I’ve been scratching around on the genetics of some pre-Roman Empire populations, and then looking for what Jeanson had to say about them. In doing so, I came across this little ‘gem’:
I would note that the Etruscans,[1] Celts[2] and Basques[3] are all pre-Roman Western European ethnic groups, known to have the R1b haplogroup.
Making claims about the migration of R1b to Western Europe without tracing these groups, is ludicrously blatant negligence. I must assume that Jeanson omitted them because he knew that their inclusion would blow his thesis out of the water.
I think this puts the last nail in the coffin of Jeanson’s “supposed” understanding of human genetic history, and his “supposed” claims to being a real scientist.
The origin and legacy of the Etruscans through a 2000-year archeogenomic time transect
By contrast, the newly reported central Italian individuals from 800 to 1 BCE show ~75% frequency of the Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b, mostly represented by the R1b-P312 polymorphism and its derived R1b-L2, that diffused across Europe alongside steppe-related ancestry in association with the Bell Beaker complex (16). This suggests that this R1b Y-chromosome lineage spread into the Italian peninsula with steppe-related movements during the Bronze Age. In the first millennium CE, its frequency is reduced to ~40% with higher occurrence of Near Eastern–associated Y-chromosome lineages such as J (fig. S5B).
↩︎Neolithic and Bronze Age migration to Ireland and establishment of the insular Atlantic genome
This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying introduction of Indo-European, perhaps early Celtic, language. Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago.
↩︎The place of the Basques in the European Y-chromosome diversity landscape
The majority (about 86%) of the Basque Y chromosomes belong to haplogroup R1*(xR1a,R1b3f)-M173, of which R1b3*-M269 accounts for 88% (Figure 1). As this haplogroup is also the most abundant type in all Western Europe16 it places the Basque Y chromosomes within the European landscape. The above data are reflected in the low diversity values for the Basque populations (Table 1). Within R1b3*-M269, Basques also show a reduced STR diversity (Table 1). Thus, compared for instance to the non-Basque Iberians, the average number of mutations in our sampled Basques is significantly lower (Mann–Whitney U-test, P=0.009).
↩︎