New Jeanson Book: Traced Human DNA's Big Surprise

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Looks like the Discovery Institute have entered the fray with an article in Evolution News: Luskin: Adam and Eve and the Evolving Scientific Consensus.

Dr. Luskin has been an important figure among evangelical Christians in defending the scientific possibility of a first pair, even as other evangelical Christians insisted on adhering to the “consensus” view which, they said, showed that humans originated from a far larger population than two. The debate among evangelicals goes back to about 2011 and Casey reviews the twists and turns that have led to the present moment. Today, the truth of the so-called consensus seems far less clear and scientists have become much more reticent about saying the first couple must be no more than a product of the ancient Hebrew imagination.

That quote is pretty convoluted but I understand it to mean that Dr Luskin (and therefore the DI?) reckons that the scientific consensus is reverting to support an original first couple whose names were Adam and Eve. Regrettably, Luskin’s comments are drawn (by the DI) from a profoundly boring 100 minute podcast featuring Luskin with Hank Hanegraaff on *the Hank Unplugged podcast" (there’s a link in the DI article). Masochists are welcome to listen to the entire podcast.

Dr Luskin is uniquely credentialed to comment on this area of science and the Bible, holding, as he does, a Law degree from the University of San Diego and a PhD in Geology from the University of Johannesburg.

PS: just noticed that the article in Evolution News is dated 1 April 2022. I don’t think the DI jokes about stuff like this, so the date is, I think, purely a coincidence.

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No. Perhaps instead you should consider the massive amount of actual evidence that contradicts Jeanson’s notions, which makes them not scientific.

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The competitive advantage is if the mutant keeps migrating to areas of lower population density.

The timeline could still be generally right and his hypothesis for the migration could be wrong. I was reading this recently. https://www.science.org/content/article/mystery-warriors-made-fastest-migration-ancient-history If R1b was brought in, perhaps at first Avar groups settled in areas of low population density, then began to mix with the local population as their numbers grew.

Generally in Europe there is a gradient from West to East. The localized differences could just be a founder effect.

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Lot of iffy, could’ve special pleading there. Both population distributions and archeological evidence seem to favor R1b being present in Europe for millennia. Europe has history, perhaps too much of it, and the pattern of migration suggested does not appear to widely conform to what you are suggesting. My question is “what is at stake, anyways?” In the face of this, why is it so necessary that R1b haplogroup fit as a recent introduction to Europe?

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  1. That does not seems to be a “competitive advantage” as the term is generally understood in Evolutionary Biology.

  2. Where is your evidence of these entirely imaginary and oh-so-convenient “areas of lower population density” existing in Western Europe in the time-frame under consideration?

No it couldn’t. I have just shown that such a major migration was highly unlikely at any time since the 8th-9th centuries (see my last post) – something like half a millennium before Jeanson seems to be suggesting it occurs.

  1. The Pannonian Avars invaded the Pannonian Basin before the Hungarians (also see my last post), and the last remnants of them were absorbed by the latter.

  2. The Avar Kingdom did not reach further west than modern-day Austria.

  3. The Avars were not known to carry R1b – Wikipedia states:

A genetic study published in Scientific Reports in November 2019 examined the remains of fourteen Avar males. Eleven of them were dated to the early Avar period, and three were dated to the middle and late Avar period.[52] The eleven early Avar males were found to be carrying the paternal haplogroups N1a1a1a1a3 (four samples), N1a1a (two samples), R1a1a1b2a (two samples), C2 G2a, and I1.[52] The three males dated to the middle and late Avar period carried the paternal haplogroups C2, N1a1a1a1a3 and E1b1b1a1b1a.[52] The Avars studied were all determined to have had dark eyes and dark hair, and the majority of them were found to be primarily of East Asian origin.[53]

A genetic study published in Scientific Reports in January 2020 examined the remains of twenty-six individuals buried at various elite Avar cemeteries in the Pannonian Basin dated to the 7th century AD.[54] The mtDNA of these Avars belonged mostly to East Asian haplogroups, while the Y-DNA was exclusively of East Asian origin and “strikingly homogenous”, belonging to haplogroups N-M231 and Q-M242.[55] The evidence suggested that the Avar elite were largely patrilineal and endogamous for a period of around one century, and entered the Pannonian Basin through migrations from East Asia involving both men and women.[56]

(I actually checked out the Avars’ genetics earlier, when I posted that quote from Jeanson saying he was ignoring them.)

A good quick summary of the migrations, invasions and boundary shifts in the last 2 millennia can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI

Please explain how the Founder Effect explains the anomolously high levels of R1b found in the Basque country and Po Valley. For that matter, how would this effect explain the ‘bulge’ in high levels of R1b that extends eastwards from Brittany, probably to somewhere slightly eastwards of Orleans in central France?

I’m fairly sure you don’t understand the ‘Founder Effect’ – which is about reduced genetic variation in a sub-population, not that “a lineage new to an area can have more success than it did in the areas it migrated from or migrated through.”

All this seems to be you throwing anything and everything against the wall to see if something sticks in defense of Jeanson’s thesis (or something approximating to it). This cannot help but be unavailing as his thesis contradicts the evidence on a wide number of issues. It is not helped by your apparent inability to marshal any supporting evidence of your own – this renders your attempted rebuttals purely hypothetical, and often easily rebutted by simply checking easily-available evidence.

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Quibbling over these details is, frankly, a complete waste of time. Jeanson conflates genealogy and phylogeny. He literally directly overlays the y-chromosome phylogeny and Biblical pedigree. It’s such a trivial error, it makes everything else he talks about irrelevant. Genealogy and phylogeny aren’t the same thing! Genealogical and phylogenetic coalescence aren’t the same thing! Except to Jeanson apparently.

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Also, I’ll make a new thread for this next week, with a text writeup, but I’ll be reviewing Traced next Wednesday at 9pm EDT:

This will be less rambly and indignant than my Replacing Darwin Made Simple review from a while back. Well, less rambly anyway. More structured and specific. Got a lot of thoughts.

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You would think that would matter, wouldn’t you? Yet, as we are seeing, to the committed YEC such gross incompetence is not a problem at all.

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Perhaps you mean “fundamental”?

This is good. :slightly_smiling_face: I look forward to watching. Already had come up in my YouTube feed today before I checked this thread tonight.

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To be fair I often get the impression that to the committed creationist, due to their own lack of knowledge of the subject, it isn’t obvious where and how Jeanson is incompetent.

It seems like so much of the ability of creationists to ignore good evidence comes from simply not understanding it, and I think we sometimes understimate how much backgroundknowledge and education we are taking for granted, which also takes considerable work on the part of the reader to fully grasp.

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True. But that should not be the case here in this present discussion.

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I mean trivial as in basic, rather than unimportant.

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As there has been a pause in conversation, and as @dsterncardinale’s video review isn’t going to be out for a few days yet, I thought I’d loop back to an issue both RonSewell and I have touched on – that, in Ron’s words, “there is plenty of archeological evidence which is completely independent of radiometric dating that these remains represent people from well before historic times.”

It turns out that one of the most well-documented pre-historic R1bs, is one that Ron has already mentioned – the skeleton known as Villabruna 1 (found in Sovramonte, in NE Italy) – which even has its own section in Wikipedia, as well as nearly one hundred scientific articles about it, e.g.:

The Late Upper Paleolithic skeleton Villabruna 1 (Italy):
a source of data on biology and behavior of a
14.000 year-old hunter

The skeleton was laid extended and supine in a narrow and shallow (30-40 cm) pit, the head reclined to the left and the upper limbs extended at the side. Six grave goods, most probably originally contained in a bag were recovered from the left side of the skeleton. They include what has been proposed as the equipment for a Paleolithic hunter: a flint knife, a flint nucleus, a stone used as a hammer, a flint blade, a bone point and a pellet made of ochre and propolis (Cattani, 1993). Atop the burial were found several calcareous stones, some of which exhibit well-defined drawings painted in red ochre. According to the discoverers, the stones were placed to mark the burial location (Broglio, 1992, 1998). Six vertical bands painted in red ochre, which were discovered on the walls of the rock shelter jutting above the burial, may have served an analogous purpose.

I would like to ask Valerie, @thoughtful, which she thinks more likely:

  1. that this burial dates back to the Stone Age (whether we use a YEC, or a consensus-science, dating for that age);

  2. that a Stone-Age culture continued to exist in this (highly contested) area, without being noticed or disturbed by the Cisalpine Gauls, the Romans, the Lombards, the Franks, the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetians, etc, etc, but purely coincidentally managed to interbreed with a recent influx of R1b in the last two millennia; or

  3. that the hundreds of expert archeologists, who have written about and/or peer-reviewed the evidence all misidentified a Medieval burial as Stone Age?

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Well that’s too good to pass up, I’ll be specifically referencing this example to illustrate the problems with Jeanson’s chronology.

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Have you been bored? :slightly_smiling_face:

I would say the first possibility is the likeliest. Others are extremely unlikely. So then the question is - contamination, unreliability of ancient DNA, the same mutations in different lineages and back mutations, or Jeanson is wrong because evolution is true, or Jeanson is wrong because there was a much higher mutation rate in the past, or Jeanson is wrong because Q/R originated in Africa and it had a higher mutation rate in the past like other African lineages for environmental reasons, or some other localized cause. The last possibility intrigues me.

But then I read this last night and again, it seems like R1b Western European variants have to be A.D. era.

You might be interested, refers to Basque region. Analysis of the R1b-DF27 haplogroup shows that a large fraction of Iberian Y-chromosome lineages originated recently in situ | Scientific Reports

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Jeanson specifically says R1b arrived in Italy in the 1400-1500s AD.

Would you care to specifically address the validity of that claim not only in light of the Villabruna specimen, but also the paper you just linked.

Those authors provide a date of about 4000 years ago for the origins of a specific R1b subset (DF27) in Western Europe. So how do you square that with “seems like R1b Western European variants have to be A.D. era”?

Also, note the bait-and-switch you pulled here: Jeanson is talking about R1b as a whole. You’re talking about Western European variants of R1b, but using those findings (which you are not accurately representing) to defend Jeanson’s claims.

I don’t know what’s so challenging about this or why you’re having such a hard time accurately conveying the findings of papers you’ve presumably read.

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I’m not seeing what you are seeing. From your linked paper:

The age of this haplogroup appears clear: with independent samples (our samples vs. the 1000 genome project dataset) and independent methods (variation in 15 STRs vs. whole Y-chromosome sequences), the age of R1b-DF27 is firmly grounded around 4000–4500 ya, which coincides with the population upheaval in W. Europe at the transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.

This sub-variant of R1b arrives and establishes well before AD. You have skipped past the entire Bronze age.

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Not particularly. It was something that I had bouncing around in my brain on my walks for a day or two, that I finally got around to spending half an hour putting into some sort of order (it was only then that I realised that Ron had already obliquely mentioned Villabruna 1, and just how much had been written about V1 in the scientific literature).

Good. That’s a start.

Okay, there’s a lot there, all mashed together.

Let’s take the first bit:

… - contamination, unreliability of ancient DNA, the same mutations in different lineages and back mutations …

The general theme of this is that the Villabruna 1 DNA was an anomaly, that it was in some way ‘wrong’ or ‘misleading’. The problem is that the evidence is that it is not anomalous – it is consistent with the majority of the other supposedly Stone Age/Bronze Age DNA, including large-scale studies of Etruscan, Insular Celt and Basque burials, that also shows R1b. If you argue that this is a coincidence, then it is a truly remarkable coincidence. A more reasonable conclusion is that the evidence is consistent because R1b was prevalent in Western Europe back then.

I would note that in contrast to this mass of evidence for ancient R1b, you (and it would seem Jeanson) have presented absolutely no evidence that any recent migrant group from “far Eastern Europe or Central Asia” actually carried R1b.

This means that for all your problem with my earlier wisecrack about “teleporting”, you/Jeanson have no more evidence for Jeanson’s thesis, than for one that R1b came into Western Europe due to aliens disguised as medieval male humans teleporting in and proceeding to breed with human females. This creates a very large problem for anybody trying to convince us to take Jeanson seriously.

… or Jeanson is wrong because evolution is true …

I would make a more modest claim. I don’t think that this evidence, on its own, proves that “evolution is true”. I would however say that it throws considerable doubt over Jeanson’s alternative thesis, and on his mutation rates.

Unless somebody is now claiming that R1b came into existence in Europe last Thursday (or similar), I don’t think anybody is going down this particular rabbit-hole. (The consensus seems to be that his rate is too high, not too low.) :slight_smile:

… or Jeanson is wrong because Q/R originated in Africa …

Is somebody claiming this?

Like @dsterncardinale & @RonSewell, I’m having trouble matching this claim with what your cited source actually says.

Actually, what they do say makes sense. They place the R1b-DF27 strain at “~4,200 years ago”, which would place it as the endemic strain in Spain, before the colonisation, migrations, and invasions by Carthage, Rome, Visigoths, Muslim Berbers, etc, over the last three millennia. Therefore it is higher among the Basques of the Pyrenees (70%), than among the populations of the Iberian coasts and lowlands (40%) where intermixing with these influxes would have been greater.

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Here’s how they calculated the dates:

Mutation rates were retrieved from the Y-Chromosome STR Haplotype Database (YHRD, www.yhrd.org) on Feb. 1, 2017. DYS385 was omitted from the calculations, and DYS389I was subtracted from DYS389II. Additionally, outlier individuals were detected and removed from the estimate as suggested in ref. 20.

Unweighted ρ was used to estimate the age of DF27 by using the whole Y chromosome sequences of the 88 unrelated individuals derived for this SNP and present in the 1000 genomes project dataset. The mutation rate considered was 0.888 × 10−9 per year1, 46, which, taking into account the ~10.36 Mb of the Y chromosome amenable to short-read sequencing and SNP detection1, translates to a rate of 108.7 years/mutation.

The Western European variants have to be A.D. era because of branching and population growth. The authors even mention “explosive growth.”

The Western European variants are evidence that the evolutionary clock doesn’t make sense. Branching within those variants shouldn’t have survived since the Bronze Age - we should only have very few lineages since then because of drift. Unless I missed it, no one has yet critiqued Jeanson’s main hypothesis in the book in particular in this thread - that branching is evidence of minimum population growth. It’s uniparental genealogical science. (I made up that last sentence; I think it should have been in the book :slightly_smiling_face:). Genetic drift meets genealogy and they had a kid. :laughing:

Read above.

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Why do I even bother.

That does not follow.

This paragraph is word spaghetti and I have no idea what you’re trying to say.

You did not answer the specific questions I asked nor address the problem that I pointed out RE conflating R1b and specific variants of R1b. I would appreciate if you would do that, rather than ignoring the problems in the last thing you said and making a new set of incorrect statements.

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