Recent Wars and Bottlenecks

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mwauthy

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After doing some reading I've noticed that migrations thousands of years ago are often referenced as reasons for the y-DNA frequencies we see today as with the Indo Europeans, Celts, Romans, Germanic and Slavic peoples. My question is what impact did the wars of the last 500 years in Europe have on the y-DNA frequencies we see today? Millions of people, generations of young men, villages and towns were destroyed because of the Religious, Napoleanic, and World Wars. What type of bottlenecks did these wars create? Do Y-DNA samples from prior to 1500 AD show different frequencies than what we see in Europe today?
 
Last 500 years didn't have much impact, because there was no bottlenecking or sharp expansion. Even in midst of WW2 when 60 million people died, there were still 300 million people alive in Europe. So no bottlenecking.
The biggest bottlenecking or founder effect was happening in Europe through Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age, and in lesser scale into modern era, when European population was much smaller and much more susceptible to climate change or invasions, which in turn brought population collapses-explosions and population replacements.
The last big haplogroup changes in Europe happened after Roman Empire collapsed and onset of Dark Ages, which was combined with depopulation of parts of Europe and Germanic and Slavic expansion to South Europe.
 
mwauthy said:
After doing some reading I've noticed that migrations thousands of years ago are often referenced as reasons for the y-DNA frequencies we see today as with the Indo Europeans, Celts, Romans, Germanic and Slavic peoples. My question is what impact did the wars of the last 500 years in Europe have on the y-DNA frequencies we see today? Millions of people, generations of young men, villages and towns were destroyed because of the Religious, Napoleanic, and World Wars. What type of bottlenecks did these wars create? Do Y-DNA samples from prior to 1500 AD show different frequencies than what we see in Europe today?
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That's an excellent question, but the answer is that I'm not aware of any papers that specifically address the issue. As one example, I know that there was severe depopulation in certain areas of Germany following "The Thirty Years War".

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War#Casualties_and_disease

"The war ranks with the worst famines and plagues as the greatest medical catastrophe in modern European history.[73][74] Lacking good census information, historians have extrapolated the experience of well-studied regions.[75] John Theibault agrees with the conclusions in Günther Franz's Der Dreissigjährige Krieg und das Deutsche Volk (1940), that population losses were great but varied regionally (ranging as high as 50%) and says his estimates are the best available.[76] The war killed soldiers and civilians directly, caused famines, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted commerce, postponed marriages and childbirth, and forced large numbers of people to relocate. The reduction of population in the German states was typically 25% to 40%.[77] Some regions were affected much more than others.[78] For example, Württemberg lost three-quarters of its population during the war.[79] In the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas, an estimated two-thirds of the population died.[80] The male population of the German states was reduced by almost half.[81] The population of the Czech lands declined by a third due to war, disease, famine, and the expulsion of Protestant Czechs.[82][83] Much of the destruction of civilian lives and property was caused by the cruelty and greed of mercenary soldiers.[84] Villages were especially easy prey to the marauding armies. Those that survived, like the small village of Drais near Mainz, would take almost a hundred years to recover. The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages, and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.[85]"

The event I've most wondered about is actually not a war but pestilence, i.e. the plague. One town near where I was born lost 90% of its inhabitants in the major outbreak. There were others in the 1600s and other periods.
 
Yes good point. If the Black Death wiped out 30-50% of certain European populations in the Middle Ages then it must have had an impact on y-DNA frequencies we see today.
 
mwauthy said:
Yes good point. If the Black Death wiped out 30-50% of certain European populations in the Middle Ages then it must have had an impact on y-DNA frequencies we see today.
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I've made this argument before, and one of the responses was that it would have affected all haplogroups equally, and so wouldn't have changed anything. I'm not sure that's correct. It's not that the y itself would have been implicated, but the autosomal composition of groups carrying a certain y signature might have conferred more immunity. The mtDna is also very important in terms of health consequences. That might be implicated in the increase of mtDna "H" over time in Europe.

LeBrok is correct, though, population numbers were too high for an actual "bottleneck".
 
Yeah I'm not so sure disease and warfare affected haplogroups equally. There is some evidence that certain Northern Europeans carry a gene that keeps them protected from the plague and even HIV. Also, if whole towns or geographic areas are wiped out from war or disease and then new people from other lands move in doesn't that create a bottleneck in those areas with the new settlers. I have not done any research but maybe there was more I1 in Germany or France prior to the 30 years war in which many Protestants perished.
 
mwauthy said:
Yeah I'm not so sure disease and warfare affected haplogroups equally. There is some evidence that certain Northern Europeans carry a gene that keeps them protected from the plague and even HIV. Also, if whole towns or geographic areas are wiped out from war or disease and then new people from other lands move in doesn't that create a bottleneck in those areas with the new settlers. I have not done any research but maybe there was more I1 in Germany or France prior to the 30 years war in which many Protestants perished.
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It would be an extreme coincidence if wars and plagues had affected ALL haplogroups equally.

The effects of wars and plagues are not always homogeneous, if ever.
 
castelleone said:
It would be an extreme coincidence if wars and plagues had affected ALL haplogroups equally.

The effects of wars and plagues are not always homogeneous, if ever.
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Hmmm, unless haplogroups are written on foreheads how would you avoid killing guys of haplogroup T, for example?
 
Nice thread, but it would more interesting if we discussed bottlenecks in general, since the Palaeolithic.

What causes them ? we can think of wars and diseases, but I find it remarkable how some haplogroups, like G, which is defined by +300 mutations, those were like 20,000 years, imagine how many generations, how many families and tribes, how many nations, could have formed in that time, yet it didn't, only one man, one family, survived. Even maternal haplogroups associated with G, like N1a, W and X are directly descended from the very old haplogroup N*, rather than from the more recent macro-haplogroup R, mirroring the bottleneck on the maternal side.

Whenever I think of haplogroup G I get goosebumps, what caused this family to expand after all this time ? why didn't they die out like the rest of their cousins ? goosebumps intensify when I think of the importance of this lineage to humanity, being one of the first to adopt and spread agriculture. Amazing
 
I think the ottoman did bring quite few changes in the byzantine empire and the balkans. And yes the black death was a main cause.

quoting from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Ottoman_Empire
Anatolia and the Balkans were greatly impacted by the arrival of the Black Death after 1347. Urban centers and settled regions were devastated, while nomadic groups suffered less of an impact. The first Ottoman incursions into the Balkans began shortly thereafter. Depopulation resulting from the plague was thus almost certainly a major factor in the success of early Ottoman expansion into the Balkans, and contributed to the weakening of the Byzantine Empire and the depopulation of Constantinople.
 
LeBrok said:
Hmmm, unless haplogroups are written on foreheads how would you avoid killing guys of haplogroup T, for example?
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Unless haplogroups are written on foreheads how would you manage to kill guys of each haplogroup at the same rate?

Recruiting, allocation to squads (platoons, companies, ...) and the actual killing occur at random.

Considering the initial conditions and nature of the stochastic processes above, it is very unlikely to observe that ALL haplogroups are affected equally.
 
Angela said:
I've made this argument before, and one of the responses was that it would have affected all haplogroups equally, and so wouldn't have changed anything. I'm not sure that's correct. ...
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Can the effects of war and plague be considered ergodic? I don't think so.
 
castelleone said:
Unless haplogroups are written on foreheads how would you manage to kill guys of each haplogroup at the same rate?

Recruiting, allocation to squads (platoons, companies, ...) and the actual killing occur at random.

Considering the initial conditions and nature of the stochastic processes above, it is very unlikely to observe that ALL haplogroups are affected equally.
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For small tribes yes, but not for tens of hundreds of thousands. Killing will affect all haplogroups proportionally equally in huge populations.
 
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IronSide said:
Nice thread, but it would more interesting if we discussed bottlenecks in general, since the Palaeolithic.

What causes them ? we can think of wars and diseases, but I find it remarkable how some haplogroups, like G, which is defined by +300 mutations, those were like 20,000 years, imagine how many generations, how many families and tribes, how many nations, could have formed in that time, yet it didn't, only one man, one family, survived. Even maternal haplogroups associated with G, like N1a, W and X are directly descended from the very old haplogroup N*, rather than from the more recent macro-haplogroup R, mirroring the bottleneck on the maternal side.

Whenever I think of haplogroup G I get goosebumps, what caused this family to expand after all this time ? why didn't they die out like the rest of their cousins ? goosebumps intensify when I think of the importance of this lineage to humanity, being one of the first to adopt and spread agriculture. Amazing
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I don't have the best memory so I might be missing something, but all the ancient paleolithic dudes, we have dug up, don't have descendents in current population, be it Mal'ta boy, Kostenki or Oase, not mentioning Neanderthals or other hominids. Their exact lines are gone. We are descendents of few lucky ones from Paleolithic, the ones who survived Last Glacial Maximum, the Younger Dryas, and other fast cooling periods, but not only.
 
LeBrok said:
For small tribes yes, but not for tens of hundreds of thousands. Killing will affect all haplogroups proportionally equally in huge populations.
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Wars don't last forever and their usually short duration do not allow us to observe ergodicity.

At the end of a war, one haplogroup will be reduced from x% to (x-a)%, another from y% to (y-b)% and yet another one from z% to (z-c)%.

If you stop the war at instant s, then due to the stochastic nature of the 'killing process', a can be higher than b and lower than c at that particular instant.

It would be a extreme coincidence if a, b and c are exact equal.

It would also be an extreme coincidence if the next generation of haplogroups X, Y and Z grow at the necessary exact rate to compensate for the loss of a%, b% and c%.

Given the disparate initial conditions (e.g. haplogroup X accounts for no more than 0.5%, eventually haplogroup X might disappear (e.g. reduction from x% to 0%).

0.5% may mean 1.000, 10.000 or 100.000 soldiers, who can all potentially die.

Take the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War.
 
castelleone said:
Wars don't last forever and their usually short duration do not allow us to observe ergodicity.

At the end of a war, one haplogroup will be reduced from x% to (x-a)%, another from y% to (y-b)% and yet another one from z% to (z-c)%.
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Nope, for big numbers of population all the haplogroups will be reduced by x%. Ratio of haplogroups to each other will not change.
 
LeBrok said:
Nope, for big numbers of population all the haplogroups will be reduced by x%. Ratio of haplogroups to each other will not change.
Click to expand...

Thank you.
You expressed your opinion, but you didn't present any supporting arguments.
 
mwauthy said:
After doing some reading I've noticed that migrations thousands of years ago are often referenced as reasons for the y-DNA frequencies we see today as with the Indo Europeans, Celts, Romans, Germanic and Slavic peoples. My question is what impact did the wars of the last 500 years in Europe have on the y-DNA frequencies we see today? Millions of people, generations of young men, villages and towns were destroyed because of the Religious, Napoleanic, and World Wars. What type of bottlenecks did these wars create? Do Y-DNA samples from prior to 1500 AD show different frequencies than what we see in Europe today?
Click to expand...

Can we speak of the Jewish Holocaust as an example of bottleneck in Europe?
 
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