How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (7 page)

Trade and military conquest, however, tend to produce different signatures. They rarely result in wholesale extinction of local communities, but traders and invaders often
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leave traces behind them. Since most traders and soldiers are male, it is inevitably the case that these traces are most obvious in the Y chromosome.

Sometimes, the people themselves are actually aware of their heritage. In northern Pakistan, for example, the Burusho, Kalash and Pathans all claim to be the descendants of Greek soldiers from Alexander the Great’s all-con-quering army in 326 bc. Pakistan represents the furthest east that Alexander managed to get in his whirlwind conquests. Considering that he and his army weren’t around for all that long (mainly thanks to young Alex’s untimely death at the tender age of thirty-two), it is remarkable that they left anything more than their name deeply scarred into the invariably ravished and pillaged populations they conquered. Nonetheless, a recent analysis of the genes of around a thousand Pathan men turned up a handful of individuals who have particular genes that otherwise occur in significant numbers only in modern-day Greece and Macedonia.

The traces are weak, but they are there. The folk legends seem to be true.

Trade, as opposed to conquest, was what motivated the Phoenicians during much the same period. For the better part of a thousand years between around 1500 and 330 bc, Phoenician galleys traded widely throughout the Mediterranean from their homeland in modern-day Lebanon and western Syria. But by the time the Romans turned up on their patch in the closing centuries of the pre-Christian era, they had disappeared. They left relatively little trace of their existence other than in contemporary histories (including the Bible, of course) and in the fact that they produced one of the earliest alphabets. The Canaanite–Phoenician alphabet is the direct ancestor of
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many of the modern alphabets. The Phoenicians never aimed at conquest, but instead simply established trading colonies all over the Mediterranean – there have even been suggestions that they made it as far as the British Isles.

Recently, a rather sophisticated analysis of male Y-chromosome genes sampled all over the Mediterranean basin has managed to uncover what seem to be some specific Phoenician genetic lineages. Those parts of the chromosome that do not seem to have a direct function (i.e. don’t code for the proteins involved in actually building the body) tend to have higher mutation rates than the bits that really matter, and over time these tend to come to characterise certain male lineages in particular localities. By focusing on those locations that were known to be Phoenician trading strongholds (the list included Crete, Malta, Sardinia, western Sicily, southern Spain and coastal Tunisia) and comparing them both with nearby sites with no historical record of a Phoenician presence and with sites that the Greeks colonised later, the study was able to show that a handful of distinctive Y-chromosome types were probably of Phoenician origin. In case you happen to have them, they go under the rather uninspiring names of J2, PCS1+, PCS2+ and PCS3+. If you have one of these, be in no doubt: your Dad was a Phoenician.

Slavery has been much in the news recently, not least thanks to the fact that 2007 was the two hundredth anniversary of the slave trade’s abolition in Britain. Nonetheless, amid all the fuss, we risk obscuring the fact that slavery has a very ancient history, as well as a recent
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one. Britons also forget, perhaps, that their islands have, as much as anywhere else, been subject to the forcible removal of their inhabitants for a life of slavery elsewhere for as long as history has anything to tell us. While the inhabitants of Scotland were no doubt spared much of this, not a few of their fellow Celts from England found their way involuntarily to Rome during the long Roman occupation of Britain. It is thought that between a quarter and a third of all the people who lived in Italy at the height of the Roman Empire were slaves. Rome’s economy was entirely dependent on slave labour, and they came from all over the known world.

Things did not improve all that much for the belea-guered inhabitants of these islands after the departure of the Romans. In the two centuries or so after the somewhat precipitate departure of the legions in ad 410, their replacement by a motley collection of Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes from across the North Sea merely added to the woes of the Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants who had been left to fend for themselves.

Studies of the genetic make-up of the southern English of today reveals that Celtic genes become increasingly rare, and continental Anglo-Saxon genes progressively more common, as you go from the Welsh Marches to East Anglia. However, while as many as fifty per cent of the Y chromosomes carried by the inhabitants of the southeast are of continental Anglo-Saxon origin, this seems not to be true of female genes. Computer simulations carried out by Mark Jobling and his colleagues at University College London suggest that a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxon men had more than their fair share of the local Celtic women, very much to the exclusion of the
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local Celtic men. History offers some hints of what might have happened: the name ‘Welsh’, for example, derives from the Anglo-Saxon
wealasc
, which has been variously translated as ‘foreigner’ and ‘slave’ (which, to the incoming Anglo-Saxons, probably meant much the same thing).

Indeed, the
wealasc
didn’t even have the same rights under the law as Anglo-Saxons, and it took the better part of five hundred years before this unexpectedly ancient form of apartheid was lost in both society and the law.

Although the Scots and Irish didn’t have quite as much trouble from the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, in fact their relative immunity from outside interference didn’t last all that much longer. The give-away lay hidden in the genes of the Icelanders for the better part of ten centuries until modern geneticists turned their eyes on this historically isolated community. Rather to their surprise, they discovered that, while Icelandic Y chromosomes come from fairly conventional Norwegian and other Scandinavian stock, an astonishing fifty per cent of Icelandic women’s genes have Celtic origins. And guess where they came from? Yes, Scotland and Ireland – a convenient spot to stop off and pick up some women on one’s way to a new life in Iceland. Especially if one’s own Scandinavian women weren’t so keen on the rather grim sea voyage on offer and the prospect of a hard life on a volcanic outcrop.

All this raises some interesting questions about history and how we see it. Should the Scots and Irish, for example, be asking for their women back? The recent financial crises that hit Iceland notwithstanding, I rather fancy the last place the Icelandic women would really want to come back to is the grim British Isles. So perhaps they
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should be asking for restitution and compensation, instead – but from whom? Their genetic and social stake in modern Iceland, thirty generations later, is much too great for it to make any sense to be seeking restitution. In any case, what does it actually mean to say that the women of Iceland are half-Celt? How should their Norse half feel? Presumably, they would prefer to stay.

And what about the descendants of the British slaves hauled off to staff the villas of Roman dignitaries in far-off Italy a thousand years earlier? This far down the line it hardly matters, even if most of their descendants have probably remained in the lower strata of Italian society ever since. They are all Italians now. History and one’s ancestry is fascinating to explore, but not a recipe for hand-wringing and angst. It’s the future, and one’s place in it, that counts.
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We are, as a species, rather an uptight lot: we don’t like being touched. Well, perhaps I will rephrase that. We don’t like being touched by all and sundry. That’s no doubt because touch is the most intimate of all the senses. A touch is worth a thousand words. We get so much more information about someone’s real meaning and intentions from the way they touch us than from anything they could ever possibly say in words. Words are fickle, open to abuse, double meaning and downright deceit – all too often, they say what we don’t really mean. But the intimacy of touch catapults communication between us into another dimension, a world of feeling and emotion that words can never penetrate.

We engage in many forms of intimate touch – cuddling, stroking, petting, patting. These share much in common with the grooming that takes up so much time among monkeys and apes. Contrary to popular imagination, monkey grooming is not about removing fleas. It is not even just about removing the bits of debris and vegetation that
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clog up the fur during a day’s foraging, though it certainly does this. Rather, it is about the intimacy of massage. The physical stimulation of the skin triggers the release of endorphins in the brain. Endorphins are a family of endogenous opioids that are chemically closely related to morphine and opium. They are the brain’s own painkillers – part of the pain-control mechanism that cuts in when pain is low-level but chronic. Harsh, sharp pain is neu-tralised by the two neural pain circuits, the fast and slow circuits. In contrast, low-level pain associated with generalised stresses – such as those that come from jogging and routine physical exercise, or from mental stress – is dealt with by the endorphin system. It’s what creates that sense of wellbeing and relaxed contentedness after your morning jog or that hot shower on the back of the neck. You may have noticed that if, as a habitual jogger, you can’t for some reason fit in your morning jog, the day isn’t quite the same, and your friends probably find you rather more tetchy than usual. It’s because you’ve not had your morning fix, and are suffering a very mild form of cold turkey.

As with all monkeys and apes, touch is still very important to us. We have this intense desire to stroke and touch those to whom we feel close. We can’t help it. It’s the first thing we want to do in any kind of close relationship. There is something intensely intimate about touch – even just holding hands, or placing an arm round someone. A touch that has no emotional commitment behind it is just plain obvious. It’s not for nothing that we refer to someone as being as ‘cold as a fish’. It doesn’t matter what the person may be saying, the lack of warmth or caring intimacy is transparent.

Touch plays – and has surely played – a much more
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important role in our social lives than we ever give it credit for. One reason for this is probably that it is perceived at a deep emotional level, rather than being something we actively think consciously about in words. We do not know how to say it, but we know exactly how to interpret the meaning of a touch. It is visceral, a gut instinct, something very ancient and primitive that is buried deep down within our psyche. It is not especially well connected to the evolutionarily more recent language centres in the brain’s left side. It is emotional and right-brain.

For this reason, perhaps, we tend to underestimate the importance of touch in our lives. To be fair, there is perhaps a good reason for this. Being so tightly tied in to the emotional brain, touch seems able to arouse us very easily, and it can just as quickly spill over into sex. There you are, not especially interested; and then a few caresses or a kiss that lasts just a moment too long, and suddenly the whole system flips without warning from one state of mind to the other. How often have you said: I didn’t mean to, but... ?

Perhaps that is why we are so reluctant to be in close contact with strangers, or even those we know we don’t have an especially intimate relationship with. Physical contact can too easily spill over into areas of our psyche where, in cooler, more considered moments, we might not want to go. So rather than risk that sudden, uncontrolled, emotional flip, we back off and distance ourselves.

Every day, you drive to work, and you trust that other motorists will abide by the rules, stay on their side of the
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road and try not to run you down. It may seem obvious, but we take the role that trust plays in regulating our lives for granted. In fact, our entire social world depends on it. It’s famously true that the diamond market in Amsterdam – the largest in the world – works entirely on what was once referred to a ‘gentleman’s bond’. Millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds are traded solely on the strength of a handshake as to quality and payment. To be fair, there would probably be an issue of hooded gentlemen and broken legs if anyone did try to pull a fast one. But the real core to it is personal trust within a very small, closed community of fewer than a couple of dozen people. They will only trade with each other, and if you are not one of them, forget it... you won’t even get a peek at the stuff worth buying.

Trust permeates every aspect of our daily lives. Not to put too fine a point on it, it reaches the parts that only certain beers are said to reach. There has always been an implicit assumption that trust is based on some kind of reciprocity – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours later. Now it seems that trust has a chemical basis. The chemical in question is an obscure little thing called oxytocin. A group of economists at Zurich University in Switzerland have recently shown that a squirt of oxytocin from a nasal spray can make you more willing to share a reward with another player.

In these experiments, one contestant (the investor) was given a sum of money and then invited to share some, all or none of it with a second contestant (the trustee). Whatever the investor gave to the trustee was doubled, and the trustee then invited to share some, all or none of the enlarged pot with the original investor. The investor’s
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risk, of course, is that the trustee simply pockets the lot. But if the investor could trust the trustee, they would both do best by the investor putting the whole sum into the initial pot and the trustee offering half of the augmented pot back. Most investors, however, hedge their bets and offer something, but not the whole lot.