Comparing an incomparable?

 

Stigmata Siciliana (1964), David McLure (Wikicommons)

 

 

What is the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans? There’s no clear answer. Current estimates come from an early stage of the Flynn effect and are also distorted by qualitative differences in cognition. Furthermore, mean IQ differs among African groups.

 

 

 

At present, there is little consensus on the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Estimates have ranged from a low of 66 to a high of 82 (Lynn 2010; Wicherts et al. 2010). Rindermann (2013) put forward a "best guess" of 75, which is inexplicably much lower than the estimated African American mean of 85. Yes, African Americans are about 20% European by ancestry, but that degree of admixture would not cause a 10-point difference. Malnutrition? That might depress IQ scores in some African countries but not most.

 

Noah Carl (2022) has reopened the debate by inferring mean IQ from harmonized test scores and GDP per capita. Sub-Saharan Africa looks somewhat better on the first measure and somewhat worse on the second. Both measures correlate roughly with mean IQ, but the correlation isn’t strong enough to tell us whether the mean is 62, 75, or 82. Moreover, the first measure suffers from the same problem that plagues IQ tests: Africa is just starting to experience the secular increase in mean IQ that the West experienced during the 20th century, i.e., the Flynn effect. By how much should we increase the estimate of mean African IQ to adjust for Africa being at an earlier stage of the Flynn effect?

 

As for the second measure, GDP per capita, the ability to create wealth is determined not only by cognitive ability but also by other mental traits: future time orientation (also known as time preference), willingness to follow rules and enforce them, feelings of guilt over breaking rules, reluctance to use violence to settle disputes, tendency toward individualism rather than nepotism and familialism, and so on.

 

In a reply to Carl’s article, Emil Kirkegaard (1922) infers mean IQ from the Social Progress Index. But that measure is no less problematic than GDP per capita. Social progress is driven by a basket of mental qualities, of which cognitive ability is only one. Emil himself makes that point:

 

One cannot just impute IQs reliably from non-IQ data in order to get some kind of unbiased estimates of a region's IQ because the regions themselves may under- or overperform on international rankings for whatever reason, [including] legacy of or current communism, nonWEIRDness, low individualism, or any other difference you can imagine.

 

Emil concludes: “There’s no avoiding having to collect more African IQ data.”

 

More data would be nice, but no amount of data will provide us with a mean African IQ that can be usefully compared with the mean IQs of other populations. There are several reasons:

 

·        Again, estimates of African IQ come from an early stage of the Flynn effect. They are not comparable with estimates of IQ that come from a later stage in other populations.

·        The genetic architecture of cognition is not the same. Sub-Saharan Africans seem to have alleles for cognitive ability that do not exist in other populations. To date, such alleles have been identified only in people of European descent.

·       Recent cognitive evolution, particularly in societies near the Niger, has created differences in mean cognitive ability among African groups. It is no more meaningful to talk about a single mean African IQ than it is to talk about a single mean European IQ.

 

Differences in the stage of the Flynn effect

 

IQ data from Western societies are not comparable with IQ data from African societies. The latter are just beginning to experience the rise in mean IQ that took place earlier in the West, specifically the increase of 13.8 points between 1932 and 1978 (Flynn 1984). The Flynn effect seems to be not so much an increase in cognitive ability as an increase in familiarity with the “test paradigm” at school and, more broadly, in society. Flynn (2013) situates the cause in the modernist paradigm: “We freed ourselves from fixation on the concrete and entered a world in which the mass of people began to use logic on abstractions and universalize their moral principles.”

 

Keep in mind that competitive exams began to appear in the West only in the late 19th century, first for entry into the civil service and then more generally for the educational system (Wikpedia 2022). Previously, people entered the civil service through patronage appointments, and education took the form of apprenticeship and imitation of role models. In those days, people were less inclined to formulate questions and look for the answers. The answers were already known, and you had to learn them. In fact, there was a stigma attached to asking too many questions, especially in rapid-fire succession.

 

Differences in the genetic architecture of cognition

 

As a means to estimate cognitive ability, the IQ test is becoming superseded by the educational polygenic score. This measure is based on SNPs that have been shown to be associated with educational attainment. Your polygenic score is higher to the extent that the alleles at those SNPs are associated with higher educational attainment. It is thus a measure of innate cognitive ability. At present, we have identified 1,271 SNPs that are associated with educational attainment and which, together, explain 11-13% of the variance in educational attainment among individuals (Lee et al. 2018). The educational polygenic score has shown good reliability in predicting the IQ of individuals and even better reliability in predicting the mean IQ of populations.

 

Again, we have identified alleles associated with educational attainment only in people of European descent. For this reason, the educational polygenic score is five times worse at predicting the cognitive ability of African Americans (Lasker et al. 2019). The loss of predictive power seems greatest in the domain of language ability, according to two studies:

 

·        Guo et al. (2019, p. 27) found that the educational polygenic score is ten to eighteen times worse at predicting the verbal ability of African Americans, in comparison to White, Asian, and Hispanic White Americans. They attributed this difference to the smaller size of the African American sample, to gene-environment interactions, and to “significantly less than full coverage of African genetic variants related to cognitive ability.”

·        With a sample of school-age African Americans, Rabinowitz et al. (2019) found that the educational polygenic score fails to predict performance on a standardized reading test but does predict pursuit of postsecondary education, getting a criminal record (only among boys), and performance on a standardized math test (only for one of the three cohorts).

 

When modern humans began to spread out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, those left behind began to pursue their own trajectory of cognitive evolution. The evolutionary change seems to have been greatest in the domain of language, i.e., the ability to express oneself in speech and writing. Polygenic scores cannot predict innate reading ability because too many of the relevant alleles are exclusive to the African gene pool and remain unidentified. Other relevant alleles may simply be more important or less important in other gene pools.

 

Although the educational polygenic score is based on alleles identified in Europeans, it can still be used for rough predictions of cognitive ability among people of African descent. Lasker et al. (2019, pp. 444-445) were able to increase its predictive power for African Americans by almost a factor of three, i.e., an increase from 20% to 54% of its predictive power for European Americans. They achieved this improvement by using alleles from a much smaller subset of SNPs that are less sensitive to decay of linkage disequilibrium.

 

Differences among African groups in the trajectory of cognitive evolution

 

Within the larger African trajectory of cognitive evolution, various African populations have pursued their own sub-trajectories. This has been especially true for populations in West Africa over the past millennium and a half. Their educational polygenic scores vary as you go from west to east, being lowest among the Mende (Sierra Leone) and progressively higher among Gambians, the Esan (Nigeria), and the Yoruba (Nigeria). The Yoruba have almost the same educational polygenic score as that of African Americans, who nonetheless are about 20% admixed with Europeans (Piffer 2021, see Figure 7).

 

Before European contact, West African societies were more complex in the north and the east, i.e., in the Sahel and the Nigerian forest. Those areas saw the creation of towns, the formation of states, and an increasing use of metallurgy and luxury goods from the fourth century onward. The increase in social complexity seems to have been driven by the development of trade along the Niger, which served as the main trading route between the coast and the interior (Frost 2022).

 

In West Africa, cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest among the Igbo of the Niger delta. We have no educational polygenic data on them, but their record of academic achievement in Nigeria, the UK, and elsewhere indicates an unusually high level of cognitive ability (Chisala 2015).

 

Conclusion

 

We should get more data, while recognizing the limits of what the data may tell us. IQ tests will always be problematic, and future research should focus on educational polygenic scores. In particular, we need to identify relevant alleles in non-European populations. Some of those alleles may be population-specific, and others may be universal but more important in some populations than in others. Finally, Africa is not a monolith. Different African populations have pursued different trajectories of cognitive evolution.

 

 

References

 

Carl, N. (2022). How useful are national IQs? Noah’s Newsletter, July 13. https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/how-useful-are-national-iqs  

 

Chisala, C. (2015). The IQ gap is no longer a black and white issue. The Unz Review, June 25.

http://www.unz.com/article/the-iq-gap-is-no-longer-a-black-and-white-issue/   

 

Flynn, J.R. (1984). The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932–1978. Psychological Bulletin 95(1):29–51. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-2909.95.1.29  

 

Flynn, J.R. (2013). The “Flynn Effect” and Flynn’s paradox. Intelligence 41: 851-857. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.intell.2013.06.014   

 

Frost, P. (2021). Polygenic scores and Black Americans. Evo and Proud, April 27. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2021/04/polygenic-scores-and-black-americans.html   

 

Frost, P. (2022). Recent cognitive evolution in West Africa: the Niger’s role. Evo and Proud, April 30. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2022/04/recent-cognitive-evolution-in-west.html  

 

Guo, G., Lin, M.J., and K.M. Harris. (2019). Socioeconomic and Genomic Roots of Verbal Ability. bioRxiv, 544411. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/544411v1  

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W. (2022). African IQs without African IQs: it’s complicated. Just Emil Kirkegaard Things. August 7. https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/african-iqs-without-african-iqs-its?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email  

 

Lasker, J., B.J. Pesta, J.G.R. Fuerst, and E.O.W. Kirkegaard. (2019). Global ancestry and cognitive ability. Psych 1(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010034  

 

Lee, J. J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics 50(8): 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0147-3

 

Lynn, R. (2010). The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans assessed by the Progressive Matrices: A reply to Wicherts, Dolan, Carlson & van der Maas. Learning and Individual Differences 20(3): 152-154. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2010.03.009   

 

Piffer, D. (2021). Divergent selection on height and cognitive ability: evidence from Fst and polygenic scores. OpenPsych. https://openpsych.net/files/submissions/14_Divergent_selection_on_height_and_cognitive_ability_evidence_from_Fst_and_13c3ICJ.pdf     

 

Rabinowitz, J.A., S.I.C. Kuo, W. Felder, R.J. Musci, A. Bettencourt, K. Benke, ... and A. Kouzis. (2019). Associations between an educational attainment polygenic score with educational attainment in an African American sample. Genes, Brain and Behavior, e12558. https://doi.org/10.1111/gbb.12558   

 

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2012.06.022   

 

Wicherts, J.M., C.V. Dolan, and H.L.J. van der Maas. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence 38: 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2009.05.002   

 

Wikipedia. (2022). Imperial examination – Influence - West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#West  

Africa's Neanderthals

Skull from Zambia, dated to 110,000 years ago. Modern humans co-existed with archaic groups in Africa, particularly in the south and west.

When and where did modern humans emerge? Anatomical evidence points to somewhere in eastern Africa some 300,000 years ago. The time of origin is different if we look at behavioral and genetic evidence. Sophisticated tool-making, detailed artwork, and other signs of “behavioral modernity” appeared only 70,000 years ago (Brown et al., 2012). Genetic evidence points to a series of demographic expansions between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago in eastern Africa, with the last one spreading throughout Africa and into Eurasia (Watson et al. 1997). At that moment, an innovation in thinking seems to have given these truly modern humans an edge over everyone else.

As these humans spread throughout the world, to what extent did they intermix with the more archaic groups they replaced? We can answer this question for Eurasia by comparing the modern human genome with reconstructed genomes of the now-extinct Neanderthals (Europe, Middle East, and Central Asia) and Denisovans (East Asia, Southeast Asia). Present-day Eurasians have relatively low levels of archaic admixture: about 2% from Neanderthals and up to 5% from Denisovans (Sankararaman et al. 2016).

What about Africa? Unfortunately, we have not yet reconstructed the genome of any archaic population from that continent. We probably never will, given that DNA tends to degrade quickly in tropical climates. In theory, there should be more admixture in Africa than in Eurasia, since many archaic Africans would have been "near-modern," i.e., much more similar in appearance, behavior, and genetic makeup to modern humans than either Neanderthals or Denisovans. Greater genetic similarity would have also made hybrid infertility less likely. Indeed, it looks like male fertility suffered from hybridization with Neanderthals or Denisovans, given that present-day humans have a lower proportion of archaic ancestry on the X chromosome and in genes disproportionately expressed in the testes (Sankararaman et al. 2016). In these parts of the genome, natural selection has stepped in to remove archaic admixture.

The above speculations seem borne out by a recent and still unpublished paper. Its authors, Sriram Sankararaman and Arun Durvasula, came up with a novel way to measure admixture from an unknown archaic group, essentially by using a machine learning algorithm (which they validated with data on Neanderthal introgression in present-day Europeans). When they applied this method to Yoruba from Nigeria, they found a level of archaic admixture higher than in any other human population known to date:

Our results suggest that Yoruban individuals trace about 7.9% of their genomes to an as yet unidentified archaic population. This is in agreement with some results from previous papers in other African populations such as the Biaka and the Baka, suggesting that there was a rich diversity of hominin species within Africa and that introgression was commonplace. (Sankararaman and Durvasula 2018)

This finding is consistent with previous archaeological and genetic evidence, particularly from western and southern Africa. Both regions seem to have had archaic populations until recent times:

- A skull from a Nigerian site (Iwo Eleru) is only about 16,300 years old and yet looks intermediate in shape between modern humans on the one hand and Neanderthals and Homo erectus on the other. It resembles the skull of a near-modern human, like the Skhul-Qafzeh hominins who lived in the Middle East some 80,000 to 100,000 years ago (Harvati et al., 2011; Stojanowski, 2014).

- Genomic analysis of 16 prehistoric Africans suggests that modern humans spread out of eastern Africa and into western Africa, where they mixed with an archaic population as divergent from modern humans as Neanderthals were, the time of separation from modern humans being 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. This archaic admixture is estimated at 9% in Yoruba and 13% in Mende (Skoglund et al. 2017)

- Genomic analysis shows an apparently higher level of Neanderthal ancestry in the Yoruba of Nigeria than in the Luhya of Kenya. This admixture seems to come from a Neanderthal-like population that formerly lived in West Africa (Hawks 2012)

- A skull from Zambia has been dated to 110,000 years ago and yet looks very much like a Homo erectus (Bada et al., 1974; Stringer, 2011). 

-  About 2% of the current African gene pool comes from a population that split from ancestral modern humans some 700,000 years ago. This archaic DNA was then picked up by modern African humans about 35,000 years ago, probably in central Africa because this admixture is highest in pygmy groups from that region (Hammer et al. 2011).

- Genomic analysis of western African pygmies (Biaka and Baka) indicates frequent, low-level interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, including an admixture event within the last 30,000 years (Hsieh et al. 2016). 

- Jawbone fragments from South Africa exhibits significant size and morphological variability, indicating admixture with an archaic population. The fragments fall within the range of 110,000 to 60,000 years ago (Malekfar, 2012)

- Sub-Saharan Africans exhibit dental traits that distinguish them from other modern humans (Sub-Saharan African Dental Complex). These traits are shared with extinct hominids and many extinct and extant nonhuman primates (Irish 1998). When dentitions are compared from western, central, eastern, and southern Africans, these ancestral traits appear to be least present in Kenyans and Tanzanians (Irish 1998). The SSADC thus seems least present in the "homeland" of modern humans (eastern Africa) and more present farther west and south.

Is the estimate of 7.9% archaic admixture a lower bound?

While the new finding of 7.9% archaic admixture is higher than what we see in other modern humans, the actual figure may be higher still. Sankararaman and Durvasula attribute this 7.9% admixture to "a deeply-diverged archaic population," while nonetheless acknowledging the "rich diversity of hominin species within Africa." Dienekes (2018) likewise notes that multiple admixture events had occurred between modern African humans and a range of "Palaeoafrican" groups.

Thus, Sankararaman and Durvasula are measuring admixture only from a highly divergent archaic group, apparently the same one that Skoglund et al. (2017) found in their study of the Yoruba. Indeed, the two studies found almost the same level of archaic admixture in the Yoruba: 7.9% versus 9%. Although Sankararaman and Durvasula validated their methodology with data on Neanderthal admixture in Europe, the two situations are not really comparable. In Europe, modern humans encountered only one archaic group over a relatively short time span, intermixture taking place essentially between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago with a second event more than 37,000 years ago (Yang and Fu 2018).  In Africa, modern humans likely encountered a range of archaic groups over a longer time, including "near-moderns" whose ancestors diverged from those of modern humans less than 200,000 years ago.

If we include introgression from these “near-moderns,” the total for archaic admixture in present-day sub-Saharan Africans should be much higher.  Indeed, 13% of the sub-Saharan gene pool seems to come from a demographic expansion that took place some 111,000 years ago and which probably brought the Skhul-Qafzeh hominins to the Middle East (Watson et al. 1997). Those hominins were anatomically modern, or almost so, but culturally Neanderthal.

Did archaic admixture help or hinder?

Mainstream evolutionary theorists have argued that admixture does more harm than good. As Ernst Mayr (1970, p. 80) wrote:

The claim has been made that species owe much of their genetic variability to introgressive hybridization. However, all the evidence contradicts this conclusion so far as animals is concerned. Not only are F1 hybrids between good species very rare, but where they occur the hybrids (even when not sterile) are demonstrably of inferior viability. The few genes that occasionally introgress into the parental species are not coadapted [...] and are selected against. Introgressive hybridization seems to be a negligible source of genetic variation in animals.

This view has been challenged by Hawks et al. (2007), who argue that gene introgression helped modern humans adapt to new environments. Instead of starting from scratch, they could cherry-pick genes that had already been tried and proven by the populations they were replacing: 

Compared with novel mutations, archaic genetic variants would have had several qualities that, in some cases, may have enhanced their selective value. Because they had long existed within human populations, these alleles had a much lower chance of being strongly deleterious. [...] Alleles with local advantages might never have been selected within the expanding modern population until it reached new climatic regimens. The spread of modern humans may have attained a burst of evolutionary change by drawing on the fruits of the existing adaptations of archaic humans. (Hawks et al. 2007)

The latest findings seem to lie between the above two views. Introgression can in some cases provide useful genes. Usually, however, it’s maladaptive.

We observe a decrease in the frequency of archaic ancestry in the Yoruban populations in more constrained regions of the genome, suggesting that these archaic alleles have been subject to the effects of purifying selection similar to the deleterious consequences of Neanderthal and Denisovan alleles in the modern human genetic background. On the other hand, we find several loci that harbor archaic haplotypes at elevated frequencies (>60%). (Sankararaman and Durvasula 2018)

Similarly, Yang and Fu (2018) note that a "gradual decline in archaic ancestry in Europeans dating from ~37 to 14 ka suggests that purifying selection lowered the amount of Neanderthal ancestry first introduced into ancient modern humans."

This pattern is consistent with findings from nonhuman species. A study of admixture in trout found sharp declines in fitness even with 20% admixture. The decline has two causes:

Hybridization can reduce fitness by either introducing alleles to a population that are not suited to the local environment (extrinsic outbreeding depression) or disrupting co-adapted gene complexes (intrinsic outbreeding depression) (Templeton 1986). These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and identifying the contribution of each effect is difficult. However, the high reproductive success of F1 hybrids relative to post-F1 hybrids with similar amounts of admixture suggests that some of the outbreeding depression is intrinsic. (Muhlfeld et al. 2009)

By disrupting co-adapted gene complexes, introgression causes individual genes to lose their adaptive value. Selection will thus eliminate either the introgressed alleles or the previously existing ones. In the second scenario, the complex of co-adapted genes is replaced with a simpler version.

Conclusion

Something “clicked” in eastern Africa 80,000 to 60,000 years ago. A relatively small group of humans acquired a new way of imagining themselves, each other, and the world around them, and this innovation gave them an edge over everyone else. The result: a “big bang” of population growth. They began to spread outward, first within Africa and then into Eurasia.

Their expansion within Africa seems to have proceeded more slowly than in Eurasia. Initially, these modern humans were replacing “near-moderns”—people fairly similar in appearance and genetic makeup. As they pushed farther east and south, however, they encountered populations that were much less similar. West Africa seems to have been home to a people who were as different from modern humans as Neanderthals were, perhaps being related to them. In southern Africa, modern humans encountered people even more divergent: a relic Homo erectus population. Even these highly divergent archaic groups were not rapidly replaced; they may have persisted as late as 15,000 years ago in West Africa and 30,000 years ago in central Africa. Thus, modern and archaic groups seem to have long coexisted in parts of Africa.

In general, archaic admixture reduced fitness: “archaic alleles that introgressed into the Yoruban population were deleterious on average”; neutral alleles were more likely to be retained than those that had functional impacts (Sankararaman and Durvasula 2018). A few, however, seem to have been favored by selection. This is the case with alleles located at a tumor suppressor gene, a gene involved with hormone regulation, and a gene involved with potassium channels. These are individual genes, however, and it is hard to know the impact on co-adapted gene complexes. In theory, archaic admixture should have had a disruptive effect.

Present-day Africans thus have admixture from a range of archaic groups, some being similar to modern humans and others more like Neanderthals or even Homo erectus. This admixture is highest in western and southern Africa and lowest in eastern Africa. In West Africa, admixture from a Neanderthal-like group is estimated at 7.9% by Sankararaman and Durvasula (2018) and at 9 to 13% by Skoglund et al. (2017). Admixture from “near-moderns” is harder to measure. There seems to be a 13% pan-African admixture from a population that had expanded across much of the continent some 111,000 years ago and which perhaps spilled into the Middle East, giving rise to the Skhul-Qafzeh hominins, i.e., early modern humans with Neanderthal culture (Watson et al. 1997, see L1i in Table 2).

References

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Brown, Kyle S.; Marean, Curtis W.; Jacobs, Zenobia; Schoville, Benjamin J.; Oestmo, Simen; Fisher, Erich C.; Bernatchez, Jocelyn; Karkanas, Panagiotis; Matthews, Thalassa (2012). An early and enduring advanced technology originating 71,000 years ago in South Africa. Nature 491 (7425): 590.

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Dienekes (2018). Statistical Palaeoafricans, Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, March 25

http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2018/03/statistical-palaeoafricans.html

Durvasula, A., and S. Sankararaman. (2018). Recovering signals of ghost archaic admixture in the genomes of present-day Africans, BioRxiv, March 21

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/21/285734  

Hammer, M.F., A.E. Woerner, F.L. Mendez, J.C. Watkins, and J.D. Wall. (2011). Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 108: 15123-15128.

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The unlikely domino

Ahmed Ouyahia, "The Eradicator" - Prime Minister of Algeria. (Wikicommons: Magharebia). "We are the kings of our home!"

When political change comes to a world-system, does it begin near the center and then spread outward? That seems to be the common view. Karl Marx predicted that communism would first triumph in the U.K., France, and Germany, yet he was proven wrong. In 17th century England the "Levellers" called for giving all men the right to vote, an aim first achieved in the United States and only much later in England. Similarly, the late 19th century saw women gain voting rights in Scandinavia, some Australian colonies, and some western U.S. states. Not until 1928 were the same rights recognized in the U.K. 

The center is an interesting place for new ideas, but it's terrible for getting them implemented. It’s the place where power is concentrated, where resistance to change is strongest, where the elite has been established the longest, and where the elite has diverged the most from ordinary people in terms of self-interest and social distance. So the center is where new ideas have the most trouble spreading through all social strata and gaining acceptance. 

The situation is different farther out on the periphery of a world-system. Social distances are generally shorter and the elites less entrenched. This is partly because peripheral societies tend to be more recent—often beginning as colonies of central societies—and partly because weaker control by the center and greater contact with other world-systems may make them the scene of war, rebellion, and social upheaval, which in turn means replacement of local elites. New ideas can thus percolate more easily throughout the whole of a peripheral society

These are tendencies to be sure and, as such, may not always hold true. The periphery may be a quiet backwater where elites stay put and become more distant from the people. Furthermore, a new idea may face hostility not only from the elite but also from ordinary people. Communism, for instance, was admired in the Muslim world for its opposition to Western imperialism, but its atheism made support impossible among the working people it targeted.

In writing this series I'm simply arguing that public sympathy isn't the only factor in the spread and acceptance of new ideas. There is also elite hostility, and that factor tends to be more formidable at the center than at the periphery.

The next two to three years

A nationalist bloc of European nations has formed on the periphery of the Western world—Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary. This has happened not only because public sympathy for nationalism is stronger there but also because elite hostility is weaker. The elites are less differentiated from the rest of society; consequently, there is more social cohesion and commonality of purpose. Finally, the language of the Western world being above all English, the centre has trouble maintaining ideological conformity in those countries where English is poorly understood and where ideology, like culture in general, tends to be locally produced.

In my previous posts I’ve argued that the nationalist bloc will spread outward into culturally similar countries, as well as into countries where post-national elites are unpopular and weakly entrenched. By the year 2021 this bloc will cover a much larger area: almost all of central and eastern Europe, plus Italy. 

It will also include a seemingly unlikely area that isn't European at all, an area that is, in fact, African and Muslim.  

Background to the migrant crisis

Population pressure has been mounting in sub-Saharan Africa for some time. While fertility rates have fallen throughout most of the world, often dramatically, the picture is different in this world region. Fertility declines have at best been modest, and in some countries, like Somalia, fertility has actually risen. The current pace of population growth will continue even if fertility rates fall dramatically:

Rapid population growth in Africa is anticipated even assuming that there will be a substantial reduction of fertility levels in the near future. The medium-variant projection assumes that fertility in Africa will fall from around 4.7 births per woman in 2010-2015 to 3.1 in 2045-2050, reaching a level slightly above 2.1 in 2095-2100. After 2050, it is expected that Africa will be the only region still experiencing substantial population growth. As a result, Africa's share of global population, which is projected to grow from roughly 17 per cent in 2017 to around 26 per cent in 2050, could reach 40 per cent by 2100.

[...] It should be noted that the population of Africa will continue to increase in future decades even if the number of births per woman falls instantly to the level required for stabilization of population size in the long run, known also as "replacement-level fertility". Growth continues in that scenario thanks to the age structure of the population, which is currently quite youthful. The large numbers of children and youth in Africa today will reach adulthood in future decades. Because of their large numbers, their childbearing will contribute to a further increase of population even assuming that they will bear fewer children on average than their parents' generation. In all plausible scenarios of future trends, Africa will play a central role in shaping the size and distribution of the world's population over the next few decades. (United Nations, 2017, p. xxii)

Meanwhile, the inevitable has begun. When the slave trade ended in the early 19th century there began a long period when relatively few people left sub-Saharan Africa. Some did, but their numbers were relatively small—Senegalese riflemen, Somali seamen and, later, university students. This hiatus came to an end in the early 1970s. To fill insecure, low-paying jobs, French employers extended their zone of recruitment to sub-Saharan Africa, and this example was followed by employers elsewhere. Even Greece began to recruit African labor for jobs in construction, agriculture, and shipping (Pteroudis 1996).

The stream of migrants continued despite the economic slowdown that set in with the Oil Crisis of 1973 and the 1982-1983 recession. They came for the most part on temporary visas and then overstayed. Large-scale illegal entry did not begin until the early 2000s, via a route across the Sahara to Libya and then across the Mediterranean to Italy by boat (De Haas 2008). In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi, signed a treaty with Muammar Gaddafi to block this route, but enforcement collapsed with Gaddafi's overthrow and murder in 2011. The result was a surge in African migration.

Yet this surge is only the tip of the iceberg:

[...] it is a misconception that all or most migrants crossing the Sahara are "in transit" to Europe. There are possibly more sub-Saharan Africans living in the Maghreb than in Europe. An estimated 65,000 and 120,000 sub-Saharan Africans enter the Maghreb yearly overland, of which only 20 to 38 per cent are estimated to enter Europe. While Libya is an important destination country in its own right, many migrants failing or not venturing to enter Europe prefer to stay in North Africa as a second-best option (De Haas 2008).

African migrants currently take three routes to Europe: a western route via Morocco and Spain; a central one via Libya and Italy, and an eastern one via Egypt and Greece. Given the chaos in Libya, the central route is shifting to Algeria, and that country is increasingly becoming their final destination. "Our studies revealed that more than half of the migrants in Algeria actually live there," explains MDM. [Médecins du Monde]" Even if this was not their plan at the beginning, they end up finding a job and settling in one place." (Matarese 2016)

A changing response

Until recently, the official Algerian response has been similar to that of Western countries. Last July, the government announced plans to grant at least some of them residency rights and job permits. These measures were announced in a sympathetic tone:

"The presence of our African brothers in our country will be regulated and the Ministry of the Interior is using the police and the gendarmerie to take a census of all the displaced people," said Tebboune, who was replying to the concerns of deputies of the National Popular Assembly during debate over the government's action plan.

[...] "There are parties who wish to tarnish Algeria's image and label it as a racist country,' said Tebboune, who added: "We are not racists. We are African, Maghrebin, and Mediterranean."

"Africa and the Arab world are the natural extension of Algeria and the space in which it has evolved and developed," said Tebboune, underscoring "the moral and human duty that requires us to provide assistance to our brothers who are forced to flee their lands because of poverty and the torment of war." (Huffpost 2017)

Other members of the government, however, were less sympathetic. Also last July, the Minister of State, Ahmed Ouyahia, condemned the growing numbers of African migrants:

The African community that illegally resides in Algeria brings drugs, delinquency, and other scourges. One cannot say to the authorities: "Throw them into the sea" but one must live in Algeria legally.  [...] People will say to me "human rights!" but we are the kings of our home! (RT 2017)

Public opinion has also turned sour. In June of this year, an anti-migrant campaign was launched on the Algerian social media via the hashtag No to Africans in Algeria! This slogan may sound strange in a country that is, in fact, in Africa, but the reality is that the average Algerian feels more in common with Europe or the Middle East.

Anti-migrant discourse is summed up by this comment:

[...] these Africans from all over the Sahel think they're in conquered territory, being arrogant and threatening. They forcefully demand money and not food. They're everywhere and present a sorry picture of what a human being should be. Begging, nothing but begging from these hefty guys who are more athletic than Cristiano Ronaldo and who refuse to roll up their shirtsleeves and work. Now they're no longer content to be in southern Algeria; that's no longer their fine seigneury. They're moving into the coastal cities. There are hundreds of thousands of them, and more come every day. (RT 2017)

Threatening behavior might work in Europe, where the average citizen feels that only the police are entitled to respond to threats with violence. In Algeria, however, the police are a relatively recent institution, as is State authority in general, and every adult male feels entitled to use violence if threatened or even insulted. An exchange of insults can quickly escalate into fighting by both parties:

Kader, an Ivorian who has been in Algeria for six years, said there was a growing number of Guineans in Algiers. "They don't know the country, and they react very badly the minute an Algerian is rude to them or insults them. It ends up in a fight, and people get hurt." (Chenaoui 2017)

A single incident may become a riot. In March 2016 more than a hundred residents of a small town south of Algiers showed up at an abandoned shopping center where migrants were living and assaulted dozens of them in retaliation for an alleged rape (The Observers 2016). At about the same time in another town, some 300 local inhabitants surrounded and attacked a refugee reception center after a migrant from Niger murdered a local resident during a break-in (Huffpost 2016)

Last August, Ahmed Ouyahia was appointed Prime Minister, and migrant policy has grown increasingly hardline. Since August 25, more than 3,000 migrants have been summarily deported to Niger, including many from other African countries (HRW 2017). There is a striking similarity here to Israel’s response when African migrants began pouring into that country. It, too, initially responded like Western states but did an about-face partly because of the magnitude of the problem and partly because of pressure from public opinion. Whatever one thinks of either country, they are both fundamentally democratic, more so in fact than most Western countries. The elites cannot defy public opinion because they’re too close to the public and because they lack the firm ideological control that makes defiance possible.

Algeria, like Israel, will have to adopt harsher measures against the migrant influx. Unlike Israel, the migrant population is much larger and will continue to grow through natural increase alone. Meanwhile, public opinion is radicalizing. The situation may become like what we see in Greece, but without the external coercion that comes with being an EU member.

The migrant issue will loom large in Algeria's 2019 presidential election. Ahmed Ouyahia may run as a Trump-like populist candidate. He may even, à la Trump, call for construction of a fence along the southern border. And like Trump he has already been condemned by human rights groups, notably for his role in the "eradicator" faction that pushed for all-out war against the Islamist insurgency in the 1990s.

References

Chenaoui, Z. (2017). Adrift in Algiers: African migrants marooned in a new transit bottleneck, The Guardian, October 31

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/31/algeria-african-migrants-libya-civil-war-europe

De Haas, H. (2008). Irregular Migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union: An Overview of Recent Trends, International Organization for Migration, Geneva

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/14f2/ff491b6e9e0f66ad69ab58444bf3f3330708.pdf

HRW (2017). Algeria: Surge in Deportations of Migrants. Apparent Racial Profiling, Summary Expulsion of Sub-Saharan Africans, Human Rights Watch, October 30

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/30/algeria-surge-deportations-migrants

Huffpost (2016). Après les affrontements de Ouargla, 700 migrants subsahariens transférés à Tamanrasset (Wali), March 3

http://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/2016/03/03/affrontements-ouargla-migrants_n_9371888.html

Huffpost (2017). Abdelmadjid Tebboune : La présence des migrants subsahariens sur le territoire algérien sera réglementée, June 24

http://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/2017/06/24/tebboune-migrants-subsaha_n_17281390.html

Matarese, M. (2016). Migrants in Algeria struggle for acceptance, Middle East Eye, January 6

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/taboo-migrants-algeria-707071868

Pteroudis, E. (1996). Emigrations et immigrations en Grèce, évolutions récentes et questions politiques, Revue européenne de migrations internationales, 12, 159-189 (Espagne, Portugal, Grèce, pays d'immigration).

RT (2017). L'Algérie raciste ? Une directive anti-migrants, finalement retirée, fait polémique dans le pays. RT en français, October 3

https://francais.rt.com/france/44118-algerie-raciste-politique-anti-migrants

The Observers (2016). Police watch as locals attack migrants in Algeria, March 29

http://observers.france24.com/en/20160329-video-algeria-migrants-attack-african

United Nations (2017). World Population Prospects. The 2017 Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Volume 1, Comprehensive Tables

https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2017_Volume-I_Comprehensive-Tables.pdf

Making the big time ... elsewhere

 

Skull from Broken Hill (Kabwe), Zambia. This kind of human was still around when the Neanderthals were going extinct in Europe. (Wikicommons)

 

East Africa, 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. The relative stasis of early humans was being shaken by a series of population expansions. The last one went global, spreading out of Africa, into Eurasia and, eventually, throughout the whole world (Watson et al., 1997). Those humans became us.

This expansion took place at the expense of more archaic humans: Neanderthals in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia; Denisovans in East Asia; and mysterious hobbit-like creatures in parts of Southeast Asia.

And in Africa itself? We know less about those archaic humans, partly because the archeological record is so patchy and partly because ancient DNA does not survive as long in the tropics. Over time, the double helix breaks down, and this decomposition occurs faster at higher ambient temperatures. We'll probably never be able to reconstruct the genome of archaic Africans.

Yet they did exist. Surprisingly, they held out longer in parts of Africa than their counterparts did much farther away. A Nigerian site has yielded a skull that is only about 16,300 years old and yet looks intermediate in shape between modern humans on the one hand and Neanderthals and Homo erectus on the other. It resembles the skull of a very early modern human, like the ones who once lived at Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel some 80,000 to 100,000 years ago (Harvati et al., 2011; Stojanowski, 2014).

Archaic humans also held out in southern Africa. The Broken Hill or Kabwe skull, from Zambia has been dated to 110,000 years ago and looks very much like a Homo erectus (Bada et al., 1974; Stringer, 2011). This pre-sapiens human seems to have lasted into much later times. Hammer et al. (2011) found that about 2% of the current African gene pool comes from a population that split from ancestral modern humans some 700,000 years ago. They dated the absorption of this archaic DNA to about 35,000 years ago and placed it in Central Africa, since the level of intermixture is highest in pygmy groups from that region.

 

Cognitive modernity: less awesome on its home turf

Why did archaic humans survive longer in Africa than elsewhere? Some of them were more advanced than the Neanderthals or Denisovans, and perhaps better able to fend off invasive groups. This was the case with archaic West Africans, who seem to have been transitional between pre-sapiens and sapiens. They may have met modern humans on a more level playing field while enjoying the home team advantage.

On the other hand, archaic southern Africans look clearly pre-sapiens. What was levelling their playing field? Perhaps modern humans had advantages that were more useful outside Africa. Klein (1995) has argued that this advantage was cognitive, specifically a superior ability not only to create ideas but also to share them with other individuals via language—in a word, culture. This cognitive edge may have been more useful outside the tropics, where the yearly cycle forced humans to plan ahead collectively and keep warm collectively by building shelters and making garments. The result was a much wider range of human technology: deep storage pits for meat refrigeration; hand-powered rotary tools; kilns for ceramic manufacture; woven textiles; eyed sewing needles; traps and snares; and so on (Frost, 2014).

Modern humans were thus pre-adapted in Africa for later success elsewhere. We see this in their rapid penetration of cold environments unlike anything in their place of origin. By 43,500 years ago, they were already present in Central Europe at a time when it was barren steppe with some boreal forest in sheltered valleys (Nigst et al., 2014).

Pre-adaptation is a recurring oddity of evolution. A new ability may initially be a bit helpful and only later truly awesome. Does this mean that evolution anticipates future success? Well, no. It's just that the difference between failure and success—or between so-so success and the howling kind—often hinges on a few things that may or may not exist in your current environment. By moving to other environments, you increase your chances of finding one that will put your talents to better use. Success is fragile, but so is failure.

 

References

 

Bada, J.L., R.A. Schroeder, R. Protsch, & R. Berger. (1974). Concordance of Collagen-Based Radiocarbon and Aspartic-Acid Racemization Ages, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 71, 914-917.

http://www.pnas.org/content/71/3/914.short

 

Frost, P. (2014). The first industrial revolution, Evo and Proud, January 18

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/01/the-first-industrial-revolution.html

Hammer, M.F., A.E. Woerner, F.L. Mendez, J.C. Watkins, and J.D. Wall. (2011). Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 108, 15123-15128.

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~flmendez/papers/Hammer_2011.pdf

Harvati, K., C. Stringer, R. Grün, M. Aubert, P. Allsworth-Jones, C.A. Folorunso. (2011). The Later Stone Age Calvaria from Iwo Eleru, Nigeria: Morphology and Chronology. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24024. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024024

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024024

 

Klein, R.G. (1995). Anatomy, behavior, and modern human origins, Journal of World Prehistory, 9, 167-198.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02221838

 

Nigst, P.R., P. Haesaerts, F. Damblon, C. Frank-Fellner, C. Mallol, B. Viola, M. Gotzinger, L. Niven, G. Trnka, and J-J. Hublin. (2014). Early modern human settlement of Europe north of the Alps occurred 43,500 years ago in a cold steppe-type environment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), published online before print

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/16/1412201111.short

 

Stojanowski, C.M. (2014). Iwo Eleru's place among Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene populations of North and East Africa, Journal of Human Evolution, epub ahead of print

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248414000876

 

Stringer, C. (2011). The chronological and evolutionary position of the Broken Hill cranium. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 144(supp. 52), 287

Watson, E., P. Forster, M. Richards, and H-J. Bandelt. (1997). Mitochondrial footprints of human expansions in Africa, American Journal of Human Genetics, 61, 691-704. 0024024

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024024