--- In cybalist@..., "richardwordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:
> Have you read
> http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~macaulay/papers/richards_2000.pdf?
....[snip]... Has any member of the group looked at this raw data?
> I've only got as far as down-loading it.) It is not impossible
that
> Vasconic entered from the Near East after the LGM; the earliest
> Europeans are best represented in Scandinavia, not the Basque
country!
Even if I looked at the raw data, I doubt that I would be able to
properly interpret it, but for whatever it is worth I have just
finished reading a summary of Richards et al.'s findings in "Mapping
Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes" [Steve Olson:
Houghton Mifflin: 2002]. Olson discusses this study on pages 172-174.
He makes the point that while 22% of European mitochondrial DNA can
be traced to the spread of agricultural people from the Middle East,
on the other hand only 10% can be traced to the original settlement
of Europe by homo sapiens. Fully 60% appears to have come from the
Middle East and western Asia during the time between those two
events; Olson says "probably as a result of a continuous trickle of
people".
To me this would seem to both support the suggestion that the
precursor to Vasconic could have come into Europe well after its
initial settlement, and also suggest that the precursor to PIE could
have came into Europe before the spread of agriculture. 60% of the
mtDNA pool seems to imply an awful lot of movement into Europe, even
if each individual component was too small by itself to leave much of
an impact on the archaeological record.
Ned Smith