A genome study finds ancestry sorted by language

Jennifer L. Baker, Charles N. Rotimi and Daniel Shriner published a study in Scientific Reports in 2017 examining how human genetic variation is distributed. They found that ancestry corresponds to the languages people speak and that race works badly as a way of classifying genomes. Linguists and anthropologists had reached that conclusion by their own routes decades earlier, and the genetic data now agrees with them. The result carries most weight in Africa, which holds more human genetic diversity than any other part of the world. Speakers of Nilo-Saharan languages across the Sudan belt, Cushitic speakers in the Horn, Niger-Congo speakers through West and Central Africa and Khoisan speakers in the south are each varied within themselves and overlap heavily with one another. Sorting them into races produces categories with no biological content. What holds any of these groupings together is history: migration, settlement, marriage and the exchange of goods and words, all of which move genes along the same paths that carry language.

Cholera had never been recorded in Haiti before United Nations troops introduced it in the autumn of 2010 through defective sanitation at one of their bases. Conservative counts put the dead at ten thousand and the sick at close to a million, about a tenth of the population, and researchers who have followed the epidemic believe the real numbers are several times that. In August 2016, after more than five years of denials, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that the organisation had a role in the outbreak and promised a new response within two months. In December he said that the United Nations apologised to the Haitian people, and set out a plan to eliminate the disease and compensate victims. Alongside the apology the organisation restated its legal immunity from claims by anyone the epidemic had harmed. What forced the shift was an internal report by the special rapporteur Philip Alston, who condemned the cholera policy in terms the institution could not absorb quietly.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.

Juliana Deguis Pierre was born in the Dominican Republic in 1984. Her parents lived and worked on a sugar plantation and neither had legal residence, and under the law of the time she was issued a birth certificate. In 2008, aged twenty four, she went to an office to request her cedula, the national identity card. The staff refused it and cancelled her birth certificate on the ground that both her parents carried Haitian surnames. In 2013 the new Constitutional Court took her appeal as one of its first cases and ruled that she had never been entitled to citizenship at all, that everyone in the same position should lose theirs, and that the records of people registered as Dominican between 1929 and 2007 should be audited and moved into the register for foreigners. The court also ordered the government to produce a plan within ninety days for migrants without papers.