Amerika

People in the past were less prone to distorting reality in their own minds in order to get along with others. They did not depend on government; they did not have corporate jobs (created, mostly, by government). They were independent and made their own living in free markets based on shared culture and not much else.

Consequently, they had no reason to lie constantly like modern people do. Almost everything said in public now is a half-truth, distortion, or evasion of the truth by leaving out crucial details or shortening the time scale. Those who do repeat the lies are suspected of being dissidents and deplatformed/ostracized from polite society.

Back in the day however, people saw a simple reality: the Western European nations represented the unbroken line of our Cro-Magnid ancestors, while the periphery of Europe showed admixture, or the blending of racial groups. This led to suspicion of half-breed “hwites” from Southern, Irish, Eastern, and Mediterranean fringes of Europe.

Consequently, the Western Europeans — “WASP” is shorthand for people from over the Hajnal Line — had a cynical view of hwites:

The evidence for the existence of very definite unfavorable stereotypes and dislikes of Jews and Italians, and to a small extent also of Irish, is unmistakable. Photographs to which Jewish surnames had been attached dropped, as seen from Table 3, 1.21 points in General Liking, 0.81 in Character, 0.29 in Beauty, while going up 1.01 in Ambition and 0.36 in Intelligence, with little consistent change in Entertainingness. The photographs with Italian surnames went down 0.78 points in General Liking, 0.33 in Beauty, 0.35 in Intelligence, 0.45 in Character, 0.34 in Entertainingness, while going up 0.39 points in Ambition. The Irish surnames produced a drop of 0.25 points in General Liking, 0.12 points in Beauty, 0.19 in Intelligence, 0.29 in Character, o.i i points in Entertainingness and a rise of 0.18 points in Ambition.

We can see evidence of this admixture, for example in Southern Europe, through the genetic diversity of these regions:

Some of the lowest levels of common ancestry are seen in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, which may indicate different effects of historical population expansions in these areas and/or more stably structured populations.

They punt on the conclusion, but wherever you see wide variation in a population, you are seeing genetic chaos caused by admixture of many different groups. As a result, traits are not consistent yet, since that may take a few dozen generations, and bits of past heritage patterns pop up in individuals without being shared between them.

On the other hand, sources have recently found that Eastern Europeans represent another axis of European populations:

Russians from the central part of European Russia (Tver, Murom, and Kursk) exhibited similarities with populations from central-eastern Europe, and were distant from Russian sample from the northern Russia (Mezen district, Archangelsk region). Komi samples, especially Izhemski Komi, were significantly different from all other populations studied. These can be considered as a second pole of genetic diversity in northern Europe (in addition to the pole, occupied by Finns), as they had a distinct ancestry component.

This most likely occurred through Asiatic admixture as seen through comparison with the Saami:

Using model-based individual ancestry analysis, the median estimated percentage of the genome with east Asian ancestry was 6% (first and third quartiles: 5 and 8%, respectively). We found that genetic similarity between population pairs roughly correlated with geographic distance. Among the European HGDP-CEPH populations, F(ST) was smallest for the comparison with the Russians (F(ST)=0.0098), and estimates for the other population comparisons ranged from 0.0129 to 0.0263.

Some sources identify a Eurasian and North African flow in these outer axes:

For example, we and others have previously reported a gradient of North African ancestry within Europe and this may be a source of differential non-European ancestry among the CEU, TSI, and double European segments in the MXL. North African gene flow into Europe likely occurred after the death of the Iceman, so he would not carry many North African segments and thus would appear more closely related to the high-confidence European segments in the MXL. Another potential source of non-European ancestry in modern day Europeans is gene flow from other parts of Asia (e.g., the Finns appear to carry significant amounts of non-European Eurasian ancestry – see below).

In other words, North African ancestry shows up in the Italians and Mexican samples where Eastern Europe shows more of an Asiatic admixture, as one would expect given geography. If you are right next to Africa, like Italy is, some population drift will occur, and then be transmitted through Italian migration into Central Europe.

We have covered Semitic genetics in the past here with the Irish featured prominently, but not as much coverage of Ashkenazi Jews, who are a distinct European-mixed (hwite) population with North African and Asian ancestry:

In conclusion, we show that, at least in the context of the studied sample, it is possible to predict full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity, although it should be noted that the exact dividing line between a Jewish and non-Jewish cluster will vary across sample sets which in practice would reduce the accuracy of the prediction. While the full historical demographic explanations for this distinction remain to be resolved, it is clear that the genomes of individuals with full Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry carry an unambiguous signature of their Jewish heritage, and this seems more likely to be due to their specific Middle Eastern ancestry than to inbreeding.

The authors of this study were careful to point out that this indicates a middle eastern origin for Ashkenazim, not an Eastern European one despite recent partial admixture there, which has the Asian and North African admixture via Near Eastern populations:

We found that the full Jewish cluster fell between that of Middle Eastern and European populations. We also compared the average heterozygosity across the set of linkage disequilibrium-pruned polymorphisms in those with full Jewish ancestry to those without, and found that the subjects with four Jewish grandparents were, on average, slightly more heterozygous than the subjects with no Jewish ancestry. These data therefore suggest that the Jewish group is distinguished from non-Jewish Europeans more because of their genetic heritage in the Near East than due to population bottlenecks perturbing the genetic composition of Jewish groups.

For more on that Near Eastern ancestry:

We show that the earliest populations of the Near East derived around half their ancestry from a ‘Basal Eurasian’ lineage that had little if any Neanderthal admixture and that separated from other non-African lineages before their separation from each other.

These populations, possibly related to the same Karluk Turks who provided the genetic basis to the Uyghurs, have a great deal of European heritage through their Roman wives:

Overall, it seems that at least 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry is due to the assimilation of mtDNAs indigenous to Europe, most likely through conversion. The phylogenetic nesting patterns suggest that the most frequent of the Ashkenazi mtDNA lineages were assimilated in Western Europe, ~2 ka or slightly earlier. Some in particular, including N1b2, M1a1b, K1a9 and perhaps even the major K1a1b1, point to a north Mediterranean source. It seems likely that the major founders were the result of the earliest and presumably most profound wave of founder effects, from the Mediterranean northwards into central Europe, and that most of the minor founders were assimilated in west/central Europe within the last 1,500 years.

In other words, Ashkenazi Jews have been accumulating Western European DNA since the time of their founding, but there was later a bottleneck which reduced their core population to 330 individuals:

Reconstruction of recent AJ history from such segments confirms a recent bottleneck of merely ≈350 individuals. Modelling of ancient histories for AJ and European populations using their joint allele frequency spectrum determines AJ to be an even admixture of European and likely Middle Eastern origins.

These middle eastern origins, as you would expect from geography, consist of the Asian, European, and North African populations coming together in the meeting point of the continents which probably was a commercial and artistic hub because of this interaction.

Our ancestors knew what they were talking about. They viewed hwites — Eastern European, Irish, Southern European, and Mediterranean/Semitic groups — as not quite “White” because of admixture from other races. Modern genetics proves them correct, and shows how WASPs remain a distinct group of a core European population.

Tags: admixture, irish genetics, italians, jews, slavs, trace admixture, WASPs