Bolívar's bones revisited

The Venezuelan military regime announced some details about a new maosoleum that is going to hold Bolívar's bones "for eternity". This construction has taken almost 20 million euros from the national treasury at the official rate and is going to cost more, much more. This is going to be an extension to the already existing National Pantheon of Venezuela, now against all kinds of earthquakes. I suppose it is going to be against tsunamis as well.

Meanwhile the regime ordered all scientists working in the analysis of what is pressumed to be Bolívar's bones to be completely hermetic about the findings. This is top secret. Those scientists are trying to find out if some of the conspiracy theories Chávez has in mind about Bolívar's death are true. 

Fat chance you get any news if you ask at the IVIC or to the US and Spanish specialists in charge. Why? Because Chávez is using the whole issue for political purposes and he wants to be the one to reveal an interpretation of the findings when it suits him.

Remember: Chávez is Bolívar's Sibyl. One of the things he loves the most about his job, apart from the possibility of traveling around for free for months and forcing millions of Venezuelans to listen to him every week is to play as Bolívar's medium on Earth, specially while holding Bolívar's gold sword, which is now under his special custody while it was in a museum before.

It would be nice if the democratic forces publicly asked Chávez to stop using bones for political purposes and let scientists say whatever they have to say now and go to work on something else.

So far we have heard those bones do seem to come from the Venezuelan XIX century caudillo and greatest self-promoter of all times and that the original owner of those bones had mostly European ancestors but was of mixed raced (male Y chromosome haplogroup and - I guess- native American mDNA as most Venezuelans, perhaps with some African background). This is just what you would expect from anyone whose ancestors had been living in Venezuela for several generations.

Of course, Chávez will be trying to interpret this last part in the ways he needs. I wonder if he is also trying to see who the closest common ancestor between himself and Bolívar was.

The First Nations in our blood

Map showing how main female genetic markers spread

Population genetics has been providing new insights into where we all came from, what roads we took to settle the world and how each of our many ethnic groups interacted with each other. Very little research has been carried out in Venezuela compared to Europe. Still, Venezuelan scientists have carried out some interesting studies. They confirm a lot of what historians knew but they also provide new details that could help us fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of the past.

I have written before about some of those studies. Basically, they confirm what most Venezuelans but our president knew: the vast majority of Venezuelans are very mixed, most of our male ancestry is of European origin and most of our female ancestry is native American and there is sub-Saharan influence on both sides as well.

Native Americans keeping a distinctive ethnic group are a tiny minority in Venezuela these days. I have talked a little bit about those groups. A lot of Venezuelans have some native American background, though, even if they look very European or African or anything else. Still, little do they know about that background. We eat arepas, we eat cachapas, we use some Indian words in our Spanish (less than Bolivians, Peruvians or Mexicans, but still some like cuaima or catire) but we don't know much more about our American ancestors. As Alexander von Humboldt noted already after his 1799-1801 trip through Venezuela, most Venezuelans have lost track of their history, their European, their native American and their African history.

The historical records tell us that there were some Indian groups around the Tacarigua Lake, some others in what is now Caracas, some others in Margarita Island. We know about some of those groups have the same language and others belonging to very different groups with very different looks and customs.

Very roughly, we know a lot of the West of what is now Venezuela was populated by Arawak groups (Arawak being a very broad term, like Romance groups or Slavic groups) and a lot of the East was populated by Carib groups (also a very broad term). We also know there were isolated groups that spoke languages completely different to all the others. We still have in Venezuela about 30 languages that represent several language families, quite a lot of variety compared to what you see in Europe. The native Americans are now mostly in remote regions on the West, on the East and South. Still you see the Arawak groups more to the West, the Carib more to the East and both in the South, but there are exceptions, like Carib Yukpas in Zulia, and there are many groups that have very different languages to all the rest, like the Waraos.

Some Venezuelan scientists presented a paper this year where they showed a first study on "Mitochondrial diversiy in Northwest Venezuela" and "Implications for Probable Prehispanic Migratory Routes".

Dinorah Castro de Guerra, Figuera Pérez, Izaguirre, Rodríguez Larralde, Guerrera Castro and other Venezuelan researchers chose 4 communities in Northwestern Venezuela: three very small towns in Northwestern state Falcón and Barquisimeto, a big city and capital of Lara (to the South of Falcón). They selected their samples from people whose grandparents were all born in the same town, signifying people who were likely to have very strong roots with the place.















The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is always inherited through the mother and the Y chromosome through the father. A certain pattern of DNA sequences in the mtDNA or Y chromosome can be used to identify a a genetic group, a haplogroup. In this case, most of the mtDNA haplogroups (refering to the mother's mother's mother's...) were of native American original, albeit there were also instances of sub-Saharan African and European groups.
This contrasts with the markers on the Y chromosomes, which show, as usual in the Americas, that Venezuelans have on the paternal side mostly European haplogroups.

There are 4 native American mtDNA haplogroups and they are known simply as A, B, C and D. H is the most typical of European populations, J is typical of Middle-East, Northern Africa and Europe, U is mostly in the Old World outside sub-Saharan Africa and L and L3 are mainly found among sub-Saharan populations and recent descendants (like slaves).

Here I plot the mtDNA haplogroup distribution for every town in this study.

Some of the things we can observe:

1. 

• As in previous studies, the Indian contribution is the most frequent on the female side
  
• the European maternal contribution in traditional populations in those towns is much lower than in the main cities as in the capital (see what I wrote on a previous study for Venezuela's capital here)
• Macanillas is a place where people apparently have very unique haplotypes and in general there seem to be a lot of unidentifiable haplogroups in this study (errors? something special about hardly studied groups?).
  
• The African maternal contribution is slightly higher in the most costal village, which is not surprising for anyone who has been to Venezuela
• It seems as if on the coast (Macuquita) haplogroup D is particularly represented, which could hint at Indian populations that differ more from the other 3 locations

All this should be taken with a pinch of caution. The samples were taken from 81 persons in Barquisimeto, 25 in Macuquita, 58 in Churuguara and 29 in Macanillas.

I will continue in a future post with some proposals for future studies on Venezuelan population genetics.

Venezuelan colours II

Venezuela is very mixed, as we have often mentioned, but: how mixed is it precisely? What differences are there exactly across social groups?

Population geneticists help to investigate how homo sapiens expanded from Africa to settle the whole world and how different groups intermingled. One of the main sources they have are non-recombining pieces of DNA. These are genetic markers we all get from one side of our ancestors only. Most of the DNA information in our cells are a "random" mixture of both parents' genes: it is not possible to know but some parts get transmitted almost unchanged from father to sons across many generations or from mother to daughters and sons. They are patterns that are recognizable after thousands of years. Only from time to time there are minor mutations and those mutations help us see how different branches of mankind appeared.

The markers on the males' side are patterns of DNA-bases found in the Y chromosomes. I have the same sequences as my dad but for very minor variations. The markers on the female sie are DNA bases found in our mitochondria, little structures we all have in all our cells and which we get exclusively from our mothers. We all have the spitting image of our mother's mitochondria.
As populations in previous times stayed put in some places and did not mingle randomly with others, geneticists have been able to find haplogroups that are shared by all common ancestors of an individual many years ago. Things get much more complicated than that, but basically, with those haplogroups we can track down a whole line, either on the paternal side or on the maternal side of each man and on the maternal side of every woman on Earth.





Like your mother










The Y: like dad's







Sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans, Asians and native Americans have particular haplogroups. If you see a "sub-Saharan" male haplogroup in an European, this means that the father of the father of the father...of that European (a male as only males have Y chromosomes, unless we are talking about very unusual cases) came from sub-Saharan Africa in recent history. The same goes on the female side.

I am Venezuelan and as I wrote in previous posts, I have the usual admixture. My paternal haplogroup appeared in the Fertile crescent around 18000 years ago and it is present in lots of Lebanese, Iraqis, Syrians, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Southern Italians, Jews and to a lesser extent Spaniards. I got it from there. My mother's haplogroup is sub-Saharan and most likely a female ancestor of mine was a slave brought to Venezuela between 1528 and 1810 (it could have come indirectly through Spain as 1-3% of Spaniards also have sub-Saharan female haplogroups, but that is less likely). That lady was from West Africa. That is only part of my background. As my family has been in Venezuela for a long time, it is almost certain there is native American blood there as well and from other parts of Europe (two of them I know) and Africa. One has 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents and 2 times n ancestors n generations ago.

Now back to the study carried out by Rodríguez-Larrade. The blood samples were from 50 and 60 individuals who were in a public and a private maternity respectively.

The results for male haplogroup origin in the public maternity (where the dad of the dad of the dad of the dad...of the males came from) showed this:














The results for male haplogroup in the private maternity showed this:

A lot of the people in public hospitals are people from families who came from the countryside to the capital in the last 50 years. About 40% of the grandparents of the people in the private clinic were born in Europe. As the study says, "Many of these migrants, mostly Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, helped to develop economic activities related to commerce and construction, activities that rapidly introduced them to the high socioeconomic level. On the other hand, most of those individuals at the low socioeconomic level are a consequence of rural-urban internal migration; they seem to be more representative of the traditional Venezuelan population. This reveals that the identification of the grandparents' geographic origin is an important methodological aspect to take into account in genetic studies related to the reconstruction of historical events."

Still, in both cases we see the European component on the male side is the dominant by far. Male Indians were killed or outbred in previous centuries, whereas the conqueror or richer settler reproduced more, as all around the world.

On the background we got from our mothers, we have a completely different picture. The background in the public maternity looked like this:














The genetic background on the female side in the private clinic looked like t his:














Let's hope in the future there won't be such differences and our public hospitals become as good as those in Northern Europe. Let's hope any background differences between public and private clinics disappear.

In any case, we sum up saying Venezuelans are, genetically speaking, mostly European on the paternal side and mostly native American on the maternal side, with a sub-Saharan component on both sides (as my maternal haplogroup shows) but any mixture is part of Venezuela and most Venezuelans have a bit of recent background from every continent. There are obvious ethnic differences, although smaller than elsewhere: the poor of the present tend to be descendants of the poor of yore, who tended to be more descendants of Indians and slaves, although it is a matter of some degrees. There has been a lot of mobility in Venezuela for many decades now, probably more than in many other places, although not as we would want. The main reason is the little support given to the quality of education of the poorest, something that hasn't changed.

The cool thing is that a Venezuelan of German or Lebanese, Japanese or Peruvian parents is just that: a Venezuelan with foreign parents, but a Venezuelan 100%. She is also going to eat her arepas and cachapas, she will have the same Venezuelan music, use the Latin American Spanish adorned with those Indian, African and Italian words

Genetics can take us further and teach us more about the history of Venezuela. We will write about this in future posts. But it does not take genetics for us to know we need better education for the poor. This will help us reduce all kinds of social differences and get us on the road to sustainable development.