Hah! Am I then 'hoist on my own petard?' says Mark - eh?! Most likely as always, yes. . . But complex. . .
Interesting question in many ways. If I bore you, you will no doubt move to the next message. . but there are a few layers here! 1) The derivation of the term - one meant to enshrine whites as 'the superior race' - goes back to the Goettingen School of biology in the 18th C: In Why White People Are Called 'Caucasian?' [ Nov 7 20023] says Nell Irvin Painter : "My question of why white people are called "Caucasian" and its answer belong to the relatively new field of whiteness studies, a field nowhere as developed as African-American studies, with its sophisticated literature on race. . . Including the invention of "Caucasian" as the name of white people makes good sense in a conference dedicated to collective degradation, for the still current term "Caucasian" connects directly to collective degradation, in the form of the gendered, eastern slave trade, via the network of learned societies that so deeply influenced the history of science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before this essay turns to Göttingen in 1795 and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1762-1840), who is known for having invented the association, let me locate the Caucasus and its peoples. "; at: http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/race/Painter.pdf See the same story, and told well also - in Charles King : " Gods of the Upper Air - How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century". (Charlie please ignore, I am not trying to wind you up]. While a rattling good yarn, it basically only mentions the anthropology of Marx and Engels peripherally. But it deals with the term 'caucasian' - tracing the same story as does Painter. As you likely know Mark, many are trying to get rid of this term for its connotations of the history of racism. But it is not purely 'wokism'. As you know I think, scientific data of vast inter-mixing of gene pools is now quite abundant. Especially in the last 5-10 years as 'automatic' gene sequencers are more easily available and cheaper. 2) How complex the background lineage of India is (really like everywhere - nothing special I guess). (i) There has been a long debate about the origins of caste in both its sociological perspective and in its potential purely genetic perspective. The pioneers of this type of study include a chap called David Reich at Harvard, whose book "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past Paperback" February 5, 2019 - tells the story ( well, one of them - he does rather pose as *the* solitary genius - actually his mentor based in Germany got the Nobel Prize recnlty, ) of how DNA testing has been used to track population passages out of Africa. And in caste in India. He tells there in detail, how he & his group used differing segments of DNA to research. But here I quote from a readily available source(see after quote): " all populations in India show evidence of a genetic mixture of two ancestral groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) , who are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) , who are primarily from the subcontinent. . . .The researchers took advantage of the fact that the genomes of Indian people are a mosaic of chromosomal segments of ANI and ASI descent. Originally when the ANI and ASI populations mixed, these segments would have been extremely long, extending the entire lengths of chromosomes. However, after mixture these segments would have broken up at one or two places per chromosome, per generation, recombining the maternal and paternal genetic material that occurs during the production of egg and sperm. By measuring the lengths of the segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes, the authors were thus able to obtain precise estimates of the age of population mixture, which they infer varied about 1,900 to 4,200 years, depending on the population analyzed. While the findings show that no groups in India are free of such mixture, the researchers did identify a geographic element. “Groups in the north tend to have more recent dates and southern groups have older dates,” said co-first author Priya Moorjani, a graduate student in Reich’s lab at Harvard Medical School. “This is likely because the northern groups have multiple mixtures.” “This genetic data tells us a three-part cultural and historical story,” said Reich, who is also an associate member of the Broad Institute. “Prior to about 4000 years ago there was no mixture. After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups. And finally, endogamy set in and froze everything in place.” “The fact that every population in India evolved from randomly mixed populations suggests that social classifications like the caste system are not likely to have existed in the same way before the mixture,” said co–senior author Lalji Singh, currently of Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi, India, and formerly of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology. “Thus, the present-day structure of the caste system came into being only relatively recently in Indian history.” David Cameron; Harvard News & Research; August 8, 2013; "Genetics Proves Indian Population Mixture"; https://hms.harvard.edu/news/genetics-proves-indian-population-mixture The book describes how the pro-Hindutva (militant Hindu a=linked to the BJP) took great objection with the implication that North Indians - had a fair bit of 'Western' admixture, or. . . Caucasian mixture. Even more explosive was what Reich was (if I recall the book - read a few years back) prevented at being able to get at, namely caste. . . Well.. 10 years later now. . . The story of caste from a very narrow biological viewpoint Maternal DNA derives in a direct way a lineage without involvement from the father's genes, and a segment known as mitochondrial DNA - this is 'useful' in population genetics: "The fact that mitochondrial DNA is mostly maternally inherited enables genealogical researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. . . This is usually accomplished on human mitochondrial DNA by sequencing the hypervariable control regions (HVR1 or HVR2), and sometimes the complete molecule of the mitochondrial DNA, as a genealogical DNA test." Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA This was used very recently in an as yet unpublished gene study. That found several interesting things including this: "Moreover, Indians have the largest variation in Neanderthal ancestry, as well as the highest amount of population-specific Neanderthal segments among worldwide groups." 50,000 years of Evolutionary History of India: Insights from ∼2,700 Whole Genome Sequences Elise Kerdoncuff, Laurits Skov, Nick Patterson, Wei Zhao, Yuk Yee Lueng, Gerard D. Schellenberg, Jennifer A. Smith, Sharmistha Dey, Andrea Ganna, AB Dey, Sharon L.R. Kardia, Jinkook Lee, Priya Moorjani doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.02.15.580575 ; free at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC311057/ Perhaps even more potentially 'explosive' is this - & I U/L key bits: "MtDNA HVR1 genetic distances between caste populations and Africans, Asians, and Europeans are significantly different from zero (p < 0.001) and reveal that, regardless of rank, each caste group is most closely related to Asians and is most dissimilar from Africans (Table 1). The genetic distances from major continental populations (e.g., Europeans) differ among the three caste groups, and the comparison reveals an intriguing pattern. As one moves from lower to upper castes, the distance from Asians becomes progressively larger. The distance between Europeans and lower castes is larger than the distance between Europeans and upper castes, but the distance between Europeans and middle castes is smaller than the upper caste-European distance. These trends are the same whether the Kshatriya and Vysya are included in the upper castes, the middle castes, or excluded from the analysis. This may be owing, in part, to the small sample size (n = 10) of each of these castes. Among the upper castes the genetic distance between Brahmins and Europeans (0.10) is smaller than that between either the Kshatriya and Europeans (0.12) or the Vysya and Europeans (0.16). Assuming that contemporary Europeans reflect West Eurasian affinities, these data indicate that the amount of West Eurasian admixture with Indian populations may have been proportionate to caste rank." I was born to a family of Hindu refugees from now Pakistan. I think that almost undoubtedly came from Iranian stock somehow. . . Anyway. . . all very interesting. Similar types of studies in Europe and the UK show astonishing migration patterns. So - finally - You are right - I should definitely *not* have used term 'caucasian'! Be Well, H -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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