What DNA says about human ancestry -- and bigotry. Myth-maker Witzel should read Tok Thomson's review and OUP should withdraw the book.
shame on Oxford Univ. Press review policy
Any consideration that this book show be taken seriously will need to deal with the insightful points made in this review by Tok Thompson, University of Southern California:
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1613 (Appended for ready reference)
(All JFR Reviews are permanently stored on-line at
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/reviews.php)
OUP will do well to read this review which endorses the review at the india.edu URL provided above and withdraw Witzel's book since it exemplifies bigotry of the type described below. Spinning cock-and-bull stories and linking apples and oranges does not an academic work of scholarship make. Don't assume that any book by a person claiming to be in the academe is fit for publication. Make OUP editors review and do a due diligence check once more. Harvard Corp. which employs the author should also subject the work to review by Harvard U. Provost to evaluate the possible damage caused to the psyche of impressionable minds of students of Harvard U and other academic institutions which may inadvertently get access to the bigoted work.
OUP and Harvard Corp., do not allow prejudices to cloud social responsibility.
Kalyanaraman
What DNA Says About Human Ancestry—and Bigotry
Part 3, The Myth of Race
Village Voice
Mark Schoofs
Race and genetics form their own double helix, twisting together through history. The Nazis, as everyone knows, justified the death camps on the grounds that Jews and Gypsies were genetically inferior—but what is less known is that the Nazis took their cue from eugenics legislation passed in the United States. Here, race is defined primarily by skin color. Since that's a genetic trait, the logic goes, race itself must be genetic, and there must be differences that are more than skin deep.
But that's not what modern genetics reveals. Quite the contrary, it shows that race is truly skin deep. Indeed, genetics undermines the whole concept that humanity is composed of ''races''—pure and static groups that are significantly different from one another. Genetics has proven otherwise by tracing human ancestry, as it is inscribed on DNA.
Demystifying race may be the most important accomplishment of this research, but it has also solved some of the most intriguing mysteries of human history.
In 1918 a wounded woman showed up in a Berlin mental hospital claiming to be Anastasia, the last surviving member of the Russian imperial Romanoff family. Her story, from which she never wavered, engendered an epic controversy that ranged from courtrooms to the silver screen. The mysterious woman married an American, took the name Anna Anderson, and died in 1984, insisting to her grave that she was the true Anastasia.
After her death, an amateur historian bought some of Anderson's books.
In one was an envelope with some strands of her hair. He took them to Mark Stoneking, a Penn State University genetic anthropologist who would later confirm the identity of Jesse James's remains. Meanwhile an English geneticist had obtained some of Anderson's colon tissue that a hospital had stored after an operation. Both researchers analyzed the DNA. ''We found that our sequences matched each other,'' Stoneking recalls, ''but they didn't match the royal family.''
So who was Anna Anderson? ''One of the private investigators hired by other Russian nobility came to the conclusion that she was a Polish woman who had been working in a munitions factory,'' Stoneking says. There had been an explosion at this factory, which could explain the wounds that gave such credence to her tale of fleeing the Bolsheviks. The English team tracked down a relative of this Polish woman, and, indeed, her DNA matched Anna Anderson's.
If the Polish relative had come from the paternal side of Anderson's family, the English team would have been at a dead end. That's because they were analyzing something called mitochondrial DNA. Almost all human cells contain tiny bacteria-like entities called mitochondria. They provide energy to cells, and they have their own DNA, separate from the DNA that actually makes a person. Mitochondria are not in sperm cells; therefore, they are inherited only from the mother. They record a person's matrilineal heritage.
The paternal counterpart is the Y chromosome. Women, of course, lack the Y chromosome, so it is inherited strictly from father to son. It can be quite revealing to trace how the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA mix in a single population. Under the old South African apartheid categories, ''colored'' people were those who descended from black and white parents—but their Y chromosome almost always shows a European ancestry, whereas their mitochondrial DNA usually shows an African heritage. To put it plainly, white men were sleeping with black women, but black men were not sleeping with white women.
This pattern is common wherever one finds ''dominant and subservient groups,'' says South African researcher Himla Soodyall. In southern Colorado, for example, a group of Hispanics trace their ancestry to Spanish settlers from the 1500s, before Jamestown. ''Their oral history says they didn't mix with the native Americans,'' says University of Michigan researcher Andrew Merriwether, who studied this group. But genetics tells a different tale: about 85 per cent of them carry mitochondrial DNA of Native American origin. Other genetic markers show a strong European heritage, which indicates ''directional mating,'' says Merri- wether. As in South Africa, European men were sleeping with Amerindian women, but Amerindian men were rarely sleeping with European women. Partly this is because few Spanish women traveled with the conquistadores, but it's also due to sexual politics, and they are inscribed on DNA.
So are ancient human migrations. Thor Heyerdahl believed that Polynesians crossed the Pacific and helped populate the New World. By sailing his boat, the Kon Tiki, he proved such a voyage was possible—but DNA demonstrates that it didn't happen. Polynesians bear a distinctive motif on their mitochondrial DNA that is not present among any native American peoples, either those who are living now or mummies. So did the first Americans come from Siberia? Surprisingly, no. Mitochondrial DNA indicates that native Americans descend from Mongolians.
Such genetic history depends on statistics. Researchers test hundreds or thousands of people in a given population to find what motifs are present and in what concentrations. Then they look for other populations that possess the same markers. ''We try to construct the most likely historical scenario,'' explains Stoneking, ''but we can't rule out more complicated alternatives.'' He says scientists must triangulate ''the fossil, archaeological, and genetic evidence.''
But sometimes only DNA can settle questions of human history. Europeans almost all descend from farmers who slowly moved northeast from what is now Turkey. They subsumed the hunter-gatherers whom they encountered, but pockets of the old hunters still remain. The Saami people—formerly known as the Lapps—live in Scandinavia and speak a language close to Finnish. Finns and Saamis ''used to say they had a common history, one that goes back to Romantic myths of coming from the Urals,'' says University of Munich researcher Svante Paabo. Genetically, the Saami are indeed distinct from the mass of Europeans. ''But the Finns look like everyone else in Europe,'' says Paabo. ''The Finns borrowed their language from the Saami, probably when they came as farmers. Then they pushed away the Saami by taking more and more land.'' The Basques also seem to be an outpost of the earlier hunters; their DNA carries different motifs than that of the surrounding Europeans.
Japan was populated by ancient Koreans and, earlier, by a mysterious people called the Jomon, known only by their pottery and other archaeological remains. Where did they come from? To figure that out, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona looked at the Y chromosome. Surprisingly, the closest match to the Jomon variant lies in Tibet. How could an isolated mountain tribe thousands of miles from the sea be related to the first Japanese? The Tibetans and the Jomon might descend from a common tribe that lived in central Asia, where the Jomon-Tibetan motif is now found only rarely, superseded, perhaps, by the ceaseless mixing of people. But it might also be that migrants from Tibet crossed Asia and entered Japan on an ice bridge 12,000 to 22,000 years ago.
Even individuals can sometimes trace their heritage. (See box, Roots, DNA Style.) Matthew George, a geneticist at Howard University, is analyzing the DNA from bones found in the African Burial Ground in Wall Street's Foley Square. Since lab contamination is always a danger, he says, ''we test our own mitochondrial DNA.'' He recalls that an African American colleague had DNA that was closely related to people in Benin. ''She started dancing around saying, 'Oh, I'm from Benin, I'm from Benin.' I said, 'No, you're from Plains, Georgia. But, yes, your mitochondrial DNA comes from Benin.'''
With the promise of genealogy comes the danger of bigotry. Genetic classification could ''concretize the racist assumptions already out there in the scientific milieu,'' warns University of Maryland anthropology and biology professor Fatimah Jackson. ''This isn't an idle fear I have.''
Others share her uneasiness. Ashkenazi Jews are much more likely than other groups to have a mutation that causes breast and ovarian cancer. New York magazine recently called this the ''Jewish gene,'' even though non-Jews can also carry it. In the shadow of the Holocaust, some Jews worry about being stigmatized as genetically inferior.
So do African Americans. ''Medical literature is replete with black-white distinctions,'' says Jackson, and many of them are based on bad science. ''You realize they sampled 12 black men in Chicago, who are supposed to stand for all African Americans. Science begins with the collection of the sample and the definition of the group to be studied.''
The impact of what Jackson calls ''lazy genetics'' can be devastating. ''With anemia,'' she recalls, ''physicians were being told, 'When you see low hemoglobin levels in a black child, that's not anemia, it's just genetic and you don't need to treat. But the same level in a white child needs treatment.' So they disenfranchised all these people by geneticizing what might have been environmental.''
Specific problems such as this arise from a general set of assumptions about race. Biology textbooks used to show the ascent of man, leading from apes through Africans and Asians and culminating with Europeans. These racist hierarchies were justified in part by evolutionary theory. Two million years ago, various hominid ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa. Neanderthals settled in Europe--and some scientists argued that Europeans descend from Neanderthals, Asians from other hominids such as Peking Man or Java Man, and Africans from still other sources. Genetics has helped demolish this ''multiregional'' theory.
Mitochondrial DNA indicates that all living humans descend from one maternal source—christened Mitochondrial Eve—who lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Similarly, the Y chromosome shows that all men have a common ancestor, Y-chromosome Adam, who lived at the same time. (Actually, both analyses indicate that modern humans descend from a small founding population of about 5000 men and an equal number of women.) The time estimates are based on assumptions on how frequently genetic mutations occur. The mutation clocks of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome tick at different speeds, so the fact that they both indicate humans emerged at the same historical moment makes this evidence much more convincing.
Did modern humans coming out of Africa completely replace Neanderthals and the other earlier hominids—or did they interbreed with them? This year, Stoneking and researchers in Germany compared the mitochondrial DNA of modern humans to that of a Neanderthal skeleton between 30,000 and 100,000 years old. The conclusion: Neanderthals contributed nothing to human maternal ancestry.
But, says Svante Paabo, who led the Neanderthal project, the question of whether humans mated with other hominids, such as those in Asia, is still open. ''The ultimate answer will be to look at 100 or more loci in the genome,'' he says. ''If it all comes from Africa, then that would prove'' humans from Africa colonized the globe, replacing their older hominid cousins. But, he says, ''I find it hard to believe that there would have been absolutely no interbreeding, that it would be such a simple story.''
Indeed, the Y chromosome has begun to tell a more complicated tale. ''We found that the oldest branches in the Y chromosome tree trace to Africa,'' explains Hammer. ''But an intermediate-length branch seems to originate in Asia, and that one led to a newer branch in Africa.'' In fact, says Hammer, ''the majority of the Y chromosomes in Africa seem to be derived from one that may have come from an Asian source.'' Hammer thinks that after the initial human diaspora out of Africa, there was a reverse migration back into Africa between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago.
This doesn't prove Homo Sapiens bred with other hominids: Hammer's Asian Y chromosome could have arisen by mutation, not by interbreeding. But if some breeding with older hominids is proven, might that rekindle the old racist genealogies? Hammer doesn't think so. ''Each trait is floating around out there in geographical space,'' he says. In other words, every person's DNA is a mosaic of segments that originated at various times and in different places.
That helps explain a fundamental finding: Genetic variation within any race is much greater than between races. ''If you take even a small camp of Pygmies,'' says L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a pioneer of genetic anthropology, ''they are extremely different for all the genetic markers we look at.'' Indeed, they show almost all the genetic variation catalogued in the world.
Racial hierarchies are cultural, not scientific. While every group has genetic characteristics—and sometimes flaws—that are more common than in other groups, not everyone in the group will share them. The Afrikaners, much more than South Africa's other ethnic groups, are prone to porphyria variegata, the blood disorder depicted in the film The Madness of King George. It turns the urine purple and can incite temporary insanity. Almost all the South African cases of this disease can be traced to a single Dutch couple who married in Capetown in 1688. Being an Afrikaner is not a risk factor; being a descendant of this couple is.
Not only is race or ethnicity a poor predictor of most genetic traits, it is very hard to define. Many people think they can easily tell an Asian from a European, but, says Paabo, ''If we start walking east from Europe, when do we start saying people are Asian? Or if we walk up the Nile Valley, when do we say people are African? There are no sharp distinctions.''
Cavalli-Sforza has probably spent more time trying to classify human groups by genetic analysis than anyone else. In his massive book The History and Geography of Human Genes, he groups people into geographic and evolutionary clusters--but, he writes, ''At no level can clusters be identified with races.'' Indeed, ''minor changes in the genes or methods used shift some populations from one cluster to the other.''
Geneticist Steve Jones makes this point by looking at blood. ''We would have a very different view of human race if we diagnosed it from blood groups, with an unlikely alliance between the Armenians and the Nigerians, who could jointly despise the...people of Australia and Peru,'' who generally lack type-B blood, Jones writes in The Language of Genes. ''When gene geography is used to look at overall patterns of variation,'' he writes, ''color does not say much about what lies under the skin.''
Not only is our concept of race arbitrary, but it is based on a relatively insignificant difference between people. Skin pigment, eye shape, and hair type are all determined by genes. Indeed, as the human genome is mapped, geneticists might be able to reconstruct what mummies or other ancient people looked like. But the physical ''stereotypes'' of race, writes Cavalli-Sforza, ''reflect superficial differences.'' For example, light skin color is needed in northern climates for the sun's ultra- violet light to penetrate into the body and transform vitamin D into a usable form. This mutation may well have arisen at different times, in different ancestral groups, on different points along the DNA. That's true for cystic fibrosis, which occurs almost exclusively in people of European descent but is caused by several different mutations.
In other words, ''white people'' do not share a common genetic heritage; instead, they come from different lineages that migrated from Africa and Asia. Such mixing is true for every race. ''All living humans go back to one common ancestor in Africa,'' explains Paabo. ''But if you look at any history subsequent to that,'' then every group is a blend of shallower pedigrees. So, he says, ''I might be closer in my DNA to an African than to another European in the street.'' Genetics, he concludes, ''should be the last nail in the coffin for racism.''
That's the utopian view. But there are still scientists who claim that inferior genes plague certain races. J. Phillipe Rushton, a professor of psychology at Canada's University of Western Ontario, publishes books and articles claiming that ''Negroids'' have, on average, smaller brains, lower intelligence, more ''aggressiveness,'' and less ''sexual restraint'' than ''Caucasoids'' or ''Mongoloids.''
Rushton's views are on the extreme fringe, but even in mainstream genetics, largely discredited concepts of race persist. Scientific articles constantly speak of ''admixture'' between races, which implies a pure and static standard for each race. ''Where did these standards come from?'' asks Jackson. ''We've taken a 19th-century view of racial variation and plugged in 20th-century technology.'' Indeed, the whole notion of racial standards—of a pure Caucasian or a pure Negro—is exactly what modern genetics undermines. But, says Jackson, ''the philosophy hasn't caught up with the technology.''
Over time, ''genetics will help beat down racist arguments,'' says Eric Lander, a world-renowned geneticist at M.I.T. ''But they will need to be beaten down, because they will keep coming up.''
Research assistance: Ebony-Anne Smith, Dennis Lim, Mina Seetharaman
Also see part 1,part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7of this series
The Origins of the World's Mythologies
By E.J. Michael Witzel. 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[Review length: 1535 words • Review posted on December 5, 2013]
This is an astonishing book, but not for the reasons the author intended.
The Origin of the World's Mythology utilizes completely out of date and highly questionable scholarship to claim a grand scientific discovery which relies on the author's "theory" of ultimate mythological reconstruction, dating back all the way to reconstructed stories (i.e., made up by the author) told some 100,0000 years ago. The "theory" (I would say hypothesis) is implausible (in terms of data, scholarship, logic, internal plausibility, etc.), even more so than quasi-academic concepts, like Nostratic, which it relies on as proven fact.
The book's main claim is explicitly racist. I define "racist" here simply as any argument that seeks to categorize large groups of people utilizing a bio-cultural argument ("race"), and that further describes one such group as essentially better, more developed, less "deficient," than the other(s).
The book claims that there are two races in the world, revealed by both myth and biology: the dark-skinned "Gondwana" are characterized by "lacks" and "deficiencies" (e.g., xi, 5, 15, 20, 88, 100, 105, 131, 279, 280, 289, 290, 313, 321 315, 410, 430, 455) and are labeled "primitive" (28) at a "lower stage of development” (28, 29, 410), while the noble "Laurasian" myths are "our first novel," the only "true" creation stories, and the first "complex story" (e.g., 6, 54, 80, 105, 321, 372, 418, 421, 430), which the Gondwana never achieved.
Such a grand evolutionary pronouncement, published by Oxford University Press and penned by a Harvard Professor (of Sanskrit), demands attention and careful investigation of its claims. If the author is correct, then indeed the field of mythology, and folklore, will be entirely rewritten. Not only this, but the ideas of a separate, deficient "dark-skinned race" will be, for the first time, scientifically validated.
The theoretical justification of this work is derived from a sort of straw man contest between ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), representing monogenesis and diffusion, and Freud's errant disciple Carl Jung (1875-1961), with his universal archetypes of the collective unconscious. This straw man argument is not an appropriate one: Jung's theories have long been derided in scholarship on mythology, and the data have been shown not to support his claims of universals (Dundes, 2005). Indeed, the resounding refutation of universals not only invalidates Jung's theories, but also stands in direct contradiction to many of the claims of this book.
His sole factual claim to his grand separation of the races seems to be his assertion that only the light-skinned Laurasians developed a "complete" myth. He makes several claims about what this myth "is," but these are contradictory, vague, and with many exceptions or permutations (variously: 53, 64, 76, 120, 183, 323). At some points he claims that the only actual differences between the two is that the Laurasian has the world end, and the Gondwana do not (e.g., 283). At other times, however, he claims that the Gondwana actually have no cosmogonic myths whatsoever. For example:
• "Gondwana mythologies generally are confined to the description of the emergence of humans and their culture in a preexisting world" (5).
• "The Laurasian stress on cosmogony, however, is entirely absent in Gondwana mythologies" (105).
• "In Gondwana mythologies the world is regarded as eternal" (20).
• Describing Gondwana mythology: "In the beginning: heaven and earth (and sea) already exist" (323, restated 361).
This particular claim is made even more remarkable in light of his own comment on page 474, where he himself discusses the common African myth of the world being created from a god's spittle and/or vomit.
In previous publications the author argued that the Gondwana had no flood myths as well. However, in this book the author relates recently encountering Alan Dundes' The Flood Myth, which disproved the assertion (see the author's discussion, page 284). Taking pains to explain this change, the author now claims the flood myth "is universal" (wrongly: see Dundes 2005) and not, as he previously decreed, "Laurasian." This late encounter with Dundes' scholarship is instructive: Dundes is generally regarded as one of the most important folklore theorists of the last century, yet aside from this one problematic citation of The Flood Myth, no notice is taken of him, not even his classic work on myth, Sacred Narrative. Nor are other seminal recent works in scientific myth scholarship cited, such as Schrempp and Hansen's Myth: A New Symposium, or even the earlier Sebeok's Myth: A Symposium. The sustained overlooking of the scholarship on mythology over the last fifty years or more is one of the larger foundational problems of this work.
For example, aside from a brief early mention (45, 46), the concept of polygenesis is never considered as a potential explanation, yet a mere acknowledgment that different people do sometimes create similar-sounding plots and motifs removes any necessity to view every similar motif or narrative as united in some grand historical scheme (see Thompson 2002). An instructive case in point might be the flood myths of the seismically active coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest, held to be caused by mountain dwarves dancing (a compelling explication of which can be found in McMillan and Hutchinson 2002)—there is absolutely no reason to assume this is derived from the same source as the very different biblical flood myth, simply because they both involve floods in flood-prone areas. Stripped of any emic understanding of the explanatory and rhetorical majesty of sacred stories, myth is reduced to a mere grab-bag of words and motifs.
I consider my own research specialties, and the many Dene and Inuit/Yupiq mythologies I have heard, and watched, and read. In the Dene, and the Inuit, one finds no apocalypse stories, no end of the world. This should, then, disqualify them completely from the Laurasian. Nor is there "Father Heaven/Mother Earth," or the time of "nobles," or a "slaying of the dragon," or a "drinking of soma," all of which are expected to be in his Laurasian story (at least as per page 53). But according to the author, all this is irrelevant, since they are simply Laurasians who haven't told it all, or haven’t been recorded telling it, or have forgotten parts, or there is some other reason. In other words, they are Laurasian because he says they are Laurasian. But when the same question is asked of the South African San, who also do not have all those elements, the answer is that they are Gondwana. The criteria are not applied equally, but rather only as the author sees fit in justifying his hypothesis.
In chapter 4, the author seeks to buttress support for his hypothesis by using reconstructions in linguistics and genetics. Genetically, he states that specific DNA haplogroups "seem to represent the Gondwana type of mythology" (233). His appeal to linguistics is at least marginally more appropriate, as language is a cultural, not biological, phenomenon. But here, too, he utilizes less-than-scientifically-accepted hypotheses, such as a "Dene-Caucausian" language family linking Basque and Navajo, and "Nostratic." The all-too-breezy use of non-academic claims can be seen in the following two quotes, located on the same page (193):
"Nostratic theory has not been accepted by most traditional linguists."
"Once we accept the reconstruction of Nostratic, we can establish the natural habitat, the material culture, and the Weltanschauung and mythology of the Nostratic populations."
To be clear: if linguists don’t think that languages could be reconstructed back more than 6,000 years, why does the author believe they can, and further, that entire stories can be reconstructed for over 100,000 years?
Finally, the startling claim that the book proves the existence of two races, going against all other scholarly data, would have profound implications for global society as a whole, yet these implications are never discussed by the author. Instead, in his conclusion he claims that the reason Abrahamic religions have made inroads into the global south in recent times is simply because Laurasian myth is "better" and "more complete" than any ever formulated by the Gondwana themselves (430), a remarkably naïve view of global political history.
To conclude: this book will no doubt prove exciting for the gullible and the racist, yet it is useless—and frustrating—for any serious scholar. This is a work which should never have reached book publication stage: a whole series of scholarly checks and balances—ranging from Harvard's venerable Folklore and Mythology Department, to the editors and reviewers at Oxford University Press—should have been in place to guide the scholarly inquiry, which would have prevented the socially irresponsible publication of such grandiose, brash, and explicitly racist claims based on ill-informed, highly problematic scholarship.
Works Cited
Dundes, Alan. 2005. “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of American Folklore 118:385-408.
-----, ed. 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
McMillan, Alan D., and Ian Hutchinson. 2002. “When the Mountain Dwarfs Danced: Aboriginal Traditions of Paleoseismic Events along the Cascadia Subduction Zone of Western North America.” Ethnohistory 49:41-48.
Schrempp, Gregory, and William Hansen, eds. 2002. Myth: A New Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas, ed. 1966. Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Thompson, Tok. 2002. “The Thirteenth Number: Then, There/Here and Now.” Studia Mythologica Slavica 5:145-160.
http://www.indiana.edu/~jofr/review.php?id=1613 
