Growing weary of archaeogenetics

[Travis B.]

Somehow academics overlook what the "spoils" of conquest really mean...

And it may not be you're thinking of. Think of the half a million male-line descendants of Somerled, or the estimated 16 million male line descendants of Genghis Khan.

I was thinking of war rape in particular.

[Moose-tache]

"Socio-politically enhanced mating opportunities" does not mean men running around to the tune of Yackety Sax raping people. It can also mean exactly the sort of increased offspring that we see in feudal leaders, God-emperors, and Handsford Parish authoritarians. The key thing to remember when talking about Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analysis is that these privileges do not affect both sexes equally. Ghengis Khan's third wife or whoever doesn't get to have hundreds of children no matter how many B vitamins she can pillage from Samarkand or Xi'an.

[WeepingElf]

Obviously, a man can have a hundred children; a woman can't.

[Travis B.]

"Socio-politically enhanced mating opportunities" does not mean men running around to the tune of Yackety Sax raping people. It can also mean exactly the sort of increased offspring that we see in feudal leaders, God-emperors, and Handsford Parish authoritarians. The key thing to remember when talking about Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analysis is that these privileges do not affect both sexes equally. Ghengis Khan's third wife or whoever doesn't get to have hundreds of children no matter how many B vitamins she can pillage from Samarkand or Xi'an.

That is true, but you do get things like the Russian treatment of German women in the closing days of WW2 in Europe.

[WeepingElf]

War-time rape is almost certainly as old as war itself. But we should not expound on such matters here.

The point is that whether one examines mtDNA, Y-DNA or autosomal DNA, one gets different results, which is just one problem with archaeogenetics. Another is, as I wrote before, the interplay of small sample sizes and the non-existence of genetically pure populations, which almost inevitably leads to different studies on the same populations yielding different results. And finally, genes don't speak languages, so it is hard to make anything beyond the most obvious conclusions on prehistoric languages based on genetic patterns. (An example of such a "most obvious conclusion" is that when Europe was effectively repopulated by immigrants from the Pontic steppe around 3000 BC, the linguistic landscape would have been completely turned over, such that Indo-European can hardly be older. And because it can hardly be much younger on other, chiefly linguistic, criteria, either, we can in this case pinpoint it to that repopulation event.)

Also, archeaogenetics has inspired a resurgence of Kossinna's völkische Archäologie (the notion that archaeological cultures could be equated with "races" or ethno-linguistic groups), as its results can be put to the same kind of abuse as physical anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance, doesn't the discovery of "steppe DNA", as it is called in the popular press, look like the "proof" that an "Aryan race" actually exists? Of course, most archaeogeneticists would flatly deny that, for valid reasons (shared genetic patterns aren't "races", and genetically pure populations are still a myth), but I can easily imagine how people on the hard right may interpret these results. Many historians opine that archaeogenetics does hardly anything to answer historical questions (even if it helped decide both the controversy about Neolithicization by migration or acculturation, as well as the PIE homeland controversy); one historian once mentioned the Y-DNA haplogroup of Charlemagne as an example of a useless fact.

[Travis B.]

Of course you also get the opposite, where language belies genes, as is the case of the Icelanders, who are largely maternally descended from the Gaels, which is almost completely hidden linguistically.

[WeepingElf]

Indeed. And actually, language can spread independent from genes. An example is Latin, which did not spread by Romans displacing the people who lived in the provinces before, but by the provincials adopting the Latin language, first as L2, later as L1. The Roman conquest hardly left a trace in the genetic landscape of western Europe, but it greatly changed the linguistic landscape.

[hwhatting]

Also, archeaogenetics has inspired a resurgence of Kossinna's völkische Archäologie (the notion that archaeological cultures could be equated with "races" or ethno-linguistic groups), as its results can be put to the same kind of abuse as physical anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries. For instance, doesn't the discovery of "steppe DNA", as it is called in the popular press, look like the "proof" that an "Aryan race" actually exists? Of course, most archaeogeneticists would flatly deny that, for valid reasons (shared genetic patterns aren't "races", and genetically pure populations are still a myth), but I can easily imagine how people on the hard right may interpret these results. Many historians opine that archaeogenetics does hardly anything to answer historical questions (even if it helped decide both the controversy about Neolithicization by migration or acculturation, as well as the PIE homeland controversy); one historian once mentioned the Y-DNA haplogroup of Charlemagne as an example of a useless fact.

TBH, that looks a bit like denying the use of something because you don't like how some people abuse facts. The main question is whether the conclusions of archeogenetics are correct or not; that some people may abuse them is bad, but any fact can be abused.

[WeepingElf]

TBH, that looks a bit like denying the use of something because you don't like how some people abuse facts. The main question is whether the conclusions of archeogenetics are correct or not; that some people may abuse them is bad, but any fact can be abused.

You are of course right. Such abuse of science doesn't invalidate the science itself. This was more or less a note to myself, who had gone down the slippery road from archaeogenetics to Kossinnaism myself to some degree (see here) before realizing that the whole business of equating Y-DNA haplogroups and language families was completely misguided.

[FlamyobatRudki]

I wouldn't say that archaeogenetics is pseudoscience as, for instance, astrology or ufology are,

Humans are generally shitty at making that assesment even if they have the relevent related qualification and years of experience;

That said i'm facinated by Both ufology and Archeogenetics;
(Offtopic Iwish one could do scientific ufology though)
I've looked into it personally don't see reason to be weary of it except for some odd people)