Are the Bushmen the most genetically distant ethnic group from the Western Europeans?

[Teatisfilius]

As an Italian, I wanted to understand which is the most divergent population from me (Australian aborigens, Andamanese islanders, African pygmies?), so I started to surf the Internet and try to read studies published by scientists. I found different articles, some of which used the principal component analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis), which is based on the single-nucleotide polymorphisms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-nucleotide_polymorphism), while others used the clustering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering), but I was attracted by this image.

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This research (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049438) was published thanks to the University College of Dublin, whose experts analyzed the genomes of 2227 individuals of 51 populations from all the continents using the dataset of Human Genome Diversity Project and HapMap, and a new method (Ancestry Mapper) focused on some Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms which assigns each individual to his ancestry. Using all selected 289,160 SNPs they calculated the distance between each individual and the different groups, which are represented by the the individual with the smallest median of the euclidean distances to all other members of the same group. The map shows the normalized genetic similarity between the different individuals who are considered the “best example” of a single group, so you can see five main continental groups: Africa/North Africa & Middle East, Europe, Central-South Asia/East Asia/Americas/Oceania. Even if their closest “kins” are Mbuti Pygmies (another hunter-gatherer African population), in this study the genetic isolation from other human groups of San people is clear, also because it is said that: “Both San and Papuan are shown to be quite distant from any other HGDP reference”, but there are also other isolated populations, such as Mbuti and Biaka Pygmies, Kalash, Pima, Colombian, Karatiana, Surui, Melanesian. In particular if you examine the Table S1. (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0049438.s010), you will see that Italians show the highest level of genetic distance with Bushmen, generally followed by Pygmies.

The Bushmen (https://www.britannica.com/topic/San), who are traditionally classified in the capoid race (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capoid_race) by anthropologist, live as hunter-gatherers in Southern Africa, especially in the Kalahari Desert, but their population is limited to 100.000 individuals and according to some statistics there are only 15.000 full-blooded bushmen, because they were exterminated by Bantu peoples and Europeans. According to some other studies (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/5255229/Most-ancient-race.html), their genetic variability shows that they may be the oldest ethnic group of the humankind. In addition the controversial psychologist Richard Lynn, who measured the IQ of different human groups, said that they are the ethnic group with the lowest intelligence (followed by African pygmies and Australian aborigens), but I am honestly skeptical about his method to establish the supposed cognitive gap, because I do not know it and I think that he should have examined bushmen adopted by white people of the middle class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZ11VVdP_M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ywkv3RUpMc

[Peterski]

First of all, as an Italian you are not a Western European but a Southern European.

As for the Bushmen, they do not sound like retards that Lynn claims them to be:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKJ9mNRRYaY


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5_OGa_Ktek

[Teatisfilius]

First of all, as an Italian you are not a Western European but a Southern European.

As for the Bushmen, they do not sound like retards that Lynn claims them to be[...]
Yes, sometimes the word Western Europeans is used to indicate a group which includes the populations of Southern Europe, like Italians and Spanishes. I am skeptical about the supposed intellectual gap of San peoples, also because they speak the click languages, which are very complex and difficult to learn.

[Aldaris]

I am skeptical about the supposed intellectual gap of San peoples, also because they speak the click languages, which is very complex and difficult to learn.

Me too. Those people aren't used to work with numbers, geometrical shapes and other abstract patterns at all. I'll present an analogy. Imagine a chess club and a guy with intelligence level comparable to the guys in chess club, who has never even heard of chess before. Then, explain the rules to him in five minutes and let him play with the others. He'd surely perform extremely badly compared to them and may even seem semi-retarded to them. Yet, we've established, he's just as smart as they are. If you don't have the basics in something, you cannot hope to reach comparable level to someone who does, in most cases. I think, something similar is going on here. Another piece of evidence, that they aren't as dumb as presented is that they are performing tasks, which they couldn't, if they had average IQ of 64.

[Cristiano viejo]

First of all, as an Italian you are not a Western European but a Southern European.


Both terms are not exclusive, you Eastern European.

[Teatisfilius]

Me too. Those people aren't used to work with numbers, geometrical shapes and other abstract patterns at all. I'll present an analogy. Imagine a chess club and a guy with intelligence level comparable to the guys in chess club, who has never even heard of chess before. Then, explain the rules to him in five minutes and let him play with the others. He'd surely perform extremely badly compared to them and may even seem semi-retarded to them. Yet, we've established, he's just as smart as they are. If you don't have the basics in something, you cannot hope to reach comparable level to someone who does, in most cases. I think, something similar is going on here. Another piece of evidence, that they aren't as dumb as presented is that they are performing tasks, which they couldn't, if they had average IQ of 64.

You have pointed out another problem of Lynn's work, becuase the definition of intelligence is different among ethnic groups which have to live in a so different enviroment. However the main problem is: how can you measure the IQ of people educated in a desert and say that they are biologically less intelligent?

[Cristiano viejo]

how can you measure the IQ of people educated in a desert and say that they are biologically less intelligent?
Precisely they are less intelligent because they are educated in a desert.