1. This topic of U6 is the only back migration "evidence" being given
2. That this(http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_U6_mtDNA.shtml) is the only source in reference to U6 that is being given
Like I said before, I'm still making an assessment but right now this is looking like what I thought it would(red flags everywhere) Instead of giving my final opinion(which I don't have yet) I'll walk you through how I arrived at my current thoughts on the source given....
My assessment timeline:
My Biases:
First off I'm going into any source claiming an ancient + back migration + Africa with alarm bells ringing.
Why?
Anyone who's done a decent share of work on Africa knows that the African "back migration" narrative has been spun off on everything from...
1. Ghana/Mali/Songhai wasn't started/ran by African people it was started by whites from the north and ran by Arabs
2. Great Zimbabwe wasn't built by Africans it was built by wondering Phoenicians
When they don't have Arabs, Phoenicians, "hamites", MF'n aliens, they then invoke the "ancient back migration" into Africa(of course of white people) ...though now a days the white part isn't explicitly added and left to be implied/inferred.
3. Egypt wasn't built by Africans it was built by people(Caucasians) from an ancient back migration
I.E. The "ancient back migration" is what's relied on when it's to far back in time to point to any specific group of people like Arabs or Phoenicians.
Timeline:
1. I goto the link http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_U6_mtDNA.shtml and read over the article "Haplogroup U6 (mtDNA)"
2. From that first once over I ask "what is this some kinda wikipedia user generated article or professional? ....what is this eupedia anyway?"
3. Clicks and reads the "about us" at the bottom of the page.
4. Red flag #1 this is literally a European centered site and it's explicitly stated to boot.Eupedia.com was founded in December 2004 by Maciamo Hay.
Our aim is to create a detailed and informative guide to countries of the European Union, with an emphasis on travel, history, culture and life in Europe.
Since 2009, Eupedia also has a dedicated section for genetics focusing chiefly on European population genetics, historical genetics and genetic genealogy, as well as related fields such as prehistory, archaeology and anthropology.
At Eupedia we consider that the knowledge of history is essential to understand the complex ethnic, cultural and linguistic patchwork of the modern world. Retracing the ancestry and ancient population movement in Europe and its interactions with other regions like West Asia or North Africa provides valuable insight into what it means to be European today and what common heritage Europeans share with their neighbours. Understanding the diversity of genetic variations in society and how numerous historical migrations shaped our genes and identity is one of the most potent ways to eradicate xenophobia and dispel myths about racism.
(now being European centered in and of it self means nothing ...but it doesn't calm the alert I entered the site with)
5. Ok fine but still who wrote the U6 article?
6.Author: Maciamo Hay. Last update December 2014
7. Red flag #2 wait, the same dude who made the European centered site wrote the U6 article? Well damn!
8. Well now who is "Maciamo Hay"?
9. Clicks on his name and his academia page pops up https://independent.academia.edu/MaciamoHay full of various genetics papers.
10. Ok good so far this is something he does on a regular. But what is independent .academia.edu ?
11. http://support.academia.edu/customer/en ... researcher
Deleting An Affiliation or Becoming an Independent Researcher
Last Updated: Sep 28, 2016 05:39PM PDT
12. So this is a guy with no co-authors or peers to review his material before publishing. Ok fine I know plenty of people who have done/do the same.In some cases, you may wish to delete an affiliation, or remove all affiliations to become an independent researcher. You can do this by accessing your affiliations from your profile edit drop-down.
...
If you would like to have your primary affiliation be independent, but also have secondary affiliations
At this time, we do not offer this feature. If you would like to be viewed as an independent researcher, than you cannot have any additional affiliations. If you would like to affiliate with any schools or other institutions, you cannot also show independent researcher status.
13. So apparently this is just a random knowledgeable dude who has an interest in genetics with a fancy blog. Check
Checks for bias
14. Him having European focused website doesn't mean he is bias but lets check his other work to see what is the case.
15. Looks over his work on J haplogroup http://www.academia.edu/6100770/Origins ... up_J_mtDNA_
(J haplogroup was always one they try to claim constitutes a "back migration" so lets see if he's trying it here also)
16. Origins and history of Haplogroup J (mtDNA) Author: Maciamo Hay. Originally published in January 2014. Last revised in September 2016
17. Well nothing serious he seems to be ignoring Africa all together only mentioning it about twice.Geographic distribution
Haplogroup J is relatively evenly distributed across all Europe. The only population in which it is absent are the Saami fromLapland. The highest frequencies of mtDNA J in Europe are found in Cornwall (20%), Wales (15%), Iceland (14%), Denmark(13.5%), Sardinia (13%), Scotland (12.5%), England (11.5%), Switzerland (11.5%), the Netherlands (11%) and Romania(11%). In the Middle East, it is most common in Saudi Arabia (21%), followed by Kuwait (16%), Yemen (15%), Kurdistan(15%), south-west Iran (14%), Iraq (13%), and the United Arab Emirates (12%). Local peaks are also observed among someCaucasian ethnic groups, such as the North Ossetians (16%) and the Dargins (11%).
....
Origins & History
The mutation defining haplogroup J is thought to have taken place some 45,000 years ago, probably in West Asia. It isestimated that J2 split first from J* around 37,000 years ago, followed by J1 some 33,000 years ago. Between the Last GlacialMaximum (c. 26,500 to 19,000 years before present) until the end of the last glaciation (c. 12,000 years ago), J lineagesbranched off in seven main subclades: J1b (± 23,000 ybp), J1c (± 16,500 ybp), J1d (± 20,000 ybp), J2a1 (± 16,500 ybp), J2a2(± 20,500 ybp), J2b1 (± 15,500 ybp) and J2b2 (± 11,000 ybp). Note that the current nomenclature does not include anysubclade called J1a anymore (the previous J1a was renamed J1b3a).
....
- Maciamo HayOn the other hand, J1b has never been found in Europe before the Bronze Age and was very probably brought by the Indo-Europeans carrying R1b paternal lineages. Both the Unetice and the Urnfield cultures are thought to have been founded mainly by R1b men. J1b has also been found among African tribes carrying R1b-V88 lineages, which would presume that J1bwas one of the original maternal lineages found in R1b populations at least since the Early Neolithic (see R1b history). The absence of J1b in Bronze Age sites associated with the expansion of the R1a branches of the Indo-Europeans (Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian) supports that European J1b is exclusively associated with ancient R1b populations.
...
Middle Eastern subclades
J1b (xJ1b1), J1d, J2a2, J2b1b and J2b2 are rare in Europe and essentially confined to the Middle East. J2a2 is also commonin north-western Africa (J2a2b and J2a2d).
18. I don't detect any intentional malice on his part toward African people, simply a focus on Europe ...which given that it was implicitly stated as the goal of his website I'll let him cook.
Proof of his claims
19. Ok, lets go back and assess this guys claims....
20. What's with all the weasel words like "though to", "probably", and "might"Although now found primarily in western, northern and north-eastern Africa, haplogroup U6 descends from the western Eurasian haplogroup U, and therefore represents a back migration to Africa. Secher et al. (2014) estimated that U6 arose very approximately 35,000 years ago (±11 ky), during the Early Upper Paleolithic, and prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).
- Maciamo HayThe oldest and largest subclade, U6a, would have appeared around the LGM. U6a lineages are thought to have spread in several waves across North Africa, probably starting around 20,000 years ago, following the northern coastline of Africa. Several U6a branches (U6a1, U6a3, U6a6, U6a6b, U6a7, and U6a7b) appear to have expanded within the Maghreb from 20,000 years ago, with some spreading to the Iberian Peninsula (U6a1, U6a1b).
...
This expansion might have been carried by the arrival of domesticated cattle from the Middle East by men belonging to Y-haplogroup R1b-V88 as U6b is typically found in herding populations in which both R1b-V88 and U6b are present, including the Berbers of the Maghreb, the Fulani people of the Sahel and the Hausa people of Sudan.
21. Wait, this guy isn't even the original researcher he's just referencing & interpreting someone else's work(Secher et al. (2014) ) ...now I do the same so that's not a problem. That said I want to know what the original study says in the context it was given.
(Down the rabbit hole I go)
The history of the North African mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U6 gene flow into the African, Eurasian and American continents - BMC Evolutionary Biology 2014
http://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/ar ... 148-14-109
22. So this is the original study(abstract, methods, results) check. lets get it in.
Abstract
Background
Complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome analyses have greatly improved the phylogeny and phylogeography of human mtDNA. Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U6 has been considered as a molecular signal of a Paleolithic return to North Africa of modern humans from southwestern Asia.
23. Wait, ..."southwestern Asia" as in the Arabian peninsular?
Maaaaan they need to stop it. What does " southwestern Asia" even mean 35,000ybp? Especially within the context of what this entire post is about, which is the phenotype of this woman. The same people on the peninsular were the same as the ones on the other side of the red sea.
100,00 ybp
He and his international team of scientists returned to Oman in 2010, and on the final day of their surveying season, at the last site on their list, "we hit the jackpot." The find was a very specific stone tool technology used by the "Nubian Complex," nomadic hunters from Africa's Nile Valley. Nubian technology is a unique method of making spear points that was previously only known from North Africa. Rose's team ultimately discovered over a hundred workshop sites where these artifacts were manufactured en masse. "It was scientific euphoria," he describes.
The Nubian origin and inland location of the discovery were equally unexpected. "We had never considered the link to Africa would come from the Nile Valley, and that their route would be through the middle of the Arabian Peninsula rather than along the coast," Rose notes. "But that's what the scientific process is all about. If you haven't proven yourself wrong, you haven't made any progress. In hindsight, the Nubian connection makes perfect sense. The Nile Valley and Oman's Dhofar region are both limestone plateaus, heavily affected by perennial rivers. It's logical that people moved from an environment they knew to another one that mirrored it. At the time when I'm suggesting they expanded out of Africa, southern Arabia was fertile grassland. The Indian Ocean monsoon system activated rivers, and as sand dunes trapped water, it became a land of a thousand lakes. It was a paradise for early humans, whose livelihood depended upon hunting on the open savanna."
Accurately dating Rose's Nubian discovery was made possible by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) technology, which can determine the last time a single buried grain of sand was exposed to light by measuring the amount of energy trapped inside of it. The technique revealed the tools to be 106,000 years old, exactly the same time the Nubian Complex flourished in Africa. This also means Rose's theory places the first exit from Africa much earlier than previously believed. "Geneticists have shown that the modern human family tree began to branch out 60,000 years ago. I'm not questioning when it happened, but where. I suggest the great modern human expansion to the rest of the world was launched from Arabia rather than Africa."
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explo ... frey-rose/
**full study** The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi ... ne.0028239
40,000ybp
-- The Incredible Human Journey 14 December 2009The skull is 40,000 years old - the oldest remains of our species in Europe. The skull has a big round braincase just like us, but has very big teeth compared to modern people, and a more rugged-looking face. Forensic sculptor Richard Neave has used the skull to reconstruct what the person looked liked.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005llpc
30,000ybp +
“From a genetic point of view, several
recent genetic studies have shown that
subSaharan genetic lineages (affiliated
with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade;
Underhill et al. 2001) have spread
through Egypt into the Near East, the
Mediterranean area, and, for some
lineages, as far north as Turkey
(E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniogclu et al.
2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during
several dispersal episodes since the
Mesolithic(Cinniogelu et al. 2004; King
et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003;
Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al.
1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al.
2001).
This finding is in agreement with
morphological data that suggest that
populations with sub-Saharan
morphological elements were present in
northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic
to at least the early Holocene, and
diffused northward to the Levant and
Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.
Indeed, the rare and incomplete
Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal
specimens found in Egypt - such as the
33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen
(Pinhasi and Semai 2000), the Wadi
Kubbaniya skeleton from the late
Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley
(Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian
(Faiyum) early Neolithic crania
(Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes
2000), and the Nabta specimen from the
Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western
desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980) -
show, with regard to the great African
biological diversity, similarities with
some of the sub-Saharan middle
Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan
specimens. This affinity pattern
between ancient Egyptians and
sub-Saharans has also been noticed by
several other investigators..”
--Ricaut and Walekens (2008) ‘Cranial
Discrete traits)
Nazlet Khater man was the earliest modern human skeleton found near Luxor, in 1980. The remains was dated from between 35,000 and 30,000 years ago. The report regarding the racial affinity of this skeleton concludes: "Strong alveolar prognathism combined with fossa praenasalis in an African skull is suggestive of Negroid morphology. The radio-humeral index of Nazlet Khater is practically the same as the mean of Taforalt (76.6). According to Ferembach (1965) this value is near to the Negroid average. " The burial was of a young man of 17-20 years old, whose skeleton lay in a 160cm- long narrow ditch aligned from east to west. A flint tool, which was laid carefully on the bottom of the grave, dates the burial as contemporaneous with a nearby flint quarry. The morphological features of the Nazlet Khater skeleton were analysed by Thoma (1984). The 35,000 year old skeleton was examined using multivariate statistical procedures. In the first part, principal components analysis is performed on a dataset of mandible dimensions of 220 fossils, sub-fossils and modern specimens, ranging in time from the Late Pleistocene to recent and restricted in space to the African continent and Southern Levant.
---Thoma A., Morphology and Affinities of the Nazlet Khater Man; Journal of Human Evolution, vol. 13, 1984
3,300ybp
Peter van der Veen investigates an Egyptian presence before the time of David
Noah Wiener • 02/25/2013
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail ... -jerusalemThe initial study by Gabriel Barkay (which Peter van der Veen refers to as “reminiscent of nothing so much as Sherlock Holmes”) exposed Egyptianizing column capitals, a hieroglyphic stela and two Egyptian-style alabaster vessels that likely served as burial gifts. Peter van der Veen expanded the investigations of Gabriel Barkay to include figurines and Egyptian statues as well as a funerary stela referring to the local “ruler” of Bronze Age Jerusalem.
The Egyptian artifacts date to the 13th century B.C.E., during the 19th Egyptian Dynasty that included the reign of Ramesses II. Peter van der Veen writes “Egypt was not new to Canaan in the 19th dynasty … Canaan was in effect an Egyptian province during the 14th century B.C.E.” In the famous Amarna letters, Abdi-Heba, the puppet-king of Jerusalem, proclaims that “the king has placed his name in Jerusalem forever.” While Bronze Age Jerusalem was not situated on Canaanite trade routes, Peter van der Veen notes that it controlled north-south traffic between Hebron and Shechem, as well as east-west traffic from the Via Maris to the King’s Highway. The Egyptians established a garrison at Manahat, just two miles southwest of Bronze Age Jerusalem.
24. Heck and that's even before the issue of being archaic itself. I.E. the further back in time you go the less meaning it even bears. Why? Because the further back in time we go the closer everyone is genetically anyway. ...and that's not me speaking, that's the phylogeny speaking.
25. Hell stuff like "light skin", "blue eyes", etc as genetically marked in Europeans didn't even evolve/enter Europe until around 8,000 ybp.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z4aI8WYD00"The researchers found five genes associated with changes in diet, body size and skin pigmentation that underwent natural selection in the past 8,000 years. Two of the genes were associated with producing light skin - SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They found that the remains of early hunter gatherers who lived in Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary around 8,500 years ago, they lacked these key gene variants. However, in the remains of hunter gatherers that had lived in Motala 7,700 years ago, they carried both variants of SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 that produced lighter skin. They also carried another gene known to produce blue eyes in Europeans. Surprisingly they found a fourth set of genes in the DNA from these people suggests these people may actually have been related to people living in East Asia at the time.Dr Mathieson and his colleagues also found that when the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe, they carried with them genes for light skin. At this time the SLC24A5 gene quickly became prevalent in southern and central European populations and then around 5,800 years ago. These gene is known to account for between 25-40 per cent of the skin tone lightening in Europeans. Around 5,800 years ago the gene variant for SLC45A1 then becomes prevalent, lightening skin colour further. The results contradict the traditional view that lower sunlight levels in Europe would have favored lighter skin. The study also showed that around 4,800 years ago a group of herders known as the Yamnaya migrated from the steppes between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, carried with them genes for tallness to northern and central Europe.
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... laims.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/ ... white-skin
Genomes document ancient mass migration to Europe
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31695214
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14317
Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe
http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/earl ... 7.full.pdf
-The Incredible Human JourneyThe oldest European
Alice Roberts is in Romania, somewhere to the south of Transylvania, exploring the remote cave of Pestera Cu Oase (the Cave of Bones). In 2002, divers discovered a hidden chamber full of bones. Silviu tells Alice about discovering cave bear bones and then, amongst them, pieces of a human skull, which they painstakingly fitted back together. The skull is 40,000 years old - the oldest remains of our species in Europe. The skull has a big round braincase just like us, but has very big teeth compared to modern people, and a more rugged-looking face. Forensic sculptor Richard Neave has used the skull to reconstruct what the person looked liked. He doesn't know if the skull was a man's or a woman's - it is rather androgenous. The facial features - as expected for such an old skull - are generic, with hints of African, European and Asian characteristics. The earliest Europeans were much darker skinned than later Europeans, having only just arrived from more tropical places.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005llpc
https://youtu.be/mR9RcStvsTE?t=2m
"No southwest Asian specific clades for M1 or U6 were discovered. U6 and M1 frequencies in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe DO NOT FOLLOW similar patterns, and their sub-clade divisions do not appear to be compatible with their shared history reaching back to the Early Upper Palaeolithic."
--Erwan Pennarun, Toomas Kivisild et al.
Physical variations in any given trait tend to occur gradually rather than abruptly over geographic areas. And because physical traits are inherited independently of one another, knowing the range of one trait does not predict the presence of others. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south; its intensity is not related to nose shape or hair texture. Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.
--American Anthropological Association
http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.
[...]
"From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations. From a genetic point of view, several recent genetic studies have shown that sub-Lines: 369 to 3770.0pt PgVar Normal PagePgEnds: TEX [554], Saharan genetic lineages (affiliated with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade; Underhill2 et al. 2001) have spread through Egypt into the Near East, the Mediterranean area, and, for some lineages, as far north as Turkey (E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniog¢lu et al. 2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during several dispersal episodes since the Mesolithic (Cinniog¢lu et al. 2004; King et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003;6 Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al.7 2001). This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward10 to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.
"Indeed, the rare and incomplete Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal specimens found in Egypt—such as the 33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen (Pinhasi and Semal 2000), the Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton from the late Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian (Faiyum) early Neolithic crania (Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000), and the Nabta specimen from the Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980)—show, with regard to the great African biological diversity, similarities with some of the sub-Saharan middle Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan specimens. *This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic–early Holocene populations from northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations."
--F X Ricaut · M Waelkens
Article: Cranial Discrete Traits in a Byzantine Population and Eastern Mediterranean Population Movements
Human Biology 11/2008; 80(5):535-64. DOI:10.3378/1534-6617-80.5.535 · 1.52 Impact Factor
Many human craniofacial dimensions are largely of neutral adaptive significance, and an analysis of their variation can serve as an indication of the extent to which any given population is genetically related to or differs from any other. When 24 craniofacial measurements of a series of human populations are used to generate neighbor-joining dendrograms, it is no surprise that all modern European groups, ranging all of the way from Scandinavia to eastern Europe and throughout the Mediterranean to the Middle East, show that they are closely related to each other. The surprise is that the Neolithic peoples of Europe and their Bronze Age successors are not closely related to the modern inhabitants, although the prehistoric/modern ties are somewhat more apparent in southern Europe. It is a further surprise that the Epipalaeolithic Natufian of Israel from whom the Neolithic realm was assumed to arise has a clear link to Sub-Saharan Africa. Basques and Canary Islanders are clearly associated with modern Europeans. When canonical variates are plotted, neither sample ties in with Cro-Magnon as was once suggested. The data treated here support the idea that the Neolithic moved out of the Near East into the circum-Mediterranean areas and Europe by a process of demic diffusion but that subsequently the in situ residents of those areas, derived from the Late Pleistocene inhabitants, absorbed both the agricultural life way and the people who had brought it.
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/1/242.short
