A Deep History of White People
Authors Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe explore what archaeogenetics can tell us about the origins of humans in Europe
As a genealogist, I am interested in origins. How did I get here? And how do those origins affect who I am today? My origin curiosity doesn’t just apply to my recent ancestors. I also want to know about the deep origins of humans. For people of European ancestry, we can find some of our deep backstories in a recent book by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe (translated by Caroline Wright) called A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe.
Johannes Krause is an archaeogeneticist and Thomas Trappe is a journalist who was brought in to make archaeogenetics understandable to people like me. Just like an archeologist looks for clues about ancient peoples that can be found in the ground, archaeogeneticists look for clues in ancient DNA.
As an aside, I should note that the title of the book, A Short History of Humanity, is inaccurate, because the entire focus is on Europe, and other places are only mentioned tangentially or as sources for migrants into Europe. Perhaps we can excuse the Eurocentricity in the title because the book is a translation from German, and was originally titled Die Reise Unserer Gene, which translates to ”the journey of our genes,” a (slightly) less presumptuous opening.
Part of the reason archaeogenetics has focused on Europe has to do with the optimal conditions for the preservation of human remains. In the relatively warmer Africa and other places near the equator, there is a lack of ancient human DNA to analyze, due to rapid decomposition. Whereas ancient human DNA is more easily preserved in colder places, in burial sites, bogs, caves, and glaciers.
Just a few years ago, archaeogenetic technology didn’t exist. It depends on the ability of machines to rapidly sequence the entire genome of a human from a scrap of bone or tooth from an ancient skeleton. Then, that genome needs to be compared to other ancient DNA samples using high-powered computers and the data has to be analyzed to look for meaningful differences between the samples. All that tech and capacity is new, and the results of this new science are rewriting deep history and challenging fundamental prejudices about what it means to have European heritage.
Scientists like Krause make sense of ancient DNA and try to build plausible stories based on the evidence. The key tool Krause uses is the so-called “junk” DNA sections that have no known associated genes. A change in this DNA due to a mutation seems to have no effect on the survival of an organism, which is important because that means these changes will be conserved over time. Since mutations happen at a predictable pace, by comparing the number and type of junk DNA mutations between various samples, scientists can tell where and when each sample diverged from every other sample in their database. They can build a family tree and a timeline for human history and migration.
The first European humans were Neanderthals, a subgroup of humans who left Africa and lived in Europe and elsewhere for hundreds of thousands of years. These humans were intelligent (if brain size is any indication — bigger than ours) hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands which mainly went after large prey animals.
By the time other humans (which scientists call “early modern humans”) entered Europe (to stay) from Africa 40,000 years ago, those early modern humans had lived apart from Neanderthals long enough to have some different physical and (likely) social characteristics. The evidence suggests that the early modern humans used different hunting and gathering techniques which allowed them to live in larger communities that were not so spread out, giving them an advantage over the existing Neanderthals.
Technically, early modern humans and Neanderthals were the same species, because archaeogenetics shows that they could and did interbreed when they met in Europe. Today, present-day humans with European ancestry show about 2% Neanderthal DNA, while humans with African ancestry show little to no Neanderthal DNA. The 2 percent might seem small, but it is equivalent to having a 3 or 4 times great grandparent as a full-blooded Neanderthal, so it is not nothing.
Archaeogenetics shows that when early modern humans migrated to Europe, they didn’t wipe out Neanderthals as was previously thought, but rather, they displaced them and then absorbed them into their greater population over time to become the foundational hunter-gatherer modern human Europeans.
These early hunter-gatherers had what we might call a good life. They worked an average of two to four hours per day (estimates based on observations of present-day hunter-gatherer societies). They were relatively free of communicable diseases due to their widely dispersed populations. They ate a varied diet, which included a lot of protein from wild animals, and as such, their diet was rich in Vitamin D from natural sources, and their skin was as black as their African ancestors (according to DNA analysis of ancient skeletons).
Archaeogenetics then finds a distinct change in the genetic makeup of ancient Europeans about 8,000 years ago. A new population migrated into Europe from a region called Anatolia, which is in modern-day Turkey. These Anatolians had developed or acquired a new set of skills called farming, which allowed them to live in closer quarters and have a greater population than the hunter-gatherers who were already living in Europe.
A side effect of farming was that the quality of the diet for the average Anatolian farmer was significantly worse than the average hunter-gatherer. The farmers were physically smaller, less healthy, and specifically, their grain and dairy-based diet lacked Vitamin D. This dietary deficiency led to selection pressure for lighter skin among the farmers, in order to facilitate an alternate path to Vitamin D through a sunlight conversion process.
As the Anatolian farmers moved into Europe, they didn’t immediately absorb the hunter-gatherers into their population. Rather archaeogenetics shows that the two populations lived side-by-side for a long time. Eventually, however, the two populations merged everywhere throughout Europe, as the sheer numbers of farmers overwhelmed and absorbed the hunter-gatherers. Nowhere was there an intact population left of pure hunter-gatherers.
That was not it for the making of the European genetic mix. Somewhere around 5000 years ago, a nomadic “horse people” people, known to archeologists as the Yamnaya culture, migrated from the steppes of Central Asia migrated into Europe, only to find the existing population mostly gone. They did not so much conquer them, as step into a void caused by a dramatic loss in population.
Archaeogeneticists don’t only look at ancient human DNA. In this book, the authors also tell the story of the bubonic plague DNA. The authors tell how such plagues, which, I suppose, we now call “pandemics,” shaped the deep history of Europe. They speculate that when the steppe people moved into Europe, it had recently been devastated by a plague, much like when European settlers moved into North America and found it depopulated by as much as 90% due to disease.
The authors speculate that the bubonic plague was the cause of the depopulation for two reasons. First, archaeogenetic analysis shows that the oldest decoded plague DNA dates from this same period. Second, for about 700 years prior to the population influx from the Yamnaya people, there is a near-total absence of skeletons throughout Europe, including a “150-year black hole” immediately prior to the arrival of the steppe people with no usable DNA samples at all. Something happened, and the coincidence of the plague showing up at the same time seems like a smoking gun.
These newcomers from the steppes coexisted for a long time with the remnants of the ex-Anatolian farmer/early hunter-gatherer peoples, and they eventually formed a single interbreeding population with them. Archaeogeneticists can look at the junk DNA segments of any of today’s European ancestry people and find variations of these four waves of migration: Neanderthals, Early Hunter Gatherer, Anatolian Farmer, and Steppe Horse People, and if we look back far enough, all of those groups have roots in Africa.
My takeaways from this book:
- White supremacy is weird. The evolution of white skin is based on dietary deficiency and the need to make Vitamin D.
- The idea of being “pure” is weird. As in, my dad is 100% German ancestry. Yes, but before Germany was Germany there was a LOT of mixing. Archaeogenetics laughs at purity because no one has it.
- Anti-immigration policies are weird. How did people get to Europe in the first place? They moved there from the same places that current migrants are trying to move from (Africa, Turkey, the Near East, and the “steppes”). It is just a question of time scale. There is nothing superior about being there first.
- National boundaries are weird. Looking at the deep genetic history of people on the European sub-continent, there is not much difference in the origins for anyone alive today of European ancestry. We are more alike than different. Way more.
- The racial category “Black” is meaningless from a genetic perspective. There is much more genetic diversity within Africa than there is for everyone outside of Africa. There is a huge genetic diversity of people within Africa, all of whom happen to be dark-skinned to some degree because of the evolution of melanated skin to provide protection against skin cancer. Then a few groups of people left Africa and spread out over the rest of the world. As a farmer, I see a parallel in potato genetics. In Peru, there were/are thousands of varieties of potatoes. Europeans brought a few to Europe, and today those varieties dominate the french fry and baked potato industry worldwide. To call all potatoes from Peru by the same name is imprecise and meaningless, and to say that the Irish Lumper or the Russet are superior because they are more widely grown is also meaningless.
- Plagues have had a distinct and lasting effect on history going back to the development of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers seemed to live healthier lives, partly because of their superior diet, and partly because the scarcity of wild game meant that they could not live in concentrated populations, which prevented the spread of disease. They were the original social distancers. Since the coming of agriculture and concentrated populations of humans living next to animals, we have been subject to plagues.
My title says this essay is about “white people,” but the book really is about the origins of the people who lived in Europe up until about 5000 years ago. My understanding (based on the scholarship of Nell Irvin Painter and others) is that while European people had lighter skin going back to the first farmers, they did not become “white” until about 500 years ago, with the advent of chattel slavery based on race. According to Painter and others, Europeans thought of themselves as from a specific place like Barcelona or Denmark, but didn’t have a sense of identity or superiority based on skin color. The racial category of “white” was invented to justify the invention of the racial category of “black.”
Along with the invention of whiteness, a unique origin story for white people was also invented. They/we were a separate subspecies, originating in Europe. They/we were physically and mentally superior to the other subspecies, especially the Black race, and this had something vaguely to do with the challenges of hunting and surviving in cold temperatures. There is a whole genre of white survivalists who like to build their skills as they go about “rewilding” themselves. It is exciting to think about those proto-white people living in the wilds of Europe, looking out for bears and wolves, while they hunt and gather. But the problem is that the earliest Europeans who were hunting and gathering were Black like their African relatives, and those people were only able to expand into Europe because of evolutionary processes that happened earlier, in Africa. Later, when people did enter Europe with lighter skin, it was only because of a farming technology that was developed in the Middle East. If this book tells the deep origin story of white people, then the principal takeaway is that we are neither unique nor superior.
Part of my quest to discover my ancestry is to find out what makes me different from other people. What about my ancestors’ unique experiences shaped who they were and, by extension, who I am? I use the lens of genealogy to hold up a mirror to myself and see who I am. The findings of archaeogeneticists suggest that I can also hold up the same mirror to see what I have in common with other people.
The origin of Europeans in Africa, the Near East, and the steppes shows my own commonality with people from all of those places, past and present. European heritage people like me have a deep history of hunting and gathering and also of farming. We have a history of migration. We have a history of social life and working together. We have a history of surviving pandemics. I see myself in all of these commonalities.
© 2023 Andrew Gaertner. All rights reserved.
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