The Political Use of Physical Anthropology

While collecting links for this issue, I found an article bearing the impressive title “New Research Refutes Myth of Pure Scandinavian Race.” (http://tinyurl.com/3z9sg2 )

Well, I thought, that’s a real firecracker to toss into our readers’ laps! Reading through the Science Daily account of DNA testing done on skeletons from Iron Age Denmark, I found out that Scandinavia was not an isolated cultural backwater, after all…but I already knew that. I learned that an Arab skeleton has been found in a Danish grave site…again, an interesting factoid, but hardly amazing. I was further informed that Iron Age Danes often did not die in the village of their birth…which again left me underwhelmed. So what is the point of telling us all these things we already knew?

Scientist Linea Melchoir delivers the message we’re supposed to get: "All of our ancestors, no matter when they arrived have contributed to our history and the development of our lifestyle. Indeed, Danish identity is more a definition of where one is physically located and lives today than a question of our past history - since we're all originally African in origin. That we ended up in Europe was accidental, which is in itself remarkable".

Okay, now we get it: A single Arab in a Danish cemetery, plus a relatively mobile population, now means that our “past history” doesn’t matter. And since Danish identity depends on “where one is physically located today,” all those new “Danes” from Algeria and Turkey and Somalia are just as Danish as someone whose ancestors followed the receding glaciers to Denmark after the last Ice Age.

The one that really gets me is the old canard about how “we’re all originally African in origin.” It’s possible that she didn’t really say that, or didn’t say it quite the way it was reported. Goodness knows, reporters have been known to stretch things to get the story their editors want, and maybe I should be kinder to Ms. Melchoir. But let’s take the quote at face value: That an anthropologist can toss out such a sophomoric cliché tells me one of two things: (1) She’s really ignorant and/or superficial, or (2) she wants to keep her job in a field where only certain attitudes and opinions are tolerated.

We are not Africans. In recent month, AFA Update has reported on studies showing that human evolution accelerated greatly when our (very) distant ancestors left Africa. (John Hawks, Eric T. Wang et al, Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution, http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/accel.pnas.smallpdf.pdf and a paper by Eric T. Wang, Greg Kodama, et. al. titled “Global Landscape of recent inferred Darwinian selection for Homo sapiens,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, January 3, 2006 (vol. 103, number 1). We adapted to our new environments through good old Darwinian selection. Important mutations affecting everything from lactose tolerance to cognition occurred in Europe and in Asia. The idea that we are just Africans with light skins is absurd.

But there’s more. The news account gushes that “there was as much genetic variation in their remains as one would expect to find in individuals of the present day. The research team also found DNA from a man, whose genetic characteristics indicate a man of Arabian origin.”

Note the juxtaposition and its implications: Humans, who of course are very diverse today, were just as diverse in ancient times. Arabs in the Iron Age, Arabs in the twenty-first century, it’s all good.

So, just how diverse are modern Europeans?

In The Seven Daughters of Eve, Brian Sykes concluded that at least eighty percent of the European genetic makeup goes all the way back to the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the continent during Paleolithic times. Nicholas Wade, in Before the Dawn, tells us that 78 percent of the male ancestors and 87 percent of the female ancestors of the average modern European belonged to this earliest stock (These figures would probably be much higher if they focused on Northern Europe rather than the continent as a whole). A study by Loring Brace and others in 2005 revealed that modern-day European faces reflect their ancestors all the way back to the Stone Age. So, to say that Iron Age Danes showed as much genetic diversity as their modern-day counterparts is just to say…well, that they weren’t very diverse. Science Daily leaves you with just the opposite impression, however.

Actually, aside from Dr. Melchoir’s silly statement, there’s no indication that the study contains any of the things Science Daily claims it does. Reading the abstract (see the link at the end of my rant), I found no claim that there was a large influx of genes from outside Europe. Nor does the abstract mention “pure Scandinavian races” or the refutation thereof. It seems the people at Science Digest just made the study mean what they wanted it to mean, with a little help (deliberate or not) from one of the scientists involved in the study.

Some writers and scholars have an agenda - to deny that those of us who are of Germanic descent are a distinct people, one of the related peoples making up the Greater Family of Europe. We will not desist in countering their propaganda.

http://tinyurl.com/3f9z6p - link to the abstract