I had an online conversation with Lund on this subject many years ago, and concluded that he was a nutball.
I'd forgotten he was still around. Interesting blog. At least back then.
And now clicking through, I see no reason to doubt my conclusion.
I'm not sure how much of a nut he is, hence the post. You people know things.
Alex got me reading him, way back in the day.
What makes me think he has a point* is that the process he describes sort of happened in Taiwan in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Qing government recognized Aboriginal title,** the Aboriginals rented usage rights to the Han, who usually sub-let to other Han who did the actual farming. Most of the gains accrued to the Han middlemen, and eventually the two-tiered rent system was abolished, but in the interim some Aboriginals did pretty well. And at the same time lots of them were Sinicizing and intermarrying, to the extent that when the Japanese did a census they counted those people as Han. Based on descent from the Japanese classifications, Taiwan today is ~2% Aboriginal; counting descendants from the Sinicized, as much as 20%.
*However much smaller it may be than the point he wants to make.
**To stop Han settlers from grabbing land and starting wars.
I'm sure there are exceptions -- the US is big, and the time periods here are long -- but where the analogy fails in the US is that Native landowners were more often dispossessed than able to extract rents from immigrants.
My specific disagreement with the guy was over the extent of mixed marriage/parenting in SE New England in the 17th century. He thinks it was extensive. I think there is zero evidence for this, either contemporaneous or modern. I'm not saying there wasn't some. I'm saying that you couldn't say that a double digit percentage of the 'white' people of SE NE in 1700 were of mixed race.
DNA from the descendants of 17th French settlers is in no way probative of Lund's argument.
Obviously, there was mixing on the frontiers, but, in general, you don't see those mixed race children moving to the eastern cities, and so places like Quebec City, Boston, and Providence never had large mixed race population.
As is easy to show with the app at nosorigines, nearly everyone with French Canadian ancestry is related. The math isn't complicated: take a population of 4,000 (or whatever) advance 300 years, and you'll see at least some overlap all over the place. Thus, I'm probably related, with a common ancestor in the 10th or 11th generation back, to anyone with Metis heritage, which includes a substantial number of Natives here in Montana. That doesn't mean I have any Native ancestry at all (and to my knowledge, I do not*)
9: Thanks, I figured it would be something like that. When say SE New England, do you mean basically urban, what's now greater Boston?
* There's a persistent contention that a particular 17th female ancestor of mine (and, what, a million other people) who lived in Quebec was a Native. I've never found the evidence remotely persuasive. Anyway, someone recently made a formal claim of some sort in Ontario based on her ancestry: the admin body hearing the matter wasn't impressed either.
10 Yeah, Providence-Salem.
I think English settlers were way more racist than he seems to think, and that rather than inferring Native heritage from silence, one should expect Native heritage to have been called out in the contemporary records etc. I just do not see at all that you can have had King Philip's War, both in the execution and the documentation, without the existence of a by-then supposedly extensive mixed race population being rather prominently featured.
Makes sense. What do you think of his claim that there are insufficient documented immigrants to account for population increase i the colonies?
I don't think you assume that a women for whom we have only a first name was a Native, rather than an English immigrant whose passage wasn't recorded (as most people's passage was not). White trash doesn't show in the records nearly to the extent as landowners/tradesmen, etc.
Following 12, I was just looking to link to that Ontario decision, but got diverted on the subject of DNA. They've tested several descendants of the woman, and find mitocondrial DNA that's unequivocally European. To which the response, from proponents of her Native ancestry, is that DNA doesn't tell you anything, because some woman in the chain might have been adopted (although in Quebec we're usually working from original parish infant baptism records).
This reminds one of the very sad fate of Pocahontas.
Never trust Whitey.
A large branch of my people started out in SE New England, and the emphasis certainly seems to have been on killing Indians, not breeding with them.
Indeed, my sister did the genetic ancestry test thing, and it turns out that we are extremely white.
I don't know. I could use some of that Disney money.
I think English settlers were way more racist than he seems to think
Is that mutually exclusive? Latin settlers were also racist as shit but intermarried like crazy.
Just landed in Vegas. I'll ask around.
Catholics are promiscuous. Kind of by definition.
3 was my conclusion too. Also, I recommend Elliott West's Contested Plains.
I read a fascinating book long ago about the revival of the Western Pequot Tribe in Connecticut in the 1980's. Essentially, after the last resident of the tiny reservation (100 or so acres of worthless swamp) died, the State government started to legally terminate the reservation. One guy who had grown up there and possibly had a tiny bit of Native ancestry, decided to move back and fight the state. He and his lawyer figured they needed more than one person to make a tribe, so they did some geneological research going back many generations, and invited everyone who might qualify to a tribal Council Meeting, the first in a century. Most of the people contacted had no idea they had any Native ancestry.
At the tribal Council meeting, it was immediately obvious that about half the Tribe was "White" and half was "Black."
(The rest of the story: Several people moved back onto the swamp, the Tribe got to keep its acres, and within a few years they filled in some of the swamp and opened the Foxwoods Casino, and most of the members got rich, alcoholic, and bankrupt.)
21: Thanks. Does it bear directly on this? The periods obviously are widely separated.
I think it bears on the first link, although I haven't read either link. IIRC, West talks about how there were early interracial marriages/relationships that got pushed out/obscured as settlement intensified
I recently did the 23andMe DNA test. Apparently my DNA has more Neanderthal variants than 86% of those who have taken the test. I'm basically that caveman in the GEICO ads!
As previously reported here my NA relatives born on a reservation un-identified as NA as quickly as they possibly could. I think that prior to CA allowing gambling on NA lands the CA tribe I'm related to would have accepted my application to be enrolled, but then they got a casino up and running and raised the bar for enrollment, which is fine by me as I have no personal attachment to being NA so enrolling would be a very odd thing to do from my perspective. And the last time I read anything about the tribe in the news it involved some huge shootout in the casino, with the customers taking cover 'neath the gaming tables, so nope not at all interested! Carry on without me dudes!
I have a colleague whose kids gave him a test from them for christmas, i think i'd not like that gift. I have no reason to think my dna is anything other than largely very pale former sheep rustlers from sw UK via australia (free ticket!) thence to CA on paternal side and dirt poor very pale German alcoholics and ridiculously beautiful dirt poor alcoholic NA on maternal side, just doesn't seem to be much room for mystery around these parts.
23 and me is claiming enumerable Neanderthal variants? Not best practice. There are a bunch or regions on the modern human genome where the population genetics strongly suggests introgression from a population with different ancestry (so neanderthal) but the actual alleles detected in those regions do not match the (badly degraded and uncertain) neanderthal sequence that exists. It's gene flow analysis to find haplotype blocks inconsistent with African ancestry, not allele enumeration using neanderthal sequence.
I mostly know about the tests from the adoptive search side. I have a friend who signed up because her mother was adopted as an infant and she's curious about her history but also some heritable medical conditions. She quickly got a very close match, found out that her dad and the girlfriend before her mom had placed a baby for adoption who is now an adult looking for contact. I've been able to help her facilitate that, but still haven't pinned down her maternal side yet. I'm pretty sure everybody's pretty white.
I was always under the assumption that in the US, the one drop rule as a method of legal racial categorization and discrimination really only applied to African ancestry, so being a quarter Asian or Native didn't necessarily prevent you from being white the way being a quarter black did? (AIUI, wasn't blood quantum mainly used as a way to deny people claims to native ancestry, so the pressures were reversed, with white people wanting to deny Native status, and Natives wanting more inclusive recognition)
28. Whoops, my misunderstanding-- they do then go back and compare the predicted windows to equivalent neanderthal windows.
30 The wikipedia entry on the one drop rule is informative, not that that's surprising.
Can those internet DNA tests go beyond the maternal bloodline, though? Like, am I really 23% Scandinavian, or is it that the part of the DNA that they can test is 23% Scandinavian?
I recommend Elliott West's Contested Plains.
I recently bought a copy as part of my local used bookstore's clearance sale, so I'm glad to hear it's good.
I think they were still at $5 a book at that point. Now they're down to $2 a bag. Not much left that looks interesting, though.
Like, am I really 23% Scandinavian, or is it that the part of the DNA that they can test is 23% Scandinavian?
As I understand it (but I don't really understand it, and someone who actually knows something about DNA should feel free to correct me!), they do test all relevant DNA, or all 23 pairs of chromosomes. So yeah, you're probably 23% Scandinavian; except that, what do we mean by "Scandinavian"?
I read something by John Grenham (a very sharp, and often quite funny, Irish genealogist) the other day that sort of made sense to me. Expressing scepticism about, and distaste for, the notion of "ahistorical essences that define groups as this ethnicity or that," Grenham confesses that he was nevertheless "blown away" by ancestry.com's pinpointing of his North Connacht and Galway origins, based purely on his DNA. How could they do this, he asks?
Long story short: in place of an essentialist notion of "ethnicity" (which, in an American context, is likely to be even more reductively reduced to an essentialist notion of "race"), ancestry's concept of a "genetic community" is "simply a group of people from more or less the same place who married each other over multiple generations, a nice, loose target, and much more sensible than 'ethnicity.'" So it's not that Grenham is essentially, or ethnically or racially, "Connachtian," it's that he has a lot of ancestors who lived, and intermarried and reproduced, in Connacht. Likewise, I guess, with your ancestors who lived and reproduced in what we now call Scandinavia. It's not that "Scandinavian" is actually a thing; it's that you have some ancestors who lived and intermarried and reproduced in an area that we now call "Scandinavia."
Here's something I wonder about DNA. I'm 1/8 French. So are my brothers and sister. Assuming there's some DNA combination you could look at that would say French, would we each really have 12.5% of that? My sister and I look related, but my brothers do not look like us at all. They obviously have a lot of genetic material from elsewhere in the tree. I kind of look like my mom's family, so wouldn't it be natural to think I'm going to clock in under 12.5% French, since I seem to have picked up a bunch of features from an English side?
Or does it not work that way at all?
"Genomics doesn't get to define indigenous identity."
https://twitter.com/KimTallBear/status/852533728920223746
38: there's a lot more going on with genetics than the obvious aspects of external physical appearance (e.g., blood type), so I'd be hesitant to make that assumption.
I'm kind of drunk and this is hard to think about, but I think it's possible (albeit vanishingly unlikely) to pass on literally zero of one of your parents to your kid. You have to get alleles from both of your parents, but your kid could get only the ones from your mother for example - unlikely but possible. So in theory you could inherit nothing from one (or even two!) of your grandparents.
1/8 is great-grandparent level, so it's quite possible that you and your siblings have different amounts of French.
If I'm right about the above then there's a way that you could become a clone of your half-uncle or half-aunt purely by fluke. I think. Again - drunk.
(Oh yeah and as others said above it's not always a great idea to try working backwards from phenotype to genotype for quite a number of reasons)
41 is correct. In the simplified case where there are only four genes, each with two alleles, you could have
Mother ABCDABCD
Father abcdabcd
You AaBbCcDd
Your gamete ABCD.
So in one in eight cases (2x2^-4) your kid would inherit only alleles from one of your parents. Of course humans have tens of thousands of genes, not four.
So yeah, you're probably 23% Scandinavian; except that, what do we mean by "Scandinavian"?
In my case, I suspect it means "people from the Danelaw and/or the Normans."
It also says that I have a large chunk of Irish, which I don't believe to be true. I think they are confusing Welsh for Irish.
15: According to family legend, I am descended from Pocahontas (through her marriage to John Rolfe), but I gather that that's a very common claim made by Virginia families with ancestors going back to the early Jamestown era. I haven't seen any actual evidence, although my father was a stickler for his research. Ancestry.com isn't turning anything up.
One factoid I've heard and enjoy citing without the ability to actually point to data is that you are white but have ancestors in the American south before 1800, the probability of having African ancestors goes up to some really high (50? 66? 99?) percentage. Since the bulk of my (easily traceable via Ancestry) family seems to have come out of early 1600s Virginia and Maryland, this would entertain me no end. Not because I would suddenly be able to identify as anything other than super-white, but I have a couple conservative aunts who would get real uncomfortable, and that could be fun.
One of the few branches that doesn't come to Ohio in the early 1800s through Virginia and Maryland came to Ohio in the early 1800s from the Philadelphia area back when New Sweden existed--I had no idea that Sweden had any North American colonies, but there you go.
I've not really done much with Virginia families, but it kind of surprises me that there isn't a reference work of some kind setting out Pocohontas' descendants for 5 generations of somesuch. That would get us to. what, people born 1750-1800 . . .
What little I have done with Virginia, though, is frustratingly difficult, since so many records were destroyed in 1864 or so.
My mom's family has had a narrative claim to Native ancestry, though no one ever made a big deal about it. I always assumed this was an icky fabrication, but the aunt who's into genealogy claims to have pinned down the identity of the ancestor in question and it seems legit. I still feel weird about that.
The girls and I have talked about doing ancestral genetic testing at some point. Selah has one white grandparent but the rest are from black families, but of course that can mean quite a bit of white and sometimes NA ancestry too.
I find I have less curiosity about this than almost anybody I know. My friends have had it done, my wife is curious--everybody expects me to be completely NW Eur, as do I, so what's the point?
Yet more than one friend has expressed disappointment on finding that this or that they hoped for traces of doesn't show in their tests.
I guess everybody is Anastasia now.
"An American," a Frenchman once told Mark Twain - or at least he did according to Mark Twain, so it probably never happened, but it's a good story - "an American need never be idle; if he has some spare time, he can always try to discover who his grandfather was."
"Right you are," Twain replied. "And I reckon a Frenchman's got a good standby for a rainy day too - he can turn to and try to find out who his father was."
And, as Charlie informs us, all Americans are actually French Canadians, so now they can do both.
I find I have less curiosity about this than almost anybody I know. My friends have had it done, my wife is curious--everybody expects me to be completely NW Eur, as do I, so what's the point?
I'm in much the same boat. Though even if it weren't quite what I expected, why should I care?
I'm mildly curious, but I expect it to show that I'm British. There's an adoption in my immediate ancestry, but, as far as I know, it was an adoption of a child from one Glasgow family with origins in the north of Ireland who migrated to Scotland in the mid 19th century, to an another Glasgow family WOiNIWMtSit19C. I suppose there might be some Scandinavian in there for the usual reasons.
I'd still do the test, just because I'm mildly interested.
as Charlie informs us, all Americans are actually French Canadians
#notallfpps
44 -- With a ggparent, I suppose the odds are quite good that you'd get some genetic material, maybe even an 8th, plus or minus a little. When you're talking about a single ancestor 8 generations back -- and Pocohontas is probably 15 or more generations back from Chopper -- it seems to me that the percentages you'd see in the DNA would be nearly useless.
I'm interested, but I don't suspect any surprises--Irish and British of various sorts through various paths. And thanks for the discussion above, Charlie--I have some distant old New England ancestry and figured that it was more likely than not that there was a small amount of Native American ancestry there but I see that's probably bullshit. Regardless, I wouldn't expect it to be enough to show up on one of these tests.
57 All individual cases are individual.
Oh, definitely. I just don't have good evidence for that beyond women that I couldn't find references to before marriage, and that's just absence of evidence. I'm just adjusting my priors for the next time I look into it.
As for surprises, I would say that the DNA results for my paternal line immigrant ancestor -- born in Wiltshire in the late 16th century -- was unexpected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1a#R-Z282_.28R1a1a1b1a.29_.28Eastern_Europe.29
60
Hmm...do you think it's enough to make a move for the Romanov crown?
I'm an unusual American in that I don't think I have any unknown ancestry in the past 300 years or so, most of my ancestors are pretty well attested in the church bible. I suppose there's room for infidelity or trysts with foreign Hansa merchants in there somewhere.
41/44
I look rather uncannily like an exact cross of my maternal grandparents, even more so than I resemble my mother. It's a bit difficult to say I don't look at all like my paternal grandparents, because TBH they don't look *that* different from my maternal grandparents, so no one would see me with them and assume I'm not related. I probably look least like my paternal grandfather. When I was little, my father's mother shamed (in her sort of passive aggressive way) me for looking too Swedish and Finnish and not Norwegian enough, and I always felt vaguely inadequate about it.
Now actually, I wonder if I am more related to my mother's family than I am to my father's family, so maybe I'd get the tests done for that reason.
Though, thinking about it for more than 2 seconds, I'm not sure how you'd clearly distinguish "Norwegian" from "Swedish" through genetic testing. I suppose Finnish would be easier given the greater genetic distance.*
*Though, our family lore claims were Swedish Finns, but I think that's more whitewashing/ attempted "passing" than any evidence we actually have Swedish Finns in the family.
I'm 1/8 French. So are my brothers and sister. Assuming there's some DNA combination you could look at that would say French, would we each really have 12.5% of that?
Not necessarily. I found this explanation (probably way oversimplified, but I'm clueless, and therefore appreciate the graphics) to be quite useful.
Re: ancestral DNA testing. I resisted doing the test (though several cousins had been urging me to) for several years. I do have a lot of interest in family history, but there's something about DNA that makes me feel a bit squeamish.
Or at least, something about the uses to which DNA results are too often put: the reification of race/ethnicity; not to mention, in a specifically Irish ancestral context, the somewhat ridiculous desire to prove one's descendancy from Niall of the Nine Hostages (yes, this is actually a thing, and at Family Tree DNA, you can actually get a badge -- if you're a male and your Y chromosome matches the profile -- to proudly proclaim your connection to an early medieval warlord and chieftain).
However, a distant cousin really, really wanted me to take the test; and since he drove me up from Dublin to Armagh last summer, and took me to a bunch of cool places, and had me stay with his family, I couldn't really say no. Also, while I've uncovered at least a county, but often a parish and a townland, for every other branch of my family, I still don't know where in Ireland my [My Surname] ancestors originated. It's a fairly common surname, and the paper trail has dried up. I'm hoping the DNA results might provide some clues.
63.3: I'll mention that to my college roommate, the one that was once thrown through the window of a bar.
My impression was that most claims of Native American ancestry in white American families are bogus, and are sometimes cover for some other sort of non-white or disparaged ancestry. It's often "Cherokee", because Cherokees had a "good" assimilationist reputation and did intermarry a lot.
However, it's entirely possible that some of these people have Native American ancestry that is entirely different from what they claim they have.
63: The absolutely fucking awful book Saxons, Vikings, and Celts (in the UK called something like Blood of the Isles), on the haplogroup distribution in Britain and Ireland, had a few good points among its racism and misogyny, one of that ancient warlords are a hugely disproportionate contributor to the patrilineal genetic environment.
Wait, no, scratch that, that had to be A Farewell to Alms, an actually decent book. Well, regardless, I can get finding descent from Niall interesting as he is--or at least his directish descendants--just about the earliest person in the west that we have decent genealogical records on. Although I assume that this service doesn't have a similar badge for descent from Confucius. But it is still a silly thing, and reminds me of Mr. Prosser from the Hitchhiker's Guide.
My horrible grandmother claimed to be descended from Brian Boru rather than Niall of the Nine Hostages, but I have no idea what her basis was. And very little of anything else she ever said was true, so there's no reason that this should have been.
My newish girlfriend (let's call her Molly Malone) is 100% ethnically Irish. She attributes her moderately curly hair to Moorish piracy in the long ago. I find this endearingly batty, but wonder if this is a common thought among the Irish or if it's something she came up with on her own. Anybody know?
I'm the amateur genealogist in the family, and while I'm intrigued by the tests, I haven't wanted to spend the money just yet. AFAIK, I'm half Irish, half Polish, though the Polish part contains some German and possibly Russian (for obvious reasons).
Never heard that one. The dark, curly hair in my dad's family was once explained as a result of a guy shipwrecked from the Spanish Armada. But only by an uncle with dementia.
More generally, Barbary piracy in Northwest Europe was a real thing, most notably in the enslavement of Vestmannaeyjar in Iceland--which, continuing the theme, had been named centuries before for its settlers, former Irish slaves of the Norse. (It's gross saying "Irish slaves," even if it's legitimate in this context. Let's say thralls instead.)
71: Yeah, that's probably a more common take--I was generalizing. Irish people have folk explanations for why some of them have darker hair or complexion, and they mostly assume immigration from Iberia or thereabouts. This can even be seen in medieval myth, e.g. in the Milesians.
69: I don't think she's thinking of Iberian Berbers ca. 5000 BCE--more like raiders ca. 500-1200 CE (post fall of the Western Empire, perhaps concurrent with Moorish Spain) . I thought the Spanish Armada theory had been long ago shown to be bunk--no evidence of survivors, no way for a small population of survivors to have a large enough impact genetically. I guess my question is if there's any genetic evidence that the dark/curly-haired Irish have enough Moorish/North African ancestry to cause the hair, etc.
Most importantly, of course, I want to be proven right in an argument where I have no stakes other than enjoying being right and teasing my girlfriend for being wrong. I'm told it's one of my most endearing traits.
I've heard the Spanish Armada story, but not Moors.
75: Yeah, that's what I figured and why I brought up the Barbary raid on Iceland. As for actually history, there's no evidence. I think it's just part of the usual European mixture of phenotypes; if there is a valid ethnicity-based explanation, it happened prehistorically with people we don't have names for.
78: Yeah, but even that story is about abduction for slavery (which I knew about and was common throughout the coastal North Atlantic) rather than the introduction of enough genetic material (through rape during short raids) to the local population to cause a broad section of people to have curly hair.
I thought the most likely story was just the pre-celtic genes.
Yeah, it's a very specific look, that isn't particularly North African -- Snow White coloring: dark hair, pale skin, light eyes.
People like that are described in the Ulster cycle, supposedly 1st century AD.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if pretty much anyone who can trace back to minor English gentry alive in the 16th century can then also trace back to Brian Boru. Among nobility at all levels, daughters were often married off for political purposes, so you end up with sons of followers (or, sometimes, opponents) marrying granddaughters of leaders, and dispersal of the DNA from chieftains. That's a different kettle of fish from Y chromosome descent from Niall, which is obviously more about men of privilege attaining a reproductive advantage.
In the pre-internet era, it was a fairly ambitious project to establish and document individual descent from, say Charlemagne.* There's a society of such descendants: I suppose this serves the twin purposes of showing disdain for immigrants from other than Western Europe, and, in the old days, either research prowess or, more likely, ability to hire research prowess. I can imagine that the desire to have the Niall badge is not unrelated to the petty snobbery of the Charlemagne descendants and the like.
There's a society of descendants of Roger Williams -- my application remains about a third completed, having lost what was a fairly faint interest some years ago. I have no idea how many similar organizations exist out there: it's surely easier to prove membership, which probably has not added to the appeal.
* In practical terms, this too means tracing to landed gentry in the 16th century. Because records for people other than landed gentry disappear as you get into that period, but since everyone in Western Europe is a descendant of Charlemagne, it's an issue of documentation, not of descent.
In Grandma's case, I think I can reliably say that she was just making things up.
Did she want you to raise an army and obtain high queenship?
I'm picturing chopper's girlfriend as Merida now, fwiw, even if iirc she's Scottish.
The Scots are just the white suburbanites of Ireland.
I can trace my ancestry back to a 16th century farmer named Ole. Is there a badge for that?
I heard an explanation from an archeology student for the high percentage of red hair in Ireland and Scotland as a result of the blonder Vikings reproducing with the darker Celts, which would imply that the Irish originally had darker hair.
Similar reasons account for the grey skin tone common in the Caribbean.
I thought the most likely story was just the pre-celtic genes.
Yeah. I don't think there's much evidence of Celticness bringing with it much genetic transfer, but I may be forgetting. I thought it spread too quickly out of the Alps for that to be the case.
the high percentage of red hair in Ireland and Scotland as a result of the blonder Vikings reproducing with the darker Celts
Opinionated Gregor Mendel comments: AAAUUGH.
I can trace my ancestry back to a 16th century farmer named Ole
Hmm, Olé definitely sounds Spanish. The stories must be true!
BTW it's not uncommon to see red hair and freckles among the Berbers of the Rif.
I thought the Irish got red hair from the vast quantities of clover mites they eat.
You have like 15,000 ancestors who were alive in the last decades of the 16th century. Surely a set that size includes some horsethieves and some grandchildren of washed up gentry. All of which were descendants of Ragnar Lodbrok.
Tangentially on topic.
Speaking to a cheering crowd of NRA members in Atlanta, Trump said "it may be Pocahontas" who seeks the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. "And she is not big on the NRA,"
Scientists from Japan must have some kind of Japan-dar so they know to bow at each other but not to a Korean or something.
IIRC there is a fairly distinct Y chromosome type which is way more common in the West of Ireland and is linked to the origina ancientl population of W Europe before successive waves of arrivals - found also among the Basques.
My personal idea of a phenotype seen more in the west is not so much the "black Irish" but a cart of feature that's almost Slavic about the cheekbones.