Mistake?

I forget what drew my attention to reference 1, but I was intrigued by talk of simple experiments which uncovered interesting interactions between unconscious and conscious processing.

An accessible book, written in a chatty, friendly style which becomes a little irritating after a while, despite the interest of the subject matter. I associated to the strong tradition of self-help manuals in the US.

Along the way I learn (BH already knew) about Ötzi the iceman, murdered 5,000 years ago in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between what is now Austria and Italy, frozen in ice and turned up, more or less intact, just a few years ago. The subject of documentaries on the BBC. Bargh makes the point, in the context of the important drivers of ancient human activity, that the iceman had had children. He was an illustration both of the difficulty of surviving at all in a dangerous world and of the power of the drive to reproduce.

He makes this point on the grounds that 19 people, from a large sample of Austrians, share a rare gene (the sub-haplogroup G-L91 or SNP L91) with the iceman. And makes the deduction that they are his distant progeny.

I do a bit of poking around and from the extensive coverage in the regular media, I unearth reference 2. A technical for me, including a lot of stuff about population sampling and gene technology which is not relevant here, but it does seem to me that Bargh has got it quite wrong. Two people sharing a rare gene might mean that they are related, but does not mean that there is a line of descent from one to the other. We cannot say that the iceman had a family, probable though that might be for other reasons.

Furthermore, he talks of 19 people, the 12 plus 7 in the bottom line of the illustration. The catch with this being that the right hand group of figures is about a subsample of the sample from which the left hand group of figures is drawn. The two numbers should not be added together. Or has someone slipped up to the L32 line, where there is a 19, albeit in the wrong column?

Not a mistake which much disturbs his line of argument, but not a good start either. Hopefully Bargh is on firmer ground in his own subject.

Reference 1: Before you know it - John Bargh - 2017.

Reference 2: High resolution mapping of Y haplogroup G in Tyrol (Austria) - Burkhard Berger, Harald Niederstätter, Daniel Erhart, Christoph Gassner, Harald Schennach, Walther Parson - 2013. Open access if you poke around a bit. The source of the illustration.