While this article's content isn't exactly wrong, the Wikipedia on "Identical ancestors point" gives some important context for what's actually being asserted:
All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.
This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: Considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern day Japanese person will get 88.4% of his ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of his ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan. Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions.
A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than he will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.
An intuition about the "appearing trillions of times in a family tree" is to realize that family trees are actually a binary tree extending backwards in time--i.e. each person has exactly two parents, who have exactly two parents, and so on. So N generations back, there are 2^N individuals. Obviously, there weren't 2^100 people on Earth at any point in time, so this backwards tree starts folding back on itself, containing duplications. Go back far enough and there is a set of individuals who were alive at a particular point in time that completely cover that forward tree.
It helps to visualize this more as a mesh than a tree, or as a flowing river. The river divides around rocks and obstructions (those are points of temporary divergent evolution) but ultimately all flows together (convergent ancestry). We are truly one body of genetic material, and yet each is a unique combination of backwards traces.
I'm trying to square those articles, which put Y-chromasomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve >100kya with the Identical Ancestor Point, which is only 5000-15000ya.
I guess it's kind of like the difference between a permutation and a combination.
This is talked about in the article too: You do not have genes from all your ancestors, because any given person only contributes half their genes to their children. So you have to go much further back to find a point when someone's genes would be present in all modern-day humans.
In particular, if you have a male ancestor at the Identical Ancestor Point but the lineage from them to you passes through a woman at any point in the family tree, you would not get that male ancestor's Y-chromosome via that line of descent.
Or put yet another way, if you are male, you have 2^N (possibly overlapping) ancestors N generations back, but only _1_ ancestor N generations back that contributed your Y-chromosome. Comparing to a different male, the chance that you share Y-chromosomes is naively something like 1/P where P is the size of the male population at the time, while the chance that you share your ancestor sets is a much more complicated calculation, and the article claims it's ~1.
Simple explanation. It is the difference between "things have mixed so much that everyone is your ancestor somehow" and "on a strict matrilineal or patrilineal descent, everyone winds up at the same thing".
In the first the path goes through both fathers and mothers. This is easier to achieve, and so you get to it more recently. The second is harder and so happened longer ago.
Adam and Eve are along the male (or female) line, whereas the common ancestor could be anywhere in your family tree. So 10 generations back you only have a single male line ancestor but 1024 ancestors total.
To play with the river analogy: and then imagine that it flows next to a dye factory, and every now and then a droplet of dye finds its way to the stream, creating a colorful streak. That's to account for random mutations.
And then what would an analogy look for prokaryotes - bacteria, archaea? If my understanding of biology is correct, it would be like an infinitely tall, densely tiered waterfall. There's some forward generational movement, but there's also plenty of lateral ones - exchanging gene packets "at runtime".
To continue playing with our river analogy: consider a man fishing beside the river, who catches a large salmon. The man is ecstatic, for he is poor, and his family is hungry. Just as he draws his knife to gut it, the fish speaks! It says "Please do not kill me. Throw me back into the river, for I am the Fish King, and I will grant you 3 wishes. You can have whatever your heart desires." Astonished, the man agrees, and throws the talking fish back into the water. He speaks his 3 wishes into the air: to be rich, to be respected, and to be young again. Time passes. The man goes home to his hungry wife and child, hands empty. A day passes. A week. Then a year, and youth, wealth and respect remain elusive. A year after that, the man is fishing by the same riverbank - and remember, this is an analogous riverbank - an analogy for our ancestry - and the man catches the same fish! Or is it? It looks the same, but it does not speak. There is no recognition in its fishy eyes. It just lays on the shore, gasping, flopping. The man decides it's just a normal fish after all.
The fish represents the lost dreams of our ancestry, if not the fishy ancestors themselves. The man is us, all of us. The hungry family is our hungry family. Or perhaps our hunger for connection to our past. The story as a whole is meaningless, and in being so, represents the randomness and chaos in which we find ourselves. Is the universe beneficent, malevolent, indifferent? We cannot know for sure. We can only stare into the dying eyes that stare at us in turn, from the mirror, and guess.
To be clear, the river can divide, too. That's speciation, where populations no longer interbreed because their offspring are either unviable or themselves cannot produce offspring.
The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related.
If you look at one generation ago one have 2 * 2 ^ 0 ancestors, at two generations, one have 2 * 2 ^ 1 ancestors, etc.
At 27 generations one apparently has more ancestors than people in the world at that time. This apparent paradox stems from the fact that we are heavily inbred.
> The point in the article is that at many generations ago, we are heavily inbred, it is not that we are all related.
I'm not following your point - maybe it's just a linguistic thing. To me, inbreeding implies relation, at least blood-relation, even when there was no other relation, e.g. conquering armies raping and pillaging.
The article is saying that every person bears some relation to each other, even among distant groups. No further back than 3500 years ago existed a person who was a common ancestor to every currently living human being.
No, there were fuzzily-separated groups of humans on different continents. There was still some interbreeding across continents.
The Americas may have been clearly separated for a while, but they have done so much interbreeding with people from other continents since 1492, that the common ancestor is more recent than that.
I guess that depends much on whether the claim is that literally every human can draw ancestry back to this common pair, or merely the vast majority, because I'm fairly sure there are still "uncontacted" indigenous peoples in the Americas...
3500 sounds about right, if we consider only Eurasia. Otherwise, it could be farther back, but possibly not that much further, according to the wikipedia entry for Mitochondiral Eve (look for "most recent common ancestor"):
"Monte Carlo simulations suggest the MRCA was born surprisingly recently, perhaps even within the last 5,000 years, even for people born on different continents."
It would be interesting to find out the degree to which inbreeding went down in modern days. The downside of modern life is that traditional families are being torn apart but this might be an evolutionary advantage since it means that the gene pool gets a lot more mixed since I imagine inbreeding is probably much lower in cities due to much broader selection pool.
Another important point here is that genes don't divide infinitely, so that if you go back some distance, you start finding ancestors from whom you actually didn't get any DNA.
The book Who We Are and How We Got Here talks about this. When DNA recombines at conception, it only snips and stitches in a fairly limited number of places. It doesn't 'mix' finely like paint. It's more like taking two short pamphlets of ~25 pages, cutting each numbered page horizontally at a random vertical point, and then assembling a new pamphlet of the original size from each pair of pages (pamphlet A's page from above the cut, pamphlet B's from below).
All this to say that if you go back something like 800 years, you have ancestors from whom you didn't get any genes at all.
This means that these infintesimal mixings have even less impact than you'd think. A modern Japanese person could have a European ancestor who traveled to Asia a thousand years ago, but have zero genes from that ancestor. Which means that while that European is technically an 'ancestor', this is just a bit of historical trivia, it means literally nothing about that Japanese person's biology.
---
On to the color commentary:
I suspect that articles like this are heavily influenced by the politically-based drive to try to minimize intergroup genetic differences in humans. The reality is opposite the title - humans are far more distinct, especially on group levels, than is commonly understood. The notion that single common ancestors (among trillions) mean people from hugely divergent groups are 'related' in some meaningful way is just exploiting and expanding the ignorance of the public around how genetics actually work.
It's arguably a pro-social thing to do; I'd say I agree with the philosophy here, but that doesn't make it true and the 'noble lie' seems anything but to me.
The genetic evolutionary difference between distinct groups like Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, and Australian Aborigines is something like 70,000 years of divergent evolution with very very minimal gene flow between the groups, in completely different environments. The genetic split between timber wolves and Chihuahuas was like 5,000 years ago and I bet they have common ancestors much more recently than that.
> The genetic split between timber wolves and Chihuahuas was like 5,000 years ago and I bet they have common ancestors much more recently than that.
Well, for a start, this is completely wrong. Dogs diverged from wolves 20-40,000 years ago (lots of ambiguity over where exactly the divergence should be called), but from a now-extinct wolf species. While dogs and wolves _can_ interbreed, it doesn't happen naturally all that often (and when it does, it's pretty much all unidirectional; dog to wolf). Humans don't have the same issue.
A chihuahua, of course, is a result of deliberate and extreme forced breeding of a sort that (thankfully) has not really been practiced on humans. The closest parallel might be certain European royal families who had severe genetic diseases and abnormal physiology due to repeated inbreeding, but those were much, much less extreme. Dogs, though, were subject to fairly dramatic artificial selection from the start.
>> The genetic evolutionary difference between distinct groups like Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, ... is something like 70,000 years of divergent evolution with very very minimal gene flow between the groups.
Europeans have pretty low levels of sub-saharan genetic markers, with some remnant markets in southern Europe dating to the late Roman era, diminishing substantially as you move north.
This is tautological, sub-saharan genetic markers are found predominantly in sub-saharan populations by definition.
Given how humanity has evolved, "european" markers are a subset of the diversity found in subsaharan populations that are overrepresented from founder effects, with very few exceptions. 40,000 years ago sounds like a long time, but it really isn't.
You need an amazingly small amount of migration (about one person per generation) to keep a population in sync with each other genetically.
I get your point. I'm somewhat surprised that the person I was responding to seemed to think it would even need a citation, but there you are.
>You need an amazingly small amount of migration (about one person per generation) to keep a population in sync with each other genetically.
Well it depends on the size of the population, but even then I don't see how this can be the case. One individual only contributes half their genes to each child, so assuming 2 surviving children that's a 25% lost immediately in the next generation. In just a few generations about half the incomer's genes will be lost in this way. The remainder will likely persist, but equally the number of their descendants that have none or very few of their genes will rise to predominate. In a stable population of 1,000 people, one single individual is unlikely to contribute much more than 1/2,000th of the genes in circulation.
"This means that these infintesimal mixings have even less impact than you'd think. A modern Japanese person could have a European ancestor who traveled to Asia a thousand years ago, but have zero genes from that ancestor. Which means that while that European is technically an 'ancestor', this is just a bit of historical trivia, it means literally nothing about that Japanese person's biology."
It also means that a modern Japanese person has thousands of "Japanese" ancestors from whom they received zero genes. Of course, this is a bit of misdirection, as the genes that one receives are not unique, but drawn from a pool of possible genotypes common to humanity. The matter of how closely we resemble each other is not one purely of ancestry, but of the size of that pool - our overall genetic similarity. From what I gather, it's not an exceptionally large pool. I may not have gotten whatever gene controls the formation of the human prefrontal cortex from the same nth ancestor as you, but I got it all the same.
Also, where does dominance play into this, I wonder?
> The reality is opposite the title - humans are far more distinct, especially on group levels, than is commonly understood.
This really seems to have some huge assumptions in there. What is commonly understood? I don't think there is much common understanding associated with this. Except maybe that we should treat individuals as individuals, rather than make strong distinctions based on group membership, regardless of any underlying distinctions in the groups. At least that's the noble intent -- I don't think any lies are layered on this.
I agree with you about the "noble" lies. You wrote something else that I have never seen before and that seems quite interesting:
> When DNA recombines at conception, it only snips and stitches in a fairly limited number of places. It doesn't 'mix' finely like paint.
I had always assumed that clearly recognizable traits that children inherit from parents are simply based on the large influence of certain small pieces of DNA.
Do you know a good text that discusses that?
> I had always assumed that clearly recognizable traits that children inherit from parents are simply based on the large influence of certain small pieces of DNA
I never understood this position from the logical point of view.
Say that you were put in front of two pictures that are entirely covered except for a small visible part each. The two visible parts of the pictures are different. Would you ever assume the parts that you can't see to be identical, or would you assume they differ from each other as much as the visible parts do?
> Some very small genes have very large visible expression
Let me change your italics:
Some very small genes have very large visible expression
So small parts of the DNA code for changes that we can visually appreciate. This doesn't mean that the rest of the DNA contains no variations, but just that we cannot see them. But it would be wrong to assume that the only parts that are actually different are those which encode for visible characteristics.
A 2011 study identified 13 DNA variations across 11 different genes that could be used to predict hair color.
This seems like a clearly recognizable inherited trait, based on a large influence of certain small pieces of DNA. The abstract mentions eye color as well.
The article is about simulation results, but I have a mathematically proven result for an idealized abstract species notion, published in an article in Acta Biotheoretica.
Definition: An "infinitary species" is a set X of organisms which is (i) infinite, (ii) ancestrally closed (contains every ancestor of every member of itself), and (iii) as small as possible with those two properties (i.e., no strict subset of X has properties i and ii).
Theorem: In any infinitary species, every member is an ancestor of almost every other member (more precisely: of all but finitely many other members).
Proof: Let m be a member of an infinitary species X. Let S be the set of members of X who are NOT m or descendants of m. Let S' be S plus all ancestors of members of S. Since X is ancestrally closed, S' is a subset of X. S' is ancestrally closed by construction. S' does not contain m, so S' is a strict subset of X. Therefore, since X is as small as possible with properties (i) and (ii), it follows that S' must be finite (otherwise S' would be a strict subset of X with properties i and ii). Thus S is finite, proving the theorem, QED.
My relatives would sometimes talk about how we were related to some deposed king or some princess who ran away to avoid being married. I thought it's likely there's enough princesses and undocumented deposed kings out there that everyone should have a great-great-grandaunt who was a legitimate princess in their lineage. This article supports that theory.
Even more interesting IMO is that the same argument holds not just for royalty but also for religious figures whose descendants have special divinely-sanctioned status in various different religions. For example, it's quite likely that we're all descendants of the original high priest Aaron, whose descendants and no-one else are allowed by God to perform certain actions (caveat: the ancient texts are ambiguous about whether "descendant" means "descendant along both maternal and paternal lines" or whether it's more restrictive, and in certain circles this could be a sensitive question). Similar thing for religious prophecies about peoples' descendants (e.g. that the Messiah is a descendant of Judah---it's probable that we are all descendants of Judah by now).
Problem is, The article assume humans mate with uniform distribution, and that they did so generations ago. The 2^n argument is way naive and this level of uniformity assumes every people on earth has the chance to end up with a uniform random other person as their partner, regardless of geographic, cultural etc differences.
Doesn't that only support their point? A naively optimistic estimate that ancestors are uniformly distributed will take more generations to hit the limit of 2^n vs the historic population. In reality ancestors are "reused" even faster than that, particularly with examples like geographically isolated villages, etc.
Agreed. There are regions of commonality, that share little or nothing with other regions. This isolation feature means that simple statistics is uninformative.
Weren't Australian Aboriginals isolated for tens of thousands of years and some full blooded individuals still exist today? How could they have an ancestor outside Australia in only 1400 BC?
The entire linked Nature paper is freely accessible. It's just a simulation, but they say this:
> No large group is known to have maintained complete reproductive isolation for extended periods.
The paper's conclusion:
> Given the remaining uncertainties about migration rates and real-world mating patterns, the date of the MRCA for everyone living today cannot be identified with great precision. Nevertheless, our results suggest that the most recent common ancestor for the world’s current population lived in the relatively recent past—perhaps within the last few thousand years. And a few thousand years before that, although we have received genetic material in markedly different proportions from the people alive at the time, the ancestors of everyone on the Earth today were exactly the same.
> Further work is needed to determine the effect of this common ancestry on patterns of genetic variation in structured populations. But to the extent that ancestry is considered in genealogical rather than genetic terms, our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
Odd stuff I've read. There wasn't no contact. But contact was very limited. It's northern Australia is 100-300 miles from parts of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, etc.
Also also genes that don't confer any particular advantage tend to peter out when inserted into large populations.
Above my pay grade but I think that argues that the genetic difference that do exist tend to either not confer any particular advantage, like maybe shape of your nose, hair color. Or confer some limited advantage, skin pigmentation for instance seems to be strongly associated with solar radiation and dietary availability of Folic Acid and Vit D.
Well, the article talks a lot about 'our ancestry' and not all of mankind. So probably it applies only to 'us'(Europeans and US) and not 'them'. Ok, probably it was just lazy science and no politicsl agenda.
The article asserts that all people have some European ancestry. I strongly doubt that. Consider uncontacted tribes in Papua New Guinea, the Amazon rainforests or Sentinel Island.
>At first glance, these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere. But “genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time,” Rutherford explains. Beginning in 1492, “you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are no people in South America today who don’t have European ancestry.”
I agree - I struggle with this too. I'm not convinced that in 500 years, European DNA has made it into every. single. individual. in South America. Similarly, I struggle to accept that the same is true for some of the indigenous people of Australia, or other similarly remote tribes.
As a mathematical model, I don't doubt the assertion that it's possible one bit. But humans don't interbreed like that.
IMO all this tree stuff doesn't pass my "finitist efficiency test". I don't think we should choose to work with this these super large exponential numbers just to quotient them out. Better to just us the "Family DAG" from the get-go.
What must be done by real demographers, but never covered in these articles from the general public, is some sort of "outbread---diversity" distribution. There is a clearly a conservation law in that genetic variation at larger scales depends on inbreeding / genetic homogeneity at smaller scales.
While I doubt the phenomenon is scale-free, there is still variation in the possible distributions at every scale. I want to know where humans have lied in that distribution-of-distributions over time. E.g. Europe is very homogeneous but if there was something more egalitarian than federalism would it be even more homogeneous?
My hunch is "no" because most of these Eurasian hierarchical societies had tones of elite man + non-elite women illegitimate children who were denied elite privileges, but I'd still like to see the definitive answer.
> I'm pretty this is why people all over the world like to keep track of their ancestry. People who don't will be more closely inbred.
Not sure about that. Tracking ancestry probably became a middle-class hobby in mimicry of the aristocracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the aristocracy in most places were notoriously pretty much okay with marrying cousins.
There isn't actually much risk in marrying a cousin. It is when successive generations marry cousins that you become more closely related to your cousin than you might naively expect. This is where the inbreeding risk comes from. And, parts of the aristocracy did, in fact, have significant effects from this inbreeding.
You are the result of a thousand generations of cousin-breeding, and from zero to a couple dozen generations of not-cousin breeding. There are still current anti-incest traditions followed by modern people that pretty much read "You will marry your cousin." The sky doesn't fall in on them, although miscarriages and infant mortality are high, as well as a bunch of recessive diseases.
I'm slightly wary of thoughty2, I enjoy (can't say "like" nowadays) his videos, but I feel he is prone to the trap of many smart people, where he is too convincing, even to himself sometimes.
> Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to Rohde’s calculations.
All the article seems to be based on the Out of Africa hypotesis, but what about the multiregional hypotesis?
The strong multi-regional hypothesis is essentially a dead issue; didn't survive contact with modern genetics. There's now some evidence for regional admixture for genetics from archaic humans with Homo sapiens, and this is sometimes called (kind of misleadingly, IMO), the weak multi-regional hypothesis.
I doubt that. All these estimates conveniently fail to account for the few isolated tribes that still exist to this day, for instance various tribes in Amazonia or the Sentinelese.
No. There's some evidence that Homo sapiens, after distributing itself, had some degree of regional admixture from archaic hominids, which may be what you're thinking of.
Your intuition on this is wrong, and there's no need to fly off the handle.
Ancestry is infectious. Take two populations, A and B, completely isolated from each other. (nevermind that they all have a common ancestor long before the populations diverged). Now one day in 1000 B.C. a single individual from population A migrates over to population B, mates, and has offspring (more than 1) with an individual from population B. Just keeping things simple with 2 children per generation. The next generation, those 2 individuals go off and have offspring with other members of population B. That's 4 descendants. Next generation 8. And so on. Of course the characteristics of population A (it's phenotype) may become less, because proportionally, that individual's genes make up less and less with each generation. So it might not even be detectable by looking at someone that they have a tiny bit of A's genes.
The key is that the propagation of ancestry never stops, because ancestry doesn't round down to zero. It's a mathematical relation. Now, genetically, those genes keep spreading (thinly) over the entire population, generation after generation, so it is actually possible that those genes get rounded down to 0, and you actually have no DNA in common with that ancestor (except that which they had in common with your other ancestors). But mathematically, in terms of ancestry, there is a point many generations later that it becomes almost impossible to not interbreed with someone who is descended from A.
This is exactly the intuition behind this genetic isopoint--when you run the exponentials either direction in time, they overflow the population. So you either have your genes completely selected out, or they "infect" the entire population, assuming that you and your offspring consistently have more than 1 child on average.
"The key is that the propagation of ancestry never stops, because ancestry doesn't round down to zero."
I get your other points but this assumption seems obviously wrong. Plenty of people historically did not live to leave children behind. Then of course, we can have complete stops in the propagation of ancestry.
It only takes one single person to migrate and have surviving descendants for everyone to end up their descendant. So yes it's possible that people migrate and not have descendants, but that has to be true for every single one of them.
In reality even over very long geographic distances we have evidence of hundreds or even thousands of people migrating. Marco Polo first visited China with his uncles who had been there before. He recoded that there were so many European traders in Beijing that the Italians, Spanish, etc each had their own districts. Even before that Rabban bar Sauma was an Armenian Christian monk born in the Armenian district of Beijing in about 1220, who travelled to Europe. He appears in the court records at the Vatican and in England.
As for sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern traders have been plying the seas of eastern Africa, and running caravans through central Africa for thousands of years. Their cultural and genetic fingerprint is all over Africa. There is a small, but persistent and measurable level of sub-Saharan African genetic markers in southern Europe dating to the Roman era.
Most of our ancestors, even in recent history have migrated a lot.
For example Vandals, a tribe living in Poland, moved west and south, and established kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean islands and North Africa in the 5th century! Many tribes living in Europe had a similar migration pattern at that time [0].
This was a part of humans migrations from Asia to Europe, pushing people ahead of them.
Another incredible migration is the Bantu expansion, where people consistently moved eastward and southward for at least a millennia.
And we changed a lot in the process, New arriving people in Europe from Africa, at the end of the ice age, had a much darker skin than today.
The statement you're arguing against says nothing about having DNA from that ancestor, just about their existence as an ancestor. Instead, the article seems to agree with you, saying:
"Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne, however. Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain. People are more closely related genealogically than genetically".
Well the most common ancestor is used to push a certain narrative about all people "being the same", while conveniently putting aside hundreds of thousands years of evolution, which are precisely the source of the present day differences, but that doesn’t mean it’s false either, as there is indeed a common ancestor if we look back far enough.
I think it's clear from history that narrative of us "being the same" hasn't caused nearly as much trouble as the opposite, the complete and utter lie that we are not all human.
> It's no coincidence that people with African genetics always win sprints and marathons in the Olympics.
This is a lie, and you know it. Many people of non-African origin do win such sprint and marathon contests. I suspect what you are really trying to get at, in as few words as possible, is a typical the racist trope: that Africans excel in mindless physical sports, while being inferior in the intellect. However, for example, the physical sport of swimming (and many other sports) is dominated by caucasian people. Given this, it would be wrong to ascribe any over-arching superiority of Africans in sports, or even of any sport category.
That there are physiological differences between groups of people is not in doubt. However, that does not necessarily translate to any culturally meaningful broad characterizations. Fitness in any endeavour requires a complex mix of talents and skills. I'm surprised to see such simplistic, pseudo-rational arguments from HN members.
> Given this, it would be wrong to ascribe any over-arching superiority of Africans in sports
I don’t see anywhere in the parent comment where this was done. They specifically talk about (running) sprints and marathons.
The claim with respect to sprints does not seem too controversial. The fastest white man ever has a personal best that is tied for 49th in the 100m [1] - put another way, the top 50 fastest men ever, citizens of multiple countries, all have recent African ancestry.
A look at the fastest ever in the marathon [2] reveals a pattern of dominance by athletes of African ancestry as well. Very different ancestry (Kenyans and Ethiopians) and average phenotype from the ones who dominate the 100m as you’d expect but such confusion is inevitable when one talks about these topics in an American forum where “African ancestry” is supposed to mean some narrow and clearly defined thing...
> This is a lie, and you know it. Many people of non-African origin do win such sprint and marathon contests
Korean people are genetically shorter than other races. Do you dispute that this would give them a profound disadvantage in basketball, all else equal? The narrative of all races being functionally the same phenotypically is prima facie absurd as even the most simplistic armchair observation reveals. Anyone who denies that Korean people have a genetic distadvantage in basketball must be acting in bad faith, and if they agree that they are disadvantaged in basketball then they agree with the premise that genetics of racial groups do play an important role in determining over- or under-performance in particular domains.
I never ascribed African dominance to sports in general, only running. Presumably the genetics required for elite swimming performance differ to those required for elite running performance, since they are completely different sports.
> This is a lie, and you know it
Absolutely not. It is an exaggeration, but very much is broadly true. All 100m men's champions at the Olympics going back to 1984 have been of African descent. If my hypothesis is correct, we would expect their dominance
to only continue and increase especially as they are given more economic opportunity, but time will tell.
Notably, there are 0 Asian champions going back to the 1800s. Is this just a total coincidence in your worldview? Or is it purely a cultural phenomenon, and if so, do you have any evidence whatsoever for this, or merely a bare assertion?
> However, that does not necessarily translates to any culturally meaningful broads characterizations.
The extent to which this is true is an open question, the only thing I'm sure of is that it's not going to be addressed honestly because of how politically charged it is.
The height difference owes a lot to nutrition and the long-term living standards of the different countries.
I bet the height difference in Koreans between the different generations alive today is quite different from one another.
As for Olympics 100 years ago. Are you for real? Most of Asia was under the thumb of Imperialism. They weren’t exactly positioned to “send their best”.
How many African nations participated in 1920? Another continent dealing with Imperialism.
> I bet the height difference in Koreans between the different generations alive today is quite different from one another.
Also quite different between the Koreas. While the average height in both has increased significantly since the Japanese occupation, it has done so significantly faster in South Korea (as you'd expect, given the economic difference).
The height difference between racial groups has a significant genetic component. Asian Americans are 8cm shorter than White Americans, despite being about equally wealthy.
This means that Asians are, on average, genetically disadvantaged when it comes to performance in, for example, basketball - meaning they are less likely to produce a star basketball player, all else equal, because there are less extremely tall Asians as a percentage of the population.
If we can't agree on this central claim then our differences are irreconcilable.
I understand that culture, nutrition, etc, makes a difference, and I don't dispute that, my only claim is that the genetics of race is playing a causal role here.
In the post you responded to, I was talking about Asian Americans which have similar wealth to White Americans and earn 38 percent more than the national median income.
Asian Americans are 6cm shorter than Black Americans who earn much less than the national median.
Thus their smaller average height can't be attributed to nutritional deficiency or wealth factors, and can only be explained by genetics.
Does your data differentiate between:
- Naturalization vs native born?
- Multi-generation height changes?
- The differences in physical activities?
- Diet differences? I think East Asians tend to be lactose intolerant.
Once all things are made equal, then how does the data look?
Why did you change your example of Asian shortness from Chinese to Korean when rewriting this comment? Did you look up statistics for Chinese basketball players and decide there were too many of them playing at an elite level to support your narrative?
If so... you do realize that Koreans and Chinese are different ethnicities but the same race, right? And that all of them play basketball?
> Did you look up statistics for Chinese basketball players and realize there were too many of them to support your narrative?
No. I realize that there are many tall Asians, as well as that there are many tall Asians who play basketball. These two facts are not relevant to my argument.
I changed the example from Chinese to Korean (not that it matters because the argument works the same with either), because China is larger and more heterogeneous, Beijing's average height is quite a bit taller than Korea's average height for example. It's easier and safer (less prone to nitpicking) to make the point by using Korea as the example.
But if there are more Asians in China than Korea, which obviously there are, they should be the more accurate representation of Asian genetics. And this is not even taking into account Asians in the US and elsewhere outside of Asia. You say it shouldn't matter yet you also admit your argument is weakened by using the bigger data set.
Claims about inherent racial strengths and weaknesses always break down once the actual genetic diversity within the population of a "race" is taken into account, because what we consider to be "race" is broad and mostly defined by cultural and political factors, rather than genetics.
By definition, professional athletes are genetic exceptions. So it would make no sense to compare the average member of any population to the elites in the NBA and make claims about race in general. Particularly with something as trivial and variant as height.
> But if there are more Asians in China than Korea, which obviously there are, they should be the more accurate representation of Asian genetics.
The tallest province in China is still shorter than the average European height. And Asians aren't a monolith, there can be genetic variation between Han Chinese, Koreans and Japanese in a phenotype such as height. The average height in Japan for men is 161cm despite being a rich country (so it is likely driven by genetics, not nutrition).
> You say it shouldn't matter yet you also admit your argument is weakened by using the bigger data set.
I say no such thing. I say it is less prone to nit picking. The argument is unchanged.
> By definition, professional athletes are genetic exceptions. So it would make no sense to compare the average member of any population to the elites in the NBA and make claims about race in general.
This is statistically illiterate. If you have two distributions with the same kurtosis, and one distribution has a mean, say, 0.4 standard deviations lower than the other, then the frequency of extreme right-tail performance is going to be much less common in one population than the other. This is just elementary statistics.
Yes, you can have an Asian who is extremely tall and therefore not disadvantaged in the game of basketball, but that is simply not relevant to the statistical claim I'm making. If you have two equally sized racial groups, one has 2% of the population that are extremely tall, and the other has 0.3% of the population that are extremely tall, then the former racial group has an advantage due to this genetic difference in this specific domain, and any elite performers in this specific domain are likely to come from the former racial group than the latter (all else equal).
Why is it so hard to believe that Black people dominate certain sports due to interest, opportunity, and hard work? Not some unsubstantiated group genetic advantage.
It's possible that White and Asian people just less interested, but it's not the sensible null hypothesis, given that we can observe with our own two eyes phenotypical differences in physique between the racial groups (e.g. Asians being shorter)
This is idiotic.If this was true, Humans wouldnt share 90%+ genetic similarity with great apes (depending on which genes you count) which would go against every scientific consesus.
And you are claiming humans share no genes each other over a span less than 100K years.
Disclaimer - the last thing I want to do is to start a religious debate on HN. So, please, don't down-vote me because I'm going to mention Bible here.
But I find it interesting that the Individual Ancestors Point is not that far off from the Biblical estimate of the Earth's age of about 6,000 to 15,000 years.
So forget about "planting" the planet with "fake" fossils, Adam and Eve are right on the same timeline as the IAP.
Which really isn't that surprising because that basically indicates the age of a modern human being, capable of passing down stories through an invention of a language, and eventually writing them down.
So, at least in this case, the Bible got the math down fairly well, and I'm bringing it up purely as a historical document here.
I don't really understand the point you're making, but the Identical Ancestors Point isn't a fixed point in history; it keeps moving forwards. So it is different now from what it was when the book of Genesis was written.
Taking the Bible at face value, Adam and Eve were created about 6000 years ago. At this time cities had already existed for thousands of years. So no, the Bible did not get "the math down fairly well".
Honestly, that's not even taking the Bible at face value. Attempting to date events in the Bible was pretty popular at one time, but it required a lot of special pleading and ignoring discrepancies (it's not like the Bible just says in the intro "this covers events from 4000BC to 22AD" or whatever; attempts at doing this mostly involve trying to infer it from ancestry and quasi-historical events mentioned), and isn't generally taken seriously by modern theologians.
Obviously the timeline in the Bible is ridiculous with people living for hundreds of years and so on. But if you take the genealogies at face value, this is the rough time scale since creation you end up with.
Which is of course a good reason not to take the Bible at face value as historical overall (even if some of the parts are reasonably historical).
That is an interesting point. In Hinduism there's some mythology around astronomical cycles that have similar spans to those mentioned in Bible. I've a far-out theory that Bible is actually referring to the same cycles.
Side track: there's a serious argument that parts of Bible are translated pretty badly (which puts into perspective people quoting it verbatum). I've been told of a specific example where (excuse the paraphrasing) Eve is said to emerge from the side of Adam, as in from the interior of his torso, and it's popularly taken to be a metaphor. Some interpret it to mean that a woman is somehow a byproduct of man, and thus lesser. Anyway, someone actually took up checking the translation and concluded that it's not that Eve emerged from Adam's side, but that she emerged at his side, as in stood by him. Going by what's written in a super old book that's been translated and altered many many times is, well, adventurous.
Hmm, I was really surprised about the part on woman creation, as I've never read such version (in Polish), but, indeed this https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2&versi... (very) strange translation mentions woman to be taken from man's rib.
> So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh.
I had heard a different theory, that this may be a mythological explanation on why humans don't have a penile bone like many common farm animals at that time (with 'rib' being a mistranslation of a more vague 'bone'). This would also make more symbolic sense, as a penile bone would be more obviously related to creation than a rib.
> The baculum (also penis bone, penile bone, or os penis, os genitale or os priapi) is a bone found in the penis of many placental mammals. It is absent in the human penis, but present in the penises of other primates, such as the gorilla and chimpanzee.
Well, ancient Israelis were quite likely to have known that sheep and goats have a baculum (and perhaps wonder why they do not), and less likely to have known about gorillas and chimpanzees.
Image search for הצלע pretty much gives rib (and rib cuts). On the other hand, it's unclear that all of the many biblical references to feet are meant literally as pedal extremities.
He took a rib from the left or from the right side? The truth would be easy to prove by counting how many ribs a man has on which side. If it's true, one side would have one rib more.
If the number of ribs is the same, then it's either that God didn't create a woman from man's rib, or he took two ribs, one from each side, and created two women.
If you take the Bible at face value it contradicts itself. It all depended on the fan interpretation to to make sense. If you are non religious and think about the old testament just as what it was, its easier to understand the contradictions.
(1) In Genesis 1 the god creates animals before the man. He creates man and woman and tells them to be fruitful and multiply.
(2) In Genesis 2 God creates Adam before animals. Adam and Eve are put into special place called Eden and are not aware of their sexuality until they sin.
Judaism is folk religion of the Israelites, not universal religion. Old testament tells the story from the point of Jewish tribes. in it's current form it was created around (538–332 BC). Israelites “God’s chosen people” in the old testament. All the interaction with the god and men is actually about Israelites and God, not the humanity and God.
One way to think this is that genesis 2 is the general creation myth, Genesis 2 is the story of how God created two first Jews. Jewish people started to separate religiously from other Canaanites between 1200 and 1000 BCE, so maybe you can put the Adam and Eve myth there.
Just a note, but actually relevant to the main topic of the thread:
> Judaism is folk religion of the Israelites, ...
In the Hebrew Bible, the tribe of Judah was just one of twelve tribes. Nowadays, the Samaritans still consider themselves distinct from the Jews with different tribal lineage.
> So, at least in this case, the Bible got the math down fairly well, and I'm bringing it up purely as a historical document here.
No. Genesis is not a historical document. It is an allegory about creation. Adam and Eve need not necessarily be the first humans, but they were the first to receive a divine spark called "the soul".
I found these kind of observations interesting.
Just a note, maybe it would have help you to avoid the downvotes if you had quotations on "Adam" and "Eve"
All living people share exactly the same set of ancestors from this point back, all the way to the very first single-celled organism. However, people will vary widely in how much ancestry and genes they inherit from each ancestor, which will cause them to have very different genotypes and phenotypes.
This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: Considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern day Japanese person will get 88.4% of his ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of his ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan. Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions.
A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than he will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point