Nigerian authorities have arrested leaders of a group leading a separatist movement in neighbouring Cameroon.

At least seven leaders of the Movement for the independence of Southern Cameroonians were arrested by the State Security Service on Friday in Abuja.

Most leaders of the movement have since fled to neighbouring countries including Nigeria amidst a clampdown by the central government led by President Paul Biya.

They were arrested at Nera Hotel in Abuja.

Cameroon has witnessed months of unrest as the push for the independent state intensifies, resulting in clashes between protesters and the police.

Dozens of people have been killed, including members of the security forces.

The agitation for secession heightened in October 2017 when the “Ambazonians” declared an autonomy over their region during the anniversary of their union with the French-speaking side.

The declaration was however rejected by the Biya government.

In December, a delegation from Mr. Biya was received by Nigeria’s Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo.

The government said at the time that the purpose of Mr. Osinbajo’s meeting with the Cameroonian delegation, led by the country’s minister of Territorial Administration and Decentralization, Rene Sadi, was to strengthen diplomatic ties between the two nations.

Our source however said the meeting was also meant to broker a secret agreement for Nigeria’s security officials to help arrest about 15 people declared wanted by the Cameroonian government.

The United Nations Refugee agency says at least 7,500 refugees from Cameroon’s English-speaking population have since fled to Nigeria since the crisis in that country worsened in October.

The southern Cameroon comprising its English-speaking population joined their French counterpart in 1961, a year after the country’s independence from colonial rule.

7 + twelve =


Comparing and contrasting sammy and tommy s struggle again

comparing and contrasting sammy and tommy s struggle again Al sharpton's half-brother arrested again while on bond sept 10, 2018 a south alabama pastor and activist charged with capital murder has been arrested again while free on bond.

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In the story, “a&p” by john updike, the student identifies the differences of social classes between sammy, a checkout clerk and queenie, a wealthy girl that visit’s the store. The amazing adventures of kavalier & clay - part vi, p 541-574 summary & analysis michael chabon this study guide consists of approximately 76 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay. The sopranos is an american crime drama television series created by david chasethe story revolves around fictional new jersey-based, italian american mobster tony soprano (james gandolfini)the series portrays the difficulties that he faces as he tries to balance his home life and his criminal organization.

Best answer: the impact of the us depression in the 1930's on most people's daily lives was much worse, exacerbated by a severe drought in the mid-section of the country for example, unemployment was at least 25% across most categories of workers, compared to the official 8% to 9% now (or even to an actual 15% now. Get free homework help on ishmael beah's a long way gone: book summary, chapter summary and analysis, quotes, and character analysis courtesy of cliffsnotes a long way gone is the true story of ishmael beah, an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in sierra leone normally a gentle boy, ishmael is changed by war into a soldier who can commit brutal, gruesome acts. A summary of chapter 9 in f scott fitzgerald's the great gatsby learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of the great gatsby and what it means perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

@jeremycorbyn’s consistent support for the palestinian struggle isn’t a obstacle to my faith in the labour party – it’s essential to it i was proud to vote for him in 2017, and i will be again. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast two short stories: where are you going, where have you been by joyce carol oates and hills like white elephants by earnest hemingway the comparison and contrast will be done based on their use of plot, point of view and character development. Educator’s guide: before we were free by julia alvarez before we were free by julia alvarez is the selection for the laii’s vamos a leer book group meeting held on march 5, 2012 the following information comprises a standards-based educator’s guide that the laii has produced to support using before we were free (julia alvarez, knopf books, 2002) in the classroom. The statement, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” has become not only a cliché, but also one of the most difficult obstacles in coping with terrorism the matter of definition and conceptualization is usually a purely theoretical issue—a mechanism for scholars to work out the appropriate set of parameters for the research they intend to undertake. For example, despite dad's urging him to put on his coat, tommy goes outside when it's cold without wearing a coat the actual consequence is probably the same, but a power struggle is avoided because the parent is positive rather than threatening then you can take on your responsibility for feeding the dog again” in contrast.

Bain played in 1943 with freddie slack , with the first recordings made in 1944 in the band of tommy dorsey , for which he also arranged in 1946 he moved to bob crosby , before he founded his own. Chameleon in john updike’s “a&p” and charles baxter’s “gryphon” the two narrators, sammy and tommy respectively, both struggle with conformity as well as the inflexibility of social systems. American literature final study compare-and-contrast the art of persuasion is using words to influence the ___ and actions of others in the struggle to be an all-american girl, why do you think wong is embarrassed to go with her grandmother to the american store.

Comparing characters in o'connor's a good man is hard to find and revelation the grandmother and the misfit of flannery o'connor's 'a good man is hard to find' are backward, opposite images of each other. Tommy cook reviews the first 12 minutes of 'ghost in the shell', screened in imax, featuring scarlett johansson as a robotic creation known as the major. Nutraceutical corp, in park city, utah, makes 'peaceful planet' and 'sammy's milk' is made by graceleigh, inc, in newport beach, california 'this is a parent's worst nightmare.

Identify the relative pronoun in the below sentence a&p is a story in which three girls disrupt the boring day-to-day routine of a small-town grocery store. As a contrast, nolan delivers a fact-based film via 2017’s dunkirk, a story set during world war ii in may 1940, allied soldiers find themselves pinned down by german forces stuck on the french beaches in dunkirk, their survival looks hopeless. Former nfl db bryant mcfadden joins our fantasy experts to compare the expectations for josh gordon and jarvis landry for this fantasy season if patrick mahomes struggles again for the chiefs.

Comparing and contrasting sammy and tommy s struggle again
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Drumheller To Banff Distance

Distance between Drumheller and Banff is 201 KM (kilometers) and 574.62 meters. Drumheller is 125.3 miles away from Banff.

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Drumheller is located in the Canada state of Alberta at the longitude of -112.7 and latitude of 51.5. Banff is located in the Canada state of Alberta at the longitude of -115.6 and latitude of 51.2.

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The Taxi-cab Problem

A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. 90% of the cabs in the city are Green and 10% are Blue.

What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green knowing that this witness identified it as Blue?


Media Studies

And other Mickey Mouse subjects.

(total 8 points)

15. How did Rolling Stone magazine refer to Rick Wakeman in a review of an early seventies Strawbs gig?

Rock Wankman (cheeky chappies that they are)

16. What periodical published this tenth anniversary two-issue article by the incomparable Jerry Gilbert?
Click on image to open higher-resolution shot in new window. Most of the text has been erased to protect the answers to this and other questions.

And here are those pages again, with nothing concealed:

17. What Strawbs album was the clue in a Viz detective story?

Heartbreak Hill (The guilty party had a copy on vinyl LP, and thus gave the game away. Yes, well, it was a Viz detective story.)

18. The film Grave New World was shown in cinemas as a triple bill with which other films? Answered by Witchwooders a few weeks ago. Substitute question: Sandy Denny's classic Who Knows Where the Time Goes was covered recently on which BBC1 comedy drama series? Again, covered by Witchwooders a few weeks ago. Strange but true. Damn and blast.

Okay, I think we'll be safe with a beat-the-intro taken from a BBC performance fronted by Dave. Name the Strawbs favorite that they were working their way towards here.

The Hangman and the Papist. (It was from a Wakeman and Cousins live special.)

By the way, could Dave C really be fronting the BATS lineup holding an H&H poster? Did you have a click on this blatant anachronism?

Sod this for a CSE in woodwork - head back to the main page.


Download Advances in Computers, Vol. 21 PDF

Read or Download Advances in Computers, Vol. 21 PDF

Best information theory books

The Discrete Cosine rework (DCT) is utilized in many functions by means of the clinical, engineering and learn groups and in information compression particularly. speedy algorithms and purposes of the DCT variety II (DCT-II) became the guts of many verified overseas image/video coding criteria.

Nonlinear Control in the Year 2000, Volume 2

Regulate of nonlinear platforms, some of the most energetic examine parts up to speed thought, has regularly been a website of normal convergence of study pursuits in utilized arithmetic and keep watch over engineering. the idea has built from the early part of its heritage, whilst the elemental instrument was once basically purely the Lyapunov moment procedure, to the current day, the place the math levels from differential geometry, calculus of diversifications, traditional and partial differential equations, practical research, summary algebra and stochastic techniques, whereas the purposes to complex engineering layout span a wide selection of issues, which come with nonlinear controllability and observability, optimum keep watch over, nation estimation, balance and stabilization, suggestions equivalence, movement making plans, noninteracting keep watch over, disturbance attenuation, asymptotic monitoring.

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Additional info for Advances in Computers, Vol. 21

Example text

Rn is called the body of the rule. 1 The tax accountant from Chapter 1 may use the following query Q tax to find the Social Security number and taxes due for each person: Tax Due(s, t) :— Taxrecord(s, w, i, c), Taxtable(inc, t), w + i + c = inc. 1 Syntax 41 Here Taxrecord, Taxable ∈ I are input database relations and Tax Due ∈ D is the only defined relation. 2 Suppose that relation Street (n, x, y) contains all combinations of street name n and locations (x, y) such that a location belongs to the street.

The weight of each package can be represented in the following relational database table. Package Serial No. 5 To all destinations within the United States, the postage fee charged for packages can be computed based on the weight of the package and the postage rate associated with the weight. The following Postage relation is a logical-level view of this relation. Postage Weight Fee 5 .. 65 .. 2 SQL 37 Suppose Mr. Johnson would like to know how much he should pay to send the three packages. Weight The following is a more complex example of aggregation constraints.

Suppose further that those who can apply to the computer science master’s program must be either computer science majors or eligible for a computer science minor, among other requirements. Note that if x are the students eligible for a computer science minor, then y, the students who can apply, is expressible as y ≤ B c ∨ x. This constraint can be rewritten as x ′ ∧ y ≤ B c. Hence this information can be expressed by the rule: Can Apply C S M S(y) :— CS Minor (x), x ′ ∧ y ≤ B c. The two preceding constraint tuples form an input database, and the rule is a Datalog program.

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The human raj on Oasis. Shrouded in secrecy from its inception (at the time of the discovery of what was then known as Planet Kepler 56-B, in 2007), the New Earth Council grew from a small initiative by the EU countries into a full-blown military government for this new world. The N.E.C. has juridictional power to arrest, try and transport anyone in the selected Earth demographic (young and poor). The N.E.C. operates the massive ships that take the young human exiles on their two-year voyage to Oasis and they direct all mining operations there.


Resignation Letter Template In English

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Friday, January 1, 2016

New Year's Day

‘Tis the season for making Top Ten lists. How about The Top Ten Stories of YOUR Life for 2015? You don't think you have 10 stories? Here are ten questions you might ask to help frame your own list.

1) The happiest story of my life in 2015… What brought me he greatest deep-down-inside joy? Serenity? Peace? How did I share that with others? What might I do to keep this happy story alive in my heart and mind?

2) The most spiritual story of my life in the past year…When was I most aware of God, of my Higher Power? of my spiritual self? What was my deepest moment of prayer? How did this touch my soul? What are my spiritual goals for the new year?

3) The most selfless story of my life in 2015... How did I sacrifice for others? What did I give up or let go of? What did I receive in how I gave? What opportunities will I have to be more generous in 2016?

4) The top story of my making peace in the past year…What grudges did I let go? What resentments did I sweep from my heart? Whom did I forgive? Whose forgiveness did I accept? What hard feelings do I carry into the new year and how will I work at letting them go? With whom do I need to reconcile in the coming year??

5) The most selfish story of my life in 2015… Did I prosper at another’s expense? Did I put my own needs ahead of those around me, those who depend on me? How might I be less selfish and more generous in 2016? How do I need to change to be more generous?

6) My saddest story from last year… What left me feeling wounded, empty, lost? Who helped me through that? What did I lose in my sadness - and what did I find? Have I healed from the sadness or do I cling to it? Did I bring my sadness to prayer and ask for healing? How might I open my heart wider to joy in 2016?

7) The most beautiful story of my life in 2015… Watching a child grow? A wedding? A friendship? A touch, an embrace, a new found love? How was I grateful for such beauty and how might I more freely open myself to beauty in the year ahead?

8) The most unfinished story in my life from the past year… What kept me from completing something I wanted and needed to finish? What loose ends do I need to tie up? What still needs to be done and when, how will I attend to it? What peace awaits me at this unfinished story’s end? Where will this story take me in 2015?

9) The top story of change in my life in 2014… What changed in my life? How did I change? How did I adapt to it? What difference has it made in my life? in my understanding of others’ troubles? How did I learn to live with this change? How will new changes help shape the new year ahead?

10) The best stories of new people I met in the year just ending… Did my first impressions of others sometimes change in surprising ways? How is my life richer for knowing these new people? How was I welcomed into others’ lives? How have I enriched their lives? Who might I reach out to and befriend in 2016?

While my “Top Ten” list and yours won't make the Late Show or be published in magazines or online, calling to mind and reflecting on these stories might be good exercise for each of us at a new year’s beginning.

We all have a fresh start ahead and new stories to add to our personal histories. I pray that your story will be filled with faith, hope and love for you and all whose paths will cross yours in 2015.

Happy New Year!


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33.6 Stopping Parameters

A minimization procedure should stop when one of the following conditions is true:

The handling of these conditions is under user control. The function below allows the user to test the precision of the current result.

Function: int gsl_min_test_interval (double x_lower, double x_upper, double epsabs, double epsrel)
This function tests for the convergence of the interval [x_lower, x_upper] with absolute error epsabs and relative error epsrel. The test returns GSL_SUCCESS if the following condition is achieved,
|a - b| < epsabs + epsrel min(|a|,|b|)

when the interval x = [a,b] does not include the origin. If the interval includes the origin then \min(|a|,|b|) is replaced by zero (which is the minimum value of |x| over the interval). This ensures that the relative error is accurately estimated for minima close to the origin.

This condition on the interval also implies that any estimate of the minimum x_m in the interval satisfies the same condition with respect to the true minimum x_m^*,

|x_m - x_m^*| < epsabs + epsrel x_m^*

assuming that the true minimum x_m^* is contained within the interval.


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April 27, 2018

Why Bronze Age steppe people replaced the farmers they conquered

Filed under: Historical Genetics,History,steppe — Razib Khan @ 9:59 pm

One of the major revisions in my own mind about the demographic and historical processes of the Holocene in relation to humans has been the reality that large and dense agglomerations of agriculturalists could be marginalized by later peoples, to the point of having a smaller genetic footprint in the future than anyone might have imagined. If you had asked me ten years ago I just wouldn’t have believed that the first farmers of Europe or South Asia wouldn’t account for the vast majority of the ancestry of the contemporary populations of the region. By “first farmers” I don’t even mean migrants. At that point, I had assumed a primarily Pleistocene indigenous hypothesis for the origin of Europeans and South Asians, with farming diffusing through a mixture of a few migrants along a demographic wave of advance.

That’s not what it looks like according to ancient DNA. In Northern Europe, it seems that around half or more of the ancestry is due to the incursions of a pastoralist steppe population during the Bronze Age. In Southern Europe and South Asia, the fraction is closer to 10-25%. But even in the latter case, the fraction of steppe ancestry is far higher than I had expected.

I had assumed that the steppe migrants would contribute 1-5% of the ancestry of Europeans and South Asians and that the spread of Indo-European languages was a matter of elite transmission and emulation. Think the Hungarians, for example, as an example of what had assumed.

So what explains what really happened?

During the Mongol conquest of Northern China Genghis Khan reputedly wanted to turn the land that had been the heart of the Middle Kingdom into pasture, first by exterminating the whole population. Part of the motive was to punish the Chinese for resisting his armies, and part of it was to increase his wealth. One of his advisors, Yelu Chucai, a functionary from the Khitai people, dissuaded him from this path through appealing to his selfishness. Chinese peasants taxed on their surplus would enrich Genghis Khan far more than enlarging his herds. Rather than focus on primary production, Genghis Khan could sit atop a more complex economic system and extract rents.

Most of you at this point can see the general framework then. For thousands of years, pastoralist people of the Inner Asian steppe and forest would extract rents out of the oikoumene by threatening them with force. The reason the East Roman Empire did not face the Hunnic onslaught during the lifetime of Attila is that they paid the horde tribute. Imperial China did the same during some periods. In other instances, civilized states found in the barbarians of the steppe useful confederates. The Tang dynasty did not collapse during the 750s because of the intervention of the Uyghurs, who suppressed the rebellion of An Lushan. In 9th century Baghdad the rise of the Turks was enabled by their usefulness in court politics and distance from any given faction.

The rise of the “gunpowder empires” during the 16th century and the eventual closing of the Inner Asian frontier with the crushing of the last embers of the Oirat confederacy between the Russian and Chinese Empires in the 18th century marked the end of thousands of years of interaction between the farmland and pasture.

But this makes us ask: when did this dynamic begin? I don’t think it was primordial. It was invented and developed over time through trial and error. I believe that the initial instinct of pastoralists was to turn farmland into pasture for his herds. This was Genghis Khan’s instinct. The rude barbarian that he was he had not grown up in the extortive system which more civilized barbarians, such as the Khitai, had been habituated to.

In these situations where pastoralists expropriated the land, there wouldn’t have been an opportunity for the farmer to raise a family. Barbarian warlords throughout history have aspired to be rich by plundering from the civilized the peoples…but would the earliest generations have understood the complexity of the institutions that they would have to extract rents out of if there wasn’t a precedent?

Instead of conventional historical dynamics of predatory elites and static peasantry, a better way to understand what occurred with the incursion of steppe pastoralists during the Bronze Age might be a simple ecological model of intra-specific competition. In a pre-state society defined by clan and tribal ties, steppe elites may have seen the farmers who were earlier residents in the territories which they were expanding into as competitors rather than resources from which a life of leisure might be obtained. In other words, instead of conquest, the dynamic was of animal competition.

Of course, pre-modern societies did not have totalitarian states and deadly technology. Rapid organized genocide in a way that we would understand was unlikely to have happened. Rather, in a world on the Malthusian margin, a few generations of deprivation may have resulted in the rapid demographic extinction of whole cultures. You don’t need to kill them if they starve because they were driven off their land.

In fact, we have some precedent of this historically. The Spaniards were intent on extracting rents out of the native peoples of the New World and living a life of leisure, but in many areas disease and exploitation resulted in demographic collapse. Imagine a conquest elite as vicious as the Spaniards, but without thousands of years of precedent that conquered peoples were more useful alive rather than dead.

Addendum: The fraction of haplogroup M, which is probably derived from Pleistocene South Asians, is greater than 50% in places like Sindh. This indicates that the steppe migrations were strongly male biased in the initial generations.

May 30, 2017

Ancient Egyptians: black or white?

Filed under: Egypt,Genetics,Historical Genetics,History — Razib Khan @ 9:20 pm

One of the most fascinating things about ancient Egypt is its continuity, and our granular and detailed knowledge of that continuity. We can thank in part the dry climate, as well as the Egyptian penchant for putting their hieroglyphs on walls and monuments (as well as graffiti!). And we can also thank the fact that both the ancient Greeks and Hebrews, Athens and Jerusalem so to speak, were deeply connected to and perceived themselves to be indebted to Egyptian civilization. Even before the translation of the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of ancient Egyptian writing the Hebrews’ interactions with Egyptians, in particular in Exodus, mean that their memory would echo down through the millennia (the newly Christianized Irish interpolated Egyptian ancestry into their own genealogy).

The Greek relationship with Egypt was less fraught and at greater remove than the Hebrews. But the Classical period philosophers correctly perceived that Egyptian civilization was ancient, and preceded their own. Aegean-Egyptian connections were actually more longstanding than the Classical scholars knew, in Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, the correspondence in state archives which have been retrieved are rather clear that Minoan civilization was part of the orbit of Egypt early on. Though Egyptians never conquered the Aegean polities, mercantile and diplomatic connections were extremely old and persistent. The late Bronze Age eruption of barbarian Sea Peoples who attacked the whole civilized Near East may have been facilitated in part by the broad familiarity engendered by widespread trade networks.

The most recent book devoted to ancient Egypt I have read was Toby Wilkinson’s The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. Synthesizing extensive written material with archaeology, perhaps the most impactful argument in Wikinson’s narrative was the persistence of the temple based institutions from the Old Kingdom down to the Ptolemaic era. Religious institutions carried on even with the shocks of Nubian and Libyan conquest in the post-New Kingdom period, down to Late Antiquity. The temple at Philae in southern Egypt was an active center of the traditional religion, and therefore the culture which dates to the Old Kingdom in continuous form, down to the 6th century A.D. (when it was closed by Justinian in his kulturkampf against ancient heterodoxies).

For various ideological reasons though many people are very curious about the racial characteristics of the ancient Egyptians. There are two basic extreme positions, Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists. Though I have not done a deep dive of the literature of either group, I’ve read a few books from either camp over my lifetime. In fact I believe the last time I read the “primary literature” of Afrocentrist and Eurocentrism was when I was an early teen, and it was rather strange because both groups seem to be recapitulating racial disagreements and viewpoints relevant to the American context, and projecting them back to the ancient world.

In college I stumbled upon Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out Of Africa, a book length argument against the more sophisticated Afrocentrist views articulated in the wake of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Lefkowitz was a classicist, so many of her objections were exceedingly scholarly. The reality is that the best refutation of an Afrocentrist view of of ancient Egypt, which reduces to the idea that ancient Egyptians would be recognizably black African today, are the Fayum portraits. It is notable to me how similar these portraits are to modern Copts. In fact the actor Rami Malek, of Coptic background, looks strikingly like someone who stepped out of the Fayum portraits.

I have read no book length refutation of the Eurocentrist, usually Nordicist, perspective. Mostly because this is a view associated with white supremacism, and that ideology is generally attacked on normative, not positive, grounds. But the visible evidence of the Fayum portraits is a strong refutation of the Nordic model. Of course, there is the reality that we now know that the Nordic phenotype, and the genetic components which congealed into that typical of Northern Europe today, was only coming into existence when the Old Kingdom of Egypt was already a mature civilization.

Of course both Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists will reject the evidence of the Fayum portraits became they came from the Roman era, and they would argue that the demographic nature of Egyptians changed quite a bit between that period and the end of the New Kingdom. And they are not incorrect that the period between the arrival of the Romans and the fall of the New Kingdom was characterized by a great deal of change. There were Libyan dynasties, Nubian dynasties, and periods of rule by Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonians. Large colonies of Greeks, Macedonians, and Hebrews-becoming-Jews were also resident in Egypt. Especially, but not limited to, the urban areas.

But now we have ancient DNA! Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods:

Because modern people care about the Afrocentrist question, the extent of Sub-Saharan African ancestry is highlighted in this paper. I do not think this is actually the most interesting aspect. But I’ll get to that. Since this post will be read by a fair number of people I’ll talk about the relationship of ancient and modern Egyptians to (Northern) Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans.

The figure to the left is looking at 90 ancient Egyptian mitochondrial genomes (and some modern ones in the two rightmost columns). Since mtDNA is copious it was relatively easy to extract and analyze.  Haplogroup L, the red to orange shades in the bar plots, are associated without dispute with Sub-Saharan Africa. Haplogroup U6, M1 and a few others may be “back to Africa” variants of different periods (they are generally found in Afro-Asiatic groups).

What you can see is that somewhat more than half of Ethiopia’s mtDNA lineages are L, in keeping with the whole genome estimate of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in most Cushitic populations. In Egypt there is a difference over time; haplogroup L goes from low frequencies to much higher frequencies in modern periods. The ~20% fraction in the modern samples is in line with the population wide admixture one sees in modern Egyptians of Sub-Saharan admixture.

I actually recomputed the haplogroups to a finer granularity from the supplements for readers who know this stuff well. Here they are:

Haplogroup Count
H 2
H13c1 2
H5 2
H6b 2
HV 3
HV1a’b’c 4
HV1a2a 3
HV1b2 2
HV21 2
I 5
J1d 2
J2a1a1 2
J2a2b 2
J2a2c 4
J2a2e 3
K 16T 2
K1a 2
K1a4 2
L3 2
M1a1 4
M1a1e 2
M1a1i 2
M1a2a 2
N 2
N1’5 2
N1a1a2 2
R 3
R0 2
R0a 2
R0a1 2
R0a1a 3
R0a2 3
R0a2f 2
R2’JT 2
T 3
T1a 3
T1a2 2
T1a5 4
T1a7 7
T1a8a 2
T2 3
T2c1 2
T2c1c 2
T2e 2
U 2
U1a1 2
U1a1a3 2
U3b 3
U5a 2
U6a 2
U6a2 2
U6a3 2
U7 4
U8b1a1 3
U8b1b1 2
W3a1 2
W6 2
W8 2
X 2
X1 2
X1c 2

A quick inspection of mtDNA haplogroup frequencies shows that ancient Egyptians are not typical of modern Europeans. Not that much H, and lots of T, J and K. What that does remind me of are Early European Farmers. These people, who brought agriculture to Europe from Anatolia contributed a large fraction of the ancestry of modern Southern Europeans, and a lesser component to Northern Europeans.

But ultimately what’s great about this paper is that they have ancient autosomal DNA. That is, genome-wide results.

They got three samples of reasonably high quality. More precisely: “Two samples from the Pre-Ptolemaic Periods (New Kingdom to Late Period) had 5.3 and 0.5% nuclear contamination and yielded 132,084 and 508,360 SNPs, respectively, and one sample from the Ptolemaic Period had 7.3% contamination and yielded 201,967 SNPs.”

You can see the three samples on this bar plot. What is interesting is that they’re all pretty similar.

What you can see here is that to a great extent ancient Egyptians were descended from a population closely related to Natufians, or Natufians themselves. This easily explains the mtDNA affinity to Neolithic farmers: Natufians and Anatolian Neolithic populations were sister populations. The f3 statistic which looks at shared drift shows an affinity of ancient Egyptians with ancient farmer populations with Near Eastern provenance, but also with modern Sardinians. This is a common pattern, as ancient groups do not have later migration waves, with the Sardinians the modern population closest to this.

You see in the bar plot that northern Levantine populations are placed between Anatolian Neolithics and Natufians, as one might expect based on their geographical position and gene flow between these two regions. Additionally, the cyan color is associated with eastern farmers from the Zagros. I’ve already talked about gene flow from this area to the Levant recently. If you compare the Bronze Age Sidon samples I think you’ll see broad affinities with these Late Period Egyptians.

The PCA gives us results consonant with the model-based clustering. If you plot the genetic variation of ancient Egyptians they’re closest to Neolithic eastern Mediterranean populations. No great surprise.

Not the modern Egyptians. Why? It’s pretty clearly because modern Egyptians are shifted toward Sub-Saharan Africans. But there is also another component: modern Egyptians have more of the cyan eastern farmer component. What could this be?

An immediate thought comes to mind. We focus a great deal on Sub-Saharan African slavery. One reason is that it is visible. Black Africans are physically distinct from most Middle Eastern populations. But Egypt was long the center of another slave trade: “white slaves” from the Caucasus. Circassians. For hundreds of years Mamluks were recruited from the Caucasus as military slaves. They eventually became the ruling class of Egypt, until their decimation in the 19th century under Muhammad Ali (who himself was an Albanian Ottoman who never learned to speak Arabic well).

As noted in the paper earlier work looking at patterns in ancestry tracts and LD decay had made it obvious that much of the admixture of Sub-Saharan ancestry in Egypt, as in much of the Middle East, is relatively recent. In particular, it dates to the Islamic period, when trade and conquest took on new dimensions in Africa and north into Central Asia. One way ethnic minorities like Assyrians and Lebanese Christians differ from their Muslim neighbors is that they have much lower fractions of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, and no East Asian component. The latter might surprise, but remember that Central Asian Turkic slaves have been prominent in Muslim armies since at least the 9th century.

But some of the Sub-Saharan ancestry in Egyptians is old. The ancient Egyptian samples have it. To have none of it would seem strange, considering the history of contact between Nubia and Egypt, dating back to the Old Kingdom. Second, there is evidence of low levels of Sub-Saharan African gene flow into Southern Europeans. How did that happen? The highest fractions are in Spain, and can there be attributed to the Moorish period. But that explanation does not hold in much of Italy, where there are a few percent of haplogroup L. This probably is due to south-to-north gene flow across the Mediterranean during the Classical period. Some of the peoples on the south shore of the Mediterranean almost certainly already had some Sub-Saharan African admixture.

Not getting into the details of it, there are ways to explicitly model gene flow into a target population from donors defined by a phylogeny. In this case the authors tested various models of gene flow from Sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians (non-Africans) to generate allele frequency patterns we see in modern Egyptians and ancient Egyptians.

What they consistently found is that modern Egyptians are about twice as much Sub-Saharan African as ancient Egyptians. The proportions for modern Egyptians ranged from ~10 to ~20 percent Sub-Saharan African against a Eurasian background, with a bias toward the higher values (depending on which populations you put into the phylogeny for non-Africans), and ~0 to ~10 percent for the ancient Egyptians, again with a bias toward the higher values. The pattern is consistent in these tests.

An issue here is that we’re going off three samples. That being said, the authors observe that despite differences in contamination/quality and time period they’re very concordant with each other. If I had to bet I think Old Kingdom samples would have somewhat less Sub-Saharan and eastern farmer ancestry. But the basic pattern persisted down to the Roman period, and was only shifted by admixture due to slavery.

And not to belabor the point, but a paper from a few years ago which had some Copt samples looks familiar in its broad outlines. You see that the Copts have very little Sub-Saharan African ancestry, though it does seem to be evident (the marker set is in the hundreds of thousands of SNPs). Additionally, they are quite distinct from the Qatari Arab sample.

Unfortunately the data for this paper just published is not on the European Nucleotide Archive. I really want to dig a little deeper into it.

What are the takeaways here? Egypt has been the sink for a lot of migration and gene flow over the past several thousand years, and probably earlier. Not surprising considering that it was relatively wealthy in the aggregate. The Natufian population that the Late Period Egyptians resemble the most did not have Sub-Saharan African ancestry according to earlier research. These Late Period Egyptians do have some. This is reasonable in light of the long interaction with Nubia which is historically attested. Similarly, there was clearly gene flow from Southwest Asia. This is again historically attested, especially in the Nile Delta (though foreign garrisons of mercenaries are recorded in Upper Egypt as well).

The Roman period probably did introduce some gene flow from Southeast Europe and Southwest Asia. But these populations are not that distinct from Egyptians.

Similarly, the Islamic period also brought in different peoples from Arabia and the Caucasus. But the most salient dynamic during the Islamic period was a massive trans-Saharan slave trade (though the Caucasus impact may have been comparable, and I think these results support the proposition that it was).

It seems entirely likely that the Copts are descended from a mix of Roman era Egyptians. Not only do they resemble the people in the Fayum portraits, but the circumstantial genetic data is that they have fewer “exotic” components which increased in frequency during the Islamic era. This would be exactly parallel to ethno-religious minorities in the Levant and Iraq.

One curious element to me is the suggestion gene flow before ~5,000 BCE between Sub-Saharan Africa and the lower Nile valley was low. If it hadn’t been low, it seems unlikely that the fraction of Sub-Saharan ancestry (or shift in that direction in relation to other Eurasians) in Copts would be so small.

So what explains the lack of earlier gene flow? I think the answer is going to be the fact that the human demographic landscape is characterized by lots of local population extinctions. As ancient DNA sampling coverage gets better and better meta-population dynamics are coming into focus, and we see gene flow, and die offs, in several areas. It is fashionable to say that human population variation is characterized by clines. But much of this clinal aspect is an outcome of the period after massive admixture over the last ~10,000 years.

And yet it may not be that the period before the Holocene was not clinal. Rather, it may be that large depopulations of areas of human occupation fragmented clinal ranges, and resulted in new range expansions from “core” zones.

About ~8,000 years ago there was a major desertification period in the Sahara desert. Many trans-Saharan populations may have gone extinct during this time due to rapid climate change. Eventually repopulation may have occurred from outside of the Sahara, so that post-Natufian Levantines and Sub-Saharan Africans from what today call the Sahel pushed up and down the Nile drainage basic respectively, meeting in the zone of Nubia on the boundary of history and prehistory.

Unlike many other areas of the world we have a long attested record of Egyptian history. As we get more mummy samples it seems likely that we’re get a crisper, clearer, picture. And the time transects will not be narrative blind; we already know the general arc of Egyptian history. If, for example, we see a new ancestral component around ~1500 B.C., in Egypt it’s not mysterious what this might be: the Hyksos.

This is just the prologue to a fascinating book that will be written over the next decade.

Related: Blog post analyzing one Copt’s results suggests that Sub-Saharan admixture is more like Dinka than Yoruba (in contrast, Muslim Egyptians have a mix of both, the latter probably coming during the Islamic slave trade, while the former is probably ancient admixture).

Citation: Schuenemann, V. J. et al. Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods. Nat. Commun. 8, 15694 doi: 10.1038/ncomms15694 (2017).

July 7, 2011

The biocultural frog and tortoise

November 17, 2010

15 ancestral components to bind them all

Filed under: Admixture,Dodecad,Genetics,Historical Genetics,History — Razib Khan @ 11:01 am

Dienekes Pontikos keeps chugging along, and has cranked out a new bar plot from the ADMIXTURE program with 15 putative ancestral components. He has “69 populations, and 1,189 individuals in total.” Most of these were assembled from public data, but some of them are particular to the Dodecad Ancestry Project. He contends:

Not only has he generated a bar plot, but there is a PCA showing the relationship between the 15 ancestral groups, as well as a hierarchical tree. Since he references to the ANI and ASI of Reich et al., I thought I would note that the South Indian element from Dienekes’ K = 15 is still found in appreciable portions in the Turkic groups which earlier exhibited the South Asian component. And, on the PCA and phylogenetic tree it still clusters with West Eurasians more than East Eurasians, which is not the case with ASI (or the various Indian mtDNA lineages which coalesce back to a more recent common ancestor with East Eurasians).

The bar plot is below. Of interest are the most “pure” European groups, the Sardinians and Lithuanians. Also, compare Scandinavians and Finns.

November 3, 2010

The genetic heritage of Europe’s north

Filed under: Culture,Finland,Genetics,Historical Genetics,History,Sweden — Razib Khan @ 1:43 pm

If you haven’t, you should keep an eye on Dienekes‘  Dodecad Ancestry Project (RSS). The pilot phase of data collection is over, and the first population level statistics are now coming out. Of particular interest to me is a new analysis of various northern European ethnicities just published.

The samples used in this analysis are:

- 25 HapMap-3 White Americans. These are the Mormons of predominantly Northwest European heritage

- 5 Dodecad Project Finns

- 25 HGDP-CEPH Russians from Vologda, in north-central European Russia

- 12 Dodecad Project continental Germanics (Scandinavians and Germans)

- 10 Behar et al. (2010) Lithuanians

- 9 Behar et al. (2010) Belorussians

- 3 Dodecad Project Northern Slavs

Below are two visualizations of the genetic structure. First, an MDS. And second, a bar plot of ancestral quanta derived from ADMIXTURE. I’ve added some clarifying labels.

Remember that the data you input into these analyses shape the nature of the outcomes to some extent. All these populations are very genetically close when scaled to average worldwide inter-population genetic variation. So what Dienekes is smoking out here are subtle differences between relatively close groups.

The first clear result supports previous research using uniparental markers: the ethnogenesis of the “Great Russians” involved both demographic expansion, and, cultural assimilation. The process on the southern and eastern frontiers is well documented, because it continued into the early modern period via a series of private wars of expansion. Turkic and Ugric groups were defeated by “Cossacks”, and often themselves integrated into the Cossack population as it expanded further into Siberia and the Steppe. Lenin’s paternal grandmother for example is often claimed to have been a Kalmyk, a branch of the Dzungar Mongol Confederacy which had settled in the lower Volga region. Whatever the truth, Lenin’s father clearly had an Asiatic cast to his features. The ancestral quanta estimates always seem to show that Russians, though not other Slavs further to the west, seem to average around ~5% or so “eastern” ancestry (by analogy, this is about the amount of African ancestry in the typical Levantine Arab).

But the expansion into the Finnic north is less well documented. To some extent the process of Russification began far earlier, as even Kievan Rus at the turn of the first millennium has been claimed to have had Finnic elements (the Rus were Swedes, but they probably picked up Finns in their warbands as they swept south, in addition to the numerous indigenous Finnic groups in northeast Europe). Additionally, unlikely the Muslim Turks these Finnic groups were often small-scale societies without international connections or affiliation with any “higher civilization” which could serve as an oppositional ideology to Orthodox Russian culture. The wide geographic expanse of the Russian ethnos means that one must be exceedingly sensitive to sample representativeness. Readers of Russian or Finnish origin are often aware of which localities in northern Russia were only recently Slavicized, and so express caution in comments as to utilization of those samples as representatives of Slavs more generally.

The second peculiarity are the “Germans” who affiliate with the Finns in the MDS, and contribute to the Finnish element among the Germans. Dienekes says: “without revealing any information, I’ll just say that this is contributed primarily by 3 Dodecad Project members who deviate towards Finns and whose ADMIXTURE analysis shows a higher than expected Northeast Asian component. Their outlier status is also visible in the MDS plot.” By “Northeast Asian” he presumably means one of the 10 ancestral components he’d found in earlier analyses. Without any more information I assume there’s a high probability that these are simply Germanized part-Sami. Much of northern Scandinavia was inhabited by Sami down to the early modern period. For example, the Sami were ethnically cleansed and assimilated across the north half of what is today Sweden as late as the 1600s and 1700s. Though I haven’t done the requisite reading, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just a function of more advanced farming techniques as well as hardy New World crops such as potatoes which pushed the possible limits of Swedish settlement north.

Finally, there’s a clear Finnic component in the results. As Dienekes noted this Finnic component itself may be a composite of East and West Eurasian elements, just as the South Asian component in Eurasia may be a composite of “Ancient North Indians” and “Ancient South Indians.” One thing to remember about the Finnic component is there’s evidence for a fair amount of genetic variation within Finland. Representativeness is probably key here, just as it is for Russians. Ethnic Finnish individuals with ancestry along the southern and western coasts probably have more affinity with Germanic populations than Karelians.

For many decades there have been arguments as to the provenance of the Finns. Specifically, are they outsiders to Norden who arrived from the east, bringing with them their language? Or are they are indigenous vis-a-vis Germanic speakers? The past is complex, so a simple model is going to shave off a lot of the detail, but I suspect that the truth is closer to the second. It seems that the Finnic groups, or at least their languages, have an ultimate origin in Central Eurasia after the last Ice Age. But they are possibly a circumpolar population which expanded north and practiced hunter-gatherer lifestyles following the ice sheets. Over time agriculturalists expanded north and squeezed them on the margin, but I believe there were natural ecological limits to the practice of techniques derived from Middle Eastern crops. Though northern Finns adopted some agricultural techniques, there was enough of a slowdown of the spread agriculture by Indo-European speakers and their precursors that they managed to hold their own in the north. In much of European Russia, and later in pre-19th century Finland, we see plenty of evidence of language-switching from Finnic to Indo-European (in Finland nationalism resulted in a back-switch over the past 150 years). If the Malthusian pre-modern age had persisted for another two or three centuries I would not be surprised if Finnic languages were totally absorbed by Russian and Scandinavian Indo-European dialects. As it is, 19th century language based nationalism stopped the process of elite culture assimilation, and in some cases reversed it (many elite Finland Swedes abandoned Swedish language and identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries).

Addendum: The picture I present above is simple, and I don’t believe it captures a lot of what happened. For example, from my reading there was a pause of about 1,000 years in the expansion of agriculture once it reached the Kattegat between Denmark and Sweden. I suspect that these long pauses were a function of ecology and geography, as they’re often just too long to be determined by social-political inertia. Additionally, it seems unlikely to me that the first agriculturalists in Europe were Indo-European speakers. Rather, that is possibly a subsequent linguistic overlay, especially in the western regions of Europe.

September 19, 2010

Gypsies on a genetic island

Romanis-historical-distributionIf you live in the States one of the things you hear a lot about Europe in regards to its relationship to its ethno-religious minorities are the problems with Muslims. This is probably an Americo-centric perspective shaped by 9/11, when many of the hijackers had turned out to have spent time in Germany. Additionally, terrorist actions in both London and Madrid highlight the persistence of these problems over the years. These sorts of shocking events put a sharp focus on the geopolitical cross-hairs which Europe finds itself in in the second age of mass migration. Though this time it is a destination, and not a source.

But having been to Europe recently it was notable that in several regions the day-to-day tension when it came to ethnicity often focused on Gypsies (I use the older term because the ethnonym “Roma” which has become politically correct in the USA includes only a subset of Europe’s Gypsy population, even if the greater number). Many regions of Europe now have two distinct populations of Gypsies, a long resident local group, as well as Roma from the eastern nations of the EU. Though the relationships between these traditionally nomadic peoples and indigenous populations has never been without tension, it is clear that something close to a modus vivendi has been achieved in many European nations between the majority and their small native Gypsy populations. The influx of the Balkan Roma add a new variable.

ResearchBlogging.orgBut the political fuss for me simply rekindled a curiosity as to the genetic origins of the Gypsies. Culturally their South Asian provenance couldn’t be clearer; they speak an Indo-Aryan language. Their term for themselves in many parts of Europe comes from the  Indo-Aryan word for “black,” as they are are darker than the natives of the lands in which they have settled , and in fact often look visibly South Asian. This seemed especially true of Balkan Roma. On the other hand the Kale of Finland looked to be brunette Europeans.

The problem with the genetics of the Gypsy people of Europe is that until recently they’ve focused on uniparental lineages. Though this has confirmed their South Asian origins, looking at maternal or paternal direct descent alone leaves something to be desired in terms of assessing ancestry, and, these two markers (mtDNA and Y) are subject to more drift as they are haploid (half as many copies). But a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology has some results using 16 autosomal STRs (a group of highly variant markers). A Genetic Historical Sketch of European Gypsies: The Perspective From Autosomal Markers:

In this study, 123 unrelated Portuguese Gypsies were analyzed for 15 highly polymorphic autosomal short tandem repeats (STRs). Average gene diversity across the 15 markers was 76.7%, which is lower than that observed in the non-Gypsy Portuguese population. Subsets of STRs were used to perform comparisons with other Gypsy and corresponding host populations. Interestingly, diversity reduction in Gypsy groups compared to their non-Gypsy surrounding populations apparently varied according to an East-West gradient, which parallels their dispersion in Europe as well as a decrease in complexity of their internal structure. Analysis of genetic distances revealed that the average level of genetic differentiation between Gypsy groups was much larger than that observed between the corresponding non-Gypsy populations. The high rate of heterogeneity among Gypsies can be explained by strong genetic drift and limited intergroup gene flow. However, when genetic relationships were addressed through principal component analysis, all Gypsy populations clustered together and was clearly distinguished from other populations, a pattern that suggests their common origin. Concerning the putative ancestral genetic component, admixture analysis did not reveal strong Indian ancestry in the current Gypsy gene pools, in contrast to the high admixture estimates for either Europeans or Western Asians.

This isn’t a 500,000 SNP-chip analysis, so everything needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But, 16 markers is a lot more than the two you usually have to deal with when assessing the genetics of the Gypsy populations of Europe, so it’s certainly an improvement when making inferences. One figure and table are really worth looking at in this paper.

The first plot shows the variance partitioned into two dimensions as a function of the 13 STRs. The table shows bootstrapped admixture estimates and standard deviations. They had a 3-population model with West Asians, but it didn’t look to me like they were getting sensible results with that, so I excised that portion (with only 600 pixels the table would have been very hard to read with the nonsensical estimates in). I think the last model where they aggregate West Asians with Europeans makes the most sense. I assume the major issue here is that with 16 STRs which aren’t necessarily filtered for ancestral informativeness within these populations you’re going to get weird results on the margins.

These results confirm the finding from previous Y and mtDNA results that Europe’s Gypsy populations are genetically fragmented, and seem to have gone through bottlenecks. In this paper they also seem to have found a pattern of decreased genetic variance from east to west for the Gypsy groups, which makes sense in light of a historical model of serial bottlenecks as they traversed Europe. Any reasonable model of the genetic heritage of the Gyspy people of the world posits that they’re a compound to various extents of populations distributed along a continuum between South Asia and Western Europe, and yet here you see a 2-dimensional plot that they don’t look like a linear combination of South Asians and Europeans. Why? Because of their unique genetic history has resulted in their “random walk” into patterns of allelic variance distinct from the ancestral groups.

But a second genetic dynamic with these populations seems to be admixture. With 16 STRs, and obvious sensitivity depending on the populations you survey, one should be careful about overweighting the findings from this paper. And yet plausibly it does show a pattern of decreased South Asian admixture the further you go from the Balkans. Not only does this stand to reason a priori, but empirically it’s generally agreed that the Gypsy groups of the north and west of Europe look less South Asian in appearance than those of the Balkans.

A final consideration here is that the Indian populations which they used as a reference for South Asians are not representative of the ancestral Indian groups from which Gypsies derived. The Indo-Aryan language of the Gypsies seems to share the most features with the language of northwest India, Punjabi and Hindi. But the samples which had the appropriate STRs for comparison were Central and South Indian. Overall I don’t think that’s that much of a consideration, but something to remember.

A bigger take home point is the disjunction between cultural and biological modes of inheritance and persistence. The language of the Gypsies retains in its broad outlines the character of an Indo-Aryan tongue. That is why the South Asian origins of Gypsies was able to be ascertained by Indian sailors in Britain who overheard, and broadly understood, what Gypsies were saying. Romanipen, the spirit of Gypsy culture which transcends difference of religion and nationality, seems to be clearly traceable to some South Asian antecedents (e.g., the emphasis on avoidance of contamination of food by outsiders).

And yet despite the cultural distinctiveness the various Gypsy populations have become genetically less South Asian. That makes sense, it seems likely that they left India ~1000 years ago, or 40 generations. They’ve been in the Balkans for about 600 years, or 24 generations. Let’s assume unrealistically that the Roma were 100% South Asian when they arrive in the Byzantine lands (there are related groups in the Middle East, so it seems certain they picked up Middle Eastern ancestry along the way, but no matter). 99% endogamy per generation would imply that they’d be 79% South Asian today. 95% endogamy would result in them being 29% South Asian. 90% endogamy would mean that they’d be 8% South Asian. Reality is more complex. It is likely that in the early periods when social norms had not hardened and Roma were less numerous the endogamy rates were probably far lower, especially as the Gypsy bands mixed with other destitute groups in the Balkans. The evidence of lots of structure across the Gypsy groups points to endogamy drilling down to a lower level of organization than just the ethnic group, which would be consistent with tendencies within South Asian culture more broadly.

More generally it seems that the Roma and their relatives can’t just be understood as a simple linear combination of Europeans, Middle Easterners, and South Asians, genetically or culturally. Their unique history has reshaped them, and their persistence and demographic expansion in the face of ostracism and persecution are clear evidence as to the functional success of their social-cultural traditions.

Citation: Gusmão A, Valente C, Gomes V, Alves C, Amorim A, Prata MJ, & Gusmão L (2010). A genetic historical sketch of European Gypsies: The perspective from autosomal markers. American journal of physical anthropology, 141 (4), 507-14 PMID: 19918999

August 16, 2010

Where writing is silent

In my post on Empires of the Word I observed that quite often the written record is silent on many matters which only language or genes tell us must have occurred. The Indo-Aryan character of the dominant language on the island of Sri Lanka seems to be a geographical anomaly in the least, but perhaps most strange of all is the existence of a language and ethnic group of clear Southeast Asian provenance on the island of Madagascar. To my knowledge Arab, Persian and South Asian sources do not record the existence of a prominent Southeast Asian maritime diaspora which spanned the Indian ocean in the years before 1000 A.D., but we know that it did exist. A new paper on the genetics of the island of Comoros fleshes out another piece of the puzzle, Genetic diversity on the Comoros Islands shows early seafaring as major determinant of human biocultural evolution in the Western Indian Ocean:

In the paper they note that ~6% of the Y chromosomal lineages were Southeast Asian, while ~15% of mtDNA lineages were. That indicates that the Southeast Asian presence on the Indian ocean was a case of folk migration, men, women and children on the move. The data from Madagascar indicate something similar, both male and female lineages show Southeast Asian imprint among the highland Malagasy (I don’t make much of the proportional difference because this is just one sample). In contrast, they show in this paper that there’s a substantial West Eurasian (probably Arab, Indian and Persian) Y chromosomal gene flow into the population of Comoros, but no West Eurasian mtDNA. So in this case you have a clear contrast with that of the Southeast Asian seafarers, the Muslim merchants who settled on the Comoros did not bring their children or womenfolk. It was not a folk migration, but a mercantile network. Because of the nature of the sources, and the cultural influence of the West Asians, we know of their presence from the historical record. In contrast, the arguably more substantial folk migration of Southeast Asian seafarers from Borneo is hidden in the text. They may have been of no concern or beneath mention from the perspective of the Muslim merchant princes, but the fact that they were no longer on the high seas by the time the Portuguese arrive may also indicate that they were driven off by the same Muslim merchant princes in the years after 1000. If the latter is the case the silence may be due to the inclination to forget an unpleasant rivalry.

All this goes to show that history’s reliance on text can mislead and obscure real dynamics. Even social and economic history which attempts to tunnel-down to the level of the populace is still heavily reliant on written records. In the case of seafarers it seems likely that even archaeologists would be unable to detect their movements because of the liminal nature of their settlements. The linguistic and cultural influences in Madagascar and in East Africa indicate a sojourn by Austronesians in that coast, but there is no physical or textual record. There is the “dark history” which we ignore because of current ideological preferences, and then there is the dark history which has fallen outside of our methodological window.

Dienekes has more on this paper.

June 6, 2010

Jews and genetics

Filed under: Genetics,Genomics,Historical Genetics,Jews — Razib Khan @ 12:24 am

April 30, 2010

Men & ideas on the move: settled lands & colonized minds

Filed under: Genetic History,Historical Genetics,History — Razib Khan @ 8:15 am

April 20, 2010

Of pigs, people and porcine polygenism

Let me finish from the author’s conclusion:

Image credit: NASA

March 27, 2010

The science of human history as written by Herodotus

Image source: Wikipedia

February 19, 2010

Armenian genetics

Filed under: Historical Genetics — Razib @ 4:40 pm

Armenian genes: Scientist in Yerevan launches a project to reveal genetic history of the nation. The description of the science in the piece is very garbled. But, it would be nice to elucidate the genetics of Armenians in more detail. Their language, like Greek and Albanian, is a singleton in the Indo-European family tree. Additionally, the Armenian nation has an extremely long history. Their identity crystallized in the wake of the Persian and Hellenistic Empires just like that of the Jews.

Demographically we know that historically much of eastern Anatolia was dominated by Armenians. Many of the prominent Byzantine dynasties were of Hellenized Armenian lineages. I would predict that one will likely find that most of the Turks of eastern Anatolia would cluster with Armenians, just as those Turks from the west and coastal Anatolia might cluster more with Greeks, because it seems likely that the ethnogenesis of most Turks in Anatolia was a process whereby Greeks and Armenians assimilated to the identity of a small minority of eastern Turkish invaders.

Armenian genetics

Filed under: Armenia,Genetics,Historical Genetics — Razib @ 12:41 am

December 7, 2009

Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain

Filed under: Historical Genetics — Razib @ 2:11 pm

Peter Frost on Roman Britain:

Historians often assume that the Romans changed Britain politically but not demographically. The indigenous elites adopted Roman culture while the mass of the population remained Celtic. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the fifth century, much of this population fled to Wales and Cornwall, where they would retain their language and traditions. Meanwhile, those who remained behind were obliterated through a process of ethnic cleansing and coerced assimilation.

This historical account may be false….

Once Rome had pulled its troops out of Britain in the early 5th century, there was no longer an inflow of people to offset the demographic deficit. The local population fell into decline, and the decline accelerated in the 6th century when plagues killed three out of every ten people. The Romano-British needed no help from the Anglo-Saxons to die out. They did it largely on their own.

Peter’s summation of the historical consensus is correct. This view is exposited in Norman Davies’ The Isles. The historians have had a bias for several generations of assuming that population movements have been marginal in shaping cultural change. In some cases this is correct; I’ve looked and it is very difficult to detect a discontinuity among the Hungarians in relation to their neighbors despite this nation’s putative origins among an Inner Asian group (and later settlement of Turks who fled the Mongols within the Magyar kingdom). The emergence of Hungarian is therefore most plausibly modeled as a process of elite emulation, where Romance, German and Slavic speaking peasants adopted the speech and identity of their Magyar overlords. The Hungarian case is easy to test because the geographical distance of the Magyar homeland in the Volga-Ural region is great enough that they would have been a genetically distinct population who would introduce alleles which couldn’t be explained except as exogenous inputs (the Hazara are a case of this).

The question of Britain is a bit more confused. Historians rely on textual evidence which points to Anglo-Saxon rule of Celtic-speaking populations in their kingdoms in the 7th and 8th century, in particular stipulations of different wergild (‘blood money’) for Saxons, noble and commoner, and Celts, noble and commoner. The existence of an elite Celtic speaking class suggests that Gildas’ allusions to genocide were exaggerations. Over the past 10 years a lot of exploration of the genetic variation within Britain has simply muddied the picture. Though some early Y chromosomal studies suggested sharp breaks between Wales and England, autosomal data don’t seem to show this. Rather, a reasonable model is that the Anglo-Saxons contributed a significant, but minority, element to England’s contribution. Their genetic impact drops as a decaying function of the distance from East Anglia, which was the heart of the “Saxon Shore,” but their cultural influence was not diluted along the wave of advance. This highlights the stark difference between genetic and cultural inheritance, the former is constrained in the nature of transmission in a way the latter is not. In fact, during the high tide of the Viking era in Britain’s history, the Saxon redoubt was Wessex, which genetic data show seem to has been minimally affected by German settlement. Rather, Wessex was likely conquered by the Saxonized.

Finally, what happened to multicultural Britain? The genetic data show a small effect, a random African lineage here and there which can not be explained by recent genealogy. An orders of magnitude less important than the Saxon migration. I think the reason is the simple that that urban areas were population sinks, and unless immigrants “went native” they disappeared into the genetic black hole. A reasonable historical analogy may be Lithuania. After the official union of the political structures of Lithuania and Poland in the 16th century the Lithuanian nobility was Polonized. The emergence of modern Lithuanian identity was to a great extent an elevation of Lithuanian peasant culture, which was left unaffected by Polonization. If extant literary or high cultural artifacts are used to reconstruct Lithuania’s history one might posit that Lithuanian’s disappeared in the early modern era, only to reemerge in the 19 century due to the ideology of nationalism.

There has long been a supposition that Latinization in Britain was relatively restricted and superficial compared to Gaul, where Celtic speech seems to have disappeared in the 5th century. This may be a inference made plausible by hindsight, because Britain was one region (the Balkans the other) where the ornaments of Roman high culture was totally extinguished in the face of barbarian invasions. By contrast, Gaul, Iberia and Italy all produced culturally hybrid elites who were Romanized. But from what I know the archaeological evidence does suggest a shift even among Romano-British warlords from a Roman to a British style in their material possessions over the 5th and 6th centuries (additionally, Roman commanders and legions stationed in Britain had a tendency to relocate to the continent in part because that was where the “action” was in terms of advancement and glory, so there may have been a sorting process whereby the most Romanized elites emigrated, while those who were willing to become barbarized, whether by going back to their Celtic roots, or becoming Saxonized, remained).

Here’s some gene related charts to support what I’m saying above about the muddle. On first inspection a Netherlandish affinity to many Briton’s is obvious (also, you can see it in Structure). Uniparental markers show the clines I’m alluding to above though, so where these samples come from within Britain matters a great deal at the scale we’re talking about. But the main problem is that some might argue that there have long been interactions between the low countries and southeast England because of their proximity, and not one particular Anglo-Saxon migration. Perhaps at some point it will be feasible to analyze the decay linkage disequilibrium (or see if there’s linkage disequilibrium) in southeast England to date the time of a putative admixture event. But of course the peoples of the North European Plain and those of England are relatively close genetically, so I’m not going to hold my breath. Ancient DNA will probably yield more sooner.

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Network and system administrators the importance of separation of duties in information technology

Separation of duties must be implemented such that operational information resource functions are separated into distinct jobs to prevent a single person from harming a development or operational information resource or the services it provides, whether by an accidental act, omission, or intentional act. Devops and separation of duties despite the rapid growth of devops practices throughout various industries, there still seems to be a fair amount of trepidation, particularly among security practitioners and auditors. The management and maintenance of authorizations is shared responsibility of information services & technology and local system and application administrators all units engaged in granting authorizations are encouraged to develop procedures that meet the requirements articulated below in the authorization policy. Separation of duties includes, for example: (i) dividing mission functions and information system support functions among different individuals and/or roles (ii) conducting information system support functions with different individuals (eg, system management, programming, configuration management, quality assurance and testing, and network.

A similar situation exists for system administrators and operating system administrators appdev vs dba and it operations the development and maintenance of applications should be segregated from the operations of those applications and systems and the dba. Separation of duties is a prevalent information technology control that is implemented at different layers of the information system, including the operating system and in applications it serves to eliminate or reduce the possibility that a single user may carry out a prohibited action. Least privilege and separation of duties are two related it security concepts that are critical in the prevention of fraud and other abuses by employees and other authorized system users. After its human resources, information is an organization's most important asset as we have seen in previous chapters, security and risk management is data centric all efforts to protect systems and networks attempt to achieve three outcomes: data availability, integrity, and confidentiality.

Technology (it) resources to only those functions that promote an appropriate separation of duties and are necessary for the user's assigned job duties also, ast rules 5 require that each agency manage. Kpmg risk consulting team comprised of experts in the field of internal audit and information technology can help you ensuring proper sod in the integrated it systems, as well as improve the process of managing system authorizations helping to incorporate the consideration for adequate sod. Separation of duties (sod) is a key concept of internal controls and is the most difficult and sometimes the most costly one to achieve this objective is achieved by disseminating the tasks and. A part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working personnel administration deals with separation of duties, job rotation, mandatory vacation etc.

Separation of duties is a preventative type of administration control, and one that should be considered when you're drafting your organizational authentication and authorization policies. Access to virginia state university's information systems and data is controlled by the implementation of an appropriate access control policy to manage accounts and define the processes of authentication, authorization, administration, and termination of access rights. Separation of duties: the separation of duties is defined as the assignment of responsibilities such that no one individual or function has control over an entire process the principle of separation of duties manages conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict of interest, and potential fraud. Separation of duties is commonly used in large it organizations so that no single person is in a position to introduce fraudulent or malicious code or data without detection role based access control is frequently used in it systems where sod is required. Separation of duties in information technology john gregg, michael nam, stephen northcutt and mason pokladnik separation of duties is a classic security method to manage conflict of interest, the appearance of conflict of interest, and fraud.

Information security means protecting information (data) and information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction information security management is a process of defining the security controls in order to protect the information assets. Management personnel, to ensure adequate separation of duties vendor supported system is one type of critical it systems and equipment where the source code is supported solely by the manufacturer of such system. Separation of duties (sod) is an important outcome when managing identity preventing any role from performing all tasks associated with a business process helps prevent fraud and other malicious.

Although it has its beginnings in the business world, separation of duties has become a powerful security principle in it and information systems edward snowden exposed the united states government's actions in spying on its citizens, corporations, and allies. However, it is important for an is auditor to obtain information to assess the relationship among various job functions, responsibilities and authorities in assessing adequate segregation of duties. 1 purpose this document establishes an operational policy for the separation of duties among the personnel responsible for security administration, system administration, database administration, system. • use the principles of separation of duties when assigning job responsibilities relating to restricted or essential resources • maintain an appropriate level of segregation of duties when issuing credentials to individuals who have access to critical information assets and protected data.

After the new network is designed, the second phase of network administration begins, which involves setting up and configuring the network this consists of installing the hardware that makes up the physical part of the network, and configuring the files or databases, hosts, routers, and network configuration servers. • perform regular plm system administration tasks including, but not limited to installations, configurations, volume management, user management, data migrations (import/export), etc • monitor & manage compliance requirements including separation of duties & highly privileged accounts (hpa.

A system administrator, or sysadmin, is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems especially multi-user computers, such as servers. One of the most basic, yet most important principles of sound management is that of segregation of duties segregation of duties is critical because it ensures separation of different functions and defines authority and responsibility over transactions. P1 the organization: separates duties of individuals as necessary, to prevent malevolent activity without collusion documents separation of duties and implements separation of duties through assigned information system access authorizations. The system owner, in coordination with the systems administrator, will implement separation of duties through assigned information system access authorizations separation of duties include, but are not limited to, the following.

network and system administrators the importance of separation of duties in information technology Separation of duties is important as system administrators to not only ensure that we are doing the correct things at the correct times, but also that it stands up to scrutiny.
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