It’s official: there’s no such thing as “indigenous people”. Not, at least, unless you’re a natural-born member of the Khoe-San groups of Southern Africa. Everywhere else – you’re just an immigrant. A “coloniser”, if you will.
It’s science.
As scientists find more ancient human DNA, sample more modern DNA and develop more ways to analyze this genetic material, it’s revealing a lot about how early humans moved – and moved and moved – around the world, coming to inhabit nearly every swath of land.
So after thousands and thousands of years of nearly constant migration, are there any people out there who have never left the spot where it’s thought Homo sapiens evolved? Put another way, is there anybody on Earth who isn’t an immigrant?
The answer is going to make a lot of troughers very, very angry.
“From a scientific point of view, maybe the only people that you could consider not to be immigrants would be some Khoe-San-speaking groups in southern Africa,” said Austin Reynolds, an assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University in Texas who specializes in human population genetics.
The designation Khoe-San (pronounced coy-sawn) refers to certain African communities in the areas of Botswana, Namibia, Angola and South Africa who speak similar languages with distinctive clicking consonants, Reynolds told Live Science.
So, sorry “world’s oldest living culture” – you’re not.
Sorry, indigenous Americans – you’re not, either.
Sorry, Te Paati Maori – you’re absolutely not indigenous to New Zealand.
You’re all just another boatload of filthy colonisers.
You’ve got to respect the science, remember?
Reynolds said there are two main factors indicating that Khoe-San groups may be non-migratory descendants of original humans: They live in the place where it’s likely humans first appeared, and they have a high amount of genetic diversity. A good way to understand why high genetic diversity indicates original ancestry is by comparing genes to a bowl of M&Ms, Reynolds said. Handfuls taken out of the bowl – ie people who broke off from the original human population – might have only a couple M&Ms colors in them, but the original bowl will have all the colors.
Even the scientists seem to be aware of just what a can of worms they’re opening, here. Note the unconvincing back-pedalling:
Yet despite the Khoe-San groups’ proximity to the proverbial “cradle of humankind” and their significant genetic diversity, identifying them as the last genetically aboriginal peoples is not cut and dry.
Firstly, researchers don’t know for sure that southern Africa is the cradle of humankind. Some scientists think humans first evolved in East Africa, said Reynolds, and scientists haven’t amassed enough archaeological evidence in either area to be completely certain just where Homo sapiens first came on the scene.
There’s even a possibility people evolved in western Africa.
Either way, it absolutely remains a fact that anyone whose ancestry lies outside Africa is not indigenous.
In fact, there may be no real indigenes, anywhere on the planet.
Mark Stoneking, a molecular geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig […] doesn’t think there are any folks left on Earth who aren’t – scientifically, at least – immigrants.
“People have always been on the move,” Stoneking said. His recent genetic research on populations across Asia has shown that there’s a touch of just about everyone in everyone else. “All human populations have been in contact with others,” including the Khoe-San, he said, denoted by evidence in their genes, their cultures and their languages.
Live Science
Now, all this may sound like I’m just having a bit of fun at the expense of “indigenous” troughers, but it in fact raises some very, very serious challenges to one of the overweening hobby horses of contemporary politics: “indigeneity”.
Nowhere more so than in New Zealand.
The entire co-governance agenda of the Ardern government is supposedly based on “Indigenous Rights”. But, if there are no indigenes in New Zealand, the entire agenda is founded on an anti-science lie.
And Jacinda is always telling us that we have to respect the science.