That is an interesting cite Blake and I appreciate you sharing it but it didn’t refute much of what I said. All it said was that it took over 20 years for a dedicated group to approach them through persistence. nothing about language and nothing about fire.
I made a mistake earlier when I referenced their island as being under Japanese jurisdiction when it is actually Indian (that I correctly referenced earlier). That was simple carelessness on my part.
This isn’t a debate and especially not a personal one. I just think it is fascinating that there are isolated tribes of people still left in the world that want to remain that way.
What are these isolated populations and what are the good reasons. We’ve laready given you our good reasons for believing that it is true.
And if even one frog has wings it won’t bump its arse on the ground when it hops.
Name these people who could have potentially have been isolated by several thousand years of genealogy?
Yes, and the nearest neighbours of Kyushu are on an island chain in the Pacific Ocean. That doesn’t indicate that Okinawans never lived on Hokkaido.
What’s point do you think you are making?
Well let’s correct that shall we:
*There is also the story of a Sentineli who grew up among Onge, best told in the unavoidable Portman’s own words. The story illustrates the degree of uncertainty surrounding things Andamanese even when one of the best-informed authority in the field is involved:
The North Sentinel Island was visited on the 15th of February 1895, and I took some Onges over there from the Quince Islands, as I had learnt at their camp there that one of them was a Sentinels, who had, some years before, left the North Sentinel in a canoe and come across, via Rutland Island, to the Quince Islands and the Little Andamans.
…
From my very slight knowledge of the Onge language, it is quite likely that I misunderstood the supposed Sentinels, and he may either have been driven away from the Sentinel in a storm, possibly as a child, and have been adopted by the Onges when he reached them on the Quince Islands, (the adults with him being killed), or there may really be occasional intercourse either between the Sentinel Jarawa and those on Rutland Island, or between the former and the Onge.
It was interesting to note that, unlike their behavior when in the jungles of the Great Andaman, the Onges on each occasion that they have been on the North Sentinel, have taken the lead in searching the forest for Jarawa [=Sentineli], and seemed to have no fear of them.*
OK, so now that’s settled.
Why should I do that? You made the claim that lack of mutual initelligibility is evidence of lack of relationship. I used the example of French and intelligent to show that such a claim is illogical nonsense. Nobody ever claimed that the languages definitely are related (they probably are, we don’t know). I simply demonstrated that your claim that the languages aren’t related because of lack of intelligibility is rubbish. A lack of mutual intelligibility tells us nothing.
Yet another claim about the Sentinelese that you post as fact, and that is once again untrue.
We know approximately nothing about the langugae. It could be very closely related to the other Andaman languages. We simply lack any information either way.
*[The Onge had a name for North Sentinel Island and knew of the island’s existence; they also appear to have recognized some degree of relationship when brought into contact with Sentineli. … A comparison of the languages could perhaps answer this question but with the Sentineli language virtually inaccessible, there is nothing to compare with.
The Onge were terrified of the Sentinelis and the frustrated scientists could not even clearly establish from the shouted exchange between Onge and Sentinelis… whether the latter understood at least a little of the formers’ possibly related language.](https://web.archive.org/web/20130402170506id_/andaman.org/BOOK/chapter8/text8.htm#sentineli) *
And that is approximately everything known about the degree of understanding their closest neighbors have about the language. your claim that their nearest neighbours know nothing is ignorant nonsense. We have absolutely no idea how much their neighbours understand. It could be a lot, it could be nothing. We just don’t know. But whereas actual anthropolgists and linguists acknowledge this, you boldly proclaim certainty that nothing is known.
What the actual fuck?
Utter fucking rubbish.
*[The earliest known mention of the Sentineli was published by the British surveyor John Ritchie who wrote down the following observation in 1771:
... and if we may judge from the multitude of lights seen upon the shore at night, it is well inhabited.
In what way does this support any of the claims that you have made? It doesn’t mention the people not using fire, in fact exactly the opposite. It doesn’t mention them not making smoke. It doesn’t mention them being hard to see because of a lack of fire.
No, it’s *supposed *to be about presenting facts and fighting ignorance. You have no facts and keep making ignorant statements.
And yet you keep making claim after claim that I can refute with references in 3 minute using Google?
Let’s see what you have said:
They don’t use fire: Proven wrong with your own references.
They don’t wear clothes: Proven wrong in 15 seconds with a Google image search.
They are unapproachable: Proven wrong in 2 minutes on Google.
They don’t make smoke or light with their fires and thus are hard to detect: Proven wrong in 12 seconds on Google.
We know that their nearest neighbours don;t understand anyhting of their language. Proven wrong using the previous Google link. No time needed.
It isn’t much, but it all disagrees with what you have posted. It’s quite amazing. We only know about ten things about the Sentinelese, you posted on five of them, and on four you were completely wrong. The only thing you got right is that they use stone age technology. Every other statment you made was wrong.
MeAny claim that they are unapproachable is utterly false. Here is reference from a team of anthropologists who approached them many times over many years.
:rolleyes:
No, aside from the fact that you said they are unapproachable and my reference documenting multiple intimate approaches, it doesn’t refute much at all.
I’m not sure about the math but perhaps being at most 50th cousins means that for the past 50 generations there are no ancestors in common. So if you go back 50 generations all 50 great-great-great-etc grandparents would be different. That’s 2 ^ 50 g.g.g…grandparents… which is about 10 ^ 16 or 10,000,000,000,000,000 of them that all must be different.
Let’s ignore questions of population genetics for this post and just clarify terminology.
Are 50th cousins 6 times removed considered to be “50th cousins” for the purpose of OP’s question? Or, would only a 47th cousin 6x removed qualify? (The same consanguinity as 50th cousins with no removal.)
I’ll wait for this to be clarified before attempting any detailed guesstimations. Yes, there will be sixth removals and worse necessary in the intriguing difficult question. Other difficulties include estimating permeabilities, the effects of plagues and pogroms, social barriers to interbreeding, etc.
Now I’m going to guess that two Han Chinese, chosen at random would probably be 20th-cousins or better, and two Europeans probably 25th cousins or better. How about pick a European at random and a Asian mainlander at random? Wild guess: 99.9% to be 35th cousins or better; 99.99999% chance to be 40th cousins or better; perhaps 100% to be 41st cousin if the criterion excludes extremely remote people.
These are wild-ass guesses, and could be off by orders of magnitude. The critical distance, beyond which 99.99999% changes to 100% is definite but unknowable. It could be there is an old monk in Tibet and when he dies, the 100% mark shifts from 43rd cousins to 39th cousin.
While an omniscient being would know exactly what that 100% mark lies, the most we can hope for is something like:
Picking any two humans on the planet randomly there is a
[ul][li] about 0.2% chance they’ll be 15th cousins or better[/li][li] about 5% chance they’ll be 20th cousins or better[/li][li] about 98% chance they’ll be 30th cousins or better[/li][li] about 99.7% chance they’ll be 35th cousins or better[/li][li] almost surely at least 99.999% that they’ll be 45th cousins or better[/li][li] probably at least 99.9999% that they’ll be 45th cousins or better[/li][li] 90% certain that they’ll always be 50th cousins or better[/li][li] 99.9% certain that they’ll always be 55th cousins or better[/li][/ul]
I’m NOT saying these vague guesstimates are the correct numbers. The important thing to note is that there are two levels of probability asserted.
There certainly is a Nth-cousin relationship which is the closest single-path consanguinity guaranteed between any two living humans. And what that guaranteed N is changes over time. Surely it was once much more than it is now – communication between, say Africa and Australia, was very minimal thousands of years ago. Perhaps N spiked sharply down, some fixed delay after the arrival of Columbus et al in the New World.
But whatever N is, we can only guess it. Above I guess there is a 90% chance Colibri is right and 50th-cousinship is guaranteed (but please review the terminology question in the first sentence above). But if I were to write “It is almost completely certain that the cousin distance is always N or less” I would agree with Shagnasty and hedge my bets by choosing, say, N = 60.
More definitive answers would depend on anthropological facts: how fast do genes diffuse through the Amazon jungle? I’ll guess that even thousands of years ago, slaves were trafficked from one part of that basin to another; no?
I skipped to the end so forgive me if this has been covered, but I remember reading an article that there is a particular point in the past at which every single human on the planet was either: 1) an ancestor to every single person now living, or 2) an ancestor to nobody now living. I recall that that date in the past was no so long ago.
And I also remember that if you limit #1 to descendants of a particular ethnic lineage (those of European or African descent) then it is shockingly recent.
Does any of this sound familiar or am I way off base?
I’ve heard about 1000 years for Europe. Interestingly, this implies that if somebody tells you they’re descended from William the Conqueror (1028-1087), and you are of European ancestry, you can reasonably say “Well, in all likelihood, I am too”.
Right. When I first started genealogy, I was excited that I was descended from William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. It turns out that every white person in the world shares the same lineage.
I have an expert-approved descent from William the Conqueror’s sister, who, like William, has a known descent from Charlemagne. However I’ve no approved descent from the Conqueror (though doubtless there are such lines unknown to or unsanctioned by the experts). (Is your descent from the Conqueror expert-approved? Care to post it?)
It’s probably true that every Frenchman or Englishman has a (probably unknown) descent from William the Conqueror but I’d be reluctant to extend this confidently to “every white person in the world.”
Here’s a pdf paper which uses a computer simulation to guess that the Identical Ancestor Point for all humans is 7400 (4200) years ago, and the MRCA point is 3400 (2000) years ago. (The parenthesized numbers are for liberal mobility.) The conservative estimates correspond to, roughly, 274 generations for IAP and 126 generations for MRCA. (The 51-generation estimate in thread title is for yet another problem.)
My son recently had his family tree traced professionally. It turns out my ex-wife and I are descended from two daughters of Edward I, Joan of Acre and Elizabeth, which makes us cousins in whatever degree. The genealogist explained to my son that the royal connection was no big deal as most people of English descent tie in to royalty if you go back 7 or 8 centuries.
This idea of “Look at these people over there. They’re so far away from everybody else they have to have been genetically isolated for millennia.” needs to be rethought.
The two most widely separated people, genetically, are the Hazda of east central Africa and the Koi-San of southwest Africa. Note that these people are on the same continent and have been significantly affected (genetically and linguistically) by the Bantu expansion. So, despite their differences, there has to be some moderate degree of cousin-relatedness.
Compared to them, most everybody else: Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, and Native Australians are much more closely related. Cousin-wise, as far as DNA can tell, those are all more closely related than the Hazda to the Koi-San.
What about Native Hawaiians? They seem more cut off from everybody until the late 1700s when it was discovered. There was some contact between Siberia and Alasa even after the land bridge froze (basically until the border was forcibly shut down as the “Ice Curtain” in the 1940s due to thee Cold War) and possibly between Greenland and Iceland. Not sure if there was contact between Indonesia and Australia.
However, who would have had contact with Hawaii? Even some sole sailor blown off course would probably not be enough to connect it to the whole gene pool. And I’m sure there are still at least some Native Hawaiians who don’t have mainland ancestry.
Are you planning to resurrect this every few months or years and ask about another isolated population that you just thought of?
To recap: the reason that the model prediction for a quite recent genealogical (either parent) MRCA for the entire human population is robust is that an isolated population must remain absolutely isolated in order to seriously violate the assumptions of the model. All it requires for a single member of an isolated population to outbreed. Once you have a genealogy linking any one member of an isolated group to the rest of humanity, then panmictic breeding within the isolated group will rapidly ensure that everyone within that group now has a lineage tracing back to the rest of humanity. So yes, “some sole sailor blown off course” would be enough to connect it to the rest of humanity.
And thus the mathematics show that there is no burden of proof to check every last human being. If *any * member of a putatively isolated group is related to the rest of humanity, then it is certain that they all are within a fairly small number of generations.
Seems like a plausible theory based on Chang’s paper. It may or may not be accurate (not a whole lot of way to know unless you can somehow trace back everybody on earth’s family tree 3000 years) but it’s at least possible. If it’s accurate it’s pretty cool.
5000-10,000 years ago we reach the common ancestors point. Where everybody who was alive is either the ancestor of everybody today or nobody today.
These dates will get more and more recent as time goes on. It might take take only 1,500-2,000 years for someone to become the MRCA in the future rather than 3,000. Since we now don’t have to rely on some rare Bering Strait crosser to connect the worldwide family tree. And people also can travel directly from say Ireland to South Africa, rather than having to mate through dozens of intermediary populations between the 2 countries as was the case in the past.
I don’t know what the odds are than someone could have gotten into the genepool of a small population and then had his genes completely washed out.
I suspect it is lower than the odds of becoming a universal ancestor though. It is starting to look like the number of viable Neanderthal-Human hybrids were rather small, and possibly only from a single group/tribe of Neanderthals. Also, the original hybrids seem to have had health issues, including sterility in the male offspring. Further, evolution has selected against Neanderthal genes in us so the percentage of genes in use has been dropping appreciably even in historic times.
Yet still we can find Neanderthal genes in every population outside of Africa and some in Africa, billions of people.
That seems like a digression, but I think it supports the idea that once someone breeds into a small population, it seems that probability favors some genes staying in the genepool.
Now, by our modern perspective, population living close to each other should inbreed unless there are some serious natural barriers between. And not a lot of barriers can stand against the human sex drive. But it appears that this was not such an obvious thing in ancient times. It appeared to be very variable. The techniques for genetic analysis of human remains are getting very good these days, and what we find is that some populations were exchanging genes over large areas. Beijing to the Baltic during the Ice Age. While others stayed completely isolationist.
Several of the isolationist populations have gone extinct or eventually merged with other populations of course. But there are still some populations that show no genetic signal of outbreeding for impressive amounts of time.
The Kalash seem to have been isolated genetically for about 12 000 years, and some !San for up to 150 000 years. I’ve looked for data on how long the Andamanese may have been isolated, but I have only found estimates for divergence from other groups, which does not really say anything about total isolation.
Australian Aborigines appear to have been genetically isolated for about 50 000 years. Previously, there were reports that genetic connections with the Indian subcontinent about 5 000 years back had been found, but research done since this thread was started seems to have disproved that, and shown deep isolation.
That seems strange? A quick mental calculation gives an average of 25 after 10 generations, assuming they are not direct male or female line generations.
Also, in practice this seems to assume that every generation is with someone unrelated. That the family tree does not fold back upon itself occasionally. In terms of small tribal of clan populations like humans had through most of time, the foldback effect and the chance of genes becoming fixed seems quite high, as the persistence of Neanderthal genes seem to demonstrate.
Anyway, for the OP I’d say no. It is enough for one cases to disprove that all of us are 50th cousins or less. Just by statistics, there are 7 billion of us and there is going to be someone somewhere who is an outlier.
