Talk:Genetic history of Europe

OCA2 In Western Hunter Gatherers?

"The HERC2 and OCA2 variations for blue eyes are derived from the WHG lineage were also found in the Yamnaya people.[43][contradictory]". WHG origin of blue eyes everyone can agree with. However WHGs are associated with the ancestral allele of skin pigmentation, and not SLC24A5, SLC45A2 or OCA2. In fact I'd never heard of OCA2 in WHGs. 83.84.100.133 (talk) 21:43, 28 June 2020 (UTC)

Name changes

The term "genetic history" strikes me as somewhat unusual. What about "Population genetics of Europe".

Bibliography

• The reference included in the section "Bibliography", by Adams et al, on religious intolerance and gentics in the iberian peninsula,from Am J Hum Gen is just terrible. Its title clearly indicates an aim outside the scope of a Journal on Human Genetics, and it contains many imprecissions and unproven judgements. No description of the sampling technique is included in the article, and even the ballot surveys describe how they choosed the sample in their data. From the description of "spaniards rueld by 300'000 visigoths" a negative judgement can be inferred, but the goths never ruled the spaniards, they just started acting as state powers when the Roman authority that hired them to be part of the roman army in exchange of being allowed to have shelter inside the roman empire borders,as some other peoples attacked them, when the roman authority faded goths found themselves as the only organized power,and started acting in acordance with their authorities, the romans allowed the goth's authorities to be preserved inside the roman army, and with their own rules. No imposition at all existed in this. The paper speaks about religious intolerance: goths changed their orginal religion, arrianism, to catholicism, in order not to enter in conflict with the rest of spaniards, but many times the facts linked to other religious groups arriving into Spain, some times forced,as some people of jewish orgin may have arrived to Spain forced by the romans,others as invaders, there were several cases when moslim authorities tryed to force christians to endorse moslim faith, or accept Mohammed as a prophet;some catholics become saints when they were killed because of this, and that probably is against the moslim rules, that stablish for the Islam a respect for "The people of the book", jewish and christians,the book named in this being the Bible. Some cases of jewish being blamed for religious violence existed,for example the case of "Santo Dominguito del Val", the history telling that young was crucified, and the expulsion of jewish in 1492 was founded in a supposed declaration of some of them of trying to "Put down the law of Jesus and stablisihing the rule of Moshes law"; even when the descendants of the kings that made the expulsion were ruling, many jews returned years after the expulsion to Spain, and there's no record of them being bothered again. The article uses the word "pogrom", a word of polish origin, but no records exits of violence in Spain specially focusing on jews, and if it was some, it was never worse than violence from some spaniards against other spaniards. The article in Am J Hum Gen speaks about some 20% of today's spanish males having jewish Y chromosome markers, and if it's taken into account that the same article says that at the time of expulsion, jewish were just 4% of the total population in Spain, the growth of this people from 4% in 1492 to 20% of today clearly speaks about no discrimination, at least. The authors have doubts about why the 20% is maintained all over Spain but in the island of Menorca. This island was for some time an english island, and either people of jewish ancestry moved to the british islands looking for a richer environment, or they were chased by the britons. This article in Am J Hum Gen seems containing a lot of propaganda, but from who,and with which goal ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.22.49.96 (talk • contribs) 14:47, 5 November 2011‎

Good Article Review #1

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Genetic history of Europe/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Pyrotec (talk · contribs) 19:55, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I will review. Pyrotec (talk) 19:55, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Pre-review comments

This article has a {{update}} flag dated November 2009 in the Genetic studies after Cavalli-Sforza which is sufficient to Quick fail this article without needing a review.

The WP:Lead is also non-compliant with WP:Lead.

I will continue to review this article, but regardless of any other findings, this article will not gain GA-status unless these two items are addressed and the article brought up to standard. Pyrotec (talk) 20:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the article's history page, this nomination was made by an editor who has not edited this article. It appears to be a drive-by nomination, so I'm closing this review. The article is listed as B-class by most WikiProjects and that appears to be an accurate assessment of the article at this time. Pyrotec (talk) 09:29, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Pyrotec - 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for deletion:

• Europe20000ya.png (discussion)
• Haplogroups europe.png (discussion)
• Percentage of major Y-DNA haplogroups in Europe.png (discussion)

Participate in the deletion discussions at the nomination pages linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:47, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Literally everything in the article is completely outdated

Population genetics is a very recent science with a lot of the content of this article having now been completely debunked. It should be written from scratch with a cut-off date for source. Nothing earlier than 2010. Otherwise its just gibberish. Its ridiculous Cavalli Sforza is still being cited here. Its the equivalent of citing Charles Darwin. Php2000 (talk) 12:13, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

On the other hand, we should not fall into WP:Recentism. "Debunked" in most cases simply means that an old hypothesis has been replaced by a more recent hypothesis based on more refined methods, which in turn eventually will fall victim to a subsequent hypothesis. In this volatile field, the "facts" of today are the "errors" of tomorrow (yes, literally tomorrow). IMHO, more important than being most up to date is to retain due weight by not presenting an indiscriminate listing of primary research results (which often has the shortest half-life). –Austronesier (talk) 13:00, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Some random quotes from the text: "meta-population", "genetically distinct sub-populations", "Ethnogenesis of the modern ethnic groups of Europe in the historical period is associated with numerous admixture events", "Genetically, Europe is relatively homogeneous". All of these transport the idea of biologically distinct human populations, i.e. races. As far as I know, there has been a stable scientific consensus for at least 20 years that "human populations are not — and never have been — biologically discrete, truly isolated, or fixed." AAPA 2019 --Rsk6400 (talk) 13:41, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

The pseudoscientific idea of "race" is almost irrelevant to the subject of this article, which is the study of gene frequencies in modern and ancient populations. "Race" and racism has no place in this article. But its content will, indeed must, include discussion of genetically distinct sub-populations, genetic admixture events, population movements, and so on. This is the business of genetic science - which gives no support to racist ideas.

The article is also overdue for a re-write. The information produced since about 2010 is so much more copious and more relevant - based on multiple nearly-complete genomes of large numbers of people over thousands of years - that the previous work is nearly irrelevant. It needs a brief historical account of the previous work, but that's it. Austronesier, you are right, we also don't need a poorly-digested list of recent details. We should aim for a good encyclopedic coverage. I suggest that we should start by removing most of the detail about haplogroups and mitochondrial DNA. Richard Keatinge (talk) 17:20, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

This article is not overdue for a re-write, but for deletion. Everything I have heard from experts in recent years is that race does not exist. This article and the author of the above comment seem to be playing semantic games and shifting the discussion from "race" to "sub-populations". These are different ways of talking around the same subject and the result is still the same: pseudoscientific racism masquerading as science. The human race does not have distinct "sub-populations". We are all one species and we all share this planet together. The idea that Europe consists of a "homogenous sub-population" is ridiculous to anyone who has lived in or visited any major European city. It is a diverse continent and home to many different people, all of whom have every right to be there. The ideas in the article seem like a slightly more palatable version of early 20th century "scientific racism" and theories of social darwinism, and ideas like this are susceptible to weaponization by alt-right and white nationalist propagandists. 2601:603:4C7F:9A40:88DF:5245:77C2:EA4 (talk) 06:11, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Fortunately, actual genetic science offers no support to racist ideas. The science belongs in this article, racism does not. Richard Keatinge (talk) 10:05, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

I fail to see how Richard Keatinge's comment can be read in the light of scientific racism. There are distinct sub-populations—in the Neolithic. What we observe now are clinal clusterings that eventually go back to much sharper defined clusters in the Neolithic. As long as Europe was sparely settled, there was enough opportunity for long pauses and founder effects. The fallacy goes both ways: even if white (or other) suprematists falsely misuse the results of (paleo-)genetics for their racist agenda, this misuse does not discredit the conclusions we can draw from genetic science about population movements in prehistory.

But I do agree, the way some of the material is presented here is simplistic, and caters to the concept of a taxonomic understanding of human genetics, which is indeed racialism in a new guise. I guess much of it will vanish if we follow Richard Keatinge's suggestion to remove poorly-digested details from primary sources. –Austronesier (talk) 10:38, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Your personal opinions and perspective are largely irrelevant. If you fail to see how Richard Keatinge's comment is racist, then that likely reflects your own western cultural biases and white privilege. Moreover, you seem to be misunderstanding my point. The fact that a line of research or inquiry is conducted in a superficially "scientific" manner does not mean that this research is credible, valuable, or morally justifiable. One has to look at and carefully analyze the broader biographical, sociological, historical, and epistemic context. Even if the "scientists" studying these subjects are not presenting explicitly racist interpretations of their work, it is hard to understand what their motives might be. To most people it looks like racism and alt-right politics masquerading as "science". If the people conducting this research are genuinely acting in good faith, then they should be able to state their aims and goals, and explain why they are so interested in topics and concepts that so closely resemble the kind of "science" that was produced in Nazi Germany about the Jews or the kind of "science" that was produced in the US to rationalize slavery and discrimination. I did not major in anthropology, but I did take several anthropology courses as an undergrad at UMD and the one recurring theme was that races do not exist and that the differences between individuals across cultures are entirely the result of cultural and ideological differences that emerge thru the process of enculturation and socialization. Maybe the "scientists" at some second-rate community college in rural Alabama or Mississippi are teaching this kind of 19th century, racially motivated rubbish, but mainstream anthropologists and cultural theorists have long since recognized that these concepts are untenable and that the study of human culture and behavior has almost no connection to the study of human biology or evolution. 2601:603:4C7F:9A40:EC87:8FA6:802A:756C (talk) 21:26, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

While we welcome contributions by IPs, we also demand that comments be civil and focused on improving the article. Calling somebody or somebody's comment "racist" is "over the line". Discrediting modern science is very popular among racists, we should not follow their lead. --Rsk6400 (talk) 07:41, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Agree with Rsk6400. I could add, linking "the study of human culture and behavior" (which are not covered at all in this article) to biology is also an integral part of racist ideology, which is the only way one could actually read "the study of human culture and behavior" into "Genetic history of Europe". What Rsk6400 has specifically criticized, is the approach of presenting genetic research here, which—at least in parts of the discussion—resorts to discrete and fixed categories, and to rigid classifications. –Austronesier (talk) 08:24, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Archaic Terminology

"Six of the European haplogroups (H, I, J, K, T and W) are essentially confined to European populations (Torroni et al. 1994, 1996a), and probably originated after the ancestral Caucasoids became genetically separated from the ancestors of the modern Africans and Asians.[92]"

Ancestral Caucasoids? No one in population genetics uses the terms Caucasoids or Caucasians, if only so it wouldn't be confused with Caucausus Hunter Gathers. 83.84.100.133 (talk) 13:40, 9 October 2020 (UTC)