[HN Gopher] Archaeologists extract DNA of ancient Israelites
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Archaeologists extract DNA of ancient Israelites
Author : wslh
Score : 63 points
Date : 2023-10-10 10:51 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.haaretz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.haaretz.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| First I want to note this:
|
| The greater the genetic differences, the more likely a population
| will survive a pandemic.
|
| Interesting research, but people forget one thing about Human
| Genetics.
|
| Outside of Africa, genetic differences between people are not
| that great. People in Africa have far greater genetic differences
| than everyone in the Americas and Eurasia.
| amanj41 wrote:
| Can you explain why that is the case? I would have thought that
| the large amounts of immigration from many places to countries
| like the U.S. would lead to greater genetic diversity.
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| Not the OP but I'm guessing that it's because humans in
| Africa were isolated in thousands of communities/regions for
| hundreds of thousands of years and evolved separately.
| Meanwhile the diaspora outside of Africa spread via select
| communities in a much shorter time. Somewhat
| counterintuitive.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Humans originated in africa, and only a subset of our species
| genetic diversity ever _left_ africa. So all immigration from
| "many places" still represents only a subset of the existing
| diversity.
|
| There is also some immigration directly from africa, but that
| can only increase it to _at most_ the same as exists there.
| Almost certainly somewhat less, in practice.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Thank you for the clear explanation.
|
| I've heard that humans were at some point reduced to a very
| small number, like thousands of individuals.
|
| So how did a few thousand individuals become such great
| genetic diversity? Does genetic diversity come from being
| isolated, instead of mingling with other migratory groups?
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Human genetic diversity on the whole is very, VERY low
| compared to other species. The superficial physical
| variation we associate with ethnic diversity (skin tone,
| nose shape, lip shape, hair color/texture, eye folds and
| angles) are genetically insignificant compared to their
| visual impact.
| livinginfear wrote:
| It's worth noting that this is not the only hypothesis for
| the origin of modern humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Multiregional_origin_of_modern...
| roughly wrote:
| Interestingly, even within Africa, the human genome notably
| lacks variability, to a point where it's hypothesized that
| there was a fairly severe population bottleneck at some
| time in the last couple hundred thousand years.
| myhf wrote:
| oh gee i wonder what that bottleneck could have been
|
| _cough_ mysterious 1:4:9 monolith _cough_
| rbanffy wrote:
| I don't remember exactly where I read that, but from
| mitochondrial DNA it was calculated that at some point we
| were down to 50 or so individuals.
| jmclnx wrote:
| You can do a search for that, I read that article a few years
| ago but never saved the link.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Humans have been living in Africa for as long as humans have
| existed--let's call that a round 300,000 years. The
| populations around where humanity first existed therefore
| reflects accumulated genetic diversity for all 300,000 years.
|
| Let's say 100,000 years ago, a small group of humans left
| Africa for the other places of the world. That small group of
| humans represent a very small fraction of genetic diversity--
| it's effectively genetically identical. Assuming no more
| admixture over the millennia, the out-of-Africa humans will
| get more genetically diverse. But so are the original
| Africans, who _also_ have the genetic diversity they started
| with--they 're getting diverse no less quickly than the out-
| of-Africans, and since they _started_ more diverse, the
| entire out-of-Africa can 't ever catch up.
|
| Real genetics is of course more complicated than this simple
| picture, but the basic principle holds that you find more
| diversity the closer you get to the origin.
| epivosism wrote:
| Think about how much you know about a random country, say
| Hungary. Probably only one composer, maybe one movie. But in
| Hungary there are millions of books, movies, etc most of
| which never left.
|
| Same for humans during migrations. Only a small percent of
| humans left Africa, and then only a smaller percent kept
| going, etc. So as long as not much time has passed to
| generate new variation in the areas they settle, only a small
| fraction of local variation ever leaves is low. And that's
| what we see, Africa is extremely diverse, Europe/Central Asia
| less, east Asia even less, etc. It's neither bad nor good,
| just a number.
|
| There are some other factors, such as mixing with people
| already present at the destination for a long time
| (Neandertals, Denisovans) which balance it out slightly.
|
| The US has lots of diversity, but there were a lot of groups
| in Africa for a very long time (maybe 10k+ separate groups).
| It's unlikely that people from each one have made it here, or
| even out of Africa at all, in significant numbers.
| droptablemain wrote:
| It's the founder effect. While on the surface it looks like
| "large amounts" of migration, it in fact represents a very
| small percentage of the gene pool. That group effectively
| becomes an isolated breeding population (though it's far more
| complex than that because groups would often encounter other
| groups and there would be interbreeding and such).
| [deleted]
| foogazi wrote:
| This coupled with current events reminds me of the Marx quote:
|
| > "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare
| on the brains of the living."
|
| Hope someday we can move on from whatever team we were born into
| voz_ wrote:
| Hard to move on when other people will kill you for it. Maybe
| the perpetrators of violence can move on first?
| aradox66 wrote:
| This is more or less Sartre's take on the identity of
| Jewishness, that it is essentially defined and maintained by
| the forces of antisemitic discourse and violence. Arguably a
| reductive, even insulting, understanding of identity and
| culture but still a compelling one for many people, people
| make the same arguments about womanhood and misogyny,
| Blackness and racism.
| drc500free wrote:
| A less charged version of this is Daniel Boyarin's take in
| "Border Lines," that early Christianity and early Rabbinic
| Judaism were largely defined in opposition to each other.
| I.e. that being "not that other thing" both established a
| bright line division where one didn't previously exist, and
| shaped the things on each side of that line. (And in his
| opinion, created the very concept of "a religion" as a
| distinct package of culture and ideas where previously it
| was more integrated across social activities and
| behaviors).
|
| As Christianity became dominant, it began to schism
| internally with much the same pattern, fractally defining
| parts of itself as things like "not Arian" or "not
| Catholic." Judaism, embedded within Christian society,
| still primary organizes around being "not Gentile" which
| ranges from simply Christian to full blown anti-semitism
| and pogroms.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "that early Christianity and early Rabbinic Judaism were
| largely defined in opposition to each other"
|
| I never heard of that theory, but I don't think it makes
| a lot of sense. I would think early christians mainly
| defined themself by believing in jesus christ, meaning
| they believed Jesus from Nazareth was the Messias and the
| other jews did not believe jesus was the messiahs.
|
| And then you had christians who believed jesus
| resurrected from the death and those who did not. Then
| you had those who believed it was only a jew thing and
| then you had Paulus, who made it a universal religion,
| ... so all in all, plenty of different things people
| believed in. So surely some groups of people define
| themself by what they are not, but I don't think this was
| valid of early christians.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| "they believed Jesus from Nazareth was the Messias and
| the other jews did not believe jesus was the messiahs"
|
| Isn't that definition in opposition?
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Not in my understanding: it is
|
| group A believes in X
|
| group B believes in Y
|
| What the parent poster seemed to imply was
|
| group A believes in not Y.
|
| Or a more concrete example of today, many people today
| define themself by being anti green, anti progressive,
| anti woke, antifashist etc. but often struggle to define
| what they are standing for.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I recently saw an interview with Natan Sharansky who was a
| Soviet dissident who spent many years in Soviet jails
| fighting to be allowed to immigrate to Israel. His take on
| Jewishness at least in context of USSR was that Jews were
| completely assimilated and only the antisemites defined
| them as such and hated them and that's all. I think jews in
| Nazi germany as well suddenly found themselves jewish by
| the Nazi genocidal ideology while before it was complete
| assimilation with the German culture.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That seems a bit taken out of context. The Old Man wasn't
| talking about ethnic identity, but about political /
| revolutionary / national traditions in the context of the
| revival of Napeolonic imagery (and autocracy) in France.
|
| Like many things with him, the quote can also be turned on its
| head when read in full context. Just like when people quote _"
| Religion is the opiate of the masses"_ they rarely read the
| rest of the sentence _" the heart of a heartless world"_.
| Negative judgement was not being cast on religion just a
| description of the reality of the situation: the world sucks
| for the mass of people and people reach for God to save them
| from it.
|
| Likewise the traditions of the dead generations can also be
| beautiful dreams. The powerful can and do use the past or
| religion or whatever to build a mythos for the purpose of
| domination, but the weak can reach for it as a tool of
| liberation, too.
|
| Good book: https://www.amazon.com/Fatherland-Mother-Earth-
| National-Ques...
|
| (early journal-article version here:
| file:///home/ryan/Downloads/titusland,+SR_1989_Lowy.pdf)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Love that I put a file URL there and it's too late to edit.
| Not embarassing at all: https://socialistregister.com/index.p
| hp/srv/article/download...
| breakyerself wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how it compares to modern groups of
| people. I don't think having ancestors in a place 1700+ years ago
| gives you defacto claim to ownership either way though.
| [deleted]
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| With the abrogation of the Mosaic covenant, I am not sure
| what the status of the Promised Land is.
|
| EDIT: Correction, the Promised Land is part of the Abrahamic
| covenant.
| aradox66 wrote:
| I'm curious which theological/mythical abrogation you're
| referring to! Rabbinic tradition generally considers
| covenant regarding living on the land indefinitely
| suspended since the 73 CE exile began. Modern religious
| Jewish Zionist movements claim that suspension is validly
| terminated and covenant renewed in the act of reclaiming
| the land by force, mostly motivated by a post-Holocaust
| reassessment of the waiting-for-moshiach strategy.
|
| Contemporary Christian Evangelicals understand Jewish
| relocation to the land to be a necessary prerequisite for
| the Rapture. IDK much about the background or history
| there.
| wslh wrote:
| Please keep the discussion civil. The findings and the future
| publication shows a great archeology achievement.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It matters little what science or anthropology generally says
| -- nationalist/nativist ideology pretty much always fits the
| facts to the desired outcome, and ignores those that can't be
| made to do so. (From any "side")
|
| In the end, "legitimacy" of a group claiming exclusive access
| to a piece of land comes down to might-makes-right.
|
| The other stuff is usually window dressing.
| aksss wrote:
| > the other stuff is usually window dressing
|
| Makes for good grievance politics though, eh?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Wouldn't it be amusing if the Israelites were genetically
| Canaanites --- just with religious differences?
|
| Someone would have a lot of explaining to do. Or maybe a lot of
| denying and covering up to do.
|
| This would flip the scripture so to speak.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > Wouldn't it be amusing if the Israelites were genetically
| Canaanites --- just with religious differences?
|
| As I understand it, that is the expectation: The consensus
| among archeologists seems to be that ancient Israelites were
| simply another group of Canaanites who came to dominate the
| region. The Exodus is not a historical event.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > Israelites were simply another group of Canaanites
|
| Yes.
|
| > The Exodus is not a historical event.
|
| This does not follow from your premise at all. (Nowhere does
| it say that people of the Exodus weren't Canaanites
| genetically.)
| optionalsquid wrote:
| My comment was not meant as an argument with the last
| sentence as its conclusion. Sorry for the (obvious) lack of
| clarity on my part.
|
| Rather, the statement about the Exodus was meant to expand
| on the "who came to dominate the region": It was meant to
| convey that they did not come to dominate through
| systematic genocide of the other Canaanites as depicted in
| the bible. It is my understand that there is little to no
| evidence of this event (or the preceding events) having
| occurred.
|
| The overall understanding that I was trying to communicate
| was simply that the ancient Isrealites were Canaanites who
| stayed in Canaan.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > they did not come to dominate through systematic
| genocide of the other Canaanites
|
| That does not follow either. Civil wars happen all the
| time, and are usually accompanied by large-scale ethnic
| cleansing.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| > That does not follow either. Civil wars happen all the
| time, and are usually accompanied by large-scale ethnic
| cleansing.
|
| It is my understanding that there is little to no
| evidence of such an event having occurred.
| hobo_in_library wrote:
| nit: (as a non-Christian) There is little to no
| __archeological__ evidence
|
| The Bible's testimony itself, along with conclusion that
| people believed in this historical event at some point in
| time, is at least a some evidence towards it.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Claims are not evidence. Mythology is not evidence. The
| more you examine the early books of the Bible, the more
| ridiculous they become.
| bawolff wrote:
| Yeah - its like say the illiad. Did the trojan war happen
| exactly like that? Obviously not. Was there some big war
| that inspired it? Probably.
|
| Like, you shouldn't take the events of the bible
| literally, but you could probably reasonably infer that
| the nations demonized in it probably were historical
| enemies of the people who wrote it, etc
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The problem with this thinking is that many of the
| "early" books of the Bible appear to be written much
| later than the "later" books, and while they are probably
| a record of the attitudes of the writers, they record
| their attitudes as of the time they were written, not as
| of the time period the claim to represent.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes. Basically, this would flip the Old Testament on it's
| head.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it wouldn't and is basically assumed as fact already.
| wslh wrote:
| The point here is not to target the Old Testament but think
| in wider terms about believes vs. history/archeology. You
| can find similar challenges in other religions and
| cultures.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| The point is to accurately unveil history.
|
| Nothing I said suggests otherwise. I was simply looking
| at potential aftereffects of the unveiling --- and why
| any such unveiling might be vehemently opposed by
| entrenched non-scientific interests.
| wslh wrote:
| > I was simply looking at potential aftereffects of the
| unveiling
|
| I think the world is less run by logic than people
| generally think. I don't think there will be an
| aftereffect. There is an Status quo and that's it. This
| observation is general and in anyway targeted in the
| context of the article. The Status quo involves any of
| us.
| hersko wrote:
| This is Haretz; the point probably is to target the Old
| Testament.
| wslh wrote:
| From the article I understand that the Israelites were a
| group of Canaanites. Regarding the Exodus, again, according
| to this article, there could be a connection between the
| withdrawal of the Egyptians from the region. The topic of
| challenging scriptures (for every religion) with archeology
| is very interesting because you need to have the mind open
| where one and/or the other have gray areas but you cannot
| repress them.
| bjourne wrote:
| That is mostly assumed these days. The Israelites were people
| that inhabited the Canaanite hinterland. Where they came from
| and whether they "came from" somewhere else is unknown and we
| can only speculate. Perhaps they were herders who migrated
| westwards from the Jordan valley and beyond. They show up in
| history at around the same time as the Philistines (1200 BC)
| whose origins are also unknown.
|
| The early Israelites were polytheists but had some affinity for
| Yahweh which was one Canaanite god among many. Why, how and
| when the Israelites became monotheists and why Yahweh became
| their only god is unknown. My guess (speculation follows) is
| that the Israelites were influenced by the Babylonians and
| Zoroastriansim. Zoroastrians worshipped fire and Yahweh was the
| god of fire (and smoke). Perhaps the many conflicts with other
| Canaanites caused them to adopt foreign practices to
| distinguish themselves from their enemies. Ritual circumcision
| perhaps was borrowed from Egypt.
|
| There is not a shred of evidence of an emigration from Egypt
| and archaeologists have been searching for it for over 200
| years. So why the Exodus is in the Bible is unknown. At the
| time these stories were written down Egypt was a regional super
| power, so perhaps whoever wrote it felt that "having been to
| Egypt" was something to brag about? Perhaps the story is
| allegorical?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The story of Moses is probably an allegory of the plucky
| Israelites beating the local great power who held them in
| captivity, and fleeing to found their own state... written by
| people who were presently held in captivity by the local
| great power, Babylon. Unlike the story of Exodus, the
| Babylonian captivity is a well-attested historical event,
| which agrees with archeological evidence and is found in
| multiple sources.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| The scripture remained quite intact despite the rise of
| astronomy and evolution theory. That is because only some
| people take old scripture literal (but those who do, tend to be
| quite dangerous).
| edgyquant wrote:
| As a sort of born again Christian I've come to believe that
| modern fundamentalists are among a very small group of people
| who believe the Torah to be literal. For ancient people they
| were myths used to remember common law
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Ok, but that's not shocking or amusing because that's the
| already-known archaeological situation of the pre-Roman Levant
| understood by anybody who was paying attention and didn't have
| an ethno-supremacist or religious axe to grind?
|
| There were probably dozens of different West Semitic speaking
| cultures/groupings, with plenty of cultural mixing. Hebrew (and
| Aramaic) speakers were only one of many in the region, all with
| competing claims over grazing and growing lands, etc. The Bible
| basically alludes to this all over.
|
| What you have there is the stories of various fragments of it
| that distilled into more or less powerful tribal federations
| and, eventually, kingdoms. Told from their vantage, because the
| others did not commit theirs to writing.
|
| And by the 3rd or 4th century AD, all West Semitic languages
| had basically gone functionally (but not liturgically) extinct,
| but the cultural and religious traditions of one of them
| tenaciously held on through the diaspora.
| codesnik wrote:
| "by the 3rd or 4th century AD" - that early?!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Hebrew itself was "extinct" as a spoken language by about
| 200ce. Until the 20th century when it was revived. It was
| replaced by Aramaic and Greek.
|
| Aramaic lived for a longer period, but then slowly died
| out. As a liturgical language western Aramaic / Syriac
| lived on, and eastern variants for longer but as a
| widespread, spoken lived language in the Levant I believe
| Greek replaced it, and then Arabic. I understand that
| "Jewish Palestinian Aramaic" lingered on for some time in
| some smaller communities.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes but semi-plausible debate still exists.
|
| Genetic evidence could eliminate this.
| air7 wrote:
| Ha, if logical inconsistencies could "flip the scripture" the
| world would be very different place than it is...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I mean you kind of have to be told these things child to ever
| believe that stuff, our brains work too well after that
|
| Just like yours is trying to, but with competing information
|
| The simple, adult, quantifiable reality is that there is always
| cross drift between populations by mere nature of humans being
| compatible species to produce viable offspring with one another
| Digory wrote:
| Not really. The story of Abraham begins in "Ur of the
| Chaldees." The modern consensus is that it should be in
| southern Iran, but historical sources had it in northern Iran
| or closer to Turkey. Which is also the source of the
| Phoenicians / Canaanites.
|
| Between that, the sojourn to Egypt, and the constant complaints
| about intermarriage in the OT, you'd already expect these to be
| roughly the same gene pool.
|
| More interesting may be the connection (or lack thereof)
| between OT-era Jews to modern Jews, which plays into political
| and racial arguments.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > The story of Abraham begins in "Ur of the Chaldees."
|
| You're presuming some historicity there that I don't think is
| warranted. A lot of the stories in Genesis had their origin
| in stories from Mesopotamia, and I wouldn't read much more
| into that than you'd read into the Aenead claiming that the
| Romans originated in Troy. They're just borrowing legitimacy
| from an older historical tradition.
| cloudyq wrote:
| [dead]
| wslh wrote:
| https://archive.is/2023.10.09-133848/https://www.haaretz.com...
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20231010105143/https://www.haaret...
|
| https://archive.ph/oLK5q
| fooker wrote:
| Interesting timing!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| context: "Going local with ancient DNA: A review of human
| histories from regional perspectives" (Science 5 Oct 2023)
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh8140
|
| Also headline is slightly misleading, it's not 'a first':
|
| "Ancient DNA from Chalcolithic Israel reveals the role of
| population mixture in cultural transformation" (2018)
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05649-9
|
| One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human
| racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual
| biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're
| mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based
| biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
| wslh wrote:
| > One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human
| racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual
| biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're
| mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based
| biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
|
| When you said "race-based biological weapons" you mean weapons
| that target specific races?
| nirav72 wrote:
| If race-based targeted medical treatment is a possibility,
| i.e that targets specific areas of the genome commonly found
| within specific human groups - then why is it not possible to
| have a race-based biological weapon?
| jghn wrote:
| For one thing because it can't be "race based":
| https://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-
| pseudoscien...
| nirav72 wrote:
| interesting read. thanks.
| jghn wrote:
| Ewan has a lot of discussion on the topic in other
| venues, including Twitter. I grabbed this one as being
| somewhat representative but if you find the topic
| interesting I'd suggest digging into his stuff further.
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah Te Ding Chong Zu Ji Yin Gong Ji "specific ethnic
| genetic attacks." There are some interesting documents
| floating around from a few years back if you're into China-US
| military stuff.
| User23 wrote:
| > One clear conclusion is that modern popular concepts of human
| racial and ethnic groups have little connection with the actual
| biological-genetic history of individual modern humans, they're
| mostly artificial (which is why claims about 'race-based
| biological weapons' are nonsense, for example).
|
| This isn't really clear at all and there is plenty of evidence
| to the contrary. For example, consumer DNA testing pretty
| reliably agrees with self-reported genealogical claims. Race
| has become a loaded word, but we understand population genetics
| pretty well and the effects of long periods of genetic
| isolation between different population groups are very much
| measurable.
|
| The claim that it's impossible to develop a bioweapon that
| targets some genomic pattern that's common in descendants of
| some formerly long term isolated population and uncommon in
| others doesn't appear well-supported. In fact, nature already
| did this herself, as is well attested by the introduction of
| Eurasian diseases to the Americas.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Even if someone has something like a specific immune system
| genetic profile that makes them more susceptible to a
| particular virus than other people, that genetic marker is
| extremely unlikely to correlate at all closely with any
| socially defined racial or ethnic group.
|
| The effects of European diseases on native American
| populations is a red herring in this context, as modern
| populations are increasingly interbred and not isolated, and
| even with that case, it's not entirely clear that it was
| genetic vs. developmental, i.e. European children who
| survived to adulthood likely had been exposed to those
| diseases when young, while native American adults had not -
| so if they had been exposed as children, there could have
| been no difference in susceptibilty.
| lawlessone wrote:
| Those diseases introduced the Americas didn't target specific
| races. Eurasian peoples could still get them too but had some
| immunity. If Eurasian people were immune we never would have
| carried these diseases with us.
|
| Saying that...shamefully it was consciously used as weapon in
| some instances.
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