duncan-jones.andrew
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

2. Professor Beard and the ‘prevalence’ of strangely-hued characters in Roman Britain.

Here we have (again) a variety of diatribes from you, in colourful language, on the basis that there cannot possibly have been a significant population of ‘blacks’ (to put it simply) in the British Isles at that time. To start with, you delve into genetic traces:

- you cite a meaningless and apparently unsourced table which appears to refer just to Italy, and seems to me completely irrelevant (https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892694339549351937/photo/1 )

- you then pick a table which appears to show the mitochondrial traces to be found ‘today’ in much of Europe, including England, Scotland, &c., (https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/892703079363203072/photo/1);

and you argue that the lack of a particular set of traces in England today is proof that there was no sizeable, settled population with sub-Saharan origins in roman Britain. Now I have a problem with this: the only paper by Gonzales et al. that I have been able to track down (there are two from this period) which seems to correspond to what you show is the following: https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-8-223#Tab2

- However Table 1 in the paper I have found does not give the data you show, and nor do the data appear elsewhere in the paper. (Nor is it in the paper by Gonzalez et al from 2006 in Annals of human genetics doi 10.11111/j.1469–1809.2006.00259.x) Quite possibly I am looking at a revised version of the paper, but it is not straightforward in these circumstances to get to grips with your argument (and, as a side issue, you may care to note that Clyde Winters dealt fairly conclusively with Gonzalez et al’s argument about backflow to Africa cf. http://www.maxwellsci.com/print/crjbs/v2-380-389.pdf).

- Let me just say that a) your argument about mitochondrial traces seems to be based on the fact that all of the L groups which embody the supposed sub-Saharan origins, and including the combined N/M/L3 groups, appear in North Africa, but far more scantily elsewhere for the most part, although Scotland looks interesting (this is more of a red herring than a counter suggestion) — but these, if I have understood, apply to current populations on the basis of limited testing; b) more seriously, no-one ever suggested that there was a significant settlement of the UK by North Africans, and your argument is aimed at a straw man: the suggestion by Professor Beard (and indeed by the BBC) was that there was some presence of soldiers or other Roman organized people from North Africa in Roman Britain, not that there was a huge settlement. Professor Beard herself pointed out that there is not even actual proof that Quintus Lollius Urbicus, for instance, albeit from North Africa (Tiddis), was actually of Berber origin.

- And you seem unduly worried by the thought that a blackamoor, or possibly even an Ethiop, might have ventured into Gaul, never mind across the Channel. (For what it is worth, I live in Southern France: and, while you can certainly find some French people to say, no — nothing like that here, yet the Front National has not won: and you will also find many more rational and capable people who will cheerfully accept that the area has long been a melting pot — at least as far back as the Celts and Ionian Greeks. And the pieds noirs are also of that opinion.) To put it another way, the picture you give at the start of this blog post, however ill-spelt your caption, could be of someone from Syria or indeed the Levant: and I doubt you would object to that as a possibility.

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