"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Thursday 19 May 2016

Our Common Forefather: Just a Few Men Controlled Reproduction in Prehistory and Dominate World Genetics Today


Our Common Forefather
Just a Few Men Controlled Reproduction in Prehistory and Dominate World Genetics Today

Imaginative depiction of the Stone Age, by Viktor Vasnetsov.
Imaginative depiction of the Stone Age, by Viktor Vasnetsov. Source: Public Domain




A new genetic study of male ancestry shows there were periods in human prehistory when just a few elite men controlled reproduction. For example, one man about 190,000 years ago was the ancestor of 1,200 living men from 26 groups around the world whose genes were analyzed for the new study.

Who knows if that one man so long ago had great genes? Would the world have been different if it had been another man who had fathered much of the human race?

And one might also wonder just how many women this man had been with in his life. He lived at the dawn of the history of the Homo sapiens species, so perhaps just by dint of arithmetic and not necessarily by having many mates his genes came to dominate humanity.

But thousands of years later, genetic studies show, just a few men were responsible for much of the reproduction.

These tantalizing questions aren’t answered in the press release from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute reporting on a new study that found this ancient patriarch’s descendants are all over the world. Dr. Chris Tyler-Smith of the institute headed the study. An institute press release on the largest-ever study of the global genetic variation in the Y (male) chromosome states:


“The study … analysed sequence differences between the Y chromosomes of more than 1200 men from 26 populations around the world using data generated by the 1000 Genomes Project. Analysing the Y chromosomes of modern men can tell us about the lives of our ancestors. The Y chromosome is only passed from father to son and so is wholly linked to male characteristics and behaviours. The team used the data to build a tree of these 1200 Y chromosomes; it shows how they are all related to one another. As expected, they all descend from a single man who lived approximately 190,000 years ago.”


Another finding of the study is that one man who lived in Europe about 4,000 years ago is the ancestor of half of Western European men, Dr. Tyler-Smith told The Telegraph. “In Europe there was huge population expansion in just a few generations,” he told The Telegraph. “Genetics can’t tell us why it happened but we know that a tiny number of elite males were controlling reproduction and dominating the population. Half of the Western European population is descended from just one man.”


Time of haplogroup growth in different parts of the world.
World Map of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups - Dominant Haplogroups in Pre-Colonial Populations with Possible Migrations Routes. (CC BY SA 3.0)


Dr. Tyler-Smith says in the press release: “The best explanation is that they may have resulted from advances in technology that could be controlled by small groups of men. Wheeled transport, metal working and organised warfare are all candidate explanations that can now be investigated further.”

The study found an explosion in the population of males around 55,000 to 50,000 years ago in Asia and Europe and about 15,000 years ago in the Americas. Later rapid expansions of male populations happened in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Europe, South Asia, and East Asia between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago.

“The team believes the earlier population increases resulted from the first peopling by modern humans of vast continents, where plenty of resources were available,” the press release states.


Time of haplogroup growth in different parts of the world.
Time of haplogroup growth in different parts of the world. (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute)


Nearly a year ago scientists reported in the journal Nature that the majority of European men are descended from just a handful of Bronze Age male ancestors.

The presence of genetic material from just a few men in the Y chromosome sequence resulted from a population explosion several thousand years ago, researchers said. The team of scientists found that there was a huge increase in the population 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, in a band from Greece and the Balkans to the British Isles and Scandinavia.

The scientists in that study also speculated that perhaps cultural and technological changes were involved in the population explosions.


Bronze-Age warriors
Bronze-Age warriors. (CC BY NC SA 2.0)


“The population expansion falls within the Bronze Age, which involved changes in burial practices, the spread of horse-riding and developments in weaponry. Dominant males linked with these cultures could be responsible for the Y chromosome patterns we see today,” Professor Mark Jobling of the University of Leicester said.


Most European Men are Descended from just Three Bronze Age Warlords, New Study Reveals

 

Bronze Age warriors on the lookout
Bronze Age warriors on the lookout (Mike Bishop / Flickr)


The majority of European men are descended from just a handful of Bronze Age male ancestors, says a new genetic study in the journal Nature.

The presence of genetic material from just a few men in the Y chromosome sequence resulted from a population explosion several thousand years ago, researchers said. The team of scientists found that there was a huge increase in the population 2,000 to 4,000 years ago, in a band from Greece and the Balkans to the British Isles and Scandinavia.


Europe in the late bronze age of about 1100 BC.
Europe in the late bronze age of about 1100 BC. (Map by Xoil, Wikimedia Commons)


Popular Archaeology reported on the study, saying the researchers from the University of Leicester in England, headed by Professor Mark Jobling, determined the origin of DNA sequences of a big part of the Y chromosome in 334 men from 17 populations in Europe and the Middle East. They found three very young branches of DNA account for Y chromosomes of 64 percent of the men who gave genetic material for the study. The team used new methods for analyzing DNA variation to give a less biased picture of diversity and to give a better estimate of timing of population variations.

"The population expansion falls within the Bronze Age, which involved changes in burial practices, the spread of horse-riding and developments in weaponry. Dominant males linked with these cultures could be responsible for the Y chromosome patterns we see today,” Jobling told Popular Archaeology.

Research into Europeans' genetic heritage had previously focused on Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) or New Stone Age (Neolithic) ancestor-farmers of about 10,000 years ago.

The principal author of the study in Nature, Chiara Batini of the University of Leicester, said: "Given the cultural complexity of the Bronze Age, it's difficult to link a particular event to the population growth that we infer. But Y-chromosome DNA sequences from skeletal remains are becoming available, and this will help us to understand what happened, and when."

A finding by researchers from Harvard Univerity in Boston found in 2014 that the European population was descended from three tribes where there was intermarrying. This study too was in the journal Nature.

The BBC, reporting on the study, said the modern European gene pool developed from the three populations within the past 7,000 years.

“Blue-eyed, swarthy hunters mingled with brown-eyed, pale skinned farmers as the latter swept into Europe from the Near East. But another, mysterious population with Siberian affinities also contributed to the genetic landscape of the continent. ... Multiple lines of evidence suggested this new way of life was spread by a wave of migrants, who interbred with the indigenous European hunter-gatherers they encountered on the way,” the BBC wrote.

The study found humans arrived in Europe about 45,000 years ago. These people were replaced by others who arrived from the Near East and the Levant about 7,000 years ago, researchers who examined ancient and modern DNA found. Researches from Harvard found most modern Europeans have a mixture of early European farmer DNA, western European hunter-gatherer DNA and some northern Eurasian ancestry.

For this study the researchers studied DNA in ancient bones of seven Scandinavian hunter-gatherers, one from Luxembourg and an ancient farmer from the area of Stuttgart, Germany and compared it to the genomes of 2,000 modern people around the world. So this was different than the more recent study by the University of Leicester, which examined just modern DNA of living men.




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2 comments:

  1. Most likely this occured after a great calamity happened on the planet. How else can we explain the age of the pyramids, given the approximate dates?
    I think this new population would be a "bottleneck" phenomenon.A population bottleneck (or genetic bottleneck) is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events.
    Now, please watch the following video. It has to do with the part played by the female in this phenomenon. It might be difficult to swallow, but given the
    information from the article, makes perfect sense. And something all wise humans should consider.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxpVwBzFAkw

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A challenging video indeed! There were at least two bottlenecks caused by catastrophic supervolcano eruptions - aside fromm the infamous Tola event which destroyed much of humankind circa 70,000 years ago, another eruption in Italy virtually wiped out all the Neanderthal people - and most of Europe - around 40,000 years ago. But these bottlenecks are not the only explanations...

      Delete

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