Who's Really "More European"?

December 4, 2019

Until a few years ago, people thought that Northern Europeans were descended from indigenous Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and Southern Europeans from more recent Neolithic farmers from the Middle East. Nordic supremacists claimed that this made them "more European" because their ancestors had been in Europe much longer and they had almost no Middle Eastern or other foreign ancestry. This went with their belief that "pure Nordics" were responsible for all European achievement.

Thanks to the ancient DNA revolution, we now know that Neolithic farmers spread much deeper into Europe demographically than was previously thought (back in 1993 by Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues):

Cavalli-Sforza was especially interested in interpreting the genetic clusters among present-day people in terms of population history. He and his colleagues analyzed their blood group data by using a technique that identifies combinations of biological variations that are most efficient at summarizing differences across individuals. Plotting these combinations of blood group types onto a map of West Eurasia, they found that the one summarizing the most variation across individuals reached its extreme value in the Near East, and declined along a southeast-to-northwest gradient into Europe. They interpreted this as a genetic footprint of the migration of farmers into Europe from the Near East, known from archaeology to have occurred after nine thousand years ago. The declining intensity suggested to them that after arriving in Europe, the first farmers mixed with local hunter-gatherers, accumulating more hunter-gatherer ancestry as they expanded, a process they called "demic diffusion." Until recently, many archaeologists viewed the demic diffusion model as an exemplary merging of insights from archaeology and genetics.

The model that Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues proposed to describe the data was intellectually attractive, but it was wrong. Its flaws became apparent beginning in 2008, when John Novembre and colleagues demonstrated that gradients like those observed in Europe can arise without migration. They then showed that a Near Eastern farming expansion into Europe might counter-intuitively cause the mathematical technique that Cavalli-Sforza used to produce a gradient perpendicular to the direction of migration, not parallel to it as had been seen in the real data.

It took the revolution wrought by the ability to extract DNA from ancient bones — the "ancient DNA revolution" — to drive a nail into the coffin of the demic diffusion model. The ancient DNA revolution documented that the first farmers even in the most remote reaches of Europe — Britain, Scandinavia, and Iberia — had very little hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. In fact, they had less hunter-gatherer ancestry than is present in diverse European populations today. The highest proportion of early farmer ancestry in Europe is today not in Southeast Europe, the place where Cavalli-Sforza thought it was most common based on the blood group data, but instead is in the Mediterranean island of Sardinia to the west of Italy.

Compare the early estimates of Anatolian farmer ancestry in Europe to the more accurate estimates of today:


It's still a bit lower in Northern Europe, but that's because it was displaced by a group of pastoralists from the Russian steppe called Yamnaya who arrived even later (less than 5000 years ago during the Bronze Age) and had a lot of another kind of Middle Eastern ancestry (from the Caucasus/Iran) plus a component from way out in Siberia called Ancient North Eurasian that's related to Native American Indians:

The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.

The Tide from the East


[...]

The Yamnaya emerged from previous cultures of the steppe and its periphery and exploited the steppe resources far more effectively than their predecessors. They spread over a vast region, from Hungary in Europe to the foothills of the Altai Mountains in central Asia, and in many places replaced the disparate cultures that had preceded them with a more homogeneous way of life.

[...]

Our analysis of DNA from the Yamnaya — led by Iosif Lazaridis in my laboratory — showed that they harbored a combination of ancestries that did not previously exist in central Europe. The Yamnaya were the missing ingredient, carrying exactly the type of ancestry that needed to be added to early European farmers and hunter-gatherers to produce populations with the mixture of ancestries observed in Europe today. Our ancient DNA data also allowed us to learn how the Yamnaya themselves had formed from earlier populations. From seven thousand until five thousand years ago, we observed a steady influx into the steppe of a population whose ancestors traced their origin to the south — as it bore genetic affinity to ancient and present-day people of Armenia and Iran — eventually crystallizing in the Yamnaya, who were about a one-to-one ratio of ancestry from these two sources.

[...]

...the frequencies of mutations in northern Europeans today tend to be intermediate between those of southern Europeans and Native Americans. He hypothesized that these findings could be explained by the existence of a "ghost population" — the Ancient North Eurasians — who were distributed across northern Eurasia more than fifteen thousand years ago and who contributed both to the population that migrated across the Bering land bridge to people the Americas and to northern Europeans. A year later, Eske Willerslev and colleagues obtained a sample of ancient DNA from Siberia that matched the predicted Ancient North Eurasians—the Mal'ta individual whose skeleton dated to around twenty-four thousand years ago.

How could the finding of an Ancient North Eurasian contribution to present-day northern Europeans be reconciled with the two-way mixture of indigenous European hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers from Anatolia that had been directly demonstrated through ancient DNA studies? The plot became even thicker as we and others obtained additional ancient DNA data from hunter-gatherers and farmers between eight thousand and five thousand years ago and found that they fit the two-way mixture model without any evidence of Ancient North Eurasian ancestry. Something profound must have happened later — a new stream of migrants must have arrived, introducing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry and transforming Europe.


What's most ironic is that it's actually all the later "non-European" Middle Eastern ancestry, including a component called Basal Eurasian, that made Europeans become "more European" (i.e. more Caucasoid, i.e. "whiter") and more homogeneous than they would have been, because the original Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, like Ancient North Eurasians, actually had affinities to East Asians:

Lazaridis was trying to understand a peculiar Four Population Test result showing that East Asians, present-day Europeans, and pre-farming European hunter-gatherers from around eight thousand years ago are not related to one another according to the tree model. Instead, his analysis showed that East Asians today are genetically more closely related on average to the ancestors of ancient European hunter-gatherers than they are to the ancestors of present Europeans. Ancient DNA studies prior to his work had already shown that present-day Europeans derive some of their ancestry from migrations of farmers from the Near East, who I had assumed were derived from the same ancestral population as European hunter-gatherers. Lazaridis now realized that the ancestry of the first European farmers was distinct from European hunter-gatherers in some way. Something more complicated was going on.

[...]

Present-day Europeans and Near Easterners are mixed: they carry within them ancestry from a divergent Eurasian lineage that branched from Mal'ta, European hunter-gatherers, and East Asians before those three lineages separated from one another.

Lazaridis called this lineage "Basal Eurasian" to denote its position as the deepest split in the radiation of lineages contributing to non-Africans. The Basal Eurasians were a new ghost population, one as important as the Ancient North Eurasians, measured by the sheer number of descendant genomes they have left behind. The extent of the deviations of the Four Population Test away from the value of zero that would be expected if the populations were related by a simple tree indicates that this ghost population contributed about a quarter of the ancestry of present-day Europeans and Near Easterners. It also contributed comparable proportions of ancestry to Iranians and Indians.

[...]

After around fourteen thousand years ago, a group of hunter-gatherers spread across Europe with ancestry quite different from that of the people associated with the preceding Magdalenian culture, whom they largely displaced. Individuals living in Europe between thirty-seven thousand and fourteen thousand years ago were all plausibly descended from a common ancestral population that separated earlier from the ancestors of lineages represented in the Near East today. But after around fourteen thousand years ago, western European hunter-gatherers became much more closely related to present-day Near Easterners. This proved that new migration occurred between the Near East and Europe around this time.

[...]

The farmers in present-day Turkey expanded into Europe. [...] They mixed with local populations there and established new economies based on herding that allowed the agricultural revolution to spread into parts of the world inhospitable to domesticated crops. The different food-producing populations also mixed with one another, a process that was accelerated by technological developments in the Bronze Age after around five thousand years ago. This meant that the high genetic substructure that had previously characterized West Eurasia collapsed into the present-day very low level of genetic differentiation by the Bronze Age.

So Northern Europeans actually have a ton of the Middle Eastern ancestry that Nordicists have always looked down on. And while they still have some of their beloved European hunter-gatherer ancestry, it turns out that's Asian-related. Furthermore, large parts of their Middle Eastern and Asian/Amerindian-type ancestries arrived long after Paleolithic and Neolithic times in the Bronze Age.

Of course, the same goes for Southern Europeans, but they generally have more of the older Neolithic farmer ancestry and less of the exotic "Asiatic" ancestries. And the originators of European civilization — Minoan and Mycenaean Greeks, as well as Etruscans and Romans — were genetically like modern Southern Europeans, not like modern Northern Europeans as the Nordicists have always claimed.

So in a pissing contest of who's "more European", playing by Nordicists' own rules, Southern Europeans would have to be considered the "winners".

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David Reich. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Related: Phenotypes of Hunters and Farmers

12 comments

Onur Dincer said...

I know you ask your question "who is more European" sarcastically to mock the Europeanness fetish of Nordicists and turn it upside down. So on a more serious note the question that is actually being tackled is "who is more Caucasoid" or "who is more West Eurasian" (because, as you point out, it seems that European hunter-gatherers were less Caucasoid than modern Europeans), and you point that it is southern Europeans rather than northern Europeans who are more Caucasoid based on the ancient DNA results. I agree with you based on the current ancient DNA results, but I would add that with increasing number of ancient DNA results from West and especially East Eurasia in the coming years we will have a more definite answer to this question than now.

Racial Reality said...

That's part of it, but it's also the timing of migrations. Nordicists used to say that Mideast ancestry from ~40,000ya was "European", but from ~10,000ya was not. So Mideast and Siberian ancestry from ~5000ya must be even less European.

Onur Dincer said...

True. Especially for CHG. For EHG I should say that their ANE ancestry came to Europe some thousands of years earlier than 5000 ya. This discussion of who is more European is illogical or done on an illogical basis (I am saying this for especially Nordicists as they are the ones who start it in the first place). The discussion of who is more West Eurasian (Caucasoid) is much more meaningful from a scientific viewpoint.

Palermo Trapani said...

Racial Reality:

Nice post. I appreciate the way you challenge both the Nordicists and Afro-centrist with the studies you review and post on.

Cheers,

Jason Muniz said...

I consider Southern Europeans especially Latins(broad sense) and Middle Easterners, Iranics/Aryans in particular,true master/imperial races. The era when the Romans and Persians contested for world supremacy must have been quite a time. But in both cases, the populations are not purely neolithic or ANE, autosomally speaking, however they are dominated by R1 haplogroups. I have a feeling that that ancient Perso-Roman/Latin rivalry will return once these Germanics and Slavics fall of their pedestals(which they got on thanks to Southern Europeans).

Lucian said...

Even before reading this very well written article, I believed that Southern Europeans are the older population and the builders of the first civilizations in Europe. Here is just one simple argument: if you visit Malta, you will see megalithic temples (made of massive, even over 50-ton blocks!) as old as 3600 B.C., that is, from a time when the main ancestors of the Northern Europeans were not in Europe yet, but also one thousand years before the first pyramids were built in Egypt. They are also older than the better known Stonehenge. The population that built those megalithic structures originated in Sicily. How does this support those often repeated fairy tales: European civilization came from the East, or the North, or Africa, depending on the propaganda source?
Jason Muniz, you are absolutely right, but you forgot the Greeks, who also disputed world supremacy with the Persians a few centuries earlier. The era of Alexander and his successors must have been quite a time too.

Disciplinalucis said...

Greeks are up there but they seem to have a tragic and/or anarchic mentality which eventually ruins their ambitions for global dominance. This is unlike the victorious, pragmatic and universalist mentality of the Romans. In my opinion there are only 4 or 5 civilizations/societies in our epoch: Latin Mediterranean(the west as it is stupidly called), Near Eastern Islamic, Hindu, Chinese, and Slavic Orthodox. Our world today is similar to the world of the Diadochi and the Late Roman Republic but also very similar to the world of Late Antiquity.

Onur Dincer said...

In my opinion, the civilizations that have continued to our era can be summed up as follows:

1- Greek
2- Assyrian (think of the Neo-Assyrian Empire centered in Mesopotamia and the Levant with Aramaic as the favored language, which would later contribute a lot to Hebrew and Arabic)
3- Indian
4- Chinese

All these civilizations crystallized during the Axial Age and have come down to this day under different guises (including different languages, scripts, religions, denominations, states and institutions). Judaism appeared in the periphery of the second one but was gradually drawn to its core, likewise did Zoroastrianism. Christianity appeared in the contact zone of the first two post-Hellenism and in turn has transformed them both. Islam appeared in the periphery of the second one in the post-Hellenistic and post-Christian era and was also gradually drawn to its core while transforming it at the same time. The third one gave Buddhism to the fourth as the main influence while the second one would give the third Judaism and Christianity (very limited in both cases) and later Islam (much more successfully in its peripheries in the northwest and northeast), a religion which would at the same time have a significant lasting impact on the southeastern regions of the first one and on the northwestern periphery of the fourth one.

PES said...

And while they still have some of their beloved European hunter-gatherer ancestry, it turns out that's Asian-related.

I was under the impression that ANE was on genetically the west side of the West Eurasian/East Eurasian split that occurred 45,000 years ago.
Did you mean geographically Asian? If so Mal'ta–Buret was indeed in Irkutsk, but the Sungir EHG burials demonstrate that they probably ranged as far west as Vladimir Oblast which is well into Europe. Hence why they are called Ancient North Eurasians and not Ancient North Asians.

Arch Hades said...

Basal Eurasian definitely played a significant role in so called "Caucasoid" morphology, in my opinion. Think about it, It's present all over Eurasia and Africa, North of the Sahara and West of the Himalayas. It was actually a fusion of this with the Crown Eurasians who settled West Eurasia that we call modern Caucasians or Caucasoids.

But then again, RR. Why are Causasoids phylogenetically closer to Africans than Mongoloids, Native Americans, or Australians are to Africans? Probably because of Basal Eurasian, no? Not to mention Basal Eurasian probably expanded starting about 30,000 years ago out of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Considering it was in greater geographic proximity to Africa, probably genetically too.

So in my view.

1. Northern Europeans are more European. I mean if they have more ancestry dating to Upper Paleolithic Europe, they have to be more European.
2. Southern Europeans are more Caucasoid.
3. "Caucasoids" (Basal Eurasian, Western Crown Eurasian hybrids) are more related to AFricans than pure Crown Eurasian branches of Mankind including the pre Basal Eurasian people of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

Curt said...

This isn't quite right and of course, Reich has an agenda.

East African urheimat
South Eurasian urheimat(pre flood persian gulf)
Eurasian divergence by Expansion from south eruasian urheimat into eurasian hunter gatherers.
South Eurasian continuity
Ice Age
Anatolian-Caucasian Eurasian divergence
Ancestral North Eurasian divergence
Post Ice Age counter-clockwise migration
Hunter gatherer hybridization
Agrarian revolution expansion and hybricization
Stepp Herder Revolution expansion and hybridization.

Human history consists of isolation events causing speciation (competitive advantage) and hybridization, where the hybrids almost always replace previous generations.

The hybridization of ANE,ANF,EHG produced today's western whites, south Eurasian iranic peoples (just as large), and iranic-indian hybridization.

Spectrum of hybridization is south european, west european, north european, easte european, scandinavian, baltic, russian, finnic then a jump to the central asian (iranic), and north asian (turkic -> Mongol).

The degree to which a race is 'evolved' is measurable. And yes, in the case of rate of adaptation, which is largely social and intellectual, we can measure the advancement of races. There are only two really, europeans and east asians. East asians took neoteny too far and paid for it. But they have a better group strategy for defeating the south eurasian spectrum: they're teh borg. We fail at every attempt at hybridization and only succeed by replacement. taht's our problem.

MyeDin said...

@Jason Muniz

I think that what will happen is either east asians will rise (thanks to northern european misjudgment of elevating them economically) or a resurgence of northern european power, the low impulse control mediocre intelligence groups of the mediterranean and middle east do not have what it takes to compete in a globalized world and are further spiralling into irrelevance. I mean think about it MENA in europe and australia are functionally equivalent to africans as were early italian immigrants to the US. I think the competition for supremacy will be fought between east asians and north europeans with cool judgement and low time preferences.