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The Origins of the European Race
As we all know, Aryans originated in the
Arctic regions above Central Asia and from there migrated south to the
steppes and then on to Iran, where they finally settled. And since the
late 19th century, European racialists have believed that they were the
"true Aryans". But for a long time, anthropologists argued against this
myth, stating that Europeans are descended from Cro-Magnon Man, who
migrated to Europe from Africa. New research supports this valid argument
and debunks the claims made by ignorant European racialists:
EDINBURGH, Scotland - Modern Europeans, and maybe populations in other
parts of the world, are descended from no more than a few hundred Africans
who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago, new research
suggests.
The findings, reported at the start of a conference of the Human Genome
Organization, the international collaboration researching the genetic
makeup of the human race, provide the first estimate of how many people
founded Europe.
They are also a blow to the theory that modern humans evolved
simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia from multiple early humans.
"I think this certainly rules that out, at least in respect to Europe,"
said study leader Eric Lander, director of the Whitehead
Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome
Research. "We're not sure whether this was just the founding of Europe or
whether, in fact, this small bottleneck represents all the people leaving
Africa."
Lander's study involved comparing about 300 chromosomes from people in
Sweden, central Europe and Nigeria. The differences in the genetic pattern
between the European and African chromosomes revealed how long ago
Europeans left Africa and about how many there must have been.
The pattern showed that the Europeans were descended from fewer ancestors
than the Africans -- an evolutionary bottleneck, Lander said.
"It's hundreds, not thousands," Lander said.
The Nigerian chromosomes had been well shuffled around, which indicates a
wide gene pool and a long breeding history, while the European chromosomes
had long stretches of unshuffled genetic material, indicating a much
smaller number of chromosome types entering the mix.
Eddy Rubin, a scientist who was not involved in the study, said he thinks
the findings are accurate.
"The evidence is overwhelming that present-day Europeans come from a very
small group that stayed small for a while, then expanded," said Rubin,
head of the human genome center at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Lander said the findings had much broader applications.
"We are going to be able to do this throughout much of the rest of the
world. The data will be able to rule it in or out for the other
populations very quickly," Lander said.
"We're still in the early days for this, but it is remarkable how much the
human chromosomes can be read as a history book," he continued. "We are
going to be able to say how populations are related to each other, when
people arrived there and how many people likely arrived in different
places."
The human race numbers 6 billion people today, but it largely has the
genetic variation of a population of a few tens of thousands, Lander said.
"We really are a tiny species grown large in the blink of an eye," he
said.
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