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Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

nature.com

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Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#61

Post by ImaCake »

Jedd wrote: post #33

It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective. The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived. There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did app…

> the original population was partly / mostly replaced

Thats not what this data shows. What it does show is that some migrants from india joined the existing culture and left a genetic, and presumably, cultural mark. When a smaller population mixes genetically with a larger population they effectively add a small amount of novel genetic markers to the population in what we call introgression.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#62

Post by dankwizard »

viewtransform wrote: post #30

More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…

The only thing more boring than hearing about peoples' dreams is hearing about their ancestral history.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#63

Post by ern »

ajross wrote: post #40
Jedd wrote: post #33

It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective. The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived. There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did app…

> emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate [...] The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative [...] that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning. [...] it's a shame Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.

From the article: a legacy of distrust about biological research among Aboriginal groups means that genetic studies are viewed suspiciously and samples are hard to come by

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#64

Post by codebje »

WalterBright wrote: post #35
jjtheblunt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following: spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).

I've heard it put more crassly as "barbarian grammar with french nouns"

The only thing that got hacked to pieces more than the English peasantry during the middle ages was the English language.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#65

Post by a_bonobo »

coderenegade wrote: post #52
ChickenNugger wrote: post #44

The only interesting thing I know about Aborigines is they're the only known people who didn't invent the bow and arrow. As a hobbyist archer this is fascinating to me. They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.

It's the wood. You can rank woods by the amount of strain energy per unit of mass that they can take before breaking. The higher this figure, the better the bow, because it'll store more energy for a lower mass in the limbs before it breaks, and the differences can be fairly significant. The best bow woods are all at the top of this list, along with a few that should be good in theory but aren't used likely for other…

Most Australian wood is also ultra-hard, you can't have a bendy bow from there. People used to build streets from blocks of Jarrah wood [1]. A much more popular Australian weapon was the combination of spear thrower and spear; that'll take your head off clean.

https://fremantlestuff.info/streets/blocks.html#:~:text=Aust....

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#66

Post by a_bonobo »

biorach wrote: post #32
causality0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is correct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3

The abstract of that article does nothing to support the claim that any Australian languages are originally from India.

You're right! The only sentence about India:

>An expansion [ of the family from the Gulf of Carpentaria] at this time is consistent with evidence from early genetic studies for gene flow into Australia from India ~4–5 ka21, but more recent work has called these findings into question

It doesn't talk about Indian languages specifically. The Gulf of Carpentaria is on the Australian side of the gulf between Australia and Indonesia.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#67

Post by nhchris »

ImaCake wrote: post #56
nhchris wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from ge…

Yes, ppl in the same country have more similar genomes. But modern population genetics has found that 1. There is more similarity than difference between any 2 humans on earth (there are africans and europeans who share more dna than with others of their own ancestry. And, 2. People move around, a lot! We knew this already but there are a huge number of undocumented migrations that are being revealed by these studies…

> there are africans and europeans who share more dna than with others of their own ancestry

You're probably referring to the "greater variation within than between races" argument. But it's only true when looking at single genes, not collections of genes - that is how genetic tests can accurately determine race. And most traits are polygenic, so it does not even make sense to compare using only individual genes.

That's the reason Asian couples don't spontaneously give birth to European-looking children, and vice versa. And genes not expressed in superficial appearance were exposed to selection pressure just as much.

Whenever you see a theory so obviously contradict the evidence of your eyes, you should be at least skeptical of it (though not dismissive - e.g. quantum mechanics are true, however counterintuitive)

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#68

Post by runsWphotons »

causality0 wrote: post #19
meepmorp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something like 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families Nonsense.

He is correct. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3

it seems the theory is more disputed than i remember, so lets say around 5000 years ago there was perhaps significant indian introgression into aborginal genetics (as per article above), the introduction of new tools, the arrival of the dingo (speculated by some to be introduced by these indian peoples) and the spread of this language family from a small progenitor language to the dominant language on the continent. So something significant was happening at that time. There are other hints there couldve been previous waves of new peoples from art and so on (these are disputed, from memory). The story of the aboriginals will wind up being more complex and interesting than "showed up 60,000 years ago and were unchanged until the first fleet".

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#69

Post by ChickenNugger »

coderenegade wrote: post #52
ChickenNugger wrote: post #44

The only interesting thing I know about Aborigines is they're the only known people who didn't invent the bow and arrow. As a hobbyist archer this is fascinating to me. They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.

It's the wood. You can rank woods by the amount of strain energy per unit of mass that they can take before breaking. The higher this figure, the better the bow, because it'll store more energy for a lower mass in the limbs before it breaks, and the differences can be fairly significant. The best bow woods are all at the top of this list, along with a few that should be good in theory but aren't used likely for other…

Huh! I have a locally made wood bow made from red oak and it's an absolute bastard to shoot. I think the bowyer wanted to one-up my 55# Samick sage so he made it a 56# draw weight. And even with a thick leather armguard it hurts quite a lot to shoot because the brace height is barely over 5" and it doesn't have a trigger grip being a piece of wood. I wonder where red oak ranks on the strain/mass chart. I'm used to hearing about yew being a really good wood for bows, but I'm more into shooting them than making them.

I did find this which appears to rank them: https://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/bow-woods/ but I don't know which if any of those are Australian.

Re: Aboriginal Australian genomes reveal Indian ancestry (2013)

#70

Post by emmelaich »

ChickenNugger wrote: post #44

The only interesting thing I know about Aborigines is they're the only known people who didn't invent the bow and arrow. As a hobbyist archer this is fascinating to me. They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.

There is the Woomera though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woomera_(spear-thrower)

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