The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes Read Free Book Online

the same rules. Herschfeld saw the war as an opportunity to discover more about blood groups, and in particular how they compared in different parts of the world. The Allies drew soldiers from many different countries, and the Herschfelds set out to collate the blood group results from as many different nationalities as possible. It was a lot of work, but easier in wartime than later, when the research would, as they put it, ‘have necessitated long years of travel’. For the obvious military reason that they were on the other side, they did not have the German data to hand, and the figures published in The Lancet were ‘quoted from memory’.
    When the Herschfelds came to review the results of their work, they found very big differences in the frequencies of blood groups A and B in soldiers who came from different ‘races’ as they called them. Among the Europeans, the proportions were around 15 per cent blood group B and 40 per cent blood group A. The proportion of men with blood group B was higher in troops drawn from Africa and Russia, reaching a peak of 50 per cent in regiments of the Indian Army fighting with the British. As the proportion of blood group B increased, there was a corresponding decrease in the frequency of blood group A.
    In drawing their conclusions, the Herschfelds did not flinch from interpreting the significance of their results on a grand scale. They decided that humans were made up of two different ‘biochemical races’, each with its own origin: Race A, with blood group A, and Race B, with blood group B. Because Indians had the highest frequency of blood group B, they concluded that ‘We should look to India as the cradle of one part of humanity.’ As to how blood groups, and populations, spread, they go on: ‘Both to Indo-China in the East and to the West a broad stream of Indians passed out, ever-lessening in its flow, which finally penetrated to Western Europe.’ They were unsure about the origin of Race A and thought it might have come from somewhere around north or central Europe. We know now that their conclusions are complete nonsense; but they do illustrate that geneticists, then as now, are never shy of grandiose speculation.
    The basic principle behind the evolutionary inferences drawn from the Herschfelds’ blood group results was that ‘races’ or ‘populations’ that have similar proportions of the different blood groups are more likely to share a common history than those where the proportions are very different. This sounds like common sense, and it looks like a reasonable explanation for the similarities found in the different European armies. But there were also some surprises. For example, the blood group frequencies of soldiers from Madagascar and Russia were almost identical. Did this mean the Herschfelds had uncovered genetic evidence for a hitherto unrecorded Russian invasion of Madagascar, or even the reverse, an overwhelming Malagasy colonization of Russia? Or take the Senegalese from West Africa, who were almost as close in their blood group frequencies to the Russians as the English were to the Greeks, which seems a bit unusual to say the least. What was happening was that because they were working with just one genetic system – the only one available to them – their analysis produced what appear to be some very reasonable comparisons between populations and others that look distinctly odd.
    In the years after the First World War, it fell to the American physician William Boyd to compile the abundant blood group data coming from transfusion centres throughout the world. As he did so, he saw inconsistencies of the Russia/Madagascar kind revealed by the original Herschfeld results time and again, so frequently, in fact, that he actively discouraged anthropologists from taking any notice of blood groups. Boyd quotes a letter from one frustrated correspondent: ‘I tried to see what blood groups