Black Genes in Southern Europeans

My post here, A Little Black In All Of Us, has aroused a tremendous amount of controversy. Not to beat this dead horse with a stick, but there are Southern Europeans and their supporters who strongly object to the notion that they have more than a smidgen of Black blood in them. In fact, there are websites that are set up in part to specifically negate that premise. Some of their supporters are simply racists.

This is definitely a sore point with Southern Europeans. As an Italian friend of mine said, "The Southern Italians really hate to be called negri. If you call them negri, they pull out the knife." A little sensitive?

In my post, I suggested that some Southern Europeans, notably Sicilians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese, had more than a negligible amount of Black in them, around 5%. This produced a hailstorm of protest from the aforementioned folks, and resulted in some bannings from the comments.

I admit I'm not an expert on the subject. The Black genes in these Southern Europeans seem to have come from Ethiopia. This much is clear. The relevant haplogroups are M1, M78, E3b, E3b1, L1, L3, E-M35 and some others. If you follow the links to the relevant scientific journals, they will describe these lines as sub-Saharan.

The deniers say that they are not really sub-Saharan, they are Ethiopian, or Afro-Asiatic, or Eurasiatic, or whatever. In general, they say that these are Caucasian lines inside the Ethiopians.

I'm not sure any of that makes sense. Better than sub-Saharan lines, I would describe these lines as "Saharan". They arose in the Sahara and possibly in Arabia very long ago. They are still quite common in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan (north and south). Those folks look White to you? Of course not.

Click to enlarge. The original, with much better resolution, is here. These are Oromos, an Ethiopian people that is fighting for an independent state in Ethiopia. A commenter, Stopped Clock, left some interesting comments.

He said first of all to call these ancient lines "Saharan" is correct if referring to the much darker-skinned people who lived in the Sahara long ago when these lines arose, but not to the Arabid types who reside in much of the region today (more recent arrivals).

He also suggested a resolution to this problem. To say that these Ethiopians are 40% White and 60% Black as so many do seems simplistic and erroneous. The "White" lines go back to Arabia 45,000 years ago. People just call that line Caucasoid because it comes out of the Middle East. But I have a strong hunch that the people who lived in Arabia 45,000 years may have looked a lot more like Black people than like Whites. If anything, I think they may have looked like these interesting folks.

He also said that the latest thinking is that these people are not some mulatto Black-White mix; instead, they are an ancient African race that evolved separately from the others and ended up looking quite different.

In addition, recent data shows that these are the most ancient humans of all, older than the Khoisan. And other data suggests that the people who came out of Africa may have looked something like this. Whether these people are the original H. Sapiens is another matter. From 90,000-135,000 years ago, there were a series of droughts in Africa. This may have led to a split in humanity into two main lines - one in East Africa and another in South Africa. Presently, we do not yet know which line gave birth to modern H. Sapiens.

I'm not much of a judge on males, but these people seem quite attractive. And some of those women in the center are absolutely beautiful. They have an appearance that is both exotic and incredibly striking.

Unless you know what you are doing, you probably don't want to dive into this debate. This stuff gets real complicated real quick, and the debaters know their stuff.

It's funny how some folks react to the possibility of the tiniest bit of Black blood like Superman to Kryptonite.
This woman here, Mathilda's Anthropology Blog, who runs an otherwise excellent blog, is on a jihad to say that there is little Black blood in Southern Europeans. I don't know what her motivation is. She also opposes "out of Africa" and "single migration to the Americas".

Just to let you know, White nationalists really, really, really hate the Out of Africa argument with a passion. "Grandpa was a nigger" is taking things just a bit too far, you know. You gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere.

This post provides some good background on where the debate is at right now. Unfortunately, the whole mess has been contaminated by Afrocentrists, who seem to be some of the most idiotic ethnic nationalists around for some reason.

As for me, I'm a bit tired of the whole "Black blood in Italians" debate and I'd just as soon let it rest.

Paper Adds Support to Aryan Invasion Theory

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

The notion of an Aryan Invasion that occurred 3,500 years ago in India had shaped the physical and religious landscape of the country is a controversial one, but it is steeped in Indian socio-cultural politics. Though it is uncontroversial outside of India, a huge debate has heated up inside India.

On the one side are the Dalits and their allies. The Dalits claim that they were the original Indians and practiced some sort of a nice, Utopian religion. I don't know if it was Goddess worship, but I guess it was something like that. The Dalits really hate Hinduism, because Hindus have decided that Dalits are born and doomed through life to be lower than whale shit, and that's at the bottom of the ocean.

So the Dalits say that these Aryans (White folks) invaded down from the steppes to the north and west (possibly Tajikistan or around Iran) and conquered a large part of India. They brought with them Hinduism and caste. They made themselves the lighter Brahmin caste and made the darker folks lower castes, and the darkest of all were made into Dalits. So the Aryan invasion started the whole mess.

Hindu nationalists (Hindutvas) love their Hindu religion and feel that it can do no wrong, so they dislike this Aryan invasion theory. Their whole line is that there was no Aryan invasion. Hinduism was native to India and was not some wicked religion brought by evil lighter-skinned dudes. This theory is also very popular with Brahmins, almost all of whom support caste, no matter what they tell you.

White nationalists, some high caste Indian racialists and Afrocentrists all support the Aryan invasion theory. White nationalists feel that there are two races in India - light-skinned cool guy "Aryans" in the north who are smart and get everything done in India, to the extent that anything gets done there, and darker Dravidians, who are apparently inferior muds or something.

In reality, there are just Indians of varying shades. The ones towards the northwest to tend to be more European-looking and lighter, and the ones heading to the south and east from the northwest to tend to get darker and more Dravidian looking. However, there are plenty of dark-skinned North Indians with varying degrees of Dravidian features, and in the south, there are a lot of lighter folks with more European features.

The "Aryans" and "Dravidians" have gotten so mixed in over 3,500 years that these categories no longer make much sense, except to idiots. In which case, they are encouraged to continue using them.

High caste Indian racialists go along with this, and hang out in White nationalist fora trying to convince White nationalists that funny looking light-skinned Indians are really just White people too, albeit with patchouli oil and a taste for curry. White nationalists are dubious about admitting wogs into their midst of their White purity.

Afrocentrists like this theory because they moronically think that Dravidians are Black folks. Except that they are not. Actually, all Indians are pretty closely related and are very distant from Africans - they are no closer to Africans than anyone else on Earth. Any resemblance to Africans is just convergence, genetic drift or coincidence.

Well, India was populated by all these really cool Indian Black folks and then evil White dudes came in, brought an evil White Supremacist religion called Hinduism, and cruelly imposed it on the darkies.

In the midst of all of this swarming intellectual idiocy, it falls to the scientists to add some sense to the discussion.

This interesting paper (available on this blog here) adds to the evidence for an Aryan invasion.

They did find that higher-caste folks tended to be lighter than lower-caste Indians, but that was just a trend. There are light-skinned low-caste Indians in the northwest and many of the Brahmins of South India are quite dark.

They also found a trend for lighter skin and more European features and genes towards the northwest and darker skin, more indigenous features and more Asian genes and one moved to the south and east. The paper felt that they had evidence for a large introgression of European-looking peoples maybe 3000-4000 years ago, though things have gotten pretty mixed up since.

Other papers studying the genetics of India have concluded Indians have been evolving, more or less in situ without a lot of outside inputs, for 15-20,000 years (call it 17,000 years). The result has been this endlessly varying type we call the East Indian. And where did the Indian stock come from prior to 17,000 years ago?

The authors were not sure, but they felt that the seed for the stock that started to grow the modern Indian tree came from the Middle East 17,000 years ago.

India, along with North Africa, the Caucasus and the Middle East, is also one of main staging grounds for the evolution of Caucasians and proto-Caucasians from 39,000-52,000 years ago. In particular, there was a movement out of India to North Africa 30,000 years ago which probably helped to create the Berbers.

There are also other, lesser known influences on the people of India and Pakistan. The Mohajirs in Uttar Pradesh are heavily Persian and Arab. Former Pakistani President Musharaff is a Mohajir, so his background was mostly Arab and Iranian.

Mohajirs are the Muslims that fled India to Pakistan during the bloody partition in 1947. They have since suffered a lot of persecution in Pakistan and are not all that well-liked there. They have set up their own patronage system, along with patronage political parties, that benefit them and only them.

We see an interesting thing in the far western states of Haryana and Rajasthan. Possibly 50% of the population of Haryana and probably all of Rajasthan is related to Scythians from 1,500-2,000 yrs ago. The Scythians probably the Ossetians of today. Long ago, the Ossetians were known as the Alans, horse-riding nomads of the Central Asian steppes.

There are some theories that try to connect to the Alans to Japan, especially to the Caucasian-appearing Samurai caste, in an invasion centuries years ago. This rests on similarities between Alan names and legends and those of the Samurai. At present, the Alan-Japanese theory remains little more than a controversial hypothesis.

The Caucasian appearance of the Samurai class is probably due more to their Ainu roots than to any Alan invasion.

Even today, the Japanese ruling class looks different (some say, more Caucasian) than the rest of the Japanese, who are closer to the Yayoi, rice-farmers from Korea who invaded 2,300 years ago and conquered the island, displacing the Ainu. The Ainu, despite superficial Caucasian appearances, are actually anthropologically Australoids close to Aborigines. Genetically, they are Asians.

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