Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2019 May 19

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May 19

Mongoloid and racial science

In genetic studies and archeological papers, I still encounter speculations relating to the time and place of a supposed Paleo Mongoloid/Neo-Mongoloids split, or instances where the term Mongoloid is used in a way that suggests all ethnicities who fall under this group share a common ancestor.

With the knowledge of haplogroups and genetic distance readily available to researchers, it should be very clear no such race exists. If it is to be used at all, Mongoloid should be labeled a macro-phenotype, as two ethnic groups can be of a similiar phenotype, yet be unrelated.

Most Native-Americans for example, are more closely related to Europeans on the paternal level than to East-Asians. This is because Haplogroup Q is sister to Haplogroup R. With this in mind, why is Mongoloid still treated as a well defined family of closely related humans? Am I missing something? déhanchements (talk) 01:26, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Actually, last time I checked, most American Indians were most closely related to the Buryat-Mongols of Siberia, not Europeans. 2601:646:8A00:A0B3:4192:EBD4:E289:ABE0 (talk) 02:19, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Y-DNA Haplogroup C-P39 is commonly found in Na-Dené speakers, so yes there is a relation between the Na-Dené and Mongolians. I suspect that paternally most Native-Americans however are more closely related to Europeans, while maternally they are related to East-Asians. In any case, there is significant genetic distance between them and both populations. déhanchements (talk) 02:31, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

We have an article Genetic history of indigenous peoples of the Americas which seems to not agree with your suspicion. Rmhermen (talk) 06:34, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

@Rmhermen: The article only confirms my suspicion, it list Y-DNA Haplogroups Q and R as the main Native-American haplogroups, and maternal haplogroups common in East-Asians and Siberians, such as D and C.

However I did read these in the article on Haplogroup Q-M242, It is unclear whether the current frequency of Q-M242 lineages represents their frequency at the time of immigration or is the result of the shifts in a small founder population over time. Regardless, Q-M242 came to dominate the paternal lineages in the Americas.

I will concede that it's possible Q-M242 only gradually came to dominate the Americas, and maybe C-P39 was more common in prehistory. déhanchements (talk) 06:44, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

Estimates of the pre-Columbian population vary, but some historians argue for an estimate of 100 million or more. You don't think colonization affected the frequency of lingeages, given the sheer ammount of people killed? Disease could've wiped out the groups closer to East-Asians leaving a vacuum for the others to fill. It makes sense, since if the maternal lineages are East-Asian, the paternal ones must have been as well. -- 174.255.142.78

Right, but even if 99% percent of Native Americans were paternally and maternally close to Mongolians before Columbus, there's still the fact that Haplogroup C is distant enough from other Mongoloid markers like O2-M122, O-M175, N-M231, D1a, and D1b, the first three if which are nearer to R, albeit only by a margin.

According to [1], Lineage O represents nearly 60% of chromosomes in East Asia. The O3 haplogroup has the highest frequency, being absent outside East Asia. The O1 and O2 haplogroups appear in Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, South China, Japan, and Korea [66,76,77].

A case could be made for three races which exhibit the Mongoloid phenotype, one including Tibetans and Ainu; one including the Mongolians, Tungusic speakers, Kyrgyz, and Amerindians (possibly); and one including the rest. And even this would be meaningless for the modern age given increased admixture between all of these groups. The Amerindians at any rate, if the above theory is true, are far from homogeneous. These three groups together don't share a recent common ancestor that Africans and Europeans don't also share. déhanchements (talk) 22:40, 19 May 2019 (UTC)

The statement that "Most Native-Americans for example, are more closely related to Europeans on the paternal level than to East-Asians." is confusing two different things: the ancestry of the individual and the origin of the group. A Native American man may have had a European (or European derived) grandfather, but the bulk of his genes and ancestry might still be derived from Mongoloid populations.--Khajidha (talk) 17:51, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

In Siberia N and Q may very well have replaced older C lineages, which would explain why N and Q people have Mongoloid traits, like O people, but unlike R people. Haplogroups N, O, P, Q, and R originated from a common ancestor. N, O, P, and Q are almost always found side by side to a minority of C and D lineages, and have Mongoloid mtDNA (A, B, C, D, F, G, M7, M8, N9, Y, Z), except around Finland, while R1 men typically have Caucasian mtDNA (H, I, J, K, T, U, V, W). C is a very ancient lineage that originated at least 60,000 years ago, and later migrations would've brought about the distribution we observe today. 2600:1700:BAA0:E760:B12C:8F8A:8DB:C6DF (talk) 18:24, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

So in your opinions, is the term Mongoloid then, at some level, a valid, biological taxon? I would also like to see more information on this supposedly larger prehistoric occurence of C. déhanchements (talk) 23:53, 22 May 2019 (UTC)

From page 89 of DNA Genealogy: A haplogroup tree of Y chromosome derived from based haplotypes of haplogroups and sub clades and their TMRCAs, systematically calculated as described in this study. 7,556 haplotypes from 46 subclades of 17 major haplogroups have been considered for the tree design. Timescale on the vertical axis shows thousands of years from the common ancestors of the haplogroups and subclades. The tree shows the alpha-haplogroup, which is the ancestral haplogroup of the African and non-African haplogroups, and the beta-haplogroup, which is the ancestral haplogroup, close or identical with BT haplogroup in the current classification. The left branch represents haplogroup A (arose ~132,000 ybp) and its subclades. The right branch of haplogroup F through R including T represent Europoids (Caucasoids) arose 58,000 years before present. Haplogroup B (arose 46,000 ybp) migrated to Africa, the Mongoloid and Austronesian haplogroup C split ~ 36,000 ybp, apparently Middle Eastern haplogroups DE split ~42,000 ybp. A region of the origin of the alpha-haplogroup ~ 160,000 ybp remains unknown. The Europeoid family of haplogroups arose apparently in the triangle between Central Europe on the west, the Russian Plain (Eastern European plain) on the east and the Levant on the south.

The classification of C as Mongoloid and Austronesian is accurate, up to 46% of Aboriginal Australian males carried either basal C* (C-M130*), C1b2b* (C-M347*) or C1b2b1 (C-M210), so in regards to a Proto and Neo-Mongoloid split, I would rephrase this as an Australoid and Mongoloid split. Furthermore the Kostyonki-Borshchyovo and Sungir complexes demonstrate that the C lineage was once present in Eastern-Europe, and a back migration from America ( ) has been hypothesized with a relation to the spread of the Dene-Yeniseian family, which could mean that the Na-Dene migration was not so late as commonly thought. I haven't researched Yeniseian or Na-Dene mtDNA, but if they share mtDNA haplogroups this may represent a replacement sometime during the back migration, with Q lineages overtaking the C ones. is the term Mongoloid then, at some level, a valid, biological taxon? The answer to that question is multi-faceted and complex, but rest assured it's not as simple as Mongoloid is outdated racial science. There are near homogeneous groups such as the Oroqen, Evenks, and Buryats who are related and share many physical features. Restricting ourselves to those maternal lineages which are related to one another, we find that on the maternal side many East-Asian and Amerindian ethnicities share a common ancestry and coincidentally or not, similar features. As far as paternal goes, if the conjectures concerning Haplogroup C are correct, then there was split in the human tree which resulted in a distinct population with shared features, and they would have been united by shared paternal and maternal ancestry. 99.141.134.13 (talk) 20:51, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

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