Using Genetic Data to Revolutionalize Understanding of Migration History
By Patrick Geary
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More recently, a new kind of source, genetic data, has begun to be employed in an attempt to gain a new perspective on migration-era Europe, part of the widespread popularity of DNA research and a tendency to look to “science†to cut through the fuzzy speculations of historians and humanists. In an age obsessed with identity politics that looks increasingly to genetics to answer the fundamental question “Who am I?â€, distributions of genetic markers across populations are being seen as proxies for ethnic and racial differences. In the words of Keith Wailoo, a historian of science and public affairs at Princeton University, the result is “lending renewed authority to biological conceptions of human difference and providing fodder for national debates over belonging, self-definition, and political power.â€1 It is also producing bad history.
To cite but one example, a recent study announced the discovery of a “western Eurasian†in a two-thousand-year-old elite Xiongnu cemetery in northeast Mongolia and suggested that the presence of an “Indo-European†was possibly evidence of “the racial tolerance of the Xiongnu.â€2 Can genetic analysis actually demonstrate that an individual was from a specific region of the Eurasian landmass, in this case from western Eurasia? Can it actually be evidence that he spoke an Indo-European language? Can it be evidence that the Xiongnu were racially tolerant? Such claims are wildly exaggerated and such conclusions deeply problematic. What they actually found was an individual with the maternal U2e1 and paternal R1a1 haploblessgroups. R1a is the most common haploblessgroup in Europe, suggesting that it was statistically more likely but not at all certain that at some point his paternal ancestors had a western origin, and less likely that they were indigenous to the region in which he died. The fact that his genetic makeup bore some similarities with some modern Indian populations is absolutely no basis on which to term him an “Indo-Europeanâ€â€”this is a linguistic, not a geographical, and certainly not a genetic term, and genotype is not equivalent to “race.†Such shifts from a biological to an essentializing cultural identity, common in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, have no place in modern scholarship. Other studies, based on DNA sampling of contemporary European populations, have attempted to argue for a massive replacement of male chromosomal material in eastern England between the fifth and eighth centuries, suggesting either the slaughter and expulsion of virtually all of the male British population of eastern Britain or else a form of “Anglo-Saxon apartheid†practiced by Anglo-Saxon invaders at the end of the Roman Empire.
Is this the best that genetics can offer migration history? I don’t think so, and I would like to suggest some posblesssible areas in which genetic history might actually contriblessbute to research projects exploring migration history. . .
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