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Search Results for 'cape coloured'
The Cape Coloureds are a mix of everything
A Cape Coloured family I’ve mentioned the Cape Coloureds of South Africa on this weblog before. Culturally they’re Afrikaans in language and Dutch Reformed in religion (the possibly related Cape Malay group is Muslim, though also Afrikaans speaking traditionally). But racially they’re a very diverse lot. In this way they can be analogized to black […]
Cape Coloureds: an instance of a generality
Several months ago I put up a post which reviewed the geographical connections within the total genome content of the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. These peoples (plural because distinctive ethnic groups such as the Griqua were subsumed into this category in the 20th century) are of diverse origin, though generally their African and European […]
Who are the Cape Coloureds of South Africa?
A little under 10% of South Africa’s population are Cape Coloureds. They speak Afrikaans and generally worship in Reformed Christian churches, but exhibit discernible non-European ancestry, in particular African ancestry. In the United States anyone who manifests African ancestry is coded as “black.” Though hypodescent started out as a tool for maintaining white racial purity […]
To be Coloured in South Africa means being all of the above
About six months ago I had a post up on the Cape Coloureds of South Africa. As a reminder, the Cape Coloureds are a mixed-race population who are the plural majority in the southwestern Cape region of South Africa. Like the white Boers they are a mostly Afrikaans speaking population who are adherents of Reformed […]
Closing the Out of Africa migratory loop
Last year a paper came out in AJHG which reported that Ethiopian populations seem to be a compound of West Eurasians and Sub-Saharan Africans. This is result itself is not too surprising for a host of reasons. First, Ethiopians and other populations of the Horn of Africa are physically equidistant between West Eurasians and Sub-Saharan […]
Evidence that Afrikaners surely have non-European ancestry
I was reviewing some literature for a blog-post-to-come and I noticed a figure in a paper I’ve long been aware of which indicates to me that Afrikaners surely have a non-trivial proportion of non-European ancestry. The paper is Population differences of two coding SNPs in pigmentation-related genes SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. It’s a forensics result. Basically […]
On phylogenetic instrumentalism
ADMIXTURE and STRUCTURE tests aren’t formal mixture tests. Yes! In fact, in the “open science” community this issue is repeated over and over and over, because people routinely get confused (our audience does not consist of population geneticists and phylogeneticists by and large). So sometimes it is necessary to lay it out in detail as […]
The quest for an Afrikaner genotype
Update: If interested, please email me at contactgnxp -at- gmail -dot- com. Also, I am getting some feedback via 23andMe that people with white South African matches noticed Africa segments in many of the ancestry paintings. This has definitely increased by probability that the admixture proportion is ~5 percent. There will probably be a few […]
The hunter-gatherers within us
Lesley-Ann Brandt One of the reasons that the HGDP populations are weighted toward indigenous groups is that there was the understanding that these populations may not be long for the world in their current form. But the Taino genome reconstruction illustrates that even if populations are no longer with us…they are still within us. With […]
Of beasts and men
“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare [children] to them, the same [became] mighty men which [were] of old, men of renown.” – Genesis 6:4 The Pith: Pygmies and Khoisan have admixture from a […]
Painting the human tree of life
Tishkoff et al. Reading Peter Bellwood’s First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, I’m struck by how much of a difference five years has made. When Bellwood was writing the ‘orthodoxy’ of the nature of the expansion of farming into Europe leaned toward cultural diffusion. Today the paradigm is in flux, as a new generation […]
50,000 years of Dreamtime
“…the occupation of Australia/New Guinea is momentous in that it demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence of their use in history. Not until about 30,000 years later (13,000 years ago) is there strong evidence of watercraft anyway else in the world, from the Mediterranean. Initially, archaeologists considered the possibility that the colonization […]
The ancestry of one Afrikaner
A few weeks ago I reviewed a paper on the the genetics of the Cape Coloured population. Within it there was a refrence to another paper, Deconstructing Jaco: genetic heritage of an Afrikaner. The title refers to the author himself. It was an analysis of his own pedigree going back to the 17th century, along […]
Paternity rates by population
A few years ago a paper came out, How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity?: Evolutionary theory predicts that males will provide less parental investment for putative offspring who are unlikely to be their actual offspring. Cross‐culturally, paternity confidence (a man’s assessment of the likelihood that he is the father of a putative child) […]
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