Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I only have a handful of records documenting where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and (s)he's either my ancestor, or (s)he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in genealogy, linguistics, and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines all three, it's a source of great joy to me.

This was my reaction to a study in Nature on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as forty thousand years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around eight thousand years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible.  That's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups -- cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899  [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE. Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back forty thousand years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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All in the family

Archaeologists and paleontologists are up against the same problem; bones and other fossils only get you so far.

There are cases where fossil evidence can give you some hints about behavior -- patterns of tracks, for example, or the rare case where the positions of the fossils themselves give you a picture of what was going on, like the recent discovery of an opossum-sized mammal, Repenomamus, attacking a much larger dinosaur, Psittacosaurus.  The pair of fossil skeletons were preserved, locked in a battle to the death -- the death of both, as it turned out, because they were both engulfed mid-fight in a mudslide.

But such lucky finds are rare, and inferences of behavior from fossils are usually sketchy at best.  This is why the study of a group of Neolithic human skeletons found near Gurgy-les-Noisats, France, 150 kilometers southeast of Paris, was so extraordinary.

The level of DNA analysis now possible allowed the analysis of the genomes of 94 of the 128 individuals buried at the site, to the level that the researchers not only were able to construct a seven-generation family tree for them, but make a guess as to what each individual looked like.

The analysis found that the bodies were buried in family groups -- the more closely two people were related, the closer together they were buried -- and that women who were not descendants of the original couple were mostly completely unrelated, suggesting they'd come into the family from another community.  Just about all the males at the burial site, on the other hand, were related, leading the researchers to conclude that men in this community tended to stay put, and at least some women did not.

Another curious thing was that the study detected no half-sibling relationships.  All of the sibling groups were from the same mother and father.  In this family group, at least, monogamous relationships were the norm.

Of course, there's a lot we still don't know; while this is a stunning accomplishment, it still leaves a great many questions unanswered.  For example, were the "outsider" women brought in because of a custom of outbreeding, or by conquest/capture?  What were the religious practices and beliefs that led these people to bury family members near each other?  Was the monogamy shown in this family universal in this culture, or was this grouping an exception for some reason?

It's an intriguing piece of research.  "This type of work really breathes new life into our understanding of ancient peoples," said Kendra Sirak, an ancient-DNA specialist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study.  "I'm especially curious about the man at the root of the family tree.  I would love to know what made this person so important."

And given that a significant percentage of my ancestry comes from central and western France, I have to wonder if anyone in this family tree is a direct ancestor of mine.  There's no way to find out, of course, but the thought did cross my mind.  It's kind of eerie to think when I look at those facial reconstructions, one of those faces looking back at me might be my great-great (etc.) grandparent.

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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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The arms of the ancestors

My maternal grandmother was born Flora Meyer-Lévy, in the little town of Chackbay, Louisiana, in 1893.  I never knew her -- she died fourteen years before I was born, at the young age of 53 -- but I have photographs of her that show a striking woman with auburn hair and a serious expression (consistent with my mom's description of her mother as being a no-nonsense type).

Flora's grandfather, Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was an Ashkenazi Jew, born in the village of Dauendorf, in Alsace.  He emigrated to the United States in the 1850s, only to get caught up in the Civil War -- he fought for a time on the Confederate side, and after the war came home and gave a go at raising horses.  He never made much of a success of it.  One of his grandchildren told me, somewhat euphemistically, that "he made bad deals while drunk."  Solomon, like his granddaughter, died young, at the age of 44.  His widow -- a French Creole woman named Florida Perilloux -- outlived him by over forty years.  She never remarried, and lived most of that time in poverty, converting their home into an inn just to make ends meet.

When I had my DNA tested a couple of years ago, I was fascinated to find that it detected my Ashkenazi great-great grandfather's contribution to my genetic makeup.  I am, the test said, about six percent Ashkenazi -- just about spot-on for having one Jewish ancestor four generations back.  I was surprised that my Jewish heritage was so clear; I didn't realize that Ashkenazi DNA is that distinct.

Apparently, the Ashkenazi have retained their genetic signature because of two factors -- being reproductively isolated and having experienced repeated bottlenecks.  The former, of course, is due to the taboo (on both sides) against Jews marrying non-Jews.  (My great-great grandparents are an interesting counterexample; he was a devout Jew, she was a devout Catholic, and neither one ever changed their religion.  They apparently lived together completely amicably despite their religious differences.  All seven of their children were raised Jewish -- and every single one converted to Catholicism to marry.  Evidently such tolerance was not the rule in nineteenth century Louisiana.)

The latter -- a genetic bottleneck -- refers to the situation when a population has its numbers reduced drastically, and the resurgent population all descends from the small group of survivors.  The bottlenecks in the European Jewish population, of course, were due largely to the repeated pogroms (massacres) that at times looked like eradicating the Jews from Europe entirely.  In fact, this is why the topic comes up today; a paper in Science that came out this week about a genetic investigation of the remains in a Jewish cemetery in Erfurt, Germany.  Many of the dead there were victims of a pogrom in March of 1349, and their teeth -- which contain intact DNA -- confirmed that the Ashkenazi were even then a genetically distinct population, descended from a small group of people who came originally from the Middle East or the Caucasus, and settled in central Europe some time around the year 1000 C.E.

Interestingly, the DNA from Erfurt was strikingly similar to DNA from a twelfth-century Jewish cemetery in Norwich, England, the subject of a paper only four months ago.  The geographical distance, apparently, was not enough to erase the distinct Ashkenazi signature.  "Whether they’re from Israel or New York, the Ashkenazi population today is homogenous genetically," said Hebrew University geneticist Shai Carmi.

Which explains how the DNA test was able to pick up my own ancestry.

It's fascinating to me that, on that one line at least, my family tree can trace its origins to a little group of migrants from the Near East who made their way to what is now eastern France, survived repeated attempts to eradicate them, and eventually produced a branch that went to Louisiana, ultimately leading to me here in upstate New York.  I can only hope I've inherited some of the dogged tenacity these people obviously had.

It's interesting, too, to look at the stern visage of the grandmother I never met, and to know a little more about her heritage.  Even though she, like all the generations before her, now rests in the arms of the ancestors, her genetic legacy lives on in me and her other descendants -- a handful of the "countless stars in the sky" that represent the lineage of Abraham.

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The anchor and the lifeline

129 years ago, Bertha Viola Scott was born in the little town of Wind Ridge, in Greene County, Pennsylvania.  She was the fourth child of Thomas Iams Scott and Nancy Elizabeth "Lizzie" (Donahoo) Scott; they would go on to have four more.

Her life wasn't easy, pretty much from day one.  Thomas Scott was a ne'er-do-well, with a reputation as a philanderer, and was gone from the home more often than he was there.  Lizzie was a kind person and a good mother, but in 1903 -- when Bertha was ten -- she died in a typhoid epidemic.

Thomas Iams Scott and his mother, Mary (Iams) Scott, ca. 1915

"Lizzie," Nancy Elizabeth (Donahoo) Scott, ca. 1880

The seven Scott children -- one of them, Clarence, had died as an infant -- were farmed out to various uncles and aunts.  Bertha and her two older sisters, Roxzella Vandell Scott ("Zella") and Fannie Elinore Scott ("Fan") decided they had to look after the younger ones to make sure they were being treated fairly, and became the surrogate mothers to their siblings.

Top row, l. to r.: Zella (Scott) Knoderer and her husband Cecil Clair Knoderer

Bottom row, l. to r.: Donald Jacobs (the Scott children's first cousin), Bertha Viola Scott, Albert Romer, and his wife Fan (Scott) Romer (ca. 1912)

In around 1914, when Bertha was 21 years old, she and a younger sister (Florence, then age twelve) upped stakes and moved to southern Louisiana.  I've never known why it was they made the move; to my knowledge, no one else came with them.  They were dirt poor, so it definitely wasn't a pleasure excursion.  It may have had something to do with the beginning of World War I, but if so, I don't know what.  In any case, both of the young ladies met and married someone from Louisiana -- Bertha married a small equipment repairman named Alfred Joseph Bonnet in 1915, and Florence a man from New Orleans named Kirby Lodrigues in 1924 -- and both of them lived in the state for the rest of their lives.

Alfred was a gentle, soft-spoken man, fifteen years Bertha's senior.  They had two children, both sons; Raymond Joseph in 1916, and Gordon Paul -- my father -- in 1919.

My Grandma Bertha and my dad, ca 1927, along with some of their numerous pets

Life didn't get a great deal easier for them.  In 1940, Alfred -- then 61 years old -- died of a sudden and massive heart attack.  My grandmother was widowed at only 47.

My grandfather, Alfred Joseph Bonnet, ca. 1930

My grandmother had no particular training that would have qualified her for a job -- she wasn't well educated, and had gone from the abject poverty of her youth right into a marriage in an unfamiliar place -- so she took on a position as housekeeper for a Catholic priest, an eccentric, cigar-smoking Dutch expat named Father John Kemps.  She finally became not only Father Kemps's housekeeper but his general manager, and he needed one.  He was a bookish, multilingual polymath who couldn't be counted upon to remember where he'd put his shoes, and my grandma took over the oversight of the household, the parish affairs, and Father Kemps's personal life, eventually pretty much running the place singlehandedly.

Bertha and Father Kemps, on a trip to visit Father Kemps's family in the Netherlands (ca. 1960) -- he convinced her to don some traditional clothing and pose like they were in a portrait by one of the Old Dutch Masters

My father joined the Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II, and spent the next 25 years bouncing from military base to military base, never staying in one post for more than three or four years.  He married my mom, a full-blooded Cajun from Raceland, Louisiana, in 1943, and two years later my sister and only sibling, Mary Margaret, was born.  Mary was born with Rh-incompatibility syndrome, and only lived three days.

It wasn't until fifteen years later that I came along -- a surprise, apparently, sometimes referred to as an out-and-out mistake.  In an eerie repeat of his own grandfather, my father was gone through a good bit of my early childhood, but in this case not by choice.  He was stationed in Reykjavik, Iceland when I was a year and a half old, and back then families rarely accompanied service members on overseas assignments.  My mom and I moved back home and lived with her father and stepmother.

This set up a fractious relationship, and honestly, it never improved much.  My parents were kind of an odd couple in a lot of ways -- my dad reserved, quiet, with a quirky and offbeat sense of humor; my mother artistic, emotional, and volatile.  Having an unplanned child suddenly show up when my dad was 41 and my mom 40 didn't improve matters any.  When I was eight, my dad retired from the military and came back home to Louisiana -- and my parents sent me to live with my grandma for a year and a half.  The reason they gave was that they were working on building a house and didn't want a little kid getting in the way, but I think it was probably just as much that they didn't quite know what to do with me.

However, it did forge a strong relationship between me and my grandma.  She became my anchor.  She was a tough, no-nonsense type, but loved dogs and cats, music, and talking about family history, all of which I shared.  My passion for genealogy started when I was about twelve, and she told me about her childhood and her own parents and grandparents, and I decided to write it all down.

My grandma, Bertha (Scott) Bonnet, as I remember her (ca. 1975)

In a lot of ways, that relationship with my grandma kept me going during my turbulent and difficult teenage years, and I remained close to her up through college.  I moved out of state in 1982, and kept in touch with regular letters -- my grandma loved receiving letters -- and when she died four years later, at the age of 93, it felt like a lifeline had been cut.

Now, 36 years later, I still cherish my memories of her, and the anniversary of her birth (March 4) always makes me think about her.  Her story is an inspiration -- that despite the cards stacked against you, you can still stay strong and survive.  My grandma started from deprivation and poverty, and beginning with the pact she made with her sisters to protect their younger siblings after their mother died, she lived life fiercely protective of the people she loved and uncompromising in her own ideals.  

I can only hope that I have lived my own life with the courage, devotion, and determination she showed in the face of adversity, and that she'd be proud of who I've become.  I still miss you, Grandma.  Happy birthday.

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Unity in diversity

It was in my evolutionary biology class in college that I ran into a concept that blew my mind, and in many ways still does.

It was the idea that race is primarily a cultural feature, not a biological or genetic one.  There is more genetic diversity amongst the people of sub-Saharan Africa -- people who many of us would lump together as "Black" -- than there is in the rest of the world combined.  A typical person of western European descent is, our professor told us, closer genetically to a person from Japan than a Tswana man is to the !Kung woman he lives right next door to in Botswana, even though both have dark skin and generally "African features."

To reiterate: I'm not saying race doesn't exist.  It certainly does, and the social, cultural, and political ramifications are abundantly clear.  It's just that what we often think of as race has very close to zero genetic support; we base our racial classifications on a handful of characteristics like skin and eye color, the shape of the nose and mouth, and the color and texture of the hair, all of which can so easily undergo convergent evolution that it triggers us to lump together very distantly-related groups and split ones that lie much closer together on the family tree.

The reason this comes up today is a couple of bits of recent research highlighting the fact that the subject is way more complicated than it seems at first.  The first looks at the fragmentation that happened in Africa, on the order of twenty thousand years ago, that resulted in the enormous genetic diversity still to be found in sub-Saharan Africa today.  By analyzing DNA from both living individuals and the remains of people from long ago, researchers at Harvard University found that this was about the time that our ancestors stopped (for the most part) making extended walkabouts to find mates, and settled into being homebodies.  What triggered this is a matter of conjecture; one possibility is that this was in the middle of the last ice age, it could be that the colder and drier conditions (even in equatorial regions) made food scarcer, so long trips into unknown territory were fraught with more danger than usual.

Whatever the cause, the isolation led to genetic drift.  A general rule of evolutionary biology is that if you prevent genetic mixing, populations will diverge because of the accrual of random mutations, and that seems to be what happened here.  The fact that a Tswana person and a !Kung person (to use my earlier example) are so distinct is because they've been genetically isolated for a very long time -- something facilitated by a tendency to stay at home and partner with the people you've known all your life.

Interestingly, some research last year suggested that there are "ghost lineages" in the human ancestry -- groups that are ancestral to at least some modern humans, but are as yet unidentified from the fossil record.  The one studied in last year's paper were ancestral to the Yoruba and Mende people of west Africa, in which between two and nineteen percent of the genomes come from this ghost lineage -- but the phenomenon isn't limited to them.  The authors found analogous (but different) traces of ghost lineages in people of northern and western European and Han Chinese descent, and the guess is that all human groups have mysterious, unidentified ancestral groups.

The other bit of research that was published last week was an exhaustive study of the genetics of people around the world, with an ambitious goal -- coming up with a genetic family tree for every group of people on Earth. "We have basically built a huge family tree, a genealogy for all of humanity that models as exactly as we can the history that generated all the genetic variation we find in humans today," said Yan Wong of the University of Oxford, who co-authored the study.  "This genealogy allows us to see how every person's genetic sequence relates to every other, along all the points of the genome."

The researchers analyzed 3,609 individual DNA samples representing 215 different ethnic groups, and used software to compare various stretches of the DNA and assemble them using the technique called parsimony -- basically, creating a family tree that requires the fewest random coincidences and ad hoc assumptions.  The result was an enormous genealogy containing 27 million reconstructed common ancestors.  They then linked location data to the DNA samples -- and the program identified not only when the common ancestors probably lived, but where they lived.

I find this absolutely amazing.  Using modern genetic analysis techniques, we can assemble our own family tree, with roots extending backwards tens of thousands of years and encompassing lineages for which we have no archaeological or paleontological records.  With the number of connections the research generated, I have no doubt we'll be studying it for years to come, and have only started to uncover the surprises it contains.

But all part of living up to the maxim inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi -- γνῶθι σεαυτόν.

"Know thyself."

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Bred in the bone

A while back I had my DNA tested.  I know a good bit about my family tree, and I did it not only to find out about my genetic heritage, but to see if the DNA tests were as accurate as they claim -- a bit like a teacher being able to tell if a student is doing a problem correctly because (s)he already knows what the answer should be.

The answer is: it's pretty damn good.  The most interesting was from a company called My True Ancestry, which supposedly was working off an enormous data bank and could do some seriously fine-grained analysis.  I uploaded my DNA file, and within a few hours I had a map of the closest matches, and they turned out to be spot-on.  It picked up my great-great grandfather Solomon Meyer-Lévy, who was an Ashkenazi Jew from Alsace, and also my father's paternal ancestry, which came from the French Alps.  The rest of my family was scattered through western and northwestern France, England (a cluster in southern England and one in Yorkshire), and two spots in Scotland (one near Glasgow, one near Edinburgh).

This aligns pretty much perfectly with what I know about the origins of my family.  The "pretty much" comes from one puzzling finding; it showed no matches in Germany.  Another great-great grandfather, one William Brandt, came to America in the mid-1800s and married a woman of French and Dutch ancestry named Isabella Rulong.  I know William was German; on the census his birthplace is given as Bremen, so I even know the city.  But my DNA shows zero ancestry in Germany.

However, the answer to this mystery could be simple.  I know a bit about William Brandt because the house he built in the 1870s is on the Louisiana Register of Historic Homes.  William was the court recorder for Lafayette Parish for almost twenty years, and served as mayor for a year.  But the woman who now lives in what was Brandt's house gave us a tour and told us a little about what she knows about my ancestor, and apparently he wasn't exactly a pinnacle of exemplary behavior.  He was, she said, a notorious drunkard, frequently having to be rescued from some ditch or another he'd fallen into after his latest night on the town.  

William Brandt's house, Lafayette, Louisiana [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paigecbroadbent, Brandt, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This may explain why he held the office of mayor for only a year, something that has always intrigued me.  And it may well also account for my lack of German ancestry.  It's entirely possible that my great-great grandmother Isabella found a friend, as it were, to provide solace and comfort in the absence of her ne'er-do-well husband, and this unknown is actually my biological great-great grandfather.  A study two years ago found that about one percent of births worldwide are due to what they euphemistically call "extra-pair paternity," which is why you have to sign a waiver when you get your DNA tested that you won't hold the company responsible if your results aren't quite what you expected.

So I think there's a pretty good chance that my great grandmother, Mary Emily (Brandt) Bonnet, was not actually William's daughter.  Just as well.  I have enough rogues and scoundrels in my family as it is.

It's amazing what we can now figure out by DNA analysis.  A study just published this week in Nature, written by a team of researchers way too long to list here, used DNA samples from bones and teeth found at burial sites in England to see if they could figure out who came from where and when, and found that in the Late Bronze Age (1,200 to 800 B.C.E.) there was a huge influx of people from what is now northwestern France.  These people, who were probably formed of different tribes but are what we usually collectively call "Celtic," eventually replaced fifty percent of the indigenous pre-invasion population.

"By using genetic data to document times when there were large-scale movements of people into a region, we can identify plausible times for a language shift," said study co-author David Reich of Harvard University, in an interview with Science Daily. "Known Celtic languages are too similar in their vocabularies to plausibly descend from a common ancestor 4,500 years ago, which is the time of the earlier pulse of large-scale migration, and very little migration occurred in the Iron Age.  If you're a serious scholar, the genetic data should make you adjust your beliefs: downweighting the scenario of early Celtic language coming in the Iron Age [and early Bronze Age] and upweighting the Late Bronze Age."

England, of course, has been invaded and settled several times since then; by the Romans in the first century C.E., by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons starting in the sixth century, then by the Norman French in the eleventh.  Each new pulse of invaders brought along their own languages and culture -- and their DNA.  That we can look at bones today and see the genetic history of the people they came from is pretty stupendous.

One of the coolest pieces of this research has to do with lactose tolerance.  You probably know that lactose is a sugar that is easily digested by most mammals only in infancy, and adults lose their tolerance for it.  (This is why it's not a good idea to feed milk to an adult cat.)  But some people retain the ability to digest lactose -- it's most common in Europe, and is caused by a single gene.  Lactose tolerance seems to have spread along with the practice of keeping dairy cattle, for obvious reasons.  And in the period studied by the research, the incidence of the lactose-tolerance gene skyrocketed, so the new influx of settlers seem to have been milk drinkers -- and brought along their cattle.

It's amazing what we can learn from a bunch of three-thousand-year-old bones, and that the DNA fragments still contained within them give us a window into the movements of people during a time we know little about otherwise.  In my case, we're talking about people who are likely to be my ancestors (all "extra-pair paternity events" aside).  One more example of the wisdom in the saying carved into the wall of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: γνῶθι σεαυτόν ("know yourself").

Or, as John Heywood put in in 1546: "What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh."

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I remember when I first learned about the tragedy of how much classical literature has been lost.  Take, for example, Sophocles, which anyone who's taken a college lit class probably knows because of his plays Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus.  He was the author of at least 120 plays, of which only seven have survived.  While we consider him to be one of the most brilliant ancient Greek playwrights, we don't even have ten percent of the literature he wrote.  As Carl Sagan put it, it's as if all we had of Shakespeare was Timon of Athens, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline, and were judging his talent based upon that.

The same is true of just about every classical Greek and Roman writer.  Little to nothing of their work survives; some are only known because of references to their writing in other authors.  Some of what we do have was saved by fortunate chance; this is the subject of Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful book The Swerve, which is about how a fifteenth-century book collector, Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a monastic library what might well have been the sole remaining copy of Lucretius's masterwork De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which was one of the first pieces of writing to take seriously Democritus's idea that all matter is made of atoms.

The Swerve looks at the history of Lucretius's work (and its origin in the philosophy of Epicurus) and the monastic tradition that allowed it to survive, as well as Poggio's own life and times and how his discovery altered the course of our pursuit of natural history.  (This is the "swerve" referenced in the title.)  It's a fascinating read for anyone who enjoys history or science (or the history of science).  His writing is clear, lucid, and quick-paced, about as far from the stereotype of historical writing being dry and boring as you could get.  You definitely need to put this one on your to-read list.

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The shrieking skulls of Calgarth

A couple of days ago, I was doing some genealogical research on the family of my Scottish grandmother, whose forebears mostly settled in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and I ran across records of an early Maryland settler (not a direct ancestor) named Matthew Howard.

The Howards intermarried with various members of the Iams family, which is a direct line of mine (yes, I'm a cousin of the pet food people), so I spent a few minutes glancing through what was known of Matthew Howard.  And I found that his grandfather was an English landholder named Miles Phillipson, of Calgarth, Westmoreland, England.

Something about those names rung a bell.  Being that at the time I was puttering about with genealogy, my mind was occupied with family history, so at first I thought I must have seen the name in some old record or another.  But something about that didn't ring right, and I kept thinking about it.  I had seen "Miles Phillipson of Calgarth" before, somewhere unrelated to genealogy, but I couldn't place where.  Finally, I googled it.

The first page of hits consisted of retelling after retelling of a famous story -- the tale of the screaming skulls of Calgarth.  That's where I'd seen the name before; decades ago, in a book with a title like Strange True Tales of the Supernatural, a genre which has graced my bookshelves since I was a teenager.

The story goes something like this.  Miles Phillipson was a wealthy landowner in sixteenth century England, and his property abutted a tract of land with a hill overlooking Lake Windermere.  This adjacent land belonged to a middle-aged couple named Kraster and Dorothy Cook, who (according to most versions of the legend) were simple, kind people.  Phillipson, however, was a greedy, mean, grasping sonofabitch, and he wanted the Cooks' property, but they refused to sell at any price.  Finally, he appeared to give up, and as a gesture of goodwill and no-hard-feelings, he invited the Cooks to dinner.  While there, Phillipson had one of his servants hide in Kraster Cook's satchel a valuable silver cup that Cook had admired earlier in the evening.  When the Cooks left, Phillipson "noticed" that the cup was gone, gave the alarm, and before the Cooks knew what was happening, they'd been arrested for theft of the cup (which, of course, was found in Kraster Cook's possession).

In due time, the Cooks were put on trial for theft, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

Oh, did I mention that Miles Phillipson was the county magistrate?

On the day of the execution, as Kraster and Dorothy were readied to be hanged, they were asked if they had any last words before the sentence was carried out.  Kraster shook his head, but Dorothy said, "Look out for yourself, Miles Phillipson.  You think you have done a fine thing.  But the tiny lump of land you lust for is the dearest a Phillipson has ever bought or stolen.  You will never prosper, nor any of your breed.  Whatever scheme you undertake will wither in your hand.  Whatever cause you support will always lose.  The time will come when no Phillipson will own an inch of land and while Calgarth walls shall stand, we will haunt it night and day.  You will never be rid of us!"

Now those are what I call kickass last words.

It is not recorded how Phillipson reacted to this, but given the rampant superstition of the time, I can only imagine that he wasn't particularly thrilled.  That didn't stop him, however, from seeing the Cooks both hanged, and taking their property, tearing down their cottage, and building himself a sumptuous manor house, which he named Calgarth Hall.

Of course, it wouldn't be a tale worth the telling if it stopped there.  Shortly after the completion of the manor, the members of the household were awakened one night by a horrifying shrieking.  Coming down into the great hall, from which the noise seemed to be coming, Phillipson and his family and servants saw two grinning skulls on the mantelpiece, screaming in an earsplitting fashion.  (Mrs. Phillipson, being an Elizabethan lady, of course "fainted dead away.")  The next day, Miles Phillipson, figuring he knew what was going on, had the coffins of Kraster and Dorothy Cook exhumed -- and unsurprisingly, found the skulls missing.  He replaced the skulls, and reburied the coffins, only to have the same thing occur the following week.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Well, things went from bad to worse.  The skulls wouldn't stay buried, but reappeared in the great hall with terrible regularity.  All the servants quit.  Mrs. Phillipson and their only son took sick and died.  Miles Phillipson's reputation sank so fast there weren't even any bubbles, and he was forced to sell off his land a piece at a time until he had nothing left, and finally died in abject poverty.  Of later generations the legend doesn't speak, but Calgarth is said to still be standing, and although an exorcism was pronounced there in the nineteenth century, it is still subject to "strange sights and sounds."

What I find fascinating about all of this is not that an ancient manor house in England is the focal point of a wild tale of terror; heaven knows that it is hardly unique in that regard.  It is the intersection between legend and fact that interests me.  When I first read the tale of the screaming skulls of Calgarth, when I was perhaps fifteen years old, I figured that (like most of those sorts of legends) the men and women who peopled it were fictional, even if the places weren't.  I never dreamed that Miles Phillipson had actually lived and died in Calgarth, as per the legend, had had a surviving daughter (Anne Phillipson) whose son, Matthew Howard, emigrated to the United States in the mid-1600s and was the founder of a large and prosperous family in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  (Why the curse didn't affect him, I'm not sure -- maybe it only applied to people who had the last name of Phillipson.)

What is interesting about this, too, is that for the most part, one side doesn't know what the other knows.  The genealogists have all of the dates and places; Miles Phillipson was born about 1540 in Westmoreland, married a woman named Barbara Sandys, had one surviving child (Anne) born in Calgarth in about 1575 or so.  None of the databases on the Howard family mention the rather sketchy story about what their ancestor supposedly did.  And I don't think it's because as genealogists, they'd be hesitant to include a wild tale; genealogists, I've found, absolutely love weird legends about their relatives, even if most of them are careful to include a disclaimer that "this is only a story."  But apparently almost none of the Howard family descendants are aware of the screaming skulls that supposedly haunted their distant ancestor.

Likewise, none of the recountings of the Calgarth story mention that the real Phillipson had one surviving child, and that Phillipson's grandson ended up being a wealthy planter in Maryland.  I guess I can understand why they'd be reluctant to include that; it makes Dorothy Cook's curse from the gallows have a little less punch, to know that the hex only lasted one generation.  But still -- you'd think that it would show up somewhere, but I couldn't find any reference to it at all.

The whole thing is kind of curious, especially given that the other two examples of ancestral hauntings I've come across seem to be well known both to the genealogical researchers and to the haunted house aficionados.  On my side of the family, we have Alexander Lindsay, the notorious "Earl Beardie," who supposedly lost his soul to the devil in a dice game and now haunts Glamis Castle in Scotland, swearing, drinking, and rolling dice (my dad's comment upon finding out that this was one of our ancestors was, "Yeah, sounds like my family, all right.").  On my wife's side, we have the Frys, who owned Morants Court in Kent, the site of the creepy story that became Alfred Noyes's poem "The Highwayman."

I suppose that every family has legends, but not many can beat the Shrieking Skulls of Calgarth for having all of the classic elements -- a false accusation, a grasping miser who gets his due, a curse delivered from the gallows, skulls, unearthly screams at night.  So next time you hear one of your kinfolk talking about "skeletons in the closet," keep in mind that whatever creepy goings-on have occurred in your family, it could be a lot worse.

They could be literal skeletons.  That refuse to stay buried.

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One of the most enduring mysteries of neuroscience is the origin of consciousness.  We are aware of a "self," but where does that awareness come from, and what does it mean?  Does it arise out of purely biological processes -- or is it an indication of the presence of a "soul" or "spirit," with all of its implications about the potential for an afterlife and the independence of the mind and body?

Neuroscientist Anil Seth has taken a crack at this question of long standing in his new book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, in which he brings a rigorous scientific approach to how we perceive the world around us, how we reconcile our internal and external worlds, and how we understand this mysterious "sense of self."  It's a fascinating look at how our brains make us who we are.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Genetic walkabouts

Today's topic comes to us from the One Thing Leads To Another department.  

I got launched into this particular rabbit hole by a notice from 23 & Me that they'd refined their analysis of their test subjects' DNA, and now had a bigger database to extract from, allowing them to make a better guess at "percent composition" not only by general region, but by specific sub-region.

So I took a look at my results.  My DNA came out 63.5% French, 25.3% Scottish and English, 6.4% Ashkenazi, and the remaining 4.8% a miscellany.  This works out to be pretty much what I'd expect from what I know of my family tree.  My mom was close to 100% French, but a great-grandfather of hers, one Solomon Meyer-Lévy, was a French Jew from Alsace and is the origin of the Ashkenazic DNA.  My dad was a bit of a hodgepodge in which French, Scottish, and English predominate.

So like I said, no surprises.  I'm a white guy of western European descent, which if you look at my profile photo, is probably not going to come as any sort of shock.

What I thought was more interesting was the regional breakdown.  The Scottish and English bits were especially interesting because I don't have good records of where exactly my British Isles forebears were from.  Apparently I have a cluster of genetic relatives around Glasgow, the London area, and Yorkshire.  Other than my dad's paternal family (which was from the French Alps, near Mont Blanc and the border of Italy) and my Alsatian great-great-grandfather, my French ancestry is all in western France; this lines up with what I know of my mom's family, which came from Bordeaux, Poitou, the Loire Valley, and Brittany.

So all of this shores up their claims to accuracy, because this was ascertained purely by my DNA -- I didn't send them my family tree, or anything.  But then this got combined with another random thing, which is that I've been reading a book called The Ancient Celts by anthropologist Barry Cunliffe, and I was kind of surprised at how much of Europe the Celts once ruled -- not only the British Isles and all of France (then called Gaul), but what is now Switzerland, southern Germany, Austria, the northern half of Italy, the eastern half of Spain, and down into a big chunk of the Balkans.  They seem to have been nothing if not inveterate wanderers, and their walkabouts took them just about everywhere in Europe but Scandinavia.  They were there for a long while, too; it was only when the Romans got their act together and started to push back that the Celts retreated; they were shoved farther west when first the Germanic tribes, and then the Slavs, moved in from the east and kind of kept moving.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

This all got me thinking, "Okay, when I say my ancestry is on the order of 2/3 French, what exactly am I saying?"  So I started doing some research into "the ethnic origin of the French," and I found out that it's not simple.  The western parts of France (whence my mom's family originated) are mostly of Celtic (Gaulish) ancestry.  People in the southeast, especially the lowlands near Marseilles, have a lot of Roman and Etruscan forebears.  When you get over into Languedoc -- the southwestern part of France, near the border of Spain -- there's an admixture not only from the Moors of North Africa, but from the Basques, who seem to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of Europe, and are the only ones in western Europe who don't speak an Indo-European language.  In Normandy there's a good admixture of Scandinavian blood, from Vikings who settled there a thousand years ago -- in fact, "Normandy" means "North-man-land."  Despite the fact that the name of the country and its people comes from a Germanic tribe (the Franks), the only place there's a significant amount of Germanic ancestry in France is in the east -- from Burgundy north into Alsace, Lorraine, and Picardy.

Apparently the only reason the French are Frankish is because the Franks ruled the place for a few hundred years, a bit the way the Normans did in England.  The common people, your average seventeenth-century peasants in Bordeaux, probably were nearly 100% Gaulish Celt.

So when I say my mom's family is French, and a guy from Lille and a woman from Marseilles say the same thing, what exactly do we mean?

And there's nothing unusual about the French in that regard; I just use them as an example because I happen to know more about them.  The same is true pretty much anywhere you look except for truly insular cultures like Japan, which have had very little migration in or out for millennia.  We're almost all composites, and ultimately, all cousins.  I remember when I first ran into this idea; that the further back you go, the more our family trees all coalesce, and at some point in the past every human on Earth could be sorted into one of two categories -- people who were the ancestors of every one of us, and people who left no living descendants.

That point, most anthropologists believe, is way more recent than most of us would suspect.  I've heard -- to be fair, I've never seen it rigorously proven, but it sounds about right -- that the two-category split for those of us with western European ancestry happened in around 1,200 C.E.  So pick out anyone from thirteenth century western Europe, and he's either my ancestor, or he has no descendants at all.

This brings up a couple of things.  First, "royal blood" is an idiotic concept from just about whichever angle you choose.  Not only does royal ancestry not confer fitness for leading a country -- let's face it, a lot of those kings were absolute loonies -- I can pretty much guarantee that I descend from Charlemagne, and if you have European ancestry, so do you.  My wife actually descends from an illegitimate child of King Edward IV of England (something she likes to remind me about whenever I get uppity), but the truth is, all of us have royal blood and peasant blood pretty well mixed indiscriminately.

Second, racism, ethnicism, and xenophobia are all equally ridiculous, since (1) we're virtually all genetic mixtures, (2) regardless of our ethnicity, our genetic similarities far outweigh our differences, and (3) we're all cousins anyhow.  I find that rather cool, honestly -- that a Zulu woman living in Botswana and I have common ancestry if you go back far enough.  Race is a cultural construct, not a genetic one, which you can see with extraordinary vividness if you take a DNA test, or if you read anything about the migration patterns humanity has taken since first leaving the East African savanna something like 250,000 years ago.

Anyhow, those are my musings about ethnicity, DNA, ancestry, and so on.  It all goes to show that we're wonderfully complex creatures, and the determination of some of us to see the world as if it was straightforward black-and-white is not only inaccurate, it misses a great deal of the most interesting parts of it.  As the brilliant science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anybody who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Not long ago I was discussing with a friend of mine the unfortunate tendency of North Americans and Western Europeans to judge everything based upon their own culture -- and to assume everyone else in the world sees things the same way.  (An attitude that, in my opinion, is far worse here in the United States than anywhere else, but since the majority of us here are the descendants of white Europeans, that attitude didn't come out of nowhere.)  

What that means is that people like me, who live somewhere WEIRD -- white, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic -- automatically have blinders on.  And these blinders affect everything, up to and including things like supposedly variable-controlled psychological studies, which are usually conducted by WEIRDs on WEIRDs, and so interpret results as universal when they might well be culturally-dependent.

This is the topic of a wonderful new book by anthropologist Joseph Henrich called The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.  It's a fascinating lens into a culture that has become so dominant on the world stage that many people within it staunchly believe it's quantifiably the best one -- and some act as if it's the only one.  It's an eye-opener, and will make you reconsider a lot of your baseline assumptions about what humans are and the ways we see the world -- of which science historian James Burke rightly said, "there are as many different versions of that as there are people."

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