History is funny

[tz]

Time and again I see "Peru, the birthplace of the potato..." or some such, which makes people think that the 'Irish potato' can trace its bloodline (sap line?) back to the Incas/Andes. But it ain't true. Our temperate zone spuds came from southern Chile. OK, so I knew that and figured that some Incan Johnny Taterseed walked them down there from Peru with a clay pot on his head to spread the goodness of spuds for mankind. But that didn't happen either. The people at Monte Verde, one of the oldest human habitation sites in the New World (pre Clovis) were eating wild potatoes, probably long before anyone ever said, "Hey, let's leave this nice warm costal area and freeze our nickers off up by Lake Titicaca." That means the people of southern Chile domesticated the wild potatoes at some point and the Spanish picked those spuds up on their way home. The Peruvian spuds, being tropical, wouldn't produce well in Europe 'as is'.

Maize, on the other hand, wandered up from the tropics and sat around in the southwest for a very long time until it made its way to the Mississipi Valley and across the Apalachains from southern Ohio into Pennsylvania around 600AD-700AD (maybe not even from the Southwestern stock). It then had 800-900 years of selection to make it adapted to short season northern latitudes as the distinctive northern flint corn before going back west to the Indians of the upper plains, there to meet with the southwestern flour corns. Beans didn't make it to New England until 1300 AD. In the 1800s Northern flint corn was crossed with southern varieties to make dent corn that could mature fast enough to be grown in the corn belt. So yes, Iowa corn came from Mexico (via several long paths), but Irish potatoes came from Chile.

An odd perpendiculo-parallel is the squash being grown in New England when the Basques and Bretans were over here whaling and fishing for cod. New England orange field pumpkins(C. pepo), came from Mexican domesticates (maybe with the corn), but pattypan summer squash and acorn squash (also C. pepo) came from the native wild gourds in the eastern and southeastern US.

So Indian corn is not from India, Irish potatoes aren't from Ireland or Peru. The Vikings were in Boston (region) before beans. Chile peppers aren't from Chile, but I put Irish potatoes from Chile in a chili recipe and won a contest with it in California, which used to belong to Mexico where the beans and peppers and tomatoes in it did come from...unless you want to argue that the tomato originally came from Peru.

[Tom Wagner]

History is indeed funny. For years Anthropologists maintained that modern man did not mix with Neandertals. They think now Europeans and their descendants are about 2.5% Neandethal. Researchers now think they also met another, less-known group called the Denisovans, and those genes are flowing within populations in China, Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, etc. Wait for the story to change and change. When I started college 49 years ago...the information sthingy fed at that time is near obsolete.

What we think we know about our own family history is changing. I had the Y chromosome tested for my maternal grandfathers side of the family through my uncle.

Haplogroup I1 (Y-DNA)
Subclade 1a3a1a
I1 is overwhelmingly a Norse Y chromosome

Haplogroup I is the oldest haplogroup in Europe and in all probability the only one that originated there (apart from deep subclades of other haplogroups). It is thought to have arrived from the Middle East as haplogroup IJ sometime between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago, and developed into haplogroup I approximately 25,000 years ago. In other words, Cro-Magnons most probably belonged to IJ and I (alongside older haplogroups like F and possibly even C).
The I1 branch is estimated to have split away 20,000 years ago and evolved in isolation in Scandinavia during the late Paleolithic and Mesolithic. I1 is defined by at least 15 unique mutations, which indicates that this lineage experienced a serious population bottleneck. Men belonging to this haplogroup all descend from a single ancestor who lived between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago.
During the Mesolithic period, pre-I1 and I1 people were part of the successive Ertebølle culture (5300-3950 BCE), Funnelbeaker culture (4000-2700 BCE) and Pitted Ware culture (3200-2300 BCE). The latter two are sometimes considered as Neolithic cultures due the introduction of farming. However, Neolithic farmers from Germany penetrated late into Scandinavia and in small numbers, and the lifestyle remained primarily one of hunter-gatherers. This is probably the reason why Scandinavia retained one of the most substantial Paleolithic ancestry in Europe.

….read further studies mentioning that at first (until about 40,000 years ago), Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons had the same tools, technology and lifestyle. Both buried their deaths, with similar ornaments. The Cro-Magnons then developed new tools, which were either copied or developed independently later by Neanderthals. As a matter of intelligence, both seem to be equivalent. Skeletons of hybrids of the two species dating from 25,000 years ago, around the time of the disapperance of Neanderthals, may indicate that their disappearance was indeed due to a genetic absorption by the increasingly numerous Cro-Magnons

I will eventually get the Y-DNA tested for the Wagner side of the family. Since my g.g. grandfather was from Luxembourg it will be interesting to see if is one of tho most common lines...either Celtic or Frankish.

[stevecrouse]

There appears to be quite a bit of Neanderthalish blood flowing up here in northern Maine at times!

[Tom Wagner]

Beware of Administrator bias!

With my training in Anthropology, I was aghast at the time (and now) of the dominance within the study that liberals possess. Books, professors,and the media viewed human evolution with racist distortions of scientific data. Liberal scientists support the "Out of Africa" Theory (Eve) because of their racial prejudices, and they suppress evidence which disproves it. I don't have any prejudice against my supposed Neanderthal ancestry...they were the original Europeans! The Neanderthals were a landrace so to speak and the co-mingling with so-called moderns races was was just part of human diversity. If my Manx fore-bearers co-existed with the Neanderthals and showed a "little love" and were "enriched" by it....then the liberal will have to re-analyze historical anthropological literature on ethnicity and biocultural interaction as a replacement for the race concept. Liberal Anthropologists want to think we are all from one woman, out of Africa, and tend to refute any true multicultural diversity.

Sometimes I think liberal anthropologists are the original sinners of Homo-phobia. They discount Neanderthals so quickly. Mankind is classified by the Latin name of Homo sapiens (wise man) and even if Homo neanderthalensis is within our blood doesn't that mean we are, in fact, all Homos? Show a little respect!

[nathanp]

I think the whole speciation descriptions/differences are a bit artificial, and we probably should hold those quite loosely. Neanderthal, Denisovan, Cro-Magnan, etc... there are several million years of unknown history and for all we know, Homo sapiens is the end result of promiscuous interbreeding between many of them. That seems quite likely to me.

[DarJones]

Our disease tolerance genes are derived from early neandertal.

I have to call a slight foul on the OP. The potatoes in Chile did indeed originate further north, most likely in the area of Peru and Ecuador. They managed to make their way to Chile somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago. As a result of humans transferring them? No way to tell.

You could have another very good discussion about the sweet potato which is known in Oceania as Kumari - the original Mocha (Peru) word for sweet potato is Kumar. The one overwhelming conclusion is that people have been traveling and trading across the oceans a lot longer than anyone suspected.

[marches]

Same with grape vines really. I get so tired of websites (mostly British ones) saying they're originally from the Mediterranean and Middle East.
The ancestor of Vitis vinifera (European wine grape and the grape you buy in shops) is Vitis sylvestris which has / had a large range stretching from Afghanistan in the south east to BELGIUM in the north. Now is Belgium anywhere near the Med?

Whilst Vitis vinifera was initially domesticated in Anatolia and the Caucasus, it has been bred with the wild grape Vitis sylvestris across its range and this was proven some years ago by genetic research.
What was found was that Iberian varieties are overwhelmingly from native Iberian V.sylvestris, that French varieties are derived from multiple populations - Italian (Roman introductions), Balkan, Middle Eastern and native French V.sylvestris.
The Pinot family of grapes is considered to be only two steps removed from wild V.sylvestris from the Rhine area.

Then there are hybrid grapes combining disease resistance of American varieties with the better flavour and cultural aspects of the European. American grapes are used since most of the diseases originate in America.
Vitus labrusca grows in woods, riparia along rivers and survives -50c in some cases and a species from the Russian far east, Vitis amurensis ripens in short seasons and survives -40c.
These hybrid vines, are they Mediterranean too? Hardly.

[marches]

Then there are apples. About a decade ago they did primitive genetic testing on them and said that cultivated apples were solely derived from Malus siversii from Central Asia. So we were meant to believe that a species that hybridizes with the European crab apple (Malus sylvestris) never produced good offspring with it?

Well they tested again latter when genetic testing had matured and found whilst Malus siversii was indeed the origin of apples, because they've bred so heavily with crab apples the majority of the ancestry in European apple varieties is actually from Malus sylvestris (European crab apple).
This is pretty amazing.

I too had a genetic test tom, I'm R1b L48 which is descended in turn from U106. It is common amongst nations speaking Germanic languages and is much higher in England than the rest of the British Isles.
Whilst this represents a direct ancestor for me (since haplogroups are a mutation that happened in a ancestor), the majority of my ancestry since will be from many different sources. This is basically the case for apples, their central Asian ancestor is about as far removed from modern apples as one can get, and looking at crab apples one can see that they're not very far removed from the wild.

Since cultivated and crab apples both grow readily in the wild here and hybridize I often find plenty of small, edible and decent tasting apples growing in the woods. Not worth releasing, but not too bad.
Unfortunately the modern trend for sweet apples is ruining this. I keep finding Golden delicious type apples now. I hate sweet apples like this, they have no acidity to give complex flavours. I prefer more acidic varieties like Cox's, Elstar or Idared. I might have to chuck a few apple cores in the woods at this rate.