"AN" genetics

Mon Sep 9 11:34:08 UTC 2002

Some months ago I had a whinge on this list about the geneticists
researching/publishing on the genetics of Austronesian speakers.

I put it to a number of the illuminaries that they needed to publish what
they have said, what they have not said and what they have meant and what
they have not meant in an Index Medicus indexed journal. Ten of us
(linguists, archaeologists, a comparative social anthrpologist and a
biological anthropologist) are now chipping away at an article to be
submitted to such a journal in the next few months.

Last week I posted a list of genetics titles to the ASAO list warning
subscribers that not all the titles were as useful as others. I have just
posted, to ASAO, a explanation of my complaints. I've pasted that
immediately below, followed by the list of titles I've/we've been looking at.
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TODAY'S POSTING TO ASAO:
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I can't believe people are interested. Maybe eight people will read our
paper rather than the normal five. Message divided into: Descent, Genetics,
Updating "Express Train" lecture notes, and References

DESCENT

I don’t actually have any theoretical bones to pick on the descent group
question and came into the work by chance.

June Helm didn’t drill us or grill on, for instance, kin systems at Iowa in
the 70s and was clear that general ethnography was still of value but not
fashionable.

If you went out looking for descent groups, e.g., on Pohnpei or Chuuk, it
is my understanding that the matrilineal clan is kind of a remnant of
grander things in the past. Although they continue to define units of
exogamy and the basic concept of what constitutes incest and what does not,
Pohnpeian rank and prestige structures are based on title systems while on
Chuuk it seems to me that land and rank/prestige structures were based on
patri affiliations.

The Saipan Carolinians are a profoundly matri-lineal and (until very
recently) matri-local group. As I ask them, in a post-modernist sense of
giving them the broadest possible opportunity to speak about life
(postmodernists are better listeners, aren't they?), whatever
 as I ask
them what they want in this history / ethnography they want me to write

MANY of them spontaneously mention the clans while for others its the
furthest thing from their minds
 either because they don’t much care or
because there is a history of profound secrecy about such things.

I haven’t read the Pohnpei and Chuuk stuff for 30 years but work by Per
Hage has come to intrigue me (recent titles at the end of this email), and
general knowledge of what he is on about allowed me to grasp the
significance of some things Gibbons mentioned when it went right by a lot
of other people (see below).

Anyway, accidental voyaging
 I reconstructed the Proto Pn kinterm system
because Andrew Pawley said "you HAVE to". "Horrors", I thought, as people
tend to have strong views on kinship, which way the shifts are going, etc.

so "I embarked on [that] project with a pronounced sense of trepidation..."

My work came to the attention of Hage and we have been working together
ever since, him doing the social anthropology, me doing the linguists
(Proto Pn, Proto Mc, and now we are starting a Bantu project). It was like
mountain climbing to me. I did it simply because it was there.

But then I started reading Per’s other stuff and it’s just fascinating. Per
has gone back to a lot of old kinship stuff and found a lot of missing
links
 i.e., things that NEVER or ALWAYS occur and why (where the old
sources were able to discern the pattern but not the reasons why). Of
interest to a linguist, at any rate
 logical systems
 they conspire to
"make sense" along various logical dimensions that are certainly opaque of
no conscious interest to individual speakers
 recurrent examples of the
overall language communities "filling in the holes" sort of thing.

Kind of explains why Samoan is such an odd terminological system given the
rest of the Pn systems: matrilineality broke down and the kin terms had
none of the new "slots" to fill with the old terms in the same sense that
Tongan and East Polynesian.

If it sounds like I’m implying these are instant responses to social change
I don’t mean to imply that at all. But the systems aren’t always wreckage
of things past and their general correlations with the synchronic society
are rather consistent.

Onward and upward:

GENETICS AND POc MATRILINEALITY

I complained about a few "Austronesian" genetics sources over this list a
week or ten days ago but didn’t say why. The first is:

Gibbons, Ann
2001    The peopling of the Pacific. Science 291(5509):1735-1737.

Oppenheimer mentioned on this list that the above was a news article
and my coauthors (on a magnum opus concerning genetics and the
prehistory of AN speakers) have also related that it isn’t appropriate
to cite or criticize news items in research papers.

I am actually quite grateful to Gibbons on one level. She makes clear that
the Polynesians initially arrived in Polynesian (3,000 years ago) with
mainly SE Asian mtDNA and mainly Melanesian/Papuan Y-chrom DNA. "Well,
that’s it", I thought. "Proto Oceanic society was matri-lineal/-local."
(See Hage titles below)

My central complaint concerning Gibbons, which I am mentioning on this and
other lists, is the same as for:

Oppenheimer, Stephen, and Martin Richards
2001a   Fast trains, slow boats, and the ancestry of the Polynesian
islanders. Science Progress 84(3):157-181.
Oppenheimer, Stephen J., and Martin Richards
2001b   Slow boat to Melanesia? Nature 410(6825):166-167.

and my complaint is their unreferenced assertions that the:

language distribution and migration theory model > out of Taiwan > "Express
Train" model

allows little or no mixing of human genetics along the way.

No linguist has ever said or implied such a thing. Or if one ever did no
citation is made of such and it wouldn't have been representative of the
larger body of linguists anyway.

Every introduction to historical/comparative linguistics text of which I am
aware specifically makes the point that there is no general expectation of
correlation or continuity between language, society, material culture,
biological ancestry, etc. The default is the null hypothesis. Then one
begins chipping away at how likely or unlikely the null hypothesis is.

Oppenheimer and Richards (2001a), for instance, is an accomplished overview
of SOME of the prehistory but their unreferenced assertion that the
linguists don't allow any genetic mixing sets them off wrestling a straw
man to the ground and it becomes kind of involuted and senseless.

Such unreferenced assertions are beginning to appear in Pacific genetics
articles in general but I mention the three above as they then make this
the centerpiece of how geneticists are going to solve the linguists'
"problem". We are researching the history of the idea.

I would say that these unreferenced claims libel and defame us (the
linguists, archaeologists and others who are attempting disciplined
syntheses of Pacific prehistory), make us vulnerable to ridicule in the
international community of prehistorians and we would be glad if the
geneticists would simply cease and desist. But as they accuse no one of
saying "no-mixing", there are no injured individuals. Not enough Yanks
concerned to work up to litigiousness anyway.

The illuminaries involved in the magnum opus say it is a familiar sort of
misunderstanding in the history of science as two or more disciplines which
have not worked closely together, come to scrutinize a problem and begin
referring to the others’ works.

As for how the linguists are actually speaking of such things in recent
years, I cite a passage from

Pawley, Andrew K. and Malcolm Ross
1995 The prehistory of Oceanic languages: A current view. In The
Austronesians: Historical and comparative perspectives. Edited by Peter
Bellwood, James J. Fox, and Darrell Tryon, pp. 39-74. Canberra: Department
of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University.

	... some Oceanic speakers moved through Melanesia
	into the Central Pacific, and they moved through
	rapidly enough to retain their Southern Mongoloid
	phenotype. pp. 60

Possibly "rapidly enough to retain an obvious Southern Mongoloid component
in their phenotype" would have been a better phrasing from several points
of view but the passage makes clear the general expectation of linguists
that Austronesian speakers would have been "mixing" with any proximus groups.

SUGGESTIONS FOR UPDATING LECTURE NOTES ON THE "OUT OF TAIWAN / EXPRESS
TRAIN" MODEL

So if you're going to update your lecture notes and tell your students what
the bottom line presently appears to be, the following will probably have
some durability in distilling the language distribution and migration
theory model + linguistic paleontology + comparative ethnography +
archaeology + anyone willing to help + genetics "Triangulation" method
(Kirch and Green 2001 Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: An essay in historical
anthropology. Cambridge (the method, not my, perhaps, bold sweep of the
method applied to AN as a whole))) model:
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Austronesian speaking populations emerged out of Taiwan migrating rapidly
and spreading out thinly to the south. They were probably
patri-lineal/-local through the first centuries of dispersal and would have
tended to pick up, over time, more Insular SE Asian mitochondrial DNA than
Y-chrom. However, the Proto Oceanic speakers were certainly
matri-lineal/-local and picked up more Y-chrom than mtDNA as they expanded
through Melanesia on their way to Polynesia and Micronesia. Within this
general framework is the notion that the Polynesians, for instance, could
have arrived in Polynesia with an Asian-derived language, an Asian-derived
society, material culture and procurement complex, and POSSIBLY, no East
Asian DNA at all. But they didn't. They arrived with a little bit of Taiwan
Y chrom left, at any rate. Particular to the Ami, as it turns out, whose
language has be mentioned, by Malcolm Ross, as possibly having a special
relationship to extra-Taiwan AN (MalayoPolynesian).
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REFERENCES

Hage, Per
1997	Unthinkable categories and the fundamental laws of kinship. American
Ethnologist 24(3):652-667.
Hage, Per
1998a	Proto-Polynesian kin terms and descent groups. Oceanic Linguistics
37(1):189-192.
Hage, Per
1998b	Was Proto-Oceanic society matrilineal? Journal of the Polynesian
Society 107(1):365-379.
Hage, Per
1999a	Alternate generation terminology: a theory for a finding. Journal of
Anthrpological Research 55:521-539.
Hage, Per
1999b	Linguistic evidence for primogeniture and ranking in Proto-Oceanic
society. Oceanic Linguistics 38:366-375.
Hage, Per
1999c	Reconstructing ancestral Oceanic society. Asian Perspectives
38(2):200-228.
Hage, Per
2001a	The evolution of Dravidian kinship systems in Oceania: linguistic
evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(3):487-508.
Hage, Per
2001b	Marking theory and kinship analysis. Anthropological Theory .
Hage, Per, and F. Harary
1996	Island Networks: Communication, Kinship and Classification Structures
in Oceania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hage, Per, and Frank Harary
n.d.	Voyaging, exchange and stratification in the Caroline Islands. m.s. .
Hage, Per, Frank Harary, and Brent James
1996	The minimum spanning tree problem in archaeology. American Antiquity
61(1):149-155.
Hage, Per, and Jeff Marck
2001	The marking of sex distinctions in Polynesian kinship terminologies.
Oceanic Linguistics 40(1):156-166.
Hage, Per, and Jeff Marck
2002	Proto-Micronesian kin terms, matrilineality, descent groups, and
overnight voyaging). Oceanic Linguistics 41(1):159-170.
Hage, Per, and Jeff Marck
forthcoming-a	The demise of matrilineality in early Polynesian Society. .
Hage, Per, and Jeff Marck
forthcoming-b	Matrilineality and the Melanesian origin of Polynesian
Y-chromosomes. .
Marck, Jeff
1996	Kin terms in the Polynesian protolanguages. Oceanic Linguistics
35(2):??-??
Marck, Jeff
2000	Topics in Polynesian Language and Culture History. Canberra: Pacific
Linguistics.
Marck, Jeff
2002	On Shutler and Marck (1975). In Fifty Years in the Field: Essays in
honour and celebration of Richard Shutler Jr's archaeological career. S.
Bedford, D. Burley, and C. Sand, eds. Noumea: Department of Archaeology of
the Museum of New Caledonia.
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End today's posting to ASAO
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START LIST OF SOURCES POSTED TO ASAO A WEEK OR TEN DAYS AGO:

The American Journal of Human Genetics has all it's pre-2002 articles in
the public domain (you don't need your library's acct. and pswd).

The web site is http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJHG/

As you will see from the list below (number of titles, length or articles),
AJHG has had a sustained commitment to the Oceania genetics question for
several years now. Hurles AJHG 2002 is a must but not available without
acct. and pswrd.

Otherwise, one can check for the other journals:

Electronic journals by subject:

	http://www.bangor.ac.uk/is/library/e_journals/ej_subject.html

Electronic journals in social sciences:

	http://www.bangor.ac.uk/is/library/e_journals/ej_so.html

Electronic journals in biological sciences:

	http://www.bangor.ac.uk/is/library/e_journals/ej_ls.html

Some our genetics titles interspersed with some of the others we are
referring to:

Burley et al. 2001	Origin and significance of a founding settlement in
Polynesia. PNAS (what's the full name??) 98(20):11829-11831.

Burton, M.L., C.C. Moore, J.W.M. Whiting, and A.K. (full names) Romeny
1996	(has to do with Y chrom and patrilocality). Current Anthropology
37:87-123.

Capelli, Cristian, James F. Wilson, Martin Richards, Michael P.H. Stumpf,
Fiona Gratrix, Stephen Oppenheimer, Peter Uderhill, Vincenzo L. Pascali,
Tsang-Ming Ko, and David B. Goldstein
2001	A predominantly indigenous paternal heritage for the
Austronesian-speaking peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania.
American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432-443.

Comas, David, Francesc Calafell, Eva Mateu, Anna Pérez-Lezaun, Elena Bosch,
Rosa Martínez-Arias, Jordi Clarimon, Fiorenzo Facchini, Giovanni Fiori,
Donata Luiselli, Davide Pettener, and Jaume Bertranpetit
1998	Trading genes along the Slik Road: mtDNA sequnces and the origin of
Central Asian populations. American Journal of Human Genetics 63:1824-1838.

Devlin, B., Kethryn Roeder, Caleb Otto, Seba Tiobech, and W. Byerly
2001	Genome-wide distribution of linkage disequilibrium in the population
of Palau and its implications for gene flow in Remote Oceania. Human
Genetics 108:521-528.

Diamond, Jared
2001	Slow boat to Melanesia? Reply to Oppenheimer and Richards. Nature
410(6825):167.

Gibbons, Ann
2001	The peopling of the Pacific. Science 291(5509):1735-1737.

Gray, Russell, and Fiona Jordan
2000	Language trees support the express-train sequence of Austronesian
expansion. Nature 405:1052-1055.

Green, Roger C.
2002	Rediscoverying the social aspects of ancestral Oceanic Societies
through archaeology, linguistics and ethnology. In Fifty Years in the
Field. Essays in honour and celebration of Richard Shutler Jr's
archaeological career. S. Bedford, C. Sand, and D. Burley, eds. Pp. 21-35.
Auckland: New Zealand Archaeological Association Monograph 25.

Hage, Per
1998	Was Proto-oceanic society matrilineal? Journal of the Polynesian
Society 107:365-379.

Hage, Per
2001	The evolution of Dravidian kinship systems in Oceania: linguistic
evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(3):487-508.

Hammer, Michael F., Tatiana M. Karafet, Alan J. Redd, Hamdi Jarjanazi,
Silvana Santachiara-Benerecetti, Himla Soodyall, and Stephen L. Zegura
2001	Hierarchical patterns of global human Y-chromosome diversity. Mol.
Biol. Evol (full name) 18(7):1189-1203.

Holden, Clare Janaki
2002	Bantu language trees reflect the spread of farming across-sub-Saharan
Africa: a maximum-parsimony analysis. Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London Series B 269:793-799.

Hurles, Matthew E., Catherine Irven, Jayne Nicholson, Paul G. Taylor,
Fabrico R. Santos, John Loughlin, Mark A. Jobling, and Bryan C. Sykes
1998	European Y-chromosomal lineages in Polynesians: a contrast to the
population structure revealed by mtDNA. American Journal of Human Genetics
63:1793-1806.

Hurles, Matthew E., Jayne Nicholson, Elena Bosch, Colin Renfrew, Bryan C.
Sykes, and Mark A. Jobling
2002	Y chromosonal evidence for the origins of Oceanic-speaking peoples.
Genetics 160:289-303.

Jorde, L.B., and full names) et al. (all authors
2000	(has to do with Y chrom and patrilocality). American Journal of Human
Genetics 66:979-988.

Karafet, Tatiana, Liping Xu, Ruofu Du, William Wang, Shi Feng, R.S. Wells,
Alan J. Redd, Stephen L. Zegura, and Michael F. Hammer
2001	Paternal population history of East Asia: sources, patterns, and
microevolutionary processes. American Journal of Human Genetics 69:615-628.

Kayser, Manfred, Silke Brauer, Gunter Weiss, Wulf Schiefenhovel, Peter A.
Underhill, and Mark Stonekind
2001	Independent histories of human Y chronosomes from Melanesia and
Australia. American Journal of Human Genetics 68(1):173-190.

Kirch, Patrick Vinton
2000	On the Road of the Winds: An archaeological history of the Pacific
Islands before European contact. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lum, J. Koji
1998	Central and Eastern Micronesia: genetics, the overnight voyage, and
linguistic divergence. Man and Culture in Oceania (The Japanese Society for
Oceanic Studies) 14:69-80.

Lum, J. Koji, and Rebecca L. Cann
2000	mtDNA lineage analyses: Origins and migrations of Micronesians and
Polynesians. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 113:151-168.

Lum, J. Koji, Rebecca L. Cann, Jeremy J. Martinson, and Lynn B. Jorde
1998	Mitochondrial and nuclear genetic relationships among Pacific Island
and Asian populations. American Journal of Human Genetics 63:613-624.

Main, P., R. Attenborough, G. Chelvanayagam, and X. Gao
2001	The peopling of New Guinea: evidence from Class 1 human leukocyte
antigen. Human Biology 73(3):365-383.

Melton, Terry, Stephanie Clifford, Jeremy Martinson, Mark Batzer, and Mark
Stoneking
1998	Genetic evidence for the Proto-Austronesian homeland in Asia: mtDNA
and nuclear DNA variation in Raiwanese aboriginal tribes. American Journal
of Human Genetics 63:1807-1823.

Melton, T. (full names), R. Peterson, A.J. Redd, N. Saha, A.S. Sofro, J.
Martinso, and M. Stoneking
1995	Polynesian genetic affinities with Southeast Asian populations as
identified by mtDNA alaysis. American Journal of Human Genetics 57:403-414.

Murray-McIntosh, Rosalind P., Brian J. Scrimshaw, Peter J. Hatfield, and
David Penny
1998	Testing migration patterns and estimating foundation population size
in Polynesia by using human mtDNA sequences. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 95:9047-9052.

Oota, Hiroki, Naruya Saitou, Takayuki Matsushita, and Shitaroh Ueda
1999	Molecular genetic analysis of remains of a 2,000-year-old human
population in China - and its relevance for the origin of the modern
Japanese population. American Journal of Human Genetics 64:250-258.

Oota, Hiroki, Wannapa Settheetham-Ishida, Danai Tiwawech, Takafumi Ishida,
and Mark Stoneking
2001	Human mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation  is correlated with matrilocal
versus patrilocal residence. Nature Genetics 29:20-21.

Oppenheimer, Stephen, and Martin Richards
2001a	Fast trains, slow boats, and the ancestry of the Polynesian
islanders. Science Progress 84(3):157-181.

Oppenheimer, Stephen J., and Martin Richards
2001b	Slow boat to Melanesia? Nature 410(6825):166-167.

Pawley, Andrew, and Malcolm Ross
1993	Austronesian historical linguistics and culture history. Annual Review
of Anthropology 22:425-459.

Perez-Lezaun, A., and et al. (full names and all authors)
2000	(has to do with Y chrom and patrilocality). American Journal of Human
Genetics 65:208-219.

Poloni, E.S., O. Semino, G. Passarino, A.S. Santachiara-Benerecetti, I.
Dupanloup, A. Langaney, and L. Excoffier
1997	Human genetic affinities for Y-chromosome P49a,f/Taql haplotypes show
strong correspondence with linguistics. American Journal of Human Genetics
61:1015-1035.

Redd, Alan J., and Mark Stoneking
1999	Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua
New Guinea populations. American Journal of Human Genetics 65:808-828.

Richards, Martin, and Vincent Macaulay
2001	The mitochondrial gene tree comes of age. American Journal of Human
Genetics 68:1315-1320.

Richards, Martin, Stephen Oppenheimer, and Bryan Sykes
1998	mtDNA suggests Polynesian origins in Eastern Indonesia. American
Journal of Human Genetics 63:1234-1236.

Seiselstad, M.T., E. Minch, and Cavalli-Sfroza
1998	(has to do with Y chrom and patrilocal). Nature Genet. (whole name??)
20:278-280.

Shouse, Ben
2001	Spreading the word, scattering the seeds. Science 294(5544):988-989.

Su, B. (full names), L. Jin, P. Underhill, J. Martinso, N. Saha, and et al.
2000	Polynesian origins: insights from the Y chromosome. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science USA 97:8225-8228.

Terrell, John Edward, Kevin M. Kelly, and Paul Rainbird
2001	Foregone conclusions: In search of "Papuans" and "Austronesians".
Current Anthropology 42(1):97-124.

Thomas, Mark G., Michael E. Weale, Abigal L. Jones, Martin Richards, Alice
Smithe, Nicola Redhead, Antonio Torroni, Rosaria Scozzari, Fiona Gratix,
Tarekegn, James F. Wilson, Cristian Capelli, Neil Bradman, and David B.
Goldstein
2002	Founding mothers of Jewish communities: geographically separated
Jewish groups were independently founded by very few female ancestors.
American Journal of Human Genetics 70:1411-1420.

Underhill, Peter A., Giuseppe Passarino, Alice A. Lin, Sangkot Marsuki,
Peter J. Oefner, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and Geoffrey K. Chambers
2001	Maori origins, y-chromosome haplotypes and implications for human
history in the Pacific. Human Mutation 17:271-280.

van Holst Pellekaan, Sheila M., Marianne Frommer, Sved. John A., and Barry
Boettcher
	Mitochondrial control-sequence variation in Aboriginal Australians.
American Journal of Human Gnetics 62:435-449.

Velickovic, Z.M., and J.M. Carter
2001	HLA-DPA1 and DPB1 polymorphism in four Pacific Islands populations
determined by sequencing based typing. Tissue Intigens 57(493-5001).

Zimdahl, H., W. Schiefenhoevel, M. Kayser, L. Roewers, and M. Nagy
1999	Towards understanding the origin and dispersal of Austronesians in the
Solomon Sea: HLA class II polymorphism in eight distinct populations of
Asia-Oceania. European Journal of Immunogenetics 26:405-416.

As always,

Jeff
Jeff Marck
PO Box 27129
Omaha NE 68127 USA
USA-402-578-3462 (cell)
http://jeff.marck.home.att.net/
http://CornPatchRevolt.home.att.net/