Re: Origin of *h2arh3-trom 'plough'

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "piervantrink" <piervantrink@...> wrote:

>
> [...]
>
> [quoted]
>
> Agriculture emerged on the human
>
> cultural scene about 10,000 years
>
> ago, spreading rapidly through
>
> Europe from the Near East to the
>
> British Isles in about 4,000 years.
>
> But did this world-changing
>
> technology get disseminated via an
>
> expanding wave of industrious
>
> farmers or through word-of-mouth
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> among local hunter-gatherer
>
> populations?
>
> To help answer this much-debated
>
> question, researchers have peered
>
> into the genetics of modern
>
> Europeans for clues. Mark Jobling of
>
> the University of Leicester in the
>
> U.K. and his colleagues found not
>
> only that agriculture seems to have
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> spread westward via a new group of
>
> Neolithic people from the Near East,
>
> but also that these new farmers were
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> incredibly successful with the local
>
> ladies, leaving their genetic traces
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> in their modern male descendents.
>
> "We focused on the commonest Y-
>
> chromosome lineage in Europe,"
>
> Jobling said in a prepared
>
> statement. The team analyzed a
>
> single haplotype, R1b1b2 (which is
>
> carried by about 110 million men in
>
> Europe today) from 2,574 European
>
> men whose families had been living
>
> in the same location for at least
>
> two generations. This common
>
> haplotype, however, is not randomly
>
> distributed across the continent.
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> "It follows a gradient from south-
>
> east to north-west," he said. About
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> 12 percent of men in eastern Turkey
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> have it, whereas some 85 percent of
>
> men carry it in Ireland.
>
> Others have previously speculated
>
> that this distribution was due to
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> earlier, Paleolithic expansion from
>
> Africa. But Jobling and his fellow
>
> researchers asserted that it
>
> reflects a rapid, more recent
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> genetic spread during the Neolithic
>
> —one that has a "striking"
>
> correlation with known Neolithic
>
> sites. "The geographical
>
> distribution of diversity within the
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> haplogroup is best explained by its
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> spread from a single source from the
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> Near East via [Turkey] during the
>
> Neolithic," the authors concluded in
>
> their study, which was published
>
> online January 19 in PLoS Biology.
>
> "In total, this means that more than
>
> 80 percent of European Y chromosomes
>
> descend from incoming farmers,"
>
> geneticist Patricia Balaresque, also
>
> of the University of Leicester and
>
> lead study author, said in a
>
> prepared statement. "In contrast,
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> most maternal genetic lineages seem
>
> to descend from hunter-gatherers."
>
> How could these early European
>
> ancestors come from such different
>
> groups? "To us, this suggests a
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> reproductive advantage for farming
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> males over indigenous hunter-
>
> gatherer males during the switch
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> from hunting and gathering to
>
> farming," Balaresque said. "Maybe,
>
> back then, it was just sexier to be
>
> a farmer."

Right. "She thinks my tractor's sexy." Or in those days, the hot country single would have been "She thinks my harrow's sexy."

What this discrepancy really indicates is that the Jed Clampett model of the monogamous nuclear family as the primary agricultural unit is inapplicable to this westward expansion of farming. A better model would be the stereotype of the plantation in the antebellum U.S. South, with the patriarch relaxing on the verandah sipping a mint julep, waited on by servants who look like him, apart from skin color.

The principal difference between the "Old South" and "Old Europe" is that the European farmlord class did not have to import slave labor from the Caribbean, or directly from Africa. They could simply put substrate-speakers to work on the land which they had just appropriated from them. And of course the farmlords had their way with the substrate women, as reflected in the Y-chromosome data. It is doubtful that these women found the invaders any sexier than substrate men. They simply had no choice in the matter.

DGK