Papua’s “monkeys”: Anthropologists, race and “population groups”.

Anthropologists employing new genetic technology might unwittingly be shoring up racist tropes

In the Indonesian province of West Papua, racism against the indigenous Melanesian majority is endemic. The standard term of racist abuse is; ‘monkeys’. Papuans, many Indonesians insist, look different from them and are inferior as humans on account of their ancestral lineage. One author’s account of his experience there is entitled; ‘As if we’re half animals’.

Much of West Papua consists of an island landmass shared with Papua New Guinea. A great deal of anthropological research is conducted across Papua because the DNA of people there reflects millennia of small groups of people living across many neighbouring loci separated by sea and difficult terrain. For anthropologists, Papua is the Galapagos of humans.

Dr Alwyn Scally, a bioinformatician and anthropologist at Cambridge University, is co-author of a widely read blogpost which has been cited in scholarly work. It asserts the anthropological orthodoxy that ‘population groups’ do not map on to folk categories of race in “clear”, “accurate” or “perfect” ways and so cannot be used to shore up racist ideas. Whatever racist notions lead to the racial abuse of indigenous Papuans, it follows from this, they are in no way shored up by population group categories created by anthropologists using new technologies.

Homosapiens overlapped in history with neanderthals. Until recently, anthropologists used the fact that the two did not breed to delineate the two; they are or were different species of human. Using genetic analysis of living people in Papua and elsewhere, anthropologists have now established that that the two did, in fact, breed.

Anthropologists employing Genome Wide Association Studies (GWASs) first proposed in 2010 that as homosapiens moved out of Africa they mated with neanderthals. This incurred a neanderthal DNA incidence in modern humans ranging from close to 0% in Africa to up to 4% in Asia and, most notably, Papua. Since an inability to breed is commonly taken as the primary criterion for species separation, it has been argued that homosapiens and neanderthals are not separate species after all, but instead are different sub-species.

More recently, genetic analysis and informatics have led anthropologists to the discovery of a previously unknown sub-species of human; the Denisovan. In East Asia, mating between denisovans and homosapiens was more extensive than between neanderthals and homosapiens. As a result, Aboriginals, Melanesians and in particular Papuans today are said by informaticians to share perhaps 6% of their DNA with denisovans, in addition to that which they share with neanderthals.

Amongst a large number of recent papers by informaticians/anthropologists on the subject, Dr Alwyn Scally, mentioned above, is also co-author of a 2018 paper which claims to detect larger than expected amounts of neanderthal and denisovan DNA in modern Papuans. The research took place in Papua New Guinea. The abstract includes:

“(We) detect archaic introgression in 89 Papuans and show how the identified segments can be assigned to likely Neanderthal or Denisovan origin. We report more Denisovan admixture than previous studies and find a shift in size distribution of fragments of Neanderthal and Denisovan origin that is compatible with a difference in admixture time”.

In common with many other researchers today, Scally and his colleagues used Genome Wide Association Surveys/Studies (GWASs) to identify “private” groupings of human through analysis of the latter’s DNA. “Admixture” here is the preferred anthropological term for the outcome of homosapien/neanderthal/Denisovan crossbreeding; “archaic introgression” is the presence of non-homosapien DNA in living Papuans.

In respect of such research in Papua, leading anthropologist Dr Grayson Camp says:

‘So far I have not seen any convincing functional studies where you take the Neanderthal variant and the human variant and do controlled experiments…no-one has actually shown yet in culture that a human and Neanderthal allele have a different physiological function. That will be exciting when someone does’ (author’s bold).

To translate this from the anthropologese: It will be exciting when anthropologists are able to show how some people today are physiologically and cognitively different from others because of their non-homosapien heritage.

Scientists like Scally and Camp are therefore researching the physiological and cognitive effects in indigenous Papuans of having less homosapien (for Camp, “human”) DNA than the Indonesians who racially abuse them as less-than-human “monkeys”. On the basis of intent, perception, power and social effect, this might reasonably be felt by some to be a new scientific form of the social construct racism.

These authors do not claim to have eliminated the possibility that the population groupings they create and employ have corollaries in social organisation; while the Papuan experience suggests such corollaries might well exist. But even that notwithstanding, it is surely true that pervasive racism does not require a “perfect” overlap of anthropologists’ “population groups” to “folk” racial categories?

The notion of Papuans as racially inferior is not an invention of modern Indonesians but was received by today’s Indonesians from Dutch colonialists. Around the world much racism reflects majority attitudes to minority ethnic groups at varying tiers of localisation; Chagossians in Mauritius, Chan in Cambodia, ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan, Rohingya in Myanmar. If “private variants” have not been mapped against such social groupings then DNA corollations cannot be scientifically ruled out.

Perhaps more important, however: How do we determine what degree of “accura(cy)” of population-to-race genetic mapping would be required to validate the notion of a biological dimension of race in Papua or anywhere else? What similarities at what loci on the genome would amount to a racially discrete group? These parameters and definitions would surely be as much a function of language and small-p politics as of highly-contested science?

However inconvenient for anthropologist and informaticians, then, their employment of GWASs, vast computing power and algorithms provides realistic intellectual scope for new definitions of race to emerge in the academy. It is not possible for such researchers to refute this by linguistic fiat.

An emergence of this sort would present considerable risk to some anthropological research. And rather than offer possible life-saving therapies as health genetics does, the utility which arises in return for anthropologists sailing in such choppy ethical waters seems limited to explaining why some ancient groups of humans thousands of years ago were better at making tools than others.

Might some anthropologists be inhabiting a sinking ship?