European languages and genetic ancestry of european men are closely combined

Written by Dr. H. P. Bustami

Sunday, 01 June 2008

Bringing together what once belonged together? European Union Flags. (Courtesy: photocase.com)

Modern europeans stem from a very small founder population which some 50.000 years ago consisted of just a small clan which than in the following ten thousands of years developed into what we know today as european peoples. This finding is indeed not new and has been proved by numerous genetic studies on haplotypes which are a clear genealogical measurement of where and when people came to which place.

So it is meanwhile common knowledge among scientists that the present european population has different genetic ancestries (which of course going back to the very beginning again have only one clan origin - that of those people living 50.000 years agon) from so called "old europeans " (not to mistake this term for that what the former US-foreign minister D. Rumsfeld called "Old Europe") arriving in Europe some 40.000 years ago and a second important migration wave which spread over Europe with the beginning of farming in the Middle East some 10.000 years ago (neolithic revolution).

Women more agile than men

Taking a closer look at migratory events within Europe and on various Y-haplotypes (genetic variations only occuring on the male Y-chromosom, thus only accounting for the males of a certain population) shows a clear relationsship between the distribution of europeans during the past and the distribution of family languages.

It is known that female members of a population always have been more mobile than male members. Women often moved to the homeland of their mates and so more frequently were facing a change of their spoken language.
Meanwhile the male members more often stayed in their area. Over thousands of years this led to a more stable ancestry of male genes within european population fitting with the distribution of different language families.
For example the basque language spoken by half a million people - which is very different from most of the other european language belonging to the Indo-European language family - shows on the Y-haplotypes very old and consistent genetic information hinting to an early Ice-Age origin on one spot. So it seems not unlikely that the basque language is very similar to what the mammoth hunters spoke.

Mankind is a widespread family

However considering the fact that all europeans stem from a small clan of maybe some hundred individuals and the fact that all men on our planet stem from not more that 2000-3000 individuals we actually are all members of a widespread family. So finally there might be a grain of truth in Bibles story of the Tower of Bable that we were once condemned to disperse and speak thousands of languages.

Sources:

- Hua Liu, Franck Prugnolle, Andrea Manica, and François Balloux (2006): A Geographically Explicit Genetic Model of Worldwide Human-Settlement History; Am. J. Hum. Genet., 79:000, 2006.

- Kalevi Wiik: Where Did European Men Come From (2008), Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Volume 4, Number 1.

Tag it:

Add as favourites (14) |

Quote this article on your site | Views: 223 | E-mail

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.