I am very interested in history. But I am limiting it to groups high in rh negative blood. The Celts and Basques are known to be among the highest. The Berbers once were said to have 40% rh negative blood, but that was based on a study from the 1950s and the same group has since been re-examined and the percentage of rh negatives was less than 10% among them. So I am going to ignore them until we have new reliable data. Instead my focus has shifted towards the Bedouins of the Sinai Peninsula with said percentages of 18-30.
Inbreeding among Sinai Bedouins is also responsible for hearing impairment being common.
I have previously posted information regarding the y-DNA of Proto-Basques being replaced by Proto-Celtic y-DNA. Which makes it even more interesting for me to look back. Who were the Proto-Basques and what percentage of rh negatives were among them? Who were the Proto-Celts before entering the Pyrenees?
On one of his shows, television innovator Regis Philbin has mentioned that his blood type is O negative and that he is of Basque ancestry.
There are groups in other areas high in rh negative blood like a district in Saudi Arabia where almost 30% are rh negative. The Bedouins are high in y-DNA J1c indicating strong relations to Cohanim Jews and Sumerian ancestry from the 3rd Dynasty of Ur. There is a strong connection between the Proto-Basques and the ancient Sumerians as well. And also groups of men from the Caucasus if you want to focus on their original y-DNA. But since the Celts are the focus of this post, let’s move right into them:
This map shows the major migrations and timelines of R1b tribes. The Yamna are among them. It looks like they arrived in the Basque region around 150 years before getting to the British Isles. It could have been that in the few generations between, the latter migrants’ generation was lower in rh- frequencies due to mixing in the meantime.
When looking at the Yamna people from the Steppe, we have the highest representation of their y-DNA in Ireland and Scotland. And there are reports that their percentage of rh negatives may have been somewhere around 40%.
If we compute expected phenotypic frequencies, this suggests that around around 65% of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers would have been type O, compared to around 40% in present-day Europeans, and around 40% of Steppe-ancestry individuals would have been Rh-, compared to around 24% of hunter-gatherers, 4% of early farmers, and about 16% of present-day Europeans.
If this is correct, it might indicate Early Anatolian Farmers with their low percentage of 4% lowering the overall percentages of rh negatives in early Europe unless there were other factors playing a role.
Yamnayan DNA tested by Haak (2015), Wilde (2014), Mathieson (2015) showed that Yamna people (or at least the few elite samples concerned) had predominantly brown eyes, dark hair, and had a skin colour that was moderately light, lighter than Mesolithic Europeans, but somewhat darker than that of the modern North Europeans. This is not unexpected considering that these samples had about 25% of recent admixture from the Iranian Plateau (before the Indo-European migrations brought Northeast European genes to the region), which would have darkened their pigmentation. Other tests have confirmed that the vast majority of Mesolithic Europeans had blue eyes, and the high incidence of red hair among Northwest Europeans (who have the highest percentage of Yamna ancestry) as well as in the Volga-Ural region and in ancient Chinese depictions of the Tocharians from the Tarim Basin strongly suggest that red hair was found among Yamnayans, and that the genes for red hair (which also include some mutations for fair hair) were spread by R1b Indo-Europeans.
The mtDNA frequencies between the Yamna and the group which once arrived in the British isles differs. Sumer, the Caucasus and the Black Sea region where the Yamnas once were are close to one another, so the thesis that there were high-rh-negative regions and tribes present makes a lot of sense. The claim that rh negative blood originated in Western Europe however does not. The Bedouins don’t show DNA indication of any migration from Western Europe.
More than 27% of the more than 10,000 people tested in Northern Ireland show up as being rh negative.The estimated mtDNA frequencies of the Yamna people.Archaeologists believe that Stonehenge was constructed from 3000 BC to 2000 BC. Likely at a time the Yamna’s have already made it to the isles.
