You might be sure, but you’re still probably wrong. Lots of things that seem intuitively correct turn out to be wrong when we analyze them scientifically.
Have not mingled with whom? There is no isolated tribe that hasn’t “mingled” with another tribe in the last 500 years. And keep in mind that what counts as an isolated tribe today wasn’t necessarily isolated for the last 500 years.
Eh. We had entire threads about that subject when it was actually news 3 years ago.
And yet you apparently forgot they existed.
No, I didn’t. Can you produce the documentation that they never interbred with anyone outside their village for the last 500 years?
I really don’t know where you are going with your argument, such as it is. Like I said, intuition isn’t a good substitute for science.
“Native American” is no more problematic than “European”. Yes, there are all sorts of ethnicities and languages in Europe, and Danes and Scots and Spaniards and Croats are all very different with different histories and on and on. The also all live in Europe, and so can be called European.
It’s also certainly true that before 1492 and long afterward, people who lived in the Americas had no concept of “America”, or Native American/Indian identity. The white people who were settling on the coasts were just one more type of foreigner.
Apparently the OP felt that “Native American” meant all tribes, but North first tribes weren’t completely homogenous.
I have no idea if these peoples have ‘interbred’ with other tribes, but if no one had heard of them up til a few years ago, perhaps not. Again, the line of thinking here was “Native American” in general, not “a native tribe that has never ever come into contact and had sexual relations and progeny with any other native tribe”.
Cut the snark.
I’m not sure if first tribes sit around and ask, “Are there any pure blooded Europeans left?”
When I was addressing someone that was not John Mace, I said:
Okay, John. I clearly said that according to this loose definition of Native American, it seems pretty freaking likely. Like you said, we have no way of knowing, but somehow you’re faulting me for my lack of DNA evidence.
Yet you have no DNA evidence to support your claim that “There is no isolated tribe that hasn’t “mingled” with another tribe in the last 500 years”, but again, the OP’s premise was ‘absent European’, not ‘absent another tribe’.
Someone from tribe A could have procreated with tribe C and their offspring may have died out in a few generations. So even if there was ‘mingling’ (as you put it), it doesn’t mean it affected any current member’s DNA.
Why is it so suprising that I won’t accept the “documentation”? It’s not that I won’t accept any evidence, it’s that we know for a fact that family histories are notoriously unreliable. I’m not saying this out of a perverse refusal to accept evidence, I’m saying it because of your husband’s family history turned out to be 100% accurate back to 1740 it would be the only accurate family history in the world. And of course, your husband doesn’t have names for each and every one of his ancestors that were living in 1740, it’s just that he can trace one branch of his family back that far.
Now, it’s true that a very small percentage of full blooded people could add up to a large population. But let’s suppose that 5% of all Navajos today are 100% full blooded native american, with no admixture of European or African ancestors. What are the odds that one of these full-bloods is going to reproduce with another full blood? Five percent. And that means that the next generation of full blooded Navajos is only going to be 0.25% full blooded. And the next generation is only going to be 0.0625% full blooded.
This means that once there is a significant fraction of non-full-blooded people in the population, if we assume random mating then in a few generations the number of full-blooded people will drop quickly. And when the number of full-blooded people is a small fraction of the population, within a few generations the likelihood of even one full blooded person becomes miniscule. And once you’re down to one full blooded person, obviously the next generation can have no full blooded people left.
The only way for a full-blooded line to maintain itself is to be genetically isolated from everyone else. Alaska isn’t a good candidate, since there have been Russians there since the 1743. It’s tempting to think that some Amazon tribes have been this isolated, because it’s true they’ve been mostly isolated from European contact. But those tribes aren’t isolated from each other, and they aren’t isolated from tribes who are in regular contact with Europeans.
1492 was 519 years ago. Even if we assume 100 generations since 1492, that gives everyone in the world 2^100 ancestors in 1492. 2^100 is what we call a very large number, much much larger than the number of people who actually lived in 1492. To be a full blooded native american, you’d have to have zero ancestors who lived in Europe in 1492. That’s out of 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 ancestors.
The use of ‘full-blooded’ sounds awfully strange and racist (even if you’re not), but okay, for the sake of the discussion here:
Who’s to say that they aren’t marrying first cousins?
edit: And just because they have contact with other groups does not mean intermarriage takes place. Some cultures have strict rules on that.
It is pretty much impossible that there are any pure blooded Europeans with no admixture of African or Asian ancestors. The reason it seems possible that there could be pure blooded native americans is that up until 1492 the Americas were extremely isolated from the rest of the world. But while it’s much more likely that there could be a full blooded Native American than there could be a full blooded European, it’s still so unilikely that probably such a person does not exist.
Another thought: your math uses a two-person marriage system. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say many of these tribes practice a form of polygyny.
And there is a major flaw in your reasoning. You are assuming that human matings are completely random. They aren’t. It is entirely possible that remaining “fullbloods” of any particular ethnicity will go to some effort to only choose other fullbloods as mates. Until you factor that into your equation your conclusions are unlikely to be accurate. Depending on how strong the cultural forces are to choose a mate from one’s own background, the next generation could be anywhere from your hypothetical 5% to something much higher - 50%, 90%, whatever.
I’m using the term “full blooded” because that’s what the OP used.
First cousin marriages turn out to be pretty common in most societies. And even without first cousin marriages, marriages between people who are closely related is very common, how could it be otherwise in small towns and villages? In pre-industrial societies two people marrying would likely be related to each other in dozens of ways. And so the same person shows up many times in different places in your family tree. Bob was your your father’s father’s mother’s father, and also your mother’s father’s mother’s father’s father, and also your mother’s mother’s father, and also your father’s mother’s father’s father’s mother’s father. This is called pedigree collapse.
But that reduces your number of ancestors, no? If girls are marrying their uncles or cousins or such and if many men have more than one wife.
(Not sure if men die easier if they’re in a hunter-gatherer society…)
Yes, that’s true. But when you look at Navajos today, or rather, when Navajos look at other Navajos, they can’t pick out the 100% fullblooded Navajos from the 99% fullblooded Navajos. They can’t tell the difference, so how can they practice assortative mating?
What sometimes happens is that a person of mixed parentage isn’t considered to belong to one parent’s ethnicity, but only to the other parent’s. And so if a black person has a child with a white person, that child is not considered white, even if most of their ancestors were white. And so this is a way that african ancestry was isolated from european ancestry, because anyone with one drop of african ancestry was considered black. But people did “pass” as white, which isn’t suprising, if you have 7/8ths white ancestry you’re going to look white. And so those African ancestors get added back into the white gene pool.
So unless Navajos practice a “one drop” rule whereby any admixture of non-Navajo ancestry makes you not a Navajo, your theorized assortative mating won’t be very strong. And of course, it turns out that most ethnic groups don’t care about ancestry this way–you’re either a member or you’re not, and it doesn’t matter where your grandparents came from.
Of course pressure to marry inside one’s ethnicity is a pretty common feature of many socieities. You’re much more likely to marry the boy next door than a boy who was born halfway across the world. There is assortative mating. But it’s not 100% strong, and if you can’t tell the difference between a 15/16th Navajo and a 16/16th Navajo, how can you exclude them?
I averaged out one branch of my maternal line over 9 generations and came up with an average generational length of 31.4y. Another branch averaged out to 27.3y. Both of these include my grandmother who had my mom at age 39, and my daughter who had my grandson at age 15. The average for all the generations I looked at comes to about 29.4y. So empirically I’d have to say 30 is a good round ballpark figure after all.
Just in my own generation among us 5 girls, my parents also had an average age of 29.4y at our births, coincidentally. (My parents are almost exactly the same age, so it was easy to figure both of them in.) My average age when my kids were born is 30.4y.
The question depends on the definition of full-blooded. Looking for absolute 100% perfection, as Blake is, going back an unlimited number of generations, means nobody can ever come up full-blooded anything. So the whole concept has to be tossed out using that premise. This thread could then be locked, if that were the case.
However, in American Indian society, the term full-blooded must have a commonly accepted meaning, which wouldn’t be so mathematically exacting, but would still hold genuine relevance for American Indian identity. The question depends on how that concept is understood and accepted in actual Native American society.
Yes, but no matter what form of marriage or childrearing a society has, a child has only one biological father and one biological mother. A child might have more than one social father or social mother, or no social father or social mother, but every child is the result of one sperm and one egg.
(Self-nitpick: Chimerism. But even then, the resulting offspring will produce gametes from one line of tissue or the other. )
But the number of ancestors is still smaller if a man and a woman have the same grandparent/s.
I have four grandparents.
A child of a different arrangement could have two or three.