Comments on: The genomic heritage of French Canadians

By: Linkage is Good for You: Classy Edition

Linkage is Good for You: Classy Edition — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:29:04 +0000

[...] Not a PUA”Laura Grace Robins – “Restoring Women”Razib Khan – “The Genomic Heritage of French Canadians“, “The American Historical “Dark Matter””Chuck Ross – [...]

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 01:34:26 +0000

@Mark

” what reactionary politicians in Quebec always say, that “Quebecois”, which they always define as those of French ancestry, are a very ‘pure’ race – it should be taken with a lot of suspicion when this happens! ”

Wow!

It just never happend mark, you’re living in your hateful fantasy.

“why is no one descended from Africans, even though there were slaves imported into Canada under the French, and slavery was practiced in Lower Canada, which became the southern part of Quebec, until the 1830s?”

Because the separatist eat them with BBQ sauce …

… good luck with your issues.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:14:56 +0000

There’s an interesting story here! The results dovetail very neatly with what reactionary politicians in Quebec always say, that “Quebecois”, which they always define as those of French ancestry, are a very ‘pure’ race – it should be taken with a lot of suspicion when this happens! Quebec has engaged in cultural and real ethnic cleansing – place names were changed – Hull was replaced by Gatineau recently – it became illegal for most people to send their kids to English language schools, use English on signs, or work in English, and the French language universities often are highly politicized . As the last poster noted, in many areas of Quebec, there are far more people with family names from the British Isles in the phone book than these figures can account for, since in many places in Quebec, they were the first European colonists – in fact, only the southern part of the Province was French, and it’s really notable that the study does not deal with French Canadians that live in Ontario, which also was part of New France – there was immigration from France after 1760 – lots of refugees from the French revolution came, some Acadians came back during the American Revolution in fact, Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, the Premier of Quebec in the late 1870s, was born in France. And why is no one descended from Africans, even though there were slaves imported into Canada under the French, and slavery was practiced in Lower Canada, which became the southern part of Quebec, until the 1830s?
To clear up another problem with terminology, Acadians and French Canadians are distinct groups – the study makes that clear.

By: gcochran

gcochran — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:37:29 +0000

The low English and/or British ancestry numbers are nonsense. I remember looking at my home county: according to the Census, ~25% English ancestry, > 80% British Isles according to the phone book.

By: Ben Shell

Ben Shell — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:22:13 +0000

The population bottleneck was most likely the number of immigrants before the English conquest in 1760. From 1620 until then, I have seen estimates that the whole population was descended from 5500 men and 2000 women who came almost entirely from France. See, for instance, Leslie Choquette, _Frenchmen Into Peasants_. Another factor in genomic distribution is the division of the population into groups largely pushing outward from Quebec, Trois-Rivieres and Montreal. An amateur genealogist is likely to find his ancestors from Quebec didn’t move very far from generation to generation until the 19th century.

Without dragging out the details, the way Quebec was settled, even after 1760, was far different from the British colonies to the south.

By: Adela

Adela — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:57:24 +0000

I see once again Quebec is the darling center of French Canadianess and Acadians are the ugly step child even though the Acadian population is older than the Quebec one. Presumably of French origin, good grief.
My Acadian Metis ancestors kinda buck the low fertility issue.

By: Emerson Rochette

Emerson Rochette — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:50:42 +0000

It might be interesting to add some historical notes to the presentation of this article. There was effectively a French Canadian population bottleneck around 1760. The British had just won the French-british war here in Quebec. The net result was a sharp decrease in the local population, caused by the war itself: people killed during the fighting period, famine, disease, the deportation of most of the acadians to Louisiana, and also importantly, the fact that the british of this new Canada would, understandably, refuse immigration from France for a long period. This induced an unnatural hermiticity of the gene pool. French-English,French-native couples were rare and, soon after the war, the french clergy, Roman-Catholic uniquely, started pushing for enormous familiesy to maintain what was left of their parishes. Effectively, Quebec was abandoned by France.
With no new genes in an already limited pool (first settlements only dated back 150 years before that period, many of the founding families emerging from a select group of women (Les Filles du Roy)) AND the fact that Quebec was geographically enormous for such a small population (infering a localization of a particular genetic trait from a small population migration) the study of this population is unique, especially when correlated with the extensive documentation provided by the clergy.

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 05:50:26 +0000

There are a fair number of families with French names in the Midwest and while they are not generally a coherent group, I have even heard of prejudice in one place where they have some concentration. In the northern Mississippi valley they are probably mostly descended from the Metis, a French-Indian creole group centered in the Red River valley (of the north). Further South they are probably Louisiana French. I don’t know really very much but it would be an interesting study

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:21:27 +0000

I wonder if mixed-race pairings resulted in higher mortality rates for the Native American spouse. Off the top of my head, a couple of well known Native Americans who married out of their race Pocahontus and Sacagewea died relatively young from disease with only 1-2 children. I don’t think it was good for the health of the Native Americans to spend so much time in close proximity to Old Worlders.

By: AG

AG — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:50:37 +0000

On PBS, there was a show called ” WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE”. Some of them thought themself as German Americans. At end, their earliest American ancestors are English. Yet, that English was diluted by later German immigrants and forgot.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:38:51 +0000

@6. Yep, I agree, Razib. Then again, the desire to be exotic versus the desire to be hyper-traditional (e.g. “Mayflower”) has gone through abrupt generational shifts. Teddy Roosevelt was deeply concerned that the Anglo-Saxons were being replaced (google “race suicide”) while much of what happened was admixture with new immigrants. Partly, TR may have been confounding his class with his race.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:02:00 +0000

stephen, i think 9 percent is an underestimate. there’s a social science trend of people picking their most exotic ancestors when giving ethnicity for whites. english is always the least exotic, so it always loses. also, in the south there is a tendency to give ‘american.’ that doesn’t seem to happen in new england as much.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:44:17 +0000

New England is different in quite a few ways. Only it had such expansionist political hegemony. Yet today in New England, only something like 9 percent of people claim English ancestry–a far lower proportion than for Spanish in northern New Mexico, or French in French Canada. New England may have been “relatively tranquil genetically” until the mid-19th century, but only for certain classes. Much of the U.S. is from the Puritan Great Migration in certain lineages, but genomically, I think that contribution is fairly small today.

By: ohwilleke

ohwilleke — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:37:16 +0000

This data set rivals the Icelandic data set by allowing us to link long genological lines to current gene pools to infer very old gene pool composition, and to get a sense of how genetic lines are preserved over long periods that are relatively tranquil geneticically to get baseline empirical constants for situations where we don’t know the facts as well.

One particularly fruitful possibility from the Montreal French Canadian gene pool plus lineage data is the possibility of estimating the amount (i.e. 0.2% of current and 1.2% of original) Native American admixture, and the character of Native American introgression into it. Since any introgression from the Lief Erikson era or early colonial era of Native American genetics into Eurasia across the Atlantic probably would have been similar genetically to introgression into the Montreal French Canadian population, it may help resolve the extent to which we are seeing North American admixture that returns to Europe via the sea, or circumpolar admixture from the East where we see Native American looking genes in Northern Europe.

Another interesting trend in the data is the strong selection against outgroups generally within the founder population over subsequent generations. The founding population was 81.8% French or Acadian. Today that is 92.9%. The share of outgroups fell from 18.2% to 7.1% over less than 300 years. Selection against minorities in founding groups may be a general trend in a lot of populations.

By: Razib Khan

Razib Khan — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 16:26:29 +0000

Are you saying that they have lower fertility rates, or less children, or less reproductive children? Or is there a difference between those? I read pretty much all of these posts but I’m not an expert in this field in the least, so sorry if this is a dumb question. Thanks.

they have fewer descendants than they “should.” so my supposition is that there were fertility differences associated with class, and mixed-race french canadians were of a class which had lower fertility rates. imagine, for example, that farm laborers tended to marry amerindian women. their children might have lower reproductive fitness in a pre-modern epoch.

By: JL

JL — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:23:02 +0000

The Montreal French Canadian group exhibited values of 0.20 and 0.12.

Those numbers are missing some zeros, I think.

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:21:48 +0000

Hey Razib, I’m interested in what you mean by this:

“I suspect this may be due to differential fertility because of variation in social status by race (i.e., mixed-race French Canadians having lower fertility, perhaps by way of their exclusion from highly fecund elite families), and not just later absorption of Amerindians than French (on the contrary, I suspect that Amerindians were assimilated earlier, not later).”