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MYTH # 1

Are Northern Europeans racially pure?

Northern Europeans are not literally "pure". A small number of non-European lineages have been detected in Northern Europe. This fact is hardly a revelation, nor does it make Northern Europeans unique in Europe. To the extent Northern Europeans (northwestern Europeans, anyway) are unique for their non-Caucasoid lineages, it is for the low levels they have compared to Southern Europeans. Had RM (racial_myths) stopped at saying Northern Europeans are not literally pure (i.e., very low levels of non-Caucasoid genes are detectable in Northern Europeans), I would not have taken issue with him.

But RM doesn't stop there. He goes on to try to prove the British are "not pure" due to a non-existent "Hamito-Semitic" influence. This line of reasoning is a bit odd, since in his next myth RM argues the "Semitic" Jews are white.

Incidentally, people sometimes claim that small amounts of non-white ancestry in whites "proves" race does not exist. Of course, it proves no such thing. Absolute isolation is not required in order for races to exist. Moreover, genetics show that northwestern Europeans (and to a lesser extent, Europeans in general) have maintained a remarkable degree of genetic isolation from non-Caucasoids.

"Hamito-Semites" in Britain?

Modern science gives no support to the idea of "Hamito-Semitic" influence in Britain. Genetics shows us that "dark" Brits are mostly descended from Paleolithic Western Europeans. Near Eastern and North African lineages are present in Britain at levels lower than almost anywhere else in Europe. What "Hamito-Semitic" genes are present in Britain are believed to date to the Neolithic. No mysterious Phoenicians are required to explain them.

PC1

At left, a synthetic map of the first principal component of genetic variation in Europe, as determined by Cavalli-Sforza using classical genetic markers. This component, which has been "proposed to reflect the diffusion of Neolithic farmers", correlates with Y-chromosome haplotypes Eu4, Eu9, Eu10, and Eu11. As you can see, Britain has comparatively little Neolithic / Near Eastern ancestry (and practically none of the small amount of Neolithic ancestry in Britain is from the male line, as we'll see below).

Now let's look at some actual numbers. Here are some populations and their frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroups 9 and 21, respectively.

Frequency of HG9

Bedouin (66%)
Palestinian Arabs (55%)
Ashkenazi Jews (43%)
Algerian (41%)
Greek (28%)
Italian (20%)
Dutch (7%)
German (3%)
Norwegian (2%)
East Anglian (1%)
Irish (1%)
Western Scottish (0%)
Scottish (0%)
Cornish (0%)

Frequency of HG21

Northern African (77%)
Algerian (52%)
Greek (28%)
Ashkenazi Jews (23%)
Sardinian (20%)
Southern Portuguese (17%)
Italian (13%)
Dutch (8%)
East Anglian (3%)
Norwegian (2%)
Irish (2%)
Western Scottish (2%)
Scottish (0%)
Cornish (0%)



"Semitic" HG9 is not detected in the Cornish, who RM would like to have you believe descend from Phoenicians. The above table is consistent with HG9 having been introduced by Neolithic farmers. Within Western Europe, there seems to be no correlation between high levels of Neolithic ancestry and dark phenotypes. And the darker areas of Britain don't even show male Neolithic ancestry, much less "Phoenician" ancestry.

Likewise for HG21, a North African marker. Regions associated with "dark Brits" have practically no North African male ancestry and the phenotypes of their inhabitants can in no way be attributed to "Hamites".

Index of Nigrescence, from John Beddoe's The Races of Britain

Beddoe notes: "In the personal observation table for Ireland, the localities are arranged in an ascending scale of depth of colour of hair; and it will be seen from the figures, and from the illustrative maps, that blonds are most numerous on and near the eastern coast, and brunets towards the west, whither they have been driven by successive invasions. There are a few exceptions to the rule, mostly explicable."

The people of western Ireland tend to be darker than those of eastern Ireland. This is not because of any outside invasion. Just the opposite. The west of Ireland has been relatively immune from invasion, a fact confirmed by genetics. Rosser et al. report that "HG 1 reaches near-fixation (98.5%) in the west of Ireland." HG 1, here, is indicative of male Paleolithic western European ancestry. So, dark phenotypes are certainly within the range of variation possible for Paleolithic western Europeans. This makes sense, since we know the Basques -- often used as a baseline for autochthonous western Europeans relatively untouched by later invasions -- show a wide range of phenotypes, from quite light to quite dark, with the average being somewhat dark.

But what about all the "evidence" RM offers for Hamites and Semites in Britain? If you look closely, I think you'll see that most of it is outdated or that it has been misconstrued by RM. RM doesn't bother presenting any evidence at all for his outrageous claim of Phoenician "settlement" in Britain. I'm certainly aware of no archaeological evidence for a Phoenician presence in the British Isles, nor, it seems, is anyone else.

The stories of the Phoenicians coming to Cornwall to first mine tin are not substantiated. As a nation Phoenicia did not arise until about 1,200BC and were based in Tyre in what is currently Lebanon. Cornish metal exploitation predates this by at least a millennium. (Source)
Even if RM had real linguistic or physical anthropological evidence suggestive of a "Hamito-Semitic" influence in Britain, it would be irrelevant since we've already seen that genetics rule out "Hamito-Semitic" influence as responsible for dark phenotypes in Britain.

Still, let's examine some of RM's "evidence".

Dismantling RM's "evidence"

Bryan Sykes and 'black genes in white Britons'

A while back, various sources reported on Bryan Sykes' claim that he had detected non-European admixture in white Britons. This news was accompanied by the usual politically correct sermonizing ('this proves race doesn't exist', etc.). Sykes claimed he had analyzed the DNA of 10000 Britons, and found that 1% was of "African or Asian" origin (from this article, it's not clear exactly what sort of DNA Sykes analyzed; I believe the 1% number may refer to those who have EITHER an "African or Asian" Y-chromosome OR "African or Asian" mtDNA). Reports often referred to "black genes", but on the basis of the information provided in the articles, it is impossible to determine how much, if any, sub-Saharan ancestry Sykes found in Britons. Sykes has yet to publish his results in a peer-reviewed journal, and the vague reports in the popular press offer little that adds to this discussion. But, even if we were to accept the 1% number, the British would still have less non-white ancestry than the Italians.

An important question is how "African and Asian" is defined here. Sykes "believes the DNA originates in Africans brought to Britain as soldiers and slaves by the Romans." As far as I know, at no point did the Romans bring sub-Saharans to Britain in any capacity (certainly not in numbers worth talking about). So I am led to believe the "African" genes Sykes is referring to may be North African. I have never seen published study in which so much as a single sub-Saharan Y-chromosome was discovered in Britain. However, I have seen studies that found sub-Saharan Y-chromosomes in Sardinia and Portugal.

I won't speculate any further on this study until it has actually been published, or at least reported in more detail. Here is the article I quoted above. Make of it what you will.

May 20 2001

DNA reveals black genes in white Britons

Jonathan Leake, Science Editor

ONE in every 100 "white" Britons is directly descended from an African or Asian, a new study has found. The study, which looked at the DNA of 10,000 people, found that many who believed their ancestry to be completely British were actually far more diverse.

Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, believes the DNA originates in Africans brought to Britain as soldiers and slaves by the Romans.

Among those whom Sykes found with a strong selection of African genes were a dairy farmer from Somerset whose British ancestry can be traced back hundreds of years.

Many other discoveries cannot be so easily explained. Sykes found that a primary school teacher in Edinburgh had Polynesian DNA that could only have originated from tribes in the south Pacific, even though her family could trace its British ancestry for at least 200 years.

Sykes believes such discoveries show that long migrations and consequent mixing of populations have always been a feature of humanity, making talk about racial purity meaningless.

He said: "This makes nonsense of any biological basis for racial classification. We are all a complex mixture and, at the same time, we are all related."

Similar analyses on black Britons have helped them to establish the links to their past that were destroyed when their ancestors were captured by slave traders.

Jendayi Serwah, of Bristol, came to Britain from Jamaica and was unable to trace her ancestry more than a few generations. Gene tests showed that she was almost certainly descended from members of the Kenyan Kikuyu tribe.

Other recent research has further undermined claims that Britain, or groups within it, could be racially unmixed. It showed that almost everybody of native European descent could trace their ancestry back to one of seven women who lived between 45,000 and 10,000 years ago.

Sykes is part of a project to create a genetic map of the British Isles, including Ireland. Early results suggest that, despite each group's claims to distinct origins, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland were once members of the same tribe, some of whose members emigrated to southwest Scotland in about 800AD.

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Nonwhite admixture in Americans

Showing where his hostilities really lie, RM attacks Americans on a page supposedly about Northern Europe. Of course, white Americans are not "pure", but so what? They still happen to have less non-white admixture than most Southern Europeans.

Black admixture

One researcher claimed that 30% of white Americans have on average about 2% Negroid ancestry, while the other 70% have no detectable trace of admixture (Mark Shriver in Sailer 2002). According to Shriver, for the US White population as a whole, the average sub-Saharan contribution is about .7%. UPDATE: Shriver now says "about 10 percent of [the European-American population] have some African ancestry" (Wade 2002) -- much lower than his previous claim of 30%. Incidentally, Shriver is now attributing his own African ancestry to "a Mexican grandmother", rather than to runaway slaves as he had implied in the Steve Sailer article.

[Important] UPDATE II: As more information has come out about DNAprint's "AncestryByDNA" test (Shriver is affiliated with DNAprint, and his findings mentioned above were made using a version of the ABD test), it has become clear that the ABD test absolutely DOES NOT accurately determine low level admixture in individuals. Thus, any statement from Shriver concerning "admixture" in American whites is meaningless. Recent research on Y-chromosomes and mtDNA detected NO black admixture in American whites (Kayser et al. 2003):

. . . African-American genetic contribution to European-Americans is below the limits of detection with these methods.

The sample included 628 European-American Y-chromosomes and mtDNA from 922 European-Americans, and the fact that there was no evidence for black admixture whatsoever is significant. The findings here also provide further indication that the ABD test is worthless for estimating "minor admixture".

[Important] UPDATE III: A DNAprint executive now claims "Five percent of European Americans exhibit some detectable level of African ancestry" (ABCNEWS.com, Dec. 28 2003). This represents a third downard revision of the proportion of white Americans claimed by DNAprint to have black ancestry. An amazing lack of consistency (30% -> 10% -> 5%) proves the pronouncements of DNAprint employees on the racial ancestry of Americans are unreliable. People who hereafter continue to cite such claims prove only their hostility towards Americans.

UPDATE IV: According to data released by DNAprint (see TABLE:ETHNIC), Greeks, Italians, and Iberians have higher levels of "Sub-Saharan" and "Native American" admixture than do "European Americans". The "ABD" test remains deeply flawed, and other lines of evidence support the fact that Americans are "whiter" than southern Europeans, but it is amusing to see the hopes of anti-American Medicists smashed by the very company they put so much faith in.

Amerindian admixture

A study of self-identified whites in a heavily hispanic area of Colorado reported a maternal Amerindian contribution of about 0.97%, which suggests an Amerindian contribution of about 0.5% of total genes -- this in an area I expect is greatly above the national average in Amerindian ancestry (Merriwether et al. 1997). Recent research on Y-chromosomes detected no male Amerindian (or sub-Saharan) haplogroups in a sample of 114 white Americans.

The bottom line is that American whites certainly have less black ancestry than the Portuguese, and probably have less Amerindian ancestry than Iberians (Helgason et al. 2001 detected 2.27% Arctic Asian and/or Amerindian haplogroups in Iberia).

Finns, HG 16, etc.

Cavalli-Sforza reports the Finns are "90% European" based on classical genetic markers. This statement does not necessarily mean the other 10% is Mongoloid, but it does set an upper limit on Mongoloid contribution to the Finns. Nor can we expect all the "Uralic" genes in Finns are attributable to HG16. In addition to HG16, Finns also have 2% HG12 (Rosser et al. 2000) and 1.49% non-European mtDNA (Helgason et al. 2001). Thus, we are left with perhaps at most ~8.25% total Uralic ancestry that could be attributed to the 61% HG16 in Finns. By analogy, Gotlanders -- with about 6% HG16 -- might be expected to have around 0.825% Uralic ancestry.

There is no reason to believe HG16 is "Mongoloid". The latest research shows that Tat C (HG12+HG16) ". . . among the Finno-Ugric races of Europe . . . is much more diverse, more multibranched, and hence apparently older than among any of the Siberian peoples." Thus, Tat C arose among Europeans and travelled east to Siberia, not the reverse.

Be aware that RM sometimes tries to pass off Japanese or half-Japanese people who happen live in Finland as "Finns". If you need some idea of what Finns look like, here is a page with the Finnish members of the European Parliament.

Sources

Guglielmino et al. Uralic genes in Europe. Am J Phys Anthropol 1990 Sep;83(1):57-68.

Helgason et al. mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry. Table 3. Am J Hum Genet 2001 68:723-737.

Kayser et al. Y chromosome STR haplotypes and the genetic structure of U.S. populations of African, European, and Hispanic ancestry. Genome Res. 2003 Apr;13(4):624-34.

Keita, S.O.Y. Studies of Ancient Crania From Northern Africa. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1990 Sep;83(1):35-48.

Keith, Arthur. Presidential Address. The Bronze Age Invaders of Britain. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 45 (Jan-Jun, 1915), 12-22.

Keith, Arthur. Some Anthropological Notes on Darwin and Members of His Family. Man. Volume 52 (Dec, 1952), 181-182.

Mays, Simon. Biodistance Studies Using Craniometric Variation in British Archaeological Skeletal Material in Human Osteology : In Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. Margaret Cox and Simon Mays. London Greenwich Medical Media Limited, 2000.

Merriwether et al. Mitochondrial versus nuclear admixture estimates demonstrate a past history of directional mating. Am J Phys Anthropol 1997 Feb;102(2):153-9

Molnar, Stephen. Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups. Prentice Hall, 1991.

Passarino et al. Different genetic components in the Norwegian population revealed by the analysis of mtDNA and Y chromosome polymorphisms. Eur J Hum Genet. 2002 Sep;10(9):521-9.

Rosser et al. Y-Chromosomal Diversity in Europe Is Clinal and Influenced Primarily by Geography, Rather than by Language. Table 1. Am J Hum Genet 2000 67:1526-1543.

Sailer, Steve. Analysis: White prof finds he's not -- 2. UPI 2002 May 8.

Wade, Nicholas. For Sale: A DNA Test to Measure Racial Mix. The New York Times. 2002 Oct 1.

Additional reading

Y-chromosome haplogroup frequency in 69 Eurasian populations



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