The mystery of the Cagots

It will come as no surprise to long-time fans of Skeptophilia that I love a mystery.  And if that mystery is mixed up with questions of ancestry and human genetics, well... that's going to pique my interest but good.

This topic comes up because a couple of days ago I stumbled upon an interesting ethnic minority I'd never heard of -- the Cagots, a distinct group found in northern Spain and southwestern France (the same region where you find high proportions of Basque ancestry -- although they appear to be unrelated).  Like many minorities, they were persecuted by the majority culture, to the point that a separate Cagot culture has all but disappeared, and today people are reluctant to admit they have Cagot ancestry (if they even realize it).

The "Street of the Cagots' Bridge" (Campan, Hautes-Pyrénées département) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sotos, Rue du village de Campan (Hautes-Pyrénées) 3, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Where it gets really interesting is their origin.  To start with, their name varies by region -- Cagot is the most common, but they've also been called Cagous, Cahets, Gahets, Gafets, Agots, Argotes, Capots, Cacons, Cacous, Caquots, and Caqueux, not to mention about a dozen others.  This makes any kind of linguistic analysis of the name difficult, to say the least.  One idea is that the name comes from the Occitan word caas, meaning "dog," and an old version of the word "Goth" -- and comes along with a suggestion that they are the descendants of the remnants of the Visigoths who were defeated by Clovis I at the Battle of Vouillé in 507 C.E.  Illustrating the truth of the adage that "for every claim there's an equal and opposite claim," others have suggested that they're descended from people who called themselves "hunters of the Goths" -- i.e. the Saracens and Moors left behind after the Battle of Tours in 732 C.E.  Yet another claims they're descended from the Erromintxela, a group of Spanish Roma, thus linking them to another tragically marginalized group.

Typical of persecuted minorities, there hasn't been much in the way of study of these people, and by now most of them have long since been subsumed into the dominant French and Spanish cultures.  But it should be possible to figure this out; for centuries there was "forced endogamy," where Cagots could only marry other Cagots, and they were only allowed to live in self-contained communities on the fringes of towns.  (In a scary parallel to other practices of visually identifying minorities, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cagots were required to wear a badge with a pattern of a duck's foot and/or a cloak with a yellow trim.  The reason for the association with ducks and the color yellow is unknown.)  The result of these practices of isolation is that there should be enough genetic distinctness to detect, even if the current descendants are of considerably mixed ancestry.

It immediately got me to thinking about other groups I've read about that are of uncertain origins -- three in the United States that come to mind are the Melungeons of eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Redbones of southwestern Louisiana.  What little genetic study has been done -- and members of all three groups have been understandably reluctant to cooperate with scientists they perceive as being part of the prejudiced majority -- suggests that all of them are "tri-racial," with ancestry from Sub-Saharan Africa, Native American tribes, and Europe.  Members of all three groups were classified as "mulattos" or "Indians" on the nineteenth-century censuses, but census takers back then were notoriously bad about accuracy of data collection on minorities.

So like the Cagots, they are still poorly-studied mysteries with little to no certainty about their origins.

Besides the obviously abhorrent treatment members of these groups received, what's appalling and frustrating about all of this is that the truth is, there is no such thing as ethnic or racial purity.  Which, of course, is the basis of most of these discriminatory practices.  I look pretty solidly White Western European, but my DNA test picked up my ancestry from my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather, something I wrote about not long ago -- and my genealogical research has found ancestors who were Basque, Mi'kmaq, and Abenaki, although they're long enough ago that those didn't show up on my genetic analysis.  If you go farther back still, the concept of race gets even more ridiculous (from a genetic perspective; it obviously has extremely important historical and cultural significance).  All people of western European descent, for example, are thought to have common ancestors as little as a thousand years ago; the same is almost certainly true of other clusters of related ethnic groups.  And there's decent evidence of a genetic bottleneck triggered by a volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Toba 74,000 years ago, an event that may have reduced the entire human population of the Earth to around seven thousand people -- the size of a single small village.  If this is correct, those seven thousand people are the ancestors of everyone on Earth, over and over and over, and all of our family trees first branch out and then coalesce to a very narrow set of limbs.

What the racists don't get, and don't seem to want to get, is that the science is incontrovertible; we're all cousins, regardless of whether we look different now.

In any case, I thought the presence of a curious ethnic group in an area to which a large chunk of my mom's ancestry traces its origins was pretty fascinating.  I don't know if I have Cagot ancestry, but it wouldn't surprise me; my mom's forebears in western France were largely poor laborers and peasants.  No way to figure out for certain, though, especially given the paucity of studies on the group.

But it does bring home the fact that the ties that unite us are, in reality, far stronger than the features that divide us.  A lesson that many of us, unfortunately, have yet to learn.

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A hand and a message

One of the most enduring mysteries, both in history and in linguistics, is the Basque people of northeastern Spain.

For many years, it was thought that because they speak Euskara -- a linguistic isolate, certainly not Indo-European and seemingly unrelated to any other known language -- that they were physically unrelated to the rest of Europeans as well.  That's proven to be untrue; their genetics are markedly similar to other western Europeans, including a high prevalence of the R1b-DF27 Y-DNA haplogroup, found throughout Spain and southern France.  While there is some evidence that the Basque people are remnants of a Paleolithic population of western Europe, there's enough similarity with the surrounding population that this question is considered far from settled.

There's no doubt they've been genetically isolated for a long time, though.  One good indicator is their abnormally high frequency of the Rh negative blood type allele.  If you, or one of your parents, is Rh negative, there is a great likelihood that you have ancestry in northern Spain or southwestern France.  (My mom, who was Rh negative, was nearly a hundred percent of French descent, mostly from western France -- I'm quite certain she has some Basque ancestry back there somewhere.)  This has a significant downside; the danger of Rh incompatibility disorder, which occurs when a negative mother conceives a positive fetus (i.e. the father is positive).  When that happens, the mother's immune system can set up a reaction against the baby's blood and destroy it.  It's what killed my sister, Mary Margaret -- when she was born, in 1945, she was premature and severely anemic, and only lived a couple of days.  Between her birth and mine, in 1960, the RhoGAM injection was developed, which suppresses that part of the mother's immune system and prevents the damage.

That injection is why I'm alive today.

In any case, there's no doubt the Basques are a unique people.  The origin of their gene pool, culture, and language are still shrouded in mystery.  But a discovery last year near Pamplona may end up shedding some light on their history.

Called the "Hand of Irulegi," it's a bronze piece thought to be about two thousand years old.  This is cool enough in and of itself, but recent analysis has shown that it has an inscription, seemingly in proto-Basque, the language of the Vascones -- the Iron Age tribe encountered in northeastern Spain by the Romans, and who are thought to be the ancestors of the modern Basques.

It had been thought previously that the Vascones had little in the way of written language -- no traces of it had been found except for occasional one-word inscriptions on coins.  So almost nothing is known about the language they spoke (except, as previously noted, that it was definitely non-Indo European).  The first word in the inscription on the Hand of Irulegi is sorioneku, almost certainly the root word of modern Euskara zorioneko, meaning "luck" or "a good omen."

It's worth being cautious, though.  Unfortunately, such claims have been made before -- and have turned out to be worse than false, actually fraudulent.  Two years ago, two archaeologists were fined and given short jail sentences for faking artifacts and claiming that they were evidence of an early Basque written language.  So following the "once burned, twice shy" rule, the archaeologists and linguists studying the Hand of Irulegi are proceeding carefully.

But if it holds up under scrutiny, it will be a pretty remarkable discovery.  The early history and linguistics of the Basque people have been huge unanswered questions before now, and any pieces we can add to the puzzle will help clarify the origins of what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating cultures in Europe.

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The Spanish replacement

It's strange to think about, but there is a point in human history at which you can divide all of the inhabitants into two categories: those who left no living descendants at all, and those who are the ancestors of every single person alive today.

Anthropologists differ as to when that date is, but it's probably more recently than most of us would guess.  It certainly happened after the Toba bottleneck, a point about 74,000 years ago when there was a massive eruption of the Toba volcano (in the Indonesian archipelago) and a worldwide climate impact that may have reduced the entire population of ancestral humans to fewer than 7,000 total.  (Nota bene: scientists are still debating how big the bottleneck was, and whether it was the volcano that actually caused it; but I'm referring to the event by its most common nickname even so.)

What's cool is that with our current ability to do genetic analysis, we can narrow in on the answers to these sorts of questions.  Just last week, some research was published in Cell giving us an interesting lens into settlement patterns in Spain -- and that only 4,500 years ago, an influx of people from Eastern Europe and Russia resulted in the replacement of nearly all of the Y-chromosomal DNA that had been there for the previous forty thousand years.

This doesn't mean that the previous inhabitants left no descendants (although that could be true) -- all we can infer with certainty is that the men who had lived there prior to the invasion left very few patrilineal descendants.  As Y-chromosomal DNA is passed only father-to-son, any male descendants a man has through his daughters would share none of his Y-DNA.  (The same is true, but with the opposite genders, about mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed through the maternal line.)

In "Survival of Late Pleistocene Hunter-Gatherer Ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula," by Vanessa Villalba-Mouco, Marieke S. van de Loosdrecht. Cosimo Posth, Pilar Utrilla, Johannes Krause, and Wolfgang Haak, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History working with the University of Zaragoza, the authors write:

The Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe represents an important test case for the study of human population movements during prehistoric periods.  During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the peninsula formed a periglacial refugium for hunter-gatherers (HGs) and thus served as a potential source for the re-peopling of northern latitudes...  Western and central Europe were dominated by ancestry associated with the ∼14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy, which had largely replaced earlier genetic ancestry, represented by 19,000–15,000-year-old individuals associated with the Magdalenian culture.  However, little is known about the genetic diversity in southern European refugia, the presence of distinct genetic clusters, and correspondence with geography.  Here, we report new genome-wide data from 11 HGs and Neolithic individuals that highlight the late survival of Paleolithic ancestry in Iberia, reported previously in Magdalenian-associated individuals.  We show that all Iberian HGs, including the oldest, a ∼19,000-year-old individual from El Mirón in Spain, carry dual ancestry from both Villabruna and the Magdalenian-related individuals.  Thus, our results suggest an early connection between two potential refugia, resulting in a genetic ancestry that survived in later Iberian HGs.  Our new genomic data from Iberian Early and Middle Neolithic individuals show that the dual Iberian HG genomic legacy pertains in the peninsula, suggesting that expanding farmers mixed with local HGs.

A different study, also published last week in the journal Science, added another piece to the puzzle.  "The Genomic History of the Iberian Peninsula Over the Past 8000 Years," by a team of scientists far too lengthy to list working at over a dozen research institutions, examined the DNA of 271 individuals and came to some fascinating conclusions about the settlement of Spain:

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula.  We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming.  We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry...  Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

This influx pushed the Iberian farmers, who before had occupied the entire peninsula, into the mountainous northeastern parts of Spain -- and they are, apparently, the ancestors of today's Basque people, who are not only genetically distinct but who speak a language thought to be unrelated to any other existing language.  "The Basque country is a really difficult place to conquer; there are quotes from French rulers in medieval times saying that this is a nasty place to get in an army," said population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson of Uppsala University in Sweden, who was not part of either of the present studies.

Iñigo Olalde, a postdoc in the lab of population geneticist David Reich at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who is himself Basque, and who participated in the second study, agrees.  "The present-day Basques look like Iron Age people from Iberia," Olalde said.

What I find most fascinating about this is how we can use genetic analysis as a lens into a time period from which we have no written records at all, and make inferences about the movements of people who before had been entirely a mystery.  There's a lot we still don't know, of course, including how this genetic replacement took place.  "It would be a mistake to jump to the conclusion that Iberian men were killed or forcibly displaced," Olalde said, "as the archaeological record gives no clear evidence of a burst of violence in this period."

This opens up the potential for using this technique to study other time periods that are historical enigmas -- like the European "Dark Ages," between the Fall of Rome and consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire with the crowning of Charlemagne in 800 C.E.  Amazing that genetics, which tells us about who we are here and now, can also be seen as a history of where we came from -- a continuous record of information back to our earliest ancestors.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a look at one of the most peculiar historical mysteries known: the unsolved puzzle of Kaspar Hauser.

In 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a military station in the city of Ansbach, Germany.  He was largely unable to communicate, but had a piece of paper that said he was being sent to join the cavalry -- and that if that wasn't possible, whoever was in charge should simply have him hanged.

The boy called himself Kaspar Hauser, and he was housed above the jail.  After months of coaxing and training, he became able to speak enough to tell a peculiar story.  He'd been kept captive, he said, in a small room where he was never allowed to see another human being.  He was fed by a man who sometimes talked to him through a slot in the door.  Sometimes, he said, the water he was given tasted bitter, and he would sleep soundly -- and wake up to find his hair and nails cut.

But locals began to question the story when it was found that Hauser was a pathological liar, and not to be trusted with anything.  No one was ever able to corroborate his story, and his death from a stab wound in 1833 in Ansbach was equally enigmatic -- he was found clutching a note that said he'd been killed so he couldn't identify his captor, who signed his name "M. L. O."  But from the angle of the wound, and the handwriting on the note, it seemed likely that both were the work of Hauser himself.

The mystery endures, and in the book Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, author Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson looks at the various guesses that people have made to explain the boy's origins and bizarre death.  It makes for a fascinating read -- even if truthfully, we may never be certain of the actual explanation.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]