Last night, I got to thinking about blood type. I wondered how come I have a B+ blood, when everyone in my family is O or A. I decided to go hunting on the Internet to see if I could learn something about where I come from using this tidbit of information.
Blood type O: the Americas
It turns out, B-type people are universally less common than O and A.
I discovered that there is a high probability I have some Asian — Siberian, Mongolian, Chinese, Indian — ancestor. Genghis Khan made serious inroads into Europe and I am probably proof of it.
The incidence of type B is low amongst Jews. Low everywhere, really. It’s not unheard of, nor so infrequent as to be rare, but low. My mother was type O, the most common blood group everywhere. Among native peoples in the western hemisphere, type O is close to 100%. Many scientists theorize that “O” was the “original” human blood type and all other types mutated from it.
That’s one theory, anyhow.
This is a bit of a hot topic because some places, blood typing has been used to categorize people as inferior, notably Japan. There are always racists looking for a way to prove they are superior to everyone else. At least one study (I’m not sure I should dignify it with that name) claims people of B-type blood are descendants of Neanderthals while O and A descended from Cro-Magnon. This is pure speculation. Not research.
Worse, there are pockets of racists who contend that A is the only pure Aryan blood type. What evidence did they base this on? None. Particularly interesting since O is the dominant blood type everywhere.
Overall in the world, B is the rarest ABO blood allele. Only 16% of humanity has it. It reaches its highest frequency in Central Asia and Northern India. It’s believed to have been entirely absent from Native American and Australian Aboriginal populations prior to the arrival of Europeans. However, there are relatively high frequency pockets in Africa too.
B is not a dominant blood type anywhere. It is highest in the Philippines and Siberia, lowest in the Americas. Very rare in the British Isles and Scandinavia. The highest percentage it reaches is 38% of the population and that is in the Philippines. The middle East, melting pot that it is, is more or less evenly divided into the three major blood types. If this shows some kind of migratory pattern for our ancestors, no one can prove it. Not yet, anyway.
It turns out there is no universally accepted theory of the origins of man. Scientists and other theorists can’t even agree whether or not we all have the same progenitors.
So after all this, I don’t know much more than I did when I started. Clearly there is something to be learned from the distribution of blood types in the world, but no one is sure what, exactly.
So, did you learn anything? I think it shows that somewhere in my dim, distant family history, a soldier from the Golden Horde left some DNA behind. I wish I knew more. It would make a terrific story. Very romantic.
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Categories: Daily Prompt, Science
URSULA LE GUIN LED US HERE 
WHEN IT’S TOO LATE, IS IT STILL PROCRASTINATING? – Marilyn Armstrong 
FANDANGO’S PROVOCATIVE QUESTION #26 – Marilyn Armstrong 
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
Fascinating… I’m Type O, Dan’s Type A… Have a great week, Marilyn!
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Hello and love, You do not mention AB blood which is the type I am. Is that rare? And from where? Let me know!!!
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Had to look this one up. AB- (negative) is the MOST rare blood type and those who have it are always needed. Fewer than 1% of the population has it.
How rare is AB positive? Less than 4% of the U.S. population have AB positive blood. AB positive blood type is known as the “universal recipient” because AB positive patients can receive red blood cells from all blood types.
It isn’t a “type” in the way the A, B, or O are. It’s a combination. My father was AB+, my mother was O — and I wound up B+ and the doctors never believe me because i shouldn’t be B+,
Blood type inheritance is complicated. I’ve got a rare secondary allele and I have a special blood typing card because I can’t get straight B+ blood. No one has ever entirely explained it to me, but I’m not sure they really know exactly why many of us have these secondary blood factors. It’s one of the reasons I find this so very interesting.
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I had no idea blood types were unevenly geographically distributed. In high school biololgy class we stabbed ourselves and checked our own blood types. It should’ve been a fascinating hands-on experiment but I’m damned if I remember what type I was. All I remember is how hard it was to stab that little thingy into my finger and at the end, when I learned my type, thinking, “So?”
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I was surprised too. I was even MORE surprised to realize that I couldn’t be what I was (theoretically) and still be my parent’s child. But I obviously AM their child. No question about that. There’s surprisingly little information about blood types and how they sometimes just “show up” where they are not supposed to be. My mother was O+ and my father might (I’m not sure and he’s long gone now) an AB+, but that should not produce a B+ kid.
Which is why whenever I’m in the hospital (rather more often than I should be it seems) and I say B+ they all raise one eyebrow and test me anyway. I have a couple of other weird anomalies. There is more to the makeup of our blood than just type. There are “sub” types, some of which are rare — and mine is (apparently) one. There’s very little information on the net. I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it and eventually, this is the article that emerged. It is the best I could do with information available to the general public. There are other databases, but I am sure you need credentials as a scientist or doctor to get into them. Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t understand most of what they were saying anyway.
Have a go at it yourself. I haven’t poked around in a couple of years. Maybe they’ve made a few breakthroughs. It’s always worth checking.
So this post is far from complete. I am not sufficiently medically sophisticated to try to start to explain the sub-typing and how Bs emerge from a non-B family. I’ve discovered — because I get a lot of reaction to this post — that there are a lot of other people trying to figure it out too. And it shows up in every race and population around the world where it absolutely should NOT be. I had my DNA done and I’m 98.7% Jewish. Almost exclusively central European with a very small (like 2%) North African percentage. Plus an unknown 1.3% from who knows where.
No one knows how all the Os appeared everywhere, either. My mother — with her straightforward central European background — should have been an A or AB, not O. The ONLY place where B is the dominant blood type is central Asia and I don’t have ANY of that DNA at all. I kind of hoped I did, actually. It would have been a lot more interesting than discovering that I’m exactly what I thought I was — Jewish as far as anyone can tell as far back as anyone has information. Pretty dull stuff.
It’s a fascinating subject about which not nearly enough is known. I’ll have to dig in again and see if they’ve learned anything new. I carry a special blood-typing card because I have some strange (rare) subtype under the B+ and when I had heart surgery, they ran a lot more tests on me than are normally run and Beth Israel is the right hospital to do it. They have some very advanced labs there.
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