Really a set of study links for me to reference. It seems that persistent criminal behaviour is in fact highly hereditary at about 0.8. So, something to ask about if you are adopting a baby would therefore be ‘what are the parents like? In particular ‘what is the mother like?’ As criminality seems to be even more inherited from the mother’s side.

Biological influences on criminal behavior

Criminal behaviour: a psychological approach to explanation and prevention By Clive R. Hollin

Psychopathology and violent crime

Genetic influences in criminal convictions: evidence from an adoption cohort

Criminal behavior

Genetic epidemiological studies

Reading through the studies the general impression is that yes, a tendency to criminal behaviour is hereditary, and that your DNA has more effect on your chances of becoming a criminal than your environment does, particularly for the sort of repeat offender that commits non stop offences their whole life. Kind of begs the issue if sterilisation might be  an answer to that one.

Before anyone gets on their high horse and starts accusing me of not understanding poverty and the causes of crime… I am myself from the exact kind of underclass background that most criminals come from- which is why I have zero  bloody sympathy for the ‘bad upbringing’ excuse. I had the same housing, schooling, diet, medical care and terrible parenting as the worst of them, and yet I always felt I had to work and pull my own weight as an adult- fortunately I take after my mother (raised by father). So mine is an informed vote for eugenics here.

No, I’m not dead, just recovering from an MS attack that ‘turned off’ my curiosity and messed up my memory for a couple of months. I will look at the comments (all 254 of them) eventually.

I was slightly irked at watching channels 4’s shockingly bad and biased series on race, in which it trotted out Lewontin’s fallacy on the programs and on its supporting material on its site. All the criticisms I posted (they had an OOA date of 50k ago, don’t get me started…) have not been allowed through to the site, so I’m going to have a mini rant here. It’s not that they are supporting the ‘no race’ line (hey, you can disagree with me), but that they are pretending that it is the consensus view among anthropologists and geneticists- no-one is allowed to post the recent work that outright states that race is real.

First of all here is the article which explained why the claims for low diversity in humans were over exaggerated…

Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy

In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors. The underlying logic, which was discussed in the early years of the last century, is here discussed using a simple genetical example.

Worth a read.

Y-chromosome markers distribution in Northern Africa: High-resolution SNP and STR analysis in Tunisia and Morocco populations

Valerio Onofria, Federica Alessandrinia, Chiara Turchia, Mauro Pesaresia and Adriano Tagliabracci, a,
Abstract
At the beginning of 2006 more than 301,000 immigrants resident in Italy resulted to come from Tunisia and Morocco, 66% of which are male subjects; in addition, it is estimated that some other thousand are clandestine. Our data show that there is an increasing involvement of Tunisian and Moroccan individuals in paternity testing and in individual identification cases. For these reasons, the aim of this work was to enrich forensic Y-chromosome databases with Northern Africa data to better know markers frequency and their distribution across these populations. 103 Tunisian and Moroccan healthy male donors were typed by 17 microsatellites extended haplotype and 41 Y-SNPs. A high-resolution level database was created, including both haplotype and haplogroup for each sample. This study confirmed that precious informations might come both from Y-SNPs haplogroup distribution besides Y-STRs data.

After just re-reading the Guanche Y chr the total abscence of  ‘I’ across this part of N Africa is a mystery. How did it get to the Canaries when it skipped Morocco? Admittedly the sample size is a bit small. Maybe it got missed.

Demographic history of Canary Islands male gene-pool: replacement of native lineages by European

Abstract
 The origin and prevalence of the prehispanic settlers of the Canary Islands has attracted great multidisciplinary interest. However, direct ancient DNA genetic studies on indigenous and historical 17th-18th century remains, using mitochondrial DNA as a female marker, have only recently been possible. In the present work, the analysis of Ychromosome polymorphisms in the same samples, has shed light on the way the European colonization affected male and female Canary Island indigenous genetic pools, from the conquest to present-day times.

Results
Autochthonous (E-M81) and prominent (E-M78 and J-M267) Berber Y-chromosome lineages were detected in the indigenous remains, confirming a North West African origin for their ancestors which confirms previous mitochondrial DNA results. However, in contrast with their female lineages, which have survived in the present-day population since the conquest with only a moderate decline, the male indigenous lineages have dropped constantly being substituted by European lineages. Male and  female sub-Saharan African genetic inputs were also detected in the Canary population, but their frequencies were higher during the 17th-18th centuries than today.

Conclusions
The European colonization of the Canary Islands introduced a strong sex-biased change in the indigenous population in such a way that indigenous female lineages survived in the extant population in a significantly higher proportion than their male counterparts.

Unashamedly nicked from Maju- but topped off with a genuine portrait of a Guanche male called Hairy Harry (centre) shown to me by Ricardo.

Interesting to see the J1, which a couple of studies have placed in North Africa from about 10k ago. A fair amount of other older Eurasian lines. I’ll have another read of this one later.

Swine flu this time- along with the rest of family. Excuse me not not clearing comments. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.

mtDNA diversity in Sudan (East Africa)

A major effort must be put in East and sub-Saharan African mtDNA diversity characterisation for the construction of an informative database. We contribute 102 new HVRI + HVRII Sudanese sequences. As expected this sample is highly diverse, mainly constituted of unique haplotypes (2.07% random match probability for HVRI alone), 72.5% of which belong to sub-Saharan haplogroups.

Somehow this slipped past me last year- I think because it came out in the school holidays. It’s a bit short on detail unfortunately. A bit like this blog entry.

I’ve been hitting Google books-love that service.

Archaeology and Language: Language change and cultural transformation

On the work that suggests AA is associated with Dravidian and Sumerian. It comments that Afro Asiatic (not just Semitic) seems to have some very early loan words into Caucasian.

Archaeology, language, and the African past,

 pg 146 for the Militarev tree, and the other attempts at organising AA. I now feel less embarrased at my multiple attempts, as they can’t agree on anything either.

A big assed argument between Keita/Ehret and Bellwood over PAA.

One of the things I got from this was that Diakonoff also wasn’t a fan of Omotic as an AA language. Also the quotes..

Militarev’s reconstructed proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary (5), whether “agricultural” or not, is also peopled with animals and plants of Levant, not African, origin and matches a Natufian cultural landscape.

And

There is no significant archaeological evidence for a population movement from Africa into the Levant, whether Mesolithic or Neolithic, at the time in question. 

THE EGYPTIAN CONNECTION: EGYPTIAN AND THE SEMITIC LANGUAGES

Which discusses how similar Semitic and Egyptian are- as I recall Ehret groups Semitic, Berber and Egyptian onto one branch with each other. Saving the lazy a long read…

Egyptian and Semitic are related languages, with astounding resemblances and disturbing dissimilarities. Their high age of attestation brings the two Afroasiatic branches closer together. But they still are separated by a prehistory of several thousand years, and it was only a comparatively short timespan, beginning with the fourth millennium, that brought them together in areal contact.

A long pdf  about the role of Semitic and Vasconic languages on Indo European.

A pdf on Cushitic

Which will have to do for now.

I used to agree with the old Ehret/Kieta model for the E3b1 Y chr as a marker for Afro Asiatic, but its become apparent that all the population movements into the near East involving this Y chromosome are too ancient to be tacked on to any modern language group. A few months of rolling this idea around, and the DNA evidence and dating seems to support an Asian origin a lot better.

Against an African origin-

The Genetics

Once it  became apparent that Omotic as an Afro Asiatic language was dubious, with it being shown to be a language isolate by several linguists- it turned out all the African Afro Asiatic speakers show Neolithic Y chromosome input from the near East, in some cases overwhelmingly. The main examples for this are the Ouldeme and other Chadic speaking tribes in Cameroon, who have tested as having an outstandingly high percentage of the Y chromosome R1b, a Eurasian Y chromosome that fits the spread of Chadic languages like a glove. As far as I can tell, the ultimate point of origin for this seems to be SE Turkey, which is within the origin area of the agricultural Neolithic expansion. So, most Chadic male ancestry traces back to the origin point of the Neolithic, which is a big supporter of an Asian origin for Afro Asiatic.

Another Y chromosome that shows a population movementthat tracks Afro Asiatic is from the Nile delta – the M81 Y chromosome. The advent of this mutation is extremely close in time to the entry of R1b’s entry into North East Africa, and it appears to have spread out into North Africa with the Neolithic farmers, and also as far as Somalia, where it is found at a very low rate, but just enough to confirm a Neolithic movement from North to South along the Nile.

The language and its dates

Mainly my gripes are based on Dr Ehret’s work on AA languages. His inclusion of Omotic as an Afro Asiatic language was always speculative, and now it appears that it shows no more than a chance relationship to the Cushitic languages (Theil). I suspect he was keen to include it as an AA language as it shores up the African origin by providing him a pre agricultural Afro Asiatic language in East Africa- which now seems to be wishful thinking on Ehrets part.

Looking at Dr Ehret’s dates for the Afro Asiatic group, one major flaw leaps out. He dates proto Cushitic at 10,000 BP, which he describes as an African pastoralist language with goats and sheep. This is impossible, as goats and sheep do not enter Africa until 2,000 years after this date.  If it were correct as a date, this would locate proto Cushitic in the North of the Levant. Assuming that the Cushitic branch is native to East Africa, the arrival of ovicaprines to the area is first known about 5,500 BP in the Sudan. Assuming that the Cushitic branch moved along the coastal areas ( the joining dialects between Egypt and East Africa later wiped out by Asian Semitic languages, and a Nilo Saharan block to them in Nubia), a date of about 6,000 BP for the separation of Cushitic in East Africa would be more likely. This casts major doubt on Ehret’s dating methods for all his work, and really casts a big shadow over his dating of technologies by dating the proto language (the basis of most of his claims for early pastoralism in Africa). This would probably mean Nilo Saharan was the indigenous language group of East Africa prior to the Neolithic.

The dates for proto Cushitic mean his 14,000 BP date for proto Erythraic (ditching the older 15k date for PAA as the Omotic Branch is now defunct) corrects to 10,000 BP assuming his rate of miscalculation is stable at 40%. As a minor note, I’ve seen text books place a maximum date of 10k for any language family, which makes me query Ehret’s work on dates for yet another reason. This 10k age limit would also support all his dates being 40% too old, which would also re-date Cushitic to about 6,000 BP- which agrees with my own estimation.

All the known population movements in this 10k time frame are into  Africa, matching the expansion of the Neolithic, which also matches the expansion of the Y chromosomes R1b and M81 in Africa. There’s no known cultural expansion out of Africa  that could fit this time frame or  movements of African Y chromosomes/mt DNA dated to this era in the near East.

The ancient presence of Semitic in Asia.

Then there is the proximity of Semitic and proto Indo European languages. Numerous agricultural terms turn up in PIE, words for barley, bull etc, that are all suggestive of the Semitic family being present close to the origin point of IE languages when they adopted farming (I’m not ignoring that they may possibly have had the same root dialect at one time). After reconciling the ‘Turkish’ and ‘North of the  Black sea’ origins for proto Indo European (the older IE languages seem to be Anatolian, the last node was ‘Kurgan’) this would place Semitic in contact with older PIE dialects around 9,000 BP. Bearing in mind the age for PAA is needs to be about 10,000 BP for at least two good reasons, this is also not supportive of an African origin for Afro Asiatic.

Theorised tree for Afro Asiatic (my fifth revision)…

The population movements suggest to me that the African AA languages all came from a common tongue at the Nile delta, and then split up from each other and differentiated very quickly as the pastoralist groups moved away more swiftly than the farmers. This might explain why proto Afro Asiatic has been such a bugger to reconstruct; it’s right on the maximum age, and some of the root words for crops and farming implements etc could have been lost by the rapidly moving pastoralist groups who never grew crops.

The main reason I’ve focused on the R1b is the ’sore thumbness’ of its presence in central/West Africa, and the M81 because of its Neolithic age and Egyptian place of origin. I’ve steered clear of the J1 and J2 Y chromosomes in this entry, as at present it isn’t very clear what entered East And North Africa in the Capsian, what with the Neolithic and what with the Arabs. J seems to have arrived in  Africa in three waves. Really it needs an in-depth going over by a specialist study to untangle it, but some papers do discuss J arriving into Africa with the Neolithic, and it is seen in East Africa as far as Somalia, so it’s not impossible one minor J hg also matches the distribution of AA languages in Africa too.

Genetic variation of 15 autosomal STR loci in Upper (Southern) Egyptians

Abstract
A sample of 265 unrelated individuals inhabiting five governorates in Upper (south) Egypt was collected with informed consent. The samples were amplified using the AmpFℓSTR®Identifiler™PCR Amplification Kit (containing 15 loci: D8S1179, D21S11, D7S820, CSF1PO, D3S1358, TH01, D13S317, D16S539, D2S1338, D19S433, vWA, TPOX, D18S51, D5S818 and FGA), and genotyped subsequent to capillary electrophoresis. Statistical analysis of the generated data indicated neither departure from expectation of Hardy–Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) in most of the tested loci nor dependence of alleles between loci. All tested loci were polymorphic; the most discriminating is D18S51 while the least is TPOX. The combined power of exclusion was 0.99999868 and the combined match probability was 1.93×10−18. The genetic diversity of the Upper Egyptians was compared with those of other populations at the local, regional and global levels.

Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) based on pair-wise FST genetic distances of Upper Egyptian and other diverse global populations. OCE, Oceanian; ME, Middle Eastern; NAF, North African; EAS, East Asian; SSA, sub-Saharan African; UEGY, Upper Egyptian; SAS, South Asian; EUR, European. The figure shows that Oceania and American populations are very distant from Upper Egyptians (marked by a grey triangle) and other populations. The Upper Egyptian population is closer to the Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian and European populations than others.

Not a mega surprise that upper Egyptians grouped closer to north African and near Eastern rather than West African samples. It would have been nice to see Ethiopian samples too, for a better sense of perspective.

No, I’m not dead. MyMS has been playing up and I couldn’t focus well on the screen for more than a few minutes, so I had to give blogging a break for a while. My apologies for any comments that have got lost.

I’ve stuck most of my ‘Faces of ancient Egypt’ on a vid, which has the better preserved painted statues on it. While doing it, I couldn’t help noticing just how popular moustaches were in the old Kingdom.

Sigh- back to clearing the comments backlog.