Philippine ethnic group has most Denisovan DNA
uu.se
uu.se
Our current understanding is that after humans migrated out of Africa, they flowed down through South East Asia, hopping across narrow straights and between islands. From Timor, they used rudimentary rafts or dugout canoes to cross to Papua New Guinea, then headed down the scythed curve of the Bismarck Archipelago, and reached the far edge of the Solomon Islands by around 40,000 years ago. There, nothing but the open ocean lay ahead of them, and so these people – the Near Oceanians – stopped, and Remote Oceania remained uninhabited.
Then some 5,000 years ago, a group of humans from what is now Taiwan left their home shores and journeyed south through the Philippines and Indonesia into Near Oceania. Called Austronesians, they brought with them sophisticated maritime technology and seafaring skills. They mixed with populations of the Near Oceanians, forging a new people – the Lapita – who then struck out to populate the rest of the Pacific. ...
“Our analyses suggest that humans left Taiwan more than 5,000 years ago, and that admixture between the Austronesian incomers and the populations of Near Oceania started only 2,000 years later,” Patin says. “The expansions from Taiwan therefore took some time, and may have involved a maturation phase in the Philippines or Indonesia.”
https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/denisovan-d...
Contrast with the Nicobarese, who are an austroasiatic people, related to the Munda and Khasi of the mainland. The austroasiatic family is potentially a distant relation of the Austronesian family, so there that.
It seems that the Andamanese being remanants of Negritos has been debunked using DNA evidence and so it's unlikely that the Sentinelese were part of Austronesians.
> The Andamanese are the remnants of a much older expansion, perhaps 50K years prior
If they crossed using land bridge from NE Indian Subcontinent during Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) then it's likely 26,500 years and 19–20,000 years ago(According to Wiki).
> The Andamanese are distant relations of the AASI ancestors of modern South Asians, and more distantly of the Australian Aborigines.
On a related note: Newer linguistic studies claims to have found proto-Dravidian languages in Indus Valley Civilization[1], If so then ASI migrations waves seems to have been happening quite regularly for thousands of years.
The 50K date I quoted is based on genetic studies - the Andamanese separated from the AASI (and the Aborigines) about 50K years ago. That's in line with the arrival of the Aborigines in Australia, so its possible the Andamanese are a remnant of the same expansion. I suspect the Andamanese arrived to the islands very early on, rather than a LGM arrival date, since unlike the high levels seen in Aborigines, the Andamanese have no Denisovan ancestry at all. Considering the high levels of Denisovan ancestry that radiates outwards from the former Sundaland, I'm not sure the proto-Andamanese could have hung out in Burma for 20K before crossing the LCM landbridge without picking up some Denisovan DNA. Of course, this is simply conjecture at this point.
> * Newer linguistic studies claims to have found proto-Dravidian languages in Indus Valley Civilization*
For what its worth, I found the paper unconvincing. I've read prior works (notably Krishnamurthy, cited in the paper), and unlike those papers, the argument here is based on a single root word. Besides, even if the root word originated in the IVC (quite possible), it doesn't rule out that it was a loan word into proto-Dravidian as well from a non-Dravidian IVC - just like in Akkadian. I am less familiar with proto-Dravidian and more with proto-Indo-European (PIE), and at least with PIE there's been considerable scholarship suggesting significant loan words into it from proto-Altic & proto-Caucasian. PIE when it formed was already a messy mishmash, with Hittite & Tocarian probably splitting off even before PIE formed. With the proto-Dravidian scholarship, I sense the desire to treat it as a monolith. Proto-Dravidian likely had just as much loan into it as out. IVC words could have survived as loan words into proto-Dravidian, without the IVC itself being proto-Dravidian.
Transporting humans against their will is a non-sequitur when considering the mode of transit. It would be canoes, rafts, or swimming. Whether voluntarily or not.
It’s possible.
I think it’s much more probable there had to have been complex social relationships between these groups rather than the only possibility being that 1 species of prehumans developed single person boats used to migrate to these islands and then a second species of prehumans independently developed boats that also held a maximum of 1 person and used them to migrate to the same islands already inhabited by the 1 group, and then the 2 groups interbred per the article.
Cool idea. Where are you digging?
Are you aware of just how convoluted and bloody complicated things get when you look at notions like species in the past? Denisovans do not really have a fixed point in the taxonomy (whatever that really means.) Their existence is inferred from a few teeth and bones - good evidence though. Well let's put it like this: we know far more about Mars than the Denisovans.
You use terminology like "decedents traveled to the Philippines." I'll ignore speling but what you really mean is that some genes have been found, not fully formed descendants discovered. Unless you've got some eyewitness grade evidence, you cannot simply decide that someone clung to a log or paddled their canoe or sailed ... etc and lo the Philippines was won. That's simply silly and sounds like a US style "how the West was won" grade phantasy.
I'll wager that we will gradually learn a bit more about a group of early humans that we call Denisovans and the link with the Philippines. We already have a genomic link - a group there: Ayta Magbukon has more in common than anyone else. As to how those genes got there is unlikely to be worked out directly.
It’s far more likely that the migration happened much later from a population with a heavy Denisovan genetic influence. Then being isolated that population retained more of those genes. The mainland group would’ve likely lost that with mixed breeding.
That’s pretty much just common sense.
Regarding the admixture, the analysis doesn't indicate the direction. If a Denisovan had offspring with an ancestor of present day Philippinos and the offspring stayed with the humans, that would create exactly the same D-statistics as if the child stayed with the Denisovans.
I think the most believable scenario is that humans migrated through an area that was already inhabited by Neanderthals, some of them had fun with the locals, and the Denisovan is an offspring of such a family. That's much easier to believe than Denisovans, who somehow never left traces in the fossil record, living all over Asia and contributing genes to all present day Melanesians.
[Reich2010] has a single sentence to rule out this scenario: the fossil is a tiny bit too old to be affected by the migrating modern humans. That relies on stratigraphic dating (C14 fails at around 50ka), and that relies on the assurance of the archaeologists that "most of the site was disturbed, but this fossil is from the undisturbed part!" Yeah, right.
As you said, Denisovans, assuming there was ever more than one, and assuming they weren't just Neanderthals, probably swam to the Philippines. Isn't it amazing how much we can learn from a single pinky bone?
The dendrogram is right here: https://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/genome-projects/neandertal/
The difference between the Denisovan and the Neanderthals is bigger than between San and French, but not by much. Keep in mind that the archaic genomes are noisy, and noise adds to their distance.
At the time, the debate was whether Neanderthals and the Denisovan constitute different species or just different subspecies. (Taxonomy is fun. You get to name species you discover after yourselves. I'd love to discover a new species, but in a pinch, a subspecies will do.)
You use the meaningless term "population". Whatever, let them be different populations. Now we have two populations, namely the "Denisovan" and the "Altai Neanderthal" living in the same cave, at roughly the same time.
Also, if you did find a first generation Modern x Neanderthal, you'd have stretches of the genome that were 100% Neanderthal and stretches that were 100% Modern. It'd be obvious that it was an F1 hybrid. Even F2, F3 etc it'd be pretty clear. Are you saying the Denisovan genome doesn't have unique mutations?
I agree that the terms species / subspecies / populations are difficult/impossible to to define sharply.
> Are you saying the Denisovan genome doesn't have unique mutations?
It sure does, but we don't know them. Anything unique to a single archaic individual can always be a sequencing error. (But it's high coverage! Right, but they couldn't compute proper genotype likelihoods for ancient DNA, so systematic errors end up in the final sequence.) And anything found only in Denisovans, however you define them, may or may not be fixed in them, and may or may not exist in other hominins. With so few archaic genomes, it's impossible to tell.
The actual analysis is done on variants that exist in extant humans. Which is why you never read sentence about the number of mutations unique to whoever, you always get something like "is more similar to X than to Y".
> So if Denisovans are more different from Neanderthals than that, why do you think the Denisovan bone was from a Modern x Neanderthal instead?
Distance is calculated by walking along the genome, calling a genotype for every base, and counting difference. This works well for modern humans, but for Neanderthals, a good chunk of the called genotypes are erroneous. This increases their apparent distance from humans, but it increases their apparent distance from each other even more. I'm saying, the Denisovan and Neanderthals may not really be more different from each other than French and San.
I'm not saying anything about the Denisovan in particular. I'm saying the gene flow was probably into Neanderthals, and we stumbled upon one affected individual. Interbreeding is a local event. It is easy to believe that we stumbled upon an individual that had some human ancestry. It is much harder to believe that such an individual ended up in a human population and ended up affecting the whole population uniformly.
There is even a known Neanderthal Denisovan hybrid: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06004-0
(Of course, that doesn't make it less amazing how much we can learn from a single bone)
The "hybrid" is just more confused terminology. If we simply acknowledged, that Neanderthals had higher genetic diversity than previously thought, the Denisovan and the so-called hybrid would just be a Neanderthal. We don't talk about hybrids of Europeans and Africans either, do we? If I remember correctly, the admixture wasn't confirmed in the hybrid, either. I think, nobody looked.
The root of this nonsense is that Neanderthals were thought to be genetically very similar, especially their mitochondria. The reason is that prior to 2009, it wasn't possible to routine sequence the mitochondrion, let alone the nuclear genome, of some random fossil. Therefore, all fossils were pre-screened using a PCR test for a mitochondrial mutation specific to Neanderthals. But not all Neanderthals have that mutation, so those that were sequenced were very similar due to a technical limitation.
Negritos diverged from Papuans 53kya!
They estimate the East Asian influx as being only about 2200ya!
Wild to imagine what pressures caused those two events.
[0] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...
So there was quite a bit of displacement of Denisovans, with some interbreeding.
"Jive" and "jibe" have been used interchangeably in the US to indicate the concept "to agree or accord." While one recent dictionary accepts this usage of "jive," most sources consider it to be in error.
"One telling of Hadza's oral history divides their past into four epochs, each inhabited by a different culture. According to this tradition, in the beginning of time the world was inhabited by hairy giants called the akakaanebee "first ones" or geranebee "ancient ones". The akakaanebee did not possess tools or fire; they hunted game by running it down until it fell dead; they ate the meat raw. They did not build houses but slept under trees, as the Hadza do today in the dry season. In older versions of this story, fire was not used because it was physically impossible in the earth's primeval state, while younger Hadza, who have been to school, say that the akakaanebee simply did not know how.
In the second epoch, the akakaanebee were succeeded by the xhaaxhaanebee "in-between ones", equally gigantic but without hair. Fire could be made and used to cook meat, but animals had grown more wary of humans and had to be chased and hunted with dogs. The xhaaxhaanebee were the first people to use medicines and charms to protect themselves from enemies and initiated the epeme rite. They lived in caves.
The third epoch was inhabited by the people of hamakwanebee "recent days", who were smaller than their predecessors. They invented bows and arrows, and containers for cooking, and mastered the use of fire. They also built huts like those of Hadza today. The people of hamakwabee were the first of the Hadza ancestors to have contact with non-foraging people, with whom they traded for iron to make knives and arrowheads. They also invented the gambling game lukuchuko.
The fourth epoch continues today and is inhabited by the hamayishonebee "those of today". When discussing the hamayishonebee epoch, people often mention specific names and places, and can approximately say how many generations ago events occurred." [1]
There are some obvious parallels here with our modern scientific understanding of human evolution. If it's not just a coincidence, we're talking about an oral tradition that is tens of thousands of years old at least.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadza_people#Religion,_myths,_...
It is really a fantastic book.
It's a fantastic demonstration of modern science at work.
What does this mean? I didn't know who David Reich is, but I take your comment to imply there is something controversial about him? A quick search doesn't indicate anything though. Would appreciate some clarification.
Considering the topic at hand, you should know who David Reich is. He (co-) wrote every single paper on Neanderthal and Denisovan genetics.
I don't really understand how you can have multiple species that interbreed and then some go "extinct" but then we find "extinct" DNA in living ancestors.
Seems like a paradox. Kind of like if I said "All swans are white" then got excited about finding a black swan.
But in that case it's only actually surprising to find a black swan because I'd made a wrong assumption based on limited evidence. Is that the case for these "extinct" human species?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
> Although the narratives of human evolution are often contentious, DNA evidence shows that human evolution should not be seen as a simple linear or branched progression, but a mix of related species. In fact, genomic research has shown that hybridization between substantially diverged lineages is the rule, not the exception, in human evolution.[6] Furthermore, it is argued that hybridization was an essential driving force in the emergence of modern humans.[6]
Seems to be hinting that the branching tree diagrams are misleadingly simplified.
edit: found this, which suggests that most of the fuss is about trying to draw firm lines in between fuzzy degrees of difference, though the author would still think of then as seperate species, and thinks it's the definition of species that needs work.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-neanderthals-same-species...
> I don't really understand how you can have multiple species that interbreed and then some go "extinct" but then we find "extinct" DNA in living ancestors.
We have sequenced and reconstructed some of the Denisovan DNA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_DNA#Human_aDNA
This helps a lot, when combined with modern humans, and allows us to reconstruct our evolutionary relationship(s).
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/LNE/lucy-and-andy-...
When they were younger, we read the kids this:
https://www.amazon.ca/Our-Family-Tree-Evolution-Story/dp/015...
This is also a good one we have which covers evolution more in depth:
https://www.amazon.ca/Evolution-Story-Earth-Jay-Hosler/dp/08...
There appear to be some others out there now that didn't exist when my kids were younger. This one looks good:
https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Graphic-History-Birth-Humankin...
"They plant taro, rice, and corn for a living. They cannot read or write. The government accuses them of being terrorists."
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/distraught-aetas-...
Just say that it comes from an ethnographic perspective and do it
To list a few examples from the Philippines...they point with their lips, small people with unusually big feet, which probably lends to climbing trees. I noticed this riding transport, as everyone wears flip flops. I wear a 13 US, and I borrowed shoes that fit from a 5'7 man. I saw people climb a vertical tree like a ladder. Please don't take this as some insult, I'm jealous.
They generally have small noses and recognize people by noses. I've never had so many people comment on my nose in my life. Half were in awe, half were insulting.
But it varies so much. In Manila you see a lot of lighter, almost hispanic looking people. In the villages, you see darker and wilder looking people. I remember a bad storm in the villages, and a lady sitting rocking holding her legs and something just seemed so primal in the reaction and look on her face.
I'll -never- forget how they cry, it's so different than Americans. Haunting really.
Probably the most stark thing I noticed though was how easy they sleep. You could get on a hot, crowded, bumpy bus and everyone is sleeping as if they're on a mattress. My wife and daughter are from the region, and are usually sleeping by the time I leave the neighborhood in my vehicle, which makes me think there's something there.
They are the friendliest, and by far the most spry people. I remember waking up hearing the hotel lady's flip flops clanking as she ran between rooms. Everyone ran everywhere, it's so much faster and more efficient than how us overweight Americans waddle around. Jealous, again.
How do "Americans" cry exactly? Perhaps the Americans you know, or what you've seen depicted in movies, but you can't generalize about all Americans, not at the least because that term isn't defined at all by things like how people cry.
> They are the friendliest, and by far the most spry people.
I'm sure you meant nothing but the best, but using superlatives, even positive sounding ones, to describe an entire population, especially one as diverse as those of the Philippines, echoes colonial perspectives that denied the cultures that they subjugated the right to be complex.
It's akin to how white Americas would often essentialize blacks as inherently rhythmically or musically gifted, ostensibly as praise, but in doing so casting them as incapable of doing things that whites did.
I have no doubt that your own personal experiences with them are as you describe, but they are just that - your experiences, and not generalizable.
If you can't tell a difference between an American and Filipino cry, you have no business refuting anything.
I think you are well intentioned, but your choice of descriptive language, superlatives and broad characterizations echo the language used by less well intentioned people of the colonial era, which is why it comes across the way you yourself described it.
If you read colonial ethnographies, you will find descriptions written in the same tone.
> If you can't tell a difference between an American and Filipino cry, you have no business refuting anything
It's entirely unclear what you mean by American here. Big diverse country after all.
My wife, a dark villager, is a starkingly beautiful person, who knows everything. Hole in your shirt? She'll sew it. Found an unknown plant? She'll identify it and tell you how to grow it. I had a weird bump on my arm that wouldn't go away...she said it's an infection and cut it out...and now it's gone. I could probably list a hundred remedies she has.
She's the most amazing person in the world I've ever met, please don't treat me like some carpet bagger or colonist. I ran the entire thing by her before posting, and she, as a person with experience in both worlds, agrees.
But, we'll leave it to you, a presumably white person, to tell us both how to feel. So please, educate us.
I wrote nothing more than generalizations based on -my- observations. It's not meant as a fact, and obviously doesn't fit every person
Patronizing? Please.
Bad presumption. I'm 100% not white. I passed no judgement on you or your beliefs, but rather on your ethnographic writing tone. You seem intent on making that about your family, which is irrelevant to my comments.
I understand the colonial tones, but bear in mind those folks always have something in mind. Slavery, resource extraction, invasion. I have absolutely no ill will or intentions, which I hope makes some difference. I truly find beauty and interest in people's differences.
I hope that my comments about your writing tone can help others better understand you as you are and not the way you say you are often perceived.
It's not hard, describe without superlatives and hyperbole. Don't use phrases like. "they are the most X".
It's not wrong, but it's also not universally true. That's how observations usually work.
https://archive.is/CYLFm "Do Babies Cry in Different Languages?"
> Quantitative acoustic analysis of these recordings has produced further insights into the factors that shape a baby’s first sounds. Newborns whose mothers speak tonal languages, such as Mandarin, tend to produce more complex cry melodies. Swedish newborns, whose native language has what linguists call a “pitch accent,” produce more sing-songy cries.
It's not that far fetched to imagine that adults can vary in the way they cry for many reasons, and this variation be consistent across populations.
I have never considered someone's nose. But they have types of noses they deem as attractive, and the larger the pointer the better.
You will notice in Chinese movies they actors all had the same type of nose.
In my country its almost rude to even mention someone's nose.
What I figured later was that Americans have tons of ways to differentiate people. Height, weight, eye color, hair color, race, etc. In a more homogeneous country, I guess noses are definers.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(21)00977...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-06-25/unusual-ancie...
“Although, much later, Negritos admixed with the East Asian group that had a small proportion of Denisova DNA, we found that the Negritos had a proportion markedly higher than those of other ethnic groups. Compared with Australians and Papuans, the Negritos’ Denisovan ancestry was up to 46 per cent higher,”
I have worked in several South East Asian countries. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Phillipines, Malaysia, Timor, and Papua during which I was volunteering with a conservation organization. It was during these trips that I encountered "Negrito" people and was shocked to discover what was actively being done to them and how little of their history, knowledge, language, culture is being documented and preserved or even mentioned in our media.
Each of these South East Asian countries used to have a much more significant indigenous "Negrito"/High Denisovan population. Some still do. But they're rapidly declining, to the point that it is below the threshold of recoverability. It pains me to say this, but this is in many cases due to the East Asian group's active policies.
In Thailand, they still exist to this day albeit their population is down to the hundreds and rapidly declining.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniq_people " The Maniq or Mani are an ethnic group of Thailand. They are more widely known in Thailand as the Sakai (Thai: ซาไก), a controversial derogatory term meaning 'slave' "
Similarly, in Malaysia they are down to below a thousand. I have met a few of them in "Reservation Forest" where an Islamic state government was, in my opinion, performing a slow 'sous vide' genocide using destruction of their ecosystem (logging, palm oil, durian) and enforcement of 'residential schools' (much like what was done in Canada and the US, it may even have been modeled after those strategies).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orang_Asli " The development of the slave trade in the region was a powerful factor influencing the fate of the Orang Asli. Based on historical records, the enslavement of Negrito tribes commenced as early as 724 AD, during the early contact of the Malay Srivijaya empire. Negrito pygmies from the southern jungles were enslaved, with some being exploited until modern times.[30] Muslims, according to the laws of Islam, could not be slaves.[31] Therefore, the efforts of slave hunters were focused on the Orang Asli. It was at this time that the Malay people began to use the derogatory term sakai, meaning "slaves". They were treated as wild animals. Aceh Sultanate, located in the north of the island of Sumatra, in the early 16th century equipped special expeditions to capture slaves in the Malay Peninsula, and Malacca was at that time the largest center of the slave trade in the region. Raids on slaves in the villages of Orang Asli were common in the 18th and 19th centuries. During this time, Orang Asli groups suffered raids by the Malay and Batak forces who perceived them to be of lower in status. Orang Asli settlements were sacked, with adult males being systematically executed while women and children being held captive and later sold as slaves. "
In Indonesia, the situation is far worse with an active genocide happening right now in the West Papua province. Although I would not term the Papuan people as "Negrito", they no doubt, have much more in common with the "Negrito" than with the Javanese soldiers (East Asian group) they are at war with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S5dNmSNR4g
I have to stop here because it is too upsetting for me to continue. I just wanted to contribute that it is great to discover that they have the highest proportion of Denisovan DNA because perhaps now their plight may get the attention of the broader world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan#Modern_humans
> A 2011 study found that Denisovan DNA is prevalent in Australian Aborigines, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, Eastern Indonesians and Mamanwans (from the Philippines); but not in East Asians, western Indonesians, Jahai people (from Malaysia) or Onge (from the Andaman Islands). This means that Denisovan introgression occurred within the Pacific region rather than on the Asian mainland, and that ancestors of the latter groups were not present in Southeast Asia at the time, which in turn means that eastern Asia was settled by modern humans in two distinct migrations.[34] In the Melanesian genome, about 4–6%[19] or 1.9–3.4% derives from Denisovan introgression.[54] It was reported that New Guineans and Australian Aborigines have the most introgressed DNA,[16] but Australians have less than New Guineans,[55] until a 2021 study discovered 30 to 40% more Denisovan ancestry in Filipino Negritos than in Papuans, by their estimates roughly 5% of the genome. They recorded the highest levels in the Aeta genome.[37] In Papuans, less Denisovan ancestry is seen in the X chromosome than autosomes, and some autosomes (such as chromosome 11) also have less Denisovan ancestry, which could indicate hybrid incompatibility. The former observation could also be explained by less female Denisovan introgression into modern humans, or more female modern human immigrants who diluted Denisovan X chromosome ancestry.[42]