higher altitudes. Interestingly some populations in the Andes have similar adaptations, that might be latent from when their ancestors left the Old World and migrated into the New, or they were a local adaptation.

Roger Hassenforder · 05-03-2019 11:46PM

Wibbs wrote: »

Not quite TC. Yes we're mostly made up of a population of East Africans that spread out fro there in a couple of waves, but if you're of European and near Eastern origin going on what we know so far you will have archaic subspecies human Neandertal DNA in your mix, if you're East Asian you will have both Neandertal and Denisovan DNA in your mix(and we only discovered the Denisovan folks a couple of years ago). If you're African you'll have neither(though you'll have more Africa local archaic in the mix. It's hard to pin that down as ancient DNA is hard to find there, or we've not been looking in the right places. The area of science is very much First World based and often biased). And these are genes that are active, not "junk" DNA. Involved in things like cholesterol levels, arthritis, schizophrenia, addiction, tissue healing, blood levels of vitamin D and a few others. And with more Neandertal DNA being sequenced(which is so far a small number of individuals) more matches are being found. We've only found just one tooth and finger bone from a couple of Denisovans in one cave, so lord knows what more is to come. Every time a new individual is sequenced we find more going on.

Who's been reading Sapiens?

Wibbs · 06-03-2019 12:00AM

Roger Hassenforder wrote: »

Who's been reading Sapiens?

Not me RH. Well I read a couple of chapters and started to get twitchy so... Don't get me started. :eek:

Through more luck than judgement I called a few of these archaic admixture events in the palaeontology and archaeology forums hereabouts before they came out. Been an interest of mine since I was a kid. I reckon they'll find another two archaics we didn't know about we got jiggy with in Asia. In Europe less so, I reckon just us and Neandertals. In Africa I reckon at least two more archaic folks in the mix, yet to be nailed down.

tylercheribini · 06-03-2019 12:08AM

Wibbs wrote: »

Not quite TC. Yes we're mostly made up of a population of East Africans that spread out fro there in a couple of waves, but if you're of European and near Eastern origin going on what we know so far you will have archaic subspecies human Neandertal DNA in your mix, if you're East Asian you will have both Neandertal and Denisovan DNA in your mix(and we only discovered the Denisovan folks a couple of years ago). If you're African you'll have neither(though you'll have more Africa local archaic in the mix. It's hard to pin that down as ancient DNA is hard to find there, or we've not been looking in the right places. The area of science is very much First World based and often biased). And these are genes that are active, not "junk" DNA. Involved in things like cholesterol levels, arthritis, schizophrenia, addiction, tissue healing, blood levels of vitamin D and a few others. And with more Neandertal DNA being sequenced(which is so far a small number of individuals) more matches are being found. We've only found just one tooth and finger bone from a couple of Denisovans in one cave, so lord knows what more is to come. Every time a new individual is sequenced we find more going on.

You'll note I said "orginated", I wasnt aware of all the the subsequent migrations you referred to though.

No population’s DNA is ‘pure’ says Harvard geneticist

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