Hitler's Aryan theory rubbished by science

[mohammadbaldwin121]

"The theory of Scandinavian racial purity cherished by Hitler and the Nazis has been rubbished by new scientific research.

... The study found that bodies from 2000-year-old burial sites in eastern Denmark contained "as much genetic variation in their remains as one would expect to find in individuals of the present day" ...

... Far from being isolated and 'genetically pure', the study on the burial sites found that Danes mixed with peoples from across the globe. ...

"It becomes clear that the Danes must have been in contact with other peoples," said scientist Linea Melchior, who analysed DNA from the Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde sites.

"One of the Danish burial grounds, which dates back to the iron age also contained the remains of a man who appears to have been of Arabian origin," she added.

Both that body and the 'Arabian' body discovered by Linea Melchior were buried in identical fashion to 'locals', showing researchers say "that people from distant parts of the world could be and were absorbed in Danish communities".

 

[ToBeOrNotToBe]

"The theory of Scandinavian racial purity cherished by Hitler and the Nazis has been rubbished by new scientific research.

... The study found that bodies from 2000-year-old burial sites in eastern Denmark contained "as much genetic variation in their remains as one would expect to find in individuals of the present day" ...

... Far from being isolated and 'genetically pure', the study on the burial sites found that Danes mixed with peoples from across the globe. ...

"It becomes clear that the Danes must have been in contact with other peoples," said scientist Linea Melchior, who analysed DNA from the Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde sites.

"One of the Danish burial grounds, which dates back to the iron age also contained the remains of a man who appears to have been of Arabian origin," she added.

Both that body and the 'Arabian' body discovered by Linea Melchior were buried in identical fashion to 'locals', showing researchers say "that people from distant parts of the world could be and were absorbed in Danish communities".

That Arabian man has been refuted, and it's suspicious enough to call foul play, but of course they aren't of mythical purity - nobody is.

That being said...

If anything, ignoring many important details, genetics is proving the Aryan theory correct. In fact, it's already been proven. This isn't to say they were some kind of master race, but they did dominate - their pottery though, as one example, was primitive compared to that of most of the peoples they subjugated.

It's unavoidable.

 

[Alyan]

Except the "Aryans" would be more similiar to Slavs than Germanics.

 

[Ailchu]

Except the "Aryans" would be more similiar to Slavs than Germanics.

according to this graphic

the people in scandinavia and probably also northern germany have the highest portion of yamna dna in europe. but at the same time they also have quite a lot of non yamna haplogroups. how does that fit together?
did they put the EHG admixture that was already present there in the I1 population into the yamna category even though it isn't really yamna?

 

[halfalp]

That's a pretty bad article, cant believe a PhD wrote that.

1) Ancient and modern individuals have nothing to do with genetic variations properly, multiculturalism in modern days, doesn't change the genetic variations in individuals, she seems to believe that modern humans have mixed with outsiders at some time to change the genetic variations between modern Danes people and medieval Danes people.

2) Scandinavia is by fact a recluse place looking at how many for exemple Finnish people have of genetic disease showing large founder effects and bottleneck. And " Around the Globe " and Arabian in a single contexte are two large different things.

3) What " Arabian " even means in her contexte ? Because it's clearly not " Arabian Peninsula " people. She probably talks of a Barbary Pirate or a north african / muslim hispanic merchant. Those people call themselves Muslims and not Arabians whatsoever in those times.

Childish study from a good university from a Danish girl probably with a big megalomania and some entitlement. She probably things she's morally better than other Danes and mostly conservatives Danes and vote for the Socialist party. Proof than being part of the scientific elite of your country doesn't protect you from being bigoted.

 

[IronSide]

"The theory of Scandinavian racial purity cherished by Hitler and the Nazis has been rubbished by new scientific research.

... The study found that bodies from 2000-year-old burial sites in eastern Denmark contained "as much genetic variation in their remains as one would expect to find in individuals of the present day" ...

... Far from being isolated and 'genetically pure', the study on the burial sites found that Danes mixed with peoples from across the globe. ...

"It becomes clear that the Danes must have been in contact with other peoples," said scientist Linea Melchior, who analysed DNA from the Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde sites.

"One of the Danish burial grounds, which dates back to the iron age also contained the remains of a man who appears to have been of Arabian origin," she added.

Both that body and the 'Arabian' body discovered by Linea Melchior were buried in identical fashion to 'locals', showing researchers say "that people from distant parts of the world could be and were absorbed in Danish communities".

Nah .. political correctness, even if he was Arabian, it doesn't mean he was absorbed into Danish community as an equal, he was most likely a captured slave hhaaha, so much for equality.

 

[Ygorcs]

That Arabian man has been refuted, and it's suspicious enough to call foul play, but of course they aren't of mythical purity - nobody is.

That being said...

If anything, ignoring many important details, genetics is proving the Aryan theory correct. In fact, it's already been proven. This isn't to say they were some kind of master race, but they did dominate - their pottery though, as one example, was primitive compared to that of most of the peoples they subjugated.

It's unavoidable.

No way. How on earth is science proving the Aryan theory of Nazis correct? You're probably mistaking it with the steppe theory proposed by decidedly non-Nazi people like Gimbutas. The Nazi Aryan theory proposed a whole lot of things that science proved completely wrong:
1) no, they didn't originate in Germany, nor even in Scandinavia, so they were confused even about the very homeland of the Aryans, let alone about who they were really like;
2) no, they were not racially/genetically purer than other populations, in fact the "characteristic" Indo-European genetics looks like a big EHG/CHG mix and by the time they reached Germanic countries they were even more mixed with EEF and some remnants of WHG and SHG;
3) no, they were not a masterful race of invincible warriors with advanced knowledge and technology, they were not primitive hunter-gatherers, but were very far from being at the forefront of development in their own era;
4) no, they were not the most light skinned and blonde haired population around, and in fact they only seem to have become more like that only after they mixed significantly more with EEF and remnants of SHG/EHG in Central/Northern Europe;
5) no, Aryans were not particularly concentrated in Tibet, all that Buddhist knowledge and tradition that some Nazi archaeologists and anthropologists obsessed about was not the particularly well preserved remnants of "Aryan religious tradition";
6) no, Germanic peoples aren't a purified, miraculously preserved continuation of the most ancient Indo-Europeans (they in general have a lot more EEF and in some areas additional CHG/West Asian), and in fact the Aryans proper, who were not identical to the Proto-Indo-European speakers unlike those Nazis seemed to believe (again) incorrectly, were quite mixed with Central Asian and even a bit of Eastern Siberian/Northeastern Asian types;
7) no, Germans (and especially southern/southwestern Germans and Austrians, people like Hitler, you know?) aren't particularly "purer" than other European populations, as far as Aryan (presuming we're talking about "steppe IE", not the real Aryans from Central Asia, because the Nazis, again totally incorrectly, didn't even think of that possibility) traits go, especially if you compare them to Scandinavians and Balts.
7) no, Aryans in fact seem to have learned a lot from those mixed, swarthy, "Semitic" (silly generalization, of course) Middle Easterners that in fact brought almost all great innovations to their steppes either via the Balkans or via the Caucasus, or via Central Asia (in the case of advanced Sintashta metallurgy for example).

What was so right about the Nazi's Aryan delusions? Oh yes, they knew that there was an extremely wide and successful expansion of Indo-European speakers in the distant past. And they were right that Germanics somehow descended from that (but boy were they wrong about them being perfect proxies for the first Indo-Europeans! lol). The only thing is that, well, even people in the late 18th century had already inferred that. They were actually wrong about almost everything that they tried to explain about how that expansion occurred.

 

[Ygorcs]

according to this graphic

the people in scandinavia and probably also northern germany have the highest portion of yamna dna in europe. but at the same time they also have quite a lot of non yamna haplogroups. how does that fit together?
did they put the EHG admixture that was already present there in the I1 population into the yamna category even though it isn't really yamna?

I've asked that myself too. That graph only includes basically EEF, Yamna Steppe and WHG. But we know Scandinavia wouldn't be that rich either in EEF or WHG, compared to other European areas, and probably would have a lot more EHG (either EHG proper or the EHG-derived portion of SHG). Would that genetic structure have simply vanished completely and got 100% replaced by either EEF or Yamnaya? I find that a bit unlikely.

 

[bicicleur 2]

according to this graphic

the people in scandinavia and probably also northern germany have the highest portion of yamna dna in europe. but at the same time they also have quite a lot of non yamna haplogroups. how does that fit together?
did they put the EHG admixture that was already present there in the I1 population into the yamna category even though it isn't really yamna?

don't forget that TMRCA of I1 is a mere 4.6 ka
all of I1 descends from that single father whose autosomal may have been mostly Yamna

 

[holderlin]

I can't take it anymore. Someone just kill me.

It's like social media has succeeded at not only making the general population stupid, but our scientists too. I don't even know where to begin with this one. Who is the intended audience for this paper? Where are all the people who ever thought that Nazi pseudoscience was real?!?!?!?! And what on earth does that have to do with Roman era Danes?

Everything is becoming a dumbed down political statement. First it began infecting our art, then our sports, and now it's firmly embedded in our science too?

 

[Ygorcs]

Nah .. political correctness, even if he was Arabian, it doesn't mean he was absorbed into Danish community as an equal, he was most likely a captured slave hhaaha, so much for equality.

I also thought something like that, but on a more general tone: how on earth do they know that that man really MIXED with the Danes of the medieval era? We already know for a fact that, especially in the case of slaves and city traders, their presence in ancient cities may not reflect a corresponding genetic impact in the local population in the long term. If we found, say, 100 "exotic" people in a medieval Danish town, a trade entrepot or something like that, that does NOT mean that those 100 people changed the future generations of that place.

The ancient world was, therefore, probably much more cosmopolitan than we can deduce from the comparison between several ancient and modern DNA samples along the centuries. The long-term effects of ancient immigration, particularly the small-scale ones, can't be taken for granted in ancient times, especially when they usually had periodic demographic disasters (pandemics, wars, displacements etc.) and in general very low population growth, especially in the case of city dwellers.

Many of those foreigners may have visited, gone away, lived, died, but without leaving any relevant genetic impact in the long term, especially if they were a visible but tiny minority that, without any big social/reproductive advantage, would have its genes easily diluted and virtually eliminated from the regional gene pool after some generations.

 

[Angela]

Does the paper go into any detail at all about the burial context of this supposedly "Arabian" man, or about his physical condition at death in comparison to burials of people of different autosomal make-up? Unless they did, how can any of you draw any conclusions about his status whatsoever?

@Ygorcs,
Your post number 7 was very good. Thanks for laying it out so clearly. People make wild comments about this issue without knowing what the Nazis actually proposed, versus even older versions of the Indo-European steppe hypothesis.

 

[halfalp]

Nazis basically take the indo-europeans hypothesis and mixed them with some french and german eugenism / racialism and german archeological datas, that those times were very nationalistic. Things were more intense with the Ahnenerbe and Himmler than Hitler. Himmler idealized a very fantasy world, he was a huge fan of J.R.R Tolkien The Hobbit and probably see the Aryans like some kind of Elfs, Elfs being major into pan-germanic mythology. If you can understand that, you can turn the page. Nazis has nothing to do with nationalism, conservatism and even ethno-nationalism. Nazis were ethno-nationalists but all ethno-nationalists are not Nazis or Neo-Nazis. The modern thing that could make a rational analogy with Nazis is the White Supremacism, in my sense, that white people became the master of the world, the bringers of civilization, the masters of universal laws, the warrantors of the common people. If there might be some individuals into that kind of megalo-delirium, truth has to say that most of people going into those crazyness are Capitalists or Democrats ( Democrats in an american way [ interventionists ] ), people that believe to the Providence State and that their culture and civilization is a model that should be applied to any others.

 

[hrvclv]

That Arabian guy was called Ahmad Ibn Fadlan and looked like Antonio Banderas. He had come a long way from the south - with a Scandinavian warrior called Buliwyf - to fight the Wendols in King Hrorthgar's kingdom... He went down in history as "the thirteenth warrior". Everyone knows that!

As for the EEF and WHG in Scandinavians, we should remember that :
For sure, their R1a from Corded Ware were relatively unmixed Steppe.
But their R1b and I1 came from the south, and by the time they arrived, they had had plenty of time to get a big chunk of farmer admixture in what is now Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Germany, Poland...

 

[hrvclv]

Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix lay forgotten by history for 2000 years. Napoleon III resurrected him to give France a symbolic figurehead at a time when the country spoke diverse dialects, and still lacked cohesion and a sense of national pride. The Nazis did just the same with their "Aryan" theories. One should never under-estimate the key role of myths in cementing together a community. The Nazis didn't start from the data to establish the myth. They established the myth, and then tried to gather the data to support it. It didn't matter to them whether the data didn't exist, or were fragmentary, or wrong. What did matter was that the myth proved effective. It provided the exaltation and self-aggrandizement that turned average men into efficient workers and resolute soldiers. The true goal was achieved.

 

[Dr Daniel Junglehart]

Yep Nazi aryan myth made them try to create that fantasy there are tribes but the origins of European people’s are more complex then people want to think about war disease just where some tribes settled who originally made up each group you cannot with knowledge of modern day genetics continue with all these story's about European populations.

 

[ThirdTerm]

"It becomes clear that the Danes must have been in contact with other peoples," said scientist Linea Melchior, who analysed DNA from the Bøgebjerggård and Skovgaarde sites.

"One of the Danish burial grounds, which dates back to the iron age also contained the remains of a man who appears to have been of Arabian origin," she added.

Linea Melchior was a Ph.D. candidate when she made these remarks in 2008. Probably she prematurely assumed that mtDNA haplogroup N1a, which was detected in an ancient Danish sample R6, was directly from the Arabian Peninsula because 2-4% of the modern population in Saudi Arabia carries this haplogroup. But N1a is most prominent in the Komi-Permyaks (9.5%) in the Volga-Ural region in Russia and it's plausible that this outlier individual was of Finno-Ugric origin.

Several haplogroups which are rare (<0.5% [50]) or absent among the extant population of southern Scandinavia were observed among the 56 ancient individuals. Thus Hg N1a was identified in individual R6 from Riisby. This haplogroup is very rare throughout Europe today (0.2% [49]). It is highlighted here since it was the predominant haplogroup (25%) observed among the 24 individuals from graves with the first European LBK farmers 7,500 YBP [10]. The low frequency of this haplogroup today indicates that the early farmers did not have a strong genetic influence on the extant European female lineages [10] and that farming culture may have spread without the people originally carrying these ideas. Haplogroup T2b was identified in individual Si9 from Simonsborg. This specific haplotype motif is only observed among extant populations in Eastern Europe (0.06%). This finding coincides with previous findings of Eastern European types and haplotype motifs, U7 (K1), H16174 (G8) and U5b (R13) in the ancient material [16], [17] and confirms archaeological evidence for contacts between Southern Scandinavia and Eastern Europe [3].

The observation of a high incidence of Hg I's among the ancient Danes (13%, Tables 1, 2, 3) is interesting since this is not reflected in extant population samples (1.9–2.5%, Table 5) and neither is it observed in ancient population samples from Italy, Spain, Great Britain, central European hunter-gatherers, early central European farmers and Neolithic samples (3 out of 184 individuals ∼1.6%) [8], [10], [14], [18]–[21]. Hg I may therefore have had more pronounced differences in frequency among ancient populations and could have been frequent in ancient Southern Scandinavia. The lower frequency observed among extant Danes may be due to later immigration events or genetic drift.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I can't take it anymore. Someone just kill me.

It's like social media has succeeded at not only making the general population stupid, but our scientists too. I don't even know where to begin with this one. Who is the intended audience for this paper? Where are all the people who ever thought that Nazi pseudoscience was real?!?!?!?! And what on earth does that have to do with Roman era Danes?

Everything is becoming a dumbed down political statement. First it began infecting our art, then our sports, and now it's firmly embedded in our science too?

you're right
it is the first time I ever heard of a 'theory of Scandinavian racial purity'
why bother?

 

[halfalp]

That Arabian guy was called Ahmad Ibn Fadlan and looked like Antonio Banderas. He had come a long way from the south - with a Scandinavian warrior called Buliwyf - to fight the Wendols in King Hrorthgar's kingdom... He went down in history as "the thirteenth warrior". Everyone knows that!

As for the EEF and WHG in Scandinavians, we should remember that :
For sure, their R1a from Corded Ware were relatively unmixed Steppe.
But their R1b and I1 came from the south, and by the time they arrived, they had had plenty of time to get a big chunk of farmer admixture in what is now Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Germany, Poland...

Ibn Fadlan was in eastern europe were he met the Rus or the Varangians. Nothing to do with scandinavia, but you maybe reference something i dont know about ?

 

[halfalp]

It's pretty funny to be Danish and have Melchior as a surname. Maybe she is a Melchiordottir ?