Amerika

As we told you before repeatedly previously, Caucasian populations on the fringes of Western Europe have trace admixture of miscegenation from Asian, Semitic, and north African groups.

One way we can track this is to look at ancient trade routes, since cities reject culture in favor of commerce and socializing, and therefore we can see not only where the plagues spread, but where people were likely to intermix and produce trace miscegenated offspring.

The main condition was the interconnectivity across the region, with Egypt as the nexus for cross-cultural trade routes, which, at the same time, acted as a gateway for the passage of pathogens into the ancient Mediterranean.

In recently published research, Sabine Huebner and I elaborate on how Egypt, and more so the lands south of it, had a “pestilential reputation” that goes back to Thucydides’ account of the Plague of Athens in 430 B.C. By the time of Emperor Justinian, and with Constantinople now a thriving port city, trade is even more fluid, bridging ecologies never bridged before.

In cultureless zones like cities and especially port or trade cities, miscegenation spreads like an infection because people choose partners based on their income expectation and minimal compatibility, especially since people in cities tend to cheat on each other and produce cuckold offspring therefore value less close marriages.

We can see the different population flows that went through Rome and Athens during that era.

Not surprisingly, this is borne out by genetic information, showing admixture of Semitic and North African groups in Iberia; this population also ventured into Ireland:

The researchers found a remarkably high level of Sephardic Jewish (19.8%) and North African (10.6%) ancestry in their large sample of Y chromosomes from the modern population. The Iberian Peninsula has a complex recent history that involves the long-term residence of these two diverse populations with distinct geographical origins and unique cultural and religious characteristics.

The large proportion of Sephardic Jewish ancestry does not fit with simple expectations from the historical record. “Despite alternative possible sources for lineages [to which] we ascribe a Sephardic Jewish origin, these proportions attest to a high level of religious conversion, whether voluntary or enforced, driven by historical episodes of social and religious intolerance that ultimately led to the integration of descendants,” offers Prof. Jobling.

Additionally, the prominent North African lineage in Iberian populations exhibits low diversity, which favors its arrival after the conquest of 711 AD, and the geographical distribution of North African Ancestry in the peninsula does not reflect the initial colonization and subsequent withdrawal. “This is likely to result from later enforced population movement – more marked in some regions than others,” explains Prof. Jobling.

As more of the genomes of the past are decoded, we are getting a better view of trace miscegenation in Southern Europe generally, such as the diversity captured in the Pompeii tragedy:

The analyses also revealed a greater genetic diversity in Pompeii than was suspected. The individuals studied were mainly descended from relatively recent immigrants from the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, rather than the people who had lived in the local region for centuries.

This is similar to diversity seen more broadly across the Roman region of western Italy, reflecting early forays into globalization, facilitated by strengthening trade across the Roman Empire.

If you wonder why European ethnic bonds like WASP identity prevail over “white” racial identity, this gives you a strong clue why: the ethnic Western Europeans are resisting admixture with the trace miscegenated populations in Southern, Eastern, Irish, and Mediterranean Europe and the middle east.

Tags: iberia, miscegenation, north africa, sephardim, southern europe, trace admixture, trace miscegenation