BAMAD no.17
Brit-Am
DNA and
Anthropology Updates
Updates in DNA studies along with Anthropological Notes of general interest with a particular emphasis on points pertinent to the study of Ancient Israelite Ancestral Connections to Western Peoples as explained in Brit-Am studies.
Brit-Am
Research
Revelation
Reconciliation
BAMAD-17
Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update
22 Shebet 5768, 22 January 2008
Contents:
1. Cultural differences alter brain's
hard-wiring
2. Why incest makes us so squeamish
3. The Disappearing Black Sheep in Scotland Riddle
4. "fully three-quarters of the American population is interested in genealogy"
Ancestral Allure by VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
5. Elephants classify human ethnic groups by odor and garment color
1. Cultural differences alter brain's
hard-wiring
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22729220/
New research finds that social perspective influences how we see the world
2. Why incest makes us so squeamish
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22685942/
3. The Disappearing Black Sheep in
Scotland Riddle
Bye, bye dark sheep due to genes, study finds
(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox)
Reuters
http://news.aol.com/story/_a/bye-bye-dark-sheep-due-to-genes-study/n20080117143809990096?ecid=RSS0001
Excerpts:
LONDON (Reuters) - The declining number of dark sheep among a wild herd in
Scotland comes down to genes, researchers said on Thursday.
The population of the wild Soay sheep on the isolated island of St. Kilda has
been virtually unchanged over the past 4,000 years, giving modern-day
researchers a unique view into natural selection and evolution.
About three-quarters of the sheep in the herd are dark but their dwindling
numbers have puzzled scientists. This is because dark animals tend to be bigger,
which should give them an evolutionary advantage to survive harsh winters.
"If being big is good and dark sheep are bigger we would expect the frequency of
dark sheep to increase," said Jon Slate, a researcher at the University of
Sheffield, who worked on the study published in the journal Science.
"This presents an evolutionary problem."
To solve the riddle the scientists analyzed versions of genes that determined
color. Like all animals, sheep inherit one version of each gene from each parent
and these sheep can inherit either a gene for a dark coat or a gene for a white
coat from each parent.
The researchers determined that the gene for a dark coat is dominant -- dark
sheep carry either two dark genes or a dark gene and a light gene.
But they also found that having a light gene boosts fitness so the best
combination in evolutionary terms for the sheep is a mix of genes that produce a
dark coat.
This explains the decline of dark sheep because those with a pair of dark genes
are the least fit, even though they are big, Slate said. The researchers do not
know why the light gene confers fitness, he added.
4. "fully three-quarters of the American
population is interested in genealogy"
Ancestral Allure by VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13wwln-medium-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Extracts:
Sites like TheFamilyHistoryStore.com, GeneaLinks.com and RootsWeb.com, with
their menus of recondite offerings (frameable certificates, migration maps, the
patented Color Track System), make up a deluxe spa for the ego. They promise an
end to loneliness and alienation by fixing you with a place in history; and they
promise you social promotion by hooking you up with illustrious ghosts, Norman
Knights, Igbo priests or at least some guys who worked with Jimmy Cagney.
It should come as no surprise, then, that participants in the forums at
Genealogy.com are tenacious. They stand to gain a brand-new and newly grandiose
sense of self. Combining speed-dating with "Are You My Mother?" urgency, users
post information about themselves on open message boards. "Please e-mail me with
any data & I will share mine," a typical forum participant writes. Others are
more willing to kick things off, showering would-be cousins with information
heirlooms in an effort to make existential connections. Turn to the omnibus
family-history sites like Ancestry.com, and what you find are people craving
reunions, major chords, narrative homecomings. According to a 2005 poll, fully
three-quarters of the American population is interested in genealogy.
In a 2001 investigation in The New Yorker into his own roots, John Seabrook
emphasized the peculiarly American fascination with family stories. The
possibility of a big story, one that would ennoble one's own existence, he
argued, is what drives many online ancestor-seekers. But Seabrook also described
mixed motives: "Genealogy serves two often-incompatible human impulses: the
desire for self-knowledge and the desire for status."
This ambivalence is largely absent from today's family-hunters. In the seven
years since Seabrook's article, blogs, message boards and reality television
have made self-knowledge and status not just compatible, but also part and
parcel of each other. Online, status and self-disclosure often amount to the
same thing, as acutely personal Web diaries gain credibility in direct
proportion to their frankness.
But if you're searching for the ingredients of your personhood in online
genealogy, don 't expect to find the whole recipe. Birth, marriage and death
records, as well as other plot points maintained by religious or state
institutions, turn up fairly frequently, but biographical flourishes ? the
career, land deals, ocean crossings and pictures that are the pay dirt of the
family historian, can be maddeningly elusive.
For black Americans, even basic records, surnames, to start with - may be hard
to secure. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor who has lately turned
his attention to black genealogies, recently started a company, AfricanDNA.com,
to help African-Americans create family trees. Part 2 of his enlightening PBS
program, "African American Lives," will be televised beginning Feb. 6 on PBS.
The staggeringly extensive International Genealogical Index, created for Mormon
eschatological reasons, also suggests to amateurs that resolving identity crises
is a few clicks away. Maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints and available online at FamilySearch.org, the sheer number of names,
more than a billion, provides not only the assurance that you and yours are
being counted, but also the hope that you all might be reunited in this
database, online as it is in heaven.
But while optimistic threads on the genealogy sites open all the time, they
rarely close. Enervation comes to suffuse many of the queries of genealogy
veterans. "I've been searching for a while," one seeker of Flahertys writes,
"and have run into that 'wall' you all know so well." Sometimes, even when a
seeker has good information, the ancestral river forks so divergently and
crookedly that discovering a source seems futile. As one contributor to the
Elias family forum at
GenForum.com says, "I've noticed lots of Eliases from all over the world, and
some from Peru seem to have a relation to Japanese/Chinese heritage in that the
surname was changed from Lee or Lo to Elias a few generations ago." Yikes. You
can almost hear Google despairing at so many generic and contradictory
word-strings.
My own genealogical pursuits were exciting but not very fruitful. I did find one
relative. I settled into a Heffernan forum and typed in the name of my paternal
grandfather, hoping to find out more about his father's father, who arrived on
our shores from Ireland in the 1840s. Amazing! Another Heffernan was looking for
information about that same relative, and our intelligence matched exactly! I
started to e-mail this guy, eager to compare notes, and then realized there was
no need. It was my dad.
5. Elephants classify human ethnic
groups by odor and garment color
http://yannklimentidis.blogspot.com/2007/12/elephants-can-classify-human-ethnic.html
Lucy A. Bates, Katito N. Sayialel, Norah W. Njiraini, Cynthia J. Moss, Joyce H.
Poole, and Richard W. Byrne
Current Biology Volume 17, Issue 22. November 2007
Abstract: Animals can benefit from classifying predators or other dangers into
categories, tailoring their escape strategies to the type and nature of the
risk. Studies of alarm vocalizations have revealed various levels of
sophistication in classification [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In many taxa, reactions to
danger are inflexible, but some species can learn the level of threat presented
by the local population of a predator [6, 7, 8] or by specific, recognizable
individuals [9, 10]. Some species distinguish several species of predator,
giving differentiated warning calls and escape reactions; here, we explore an
animal's classification of subgroups within a species. We show that elephants
distinguish at least two Kenyan ethnic groups and can identify them by olfactory
and color cues independently. In the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya, young Maasai men
demonstrate virility by spearing elephants (Loxodonta africana), but Kamba
agriculturalists pose little threat. Elephants showed greater fear when they
detected the scent of garments previously worn by Maasai than by Kamba men, and
they reacted aggressively to the color associated with Maasai. Elephants are
therefore able to classify members of a single species into subgroups that pose
different degrees of danger.
See also:
BAMAD Archives
DNA
DNA Refuted. The "Cohen Gene"
mtDNA
Y DNA
R1b The Western Japhet?? or not?
haplogroup I
Brit-Am DNA
THE PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF
THE HEBREW PEOPLES
Queries about Race
BAMAD Archives
Join the Brit-Am Ephraimite Discussion Group
Just Send an
e-mail
with "Subscribe"
in the Subject Line
Main Page
Offerings and Publications
Return to
Question and Answer
Table of Contents
