Yes. Especially since we’ve had this discussion before, and all the pertinent information has been laid out.
There needn’t be just one commonly accepted meaning, and only officially recognized tribes in the US really need to worry about defining who is and is not a member. Not sure how it works in other countries.
But still, that is a different question than the one the OP is asking.
Yes, and it is absolutely the case that recent pedigree collapse is extremely common.
It’s not common for people to have two grandparents, because that would require brother-sister mating. It happens, but it is unusual. More usual is first cousin mating. If you mate with your first cousin, you share two grandparents with your mate, but your offspring still have 4 grandparents, your mother and father and your cousin’s mother and father. Your offspring has six great-grandparents rather than 8, because the same people were great-grandparents twice.
So of course you don’t have quadrillions of ancestors in 1492, because there weren’t even a billion people alive at that time. And so if you could trace your biological ancestry you’d start seeing the same names showing up over and over again in different positions on your family tree, and the smaller and more isolated your ethnic group was, the more extreme the pedigree collapse is.
However, even given the same group of people mating over and over with the same group of people, you’ll still find outliers. That one guy who came from waaaaay over there and knocked up a village girl one night while he was just passing through. And her parents adopted the baby and it was never spoken of again. Socially that baby has the same ancestry as everyone else in the vllage–the girl’s mom and dad are the baby’s social parents. And so when that baby grows up and starts a family, that baby isn’t treated as an outsider or a half-breed.
Hold on a sec.
100 generations over 519 would mean people are becoming parents at an average age of FIVE. If you figure 30 years per generation, that gives us only 17 or 18 generations over 519 years.
Might want to run that math again.
That’s what I wasn’t sure of… because it’s trivial to establish that nobody’s ancestry is ever 100% pure blood anything, if that’s what the OP is asking. I thought that concept went out with the Nazis anyway.
The tribes themselves accept cutoff levels of <100% tribal blood to qualify for membership. If tribes have a working definition of full-blooded Indian, I’m not aware that it counts for anything more substantial than bragging rights.
And as more time passes the tribes with higher blood quantum requirements are facing the inevitable choice of rethinking those requirements, or watching the tribe die off as fewer and fewer people can qualify each generation.
The upside is that the Blonde, Blue Eyed KKK racists are facing the same dilemma.
Prepare to Drown in the Brown.
The thing is, if no one is full blooded anything, then the OP becomes a meaningless question. So we have to assume there is some other meaning to “full blooded” that is less than 100%.
And based on how people evaluate half blooded and quarter blooded, the word full blooded does not mean there is no drop anywhere. There is obviously, like in all measurements, an amount of statistical error that is acceptable.
And until you define what that is, the question is unanswerable.
That doesn’t make the question meaningless; it just makes it one for which the answer is “no”. The OP might well not have been aware of the full extent of mixing of populations.
Look, I apologize if the phrasing offended anyone. I asked the question simply out of curiosity, not because I have designs on breeding a master race. I just completed a Biological Anthropology course at my local community college, so the subject of genetic isolation just happened to be on my mind. This message board limited the length of my thread title. It seemed like a more succinct way of phrasing what I had in mind. But a better way to put it might be:
Are there any any human beings alive today who, if you made a family tree of all their ancestors from 1491, all of those ancestors would reside in what we today refer to as the Americas?
I’ve done a little bit of reading on the Hopi people. My (amateur, and definitely subject to disputation) opinion is that if there are any “full-bloods” in North America it would probably be found within the Hopi people.
Here’s why I think it’s possible:
Around 1680, they told the Spanish to bugger off and successfully revolted against them.
Afterwards, they seem to have been left pretty much alone until 1850 when they officially established contact with the U.S government.
I recall listening to a radio interview (by Art Bell) approximately 10 years ago with Hopi elders who apparently didn’t speak any English (they needed a translator)! I found it astonishing that someone could be born in the United States and yet not know English. Now I know that linguistic isolation doesn’t necesarily prove genealogical isolation, but it at least seems to be consistant with it.
I’ve heard it claimed that there are many, many Native American tribes in the US where most of the members are mostly white (or at least, mostly non-NA) and few if any members have any significant fraction of NA blood.
Hopi are surrounded by Navajo land. It wasn’t always that way, but Navajo have been there for the past few centuries and spent that time expanding their territory until it engulfed Hopi land. Hopi and Navajo did not get along well. The mutual ill feeling may have been enough to prevent Hopi-Navajo intermarriages. And to visit any other tribe’s pueblo, Hopi would have had to pass through Navajo land, which may have added considerable difficulty.
But since Navajo and Pueblos did intermarry with Spanish somewhat (after they got done fighting them), it wouldn’t take much contact with Hopi to kick it down a notch from 100% Native. So I wouldn’t put even money on the existence of 100% among Hopi. Spanish genes have been around there for 500 years now. That’s about 16 generations. Enough time to infiltrate the whole population. It is a small population too.
Edit
I googled and found that Navajo and Hopi do intermarry.
Can’t guarantee the source, but this says there still are full blooded Native Americans around.
Don’t forget down in the Tidewater region of Maryland and Virginia the Indian tribes have a strong African-American ancestry. They have been triracial mixtures, within tribal structures, since the 17th century. When Virginia was dominated by the racist Jim Crow system, in the 1920s and '30s, the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics, run by a white supremacist named Plecker, ruled that no Indians existed in Virginia, and attempted to forcibly terminate all the tribes on the basis that they were of black ancestry, invoking the one-drop rule. As a result, they have had to fight to regain their tribal status with the state government. Then came the federal push to terminate tribes all across the country.The Piscataway tribe in Maryland fought for ages to get recognition from the state, and only achieved it a few years ago. The tribes in Virginia are still trying to get federal recognition after 235 years.
What about the Inuit of remote regions of Nunavut/NWT? Couldn’t they be isolated enough?
I don’t think that this is right. So assuming that 5% of all Navajo’s have remained pure blooded for many, many tens of generations that means that only 5% of these will remain such in the next SINGLE generation?
Something isn’t right there. If you can’t tell a pure blooded Navajo by looking at one, then there is no way that it’s 5%. It’s more like 0%.
That’s the point. If you’ve got interbreeding to the extent that only 5% of your population is unmixed, there are going to be almost no unmixed members in the next generation. So the point is that it’s almost certainly not true that a small percentage of modern north american indians could be unmixed. Because you can see that a small unmixed percentage doesn’t maintain itself for generations without severe reproductive isolation.
In other words, a population that is 99% unmixed and 1% mixed will in a few generations become 100% mixed. Since we know that Euopeans and Africans have been intermixing with Americans for 500 years, this means that it’s almost certain that there aren’t any unmixed Americans left–even if there might have been a few 100 years ago, in the 3-4 generations since then those very few unmixed people would have been very unlikely to have chosen unmixed mates who chose unmixed mates who chose unmixed mates. A small amount of admixture quickly results in a totally mixed population, or a totally unmixed population.
And I don’t know how I came up with that 100 generations number for 1492, which is obviously wrong. It would be more like 15 generations. 100 generations would put us back 3000 years ago. 15 generations is only 32768 ancestors. Of course many of those ancestors wouldn’t be unique.
Blake is likely right. 100% “pure” “not a drop” is very very unlikely and in fact there’s at least one website that claims there are none. I suppose there’s no way to verify it, even DNA would likely be unable to always prove 32/32nds vs 31/32nds.
Now, if you accept "pure’ as three gens back, ie more than 15/16ths “pure” then I think there are a few that claim to be. Note that no Amerind tribe requires more than 5/8ths for membership, few require more than 1/4.