The Making Of West Virginia

A hundred and fifty years ago, a single map based on information from the 1860 census that showed the percentage of the population consisting of slaves by county, was the primary basis of the boundary between Virginia and West Virgina. The original proposed name for the breakaway states, “Kanawha” didn't stick, however.

The story of western Virginia is complex, and the map itself disguises this somewhat. Areas with relatively small slave populations generally sided against secession when the vote was taken on April 4, when it failed, then again on April 17, when it succeeded. However, this opposition to secession did not necessarily translate into abolition, or even resistance to slavery. When West Virginia finally became a state in June 1863, it passed rigid manumission laws that would have protected slavery for decades were it not for the 13th Amendment. And in several counties the opposition to secession constituted a slim rather than a decisive majority; in other words, the map is not a transparent reflection of political sentiment. Yet it captured the imagination of the nation’s leaders and the public, and it circulated widely through Washington.

By August, the Army had secured the western counties to the point that the residents could begin to organize themselves into a new state. At this moment of victory, the Coast Survey issued a second edition of the map that boldly colored the proposed state of “Kanawha” in western Virginia. This edition also reinforced the initial message of the map with statistics showing that the vast majority of slaves had remained in Virginia.

Slaves made up 31.1% of pre-division Virginia, while post-division 37.2% of Virigina's population consisted of slaves, while 2.5% of West Virginia's population did. The geographic cline in slave ownership from the hills to the coast in Viriginia was largely a product of the viability of plantation style agriculture in different parts of the state.

It isn't entirely clear to me why McDowell, Buchanan, Wise and Pendelton Counties in Viriginia, which were contiguous to West Virginia and also had few slaves did not join their neighbors in leaving the state of Virginia.

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The Population Genetic and Cultural Layers of Western Europe

Hunter-gatherer populations from before the introduction of farming and herding of domesticated plants and animals to Western Europe makes up about 15% of the Western European maternal gene pool (represented in individual with mtDNA haplogroups U5a, U5b1, V and 3H).  The finding is based upon both ancient DNA samples and mutation rate dating of mtDNA haplogroups.

This study doesn't estimate the Y-DNA contribution of European hunter-gatherer populations to the current Western European gene pool, but generally speaking, the patriline contributions of indigeneous men are similar to that of indigenous women or smaller.  Thus, probably less than 15% of the total gene pool in Western Europe is traceable to pre-Neolithic hunter-gathers.  By comparison, the non-African has 1% to 4% Neanderthal admixture. 

Thus, even though there have been anatomically modern humans in Europe for about 30,000 years, and there were Neanderthals in Europe (who co-existed with modern humans in Europe for what may have been as much as a few thousand years) for a couple of hundred thousand years or so before that, about five-sixths of the Western European gene pool is attributable to population expansions of farmers and herders into the area in the last seven thousand years or so, although some of this "Neolithic wave" of population expansion may actually have been an Epi-paleolithic population that arrived in the region a few thousand years earlier and relied on fishing for food (and perhaps cultivation of non-domesticated plants) prior to the establishment of a truly Neolithic form of food production, converted culturally to becoming farmers, and then expanded in population.

Moreover, the hunter-gather population prior to the last glacial maximum in Europe around 20,000 years ago probably retreated to Southern refugia as the ice sheet advanced, only to return as the ice sheet retreated afterwards.  There was not necessarily identity between pre-LGM and post-LGM modern human populations of Europe.  The second wave of hunter-gatherer expansion into Europe could have been heavily infused with ethnically different people from SW Asia, for example.

The cultural connections of Western Europeans to the Mesolithic ancestors are probably even more shallow than their genetic ties to them.

In all likelihood, all of the languages of the Mesolithic human hunter-gatherers of Europe are extinct.  If the Basque language is a Neolithic arrival (ca. 5,000 BCE in Iberia), and the Indo-European languages did indeed arrive in Western Europe only after this non-Indo-European substrate population had filled the region, and the Uralic languages of Northern and Eastern Europe arrived sometime after animals were domesticated in that area (probably after 6,000 BCE), then none of the extant languages of Europe can trace its origins directly to the Mesolithic peoples of Western Europe. 

Uralic language speaking people have the highest frequencies of mtDNA haplogroup types associated with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers and were among the last to adopt full fledged farming as a means of food production in Europe, so it is possible that these languages might be a remote ancestors of an Eastern branch of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe (which culturally and ethnically would have extended well into Siberian Asia), but there is no really strong evidence to support the description of Uralic languages as indigeneous back to the Mesolithic, rather than an intrusion that replaced prior languages during a Neolithic expansion.

Also, not all of the recent arrivals to Western Europe are associated with the first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe.  The first wave of Neolithic expansion in Western Europe appears to be strongly identified with the Neolithic Megalithic culture, popularly identified with Stonehenge although it appears to have origins in Portugal and to have stretched along most of the Atlantic Coast of Europe and the British Isles.  This culture appears to have evolved mostly culturally rather than through population replacement into the early Bronze Age.  Linguistically, it is common to associate with wave of expansion with a family of non-Indo-European languages that would have included the Basque language, which would have served the source of a "vasconic substrate" in Western Europe, upon which Indo-European languages of the area imposed themselves.  There is likewise no good reason to suspect that the Caucasian languages pre-date the Neolithic revolution.

This first Neolithic wave, it was followed by at least two main waves of Indo-European expansions in the late Bronze Age and Iron Age which resulted in language shift, disrupted the local culture, and probably left a distinguishable genetic trace in contemporary Western European populations.  The first wave of Indo-Europeans in Western Europe would have been Celtic or proto-Celtic and would have run its course, bringing all but a few pockets of Western Europe into the Celtic cultural sphere in the period from about 1250 BCE when Indo-Europeans first started to arrive, until about 500 BCE when they had largely asserted control even in the British Isles.

Several centuries after Celtic peoples consolidated control in Western Europe, the Romans would have arrived on the scene and conquered most of the same territory, only to lose its grip on those territories after the cultural transformation had already taken place when the Western Roman empire fell (one common date used to identify this moment is 476 CE, although the process happened in stages, rather than all at once).  Christianity largely replaced Indo-European and non-Indo-European during the late Roman Empire and centuries of evangelization of areas beyond the boundary of the former Roman Empire during the Middle Ages that followed.  Today, pagan folk culture, often incorporated into Christian rites, myths or secular rites, is all that remains, this often goes unrecognized as such, and these traces may be Indo-European rather than from the previous non-Indo-European cultural layer.  While there are some relict pagan practice among the Mari of Russia and the Alevi of Turkey and Basque folklore (none of which are Indo-European linguistically), in Western Europe, all of the remaining pagans of "neo-pagan" having reinvented the dead religion from the vestiges of earlier days that they have been able to recover. 

Iberia saw some demographic input from North Africa in the Middle Ages during its hundreds of years of Moorish occupation (on top of demographic inputs going both ways across the Straight of Gibralter dated to before the Neolithic revolution), but the populations genetic traces of the Middle Ages and early modern period in Western Europe were mostly internal to Europe (e.g. Viking invasions of coastal areas).  There were also minor diasporic Jewish and Gypsy population migrations to Western Europe in that time period. 

In Western Europe, the languages that descend from the Celtic languages are currently in a marginal position (Scotish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Welsh are the principal surviving Celtic languages and English is the dominant language in almost all of the areas where these languages are spoken with very few people being monolinguistic in Celtic).  The predominant Indo-European languages of Western Europe are descendants of the Latin of the Roman Empire or are part of the Indo-European Germanic language family.

This experience appears to be typical of other parts of the world in Africa and in Asia that have developed agriculture.  While population replacement of hunter-gather populations may not have been complete, the lion's share of the modern population arrives from relatively late arrivals.

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Short Takes

* Spinal fluid biomarkers can distinguish between people suffering from Lyme disease (a tick carried infectious agent), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (probably a viral condition with a long latency period), and uninfected individuals. This is important first, because Lyme disease and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome can present with similar symptoms, and second, because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and even finding ways for sufferers to convince people that they have a genuine biologically caused disease rather than simply being lazy, is a major challenge.

* The Kalash people in a remote part of the Hindu Kush Mountain range are one of the most genetically distinct populations in the world. When one has a computer break the world's autosomal genetics into the most distinct possible seven clusters, the clusters that you get are: African, European, South Asian, East Asian, Papuan, indigenous American and Kalash.

Their Y-DNA haplogroups (from a sample of about 43 people) are as follows:
L3a 22.7% (most common in Pakistan)
H1* 20.5% (most common in South Asia)
R1a 18.2% (most common in Eastern Europe and South Asia)
G 18.2% (most common in Southern Europe, Anatolia, Druze, Brahui and Pashtuns)
J2 9.1% (most common in Anatolia and where Indo-Europeans have had an impact)
R* 6.8% (most common in Thailand, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Australian aborigines)
R1* 2.3% (most common in indigenous Americans)
L* 2.3%. (most common in South Asia)

Their mtDNA haplogroups (from a sample of 44 people) are as follows:
pre-HV 22.7% (most common in Socotri, North Africa, Iran and Arabia)
HV* 4.5%
H 4.5% (the modal haplogroup of Europe)
U2e 15.9% (most common in South Asia)
U4 34.1% (most common in Central Asia)
U7 2.3% (most common in South Asia)
J1 2.3%
J2 9.1%
T* 4.5%

They speak a language from the Dardic branch of the Indo-European family (one of the more basal of the Indo-Iranian part of the late language family), and practice a polytheistic religion.

They are between areas that areas typically Central Asian and areas that are typically South Asian in genetic makeup. Their traditions place them as a lost contingent of Alexander the Great's army, but given their uniparental markers, the genetic makeup, their particularly contingent would have had to have picked up members mostly from the area from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. Their Dardic language is also an anomaly for an isolated community claiming to descend from the Greeks, they lack common distinctively Greek uniparental markers, and their religion is close to Hinduism than it is to Greek pantheistic beliefs. An origin a millennium or two earlier (if not much more ancient) would seem to be a better fit for the facts.

Given their autosomal makeup, any new arrivals in the region from somewhere would have had to either admixed substantially with a relict population that was largely wiped out or overwhelmed genetically elsewhere such as Europe and Central Asia's pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers, or South Asian hunter-gatherer populations disrupted by Munda, Dravidian, and Indo-Aryan populations respectively. Alternately, they might have undergone significant selectively driven evolution analogous to that found in Tibetans as a result of living at high altitudes. The case for incorporation of a relict Central Asian hunter-gatherer population is most strongly supported by the modal mtDNA haplogroup U4, which was one of the second most common types found in ancient DNA from Central Asian hunter-gatherers.

* There are a couple of kinds of invasive ants that have an unusual reproductive system. Future queens are clones of the current queen. Future drones (reproducing males) are clones of their fathers. Workers, who do not reproduce, have a mix of the queen and the drone's genes similar to that of ordinary sexually reproducing animals. (I'll try to find a reference later).

* As a thought experiment, it is interesting to consider would it would look like to have a society where a human or near human species with reproduction system in which only half of women had children, but they had an average of four and a half surviving descendants, assuring the replacement of the species. There are several different permutations of this that would be possible. Half of children could be gay. Half of the children could be infertile (perhaps clones of their same sex parent, or perhaps surgically or chemically neutered). Half of females could be in "harems" like those of alpha dominated gorillas or lions, and only alphas might have the pheromones necessary to trigger reproduction. One imagines that such a society might resemble the Byzantine courts.

Alternately, one could imagine a society where half the women were in a social class that averaged surviving three children, while the other half the women were in a social class that average one surviving child. A study of the vital statistic of a Bronze Age society in Spain based on its burials and the inferred diets of the dead, which showed a minority elite with a high protein diet surviving at much greater rates than a "middle class" (perhaps soldiers) or an even more deprived underclass (perhaps servants or slaves), with this kind of demographics.

* There is a tendency in Anglo-American political economy to imagine a society with strong property rights and weak governments as a "state of nature" against which political action should be measured. But, this sense is to a great extent ahistorical, particularly in farming and more urbanized societies. The oldest Minoan Linear A script is preserves administrative records of ration distribution systems, basically welfare states, that had strong parallels in Sumeria, Egypt, the Hebrew Bible and Rome - i.e. all of the major civilizations of the Mediterranean of the Copper Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, and arguably via feudal societies into to the Middle Ages. There also seems to be evidence that these were command economies in which soldiers played an integral economic part, perhaps along the lines of the large role played by military owned enterprises in the civilian economies of modern Egypt and China. Likewise, fedual societies were basically agrarian economies run on a military footing with involuntary serf labor.

Decentralized market driven economies with contract rights and private property as an important organizing principle doesn't really emerge as the predominant component of the economy until after the Middle Ages end in Europe.

* NPR made some notable observations about the Middle Eastern oil states that are experiencing revolutions at the moment. Generally speaking, these states don't impose significant taxes on non-petroleum activities. Oil money funds government operations including strong military forces and a significant welfare state. This helps explain why the oil rich states of the Middle East have managed to survive while being so undemocratic. Historically, constitutional monarchy and republican government in cases like Rome, England and France have their roots in the need of a monarch to obtain consent of representatives of people who were going to be required to pay taxes to support the state. Taxes are the price of democracy.

* Some of the dates assigned to remains used to argue for an early presence of modern humans in Europe engaged in relatively primative economic industry have been revised upon further examination to more recent dates. Remains previously touted as more than 30,000 years old, which had "long been considered to be the earliest evidence of the remains of modern Homo sapiens anywhere in Europe" in Southern France and Southwest Germany have been re-examined within the last decade and determined to have actually been less than 10,000 years old.

This also influences how one conceptualizes the Chatelperronian lithic industry in Europe, which in turn relates to how smart we think the Neanderthals were. The prior and more primative Mousterian industry is clearly associated with Neanderthals. The industry that follows the Chatelperronian is associated clearly with modern humans. The Chatelperronian has traditionally been associated with Neanderthals as well, but some researchers have argued for it as "an independent development by Neanderthals (d'Errico et al. 1998)" while others "see the Chatelperronian as the result of the acculturation of Neanderthals by modern humans (Mellars 2005)." People care, because if the Chatelperronian was an independent Neanderthal invention, then maybe they were pretty smart and advancing their technology just as the humans did when climate conditions improved. In contrast, the opposite extreme would be to argue that admixture of modern human traits into Neanderthal populations is the only reason that they were able to innovate as much as they did even in the relatively primate Chatelperronian era. Between the two extremes is the possibility that the Neanderthals were capable of mimicing modern human Upper Paleolithic lithic industries, even if they would have been hard put to develop it themselves.

John Hawks, approaching the same underlying question of Neanderthal intelligence from another angle wonders if the ability of people born blind to repurpose their visual centers for language doesn't suggest that language is less hard wired, and hence, less likely to require genetic evolution, than has been often assumed: "Kaschube and colleagues showed that the apparent developmental robusticity of the visual cortex could be maintained by simple rules of self-organization. It doesn't take specialized genetic control to create a visual cortex, it just takes information structured in the right way to flip a few genetic triggers" and the right kind of environmental exposures. As he explains:

The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don't preclude genetics, far from it -- weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.

I like this scenario because it means we shouldn't be looking for lots of language-specific genetic changes in the last few hundred thousand years. The Neandertal genome suggests that there may not have been any at all.

My second speculation: If the language environment determines the instantiation of language processing, then brains must be substantially different in the way they process language. Children experience different language environments -- not only different languages, but different microenvironments within language communities. Only strong genetic controls could canalize brains despite the differences in their language environments. In brains where language processing emerges readily in the visual cortex, genetic controls cannot possibly synchronize brains in the face of environmental variation.

* A case is being made that the strong genetic discontinuity between South Asia and Southeast Asia, despite the lack of an obviously inpenetrable geographic barrier is attributable to the effects of the Toba volcano erruption, that while not wiping out the modern human population in South Asia, did seriously disrupt and reshape it:

Oppenheimer . . . [suggests] that the prolonged ash cloud could have devastated all or most of India, especially both M and N related populations in the east and south, closest to the volcano. He hypothesizes that this area could then have been repopulated by M dominated groups immigrating from the east, who might then have spread, in a cline, to the rest of the subcontinent, while N-related groups to the west could have repopulated India from that region. This could have left India populated by more recent M and N hapolotypes than those found farther east[.]

He also associates this event with the distribution of tone languages which are found in Africa, "scattered among so many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia, southern China, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Melanesia" and in "northernmost reaches of the Indus valley . . . "would have been a likely spot where a branch of the Out of Africa migrants, who could have broken from the main group to travel north along the banks of the Indus, might have been able to survive the effects of Toba with their African traditions more or less intact. If tone language was part of their HMC inheritance, then that could explain the prevalence of tone language in this area today." Suggested musical linkages that might be legacies of this connection are discussed here.

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Does Avoiding Alcohol Encourage Polygamy?

[I]f you are in a polygynous relationship in the developed world you are probably either of Mormon Fundamentalist or Muslim faith, both of which forbid the consumption of alcohol . . . [and] pre-industrial societies with polygyny as the dominant marriage institution consume less alcohol than those with monogamy.

From here (citing Squicciarini, Mara and Jo Swinne “Women or Wine? Monogamy and Alcohol.” AAWE Working Paper No. 75).

One theory is that industrialization favors both alcohol consumption and monogamy, but early LDS society seems a poor fit to this model, and both widespread use of alcohol and the demise of polygny far pre-date industrialization.

Polygyny virtually vanished in the West by the time of the late Roman empire. Alcohol consumption was rampant and exaulted in the West by the time that the Myceneans took over in Greece, if not earlier, a millenium or more earlier. The Byzantines had polygny at some some level pretty much until it fell, as did the Ottomans that followed.

Judaism appears to been polygynous at least through the early Iron Age (ca. 1000 BCE), but had probably ceased to be by the dawn of the Rabbinic period, ca. 70 CE, and has accepted alcohol consumption to some extent, although not necessarily to excess, for all of its history.

Perhaps the more relevant point is that a prohibition on alcohol consumption is a measure of how powerful a grip a religion has on its participants, and hence, how much capacity it has also to influence marital practices of its members.

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