Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 8, despite their roots in Proto-Indo-European, the words ‘fair’ and ‘fairness’ appear only in the languages of northwest Europe where they originally referred only to behavior within the tribe. This is clearly a marker for the importance of moral reputation within the group, and it suggests selection for these traits in the northwest of Europe but not elsewhere throughout the extensive areas conquered by the Indo-Europeans. This cultural addition and its genetic basis could therefore result from the assimilation of the conquering Indo-Europeans with the more egalitarian h-gs of northwestern Europe. Despite the individualistic tendencies of both the I-Es and the h-g groups of northwestern Europe, the I-Es are not well characterized as egalitarian. They were strongly hierarchical, with egalitarianism only apparent within the aristocratic military elite (Ch. 2).
Regarding physical traits, the gene for light eye color was at 100 percent fixation in h-gs throughout Western Europe.[29] Although the more northerly SHG from what is now Sweden had the gene for white skin, other WHG found in what is today Spain and Luxemburg did not have the skin-lightening allele which is nearly fixed in present-day European populations, while EF samples were homozygous for this allele. These results indicate selection against dark-skin in the south of Europe after the influx of the EFs.[30] The finding of light skin in these skeletal remains suggests that this mutation may have been present in some WHG populations, particularly in northern Europe—i.e., the populations most likely to have genetic continuity with contemporary northern Europeans. Indeed, another study of the SHG noted that they had the genes for both light eye color and light hair color.[31]
Regarding the proto-I-Es, genes for light skin pigmentation were relatively infrequent in an ancient DNA sample from the Pontic Steppe region compared to contemporary Ukrainians, indicating selection as the I-Es spread north. They attribute these results to “a combination of selective pressures associated with living in northern latitudes, the adoption of an agriculturalist diet [i.e., low in Vitamin D, which increases selection pressure in favor of lighter pigmentation], and assortative mating [i.e., preference for light pigmentation in mates] may sufficiently explain the observed change from a darker phenotype during the Eneolithic/Early Bronze age to a generally lighter one in modern Eastern Europeans, although other selective factors cannot be discounted.”[32]
As discussed in Chapter 3, individualist marriage is far more conducive to assortative mating on the basis of partner’s traits because of individual choice of marriage partner. The possible involvement of assortative mating would imply that light skin was seen as attractive in a potential partner, so that men and women with high mate value would choose partners with lighter skin. On the other hand, in collectivist cultures marriages are often to relatives and are arranged by families as an aspect of family strategizing within extended kinship groups. In such a marriage regime (often involving marriage to first cousins), marriages do not necessarily reflect the preferences of the spouses.
The larger point is that, for a variety of possible reasons, selection for lighter eye, hair, and skin pigmentation occurred within Europe after the EF and I-E migrations. Thus there was an increase to fixation in the frequency of a gene associated with white skin color between the Mesolithic and the Bronze Age—a period of over ~3000 years.[33] The gene for blue eyes was already present in Mesolithic populations (as noted above), but is absent in the proto-I-Es.
Moreover, the gene for lactose tolerance may have originated among the proto-I-Es.[34] This gene would have been highly adaptive in a pastoral/dairy culture such as that of the Yamnaya. However, this gene was found in only 5 percent of Bronze Age Europeans, although the highest levels were in the Corded Ware culture (~20 percent) which is proposed as resulting from the Yamnaya migration (~28 percent of Yamnaya remains had this gene).
There is also a north-south gradient in height, with Europeans taller in the north. Mathieson et al. find these differences in Neolithic Europe, suggesting greater height stemming from the I-E influence which is stronger in the north and is associated with a diet high in dairy products; they also find selection for shorter stature in the south of Europe as an accommodation to their relatively low-quality farming diet.[35] This gradient in height continues into modern times and reflects a genetic (and cultural) gradient that still exists in France (see Ch. 4).
Genetic Differences within Contemporary Europe Mirror Geography
There are genetic differences between contemporary European populations that mirror geography.[36] Despite a low level of genetic variation in general throughout Europe, people from the same geographic area cluster together—even, e.g., within the German-, French- and Italian-speaking areas of Switzerland.[37] A principle components analysis reveals an adequate two-component solution. Of the two axes, a north-northwest to south-southeast axis explained twice as much variance (30 percent) as the second axis (a north-northeast to south-southwest axis).[38]
Nelis et al. also found a northwest to southeast gradient, with Finland an outlier to the northeast and Sweden the closest country in Western Europe to Finland.[39] These results are compatible with the proposal in Chapter 4 that the differences in family structure in Europe are influenced by a genetic gradient from north-northwest to south-southeast.
Within Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden are clearly distinct from the Germanic populations of the continent, while Denmark is embedded with Germanic populations; Finland is an outlier, substantially further to the north and east. The authors caution that their results may underestimate genetic differentiation between areas of Europe because relatively uncommon alleles are under-sampled.
These results were replicated by Lao et al.[40]—who again found two principle components correlated with geography, the first explaining 31.6 percent of the variance, the second 17.3 percent. Once again, Norway and Sweden (but not Denmark) are at the extreme northern end of the distribution, clustering with Finland—although the latter is an outlier. Interestingly, given the family structure data reviewed in Chapter 4, southern Italy is at the southern extreme of the genetic profiles and noticeably distinct from the more Germanic northern Italy—replicated by Nelis et al.[41] Lao et al. also found north-south differences within Spain and Germany. On the other hand, their data from France used only one sample, from the southeastern part of France; they found this sample was substantially separated from the Germanic populations, thus providing genetic support for the north-south cline in family structure in France which plays a central role in the data discussed in Chapter 4.
Sex-Chromosome Data
Based on the material in Chapter 2 on the Indo-Europeans, it would be expected that Indo-European migrations would be highly sex-biased toward males, for several reasons. Most importantly, a basic unit of Indo-European culture was the Männerbund, an all-male war band that set out to achieve fame and fortune by conquering other territories. Also, there is no evidence that these Indo-European cultures eradicated the peoples whom they dominated; they used their position to extract services from them via servitude or some more mitigated status comparable to medieval European serfdom. Females would have been taken as mates and males would have been useful for labor. In the long run, upward mobility would be possible for males of the conquered group (e.g., those with military talent), and barriers to intermarriage would gradually ease, resulting in a mixed population. Moreover, steppe cultures were highly sex-typed, with males dominating burials, deities, and kinship terminology.[42]
Despite these considerations, the genetic evidence for a predominance of Yamnaya Y chromosomes has been mixed. As noted above, around 60 percent of the Y-chromosomes from the Corded War culture derived from the Yamnaya, indicating the conquering males had relatively high reproductive success. Recently Goldberg et al. have provided evidence for robust sex-biased steppe migrations[43] and have defended their results against criticism.[44] Given the cultural considerations mentioned above and this new data, I am inclined to accept a strongly male-biased steppe migration. Moreover
, such a scenario would be highly compatible with finding some Y-chromosomes from peoples who populated Europe prior to the steppe migrations, since males from conquered populations would be useful to the conquerors for labor and other services.
Conclusion
In Chapter 2 I discuss I-E culture as based on military conquest and domination of conquered peoples, but also as characterized by important features of individualism—that, for example, they created a free market culture where kinship was deemphasized, and individual talents and accomplishment valued.
However, I-E expansion across much of Asia—their conquests reached what is now western China as well as Iran and the Indian subcontinent—did not result in individualistic cultures. Similarly, the conquests of ancient Macedon and Rome in the Middle East had no lasting influence on the collectivist, extended kinship social organization that remains typical of the area today (see also Chapter 4). Even the centuries-long domination of the Roman Empire—an offshoot of I-E culture (see Appendix to Chapter 2)—in southern Europe did not result in individualism to the extent found in northwestern Europe. Indeed, family structure in southern Europe has been much more collectivist as far back as records go, and this pattern continues into the present (see Chapter 4).
This implies either that there must have been pre-existing tendencies toward individualism in northwest Europe prior to the I-E conquests, or that there was something unique about the physical environment in northwest Europe that resulted in individualism evolving in that area beginning after the I-E conquests but not in other areas conquered by the I-Es, which seems unlikely. Such individualist tendencies are not apparent in the EFs whose genetic legacy is far stronger in the south of Europe than the individualist northwest, implying that the search should focus on the WHGs (possibly including the SHGs). As noted above, the contribution of the Late Mesolithic Ertebølle culture—a complex h-g culture based on a marine diet—to the genetic structure of contemporary populations remains an open question. The same is true of its successor, the Pitted Ware Culture, and the SHGs in general.
Such an individualism-promoting environmental feature would have to be absent not only from southern Europe but also from eastern Europe, including northeastern Europe and Russia. These regions were also conquered by peoples from the steppe but remain more inclined toward collectivist family structure, despite having a temperate climate (Ch. 4).
As discussed in Chapter 3, one possible environmental feature could have been the ability of northwestern European h-gs to develop complex cultures based on a rich marine-based diet but still requiring seasonal returns to the small, family-based groupings characteristic of h-gs. Complex h-g societies were common in many places: “quite robust evidence is now available for politically complex hunter-gatherer societies that endured for centuries on several continents.”[45] Like the Ertebølle culture, these complex h-gs tended to cluster around resource-rich marine or riverine environments.
As noted at the outset, the genetic clines described here could also have been influenced by local selection after the major migratory events, i.e., genetic differences continuous with these pre-historic clines could have evolved further as the mixed populations from southern and northern Europe remained separated for long periods. For example, genetically based psychological predispositions or physical features originally more pronounced in one of the three basic groups could have been selected for in northwest Europe.
Moreover, the genetic basis of such traits may have involved relatively few genes, without major effects on genetic differences between groups over the entire autosome. When population geneticists examine genetic differences between populations, they focus not only on adaptive and maladaptive genes but also on genes that are adaptively neutral. Indeed, a large percentage of human genetic mutations are adaptively neutral or only slightly deleterious—Boyko et al. estimate 27–29 percent and 30–42 percent respectively.[46] Autosomal percentages may thus result in misleading estimates of the contribution of particular groups to particular traits. As noted in a previous section, there is evidence of selection for light skin pigmentation and likely for eye color involving very few genes. Such selection would have had minimal effect on the overall genetic distances between the studied populations.
Thus, if traits predisposing to individualism were more pronounced in WHGs and I-Es compared to EFs, these genes could spread in the population without a major effect on the general autosomal contribution of the EFs, so that, for example, the WHG autosomal contribution to contemporary Europeans may underestimate their influence on the genetic basis of psychological predispositions related to individualism. The same could also occur with physical features such as light skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, given that these traits may well have been sexually selected as aspects of physical attractiveness in individualist marriage (see Ch. 3). In any case, a theme of later chapters is that there are psychological differences related to individualism that reflect this north-south genetic cline.
In this regard, as discussed in Chapter 3, it is interesting that the Finnish people developed traits that are quite similar to those of their close neighbor Sweden, despite remaining genetically distinct from Swedes (with some admixture, particularly in Western Finland) and being a genetic outlier from Western Europeans generally—suggesting selection in situ in the northwest of Europe.
In summary, current evidence is compatible with a primordial WHG population present from ~45000ybp. In northern Europe by no later than 8000ybp (the date of the Motala samples from Sweden) part of this population evolved into a distinct SHG population with white skin and blue eyes. In Southern Europe the WHG population had dark skin and fair eyes. Early farmers from the Levant with white skin and brown eyes entered Europe ~8000ybp, eliminating the dark-skinned WHG’s in the south of Europe (with some admixture) and intermingling to a lesser extent with the WHGs and perhaps SHGs in the north. Finally, white-skinned, brown eyed peoples from the Pontic Steppe region migrated into Europe ~4500ybp, militarily dominating other previously resident groups (Ch. 2), but eventually intermingling with them.
Substantial WHG (and possibly SHG) genetic representation persisted, however, into the modern era. The resurgence of hunter-gather genetic representation in the Early Bronze Age has been noted. The thesis developed in later chapters is that there has been a resurgence of h-gs, not genetically, but culturally—that versions of h-g egalitarianism became increasingly dominant beginning in the seventeenth century with the rise of Puritanism in England, and that this culture dominates European and especially northwestern European-derived societies in the present era. The following two chapters are devoted to describing the very different cultures of these two groups of individualists, the aristocratic I-Es and the egalitarian h-gs.
2
The Indo-European Cultural Legacy: Aristocratic
Individualism
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Whereas the Faustian man is an “I” that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite [and] whereas the Apollonian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself, the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic “We” that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to not himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes.
Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West[47]
Cattle die, kinsmen die, and so shall you die too. But one thing I know that never dies: The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds.
Icelandic Viking proverb
The Indo-
Europeans (I-Es) were highly militarized conquering groups that spread out from the Pontic Steppe region north of the Black Sea to dominate Europe for at least 3,500 years, ending only at the end of the Middle Ages in Western Europe and reverberating even beyond that. What I mean by this is that the social systems that the I-Es put in place had significant commonalities and were fundamentally unchanged over this very long time span. This section will describe the fundamentals of that social system, termed here aristocratic individualism for reasons that will become clear.
As Ricardo Duchesne notes, the Indo-European legacy is key to understanding the restless, aggressive, questing, innovative, “Faustian” soul of Europe. Indo-Europeans were a “uniquely aristocratic people dominated by emerging chieftains for whom fighting to gain prestige was the all-pervading ethos. This culture [is] interpreted as ‘the Western state of nature’ and as the primordial source of Western restlessness.”[48]
As noted in Chapter 1, current scholarly opinion is that the I-Es originated in the Pontic Steppe region of south Russia and Ukraine. In the Near East, Iran, and India, this conquering group was eventually absorbed by the local population, although, for example, there is some indication that the priestly Brahmin caste in India has greater representation of I-E ancestry than other castes in northern India.[49] In Europe, they displaced the native languages but not the natives: Originally, at least, as in the other areas they conquered, they were alien elites ruling over the older Europeans.
Indo-European Culture
The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was based neither on centralized kingship nor clan-type extended kinship groups, but on an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group. Critically, this elite was not bound by kinship as would occur in a clan-based society, but by the pursuit of fame and fortune, particularly the former. The men who became leaders were not despots, but peers of other warriors—an egalitarianism among aristocrats. Successful warriors individuated themselves in dress, sporting beads, belts, etc., with a flair for ostentation. This resulted in a “vital, action-oriented, and linear picture of the world”[50]—i.e., as moving forward in pursuit of the goal of increasing prestige. The leader was “first among equals,” commanding by voluntary consent rather than force, and being a successful leader meant having many clients pledge their loyalty.
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 3