DNA Consultants Home of the DNA Fingerprint

DNA, not Gothic literature, has all the best stories and tales of murder and intrigue. According to Sam Kean, author of The Violinist’s Thumb: And other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius as Told by Our Genetic Code, “ …Somewhere in the tangle of strands are the answers to many historical mysteries about human beings that were once thought lost forever.”  Kean says each one of us has”… enough DNA to stretch from Pluto to the sun and back,” and “…every human activity leaves a forensic trace in our DNA” and the story that DNA tells, Keans says, “…is a larger and more intricate tale of the rise of human beings on Earth: why we’re one of nature’s most absurd creatures, as well as its crowning glory.” We just have to know how to read the story and solve the mystery. Like the one about the French Revolution and King Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo’s classic novel about the French Revolution, Les Miserables, has been given a facelift for a modern audience to ponder over popcorn in the theater.  Or discuss at a local café or bookstore over cappuccino. But few of us would imagine that scientists have had any interest in the French Revolution. We would be wrong if we did, and it is a gruesome tale of the intersection of science and history in this case.

Phillipe Charlier, a forensic scientist, dubbed the “’ Indiana Jones of the Graveyards, ‘“according to the recent Abroad in the Yard article, “DNA Analysis Links Blood of Louis XVI, Beheaded in French Revolution, and Mummified Head of His Ancestor Henri IV,” by Tom Martin Scroft, has linked blood stains in a decorated squash gourd to the mummified head of King Henry IV. There was once a handkerchief, according to the article, that had been “in the possession of an Italian family for over a century” in an “ornate calabash gourd” that had been “dipped in the [beheaded] blood of King Louis XVI” by a Maximilien Bourdalou.mAccording to an earlier Discovery News article by Jennifer Viegas, “Royal Blood May Be Hidden inside Decorated Gourd,” the handkerchief “is now missing.” Most certainly it has “decomposed” by now as David Blair suggests in his recent article, “Louis XVI Blood Mystery Solved.”  Viegas also says the ornately decorated gourd was “dated to 1793” and that the dried squash reads, “Maximilien  Bourdaloue on January 21^st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his beheading.” Why he would have done such a thing?  For a bloody relic no doubt.  What  a coffee table conversation piece. Viegas quotes Carles Lalueza Fox, “lead author of the study and a researcher at Spain’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology,” as saying that the act was common: “In fact, many people went there to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood.” How gruesome. But linking blood found in the Italian family’s gourd to King Louis XVI?  It took DNA analysis to validate that tale.

How was that done? In careful steps. First, according to Fox (qtd by Viegas) her team had to identify the “brownish substance” inside the squash as “dried blood.” Later, Fox remembered that the King had “blue eyes” and he identified the genetic marker for the “blue eyes mutation.” But that is a long way off from identifying it as the blood of King Louis XVI. The researchers also analyzed its mitochondrial profile and its Y-Chromosome profile and they found the “’DNA profile [before they had a match]…was rare among Eurasians’” which “suggest[ed] that it [might] derive from a royal bloodline.” But Fox knew that they had to have “ ‘someone’” for comparison. They first thought of the “[pickled]heart located in a royal French crypt thought to belong to the King’s son, Louis XVII.”  It is beginning to sound like a tale from Edgar Allen Poe.

But they didn’t use the heart after all. They discovered the mummified head of King Henri IV, who ruled France from 1589 until 1610, which had been “shuffled between private collections ever since it disappeared during the French Revolution,” according to Marie Cheng’s AP article, “Scientists ID Head of France’s King Henry IV.” (According to the article, “Henry IV was buried in the Basilica of Saint Denis near Paris, but during the frenzy of the French Revolution, the royal graves were dug up and revolutionaries chopped off Henry’s head which was then snatched.”) I don’t suppose the head was in such great condition after all this shuffling about, but it still turned out to be useful. 

With that mummified head, DNA analysis has “solved a mystery that has lasted for almost 220 years,” according to Blair. He quotes a new study in the current issue of Forensic Science International as saying that the comparative analysis with the mummified head of King Henri IV confirms the connection by “…establish[ing] that Henri possessed a rare partial “’Y’” chromosome” and Louis, a “direct male-line descendant, separated by seven generations,” [had] this same Y chromosome. Along with “other [genetic] matches,” the study concluded that “…historically speaking, this forensic DNA data would confirm the identity of the previous Louis XVI sample.”

And you thought scientists were boring. Another DNA mystery solved.

Were Neanderthals capable of creating art? The idea seems shocking to us. After all, we learned in school that these were brutish savages without higher thinking and symbolic thought or expression. The picture of a Neanderthal making hand prints in Spanish caves or making shell necklaces is odd indeed because art is largely “considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, [and] has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe some 40,000 years ago” according to the recent Wired Science article, “First Painters May Have Been Neanderthal Not Human.” (Left:  Panel of Hands in the El Castillo Cave, Spain, dated to 37,300 years old, photo by Pedro Saura.)

A recent Daily News and Analysis article, “Neanderthals Learned to Make Jewelry and Tools from Modern Humans, “ says an international team from the Max Planck Institute in Germany suggests there was a “cultural exchange” between the two species and there is evidence that Neanderthals “learned how to make jewelry and sophisticated tools” from the early ancestors of humans. The reasoning behind this is based on the fact that artistic relics were found near Neanderthal remains but the artwork was “clearly” indicative of human hands. So the conjecture is that it must have been learned.

Whether this is true or not, Neanderthals were creative.  According to Kate Wong, in her recent Scientific American article, “Oldest Cave Paintings May Be Creations of Neanderthals , Not Modern Humans,” according to archeological evidence, Neanderthals  not only wore feathers but “painted their skin” and “made jewelry from teeth and shells.”

 
But was their artistic expression learned? There are those that do not think so. According to Eric Wayner, in a recent Smithsonian article, “Do Feathers Reveal Neanderthal Brain Power?” Neanderthals wore feathers as personal adornments which showed them to be “capable of symbolic expression.”  And Wong says, there are Spanish and French caves thousands of years old with cave paintings long thought to be the artwork of early humans that are now thought to be the work of Neanderthals. Why? She says because of recently refined techniques of radiocarbon dating, that these paintings are “significantly older” than once thought. In fact, some may be older than the date when the first humans arrived in Europe around 41,500 years ago. When there were thought to be only Neanderthals.  “A large red disk” on one of the Spanish caves, El Castillo, is “at a minimum 40,800 years old, making it some 4,000 years older than the Chauvet paintings which were previously thought to be the oldest in the world.”  This and a “stretch of limestone wall with dozens of hands” in the same cave are both thought to possibly be the handiwork of Neanderthal painters because the “estimates” are considered to be at best a conservative “minimum.” According to Ker Than, in the recent National Geographic Daily News article, “The new dates raise the possibility that some of the paintings could have been made by Neanderthals who are thought to have lived in Europe some 30,000 or 40,000 years ago.” 

So if Neanderthals were painters where did they get their creative expression if not from humans? Wong says that both “modern humans and Neanderthals might have inherited their capacity for symbolic thinking from their common ancestor.”  And she says, if that is the case, “the roots of our symbolic culture go back half a million years.”

Jewelry from the Grotte du Renne "reindeer cave" at Arcy-sur-Cure in Central France has long been assigned to Neanderthals, helping rehabilitate them in the picture paleontologists paint of early mankind. But these artifacts have now been questioned thanks to a redating of the lowest levels of the cave, where Neanderthals were presumed active. According to Science Magazine vol. 330, no. 6003, p. 439) in October 2010,

In the new study, a team led by dating expert Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom reports 31 new radiocarbon dates from the Grotte du Renne using novel methods designed to avoid contamination. The dates, obtained on materials such as bone tools and ornaments made of animal teeth, paint a disturbing picture: While upper layers attributed to modern humans clock in at no older than 35,000 years, artifacts from the Châtelperronian levels range from 21,000 years old, when Neandertals were long extinct, to 49,000 years old, before the Châtelperronian began. About one-third of the dates were outside the expected range.

What we don't understand is the dichotomy between "modern humans" and Neanderthals to begin with. If the dating was mixed (contaminated) how can paleontologists be sure, since "modern humans" and Neanderthals were mixed themselves according to all proven genetic analyses. These retests seem to be splitting hairs to prove or disprove pet theories that no longer apply.

It is particularly nonsensical to say, as the archeologist Randall White of New York University said, "This key site should be disqualified from the debate over [Neanderthal] symbolism." The debate over Neanderthals' symbolic intellectual and communicative capacities has already been settled to 99% of the scientific world's satisfaction. It is a non-issue. Paintings, jewelry and art from over 32 Neanderthal grave sites and camps settled it several years ago, and since the Neanderthal genome was sequenced in draft form earlier this year it has been demonstrated that they had the same or similar intellectual genes as "modern humans." In fact, their brains were bigger, so if anything they had a greater capacity to conceptualize the world.

We wish archeologists and science writers would work on their own symbolic thinking a bit and let the bones of tired myths and ethnocentric fallacies rest in peace. And pu-lease spell the word wrongly right. It's N-e-a-n-d-e-r-t-h-a-l. Neandertal is purist and is not going to become popular. Trust us.

Next thing you know they're going to be talking about the Visigots and Ostrogots.

They Probably Always Talked Like That

One of the startling revelations by Stephen Oppenheimer is that a form of English was probably spoken from the beginning of the colonization of the British Isles. Just as genetic bedrock was laid down by the earliest inhabitants, to persist relatively unchanged through subsequent invasions by other peoples like the Romans, the English tongue has been dominant as the language of the land, admitting little admixture with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. (See Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, pp. 303ff.)

Pretty heady stuff, but Mick Harper, author of The Secret History of the English Language (Hoboken:  Melville 2008), goes Oppenheimer one better by proposing that it was not proto-Anglo Saxon that the Ice Age inhabitants of Britain spoke but something very like Chaucer’s pilgrims, only lacking, clearly, later invasive elements due to the Celts, Belgae, Romans and Normans.

Harper compares a sample of Old English (which we are taught is the same as “Anglo-Saxon”) with Middle English and Modern English to show that Anglo-Saxon does not appear to be the same language as English—something all English graduate students suspect from the moment they are forced to read Beowulf for their comps. In the Anglo-Saxon epic (which survives in a single copy turning up in suspicious circumstances in Tudor England and is set in Sweden and never mentions England), “virtually every single word is incomprehensible except by translation,” while in “the early English poetry of Chaucer and Piers Plowman…virtually every single word is comprehensible except for spelling.”

In case you do not believe it, here are the samples:

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,

Metudaes maeti end his modgidanc,

Uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,

Eci dryctin, or astelidae.

(Caedmon, ca. 8^th cent.)

A swerd and bokeler bar he by his side…

A whit cote and a blew hood wered he.

A bagpipe wel koude he blow and sowne,

And therwithal he brought us out of towne.

(Chaucer, The Prologue, 14^th cent.)

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

(T. S. Eliot, 20^th cent.)

Harper’s comment is:  “If Anglo-Saxon/English is one language, it’s unique in the entire annals of languages on this our Earth, since it changes every goddamn word of itself” (p. 44). (Yes, he writes like that, too.)

The Anglo-Saxons were a small, obscure and illiterate tribe from, well, no one is quite sure, but perhaps northeast Germany, who arrived in waves after the Romans abandoned Britain in the fifth century, and who conquered most of the land and held it until the Danes and Norse (ca. 900) and Normans (1066) replaced them as rulers. In Harper’s view, they were just like the previous invaders, the Romans, Belgae and Celts, in having little effect on the language and customs of the populace. Just as there are only a handful of Celtic words in the English language, there was little impact on the linguistic bedrock of the kingdom the Anglo-Saxons carved out before they too had had their day. The fact that they left few monuments is unsurprising.

Which brings us to questions about the depth and breadth of Celtic heritage in Britain. If you are a Celtic fan (I’m not referring to the basketball team) you will not want to read The Secret History of the English Language. This book will disabuse you of many cherished notions. In Harper’s view, the Celts were just one of the alternating foreign conquerors of the long-suffering English-speaking peoples. Their numbers were few, even on the Continent, and they left little genetic or cultural footprint except on the “Celtic fringe” where they were squeezed in their final days.  

England has always been England. It’s always spoken English. And France has always spoken French. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."We will have to save the French linguistic heresy for another post.

If you like the unusual and provocative ideas of M. J. Harper, who lives in London, check out the community of people who have bid farewell to the dunciad of academic research and unleashed their own personal pursuit of truth on a variety of intellectual topics at The Applied Epistemology Library. You can browse on the sly but must register (for free) to post your own comments and questions on threads.