**"Genes show women were the true adventurers
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
03 April 2001
“History books depict men as the adventurous sex who travel in search of conquest and discovery, but in reality it was their womenfolk who tended to settle far from their place of birth, a study of the genetic history of British men and women reports.”**
This news article has all the makings of the things I dislike most about science news articles: 1. “Catchy” but misleading headline; 2. No references, in this case it is hard to tell what the topic of the PNAS article mentioned in passing might be; 3. Quotes from authorities without noting where or when.
However the article does bring up the question of mtDNA and its ability to relate the history of human migration, and displacement: “‘It looks like females from the European mainland moved into Britain and completely swamped the previous female line,’ Professor Goldstein said.”
If swamping the previous female line is easy to do, doesn’t this diminish the ability of mtDNA tell the past?
Jois
Geeze! The abstract looks a lot different than the news article (surprise!):
Evolution
Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural transitions in the British Isles
James F. Wilson, Deborah A. Weiss§, Martin Richards, Mark G. Thomas¶, Neil Bradman¶, and David B. Goldstein,
Galton Laboratory, Department of Biology, University College London, Wolfson House, 4 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HE, United Kingdom; Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, United Kingdom; § Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616; and ¶ The Centre for Genetic Anthropology, Department of Biology, Darwin Building, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
Communicated by Henry C. Harpending, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, January 23, 2001 (received for review June 7, 2000)
Human history is punctuated by periods of rapid cultural change. Although archeologists have developed a range of models to describe cultural transitions, in most real examples we do not know whether the processes involved the movement of people or the movement of culture only. With a series of relatively well defined cultural transitions, the British Isles present an ideal opportunity to assess the demographic context of cultural change. Important transitions after the first Paleolithic settlements include the Neolithic, the development of Iron Age cultures, and various historical invasions from continental Europe. Here we show that patterns of Y-chromosome variation indicate that the Neolithic and Iron Age transitions in the British Isles occurred without large-scale male movements. The more recent invasions from Scandinavia, on the other hand, appear to have left a significant paternal genetic legacy. In contrast, patterns of mtDNA and X-chromosome variation indicate that one or more of these pre-Anglo-Saxon cultural revolutions had a major effect on the maternal genetic heritage of the British Isles.
Looks like it would be an interesting article. I wonder what justifies the different conclusions for what seems to be similar scenarios in iceland and england.
The key point here is that men were the landholders. A man would stay on the land he grew up on, while a woman would get shipped off to marry into some other family. Also, in war the women would have been captured and brought home. So it’s not so much the women were adventurers as they were portable chattel.
I think this business of women getting shipped off to live with the man’s family goes back before land ownership but I’ve never understood it because of the risks that go with pregnancy, labor, and delivery - it would seem much more logical that the females would want to be with her own relatives.
(I’ll skip the portable chattel for now, Myron. ::Checking address books for names of headhunters:: )
Jois
I can’t post the article but if you are interested in the content, please email me.
According to genes, men are better at athletics and much stronger, and women much fatter and much more talkitive. But of course, not many “politically correct” would accept that to be true, now would they?
So, do you think men settled down closer to home because they were better athletes and much stronger than women? Or that tribe elders preferred to send their daughters off to marry away from the tribe because they were fatter and more talkative than the guys?
(ssj_man2k, unless it has already been done, you could start a nice thread on which is the more talkative sex, might be fun.)
It appears that men have always been more physically powerful than women. We can therefore assume that (as is still the case all too frequently) men used their superior physical strength to assert lordship over women. Studies of primates would seem to confirm at least that dominant animals are typically males.
As Myron Van Horowitzski implied when he said that men were landholders, it’s possible that all that happened were a number of tribal raids that resulted in women being snatched from one territory to another.
It’s also possible, and this is extremely common in a number of tribal systems across the world, that young women were the ones making the move when inter-tribal long-term mating took place.
The genetic material doesn’t tell us that these women were “adventurous” at all, only that they moved or were moved owing to circumstances best left to paleoanthropologists to explain. So much for Steve Connor, Science Editor.
IIRC, there was an article in Discover Magazine a few years ago about this. The article focused on baboon tribes. When female baboons left their birth tribes to go and mate in another group they were subjected to more physical violence by both the males and females on the new tribe. The female baboons who stayed in their birth tribe were much better off. Male baboons who left their birth tribe were also subjected to more violence, but since they were bigger and stronger it was less of a problem.
(this is all from memory and was a few years ago so take it with a grain of salt)
Points out the cause may in fact be sociological rather than genetic.
Further more these studies only relate to language skills rather than propensity to use them.
Ned, I didn’t see anything in the article about Iceland but have decided (!) that “Steve Connor, Science Editor” dragged that info in from another source that I haven’t found, yet.
I was thinking of: Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men In Conversation (William Morrow, 1990)when I read ssj_man2k remarks. Her research shows that men talk more than women and tend to use a lecture like format.
Closest I can find quickly for conversational style is:
Labdude: Your comment seems right to me, lions eject the near adult males and keep the females together, as do elephants and many other mammals, a much more logical approach. It does stand to reason that whatever the individual suffers, some mechanism must prevent continual interbreeding of the same bloodlines.
Abe and Myron: I think this kind of female “travel” existed before landholding, whatever the guise, that it is deeply ingrained in Mammals? Hominids? however far back it goes, I don’t know. Connor’s rendering of the info was very poor and I still wonder if a better explaination doesn’t exist.
I read the article (I get access being in a large metropolitan medical center with a good library). It was mildly interesting, but I try to shut all of this population genetics out of my head. It is getting crowded in here, and I don’t need Orcadian versus Basque haplotypes shoving out any useful information…
Anyway, this paper uses cagey population genetics to determine the sex-specific migrations of populations through the British Isles. They come to a conclusion that the British Isles were populated by a mix of descendants of Neolithic Europeans and Scandanavian invaders. Unsurprising really.
Europe as a whole is a gradient of what they call Neolithic European eastward to Syrian/Turkish. Basque is the most “pure” version of Neolithic European. Celts are near Basques at the Neolithic European end of the scale, indicating that a migration happened in the Stone Age sometime.
This was determined largely using variations on slow changing bits of the Y chromosome, which indicates a paternal lineage. Thus, from the evidence presented, the Basque -> Celt migration must have included males.
Here’s where it gets interesting. They add mtDNA analysis into the equation. The mitochondrial genome is passed (along with the mitochondria) from mother to child. Analysis of slow-changing bits of mtDNA gives evidence of historical female migration.
Whereas the Y haplotypes stick Celts near Basques at the “Neolithic European” end of the scale, mtDNA sticks Celts near the middle. They confirm this with another marker of female transmission, X chromosome microsatellites. Both this and the mtDNA analysis yielded no significant differences, but they manage to wheedle to data through a principal component analysis and get some separatable peaks. Both analyses show similar findings (Celts near middle with Basques and Turks on the ends). They draw the conclusion that the Celts have received more female “blood” from elsewhere in Europe than the Basques, and this contribution has been primarily female.
Some comments:
There is a lot of statistics in this article which appear a little suspect. They find no significant differences for any of the maternal data (suggesting that their assays are not sensitive enough) until they do PC analysis. The paternal data, however, look quite solid. One can make a conclusion, IMHO, that Basques and Celts are quite related.
Their PC analysis is not a cited source – it is listed as a personal communication.
This is not peer-reviewed science. PNAS is a weird journal. Articles can be accepted after review by a NAS (National Academy of Sciences member) alone (track I admission). This article was reviewed by Henry C. Harpending. Most journals usually distribute submitted articles to a blind panel of peers who review the article’s scienceworthiness. PNAS does this in some cases also (track II admission).
While I am not an expert in these kinds of analysis, I have many kinds of problems with these articles. No controls are done for mtDNA mutation rates – they are all set as standard. No other hypotheses are advanced or refuted.
Anyway, enjoyable article, but not really that earth-shattering.
On another note, the even gradation seen between Syrians and the Basques demonstrates another point – one that you may have heard already if you have been here for longer than a few months. I’ll give you a hint: Collounsbury and tomndebb versus peace.
As a scientific concept, race does not exist.
I’ll guarantee that if you look at the population Y chromosome haplotypes, you can find an even gradation from the Basques across Syria through Iran and the Caucuses into India and through Nepal into China, and probably even from China into the New World. I’ll bet the same holds true from Scandanavians in the North south through the Greece into the Middle East and Egypt and then into Africa.
Humanity exists on a continuum – any divisions in such a continuum are man made and do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Absolutely, and that is what I was referring to when I mentioned primate behaviour (frequent male dominance). “Landowners” is used in a very loose sense here, and should really be “tribal territorialism”.
As for the accuracy of the study on which Steve Connor, Science Editor, based his information, Edwino made some very illuminating points.
What i said is true for man in nature. Today it probably isn’t true, though, because of all the outside intervention. But of course, we aren’t talking about today, so it doesn’t matter.
If you want me to get technical… men had 20% more strength than women, and women had 30% more fat than man. The reasons for this are that women needed the fat to survive and bare children, while men needed strength cuz they were the hunters. Men are better at navigation, while women are better at word problems and talking things through.
But i dont see in history and women conquering far off lands, do you? The women may have gone places far and wide, but that was only after men had been there.
Edwino, Isn’t the word “wierd” a little strong here? PNAS isn’t quite “The Creationist Weekly” is it? The problem is that when you have something earth shaking to say you want to publish it in the most prestigious journal you can. Let’s say that is “Cell.” A year later when you have added the bells and whistles to your main experiment you won’t get it back into “Cell” but have to try for “Nature” or “Science.” And then one of the sub journals of the Nature group and so on. PNAS is far from the bottom of the barrel.
In 1999 Cavalli-Sforza edited a PNAS article for Krings, Geisert, Schmitz, Krainitzki, and Paabo on the DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable region II from the Neanderthal type specimen (Vol 10, 5581-5585, May 11, 1999).
This data is not suspect or corrupt. It was just not as earth shaking as the previous articles. I don’t think the information is tainted because it was published in PNAS.
I think the use of the word “weird” may give the wrong impression here.
“Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural transitions in the British Isles”
was communicated by Harpending, isn’t he lending his reputation to this article?
Yes, but HOW do you know this? I still see no cites to back up your statements. The fact that women didn’t “conquer far off places” is due to social pressures. Nothing genetic caused this difference in behavior…not that we know of anyway. However, you stated that there IS a genetic difference that caused these social differences and I’d like to know where you got your information, so that I can read it as well.
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