Each of us has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents etc and the population was much smaller in the past. Given all that, I am surprised that common ancestry is not closer than it seems to be. In any case, we are all related. All Terrestrial life is. All of the universe is a single interconnected reality. I think I have said before that a man to whom I handed an anti-racist leaflet seemed horrified by my suggestion that he and I were related to the Chinese. He kept coming back to say so, to my amusement. In London, a young black guy was wearing an image of Africa. I exclaimed, "Africa, where we all came from!" He agreed. Afterwards, it occurred to me that he might have intended the image as a symbol of specifically black identity but it doesn't matter. It also expresses human identity. The earliest known inhabitant of Britain had dark skin. See here.
In one fictional future, Coya Conyon has:
a Dutch and Malay grandfather, Nicholas van Rijn;
a Mexican and Chinese grandmother;
Scottish ancestry via the planet Hermes and African ancestry via the planet Nyanza through her father, Malcolm;
a Terrestrial mother.
Her Hermetian husband, David Falkayn, and she will lead the colonization of the planet Avalon.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Dang, somehow I missed noting that early mention of Nyanza! Probably because Coya's father was only mentioned, we never SEE him. There was also mention of how a genetic accident seems to have caused many people being born fair complexioned, even if their immediate ancestry would make that seem unlikely.
Ad astra! Sean
All human beings are related, but not necessarily closely.
Ancient DNA analysis has shown that populations of different ancestry often lived in close proximity for very long periods without intermarrying much.
Eg., agriculture was brought to Europe in the early neolithic mostly by migration -- farmers from the Middle East (specifically, Anatolia) who migrated slowly across the landscape. For long periods, thousands of years), they coexisted in some spots with the previous hunter-gatherer populations without much gene exchange.
Then towards the end of the neolithic there was more, but by that time most of the hunther-gatherers were gone; the eventual population was very largely descended from the Anatolian migrants, in most of Europe -- there were exceptions.
In Britain (and Ireland) that Anatolian-derived population, the folk who built Stonehenge and Avebury and the other henge monuments, was then replaced very rapidly in the mid-third- millennium BCE, over the course of no more than a few centuries, by migrants from what's now the Netherlands. The eventual population contained some genetic material from the previous population, but not much -- less than 10% in most parts of the British Isles.
(The two populations looked different; the local farmers were small and dark, the newcomers taller, paler-skinned, and with more light eyes and hair, ultimately deriving from the Corded Ware populations of northern Europe, and before that from the Yamnaya of the Pontic Steppe, which it is very likely were the original Indo-European speakers.)
And the same techniques have shown that indian 'jati' (castes) are genuine breeding isolates, endogamous groups of great age. often thousands of years, and have been living in the same villages for that long with very, very limited genetic exchange.
So we are related but have kept apart.
Someone in a union meeting said that there were tribal divisions in Northern Ireland without any visible differences between people's physical appearances. I informed him that there had been so little intermarriage for so many generations that there were recognizable facial differences. Sheila's aunt said, of Sheila's brother (Jim)'s girlfriend, "I swear that wee girl's a Catholic!" "How do you know, Peggy?" "It's written all over her face that she is, so it is!" (She was right.) Jim (Presbyterian)'s eventual wife was Church of Ireland.
My father was from the North West of England. My mother was from the West of Ireland. Sheila is from the North of Ireland. Our son-in-law, from the South East of England, is Jewish. Our granddaughter has a right of return to Israel. We do our best to ignore/transcend (?) social divisions.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: As always, very interesting comments by you. And it's plain the original Anatolian population of the British Isles were wiped out by the Corded Ware peoples by a genocidal conquest ("Those guys? NOT our tribe, bad guys! Kill them!").
Paul: I'm puzzled how Mrs. Shackley's aunt could tell if people were Catholics or Protestants just from their looks. I would have thought everybody in Ireland had the same ethnic ORIGINS.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Family resemblances within a sub-state of just six counties. After many generations of very little intermarriage, facial features were becoming noticeably different.
I read the combox with interest.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
We see a similar situation in Iceland, a very homogeneous population with very little intermarriage with outsiders.
Ad astra! Sean
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