Hi guys! I was hoping I wouldn't have to leave this comment, but given I've had to delete one in violation already, the internet once again lives up to its reputation. Any and all forms of racism, derogatory insults, discrimination, nationalism, racial supremacy or similar (you get the idea) will NOT be tolerated and comments alluding to it will be removed. Freedom of speech is not freedom of a platform, and I will not give a platform to views that are morally abhorrent. I acknowledge this topic can be a thorny issue where there is no solid consensus, but disagreements are possible without discrimination. Racism, bullying, or derogatory remarks will be given zero tolerance. And trust me, as someone who can get a bit clumsy with what I type on the keyboard myself, I'm very understanding. No one "accidentally" breaks these rules! Thank you in advance!
Scientific errors @2:54 1) Most mutations that are used to compute ancestry are specifically not in the protein coding genes. Therefore it is objectively and provably invaluable for research into ethnicity and ancestry. 2) It is erroneous to equate non-coding DNA with junk DNA. Besides the 2-3% of the genome that is protein coding genes, there is a quite a few more percentage that we know what they are doing. For instance ribosomes are made of RNA, so the genes that code for the ribosome are not protein coding genes, same thing for the transfer RNA that attach amino acids to create proteins. There are lots more types of non-coding RNA genes and we know about many and their functions, but of course just like we don't know what each gene does or exactly how many coding genes are in humans precisely , we don't know what every non-coding RNA does. There are also introns, 5' UTRs, 3' UTRs, longer range promoter and regulatory regions that impact which genes are turned on under which conditions and how they are spliced together to form proteins. Then there are centromeres and telomeres, scaffold attachment regions and probably a few more that I am not remembering off the top of my head. 3) Computers don't sift out junk DNA, for ancestry you usually use a targeted panel of SNPs, so the whole genome is not read at all, and certainly not line by line, but specific mutations are read off the plate. Most of these SNPs are in non-coding regions, but some are. The mutations that are useful for ancestry are called ancestry-informative marker (AIM)s. 4) For whole genome and whole exome testing your DNA has usually been broken into reads that are about 150 nucleotides long and then those are "mapped" against the human reference genome. But newer technology such as oxford nanopore allows researchers to read off up to millions of basepairs without chopping it up. 5) Genetic tests do not take a long time because of computational bottle necks. For research doing all kinds of interesting things it can take time, but for ancestry done using the way most companies do it with a SNP panel, the computational time is a few minutes and most of that time is trying to find your best fit for relatives, which needs to look at your whole results and compare them against every other person's whole results (of course it isn't done like that, algorithmic shortcuts are taken, but that is what you are basically trying to do), whereas assigning ancestry categories can be done region by region and parallelized to be almost instant even on an old consumer grade GPU. The wetlab work of extracting and cleaning the DNA and running the lab assays takes a few days. But the time it takes is mainly in the logistics of shipping and batching samples.
@@HesderOleh protein-coding DNA is what manifests in our appearance, so ethnicity, yes, is absolutely determined by it. It determines skin colour, hair colour, physical features, etc. "junk DNA" is not my term, it is the term geneticists use, and while there are arguments over it's use and whether or not it is genuinely "junk", it is also objectively not what we use to determine ethnicity in these origin studies. We use protein-coding DNA. Unless you're suggesting ethnicity is determined by genes scientists don't even agree has a purpose? That would still make my point! Yes, they are compared against the human genome. What race/ethnicity is the human genome? You seem to be making an assumption that because genetic ethnic studies are unreliable I'm calling the whole field unreliable. I'm not. I'm saying that you can no more determine a person's ethnicity through DNA anymore than you can determine if they're conservative or liberal, because it's a social definition, not a scientific one. Comparing your sample to the human genome only confirms that yes, you are indeed human. Part of what does make genetic studies reliable is indeed determining species and evolutionary charts. It just doesn't work for social definitions. It has to assume an ultimate origin for all people, which doesn't exist beyond our original evolution in Africa. As to computational bottlenecks, fair enough, I misspoke there. I didn't mean to imply that it was taking days to complete on the computer, most bottlenecks are from mailing results and delivery. I was referring to the whole process of running checks, too, which in computational terms does take quite a long time and requires a lot of processing power. This line was written specifically for users of at-home DNA tests not scientific ones in front of scientists in their own lab, sorry about that
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist The unstated assumption that ethnicity has anything to do with appearance is where I think you lose me. I don't think most people think that physical appearance is key to ethnicity. Sure, curly hair may be common in many groups, such as certain Africans and certain Jews, or blue eyes may be common in others. But what is different among different ethnic groups is the frequency of traits, there is still huge variation inside even relatively inbred populations (such as ashkenazi Jews). But also physical appearances that may look similar can have different genetic causes. For ancestry you ideally want to look at mutations that are not undergoing selection, whether purifying selection or positive selection. One reason is that selection throws off mutational clock estimation, but also if you look at a gene that is undergoing purifying selection you will see it disappear in the tree randomly creating uncertainty to how is related if it isn't consistent going down nodes, if it is undergoing positive selection then you will get confused by convergent evolution, such as when different strains of covid gained certain mutations over time, likely not from recombination but because it was somehow beneficial to the virus. I have written some of the programs that do checks both for ancestry samples but also for clinical use (which is so much more serious, any time I am coding in those areas I keep therac-25 in my head) , they do not take a lot of time. People who are doing the mail in DNA tests are nearly all using SNP arrays, I have been involved in getting some of those same exact tests approved to be used clinically. They are looking at point mutations, like an A>G at a certain point in the genome, in fact if you have a T instead of an A or G that assay will fail, so for multi-allelic loci there will be multiple assays on the chip A>T as well as A>G, but if you have a C then both of those will fail. With these tests you expect only 99%-ish to work and if everything is right then those failures are random across the genome and the plate. If the failures are in a certain region of the genome, then it is likely a structural variation deletion on both chromosomes, a deletion on one chromosome will just be an LoH (Loss of heterozygosity). If it is on an area of the plate, that is when you have to troubleshoot the machines that you use to put the DNA on the chips and all parts of the process and you try to figure out if it just that chip or is it a batch and you probably end up in an argument with the supplier and their technicians and your technicians over whose fault it is. As you aren't looking at the genome there is no line by line and there very little thorough checking because if anything looks even a bit off on the quick automated checks it just gets thrown out, those checks on 96 samples are so quick that you are limited more by RAM speed and I/O speed than processing speed. These random failures are fine when doing ancestry, however for clinical use, that is really annoying because there are mutations you need for whatever tests you are running. You might think that 99% success of mutations mean that most samples would be fine, but if you do the math if you needed 100 SNPs then samples would fail about 2/3rd of the time (1-.99^100) or worse if you need 300 SNPs then 95% of samples would fail. What this ironically means is that you have to be less stringent with medical clinical SNPs than with ancestry quality control. That sounds crazy at first , but instead of relying on automatic QC you get to know the behavior of each assay and its failure modes. So if each ancestry SNP got the same level of attention you could probably fail much fewer SNPs, but no one is ever going to invest that effort into perfecting a QC tailored for each SNP for ancestry. It is funny that you mention that you can't tell if someone is conservative or liberal from a DNA, because that is an active area of research. However our current tools such as GWAS and PGRS are poorly suited to this problem. We probably will be in the next few years though.
@@HesderOleh aaah, but you've nailed my point down! It's NOT about appearance or anything that is coded in your genes! But protein-coding DNA also determines things beyond your physical appearance, such as your biological functions and instinct behaviours. I quite agree that "junk DNA" is likely a misnomer, but again this is a genetics term. We also aren't sure what they do, so any bearing they have on ethnicity is purely speculative. But if ethnicity isn't determined by how the gene expresses itself, that leaves us with it being determined by language, culture, behaviour - all of which I break down in my video. These are social rather than scientific. And I'm sorry, but no, genetics will never be able to tell a conservative from a liberal. Being a hardcore liberal I could be snarky and say smart people have a tendency to skew liberal, and therefore anyone genetically gifted with intelligence is likely to be a liberal, but short of making assumptions like these figuring it out though genetics is problematic. Not all smart people are liberal, and not all upbringings will nurture those views. There will always be an element of nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate, and so long as humans have even a small choice, uncertainty will enter the results. Archaeologists tried to scientifically define human culture and society before in the 1950s and 1960s, it was called processualism. We attempted to make the sorts of objectives determinations you're speaking of, and many highly intelligent, empathetic scholars spent their whole careers on the idea. But it was a dead end, because exceptions always came up, skewing the theory. Maybe you subscribe to a deterministic model of the universe, with all of our actions being predetermined by our genes. I was genetically destined to be a liberal, to move to Britain and Germany, and so on. If you do subscribe to this fair enough, but we come at this science then from two opposing viewpoints. But I don't subscribe to that model, I do believe there is human agency which will make objective classification of us beyond the species level impossible
Urban populations often had lower survival rates due to crowding and disease, combine that with the fact that only 5-10% of people lived in cities 750 years ago, and it becomes quite uncertain that everyone has an ancestor who lived in city 750 years ago.
@@harutyunamirjanyan8005 yes, they did have lower survival rates, and I get your urbanisation argument. In fact I even wrote an argument to counter it, but I cut it out for time! Congratulations, you've proven why I should take a bit longer and give my audience more credit for noticing it's absence! But as to my (edited out) response: let's say cities were 10% diverse. That makes the past population 1% outsider. As a snapshot in time this doesn't seem like much, but consider a consistent influx of 1% over centuries, as well as in-migration as students came to study, and out-migration as they went back to farms or fled from war, and other such factors that force movement. This is assuming cities were always 10% diverse. I've done that for the ease of maths, but obviously some (like Rome, London, and Cusco) were very diverse while others (like Tokyo or Moscow) were less so. But consider everything that has happened since 1350. How much would cities have affected rural areas, and how much movement has occurred since the first outbreak of the Black Death? Basically, 1% of people is still a lot when we consider the vastness of how much time has passed and how many generations go by. If you go back 750 years, this is a very long time. Soldiers from the countryside (how can I say this in a way TH-cam won't censor?) spread their material across countrysides as they pillaged for food and supplies. Rural soldiers were also part of these wars, many of whom lived in border areas under conflict, too. Basically, there are a lot of things happening in life, and isolation is very hard to maintain. I hope this addresses your concerns!
@@Beliserius1 we're not playing this game (and it is indeed a game to it's defenders). You have Google, use it. If you can prove to me it's not, I'll issue a retraction
You are incorrect about results being based on current living humans who have taken the test. The maps of ancient migrations are based on DNA results, so you can't argue that migration isn't taken into account by genetic testing and make it impossible to figure out where ancestors were at which time, because those studies are based on maps. Researchers also use DNA from people who died over the last centuries and millennia to help create trees of relations.
@@HesderOleh and how do they figure out the origins of past people? The problem is there is still no reliable baseline for ethnicity. You've missed the point I'm making entirely. Yes, researchers use DNA from people who died in the past, but it is still based on these flawed assumptions, such as the fact that it's assumed we know where these people migrated from. It's also assumed this population disappeared. Take Jewish for example - the modern Jewish genome is nothing close to the "original" Jewish identifier, yet the influx of DNA that created the modern identifier is itself discarded in many studies. Maps don't tell us DNA, they are created from those DNA results. See the problem? Familial relations are simpler to determine, but ancestry isn't reliable going further back, because eventually you get a human we're all related to
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist It isn't a flawed assumption that we know where people migrated from. The same way that phylogenetic trees can be created for animal species or viruses, the same can be done for people. Yes, there will always be uncertainties, but those can be quantified. We can know when two populations diverged and when there was a common ancestor. The idea that it is assumed that this population disappeared is as nonsensical as someone asking how we can be descended from chimpanzees if chimps still exist. Firstly, chimps share a common ancestor with us, and secondly that common ancestor didn't disappear, it became both us and chimps and other related primates. My issue was that you were using maps to show that migration happened, you weren't saying those maps were wrong, you were using those maps in the video as a reliable source of information. Do you see what I mean, you weren't saying these maps were wrong, you were saying those maps show ancestry wasn't taking those migrations into account. Ancestry very far back is possible, we can trace our evolution back hundreds of millions of years, and we can figure our who my grandparents are. Why do you think there should be some "missing link" at some scale? Before I actually learned the details of the algorithms and the science behind this I was also skeptical about some claims of phylochronology and biogeography, but aside from some stuff that goes too far and some bad science communication the science is sound. If you want to argue semantics about what "ethnicity" means and feel superior because you think you are being more "nuanced", go ahead and knock yourself out. I am not here to argue the sociology or that one person's definition of a word is more "correct" or "better", because I think what matters for words is that both people understand how each other are using a word. I am just talking about the scientific aspect. And I don't begrudge you getting it wrong, I was also wrong about it until I studied the topics in great depth. I also left the lab of someone where the head of the lab was making too many assumptions in their models about evolution and speciation of algae and I just couldn't take it other parts of their research projects were great, but it just drove me crazy.
@@HesderOleh but again, what you're taking is a scientific definition of genetics, which is correct. But ethnicity is not science. I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not arguing chimps v. Humans and a common ancestor, or Homo erectus vs. Homo habilis, I'm arguing Albanian vs. Bosnian, etc., these aren't separate species or evolution. You can identify a chimp and a human through genetics, you can't actually separate Polish from Slovak, despite all the posturing by ethnographic studies. Genetics used the way you're speaking of, phylogenetic trees and biogeography, is solid. It's good. I'm not diminishing your work and I'm sorry if you think so. But ethnicity is not being part of a species, it's not about semantics or "feeling superior", ethnicity is, by literally every definition, not a species. You present arguments of "evolution", but to apply such a thing to ethnicity is impossible because it is an inherently societal definition, hence the point of my video. Genetic tests are not useless, they just need to be taken with a grain of salt given the complexity of human history and the fluid definitions of what makes an ethnic group. They shouldn't be taken anywhere near as solidly as we take their results on things like biogeography and evolution
Suggestion: spend a little more time with text screens, so people can read them. Some of them go by so fast there's not even enough time to hit the pause button.
Ethnicy isn't race or the more aplicable ecotype. Ethinicity is cultural, genetic markers are obviously present because most culture is passed by the community and people breed within community lines... well, bred... If I remember well, NA has around 20-30 major ethnic groups. US has 14/20 out of those. Quite a few shared with mexico and canada.
The issue with ethnicities is that DNA tests has no authority over already defined rules who can claim ethnicity. And there are no universal rules for what can belong to ethnic group - those are different to each ethnic group. What these tests can show is ancestry and relatedness to other people, but in most of the laws that are defining ethnicity, genetic relationship is not enough to be acknowledged as part of ethnic group - it has to be sme sort of direct lineage and in modern days it can be from both parents, but in more traditional settings only paternal lineage would have been recognized, because females were not kept in the family and were married away or in and for that reason there was no such rules imposed on ethnicity of females as children of nonethnic wife would have the same ethnicity as father. Only adoption could be a viable way for those that can't fit the criteria, but there are ethnicities that would not recognize adopted as belonmging to them as well. Ethnicities did not appear as exclusive circle for people like you, but generally in modern times they appeared as excluded from rest of people, but it might be that op is looking on this topic from different POV. For example birth of Metis nation and ethnicity was because mixed offsprings of British and French fathers with local native women simply were not recognized as European enough couple of centuries ago and now they are new nation while in modern settings they would be recognized as part of British or French. The problem with Putin is not if he has decided that Ukrainians does not exist, but because he can say that and in the case of his victory he can implement that in life. And even USA can argue from that position that Putin is doing genocide, because what Turks are doing to Kurds or Chinese doing to Uygurs would have to be recognized as such as well. Also, the issue of current conflict is not so much about Ukrainian struggles for independence as more of a struggle of defining Russian national identity, as they don't seem to have it as what they have is Soviet identity - they recognize as Russians anyone who speak Russian and share their values of WW2 cult, and then you can see Buryats saying that they are Russian or even African(that has recently arrived to Russia and have no other ties to Russia and Russians) proclaming that he is Russian for the joy of those, that support Putins saying that Russia has no borders. This is really a display of a total confusion among Russians and unlike this video it has real consequences. The claim, that ethnicities are erased only by force is not true - most of the ethnicities are being erased by denying them any independence and room for development - and usually making them appear as racists when they want to preserve their culture and differences. Generally all ethnicities that are under other cultural influence are doomed to die out.
@@ewfse364u35jh I never claimed ethnicities are erased by force, as under threat can also mean dwindling numbers and being "culturally overwhelmed", but I chose to highlight conflict in particular because 1) it's the most visible and relevant in today's politics and 2) there's so much xenophobia and disingenuous anti-immigrant rhetoric that is rooted in extraordinary bad faith and ill will that speaking of being "culturally overwhelmed", i.e. suppressed by a much larger majority, will lead to a lot of these cruel and nasty elements feeling legitimised, no matter how much context I give to it. You are correct in a lot, this is a good summary. People seem to forget just how small the world was, too. Villages of 20-100 people were the norm. One mixed baby in a village of twenty people, all interbreeding, will still be 2.5% mixed assuming absolutely nothing else happens. It's still 0.5% "impure" on the higher end, again assuming absolutely perfect isolation over several hundred years otherwise. My point was exactly that ethnicities are valid definitions and evolving, but human nature cannot make them genetically traceable. Genetics are a great tool for medicine, forensics, and family relations (among other things), but we need to look further for anthropology
I must admit that I was somewhat disappointed. I do get your points but I still think that you have gotten it completely wrong. Let me try to explain. According to ethnology people tend to fall into groups: those that you feel connected to and those that you do not. They are also called an "in-group" and an "out-group". The basis for this subdivision into groups is often a combination of different factors: language, culture and appearance (aka "race"). When scientists deal with these topics they try to find some common features in order to give this a scientific definition (or at least description). We can discuss how well they have succeeded, and to some extent it narrows down to a question of when it is a snowman and when it is melted water in a pond. The answer is: they are one and the same but under different conditions (or in different environments). And that is part of the definition frame. Ernst Mach was the first to raise this problem. Now, ignoring states as a political construct we can see, that people have been living in the same areas not only for centuries but even for thousands of years. Yes, they may have developed their language and culture. but there is a certain continuity. Just like an individual has continuity across age: as a child, as young, as parent, as old. You are not the same today as you were yesterday and will be tomorrow, but there is a continuity in identity. And even if you are correct that smaller and bigger groups of people have moved around, only a relative few of such events has had a decisive influence on their location. And because you can go back to a "core" area or population and identify common genetic features, you can also classify a persons ethnic combination. Therefor genetic analysis are valid. Thus I do not think that your critique holds water in the end. You can say that in some cases different ethnic groups merge into a new national identity, which take up elements from all (both) of the original groups. Take Americans: they identify as citizens but often also as part of ethnic subgroups (Black, Irish, Jew or what ever) and they are part of both. And it can be shown in the genetic analysis that this is the case.
@@svennielsen633 Hi! Thanks for watching! I take your points, and I'm well aware of in-groups, out-groups, and subcultures. And yes, identities are formed by environments. But where the mistake comes in is assuming that just because people lived there for thousands of years means that they both lived in isolation, and that they are the same as the people who first settled the area, neither of which are safe assumptions. Your points about how people define their ethnicity are points I agree with, but these things you're outlining are shaped by social definitions and societal factors, not scientific ones. Which is my point. Anyone can speak a language based on their societal upbringing, but their genes don't play a factor in which language it will be, and so on. These groups of continuity are created by social definitions, not genetic ones. And again, I'm not trying to erase ethnicity as valid. I've emphasised that up and down the video. I'm saying it's just a scientific definition is impossible, so you must use the social. You proved this point yourself by saying it's based on who people "feel connected" to each other, which is true enough. And to return to the analogy of the old man versus the young man, this raises an interesting question: is he actually the same? By the time you're 90, with the exception of perhaps brain cells, literally every single cell in the body has been replaced more than once, and it has altered the genetics within the human body. Cells don't replicate as easily, and this leads to degeneration. He's suffered illnesses which also contribute. Furthermore, the old man holds different views, opinions, and experiences than he did as a young man. And likewise, many of the traditions and cultures ethnic groups hold dear are altered heavily by new environments and people. Identity is furthermore a construction we have made of ourselves. Who we are is who we define. And despite all the suc-cultures, Americans still intermingle. Today it's more mixed, but in the past the woman was simply considered "gone", off to join her husband's in-group, which would add genetic diversity but seem to keep a pure ethnicity. Jewish is a rare exception where it's passed through the female line, but does this invalidate genes if you have a Jewish father but a Christian mother? Genetics is a relatively young science, and it's still experimenting with the DNA of the living. As a result, because it was a paradigm-shifting science for everything it can do, we tend to not think about what it can't do, which is what I want to highlight. Finally while you're correct large-scale events are rare, I liken this to more of a drip scenario. A garden hose dripping for a year will erode the land more than a firehose spraying for five minutes... But which one gets noticed more? Tiny but continual drops into communities which are isolated have an infinitely larger, but less noticeable, impact than widespread movement. Also, war was quite common, soldiers pillaging the countryside was an annual event in some areas and periods, but thankfully a rarity in others, so nothing I say is ever a hard and fast rule. I do see where you're coming from, and I appreciate the concerns, which I hope I've addressed.
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist - you say that "just because people lived there for thousands of years means that they both lived in isolation, and that they are the same as the people who first settled the area, neither of which are safe assumptions", and I agree on that, but perhaps I did not make my point clear enough. Let us take an example: Denmark and Danes. We know that the first people to settle in the country after the last ice age were reindeer hunters, who later followed the animal, when it moved to Sweden and Norway because of climate change. Clearly they did not contribute to Danes genetics. In stead a new group of forest hunters came in along with the forests and new animals like bear, deer and wild boar. Later, there was an invasion of farmers, and they have added to the genetics of Danes today. Finally there were the Indo-European men (but not women) from the Yamnaya Culture in Ukraine. Traces from all of these groups can be found in Danish dna and are considered to be part of the genetic definition of Danes. Now, the term "Dane" first appear around 500 AD, referring to the people living in what is Denmark today + neighboring areas. The term was used both by the people themselves and by others (Goths, France). We have so-called rune inscriptions that show that they spoke a language, which later has developed into Danish today. In this way we can show the connection between place, people and language (and culture). From historic times we have proof of smaller secondary migrations from Germanic areas, Nordic areas, but also of, say, Jews and others in modern time, but all of these migrations only constitute 1-2% of the population and do not alter the major part of Danish ethnicity or genealogy. Thus, if you take a test, it will still show the traditional result, perhaps with a minor later contribution. And people will still consider themselves as Danes, perhaps with an additional subgroup identification. Thus I think that the scientific approach is VERY valid. Without this being my area of expertise I think that genetics even as a young science quickly has learned to take into account the possible errors that historic events may cause, and that the results can be trusted. That does not exclude the possibility of further improvements in the future. I hope that this example illustrates my point of continuity better.
@@svennielsen633 It does get your point across better. It is well taken. However, why didn't reindeer hunters contribute to modern Danes? Are we sure these Indo-European groups were migrants, invaders, or settlers, or even Indo-European? That is a language family after all, and without writing that doesn't preserve. As you correctly point out, the first writings in Denmark appears about the same time as the name. What we take to make up the Danish culture is based on how modern archaeologists have interpreted materials. But we don't know what these populations were. It's akin to saying we're all a "coca-cola ethnicity" because cola cans are found in our village. Archaeologists define culture by material they leave behind, not by genetics. Genetics going based off of archaeology then is working from an already social definition rather than a scientific one. I'd also ask, where is the cut-off? At what point did Yamnaya become Danish, and what makes a northern Dane different from a southern Swede? (According to people from Stockholm, nothing, but let's put national rivalries aside!) How many generations pass before it no longer counts? Is someone who has lived in the same village with the same community in Lincolnshire still Danish 1200 years after his family came to the island under the Norse, if we assume there was no interbreeding? Or what separated Jutes in the Anglo-Saxons from Jutes of Jutland? The answer, really, is time, because our society has fossilised definitions of "from here" and "from there". I think geneticists do try to account for errors. And these studies aren't useless, people do congregate into groups. When you're discussing opposite ends of the earth, like Japanese vs. Portuguese, it can be reliable. But how do you count migration within nearby groups? Are all the Arabs in Lebanon still descended from Phoenicians, Assyrians, or Nabataeans, and when did that change? These have societal answers, but no great scientific ones. At best we can hope to get fuzzy borders between communities, and are these fuzzy borders mixed, or separate altogether, and why? When you consider just how much movement geneticists would have to take into account every generation, you wonder - what's the point in trying if it changes every century? I don't think you should discount all genetic studies, but I also think it's a mistake to use them to the extent we've been seeing lately. I think attempts to use genetics to explain human ancestry will be seen as a dead end. Just as applying biological evolutionary principles to societal progression proved to be a dead end despite a great many archaeologists subscribing to it fifty years ago, I think applying genetics to ethnicity will have similar outcomes
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist - first of all: I am happy that you find time to take this discussion. You have a lot of questions, so let me try to answer them one by one. You ask: "why didn't reindeer hunters contribute to modern Danes?" The best explanation is from a Danish archaeologist: when climate changed and the tundra moved north and forest came in from the south, reindeer followed the tundra. The hunters then had two choices: to change their way of life towards a new prey with a lot of difficulties because of change in weapons, hunting technique, how bone and antler could be used - or to follow the reindeer and keep their way of life. As he said: "to a hunter his home is where his prey is". I think that it sums it up pretty well. Next point: "Archaeologists define culture by material they leave behind". Yes, and in this case it is possible to follow the movement over time for the very same reason. The material culture shows a geographical movement from Ukraine to the north and then to the west. In the case of Denmark it is even possible to show, that their special burials form a "belt" up through the heath areas in Western Jutland, whereas earlier farmers at the same time were living in the Eastern part of the country (the islands). First they were separated, later they intermarried. I believe that the genetic proof is based on skeleton finds in graves. That is also how they prove that only men moved, not women (they just married into the local population). To me the proof seems convincing. You ask: "where is the cut-off? At what point did Yamnaya become Danish, and what makes a northern Dane different from a southern Swede?" The simplest answer on the first question is: when they decided so. According to ancient myths it was a strong leader, Dan, who became the first king by the choice of the population. It is still debated how reliable the myths are to the historic truth, but it is clear that something did trigger this self identity development. Before they were identified as "Sviones" (according to Roman sources). The second question is tricky since Southern Sweden was part of Denmark until 1660, so the population was Danish. But we know that after the Swedish occupation a lot of the Danes moved from those areas to what was left of Denmark, and Swedish people moved in, so it was a form of "ethnic cleansing" (before the term came into use). You ask: "How many generations pass before it no longer counts?" That is a difficult question, but it certainly took two-four generations before people changed their self identity. Some may keep their self identity for hundreds of years. This is true of Native Americans in the US. So there clearly is not a simple answer to the question. But if they keep their old identity they will most likely also not seek marriage partners outside the group and therefor keep their genetic identity. Thus the two goes together. You can also see it in many African countries, where the old tribal system survived through the colonial time and now divides the newly independent former colonies. You ask: "Are all the Arabs in Lebanon still descended from Phoenicians, Assyrians, or Nabataeans, and when did that change?" Frankly, I would be careful even to attempt to answer this question, since I might get banned if I do, and since there is so much present-day politics involved. A tentative answer is, that there are still different ethnic groups in the country, so it seems that they survived all of the formal political changes during the last 2.000 years. You say: "I think attempts to use genetics to explain human ancestry will be seen as a dead end." As you will understand, I do not agree with you. If you consider how much Archaeology has developed during the last 50-100 years and how much better we understand prehistoric cultures today than back then, I think that genetics will be able to improve in the same way. But we should compare results from different disciplines: next to Archaeology and genetics we have genealogy, which can bring a control of what has happened during the last 2-500 years (sometimes longer). It will be one way of checking the validity of genetic science results. Only time will show how far we can get using these methods, but there will be improvements.
@@svennielsen633 I am quite happy you can engage in the debate! And don't worry too much about getting blocked, it's mostly me manually deleting overt violations of my policy on civility with a couple of buzzwords TH-cam automatically sets, but I dragged the middle east into this, I can hardly fault you for responding to it! You can continue to disagree with me and you're nowhere near blocked territory! I appreciate the response to my questions! The only way agriculture developed was former hunters forcing themselves into a new lifestyle so there's no real proof some of them didn't stay behind. I'd also point out many of the answers you gave were based in the societal. What separated Danes from Swedes is, as I said in my conclusion, how we chose to define it. You said it yourself, they decided. But you can't decide to simply say "okay genes, you're Swedish now", so it would still show up scientifically as Danish. Often ethnic cleansing of the past was followed not by a true purge (not to minimise the suffering or intentions of madmen) but by targeted groups attempting to blend in or hide, like the Spanish Muslims and Jews during the inquisition. Basically, our identities change to our world, but our genetics can't. Vandals who moved to North Africa seem to disappear, forgotten, but through them, genes we consider Germanic would have entered the Berber and Arab populations, and so on. Yes, we can trace material culture, but at the end of the day it's all still material. There's a rather large rift in archaeology over how much a change in material culture represents an actual migration of people over a migration of goods and ideas that altered a pre-existing people. It's a question genetics does indeed try to help with, because archaeologists are also desperate for a solution to these debates. But older genetic material of course degrades, and gaps aren't easily filled in. I absolutely agree that there will be improvements, every science has them! And I do agree that genealogy is how we will ultimately solve this. Because it is easy to trace parentage, and in fact we have done that, finding the man and woman we're all related to globally, a mitochondrial Adam and Eve. There are better videos on it done by other channels on how that was solved. But the fact we seem to be able to trace our heritage through our parents to a single common ancestor scientists agree on, but that there are raging debates about ethnic origins and movement, and even contradictory results, is telling. It says that we can agree on what family looks like from an objective perspective, but ethnic boundaries are defined by the needs and mindsets of the people at the time
@@leszekwolkowski9856 I know you're being sarcastic but I am actually part Indian and Iranian. I just got all the recessive genes from the Slavic half. Don't judge a book by it's colour! 😉
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist I am being sardonic. What recessive Indo-Iranian genes are you talking about exactly, if, according to you, Indo-Iranian and Slavic ethnicity are a social construct? Or am I missing something.
@@leszekwolkowski9856 nope, you're not missing it. Darker skin and hair tend to be dominant traits, but I got the recessive traits of lighter skin and hair. Genetics still determine what you inherit from parents. It's still valid to consider your ethnicity, just as a social rather than a scientific construct. In a way, it does prove my point! How many people who look like and sound me would you expect to have an Indo-Iranian ethnicity? Of course I don't like bringing it up too often, because I do consider it irrelevant. But you can't feed me a line like that and expect me not to have a bit of fun with it myself! Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist Interesting. I am curious, what percentage of your heritage is indo-iranian? Do you have a Indo-iranian grandfather? A great grandmother perhaps?
Hi guys!
I was hoping I wouldn't have to leave this comment, but given I've had to delete one in violation already, the internet once again lives up to its reputation.
Any and all forms of racism, derogatory insults, discrimination, nationalism, racial supremacy or similar (you get the idea) will NOT be tolerated and comments alluding to it will be removed. Freedom of speech is not freedom of a platform, and I will not give a platform to views that are morally abhorrent. I acknowledge this topic can be a thorny issue where there is no solid consensus, but disagreements are possible without discrimination. Racism, bullying, or derogatory remarks will be given zero tolerance. And trust me, as someone who can get a bit clumsy with what I type on the keyboard myself, I'm very understanding. No one "accidentally" breaks these rules!
Thank you in advance!
Scientific errors @2:54
1) Most mutations that are used to compute ancestry are specifically not in the protein coding genes. Therefore it is objectively and provably invaluable for research into ethnicity and ancestry.
2) It is erroneous to equate non-coding DNA with junk DNA. Besides the 2-3% of the genome that is protein coding genes, there is a quite a few more percentage that we know what they are doing. For instance ribosomes are made of RNA, so the genes that code for the ribosome are not protein coding genes, same thing for the transfer RNA that attach amino acids to create proteins. There are lots more types of non-coding RNA genes and we know about many and their functions, but of course just like we don't know what each gene does or exactly how many coding genes are in humans precisely , we don't know what every non-coding RNA does. There are also introns, 5' UTRs, 3' UTRs, longer range promoter and regulatory regions that impact which genes are turned on under which conditions and how they are spliced together to form proteins. Then there are centromeres and telomeres, scaffold attachment regions and probably a few more that I am not remembering off the top of my head.
3) Computers don't sift out junk DNA, for ancestry you usually use a targeted panel of SNPs, so the whole genome is not read at all, and certainly not line by line, but specific mutations are read off the plate. Most of these SNPs are in non-coding regions, but some are. The mutations that are useful for ancestry are called ancestry-informative marker (AIM)s.
4) For whole genome and whole exome testing your DNA has usually been broken into reads that are about 150 nucleotides long and then those are "mapped" against the human reference genome. But newer technology such as oxford nanopore allows researchers to read off up to millions of basepairs without chopping it up.
5) Genetic tests do not take a long time because of computational bottle necks. For research doing all kinds of interesting things it can take time, but for ancestry done using the way most companies do it with a SNP panel, the computational time is a few minutes and most of that time is trying to find your best fit for relatives, which needs to look at your whole results and compare them against every other person's whole results (of course it isn't done like that, algorithmic shortcuts are taken, but that is what you are basically trying to do), whereas assigning ancestry categories can be done region by region and parallelized to be almost instant even on an old consumer grade GPU. The wetlab work of extracting and cleaning the DNA and running the lab assays takes a few days. But the time it takes is mainly in the logistics of shipping and batching samples.
@@HesderOleh protein-coding DNA is what manifests in our appearance, so ethnicity, yes, is absolutely determined by it. It determines skin colour, hair colour, physical features, etc. "junk DNA" is not my term, it is the term geneticists use, and while there are arguments over it's use and whether or not it is genuinely "junk", it is also objectively not what we use to determine ethnicity in these origin studies. We use protein-coding DNA. Unless you're suggesting ethnicity is determined by genes scientists don't even agree has a purpose? That would still make my point!
Yes, they are compared against the human genome. What race/ethnicity is the human genome? You seem to be making an assumption that because genetic ethnic studies are unreliable I'm calling the whole field unreliable. I'm not. I'm saying that you can no more determine a person's ethnicity through DNA anymore than you can determine if they're conservative or liberal, because it's a social definition, not a scientific one. Comparing your sample to the human genome only confirms that yes, you are indeed human.
Part of what does make genetic studies reliable is indeed determining species and evolutionary charts. It just doesn't work for social definitions. It has to assume an ultimate origin for all people, which doesn't exist beyond our original evolution in Africa.
As to computational bottlenecks, fair enough, I misspoke there. I didn't mean to imply that it was taking days to complete on the computer, most bottlenecks are from mailing results and delivery. I was referring to the whole process of running checks, too, which in computational terms does take quite a long time and requires a lot of processing power. This line was written specifically for users of at-home DNA tests not scientific ones in front of scientists in their own lab, sorry about that
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist The unstated assumption that ethnicity has anything to do with appearance is where I think you lose me. I don't think most people think that physical appearance is key to ethnicity. Sure, curly hair may be common in many groups, such as certain Africans and certain Jews, or blue eyes may be common in others. But what is different among different ethnic groups is the frequency of traits, there is still huge variation inside even relatively inbred populations (such as ashkenazi Jews). But also physical appearances that may look similar can have different genetic causes.
For ancestry you ideally want to look at mutations that are not undergoing selection, whether purifying selection or positive selection. One reason is that selection throws off mutational clock estimation, but also if you look at a gene that is undergoing purifying selection you will see it disappear in the tree randomly creating uncertainty to how is related if it isn't consistent going down nodes, if it is undergoing positive selection then you will get confused by convergent evolution, such as when different strains of covid gained certain mutations over time, likely not from recombination but because it was somehow beneficial to the virus.
I have written some of the programs that do checks both for ancestry samples but also for clinical use (which is so much more serious, any time I am coding in those areas I keep therac-25 in my head) , they do not take a lot of time.
People who are doing the mail in DNA tests are nearly all using SNP arrays, I have been involved in getting some of those same exact tests approved to be used clinically. They are looking at point mutations, like an A>G at a certain point in the genome, in fact if you have a T instead of an A or G that assay will fail, so for multi-allelic loci there will be multiple assays on the chip A>T as well as A>G, but if you have a C then both of those will fail. With these tests you expect only 99%-ish to work and if everything is right then those failures are random across the genome and the plate. If the failures are in a certain region of the genome, then it is likely a structural variation deletion on both chromosomes, a deletion on one chromosome will just be an LoH (Loss of heterozygosity). If it is on an area of the plate, that is when you have to troubleshoot the machines that you use to put the DNA on the chips and all parts of the process and you try to figure out if it just that chip or is it a batch and you probably end up in an argument with the supplier and their technicians and your technicians over whose fault it is. As you aren't looking at the genome there is no line by line and there very little thorough checking because if anything looks even a bit off on the quick automated checks it just gets thrown out, those checks on 96 samples are so quick that you are limited more by RAM speed and I/O speed than processing speed. These random failures are fine when doing ancestry, however for clinical use, that is really annoying because there are mutations you need for whatever tests you are running. You might think that 99% success of mutations mean that most samples would be fine, but if you do the math if you needed 100 SNPs then samples would fail about 2/3rd of the time (1-.99^100) or worse if you need 300 SNPs then 95% of samples would fail. What this ironically means is that you have to be less stringent with medical clinical SNPs than with ancestry quality control. That sounds crazy at first , but instead of relying on automatic QC you get to know the behavior of each assay and its failure modes. So if each ancestry SNP got the same level of attention you could probably fail much fewer SNPs, but no one is ever going to invest that effort into perfecting a QC tailored for each SNP for ancestry.
It is funny that you mention that you can't tell if someone is conservative or liberal from a DNA, because that is an active area of research. However our current tools such as GWAS and PGRS are poorly suited to this problem. We probably will be in the next few years though.
@@HesderOleh aaah, but you've nailed my point down! It's NOT about appearance or anything that is coded in your genes! But protein-coding DNA also determines things beyond your physical appearance, such as your biological functions and instinct behaviours. I quite agree that "junk DNA" is likely a misnomer, but again this is a genetics term. We also aren't sure what they do, so any bearing they have on ethnicity is purely speculative. But if ethnicity isn't determined by how the gene expresses itself, that leaves us with it being determined by language, culture, behaviour - all of which I break down in my video. These are social rather than scientific.
And I'm sorry, but no, genetics will never be able to tell a conservative from a liberal. Being a hardcore liberal I could be snarky and say smart people have a tendency to skew liberal, and therefore anyone genetically gifted with intelligence is likely to be a liberal, but short of making assumptions like these figuring it out though genetics is problematic. Not all smart people are liberal, and not all upbringings will nurture those views. There will always be an element of nurture in the nature vs. nurture debate, and so long as humans have even a small choice, uncertainty will enter the results.
Archaeologists tried to scientifically define human culture and society before in the 1950s and 1960s, it was called processualism. We attempted to make the sorts of objectives determinations you're speaking of, and many highly intelligent, empathetic scholars spent their whole careers on the idea. But it was a dead end, because exceptions always came up, skewing the theory. Maybe you subscribe to a deterministic model of the universe, with all of our actions being predetermined by our genes. I was genetically destined to be a liberal, to move to Britain and Germany, and so on. If you do subscribe to this fair enough, but we come at this science then from two opposing viewpoints. But I don't subscribe to that model, I do believe there is human agency which will make objective classification of us beyond the species level impossible
Urban populations often had lower survival rates due to crowding and disease, combine that with the fact that only 5-10% of people lived in cities 750 years ago, and it becomes quite uncertain that everyone has an ancestor who lived in city 750 years ago.
@@harutyunamirjanyan8005 yes, they did have lower survival rates, and I get your urbanisation argument. In fact I even wrote an argument to counter it, but I cut it out for time! Congratulations, you've proven why I should take a bit longer and give my audience more credit for noticing it's absence!
But as to my (edited out) response: let's say cities were 10% diverse. That makes the past population 1% outsider. As a snapshot in time this doesn't seem like much, but consider a consistent influx of 1% over centuries, as well as in-migration as students came to study, and out-migration as they went back to farms or fled from war, and other such factors that force movement. This is assuming cities were always 10% diverse. I've done that for the ease of maths, but obviously some (like Rome, London, and Cusco) were very diverse while others (like Tokyo or Moscow) were less so. But consider everything that has happened since 1350. How much would cities have affected rural areas, and how much movement has occurred since the first outbreak of the Black Death?
Basically, 1% of people is still a lot when we consider the vastness of how much time has passed and how many generations go by. If you go back 750 years, this is a very long time. Soldiers from the countryside (how can I say this in a way TH-cam won't censor?) spread their material across countrysides as they pillaged for food and supplies. Rural soldiers were also part of these wars, many of whom lived in border areas under conflict, too. Basically, there are a lot of things happening in life, and isolation is very hard to maintain.
I hope this addresses your concerns!
Did you actually put Project 2025 with Mein Kampf?
@@Asdf-wf6en yep! And if you've read project 2025 you'll know why I call it fascist literature
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist Show me quotes.
@@Beliserius1 we're not playing this game (and it is indeed a game to it's defenders). You have Google, use it. If you can prove to me it's not, I'll issue a retraction
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist LOL
You are incorrect about results being based on current living humans who have taken the test. The maps of ancient migrations are based on DNA results, so you can't argue that migration isn't taken into account by genetic testing and make it impossible to figure out where ancestors were at which time, because those studies are based on maps.
Researchers also use DNA from people who died over the last centuries and millennia to help create trees of relations.
@@HesderOleh and how do they figure out the origins of past people? The problem is there is still no reliable baseline for ethnicity. You've missed the point I'm making entirely. Yes, researchers use DNA from people who died in the past, but it is still based on these flawed assumptions, such as the fact that it's assumed we know where these people migrated from. It's also assumed this population disappeared. Take Jewish for example - the modern Jewish genome is nothing close to the "original" Jewish identifier, yet the influx of DNA that created the modern identifier is itself discarded in many studies. Maps don't tell us DNA, they are created from those DNA results. See the problem?
Familial relations are simpler to determine, but ancestry isn't reliable going further back, because eventually you get a human we're all related to
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist It isn't a flawed assumption that we know where people migrated from. The same way that phylogenetic trees can be created for animal species or viruses, the same can be done for people. Yes, there will always be uncertainties, but those can be quantified. We can know when two populations diverged and when there was a common ancestor.
The idea that it is assumed that this population disappeared is as nonsensical as someone asking how we can be descended from chimpanzees if chimps still exist. Firstly, chimps share a common ancestor with us, and secondly that common ancestor didn't disappear, it became both us and chimps and other related primates.
My issue was that you were using maps to show that migration happened, you weren't saying those maps were wrong, you were using those maps in the video as a reliable source of information. Do you see what I mean, you weren't saying these maps were wrong, you were saying those maps show ancestry wasn't taking those migrations into account.
Ancestry very far back is possible, we can trace our evolution back hundreds of millions of years, and we can figure our who my grandparents are. Why do you think there should be some "missing link" at some scale?
Before I actually learned the details of the algorithms and the science behind this I was also skeptical about some claims of phylochronology and biogeography, but aside from some stuff that goes too far and some bad science communication the science is sound.
If you want to argue semantics about what "ethnicity" means and feel superior because you think you are being more "nuanced", go ahead and knock yourself out. I am not here to argue the sociology or that one person's definition of a word is more "correct" or "better", because I think what matters for words is that both people understand how each other are using a word.
I am just talking about the scientific aspect. And I don't begrudge you getting it wrong, I was also wrong about it until I studied the topics in great depth. I also left the lab of someone where the head of the lab was making too many assumptions in their models about evolution and speciation of algae and I just couldn't take it other parts of their research projects were great, but it just drove me crazy.
@@HesderOleh but again, what you're taking is a scientific definition of genetics, which is correct. But ethnicity is not science. I think you're misunderstanding my point. I'm not arguing chimps v. Humans and a common ancestor, or Homo erectus vs. Homo habilis, I'm arguing Albanian vs. Bosnian, etc., these aren't separate species or evolution. You can identify a chimp and a human through genetics, you can't actually separate Polish from Slovak, despite all the posturing by ethnographic studies. Genetics used the way you're speaking of, phylogenetic trees and biogeography, is solid. It's good. I'm not diminishing your work and I'm sorry if you think so. But ethnicity is not being part of a species, it's not about semantics or "feeling superior", ethnicity is, by literally every definition, not a species. You present arguments of "evolution", but to apply such a thing to ethnicity is impossible because it is an inherently societal definition, hence the point of my video. Genetic tests are not useless, they just need to be taken with a grain of salt given the complexity of human history and the fluid definitions of what makes an ethnic group. They shouldn't be taken anywhere near as solidly as we take their results on things like biogeography and evolution
Suggestion: spend a little more time with text screens, so people can read them. Some of them go by so fast there's not even enough time to hit the pause button.
I just found your channel, and I am glad I did it
I see a funny hat on an archaeologist and I can't take him seriously. Where's your whip Dr. Jones? ;-)
@@ArnoWalter around my hip, hidden off screen!
Ethnicy isn't race or the more aplicable ecotype.
Ethinicity is cultural, genetic markers are obviously present because most culture is passed by the community and people breed within community lines... well, bred...
If I remember well, NA has around 20-30 major ethnic groups. US has 14/20 out of those. Quite a few shared with mexico and canada.
The issue with ethnicities is that DNA tests has no authority over already defined rules who can claim ethnicity. And there are no universal rules for what can belong to ethnic group - those are different to each ethnic group. What these tests can show is ancestry and relatedness to other people, but in most of the laws that are defining ethnicity, genetic relationship is not enough to be acknowledged as part of ethnic group - it has to be sme sort of direct lineage and in modern days it can be from both parents, but in more traditional settings only paternal lineage would have been recognized, because females were not kept in the family and were married away or in and for that reason there was no such rules imposed on ethnicity of females as children of nonethnic wife would have the same ethnicity as father. Only adoption could be a viable way for those that can't fit the criteria, but there are ethnicities that would not recognize adopted as belonmging to them as well.
Ethnicities did not appear as exclusive circle for people like you, but generally in modern times they appeared as excluded from rest of people, but it might be that op is looking on this topic from different POV. For example birth of Metis nation and ethnicity was because mixed offsprings of British and French fathers with local native women simply were not recognized as European enough couple of centuries ago and now they are new nation while in modern settings they would be recognized as part of British or French.
The problem with Putin is not if he has decided that Ukrainians does not exist, but because he can say that and in the case of his victory he can implement that in life. And even USA can argue from that position that Putin is doing genocide, because what Turks are doing to Kurds or Chinese doing to Uygurs would have to be recognized as such as well.
Also, the issue of current conflict is not so much about Ukrainian struggles for independence as more of a struggle of defining Russian national identity, as they don't seem to have it as what they have is Soviet identity - they recognize as Russians anyone who speak Russian and share their values of WW2 cult, and then you can see Buryats saying that they are Russian or even African(that has recently arrived to Russia and have no other ties to Russia and Russians) proclaming that he is Russian for the joy of those, that support Putins saying that Russia has no borders. This is really a display of a total confusion among Russians and unlike this video it has real consequences.
The claim, that ethnicities are erased only by force is not true - most of the ethnicities are being erased by denying them any independence and room for development - and usually making them appear as racists when they want to preserve their culture and differences. Generally all ethnicities that are under other cultural influence are doomed to die out.
@@ewfse364u35jh I never claimed ethnicities are erased by force, as under threat can also mean dwindling numbers and being "culturally overwhelmed", but I chose to highlight conflict in particular because 1) it's the most visible and relevant in today's politics and 2) there's so much xenophobia and disingenuous anti-immigrant rhetoric that is rooted in extraordinary bad faith and ill will that speaking of being "culturally overwhelmed", i.e. suppressed by a much larger majority, will lead to a lot of these cruel and nasty elements feeling legitimised, no matter how much context I give to it.
You are correct in a lot, this is a good summary. People seem to forget just how small the world was, too. Villages of 20-100 people were the norm. One mixed baby in a village of twenty people, all interbreeding, will still be 2.5% mixed assuming absolutely nothing else happens. It's still 0.5% "impure" on the higher end, again assuming absolutely perfect isolation over several hundred years otherwise. My point was exactly that ethnicities are valid definitions and evolving, but human nature cannot make them genetically traceable. Genetics are a great tool for medicine, forensics, and family relations (among other things), but we need to look further for anthropology
Super well said. I’ve trying to say the same thing for many years
My right ear enjoyed this video 👍
Earthlings can be silly
I must admit that I was somewhat disappointed. I do get your points but I still think that you have gotten it completely wrong. Let me try to explain.
According to ethnology people tend to fall into groups: those that you feel connected to and those that you do not. They are also called an "in-group" and an "out-group". The basis for this subdivision into groups is often a combination of different factors: language, culture and appearance (aka "race"). When scientists deal with these topics they try to find some common features in order to give this a scientific definition (or at least description). We can discuss how well they have succeeded, and to some extent it narrows down to a question of when it is a snowman and when it is melted water in a pond. The answer is: they are one and the same but under different conditions (or in different environments). And that is part of the definition frame. Ernst Mach was the first to raise this problem.
Now, ignoring states as a political construct we can see, that people have been living in the same areas not only for centuries but even for thousands of years. Yes, they may have developed their language and culture. but there is a certain continuity. Just like an individual has continuity across age: as a child, as young, as parent, as old. You are not the same today as you were yesterday and will be tomorrow, but there is a continuity in identity. And even if you are correct that smaller and bigger groups of people have moved around, only a relative few of such events has had a decisive influence on their location. And because you can go back to a "core" area or population and identify common genetic features, you can also classify a persons ethnic combination. Therefor genetic analysis are valid.
Thus I do not think that your critique holds water in the end. You can say that in some cases different ethnic groups merge into a new national identity, which take up elements from all (both) of the original groups. Take Americans: they identify as citizens but often also as part of ethnic subgroups (Black, Irish, Jew or what ever) and they are part of both. And it can be shown in the genetic analysis that this is the case.
@@svennielsen633 Hi! Thanks for watching! I take your points, and I'm well aware of in-groups, out-groups, and subcultures. And yes, identities are formed by environments. But where the mistake comes in is assuming that just because people lived there for thousands of years means that they both lived in isolation, and that they are the same as the people who first settled the area, neither of which are safe assumptions.
Your points about how people define their ethnicity are points I agree with, but these things you're outlining are shaped by social definitions and societal factors, not scientific ones. Which is my point. Anyone can speak a language based on their societal upbringing, but their genes don't play a factor in which language it will be, and so on. These groups of continuity are created by social definitions, not genetic ones.
And again, I'm not trying to erase ethnicity as valid. I've emphasised that up and down the video. I'm saying it's just a scientific definition is impossible, so you must use the social. You proved this point yourself by saying it's based on who people "feel connected" to each other, which is true enough.
And to return to the analogy of the old man versus the young man, this raises an interesting question: is he actually the same? By the time you're 90, with the exception of perhaps brain cells, literally every single cell in the body has been replaced more than once, and it has altered the genetics within the human body. Cells don't replicate as easily, and this leads to degeneration. He's suffered illnesses which also contribute. Furthermore, the old man holds different views, opinions, and experiences than he did as a young man. And likewise, many of the traditions and cultures ethnic groups hold dear are altered heavily by new environments and people. Identity is furthermore a construction we have made of ourselves. Who we are is who we define. And despite all the suc-cultures, Americans still intermingle. Today it's more mixed, but in the past the woman was simply considered "gone", off to join her husband's in-group, which would add genetic diversity but seem to keep a pure ethnicity. Jewish is a rare exception where it's passed through the female line, but does this invalidate genes if you have a Jewish father but a Christian mother?
Genetics is a relatively young science, and it's still experimenting with the DNA of the living. As a result, because it was a paradigm-shifting science for everything it can do, we tend to not think about what it can't do, which is what I want to highlight.
Finally while you're correct large-scale events are rare, I liken this to more of a drip scenario. A garden hose dripping for a year will erode the land more than a firehose spraying for five minutes... But which one gets noticed more? Tiny but continual drops into communities which are isolated have an infinitely larger, but less noticeable, impact than widespread movement. Also, war was quite common, soldiers pillaging the countryside was an annual event in some areas and periods, but thankfully a rarity in others, so nothing I say is ever a hard and fast rule.
I do see where you're coming from, and I appreciate the concerns, which I hope I've addressed.
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist - you say that "just because people lived there for thousands of years means that they both lived in isolation, and that they are the same as the people who first settled the area, neither of which are safe assumptions", and I agree on that, but perhaps I did not make my point clear enough.
Let us take an example: Denmark and Danes. We know that the first people to settle in the country after the last ice age were reindeer hunters, who later followed the animal, when it moved to Sweden and Norway because of climate change. Clearly they did not contribute to Danes genetics. In stead a new group of forest hunters came in along with the forests and new animals like bear, deer and wild boar. Later, there was an invasion of farmers, and they have added to the genetics of Danes today. Finally there were the Indo-European men (but not women) from the Yamnaya Culture in Ukraine. Traces from all of these groups can be found in Danish dna and are considered to be part of the genetic definition of Danes.
Now, the term "Dane" first appear around 500 AD, referring to the people living in what is Denmark today + neighboring areas. The term was used both by the people themselves and by others (Goths, France). We have so-called rune inscriptions that show that they spoke a language, which later has developed into Danish today. In this way we can show the connection between place, people and language (and culture).
From historic times we have proof of smaller secondary migrations from Germanic areas, Nordic areas, but also of, say, Jews and others in modern time, but all of these migrations only constitute 1-2% of the population and do not alter the major part of Danish ethnicity or genealogy. Thus, if you take a test, it will still show the traditional result, perhaps with a minor later contribution. And people will still consider themselves as Danes, perhaps with an additional subgroup identification.
Thus I think that the scientific approach is VERY valid. Without this being my area of expertise I think that genetics even as a young science quickly has learned to take into account the possible errors that historic events may cause, and that the results can be trusted. That does not exclude the possibility of further improvements in the future.
I hope that this example illustrates my point of continuity better.
@@svennielsen633 It does get your point across better. It is well taken. However, why didn't reindeer hunters contribute to modern Danes? Are we sure these Indo-European groups were migrants, invaders, or settlers, or even Indo-European? That is a language family after all, and without writing that doesn't preserve. As you correctly point out, the first writings in Denmark appears about the same time as the name. What we take to make up the Danish culture is based on how modern archaeologists have interpreted materials. But we don't know what these populations were. It's akin to saying we're all a "coca-cola ethnicity" because cola cans are found in our village. Archaeologists define culture by material they leave behind, not by genetics. Genetics going based off of archaeology then is working from an already social definition rather than a scientific one.
I'd also ask, where is the cut-off? At what point did Yamnaya become Danish, and what makes a northern Dane different from a southern Swede? (According to people from Stockholm, nothing, but let's put national rivalries aside!)
How many generations pass before it no longer counts? Is someone who has lived in the same village with the same community in Lincolnshire still Danish 1200 years after his family came to the island under the Norse, if we assume there was no interbreeding? Or what separated Jutes in the Anglo-Saxons from Jutes of Jutland? The answer, really, is time, because our society has fossilised definitions of "from here" and "from there".
I think geneticists do try to account for errors. And these studies aren't useless, people do congregate into groups. When you're discussing opposite ends of the earth, like Japanese vs. Portuguese, it can be reliable. But how do you count migration within nearby groups? Are all the Arabs in Lebanon still descended from Phoenicians, Assyrians, or Nabataeans, and when did that change? These have societal answers, but no great scientific ones. At best we can hope to get fuzzy borders between communities, and are these fuzzy borders mixed, or separate altogether, and why? When you consider just how much movement geneticists would have to take into account every generation, you wonder - what's the point in trying if it changes every century?
I don't think you should discount all genetic studies, but I also think it's a mistake to use them to the extent we've been seeing lately. I think attempts to use genetics to explain human ancestry will be seen as a dead end. Just as applying biological evolutionary principles to societal progression proved to be a dead end despite a great many archaeologists subscribing to it fifty years ago, I think applying genetics to ethnicity will have similar outcomes
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist - first of all: I am happy that you find time to take this discussion. You have a lot of questions, so let me try to answer them one by one.
You ask: "why didn't reindeer hunters contribute to modern Danes?" The best explanation is from a Danish archaeologist: when climate changed and the tundra moved north and forest came in from the south, reindeer followed the tundra. The hunters then had two choices: to change their way of life towards a new prey with a lot of difficulties because of change in weapons, hunting technique, how bone and antler could be used - or to follow the reindeer and keep their way of life. As he said: "to a hunter his home is where his prey is". I think that it sums it up pretty well.
Next point: "Archaeologists define culture by material they leave behind". Yes, and in this case it is possible to follow the movement over time for the very same reason. The material culture shows a geographical movement from Ukraine to the north and then to the west. In the case of Denmark it is even possible to show, that their special burials form a "belt" up through the heath areas in Western Jutland, whereas earlier farmers at the same time were living in the Eastern part of the country (the islands). First they were separated, later they intermarried. I believe that the genetic proof is based on skeleton finds in graves. That is also how they prove that only men moved, not women (they just married into the local population). To me the proof seems convincing.
You ask: "where is the cut-off? At what point did Yamnaya become Danish, and what makes a northern Dane different from a southern Swede?" The simplest answer on the first question is: when they decided so. According to ancient myths it was a strong leader, Dan, who became the first king by the choice of the population. It is still debated how reliable the myths are to the historic truth, but it is clear that something did trigger this self identity development. Before they were identified as "Sviones" (according to Roman sources). The second question is tricky since Southern Sweden was part of Denmark until 1660, so the population was Danish. But we know that after the Swedish occupation a lot of the Danes moved from those areas to what was left of Denmark, and Swedish people moved in, so it was a form of "ethnic cleansing" (before the term came into use).
You ask: "How many generations pass before it no longer counts?" That is a difficult question, but it certainly took two-four generations before people changed their self identity. Some may keep their self identity for hundreds of years. This is true of Native Americans in the US. So there clearly is not a simple answer to the question. But if they keep their old identity they will most likely also not seek marriage partners outside the group and therefor keep their genetic identity. Thus the two goes together. You can also see it in many African countries, where the old tribal system survived through the colonial time and now divides the newly independent former colonies.
You ask: "Are all the Arabs in Lebanon still descended from Phoenicians, Assyrians, or Nabataeans, and when did that change?" Frankly, I would be careful even to attempt to answer this question, since I might get banned if I do, and since there is so much present-day politics involved. A tentative answer is, that there are still different ethnic groups in the country, so it seems that they survived all of the formal political changes during the last 2.000 years.
You say: "I think attempts to use genetics to explain human ancestry will be seen as a dead end." As you will understand, I do not agree with you. If you consider how much Archaeology has developed during the last 50-100 years and how much better we understand prehistoric cultures today than back then, I think that genetics will be able to improve in the same way. But we should compare results from different disciplines: next to Archaeology and genetics we have genealogy, which can bring a control of what has happened during the last 2-500 years (sometimes longer). It will be one way of checking the validity of genetic science results. Only time will show how far we can get using these methods, but there will be improvements.
@@svennielsen633 I am quite happy you can engage in the debate! And don't worry too much about getting blocked, it's mostly me manually deleting overt violations of my policy on civility with a couple of buzzwords TH-cam automatically sets, but I dragged the middle east into this, I can hardly fault you for responding to it! You can continue to disagree with me and you're nowhere near blocked territory!
I appreciate the response to my questions! The only way agriculture developed was former hunters forcing themselves into a new lifestyle so there's no real proof some of them didn't stay behind. I'd also point out many of the answers you gave were based in the societal. What separated Danes from Swedes is, as I said in my conclusion, how we chose to define it. You said it yourself, they decided. But you can't decide to simply say "okay genes, you're Swedish now", so it would still show up scientifically as Danish. Often ethnic cleansing of the past was followed not by a true purge (not to minimise the suffering or intentions of madmen) but by targeted groups attempting to blend in or hide, like the Spanish Muslims and Jews during the inquisition. Basically, our identities change to our world, but our genetics can't. Vandals who moved to North Africa seem to disappear, forgotten, but through them, genes we consider Germanic would have entered the Berber and Arab populations, and so on.
Yes, we can trace material culture, but at the end of the day it's all still material. There's a rather large rift in archaeology over how much a change in material culture represents an actual migration of people over a migration of goods and ideas that altered a pre-existing people. It's a question genetics does indeed try to help with, because archaeologists are also desperate for a solution to these debates. But older genetic material of course degrades, and gaps aren't easily filled in.
I absolutely agree that there will be improvements, every science has them! And I do agree that genealogy is how we will ultimately solve this. Because it is easy to trace parentage, and in fact we have done that, finding the man and woman we're all related to globally, a mitochondrial Adam and Eve. There are better videos on it done by other channels on how that was solved.
But the fact we seem to be able to trace our heritage through our parents to a single common ancestor scientists agree on, but that there are raging debates about ethnic origins and movement, and even contradictory results, is telling. It says that we can agree on what family looks like from an objective perspective, but ethnic boundaries are defined by the needs and mindsets of the people at the time
Thank you mr. Black Asian Latin man for your white man wisdome.
@@leszekwolkowski9856 I know you're being sarcastic but I am actually part Indian and Iranian. I just got all the recessive genes from the Slavic half. Don't judge a book by it's colour! 😉
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist I am being sardonic. What recessive Indo-Iranian genes are you talking about exactly, if, according to you, Indo-Iranian and Slavic ethnicity are a social construct? Or am I missing something.
@@leszekwolkowski9856 nope, you're not missing it. Darker skin and hair tend to be dominant traits, but I got the recessive traits of lighter skin and hair. Genetics still determine what you inherit from parents. It's still valid to consider your ethnicity, just as a social rather than a scientific construct.
In a way, it does prove my point! How many people who look like and sound me would you expect to have an Indo-Iranian ethnicity?
Of course I don't like bringing it up too often, because I do consider it irrelevant. But you can't feed me a line like that and expect me not to have a bit of fun with it myself! Thanks for watching and commenting!
@@TravelswithanArchaeologist Interesting. I am curious, what percentage of your heritage is indo-iranian? Do you have a Indo-iranian grandfather? A great grandmother perhaps?
@@leszekwolkowski9856 my mother
glory to GOD!