Some help here please. My dad is Iranian so I am curious. I know for sure that Persians are not Arab but where or what is indo-europian? My dad has blue eyes and is one of the paleist people I know so that would make me belive that they migrated down from Russia way back in the day. However I have noticed some people from Iran have almost oriental features and that dosen't seem to go with what I think of as indo-europeian
Indo-european is generally descriptive of the family of languages spread throughout europe, iran and india. The original Persians were a group of steppe aryans closely related to the scythians and sarmatians. These people invaded modern day iran from the n east and imposed their culture and language on the inhabitants before eventually themselves becoming absorbed into the native population. Thats all i can remember off hand!
Persians are Iranians, my friend!The country was called Persia, up until 1935. A military coup in 1921 brought independence under Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925. Name of country changed from Persia to Iran, meaning "Land of the Aryans". "For over 100 years, the British and Russians had played imperial games with Persia. An attempt to escape from Anglo-Russian dominance led Reza Shah into dalliance with the Germans. To curry favor with the new Nazi government, Reza in 1935, without warning or explanation, decreed that Persia would henceforth be named "Iran," or Land of the Aryans.Hitler was quite pleased that a country would rename itself as the original homeland of his Aryan Master Race, so an alliance was formed, resulting in a joint British-Russian invasion of Tehran that kicked out Reza and installed his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the new shah. The son kept the Nazi-racist name "Iran," however, as did the fellow who overthrew him in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini."http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/12/2/124004.shtmlBy this point in history, ethnicities have been mixed and intermingled throughout time that it is hard to know just who's backround is what. But, supposedly, the Persians are decendents of the Aryans, who were originally from central Asia. Though some say that is not proven, as seen on this site: http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/aryan_people_origins.php"Against the reasons we will discuss, no valid evidence has been produced to prove that the Aryans migrated from Central Asia or any other place to Iran. What European historians have written in this regard is based on unscientific and unproven hypotheses influenced by anti-Iranian and political ideas."
I get so damn lazy! Thank you!
The markers on the Y-chromosomes of arab populations [edit - arabs aren't persians] indicate that they are descended directly from African immigrants, and predate the migration to central asia.
BTW Squatdog, you might be aware that for a while a Nubian/Kushite king ruled Egypt, and in fact started a number of public works projects, including pyramid construction. I don't believe anyone was living in caves at that time, though, although Northern Europeans (who are genetically distinct from Mediterraneans, btw) hadn't gotten around to building any monoliths, as they were still working on the tribal level and such massive projects were not really feasible at the time. Although I guess you could count stonehenge as a large construction project...
[edit - here's a ntional geographic link on the matter: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_sudankings.html]
"The markers on the Y-chromosomes of arab populations [edit - arabs aren't persians] indicate that they are descended directly from African immigrants, and predate the migration to central asia."
Im rather lost as to the relevance of this statement. Iranians arent Arabs, and most living Arabs still live in Africa.
"although Northern Europeans (who are genetically distinct from Mediterraneans, btw) hadn't gotten around to building any monoliths, as they were still working on the tribal level and such massive projects were not really feasible at the time. Although I guess you could count stonehenge as a large construction project..."
Depends really on how you define northern European, in a racial sense (as nordics) or in the sense that anyone who lives in n Europe is n european. Stone henge was built by paleo-atlantids who originally came from the near east and were mediteranean in racial type. However the aryans were described mainly as nordic, as was the upper class of ancient Greece and macedonia.
"I'm rather lost as to the relevance of this statement. Iranians arent Arabs, and most living Arabs still live in Africa. "
See Squatdog's post:
'All Arabs are Black!'
I was pointing out that Arab peoples are shown to be closely related to North Africans, more so than they are to Northern Europeans.
'However the aryans were described mainly as nordic, as was the upper class of ancient Greece and macedonia. '
Described by whom? According to the genetic samplings taken, the old (ie non-immigrant) populations of Greece and Rome carry middle-eastern markers, but not northern European.
It's all spelled out in 'Journey of Man: a Genetic Oddessy'.
Although today the whole structure is falling apart as the different groups are now intermingling again - genetic drift and all that. Thus in North America a person can have latter-day African markers and European markers etc.
Using these markers to classify people is not much use, since they're all comingling again anyway, but it does give clues as to how all the different peoples got where they are, and when, in what order, etc. Northern Europeans and North American Natives are now considered to have split from the same group in around Siberia, and both share markers with Inuit/Aluit that are not shared by anyone else . Although there is also evidence that a branch of oceanians also colonized North America.
Not that any of those people would look exactly like their descendants in the far future...
'How is it that Egyptians tend to exhibit 'caucasian' features, especially compared to the Sudanese(just across the border) who are distinctly 'black'? '
The features you consider 'caucasian' have been around probably from the beginning. Just family traits. Much like epicanthic folds.
'How is it that nearly all depictions of Greeks show classical caucasian features? Frescos of Alexander the Great always show him with tanned skin, green eyes and wavy hair. Are these Africa features? '
See above answer - although the tan skin is probably an adaptation.
When the various branches of humanity split off in the 2 waves of migration from Africa, and within Africa, the various peoples and tribes we have today did not exist, and the features one would associate say, with a Somali as opposed to an Ethiopian or an Egyptian had not yet crystalized.
Indubitably, some adaptations were due to a combination of diet and selective pressure. For example, pale skin is a sign of a drop in vitamin D, which we normlly get via diet or sun exposure. In a similar vein, it is now surmised that the dark skin of the Bantu language groups was also a later adaptation.
For a good insight into what the first modern humans looked like, I think it's instructive to look at the Oceanic peoples.
These people were the first to leave the African continent, but unlike the second wave, they didn't go through the middle east, but followed the coast, using the canoe. They populated the coast of Asia, the Australasian areas, and also landed on the West coast of North America where their sdescendants live to this day. While these people all have certain signature markers, phenotypically they are quite diverse, and include people who look like west Africans (eg, negritos) people with epicanthic folds, people with European features, people without but with blue eyes, etc. etc. And the full spectrum of hair texture.
Beyond that, people do change over time. The most ancient existing African (in fact human) tribe, the San, are a hodgepdge of characteristics we associate with 'races' in terms of facial structure, but they do not have certain features. For example, they are light-skinned ie tan, and their hair is much curlier (if you can imagine) than that of the Bantu language groups. Some of them have epicanthic folds.
What may cause a group to look more uniform has largely to do with reproduction and evolutionary pressures. For example, harsh environmental conditions may reduce the diversity of the population thrugh attrition. Or sexual politics may be at work - the faniliy with green eyes is wealthy or powerful, so they get breediong rights and others want to join up through marraige [edit - or they may not have a choice, there's always that dark side].
What most people don't realize is that the 'look' of various people isn't carved in stone. The genome has random minor mutations from generation to generation that occur at a fixed rate. When the tribes within Africa split, they didn't stop changing either. Again, back to the North American Indians, Northern Europeans, and the Inuit/Aluit - all of these people look different, but once they were all the same. Over the course of the ice age they had split up and become isolated from each other. They found different food to eat. Different families died off. And so over the millenia, they looked a bit different from each other. Not that different, really. I mean, there's more difference between a Somali and a Hausa than between Northern Europeans and the Inuit on a genetic level, at the level of minor mutations. This is because they separated more recently than did the Somalis and Hausas.
Back to the thread topic, it should be noted tahtthe Assyrians (the Iranistanis) did in fact invade Egypt, but not before pyramids were built etc.
Interesting lesson poobear ... will buy the book.
What's amazing is how relatively similar looking groups that have long-standing animus between them, such as Hutsis vs. Tutsis, or Croat vs. Serb, can completely tell one another apart whereas the outsider can't.
'By the definition Poobear presented, basically EVERYONE is Black, as we all share common ancestory.... '
Well, almost - don't forget, the very dark skin is thought to have shown up later on, like the very light skin. But it is true that we are all related in the literal sense - we share a common male ancestor and a common female ancestor, although she predated the male by many millenia. The common male is thought to have existed around the Upper Paleolithic (some people conjecture that he was the cause of the Upper Paleolithic, which was a sort of stone-age Industrial Revolution).
All of us can trace our ancestry to Africa, although many of our paths merge before you go too far back.
The race concept tries to partition humans into segments, whereas the genetic evidence points to a large family tree. Because it's a familiy, you can talk about degrees of kinship [edit - but just as I am darker than my wife but equally related as she is with my son, skin colour really doesn't show degree of relatedness, and never did - A Mohawk and a Swede aer more closely related than a Swede and an Italian]. And just like a family, everyone shares some traits but not others, and the combinations of sharing are varied. Thus my sister-in-law has a stature and head shape more like her father's, whereas my wife takes more after her mother. But you can still tell they are sisters. The fact that their parents came from a small community in Friesland (Netherlands) means that they are probably themselves relatively closely related if you go back enough generations. But that is happenstance, not determined biologically. And because it's a family, there is no real intuitive way to partition it - you can only show connections.
"Described by whom? According to the genetic samplings taken, the old (ie non-immigrant) populations of Greece and Rome carry middle-eastern markers, but not northern European."
The Greeks themselves said that a peoples Gods look like the people who worship them, and many of the Greek gods are described as blond/red haired or blue eyed. In the ancient epics of Greece almost all the Dorian/Achean characters are described as fair or red headed whilst the helot classes are usually described as being swarthy. In india the aryans left behind written works, such as the rig-veda and mahabhasya, describing themselves as 'white' and having brown hair and describing brahims (natives) as brown skinned.
"A Mohawk and a Swede aer more closely related than a Swede and an Italian"
I dont believe this for a second. Even, for arguments sake, accepting the OOA theory that caucasians and mongoloids have only recently diverged, this still wouldnt make sense. All Europeans are descended from 7 females who lived in paleolithic times, AFTER the mongoloid-caucasian split. Beides which there have been many genetic tests done on human populations to try and determine its course of evolution. Cvalli-Sforza (sp?) produced a dna map that showed amerindians clearly fall into the mongoloid clauster.
The Greeks themselves said that a peoples Gods look like the people who worship them, and many of the Greek gods are described as blond/red haired or blue eyed. In the ancient epics of Greece almost all the Dorian/Achean characters are described as fair or red headed whilst the helot classes are usually described as being swarthy. In india the aryans left behind written works, such as the rig-veda and mahabhasya, describing themselves as 'white' and having brown hair and describing brahims (natives) as brown skinned. This misses the point that being 'white' doesn't neccessarily mean you're from the same tribe circa the Ice Age. Plus, Greece didn't exist at this point. As I said, people change appearances over time, due to the mechanisms I alluded to earlier.' dont believe this for a second. Even, for arguments sake, accepting the OOA theory that caucasians and mongoloids have only recently diverged, this still wouldnt make sense.'Technically they never really diverged per se, because there never any geographic barriers. The gene flow has always flowed moth ways, and in fact they form a perfect 'cline'. And still do [edit - across the north and also in Iceland where the interbreeding started again centuries ago].' All Europeans are descended from 7 females who lived in paleolithic times, AFTER the mongoloid-caucasian split. Beides which there have been many genetic tests done on human populations to try and determine its course of evolution. Cvalli-Sforza (sp?) produced a dna map that showed amerindians clearly fall into the mongoloid clauster. 'The info I have posted is from very recent studies only possible within the last couple of years due to recent advances in DNA handling. This is result of sequncing the Y cromosome. The advantage the Y has over the mitochondrial studies (which is what they did with women) is that half the genes don't recombine, so you get better detail when mapping out the sequences [edit - because each change on that half is for sure a mutation, not a result of recombining, since it can't recombine]. I would be interested as to how you account for the fact that the M45 marker clocked in at 35,000 years ago just South of Siberia shows up in the M173 (western european) group which clocks at 30,000 years ago, the M17 (eastern European) group which clocks in at 10,000 years ago, the M242 group in Siberia at 20,000 years ago, and the M3 in North and South AMerica at 10,000 years ago. (Journey of Man, Spencer Wells, pages 182-183). In fact, Wells refers spefically to 'The History and Geography of Human Genes' by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza, as well as his [edit - Cavalli-Sforza, that is] more 'for the layperson' book 'Genes, People and Languages'. Nothing I have related to you violates what Cavalli-Sforza says, in fact it draws on Cavalli-Sforza's work, and goes so far as to put him at the top of the list for people reading this book to read. Which leads me to believe you misread Cavalli-Sforza's work, misremembered it, misunderstood it, or had it misrepresented to you.[edit - or perhaps Cavalli-Sforza's work didn't take into account the Y-chromosome evidence, as it is quite possible that the evidence wasn't there when he wrote his book. Science is funny that way...]
A brief excerpt from the book which may explain some things that seem to puzzle you:As we have seen, only a tiny fraction of the genetic diversity in the human species distinguishes populations from each other - the vast majority of variation is found within a single population. There are two reasons for this. The first is that we are a relatively young species. Around 50,000 years ago - only 2000 generations - our ancestors all lived in Africa. Given that mutations happen only infrequently, and that it takes a while for them to increase in frequency to a point where they can be sampled in the population, it is likely that most of the diversity we see now existed in this ancestral African population. This is particularly true for polymorphisms other than those on the Y-chromosome. Most of these other polymorphisms appear to be quite old, consistent with the fact that they were present in the ancestral population before our journey out of Africa. Furthermore, human 'races' seem to have very recent origins. For the most part, physical traits that distinguish modern geographic groups only appear in the fossil record within the past 30,000 years. (Note that by then, Europe had already been settled)Most older fossil Africans, Asians, and Europeans are very similar to each other. While we know nothing about our ancesor's skin colour, hair type, or other surface features, the evidence from bones suggest that our concept of race is actually a very recent phenomenon. It was probably the fragmentation of human groups as a result of the last ice age that produce the distinct 'racial' morphologies that we see in modern humans - not hundreds of thousands of years of separate evolution as Carleton Coon and others have argued. For example, sinodonty - the distinctive tooth pattern common to North-East Asia and the Americas - first appeared in the fossil record less than 30,000 years ago. Before then Asian teeth were very similar to those seen elsewhere in the world.The other reason for genetic uniformity among human populations is that humans are mobile, and groups have intermixed throughout their history. When this happens, their patterns of genetic variation become dispersed throughout the mixed population. So, even in cases where the genetic markers rose after modern humans migrated out of Africa - like most of the markers we have followed on the Y-chromosome - they will still be widely distributed as a result of subsequent mixing[edited for spelling errors]
* Bows to Poobear *
I am impressed.
poobear, I can understand when you say Y chromosome doesn't recombine as it doesn't pair with another Y chromosome at meosis, hence variation is likely to be caused by mutation. How does mitochondrial DNA recombine?, as it is seperate to choromsomal DNA, packed away in the mitochondria. I thought variation occurred like in Y chromosomes through errors in DNA replication and was inherrited in general maternally as small sperm cells contribute little mitochondria to the zygote.
THere is a lot of evidence that Aryans emigrated from India, not immigrated into India.
Normal
Good eye, when I wrote that bit I was going from (faulty) memory.
Both the MtDNA and the Y-DNA have the bebenfit [edit - from a research point of view] of not recombining. What the Y has over the MtDNA is it's length. MtDNA is 16,000 nucleotides long, Y is 50 million. This gives the Y more sites to polymorph, giving a higher rate of minor mutations over time, and thus a more detailed picture across time.
That's why the story is a bit new, Y research had a few technical glitches that had to be overcome.
The Y mutates itself, btw, in part to maintain diversity. Genetic diversity is important so that if the environment changes, a new form may be ready to deal with it.
One man's Mede is another man's Persian....
"One man's Mede is another man's Persian.... "
ha