PLoS ONE has another article up about admixture in Argentina. The interesting aspect is that in its self-conception Argentina, like the United States of America or Australia, is a European settler nation, and therefore unlike Mexico, Boliva, or Brazil, each of whom de jure or de facto espouse a multicultural and multiracial identity. Buenos Ares is in its mentality more a Southern European city situated in the antipodes, with a touch of old Mitteleuropa (Argentines are avid consumers of psychoanalysis). As noted in the PLoS article, ~1 percent of the citizens of Argentina identify as indigenous, but ~20 percent of the ancestry of Argentina’s population seems to derive from Amerindian sources! The paper itself adds little new here. Rather, it increases the sample size, and confirms that the Amerindian ancestry does seem to be lower in Buenos Ares, the magnet for so much Italian immigration.
But what is most interesting, though not necessarily surprising, is that of those Argentines who claim four European grandparents (N = 22), the average proportion of European ancestry was 91 percent. The issue here is that an individual who claims four European …