Originally posted by Linda
Vance, you made a comment about being skeptical that a trait such as shovel teeth would be so common among mixed blooded people. If it’s a dominant trait it could be extremely common. There’s a story about Croatia. It was originally populated by the Illyrians who were destroyed by the Slavs, all but a few women who were absorbed into the population. Archeologists could pinpoint the invasion because a particular skull type disappeared from the burials in that century. But 500 years later, the skull type had returned. It was a dominant trait. So . . . if shovel teeth are also dominant they could become a marker for Indian descent in a multi-racial population, even when the degree of Indian blood is extremely small. All it takes is enough time for the trait to percolate through the population.
You know, after talking to Vance about SSI, I took a quick look on the net and saw that an anthropologist, who is also a dentist, was doing some work in a Carribean Island, and noted that much of the population had SSI. This was received as good news to some people on that island who felt that their Indian heritage had been overlooked, and that they now had a genetic marker to “prove” their significant NA heritage. Naturally these people were of mixed blood.
Linda writes:
Linda, I think you should just forget the “melungeon’ word as related to these traits and just consider them Native. That’s what I’ve always understood. Certainly the epicanthic fold to your eyelid is a Native trait.
genetic drift will always win in the end. There are a cluster of traits associated with NA heritage…you may have some of them, all of them, none of them….OR your children may show up with some/none/all. To digress here, I remember Vance writing about skin color at one point….even to anthropologists, skin color is not a determinant of anything. The reason being, there is too much variation even among close relatives, neighbors who live in and have lived for long periods in, close quarters. Anthroplogists threw out skin color over 80 years ago. In the past a scale of color had been developed, from the Old World, to use as a descriptive tool among anthropologists in describing new populations ( newly discovered that is). It didn’t work. The range was so great even in village populations, that all it could do was give a more detailed description of one individual. It was useless to be of any use even in a limited…very limited population.
There is also the question of dominance and frequency. Blue eyes are a recessive trait, brown eyes a dominant one. However, the frequency of the blue eyed allel…hope I spelled that right…is greater than the brown eyed one…this means that it will be carried as a recessive trait and show up at the first chance it gets. Example: one parent with brown eyes has a blue and a brown gene. The second parent has two blue eye genes. Out of 4 children, the odds are that three will have blue eyes. Three out of four. Even though the brown is dominant, the blue will be passed on with greater frequency.
Looking forward to seeing you this Sunday, Linda!
Regards,
Lynne