2. The Basques, Rh Positive and Rh Negative Blood, and the “Problem of Europe”
At this juncture,
there was another genetic monkey wrench thrown into the works: the
Basques. I have always been fascinated by the Basques, because,
being part Basque myself on my mother’s side of the family, their
strange relationship to the rest of Europe is somehow part of my
own personal ancestry and story. The Basques inhabit the area of
the now long-defunct Kingdom of Navarre in the corner of the Bay of
Biscay in the area where the modern borders of France and Spain
touch.
The problem for
anthropology that they pose is twofold, for on the one hand, the
Basques are the European continent’s “most influential genetic
population,” and on the other, their language, Euskara, “is unique
in Europe in that it has no linguistic connection with any other
living language.”438 But they also
provide Sykes and his research team “with an invaluable clue to the
genetic history of the whole of Europe...”439
The clue comes
through the different Rh positive and Rh negative blood types. Most
people are aware of the severe complications that can occur for a
newborn baby born of an Rh positive and an Rh negative pair of
parents. “Blue baby syndrome” was a common occurrence of births for
European peoples until this distinction was discovered, and Rh
negative mothers married to Rh positive husbands were given
injections of antigens that neutralized the mother’s immune system
reaction to it and hence protected her child from accidental
circulations of both kinds of blood in her baby.440
The problem was that
while most of the rest of the world was overwhelmingly Rh positive,
in Europe alone there was a nearly equal mixture of both Rh
positive and Rh negative types. And this “did not make any
evolutionary sense.”441
It is at this
juncture that the Basques assumed a crucial role in the story, for
in 1947 the English physician Arthur Mourant decided to study the
problem posed by the Basques more closely. The results were
somewhat astonishing, as Sykes explains:
It was already known that Basques had by far the lowest frequency of blood group B of all the population groups in Europe. Could they be the ancient reservoir of (Rh) negative as well? In 1947 Mourant arranged to meet with two Basques who were in London attempting to form a provisional government and were keen to support any attempts to prove their genetic uniqueness. Like most Basques, they were supporters of the French Resistance and totally opposed to the fascist Franco regime in Spain. Both men provided blood samples and both were (Rh) negative. Through these contacts, Mourant typed a panel of French and Spanish Basques who turned out, as he had hoped, to have a very high frequency of (Rh) negatives, in fact, the highest in the world. Mourant concluded from this that the Basques were descended from the original inhabitants of Europe, whereas all other Europeans were a mixture of originals and more recent arrivals, which he thought were the first farmers from the Near East.From that moment, the Basques assumed the status of the population against which all ideas about European genetic prehistory were to be — and to a large extent still are — judged. The fact that they alone of all the west Europeans spoke a language which was unique in Europe, and did not belong to the Indo-European family which embraces all other languages of western Europe, only enhanced their special position.442
In other words, of
all the population groups in Europe, the evidence appeared quite
strong that the Basques were somehow “original” to the continent,
or, better put, the group that had been there the longest and had
arrived before the others.
The next step forward
came, of course, with the discovery of the double helix structure
of DNA itself, and with the technologies associated with genetic
sequencing. Here at last was a technique that would allow
scientists to stare down the long spiral and peer into the
histories of various human groups. By comparing massive amounts of
DNA and statistically quantifying certain clusters or sequences in
the DNA, geneticists could derive an idea of the “genetic distance”
between groups. The farther apart two groups were genetically, the
more distant in the past any common ancestry was likely to
be.443
Doing so, however,
threw yet another monkey wrench into the works, for over and over
again, in different racial groups, individuals would appear in one
group whose closest genetic relatives were in an entirely different
group.444 Genetics, in other
words, had blurred the traditional anthropological classifications
based on race, and yet was also showing the emergence of
distinctive groups within races such as
Caucasians. Nonetheless, the concept of “genetic distance”
did lead to one very interesting
conclusion when all human groups were
considered, for it meant that “the whole of the human race was much
younger and more closely related than many people thought.”445 In fact, it meant
that modern Homo sapiens sapiens has
only been around for approximately the last 150,000 years!446
Here we encounter the
most significant problem of them all, and Sykes zeros in on it with
his customary eloquence, for what was the relationship genetically between modern Homo sapiens sapiens and the earlier precursor
species assembled from fossil records by paleontologists?
Their names — Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis — reflect the to and fro of the attempts to pigeon-hole them into different species. However, these are species defined on the basis of anatomical features preserved in skeletons, particularly the skulls, and not in the biological sense of different, genetically isolated, species who are incapable of breeding with any other. It is an operational classification with no evolutionary consequences. From the shapes of the bones alone there is simply no way of knowing whether humans (I use the term ‘human’ to include everything in the genus Homo) from different parts of the world were capable of successful interbreeding. If they could interbreed, then this opens up the possibility of their exchanging genes and spreading mutations around....It is this question that lies behind one of the longest-running and most deep-seated controversies in human evolution. Are the different species defined by paleontologists — Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens — all part of the same gene pool or not? Or, to put it another way, are modern humans directly descended from the fossils found in their part of the world, or are many of these the remains of now extinct genetically separate human species?447
Bear in mind that
point about the paleontological classification of different
species within the genus Homo, for it will become very important later in
this chapter.
These paleontological
classification schemes emerged, as Sykes has indicated, by careful
comparison of fossilized remains, most of which come from Africa.
This important point led paleontologists and anthropologists to
propose an origin for modern man “out of Africa,” yet the presence
of such remains in other parts of the world have led to a
long-running debate. On the one hand, there are those who propose
that modern Homo sapiens sapiens
migrated out of Africa some 100,000 years ago. The opposite school,
on the other hand, proposed a kind of “regionalism” wherein the
species evolved, more or less simultaneously and spontaneously, in
different parts of the world for similar reasons.448
But for Sykes, the
fossil record, “incomplete and patchy though it is, consistently
points to Africa as the ultimate origin of all humans.”449 And if the species
paleontologists had classified on the basis of that fossil record
were in the evolutionary phylogenetic
tree of modern man — that is, if modern man evolved from these
other species — then could genetics resolve the debates? Was there,
for example, any evidence that Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man
had any genetic commonality, and thus possibly some deeper common
origin?450
Indeed it
could.
When mitochondrial
DNA from Neanderthal remains were sequenced and compared to that of
approximately six thousand modern Europeans, it led to the
conclusion that modern man and Neanderthal man could not be related
any later than a quarter of a million years ago. Indeed, the
sequencing led to the conclusion that not only were modern
Europeans not survivors of Neanderthal
man, Neanderthal was not an ancestor.451 There was a
complete absence of Neanderthal
mitochondrial DNA in modern Europeans.452
But that wasn’t the
only story that mitochondrial DNA told...