The end of the rowing sagas

Earlier this month I had noted that there were a couple of boats trying to row/sail down the Northwest Passage. It turns out that my awareness of the number was off by a number of boats - there were several others that I was not aware of.

However the ice came early and with darkness approaching, and the days and nights getting colder, both the two that I was following - the Arctic Joule and the Fairmont's Passion ended their attempts at Cambridge Bay. In both cases this was about half-way along their intended route, but among other things early encounters with ice slowed their progress, and they both called it quits yesterday - coincidently arriving at Cambridge Bay within hours of one another.

Sail World notes that there is 60% more ice in the Arctic this year than there was at this time last year, and that both ends of the Northwest Passage are, therefore, already blocked trapping those trying to make it through.

Figure 1. Locations along the Northwest Passage.

I have taken the Sail World map and added the position of Cambridge Bay and the two target end points for the ventures. The Arctic Joule was heading for Pond Inlet, while Fairmont's Passion was aiming for Resolute Bay. I suspect that news stories commenting on this indication that the Arctic is clearly not ice free will be somewhat sparse. And few will note that the Inuit made it a thousand years ago, establishing the Thule colony in Greenland from their origins in Alaska.
There is really nothing else to say.

Rowing the Northwest Passage - Part 2

The rowers that I have been watching as they seek to traverse the Northwest Passage are currently making good progress and have just crossed from the Northwest Territories into Nunavut.

Figure 1. Position of the Arctic Joule on Saturday evening, August 10, 2013.

What I had not realized is that they are not alone in this sort of venture. Coming just behind them now is a Norseboat, Fairmont’s Passion, in which just two men are using both oars and sail to try roughly the same passage.

Figure 2. Position of Fairmont’s Passion on Saturday evening, August 10, 2013

At present they appear to be less than 30 miles apart, with the laggard moving a little faster at present, due to the wind.

The ultimate path of the Beyond the Circle team ends in Resolute rather than Pond Inlet, so it is a shorter trip, but already one with some adventure.

Figure 3. Beyond the Circle Route.

The adventure came last Sunday when the boat entered Amundsen Bay and encountered stiff winds and pack ice. At that point they met the yacht “Anna” which was sailing from Alaska to Greenland, having made the reverse trip several years ago. After meeting yet a fourth boat, this one going the other way that warned of ice, Anna and Fairmont’s Passion struggled through that ice in Franklin Bay while sailing through a thick fog.

They are now out of the ice, and enjoying beautiful weather, making 30 miles in the last day.

Let’s hope that they have good fortune!

Crossing the Northwest Passage by Boat

I have always been fascinated by those willing to prove their point by actually going out and doing something. It does not necessarily mean that I agree with their point, but one has to recognize their willingness to put themselves in danger to validate it. Thus I have been caught into watching the travails of the four folk who are currently trying to row through the Northwest Passage.

Figure 1. Planned passage of the Mainstream vessel “The Arctic Joule.”

One of the wonders of modern technology is that the passage of the four men in a rowing boat can be updated, at intervals as short as ten minutes, as the crew battle across the northern coast of Canada. Their goal is to row from Inuvik at the Mackenzie River delta to Pond Inlet, across the coast from Greenland.

The boat is an especially designed rowing boat where the four men take shifts of 2 rowers at a time (on up to 4-hour stints in good weather, 20-minutes in bad) to move along the route.

Figure 2. Boat Movement on Friday.

The reason for my interest in this apart from monitoring the passage of folk through truly dangerous conditions where they are navigating through ice-laden waters in fog, and with the wind rising, is that they are seeking to show that boats can now make the passage. What I found particularly of note in their recent passage is that, on Friday, they dropped in on a group of beluga whale hunters.
Note this post has been updated twice, with the latest (saturday night) raising the question as to whether the row is being abandoned. (Later) However, though they did backtrack for a while, they later resumed their voyage.

It is particularly interesting in that the visit to the whale hunters relates back, a thousand years to when the Inuit made the same passage from Alaska chasing the bowhead whale. (It should be recognized that this reason for the move has been challenged). However the current tradition of hunting the beluga whale seems to overcome many of those objections.

The more prevalent view that the Thule Inuit moved across the northern coast of Canada chasing the migration of the bowhead whales is evidenced by the use of whale bones in providing the rafters for their dwellings.

They arrived in Greenland as one of the waves of immigrants that came in concert with the warming periods (earlier groups had arrived during the Roman Warming Period – the Dorset- and the preceding Minoan Warm Period).

Figure 3. Passage of the Thule Inuit from Alaska (Canadian Museum of Civilization )

They were thus in place and the succeeding arrivals fought the earlier arrivals and the Vikings who showed up around 930 AD and who considered the natives to be skraelings.

Both of these arrivals suggest that the Northwest Passage was more open, and freely accessible in those earlier warming periods that it remains today,

The current difficulties in terms of wind and ice floes are making it hard for the current team of four healthy men to make the passage, and they have had to drag their boat for a number of miles already, rather than face the conditions offshore.

Consider then that a thousand years ago the tribes brought their families with them, and made the long migration using the umiaks of the time. The archeological evidence mainly relates to the passage of the Thule Inuit, but the experience of the current team, though praiseworthy in its intent, does perhaps hint that conditions were somewhat easier a thousand and two thousand years ago, in what might have been the warmer waters of those times, when something other than rising carbon dioxide levels warmed the Earth.

UPDATE (Saturday 12:38 pm) - There is now a video up that shows that they are stuck on a beach surrounded by ice and with heavy seas, so that they are waiting where they are until the conditions improve. This has happened before and is putting them well behind schedule.

Figure 4. Boat onshore surrounded by ice. (Mainstream Last First)

UPDATE 2 - 11:13 pm Saturday. I wonder if they have perhaps given up - since the recent track tonight shows them heading back along their earlier route.

Figure 5. Boat track as it appeared on Saturday night (Mainstream Last First)

UPDATE 3: No they were just getting some headroom, and the voyage is now continuing, although it looks as though they are being driven back by a tide or some local condition, after making good progress.

Figure 6. Boat position as shown at noon on Sunday.

From Cro-Magnon man to Celt

There are now a couple of different themes running through this short series of posts on DNA and what it means in the search for our ancestors. I had started out wondering when Europeans first arrived in America, and found that there appear to be more possible answers to that question than I had first thought. I must also confess that I had not realized until last week the scale of the warfare that was a common feature of life in the Paleo-Indian times. (Though I should not have been surprised, since it was still common at the time that the Pilgrims showed up, as the story of the Quawpaw peoples – who now live around Baxter Springs, Kansas – can attest). But while this is going to remain the main theme of the thread, the changes in the analysis of DNA over the last few years has brought some other surprises with it. This means that it is becoming possible to be more refined in tracking ancestral paths that was the case even five years ago.

To illustrate what I mean, let me expand a little using some of my own results to help explain the development, and then this might help in understanding some of the debate when I come back to the main theme later.

There are now three different places that scientists can look at a DNA sample. There is the basic Y-chromosome (Y-DNA), which provides the paternal line, but which is not passed down through women. Then there is the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which comes down from the female line alone, and which goes to all children. With refinement it is now possible to look at the entirety of the DNA string and what is known as the autosomal DNA (auDNA), using new techniques to specifically focus on different regions, and, from historical records, to start to build a broader family history. Those investigations are beginning to show that there may be many medical benefits, coming from a better understanding of how the body works, and how DNA acts as the control.

I am going to cover those latter topics in posts that follow this, but for today I am going to return to the Y-DNA and the paternal, or patriarchal line. This is not meant as a personal history, but some background might help with context for the example. I am a Summers, of whom it estimated that there are some 15,564 individuals in the UK.

Figure 1. Distribution of the Summers families in the United Kingdom (Dynastree

Our group comes from the area around the village of Eglingham, in Northumberland where the First Duke of Northumberland (Hugh Smithson, who took the family name of Percy) founded a coal mine at Tarry, about 1750, with 9 workers, including a Grey, an Embleton and my relative George.

The region had, historically, been a mess, since it was the ground over which the Scots and English fought for hundreds of years until 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, following the death of Elizabeth. Bands of my Scottish ancestors (Littles, Maxwells, Moffats etc) came through the hills to steal the cattle and everything else from anyone they could find. Of course the Percys then led bands back, to burn, loot and destroy in return. Both sides of the current family lived through the time of the Border Reivers, and were likely participants albeit on opposite sides.

The current number of Summers is a little overwhelming, but looking at the lower density in the County, and that as one goes back in time, so the numbers of individuals drops considerably, and can focus back down to just one or two individuals. Bryan Sykes did a remarkable study which showed that the Celtic hero Somerled, who died in 1164, has had 500,000 descendants since (including the clans McDonald, McDougall, and McAlister). The lineage can be found here.

So how can this be proved, how can the different branches of the clan be distinguished, and how can I apply that to my own case?

Well the answer lies in the structure of the Y-DNA. Within the Y chromosome are a number of regions where a particular sequence repeats a number of times. For example (to quote Smolenyak) the four base pattern GATA might be repeated five times: GATA GATA GATA GATA GATA. But sometimes when this occurs the exact number of repetitions changes. This is particularly prone to happen when the number of repetitions gets to be more than ten where, as an example, one might find that the ten-sequence suddenly, in the next generation, becomes an eleven-count, or perhaps drops to a nine count. A generational marker thus exists, and it appears to be one where these changes can occur about every 10 to 20 generations. (Say 2-300 years). These “stutters” are known as Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) and they have become the definitive way of identifying much smaller groups of people, within the broader classification of a haplogroup.

Because the numbers can change at different marker sites at random intervals, it is only when comparing across a number of different sites that one can establish who might be related to who. Consider the results from a group of individuals, looking at the number of repeats which are counted at different markers along the chromosome. (The marker site locations are standardized and given at the top of the table).

Figure 2. Short Tandem Repeat counts for 12 individuals that all share the same basic haplogroup designation (R1b1a2) but with varying count numbers at different marker sites. The different shades show variations from the numbers of the defined count for this particular lineage, given as the bolder numbers on the top line.

To return to the McDonald lineage, as time passed the number of repetitions at different locations changed in an individual, and his children, so that different patterns (as in the above) developed. However they did not necessarily follow the divisions of the clan, though once separate any changes in the counts would be restricted to the line in which they occurred.

Figure 3. Variations in the Y-DNA counts as the branches of the Somerled lineage have developed over the centuries. (The values are the sites and the count changes at different marker locations). (Clan Donald)

For the nerds among us it is interesting that the Clan study shows

The calculated haplotype of Good John is the same as participant &PGTBN to 37 markers. We have descendants of three of John's sons. Nine of these have excellent paper trail pedigrees. As shown above on the two charts, there are 22 single-step mutations in 37 markers in 139 transmission events. This is a mutation rate of 0.0043±.0009 (one standard deviation) per marker per birth. The value calculated by the Webmaster from all available data, both academic papers and surname studies, is 0.0031, only slightly more than one standard deviation off from our Clan Donald value.

Note that the rate is calculated by dividing the number of mutations by the number of births and by the number of sites monitored. If one were looking only at the rate at which a single mutation would occur, then this would be 22/139 = 0.16 mutations per birth, or one mutation every roughly 7 generations. With an average generation being around 30 years, this gives a dividing mutation every roughly 200 years per line.

Figure 4. Division of the Clan Donald into various Septs into the 16th Century (Clan Donald). The divisions have multiplied since.

So, by establishing the basic marker counts for a group (i.e. the Haplogroup) one can then, as with the clan lineage above, establish, over time, the branching of that tree, and, for those on one of the branches, this also provide a path back to the original ancestors. There are several ways in which the different groups can be designated.

Oxford Ancestors (OA) has built on the classification system initially created by Bryan Sykes in Saxons, Vikings and Celts, which divides the results from Y-DNA STR counts at 12 sites (those in the table above) into five different major groups. This seems to now be quite widely accepted as a primary classification system, although the names of the five groups can vary from site to site. I found the Border Reiver Ancestry site useful, since it looks at several ways of assessing my particular ancestors.

The most common is the R1b group (that with the baseline values of table 2) and this Sykes called Oisin. It is now being called Celtic and can make up some 67.5% of the DNA profiles from the Border Reiver region, although Sykes found that it designated 62.8% of the samples he took in Northumberland. (The group includes me). Using the ordering of the STR count marker sites as shown in Figure 2 the values would be:

13;24;14;11;11;14;12;12;12;13;13;29

The second is Group I, called Wodan by Sykes, and now being also referred to as Anglo Saxon/Danish. The STR counts for this Haplogroup, some 20.7% in the Border Reiver sample, 15.9% in Sykes’ Northumberland, would be:

13;23;14;10;14;14;11;14;12;12;11;28

The Haplogroup R1a is the Norse Viking, which Sykes called Sigurd. Interestingly this is also the group into which Somerled falls. The STR counts for the basic member of this Haplogroup, which makes up 3.7% of Border stock but 7.3% of Sykes Northumberland, possibly because of a close Scandinavian tie to that county even today, would be:

13:24;16;10;11;14;12;12;10;14;12;32

The fourth grouping is the E1b1b group, which Sykes called Eshu. This is some 1.6% of the Sykes sample but was not recorded in the Border Reiver analysis. The counts are:

13;22;14;10;16;17;11;12;12;13;11;30

And the fifth group, defined by the letter J, which Sykes referred to as Re, and which is also referred to as Ancient Roman. It makes up 3.1% of the Border Reiver sample, and 2.4% of those sampled by Dr Sykes in Northumberland. The counts are:

12:22;14;10;12;14;11;15;12;12;11;29

Even within a single surname, and haplogroup there are individual marker count changes that have built up over the centuries that surnames have been around (roughly a thousand years). It turns out that there are Summers whose DNA falls into all five of the groups. But knowing that I am a Celt, although the Summers are reputed to be either Anglo Saxon or perhaps Norman French does perhaps explain my predilection for bagpipe music, including Spanish and Portuguese.

The story will continue . . . .