People of African origin have lived in Britain for centuries, according to genetic evidence.
A Leicester University study found that seven men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a genetic signature previously found only in people of African origin.
The men seem to have shared a common ancestor in the 18th Century, but the African DNA lineage they carry may have reached Britain centuries earlier...
Turi King and Leicester colleague Mark Jobling then commissioned a genealogist to fit the men into a family tree to see how they were related and find clues about where exactly their unusual Y haplogroup came from.
"He could only get them into two trees, one which dates back to 1788 and the other to 1789. He couldn't go back any further. So it's likely they join up in the early 18th Century," said Turi King....
"Some of the Africans who arrived in Britain through the slave trade rose quite high up in society, and we know they married with the rest of the population," said Ms King.
"It could be either of these two routes," she said. Even if the two family trees link up in the 18th Century, haplogroup A1 could have reached Britain long before that.
"But my guess is that, because many slaves came from West Africa, it could have been through that route," Ms King told BBC News.
She added that the study showed that Britain has always been composed of a mosaic of different people.
Professor Jobling echoed this view: "This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been," he said.
Tell us about it.
What in the world is going on here? It’s one thing for these guys to have their innocent fun surmising wildly about who went where when over huge swaths of paleolithic time we can’t fathom, but are people really paying them to do scientific research on genetic “migratory routes” to England in the 18th century? Do they honestly think we need them to tell us blacks have been in England for a long time? Have they ever read Shakespeare or been to an art gallery? We can hardly wait for them to report DNA studies suggest there was some intermingling with the French as early as 1066.
They really do see themselves as the fount and arbiters of all knowledge, don’t they?
29 comments:
Yes, this stuff is bleeding obvious if you know anything about human genetic history.
But the point is that hardly anybody does. I do believe that awareness of our genetic make-up can ultimately be a powerful tool against racism.
For example, one basic element is that very few people appreciate just how 'bushy' their family trees are.
People often research their surname's history, and will say, "Burnet goes back to the ancient clans", or "The name Eagar dates back to the Domesday Book", so they think they have a 'pure line' running back to there, which makes them a bit special, 'properly' Scottish or English or Anglo-Saxon.
But although this is interesting as a way of tracking a name, it is an absurdly narrow way of tracing your 'blood'. People grossly underestimate the exponential growth in the number of ancestors as you go back. Every generation your number of 'great-grandfathers' doubles. So you have 2 grandfathers, 4 great-gs, 8 great-great-gs etc.
Assuming each generation to be 20 years, you only have to go back to about the 1820s - not very long in other words - before you have 1,024 of these grandfathers*, only one of whom gave you the surname.
So if you think have somebody famous as an ancestor, chances are everybody else you know has him as an ancestor too.
(*it's actually a bit less than that, because some of these will be the same man, but the point holds).
They really do see themselves as the fount and arbiters of all knowledge, don’t they?
Indeed they do and with a straight face.
Brit;
That's the basis of some ancestry discovery scams. Odds are, if you trace back a northern European immigrant in the USA far enough, their family tree will include some sort of royalty / nobility for this very reason. You then prepare an ancestry chart that highlight that ancestor that makes the mark happy.
Yes, if you go far enough back, any famous ancient king, emperor etc who had a few kids is an ancestor of virtually everybody.
In one of those lovely cases of science not contradicting religious claims, most Jews who think they are descended from Aaron, actually are.
It's not impossible that one or more of my ancestors was royalty/nobility, but if so, it was pretty far back.
I have Swedish ancestors, for instance, and without exception (in the cases where their livelyhoods were recorded), they were maids, cooks, various other household help, or small subsistence farmers. Maybe that's why some of 'em eventually emigrated to America - where they were maids, cooks, etc.
But I do have family ties to a few people who were rich & famous in the 19th century, (Ezra Cornell, who co-founded Western Union and Cornell University, and Paul Cornell, the Chicago real estate developer and speculator who invented the Chicago railroad suburb, and founded Hyde Park, on the south side of Chicago), and "rich & famous" is the American version of the definition of nobility.
Another bizarre and wholly unwarranted rant on the subject.
Of course genetics won't end racism like a magic bullet. But it's a tool that helps.
It destroys any scientific basis for racism. Why would you object to that?
Peter:
In the first place, pretty much the only racism that was ever based on notions of biological purity was the 19th century scientific kind.
Long before Darwin, the Catholic church decided Africans weren't fully human, and therefore didn't have souls.
If there is a distinction between that and scientific biological purity, it wouldn't seem to come with much of a difference.
Skipper: I'd love to see where the Catholic Church said that. The church has been in black Africa since the 4th or 5th century and allowed colonization on the understanding the the colonial powers would assist in converting the population.
David:
Skipper: I'd love to see where the Catholic Church said that.
Africans were chattel slaves long before Darwin existed, but that was OK because they didn't have souls.
Contrast the treatment with indigenous Central and South Americans, who the Church attempted to convert.
Additionally, IIRC, European penetration into Africa, particularly regions that sourced slaves, was non-existent before Prince Henry the Navigator.
(My source is, again IIRC, Wealth and Poverty Among Nations. Unfortunately, I am on the road, so don't have it at hand.)
Peter:
You have developed a real habit of larding my words with meaning they can't possibly carry.
The statement to which I was responding, correctly, as it turns out (snide comments about research notwithstanding, particularly when David said he'd love to see where the Church said that -- the logical answer is to refer him to where I saw it), is this ahistorical notion:
In the first place, pretty much the only racism that was ever based on notions of biological purity was the 19th century scientific kind.
That is simply not true, whether one considers the theological treatment of Africans, or Conversos. Tossing in the "19th century scientific kind" as a qualifier is to establish a difference lacking any distinction whatsoever.
The Church, centuries before Darwin, denied Africans had souls; they could be enslaved at will, and there was utterly no point Christianizing the soulless. This stands in stark contrast with their treatment of the indigenous populations of Central and South America who were at least worthy of conversion, if not much more.
It's strange, because he is the same guy who is a fiercely proud American and insists the US "works" better than any other country, even though it maintained and fought for chattel slavery (and subsequently Jim Crow)for decades after the rest of the world rejected it in moral revulsion.
Given the number of times I have mentioned Jim Crow, your comment is singularly disingenuous, or equally forgetful.
What's more, you have failed to take on board what I mean by "works". It is not a term with moral content; its meaning is material only. If you had attended my arguments on this more carefully, you might well have noted that I contrast what materially works (individualistic, property owning capitalism) with what some authorities -- notably the Bible, and even a great many who wouldn't recognize the book even if they were staring at the cover page -- would view as moral.
Is and ought are not the same thing.
Although he would never say his own country is irredeemably morally disqualified by that, he is adamant the Church is forever damned by anything any churchman ever said.
From what, pray tell? I'll bet you can't answer that begged question and return to find that sentence retaining even a shred of meaning.
Significant stretches of US history are irrevocably stained by slavery and its consequents. But since US does not make any claims to moral certainty, moral blots on its history cannot vitiate claims unmade.
In contrast, the Church has long made such claims. About this there is no question.
And its history far too often directly contradicts those claims. About this also there is no question.
Given the frequently yawning chasm, both recent and historical, between the two, it is well within the bound of reasoned deduction to conclude that the Church's assertions of moral primacy might very well deserve no greater respect than any number of other claimants.
One of my ancestors was one of the nobles who did King Herny's bidding and got rid of "that #@$%& priest."
It's extremely doubtful that racism was invented post-Darwin, but it is true that all sorts of people have tried to find different scientific justifications for it.
There have been all sorts of attempts to define races scientifically, including by width of cranium and other crackpot methods which would be comical if they weren't abhorrent. Most theories hinged on the idea that whites, blacks and asians - or whatever categories the theorist prefers - all evolved from different versions of homo.
Now that we know about human DNA, we know this is all bunk. Every person on the planet is equally distant from mitochondrial Eve.
So science has destroyed any scientific justification for classifying humans into races.
Peter:
So you are less optimistic than me about the degree to which the facts about human genetics can be used to combat racism. Hardly seems worth getting into such a blue funk about it.
Man, you're a hard taskmaster, Peter. It's not like I strolled in here brandishing the human genome as a cure for all the world's ills and chanting "I'd like to teach the world to sing..."
I was only making a point, is all, guv. If a mechanic fixes your car's engine do you punch him in the face because he hasn't turned it into a Ferrari?
[B]y far the biggest "racist" (in the wide sense of fear of "the other") problem we face today is with Islam.
Except that "racism", defined as "fear of the other", is intrinsically irrational, whereas Islamic nutcases have made it perfectly clear that it's rational to expect them to be wild-eyed and murderous, even to the point of self-destruction.
That ranges from the individual level on up to the national level.
Is it "racism" to take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his word, and expect that once he gains nukes, he'll use them ?
It seems to me that doing so is simply treating him as an adult. He's responsible for his actions.
If we say that it's irrational to fear what Ahmadinejad might do with nukes, then we're patronizing him: "Aw, wook at the cute li'l wog, hims talking like a BIG boy !!"
Oro:
Islamismophobia is rational. Islamophobia is not.
Martin Amis talked about this in this interesting interview.
Well, I quite liked the Martin Amis Q & A. In this forum, at least, his ideas and mine are mostly simpatico.
I especially liked it when he wrote that everyone in the world would be better off if they all became like Americans:
"[T]he American model is the one that we (and everyone else) should attempt to plagiarise."
But when he differentiates between Islamismophobia and Islamophobia:
"What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist because a phobia is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing someone who professedly wants to kill you. The form that Islamophobia is now taking - the harassment and worse of Muslim women in the street - disgusts me. [...] On the other hand, no society on earth, no society imaginable, could frictionlessly absorb a day like 7 July."
It seems to me that what he's saying is that Islam is alright, if it's practiced by people who are culturally Western. Islam can become malignant in non-democratic states, because there's no way for dissenters to bring about incremental change, or at least to be officially heard.
So as soon as we transform, by force if necessary, all Muslim dictatorships into democracies, then we can stop being Islamismophobes.
Some other goodies:
"I am not only a feminist - I am a gynocrat. That is to say, I believe in rule by chicks."
I support that fully, although to a lesser degree. Which is to say, there should be more chicks in leadership positions, but not only gynocitizens - that just puts us back where we are now, but with reversed polarity.
Q: What is the most depressing thing about Britain you have observed since your return? [...]
GRANT MULLIN, Surrey
A: The most depressing thing was the sight of middle-class white demonstrators, last August, waddling around under placards saying, We Are All Hizbollah Now. Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can. As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: "We don't want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you." Similarly, when I went on Question Time the other week, a woman in the audience, her voice quavering with self-righteousness, presented the following argument: since it was America that supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Russians, the US armed forces, in response to September 11, "should be dropping bombs on themselves!" And the audience applauded. It is quite an achievement. People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse of those that want them dead...
Q: Can the war on terror be won?
AMBER ALWAN, by email
A: [...] Islamism has received a great boost from its rejection of reason and its embrace of death, both of which are hugely energising, as Lenin and Hitler well understood. But Islamism is simply too poisonous to survive for very long. What happened within Islam was not a civil war (between the moderates and the radicals); it was more like a revolution - a revolution which is already starting to devour its children. We won't "win", exactly. But there will come an end to the Age of Vanished Normalcy.
I do think that he's gone off the rails here:
Q: What do you think should be done about Israel and Iran's looming nuclear stand-off? Would you support an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear strike?
CLIVE MARR, Cambridge
A: [...] It is understandable that Israel should be far from enthusiastic about the emergence of a suicide bomb that can be measured in megatons. The only way forward, I think, is diplomacy, and it has to be led by America, which, in turn, must recognise that the West's two-tier nuclear position is a moral and philosophical non-starter. The West must give some face, and start cutting arsenals with a view to the utopian goal: the zero option, worldwide.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Brit:
Now that we know about human DNA, we know this is all bunk. Every person on the planet is equally distant from mitochondrial Eve.
Actually, that is not true. IIRC, mitochondrial DNA proved the out-of-Africa theory because of radiating differences in it.
Also, the current inability to draw strict dividing lines by race doesn't remove any justification for classifying humans by races, any more than an inability to strictly mark the difference between green and blue remove any justification for dividing the visible spectrum into colors.
Rather, the most important factor in eliminating racism is what works. In an individualistic, property owning, capitalist economy, assigning to individuals the putative qualities of any group to which they belong simply does not work.
It may well be true that, in general, white men can't jump. But statistics break down at the level of the individual, so acknowledging that general (hypothetical) truth tells you absolutely nothing about whether any particular white person can jump.
Because recruiting from the largest possible pool, or selling to the largest possible market, works better than the alternatives, capitalism acts, even if more slowly than what one might wish, better than anything else against tribalism, racism, and sectarianism.
That said, concrete evidence demonstrating interrelatedness doesn't hurt.
They really do see themselves as the fount and arbiters of all knowledge, don’t they?
No, they don't. But concrete evidence, even if it substantiates what may have already been suspected, makes the step from belief to knowledge.
Beforehand, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain the truth value of competing claims on this subject.
Not any more.
[By] far the biggest "racist" (in the wide sense of fear of "the other")problem we face today is with Islam.
No, it isn't. First Islam is not a race. Second, as Oroborous has noted, there is no problem to found in fearing those who wish to murder you, nor is there any problem in finding much to dislike in the sources of their motivation.
While many Muslims are sincere and anodyne in their beliefs, far too many are not. I have read about a recent BBC4 documentary that surreptitiously recorded to goings on in some "moderate" British mosques.
I hate to be a spoiler, but I hear much of it was repellant.
Skipper: In the absence of a citation to some statement of the church, I'm pretty sure that you're wrong about the church and African souls. The Ethiopian church dates from the 4th century, so at least as of that time the Church thought that Africans had soul. The Portuguese were given the right to exploit Africa in return for their promise to evangelize. As far as slavery is concerned, it might make sense to you that slavery could only be allowed if the slave was soulless, but I'm not aware of that ever being the Catholic position. In fact, I believe that the Catholic position was closer to the opposite: slavery was only morally acceptable because it allowed the bringing of Christ to the heathen.
Brit: You're an optimist, but even though we are all equally distant from mitochondrial Eve, we are closer genetically to other members of our "race" than to strangers. To people of a certain bent of mind, that's all it will take. Our purpose, after all, is to ensure the survival of our genes over other genes.
David:
My memory might have served me poorly, and you might be correct.
Unfortunately, my copy of Wealth and Poverty Among Nations is at home, which is about two weeks from where I am sitting now.
I'll get back to you after I get the book in hand.
Of course genetics won't eliminate racism on its own. But it shows that there is no scientific basis for classifying humans into races - which is not something to be sneered at.
'Racism' should really be called 'visible physical difference-ism'.
That doesn't necessarily have dramatic consequences for casual 'on the ground' racism, but it certainly does for anyone with a theory that x 'race' is an 'inferior species'. The KKK can't pretend to have any scientific rationale, for example.
But yes, I am optimistic that this knowledge of the illusion of race could have some effect on casual racism, especially in cases where individuals learn about their own genetic heritage. In fact, I've seen it happen. That's because nearly everybody falls for the narrow-line surname scam as mentioned above.
In very multi-ethnic places like Britain and the US the number of people who describe themselves as 'mixed race' on official forms grows exponentially every generation. That trend can only continue.
The trappings and cultural identity of different ethnicities won't disappear in these places, but eventually what will happen is that individuals will essentially be able to choose which one they want to belong to, and will flit from one to another as the mood suits. This already happens now anyway.
Brit: I still think you put too much faith in human rationality. Racism didn't come about by people reasoning that "In the absence of DNA evidence, I must assume that visible differences between peoples signify larger and deeper differences." Racism came about by people distinguishing between Us and Them -- for whatever reason was handy -- and hating Them. That racists will rely on whatever confirming evidence comes to hand does not mean that countervailing information will be as easily accepted.
Racism didn't come about by people reasoning that "In the absence of DNA evidence, I must assume that visible differences between peoples signify larger and deeper differences."
Actually, if you think that racism was invented by post-Darwinian scientists, that is how racism came about.
That, combined with the (Christian) idea of the Great Chain of Being, whereby white men are closest to God.
But no, you're right - it's much more complicated than that. I only said I was optimistic it could make some difference.
The Great Chain of Being is a Christian idea that places God at the top and plants at the bottom. Some Christians didn't quite go for your "all children" hug-fest and put white men above black.
Racism is interesting because I don't think it is inevitable. Maybe some kind of 'Other-hate' is inevitable, but not necessarily racism. Ancient Romans, it seems, did not pay nearly as much attention to skin colour as they did to civilised vs barbaric.
I said some Christians. What is and isn't 'mainstream' varies enormously over time and place.
I'm talking specifically here about white Europeans and their historical views about Africans.
This racism is founded on the idea that one 'race' of man is 'superior' to another.
For that to mean anything, there must be:
a) different races
b) some kind of order in Creation, so that one thing can be superior to another.
The Great Chain of Being is an underlying rationale behind (b). Maybe not the only one, but certainly important.
Peter:
The Great Chain of Being is the only coherent outcome from God made man in His image, and "each of their own kind" from Genesis.
Now we know the latter is wildly incorrect. But before Darwin, the only possible conclusion to draw was that white men were closest to God, being in His image, and all other variations, whether due to gender or race, were further away.
...as you can see around here, taken as dogmatic faith such thinking can also end up being exculpatory and used to casually justify hating a billion Muslims.
Around here, I don't see much evidence that anyone hates Muslims, except maybe Harry.
What we object to are the cultures that most Muslims live in. Once we've destroyed those, replacing them with our own, then Muslims can carry on worshipping their Big Loser in the Sky.
Peter:
Pure drivel worthy of the most rigid ideologue.
Thank you ever so much for that reasoned reply.
Perhaps you should read up on what some of the most famous Saints have said along the way.
The Great Chain of Being was certainly not designed to elevate the white man, but the basic idea of a graded order in Creation, which came from the Ancient Greeks, is so ingrained into western Christian thinking that you only even notice it by contrasting it with its absence, eg. in Buddhism.
This might be one of the reasons that people find the concept of darwinian 'fitness' difficult - most people asume it means "more sophisticated" - ie higher up the Chain.
Peter:
Did I describe the Bible's contents correctly?
For a literal believer, how can those passages be interpreted?
I believe St. Thomas Aquinas viewed slavery as being morally acceptable.
And, from Wikipedia:
See Curse of Ham The Judeo-Christian myth, provided one of the "moral pretext" upon which the Atlantic slave trade grew and flourished. According to Jewish Talmud scholars, and then later other religious groups, Ham was the progenitor of the African race and subsequent translations were stirred to reflect the biases and prejudice of the era. The most profound manifestation occurred in imagery, which constantly portrayed white as God, and black as the Devil.
It is fair to say that Catholicism led Protestant Christianity by a long way in condemning slavery.
In this respect, though, the Protestants, particularly the Southern Baptist Conference, hewed closer to scripture.
Bowever, until I can come up with a specific reference, my claim about Catholic Saints should be ignored.
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