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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-choose-your-family dept.

The genes don't lie:

A large international team of researchers has found that Neolithic hunter-gatherers living in several parts of Europe interbred with farmers from the Near East. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes comparing DNA from several early groups in Europe and evidence of interbreeding.

The Neolithic period, often described as the New Stone Age, was a period of human history from approximately 15,000 BCE to 3,000 BCE. It was a time defined by the development of settlements and the refinement of tools and the arts. Prior research has shown that people living in what is now Germany, Hungary and Spain were mostly hunter-gatherers during the early Neolithic period, but were "replaced" by farmers moving in from the Near East (Anatolia). In this new effort, the researchers suggest that interbreeding between the two groups led to the decline of the hunter-gatherers. The end result is that most modern Europeans are descended from the Near East immigrant farmers, but have remnants of hunter-gatherer DNA.

To learn more about the early history of humans in Europe, the researchers obtained and analyzed 180 DNA samples of people from early Hungary, Germany and Spain dating from between 6,000 and 2,200 BCE.

Ironic that Europeans resist admitting Turkey to the EU when they're descended from people from Asia Minor.

Mark Lipson et al. Parallel palaeogenomic transects reveal complex genetic history of early European farmers, Nature (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nature24476


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 11 2017, @03:27PM (5 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday November 11 2017, @03:27PM (#595599) Journal

    True, but the dominant group's heritage is Altaic. It's why Uighur in China is related to Turkish.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:48PM (4 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday November 11 2017, @06:48PM (#595684) Journal
    "True, but the dominant group's heritage is Altaic."

    That's nonsense, if by 'heritage' you mean anything other than language. Osman was a warlord under the Seljuks and probably claimed Oghuz ancestry as they did (though later a more native ancestry was invented for him as well,) but we don't even know that for sure. It's quite possible that he had just learned the language and invented an ancestry that would endear him to his bosses, the Seljuks also claimed Oghuz ancestry.

    But even if we assume this is correct, it really wouldn't tell you much about the pseudo-racial characteristics of these people. That's because the Turks were not a pseudo-racially defined people, they were a culturally defined people, from the very beginning. There was a very lively, productive culture for many centuries that came out of the mix where altaic and persianate culture mixed on the persian frontier. From the very beginning, they were heterogenous in ancestry.

    But forget that, even if that weren't true, it STILL doesn't mean there's any significant turkic ancestry in modern turkish people. The Seljuks and the Osmans were small families of warriors and those tend to get killed off. The Magyars to the north, are a similar case, this story happens over and over and over and over. A clan of hard-fighting horse warriors come in and conquer, and sometimes even manage to transmit their language and sometimes their religion, but their blood simply died out a few generations later, or dispersed like a drop of pure water in a pool of salt.

    And even moreso in areas where human population is very old and well established. Anatolia is extremely ancient. Just since written history started, this has happened many times. What the Turks did was not to exterminate the previous inhabitants and resettle, what they did was simply to impose their religion and with it their language on a population that mostly spoke Greek and went to Orthodox cathedral, transforming them into a population that spoke Turkish and went to mosque. Obviously they persecuted anyone that resisted, but on the other side of it if you would just learn to speak a little broken turkish and go to mosque you could avoid all that. And so that's what they did.

    "Altaic heritage" - the only thing altaic is the language, and even that's tenuous. You can argue it owes more to Persian than Altaic even at that level.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 11 2017, @09:37PM (3 children)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday November 11 2017, @09:37PM (#595738) Journal

      By heritage I meant culture and language. The Ottoman culture is certainly Central Asian, with assimilations of those who preceded them in Asia Minor. It is somewhat analogous to America, whose core is Anglo-Saxon but which has incorporated many cultural elements besides.

      "the only thing altaic is the language, and even that's tenuous. You can argue it owes more to Persian than Altaic even at that level."

      That's not tenuous at all. Turkish is a Turkic, agglutinative language. Persian is an Indo-European language. You can plainly hear the difference. As an Indo-European speaker you can discern meanings in Persian words and the syntax makes sense to you on a basic level. It makes sense. Turkish, on the other hand, is a different animal. Sure there are loan words between them, but that doesn't make them the same any more than you can call English the same as French because we have the word "entrepreneur."

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:20PM (2 children)

        by Arik (4543) on Saturday November 11 2017, @10:20PM (#595746) Journal
        "Sure there are loan words between them, but that doesn't make them the same any more than you can call English the same as French because we have the word "entrepreneur.""

        While English considered a germanic language purely on the basis of the continuity from Old Ænglisc forward, it is indeed heavily influenced by Latin languages - through French, through Spanish, through Church Latin, etc. This is not just about the norman conquest either - this process starts centuries earlier, even before the Romans conquered Britain. This is *mostly* loan words but not all, the grammar has been affected as well. And it's such a massive influence that it's not at all apparent that English is NOT a Latin language at first glance - you really have to have some historical records to be sure of the classification.

        And so this wasn't a horrible analogy for you to draw, actually, because that's a very similar story to the one about Turkic and Iranian languages. From the very earliest period we have any record of Turks, they are as I said a people on the periphery of Persia, which was a very productive and influential center at that time. The very earliest turkic is already influenced by iranian, and that only increases dramatically over time. Osman Turkish actually had more Persian in it than English has Latin, and more Arabic than we have Greek.

        Don't confuse it with Modern Turkish, which is essentially an artificial language, created by nationalist ideologues in the 1930s by systematically purging the language of loan words (particularly the Persian) and inventing new words judged to sound more 'turkish' to replace them.

        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday November 12 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday November 12 2017, @01:01AM (#595804) Journal

          Nevertheless, Turkish is not tenuously Altaic. It is. It has been influenced by Persian and Arabic, but those are Indo-European and Semitic, respectively. Their contact with Turkish has not drawn it into either of those two families, just like the great preponderance of English words in modern Japanese has not rendered the latter an Indo-European tongue.

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
          • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday November 12 2017, @11:02AM

            by Arik (4543) on Sunday November 12 2017, @11:02AM (#595879) Journal
            Drawing a link between the genetic classification of the language and, well, *anything* else - that's still tenuous at best.

            *Especially* with any of the Turkic languages, since they were spoken by mixed multitudes from the earliest known time.

            It's like generalizing English speakers as sharing some 'germanic temperament' on the same sort of basis.
            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?