Iberia: Ancient Europe's Edge of the Earth (part 1)
Unpacking prehistoric Spanish and Portuguese genetics
Note: This is part 1 of a series. You can read part 2 here.
When I was in high school, the token brown kid in a dusty little, very white college town at Oregon's extreme interior edge, we had a Danish exchange student, Matts. Matts had a habit of running a hand through his medium brown hair and explaining loftily, My hair is dark, because I am a quarter Spanish. The first time I heard him say it, my friend Patty, the token East Asian kid, whispered to me It's like he thinks that's special. Another time, apparently someone looked at him and said, So what, Matts? We already got Pedro (the token Mexican kid).
Clearly in Denmark, Matts' tranche of Iberian ancestry had conferred a touch of exoticism, of prestige. The valence in 1990's America was markedly different. Like Australia and Canada, its fellow underpopulated anglophone destinations for centuries of mass European and eventually Asian immigration, the US has never seen much direct Spanish or Portuguese immigration. The reason is simple; when the rest of Europe was sending us its poor huddled masses, any poor, huddled Iberians with an itch to immigrate had plenty of preferable options. Most of the rest of the Americas was a menu of immigrant societies that already spoke their national languages: Spanish or Portuguese. And this was convenient because more often than not, the would-be migrants were neither poor, nor huddled, but aspiring peninsulares happy to profit from an automatic perch atop the New-World racial caste system.
Today nearly nine percent of the world speaks either Spanish or Portuguese natively. Together, the languages of Iberia have more native speakers than anything but Mandarin Chinese. Indeed, even alone, Spanish is the second and Portuguese the sixth most spoken native tongue in the world. Lingua franca though it may be, English meanwhile is the mother tongue to fewer than five percent of humans.
Genetically, Iberian genes have proven no less prolific over the past half a millennium of discovery and imperialism. But what are Iberian genes? And how have the peoples of that comparatively arid, isolated peninsula at Europe's very edge related genetically to their fellow Europeans over the millennia? In this series, we'll cover Iberian ancestry composition and deep history, starting down the long path from geographic isolation toward the recent chapters of unchecked global expansion and conquest.
From the Edge to the Center
Poised at Europe’s extreme edge, the Iberian peninsula has offered refuge from the vicissitudes of earth’s volatile climatic fluctuations over the last two million years, as the planet alternated between long frigid Ice Ages and short balmy interglacials. Due to its mild climate and relative isolation, it was in Iberia that the last Neanderthals hunkered down while their modern human competitors spread inexorably across the rest of Europe 45,000 years ago. Today Iberia is known for its parched golden landscapes, but during the Ice Age, it was a land of woodlands that crept up to the edge of the European tundra, comfortably south of the vast northern ice sheets.
Eventually, the Neanderthals gave way to modern humans even in this last redoubt, and the newcomers developed cultures of great sophistication, culminating in the last great Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies of Europe west of the Rhine, the Magdalenian mammoth hunters. The Magdalenians attest to the creativity of the modern human mind long before the dawn of civilization, depicting animals with shocking realism in dimly lit caves, and skillfully engraving complex representations on mammoth ivory, bear tooth and reindeer antler. But after 10,000 years of ascendance, the authors of these timeless wonders were themselves overrun and outcompeted by the arrival of farmers from the east nearly 8,000 years ago. We do know now though that the genetic legacy of the Magdalenians continued on in some European farmers (and so down to the present among modern Spaniards and Portuguese).
For most of the brief history of the human species, Iberia’s geographical isolation was the key to understanding its halting development. But with the rise of agricultural civilization 10,000 years ago, that dynamic changed. Cereal cultivation arrived in Iberia far earlier than for example just to its north, in today’s France, because farmers from Anatolia zipped across the Mediterranean by boat, disembarking first in Andalusia. Whereas water barriers are often nearly insurmountable impediments for large terrestrial mammals, human ingenuity routinely sees our species flip an immovable obstacle into a veritable superhighway.
Maritime travel transformed an isolated peninsula into a promising and accessible destination, what Iberian Jews would later call Golden Sepharad or “Golden Spain,” a promontory of aspiration rather than isolation. After the arrival of seafaring Neolithic farmers, the manifest of newcomers to the peninsula toggled between those who braved rugged trails through the northeast, like the German Visigoths in the 5th century AD, and those who made landfall aboard ships, like the Muslim Moors nearly three hundred years later.
Today, modern Iberian genetics reflects a complex roster of peoples stretching back languidly into the Paleolithic, with more recent layers rapidly shuffling the contributions of Visigoths, and the Arabs and Berbers of Al-Andalus, and then reflecting the peninsula’s eventual reconquest by the once northern kingdoms of Portugal, Leon, Castile and Aragon. And yet genetically, the largest fractions of modern Iberian ancestry date to migrations during the Neolithic and the Bronze Age (between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago), when the first European farmers swept in from West Asia, skirting the northern Mediterranean’s extreme fringe, followed more than 4,000 years ago by warlike cattle herders from Central Europe whose forefathers hailed from the Eurasian steppe, and who didn’t hesitate to venture to the ends of the earth in search of new, wide-open rangeland.