I only recently discovered Eupedia. I am H1b, and therefore faced with just as many questions as the next H man.
I am no geneticist, no archeologist. So all I can offer is the candidness of the non-specialist.
I took a close look at Maciamo's "Frequencies by Period" in prehistoric Europe, I observe that
- Haplogroup H is virtually absent from paleolithic western Europe.
- Absent to very low in mesolithic western Europe.
- Was rare among neolithic Anatolian farmers when they were in the East - before they started moving west.
- Not significant among Yamna people.
- Then during the Neolithic, it suddenly accounts for 24% of Cardium pottery people, and 33.5% of LBK ; adding up to a total of 22.5% of neolithic Europe.
-Bronze Age : 35.5% Srubna. 42.5% German Bell Beaker.
If one admits that the H women were taken west by newcomers, we may also consider that it probably took more than one wave of mixed "marriages" to explain today's levels of H along the Atlantic fringe.
It is apparently accepted that European hunter-gatherers (I2a) sought refuge in southern Europe when the ice descended on them. If it wasn't Spain, nor Anatolia, the one place left is the (north) Balkans. For some reason (wide dispersal of U, eg), I believe HGs were far more mobile than other populations. When the ice receded, they moved north again, fanning out towards Bavaria, Bohemia, Poland, Ukraine.
In Belarus or thereabouts, they came into contact with R1a people who were heading (north-)west. And have remained there to this day - accounting for the current percentiles of some specific H clades in that area.
Some time later, the Eastern farmers moved from Anatolia to the Balkans, where they stayed quite a while. They assimilated the I2 men they didn't kill, and took some of their H women with them on their trip further west.
The same thing must have happened in the north, first with LBK G2a EEF, then a few thousand years later, when R1b started expanding. Corded ware had 21.5% H women. Unetice : 20.5%. And steadily rising as time passed.
This scenario would explain why the very "Russian" H1b gene ended up in my very French genetic make-up.
Natural selection ? Certainly. We can't rule out the hypothesis of an epidemic that selectively wiped out the non-H women of Central Europe. But if natural selection it was, it may well have been natural selection through... (I'm not kidding) sex-appeal !
In other words, my grandmothers were repeatedly picked by newcomers as wives (or sex-slaves!) because they were simply... so cute !
Thanks for sharing your ideas.
I doubt that mtDNA can influence sex-appeal. That has more to do with beauty (good autosomal genes), character (innate and built on experience), happiness, and so on.
Personally I think there are two main reasons that explain why haplogroup H is so common in Europe today.
1) It was present in all prehistoric groups except Mesolithic West and Central Europeans (as far as we know now). H has been found in Mesolithic Sweden, Lithuania, Russia, and was very probably present in Mesolithic Iberia, Italy and Greece too. H was found among Near Eastern Neolithic farmers (H2b, H5, etc.), and more H came with the Indo-European migrations (H1b, H1c, H2a1, H4a1, H6, H8, H11a, H15). Since maternal lineages were not replaced like paternal ones with new waves of invaders, old H subclades remained and were joined by new ones with each migration.
2) Haplogroup H has been linked with more efficient oxygen consumption by the body, increased fitness and endurance, lower risk of septicaemia, etc. Overall H individuals seem more physical resistant, which in harsher historical times would have been a great advantage for survival (especially among the lower classes who had to toil in the fields most of their lives). The increased fitness and endurance may also have helped H mothers withstand better pregnancies and give birth to more children. Just look at famous H women like Empress Maria Theresa (16 children), her daughter Maria Carolina of Austria -also 18 children), or Queen Victoria (8 children despite her husband dying at age 42).
Last edited: