I don’t understand what we’re fighting about, here. Let’s do a quick recap:
OP: Are we all 50th cousins or less?
Someone: Well the MRCA was more than 50 generations ago, so no.
Me: MRCA is irrelevant. We can prove a population to all be small-number cousins without needing to know where there is an MRCA, if any at all.
You: Unclear nitpick. Y-Adam this and that.
Me: I don’t understand. Are you saying they knew each other? Not necessarily.
So help a brother out here. Explain exactly what you’re nitpicking. If the male MRCA had a daughter that he never met, then my assertion stands. How am I wrong?
I’m using Y-Adam to mean the most recent male common ancestor, as Chronos was above. Let’s say Jimmy sired a son, who had a son, who had a son, who had Bob, who fathered all of (today’s) humanity. Who are you calling Y-Adam, Jimmy or Bob? I’m saying it’s Bob.
Second, I know he didn’t necessarily have a daughter, but he could have, which he never had to meet. And if she had kids with another family’s male, and their descendants are alive today, then her dad can’t be Y-Adam/maleMRCA…that other guy’s Y would spoil his claim. Now if those other kids died out and only the incestual kids survived to today, then that’s a different story.
That’s not how Chronos was using the term; nor is it the standard way.
Y-chromosome Adam (or simply Y-Adam) is the (most recent) man who donated his Y-chromosome to all now-living men. Note that being an ancestor, and being the Y-chromosome ancestor (aka patrilineal ancestor, aka agnatic ancestor) are quite different. Charlemagne, for example, has at least a billion living descendants, yet, as far as is known, not a single agnatic descendant.
The Y-chromosome is passed father-to-son with little change. You have (ignoring duplications) 2 million 20-great grandfathers, but only one of them is your unique agnatic (Y-chromosome) 20-great grandfather.
(With DNA testing falling in price, a tree structure connecting all the men of the world is becoming visible, providing fascinating insights into prehistory.)
Not necessarily. His mother was certainly a common ancestor to everyone, but his daughter need not be. The most recent common ancestor certainly had more than one child, and may well have had more than two. He could, for instance, have had three sons whose lines all spread prolifically, and one daughter whose line spread much more slowly, or possibly even died out after some number of generations.
I could imagine this could be true for people of “Old World” ancestry. However, I assume that there are still plenty of full blooded Native Americans or Australian Aborgines. In the United States Native Anericans were not really allowed to interact with the rest of the population until 1924 when they gained citizenship. Therefore a 92+ year old American Indian really can’t have Old World ancestry unless one of their parents illegally left the reservation, and even a Native American born in 2016 would likely have only 16 ancestors who were born after 1924. Of course Native Americans had absolutely no interaction with Old World people until 1492, and until around 1600 the colonies were largely unpopulated. I’m not sure that 520 years since Columbus is a long enough time to give all Natives some old world blood, especially since they weren’t citizens less than a century ago and most people marry in their race.
You drastically overestimate the isolation and lack of mixing of indigenous populations after 1492. The vast majority of Native Americans interacted a great deal with others long before 1924. There were Spanish settlements in Florida and the Southwest in the 1500s, and French and British fur trappers penetrated into remote areas of the continent - and took native wives - from very early times. Even on reservations, people came and went, and mixed race people would have lived there. Even people regarded as “full-blooded” Native Americans almost certainly have some European ancestors.
You do realise this thread is over 4 years old, right?
Some time in that 4 years you could have read the other posts. it’s not like the thread is *that *long. To summarise: no, there are no full blooded Native Americans or Australian Aborigines.
Have you ever heard of Pocahontas? You know, that Indian that all those New England blue bloods claim descent from? Have you ever seen “Dances with Wolves”? “The Revenant”? Where in the world did you get this idea that Native Americans were not allowed to interact with the rest of the population until 1924? Native Americans have been fucking Europeans literally since the day of first contact in 1492 and it has been happening every single day since.
If you really believe this, then can you explain why those reservations were all formed with rules defining how much non-Indian ancestry a person was allowed to have and still live there? Why were such rules necessary if no Indians had *any *non-Indian ancestry?
Umm, no. Polynesians Vikings and Siberians were all making contact with the New World well before 1492.
:eek:
No, that’s not true. Most people of the upper social race tend to marry their race. Most people of the lower races tend to prefer to marry upwards, out of their race.
People can make babies without being married, so marriage is irrelevant. Blacks marrying whites was illegal in the South for many years, and yet astonishingly tens of thousands of babies described as being biracial were born each year. Makes you think that tens of thousands of White men were fucking Black women who they weren’t married to, doesn’t it?
I would be very surprised if there were any Native Americans in the United States with no European ancestry. It’s very very unlikely after 500 years.
Recall that everyone has four grandparents, eight grandparents, etc. Going back over 500 years, everyone has over one million ancestors - including Native Americans. The odds that at least one of those ancestors was European are very large.
What about some isolated populations though? Remember, we aren’t talking about the typical, it is about the extremes no matter how rare they are. There are still some very remote tribes in the Amazon, New Guinea, North Sentinel Island and a few other remote places that still haven’t been contacted much let alone interbred with outsiders to any known degree.
Are there any pure Australian Aborigines still left? I presume there are but I really don’t know. If so, they could have been genealogically for tens of thousands of years at least. Compare an extreme example from that population with someone from another isolated tribe especially in South America that has also been isolated for thousands of years and you may be able to beat the 50th cousin claim.
Wikipedia has a list of uncontacted tribes and populations. The most isolated people on Earth are supposedly on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean under the jurisdiction of India but the Indian government made a three mile exclusion zone around the island because it is too dangerous for anyone to go there.
Only a few people have ever encountered the population that lives there in person and lived to tell about about because they are extremely murderous to anyone that is unfortunate enough to land on their island. What little is known is that they have their own language like no other known language and they may have been isolated as a small population for up to 60,000 years. They use mainly stone-age technology combined with improvising with whatever other materials wash up on their beaches. They are not even known to have firemaking technology.
If the Sentinelese really have been isolated even for a fraction of the claimed time, you could probably find an isolated population in the Amazon that has a relationship greater than 50th cousins.
For tribes in Amazonia and New Guinea, what do you mean by “outsiders”? Even what are referred to as “uncontacted” tribes in Amazonia are almost always in contact with related groups which are in contact with Western culture. If these small tribes had been interbreeding solely within their own group for the last 20 generations they would be incredibly inbred by now. They are probably intermarriages with neighboring groups every generation, and the neighboring groups are intermarrying with groups in contact with - and interbreeding with - people with some European or African ancestry.
Remember we are talking about long stretches of time here. As I mentioned, after 20 generations everyone has a million ancestors. (Of course, in isolated groups, most of these will be the same.) The odds are that sometime in the past 500 years somebody - or many somebodies - entered the tribal lineage that had outside ancestry.
The one group I might be able to believe was possibly truly isolated is the North Sentinelese. But even these might not have been totally isolated from other people in the Andamans for the past five centuries. And the other Andamese have been in contact with outsiders.
I understand and you make good points. However, the claim is that EVERY single human is at least a 50th cousin to each other. All it takes is a single case to disprove that so the burden of evidence is on the people making that claim. I completely understand it as a typical statement but not as an absolute claim. You can get some strange anomalies when you compare extremely disparate populations. If the North Sentinelese really are as isolated as most anthropologists think they are, they are greater than 50th cousins to almost everyone else in the world. If they had influence from other related groups, they aren’t demonstrating it because their language is not mutually intelligible to the closet islanders or any other in the world for that matter.
It is hard to believe that is possible in the 21st century but they aren’t faking it as far as anyone knows. They use stone-age weapons, they don’t use fire and they don’t have clothing. It is difficult for anyone to even photograph them from the most sophisticated surveillance aircraft because they stay hidden under the dense foliage most of the time but they will attack with spears and bows and arrows if anyone lands on their beaches or tries to fly over at low altitude.
Again, I believe the math works for the claim in general but maybe not in the absolute sense. There are still some really odd anomalies out there that probably defy it.
It’s of course impossible to test this definitively. However, it’s a matter of probabilities. In my opinion, there is a very high probability that everyone, including the North Sentinelese, are related within the past 50 generations.
Well, no. There is no particular burden of evidence here. Historians claim that the Tudor monarchs were descended from William the Conqueror. EVERY single Tudor monarch. All it takes is a single case to disprove that. Nonetheless the burden of proof isn’t on historians making the claim.
In the real world, we accept things based on a preponderance of evidence, not on absolute certainty. Maybe Queen Elizabeth was the bastard child of a wandering Chinese minstrel. But we don’t accept that, we accept what the preponderance of evidence indicates is true.
Did you read my earlier posts? They weren’t very isolated at all 300 years ago, they were living amongst their neighbours.
French is not mutually intelligible with Italian or any other in the world. Nonethless they were the exact same language just 2000 years ago. Mutual intelligibility tells us that languages are closely related. A lack of mutual intelligibility tells us exactly nothing.
All humans use fire. You are actually claiming that they are not human?
Of course they use fire, just like all other humans. Not only do they use fire, they have some rather sophisticated methods of controlling fire, including lamps and torches.
Can we have a cite for this claim? Not a lot is known about Sentinelese fashion, but they appearto wearclothes to me. After your fire comment, I’m not prpeared to take your word on other claims.
Foreigners having been there isn’t the claim. They kill many of the people that show up in short order. What is claimed is that they are so isolated that they have maintained a Stone Age culture to this day and fight so fiercely against outside interference that the Japanese government decided to protect them for their own sake but also for the sake others. I can’t say what their ancestry is but they definitely live an extremely unusual and isolated lifestyle to this day. It is a very unusual case of isolates.
You can read all about them but little is known because they are unapproachable and they can’t speak in any common language. If you know more about their heritage than I do or anyone else in anthropology please share it because there are lots of people that would love to know.
Here is a video of a group trying to approach them by boat:
The question isn’t whether they do this now, but whether they have done this for all of the past 500 years (or for that matter 2000 years). If you have evidence that they have done this for several millenia please provide a cite.
How is maintaining a stone age culture in any way evidence of being “so isolated”? Northern Australian Aborigines maintained a stone age culture up to the WWII, and were engaged in annual international trading events.
The Japanese government is protecting Indian citizens? :dubious:
Well we know enough to know that you are wrong when you claim they don’t use fire. And we know enough to be highly skeptical of your claims that they don’t wear clothes. And we know enough to know that you are wrong when you claim that:
**
[Finally, on 4 January 1991, Mr Pandit and his colleagues were met on the beach by a party of 28 men, women and children, for once unarmed. ‘They may not have chiefs, but a decision had obviously been taken by the Sentinelese to be friendly towards us,’ Mr Pandit said. ‘We still don’t know how or why.’
An administrative decision was made to stop these visits C2000, but any claim that they are unapproachable is utterly false. They are extremely cautious and prone to hostility, but approachable given time.
Given your claims that these people do not use fire, do not wear clothes and are totally unapproachable, I suspect that it wouldn’t be too hard to know more than you do. 3 minutes on Google seems to be sufficient.
Oh boy, we are reversing position here from our previous debate. The specific claim is that every person on Earth is at least a 50th cousin of everyone else. I say prove it because there are good reasons to think that isn’t true in the case of isolated populations. If even two people on Earth are isolated by several thousand years of genealogy, they are not within the 50th cousin range.
Their heir nearest neighbors are on an island chain in the Indian Ocean. It is huge and means nothing because you gave no evidence that they ever even met or interbred. There are related populations in the very general area but they claim don’t know any more about them than we do.
Interesting. Explain how the languages of North Sentinel Island and its nearest neighbors are related to each other. No one including their closest neighbors has any idea what even the most basic rules of their language even consists of. It seems to be completely unrelated to all others.
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I didn’t say ‘use fire’. I am sure that they have at some point when lightning struck. What I did say was that they didn’t know how to make fire. That is backed up by cites and observations. That is one of the reasons they are so hard to locate. They simply disappear into the foliage when they sense danger and there are no tell-tale signs of smoke to give away their positions.
This isn’t supposed to be an argument between you and me. I find the topic fascinating and I have looked up everything I can on it. You can do the same. There are plenty of web sites and even some limited Youtube video documentaries from reputable sources that describe what is known about the Sentinalese. It isn’t much but what is known is quite intriguing.
