‘Hobbit’ sized skulls found on Palau.

There’s been a recent discovery of some human skull, of a similar size to, but apparently not related to the Flores ‘Hobbits’.

It’s an interesting find, that’s well covered on anthropology.net, so I’m not going to do it myself, except in brief. Try National Geographic  for the whole article on the 3 to 4 ft tribe.

The more interesting thing about it is the accusations of mishandling and cultural insensitivity, as apparently not every living Palauan was personally consulted over the dig. It seems that the team did consult the local govt and get the relevant permits, and even had locals on the team. the remains are now in the Palauan museum. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s a storm in tea cup, brewed for the sole purpose of selling a few magazines.

The argument involving some people from National Geographic was the most interesting thing about all of this. The blog’s well worth a visit to the read the just comments. It tells you a lot about how journalists can distort facts to make a story sound dramatic.

I’m all for not digging up peoples grannies, and if it looked like these were related to modern Palauans I’d say the local chiefs were justified in griping. But considering the size of the remains, I think it’s pretty unlikely they were their ancestors…

Are you smarter than a chimp?

There’s a chimp called Ayamu that is absolutly ace at this memory game. You can play the game yourself. It took me a few tries before I got the hang of it. The trick is to relax, see the whole screen and not think. So now I am offically at least a match for chimp intelligence.

You have got to watch the vid of her doing it, it’s amazing!

DNA evidence from ancient Nubians.

Unfortunately this DNA study doesn’t discriminate between L3 and later non African mutations. However, since M1, U, pre HV and a whole slew of other Eurasian DNA hg’s date to about 35k, then later to 12k in North Africa, this study probably isn’t massively far off the mark for lower Nubia . 

 

mtDNA analysis in ancient Nubians supports the existence of gene flow between sub-Sahara and North Africa in the Nile valley

C. Fox, 1997:

Abstract:

The Hpal (np3,592) mitochondrial DNA marker is a selectively neutral mutation that is very common in sub-Saharan Africa and is almost absent in North African and European populations. It has been screened in a Meroitic sample from ancient Nubia through PCR amplification and posterior enzyme digestion, to evaluate the sub-Saharan genetic influences in this population. From 29 individuals analysed, only 15 yield positive amplifications, four of them (26·7%) displaying the sub-Saharan African marker. Hpa I (np3,592) marker is present in the sub-Saharan populations at a frequency of 68·7 on average. Thus, the frequency of genes from this area in the Merotic Nubian population can be estimated at around 39% (with a confidence interval from 22% to 55%). The frequency obtained fits in a south-north decreasing gradient of Hpa I (np3,592) along the African continent. Results suggest that morphological changes observed historically in the Nubian populations are more likely to be due to the existence of south-north gene flow through the Nile Valley than to in-situ evolution.
Krings et al study, 1999:

A study which included the modern population of lower Nubia show them to be about 45% maternally Eurasian, and there’s virtually no immigration into the lower Nubia area from Asia according to the Y chromosome study of the area by Lucotte; which suggests this 60% Eurasian figure in the mummies is probably roughly correct; particularly since the Dakhleh Oasis ancient and modern mt DNA analysis shows more Sub Saharan mt DNA than the ancient Egyptian samples, which is possibly attributable to the Arab slave trade.

Five myths of race.

Here are my five myths of race, by Jon Entine. 

It’s an archived cut and paste, none of it is my work, barring a couple of comments.

The complete text is available through the link.

1. Humans are 99.9 percent the same. Therefore, race is “biologically meaningless.”

This statement finds its origins in the research of Harvard University geneticist Richard Lewontin during the 1960s. “Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations,” Lewontin concluded in The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change in 1974. “Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”

Coming from a geneticist, Lewontin’s views had enormous influence and he was making a valid argument at the time. As Laval University anthropologist Peter Frost points out, Lewontin was referring to classic genetic markers such as blood types, serum proteins, and enzymes, which do show much more variability within races than between them. But his comments are widely misinterpreted even today to extend beyond that limited conclusion. Further research has shown this pattern of variability cannot reliably be extrapolated to all traits with higher adaptive value.

(It’s now 99.7% the same, the figure was corrected recently)

The 99.9 percent figure is based on DNA sequences that do not differ much between people or even between most mammals. As Jared Diamond, UCLA physiologist has noted, if an alien were to arrive on our planet and analyze our DNA, humans would appear as a third race of chimpanzees, who share 98.4 percent of our DNA. Just 50 out of the 32,00 genes that humans and chimps are thought to possess, or approximately 0.15 percent, may account for all of the cognitive differences between man and ape.

The impact of minute genetic differences is magnified in more sophisticated species. From a genetic perspective, humans and chimpanzees are almost identical because their genes code for similar phenotypes, such as bone structure, which are remarkably similar in many animals. For that matter, dogs share about 95 percent of our genome and mice 90 percent, which is why these species make good laboratory animals. Looked at another way, while the human genome contains some 32,000 genes, that’s not much more than the nematode worm (18,000), which is naked to the human eye. Humans only have 25 percent more genes than the mustard weed (26,000). The real story of the annotation of the human genome is that human beings do not have much more genomic information than plants and worms.

A large-scale study of the variability in the human genome by Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Connecticut, has convincingly shown the fallaciousness of arguments tied to the 99.9 percent figure. The research shows that while humans have only 32,000 genes, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 gene versions. More specifically, they found that different versions of a gene are more common in a group of people from one geographical region, compared with people from another.

The implications are far reaching. By grouping individuals by the presence and variety of gene types, physicians may someday be able to offer treatments based on race or ethnic groups that will have been predetermined to work on a genetic level. Kenneth Kidd, a population geneticist at Yale University who is not connected to the study, said it confirmed the conclusions of those who have maintained that there is in fact considerable variability in the human population. He also chided the government and some genetic researchers for having stripped ethnic identities from the panel of people whose genomes have been searched for gene sequences. The study prompted Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, to backtrack from earlier assertions that the small percentage of gross gene differences was meaningful or shed light on the debate over “racial” differences. “We have been talking a lot about how similar all our genomes are, that we’re 99.9 percent the same,” he said. “That might tend to create an impression that it’s a very static situation. But that 0.1 percent is still an awful lot of nucleotides.”

In other words, local populations are genetically far more different than the factoid that humans are 99.9 percent the same implies. The critical factor is not which genes are passed along but how they are patterned and what traits they influence.

2. The genetic variation among European, African and Asian populations is minuscule compared to differences between individuals within those populations.

This factoid, which is a variation on the first myth, has been elevated to the level of revealed truth. According to Lewontin, “based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.”

What does that mean? Not much by today’s nuanced understanding of genetics, it turns out. Consider the cichlid fish found in Africa’s Lake Nyas. The chiclid, which has differentiated from one species to hundreds over a mere 11,500 years, “differ among themselves as much as do tigers and cows,” noted Diamond. “Some graze on algae, others catch other fish, and still others variously crush snails, feed on plankton, catch insects, nibble the scales off other fish, or specialize in grabbing fish embryos from brooding mother fish.” The kicker: these variations are the result of infinitesimal genetic differences–about 0.4 percent of their DNA studied.

As retired University of California molecular biologist Vincent Sarich has noted, there are no clear differences at the level of genes between a wild wolf, a Labrador, a pit pull and a cocker spaniel, but there are certainly differences in gene frequencies and therefore biologically based functional differences between these within-species breeds.

There are other more fundamental problems resulting from misinterpretations of Lewontin’s original studies about gene variability. Numerous scientists since have generalized from his conclusions to the entire human genome, yet no such study has been done, by Lewontin or anyone else. Today, it is believed that such an inference is dicey at best. The trouble with genetic markers is that they display “junk” variability that sends a signal that variability within populations exceeds variability between populations. Most mammalian genes, as much as 70 percent, are “junk” that have accumulated over the course of evolution with almost no remaining function; whether they are similar or different is meaningless. The “junk” DNA that has not been weeded out by natural selection accounts for a larger proportion of within-population variability. Genetic makers may therefore be sending an exaggerated and maybe false signal.

The entire issue of gene variability is widely misunderstood. “In almost any single African population or tribe, there is more genetic variation than in all the rest of the world put together,” Kenneth Kidd told me in an interview in 1999. “Africans have the broadest spectrum of variability, with rarer versions at either end [of the bell curve distribution]. If everyone in the world was wiped out except Africans, almost all human genetic variability would be preserved.”

Many journalists and even some scientists have taken Kidd’s findings to mean that genetic variability equates with phenotypic variability. Since Africans have about 10–15 percent more genetic differences than people from anywhere else in the world, the argument goes, Africans and their Diaspora descendents should show more variability across a range of phenotypic characteristics including body type, behavior, and intelligence. This “fact” is often invoked to explain why athletes of African ancestry dominate elite running: it’s a product of variability, not inherent population differences.

This is a spurious interpretation of Kidd’s data. Chimpanzees display more genetic diversity than do humans. That’s because genetic variability is a marker of evolutionary time, not phenotypic variability. Each time an organism, human or otherwise, propagates, genetic “mistakes” occur as genes are mixed. The slightly increased variability in Africans reflects the accumulation of junk DNA as mutations have occurred over time. Such data “prove” little more than the fact that Africa is the likely home of modern humans–and it may not even signify that.

University of Utah anthropologist and geneticist Henry Harpending and John Relethford, a biological anthropologist from the State University of New York at Oneonta, have found that this genetic variation results from the fact that there were more people in Africa than everywhere else combined during most of the period of human evolution. In other words, greater African genetic variability may be the result of nothing more than fast population growth.

When I asked Kidd directly whether his findings of genetic variability, which showed that blacks meant that Africans were most likely to show the most phenotypic variability in humans–the tallest and shortest, the fastest and slowest, the most intelligent and most retarded–he laughed at first. “Wouldn’t that be mud in the eye for the bigots,” he said, not eager to puncture the politically correct balloon. Finally, he turned more serious. “Genes are the blueprint and the blueprint is identifiable in local populations. No matter what the environmental influences, you can’t deviate too far from it.”

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that some scientists, and certainly the general public, have embraced the popular shorthand that discrete genes have specific effects. This is sometimes expressed as there is a “gene for illness X.” Lewontin himself expresses scorn for what he calls the “religion” of molecular biology and their “prophets”, geneticists, who make grandiose statements about what genes prove or disprove. Genes only specify the sequence of amino acids that are linked together in the manufacture of a molecule called a polypeptide, which must then fold up to make a protein, a process that may be different in different organisms and depends in part on the presence of yet other proteins. “[A] gene is divided up into several stretches of DNA, each of which specifies only part of the complete sequence in a polypeptide,” Lewontin has written. “Each of these partial sequences can then combine with parts specified by other genes, so that, from only a few genes, each made up of a few subsections, a very large number of combinations of different amino acid sequences could be made by mixing and matching.” Lewontin’s reasonable conclusion: the mere sequencing of the human genome doesn’t tell us very much about what distinguishes a human from a weed, let alone a Kenyan from a Korean.

Significant between group differences have been identified in the harder-to-study regulatory genes. This tiny fraction of the human genome controls the order and make-up of proteins, and may be activated by obscure environmental triggers. For instance, the presence of an abnormal form of hemoglobin (hemoglobin S) can lead to sickle-cell anemia, which disproportionately afflicts families of African descent. But the genetic factors that actually lead to the disease operate at a much finer level. Just one change in the base pair for hemoglobin, can trigger the disease. However, the genetic factors involved are even subtler in part because of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. For example, a separate set of genes in the genome–genes that code for fetal hemoglobin–can counteract some of the ill effects of the adult hemoglobin S genes if they continue to produce into adulthood. This range of possibilities, encoded in the genome, is found disproportionately in certain populations, but do not show up in the gross calculations of human differences that go into the misleading 99.9 percent figure.

Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod, who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1965 for their work on the regulator sequences in genes, have identified modules, each consisting of 20-30 genes, which act as an Erector Set for the mosaics that characterize each of us. Small changes in regulatory genes make large changes in organisms, perhaps by shifting entire blocks of genes on and off or by changing activation sequences. But, whether flea or fly, cocker spaniel or coyote, Brittany Spears or Marion Jones, the genetic sequences are different but the basic materials are the same. Minute differences can and do have profound effects on how living beings look and behave, while huge apparent variations between species may be almost insignificant in genetic terms.

3. Human differences are superficial because populations have not had enough evolutionary time to differentiate.

Stephen Jay Gould has periodically advanced an equally flawed argument: Human differences are superficial because populations have not had enough evolutionary time to differentiate. “Homo sapiens is a young species, its division into races even more recent,” Gould wrote in Natural History in November 1984.”This historical context has not supplied enough time for the evolution of substantial differences. … Human equality is a contingent fact of history.” In other words, our relatively recent common heritage–differentiation into modern humans may have occurred as recently as 50,000 years ago, an eye blink of evolutionary time–renders the possibility of “races” absurd.

This view has made its way into the popular media as fact. Yet, it’s difficult to believe that Gould believes his own rhetoric, for his own theory of punctuated equilibrium, which argues that swift genetic change occurs all the time, demolishes this assertion. A quarter century ago, Gould and American Museum of Natural History curator Niles Eldredge addressed the controversial issue of why the fossil records appeared to show that plants and animals undergo little change for long periods of time and then experience sudden, dramatic mutations. They argued that new species do not evolve slowly so much as erupt, the result of a chain reaction set off by regulatory genes. Their theory, though controversial and still widely debated, helps explain the limited number of bridge, or intermediary, species in the fossil record (as Creationists never fail to point out). Either as a mutation or in response to an environmental shock, these regulators could have triggered a chain reaction with cascading consequences, creating new species in just a few generations.

The evolutionary record is filled with such examples. A breakthrough study by University of Maryland population geneticist Sarah Tishkoff and colleagues of the gene that confers malarial resistance (one known as the G6PD gene) has concluded that malaria, which is very population specific, is not an ancient disease, but a relatively recent affliction dating to roughly 4,000-8,000 years ago. When a variant gene that promotes its owner’s survival is at issue, substantial differences can occur very rapidly. The dating of the G6PD gene’s variants, done by a method worked out by a colleague of Dr. Tishkoff’s, Dr. Andrew G. Clark of Pennsylvania State University, showed how rapidly a life-protecting variant of a gene could become widespread. The finding is of interest to biologists trying to understand the pace of human evolution because it shows how quickly a variant gene that promotes its owner’s survival can spread through a population. Genes that have changed under the pressure of natural selection determine the track of human evolution and are likely to specify the differences between humans and their close cousin the chimpanzee.

This new understanding of the swiftness of genetic change may ultimately help solve numerous evolutionary puzzles, including the origins of “racial differences.” For instance, there has been contradictory speculation about the origins of the American Indian population. Excavations have pushed the date of the initial migration to the Americas as far back as 12,500 years ago, with some evidence of a human presence as far as 30,000 years. The 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man, the 9,300-year-old skeleton with “apparently Caucasoid” features sparked speculation in the possibility of two or more migrations, including a possible arrival of early Europeans.

Using computer analysis of skeletal fragments, University of Michigan anthropologist C. Loring Brace argues that most American Indians are the result of two major migratory waves, the first 15,000 years ago after the last Ice Age began to moderate and the second 3,000-4,000 years ago. The first wave were believed to be members of the Jomon, a prehistoric people who lived in Japan thousands of years ago. Similar to Upper Paleolithic Europeans 25,000 years ago as well as the Ainu in Japan today and the Blackfoot, Sioux and Cherokee in the Americas, these populations have lots of facial and body hair, no epicanthic eyefold, longer heads, dark hair and dark eyes. Brace argues that the first waves was followed by a second migration consisting of a mixed population of Chinese, Southeast Asians, and Mongolians–similar in some respects to current populations of Northeast Asia–and are likely ancestors of the Inuits (Eskimo), Aleut, and Navajo.

Brace’s data does not resolve whether the two migratory waves consisted of distinct populations or rather different “samples” over time of the same population, whose physical appearance had changed as a result of selection pressures specific to that region, notably the cold, harsh climate. According to Francisco Ayala of the University of California at Irvine, co-author with Tishkoff of the malaria study, the genetic data suggests the remains represent a similar population at different evolutionary points in time. By this reasoning, various American Indian populations are the result of differing paces of evolution of various sub-pockets of populations. “We are morphologically no different in the different continents of the world,” he contends. This research may help explain how “racial” differences could occur so quickly after humans began their expansion from Africa, as recently as 50,000 years ago, Ayala adds.

These findings reinforce those of Vince Sarich. “The shorter the period of time required to produce a given amount of morphological difference, the more selectively important the differences become,” he has written. Sarich figures that since the gene flow as a result of intermingling on the fringes of population pockets was only a trickle, relatively distinct core races would likely have been preserved even where interbreeding was common.

Stanford University geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has calculated the time it could take for a version of a gene that leads to more offspring to spread from one to 99 percent of the population. If a rare variant of a gene produces just 1 percent more surviving offspring, it could become nearly universal in a human group in 11,500 years. But, if it provides 10 percent more “reproductive fitness,” it could come to dominate in just 1,150 years.

Natural selection, punctuated equilibrium, and even catastrophic events have all contributed to what might loosely be called “racial differences.” For example, University of Illinois archaeologist Stanley Ambrose has offered the hypothesis that the earth was plunged into a horrific volcanic winter after a titanic volcanic blow-off of Mount Toba in Sumatra some 71,000 years ago. The eruption, the largest in 400 million years, spewed 4,000 times as much ash as Mount St. Helens, darkening the skies over one third of the world and dropping temperatures by more than 20 degrees. The catastrophe touched off a six-year global winter, which was magnified by the coldest thousand years of the last ice age, which ended some fourteen thousand years ago. It is believed to have resulted in the death of most of the Northern Hemisphere’s plants, bringing widespread famine and death to hominid populations. If geneticists are correct, some early humans may have been wiped out entirely, leaving no more than 15,000 to 40,000 survivors around the world.

What might have been the effect on evolution? “Humans were suddenly thrown into the freezer,” said Ambrose. Only a few thousand people in Africa and a few pockets of populations that had migrated to Europe and Asia could have survived. That caused an abrupt “bottleneck,” or decrease, in the ancestral populations. After the climate warmed, the survivors resumed multiplying in what can only be described as a population explosion, bringing about the rapid genetic divergence, or “differentiation” of the population pockets.

This hypothesis addresses the paradox of the recent African origin model: Why do we look so different if all humankind recently migrated out of Africa? “When our African recent ancestors passed through the prism of Toba’s volcanic winter, a rainbow of differences appeared,” Ambrose has said. The genetic evidence is in line with such a scenario. Anna DiRienzo, a post-doctoral fellow working out of Wilson’s lab at Berkeley in the early 1990s, found evidence in the mitochondrial DNA data of a major population spurt as recently as thirty-thousand years ago.

What’s clear is that little is clear. Human differences can be ascribed to any number of genetic, cultural, and environmental forces, including economic ravages, natural disasters, genocidal pogroms, mutations, chromosomal rearrangement, natural selection, geographical isolation, random genetic drift, mating patterns, and gene admixture. Taboos such as not marrying outside one’s faith or ethnic group exaggerate genetic differences, reinforcing the loop between nature and nurture. Henry Harpending and John Relethford have concluded “human populations are derived from separate ancestral populations that were relatively isolated from each other before 50,000 years ago.” Their findings are all the more convincing because they come from somewhat competing scientific camps: Harpending advocates the out-of-Africa paradigm while Relethford embraces regional continuity.

Clearly, there are significant genetically-based population differences, although it is certainly true that dividing humans into discrete categories based on geography and visible characteristics reflecting social classifications, while not wholly arbitrary, is crude. That does not mean, however, that local populations do not show evidence of patterns. The critical factor in genetics is the arrangement of gene allele frequencies, how genes interact with each other and the environment, and what traits they influence. This inalterable but frequently overlooked fact undermines the notion that gene flow and racial mixing on the edges of population sets automatically renders all categories of “race” meaningless. As Frost points out, human characteristics can and do cluster and clump even without reproductive isolation. Many so-called “species” are still linked by some ongoing gene flow. Population genetics can help us realize patterns in such things as the proclivity to diseases and the ability to sprint fast.

4. “There are many different, equally valid procedures for defining races, and those different procedures yield very different classifications.”

This oft-repeated quote, written by Jared Diamond in a now-famous 1994 Discover article titled “Race Without Color”, was technically accurate, to a point. Many phenotypes and most complex behavior that depends on the brain–fully half of the human genome–do not fall into neat folkloric categories. In fact, there has been little historical consensus about the number and size of human “races”. Charles Darwin cited estimates ranging from two to sixty-three.

The problem with this argument, however, and the clumsy way it was presented, revolves around the words “equally valid.” Diamond appeared to embrace the post-modernist creed that all categories are “socially constructed” and therefore are “equally valid,” no matter how trivial. To make his point, he served up a bouillabaisse of alternate theoretical categories that cuts across traditional racial lines, including a playful suggestion of a racial taxonomy based on fingerprint patterns. A “Loops” race would group together most Europeans, black Africans and East Asians. Among the “Whorls,” we would find Mongolians and Australian aborigines. Finally, the “Arches” race would be made up of Khoisans and some central Europeans. “Depending on whether we classified ourselves by anti-malarial genes, lactase, fingerprints, or skin color,” he concluded, “we could place Swedes in the same race as (respectively) either Xhosas, Fulani, the Ainu of Japan, or Italians.”

Throughout the piece (and indeed throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel), Diamond appeared to want it both ways: asserting that all population categories, even trivial ones as he puts it, are equally meaningful, yet suggesting that some are more meaningful than others. In discussing basketball, for instance, he writes that the disproportionate representation of African Americans is not because of a lack of socio-economic opportunities, but with “the prevalent body shapes of some black African groups.” In other words, racial categories based on body shape may be an inexact indicator of human population differences–as are all categories of human biodiversity–but they are demonstrably more predictive than fingerprint whorls or tongue-rolling abilities.

It’s one thing to say that race is in part a folk concept. After all, at the genetic level, genes sometimes tell a different story than does skin color. However, it’s far more problematic to make the claim that local populations have not clustered around some genetically based phenotypes. However uncomfortable it may be to Diamond, some “socially constructed” categories are more valid than others, depending upon what phenotypes we are discussing. Moreover, geneticists believe that some of the traditional folkloric categories represent major human migratory waves, which is why so many characteristics group loosely together–for instance, body type, hair texture, and eye and skin color.

5. Documenting human group differences is outside the domain of modern scientific inquiry.

Even suggesting that there is a scientific basis for “racial” differences is baseless speculation, according to some social scientists. University of North Carolina-Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks cavalierly dismisses evidence of patterned differences. “If no scientific experiments are possible, then what are we to conclude? he wrote to me in 1999. “That discussing innate abilities is the scientific equivalent of discussing properties of angels.”

From one perspective, Marks appears to be taking the road of sound, verifiable science: we can only know what we can prove. But he casts the issue in misleading terms, for no one familiar with the workings of genes refers to “innate abilities.” Our personal set of genes no more determines who we are than the frame of a house defines a home; much of the important stuff is added over time. There is no such thing as “innate ability” only “innate potential,” which has an indisputable genetic component. No amount of training can turn a dwarf into a NBA center, but training and opportunity are crucial to athletes with anatomical profiles of NBA centers.

Marks’s corollary assertion that truth rests only in the laboratory presents the antithesis of rigorous science. If every theory had to be vetted in a laboratory experiment, then everything from the atomic theory of matter to the theory that the earth revolves around the sun could be written off as “speculative”. As Steve Sailer writes, “you can’t reproduce Continental Drift in the lab. You can’t scoop up a few continents, go back a billion years, and then see if the same drift happens all over again.”

Ironically, the extremist position taken by Marks and parroted by many journalists mirrors the hard right stance of Darwin’s most virulent critics. While microevolution has been verified, the weakest link of evolutionary theory has always been the relatively meager evidence of transitional fossils to help substantiate macroevolution. “Evolution is not a scientific ‘fact,’ since it cannot actually be observed in a laboratory,” argued the Creation Legal Research Fund before the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attack on evolution theory. “The scientific problems with evolution are so serious that it could accurately be termed a ‘myth.’” Arguing for the teaching of Creationism in schools, anti-evolution Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) has said “we observe micro-evolution and therefore it is scientific fact; … it is impossible to observe macro-evolution, it is scientific assumption.”

Does the lack of scientific experiments substantiating macroevolution render all talk of evolution theory “the scientific equivalent of discussing properties of angels”? This ideological posturing disguised as science, whether it emanates from the fundamentalist right or the orhodox left, demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the process of scientific reasoning, which rarely lends itself to “smoking guns” and absolute certainty. It also confuses function with process. We may not yet know how genes and nature interact to shape gender identity but that does not mean, as Marks would have it, that stating that genetics play a role is “speculative.” We have yet to find the genetic basis for tallness, yet we can be quite certain that it is more likely to be found in the Dutch, now the world’s tallest population, than in the Japanese. The search for scientific truth is a process. It may be years before we identify a gene that ensures that humans grow five fingers, but we can be assured there is one, or a set of them. There are patterned human differences even though the specific gene sequences and the complex role of environmental triggers are elusive.

The Jomon of Japan, 15,000 BC to 300 BC.

 A modern day Ainu man, descended from the Jomon. Every DNA study of these people groups thm with Asians, even though they have a very Caucasian skull shape. It seems that the Jomon made it into the Americas (Spirit Cave man and Kennewick man). Their skin is somewhat lighter than the Yayoi Japanese, they have a lot more body hair, and sometimes they are described as having blue or grey eyes, and lighter hair than is normal in Japan. Many of them lack the oriental eye fold. That’s defiinitely one for a DNA population study to sort out. According to Cavalli -Sforza, the current DNA profile of Japan is about 10-20% Jomon. A modern study of Samurai skulls suggests that this was higher in the ruling classes. To me, that suggests the Korean Yayoi didn’t invade and take over, but they moved in with them relatively amicably. The standard invasion/genocide pattern you see in population DNA is the native DNA being in the underclass, with little of the Y chromosome surviving. It seems the Jomon didn’t get wiped out, they intermarried.

The morphology of the Jomon teeth does suggest that Jomons followed the coastal route up into Japan, and are descended from the same ancestral line as Melanesians and Aboriniges, not of Mongoloid descent. The first stone tools are found in Japan from about 35,000 years ago. Studies of thier teeth also suggest the were farming some sort of starchy plant like taro, as they had too high a level of dental caries to be accounted for by hunter gathering.

Early twentieth century picture of the Ainu.

Japanese polished hand axes from 30,000BC, Tokyo museum. 

 

The Jomon period, which encompasses a great expanse of time, constitutes Japan’s Neolithic period. Its name is derived from the “cord markings” that characterize the ceramics made during this time. Jomon people were semi-sedentary, living mostly in pit dwellings arranged around central open spaces, and obtained their food by gathering, fishing, and hunting. While the many excavations of Jomon sites have added to our knowledge of specific artifacts, they have not helped to resolve certain fundamental questions concerning the people of the protoliterate era, such as their ethnic classification and the origin of their language.All Jomon pots were made by hand, without the aid of a wheel, the potter building up the vessel from the bottom with coil upon coil of soft clay. As in all other Neolithic cultures, women produced these early potteries. The clay was mixed with a variety of adhesive materials, including mica, lead, fibers, and crushed shells. After the vessel was formed, tools were employed to smooth both the outer and interior surfaces. When completely dry, it was fired in an outdoor bonfire at a temperature of no more than about 900¡ C.Because the Jomon period lasted so long and is so culturally diverse, historians and archaeologists often divide it into the following phases:

Incipient Jomon (ca. 13,000–8000 B.C.). This period marks the transition between Paleolithic and Neolithic ways of life. Archaeological findings indicate that people lived in simple surface dwellings and fed themselves through hunting and gathering. They produced deep pottery cooking containers with pointed bottoms and rudimentary cord markings—among the oldest examples of pottery known in the world.

Incipient Jomon pot.

Initial Jomon (ca. 8000–5000 B.C.).By this period, the gradual climatic warming that had begun around 10,000 B.C. sufficiently raised sea levels, so that the southern islands of Shikoku and Kyushu were separated from the main island of Honshu. The rise in temperature also increased the food supply, which was derived from the sea as well as by hunting animals and gathering plants, fruits, and seeds. Evidence of this diet is found in shell mounds, or ancient refuse heaps. Food and other necessities of life were acquired and processed with the use of stone tools such as grinding rocks, knives, and axes.

 Early Jomon (ca. 5000–2500 B.C.).The contents of huge shell mounds show that a high percentage of people’s daily diet continued to come from the oceans. Similarities between pottery produced in Kyushu and contemporary Korea suggest that regular commerce existed between the Japanese islands and Korean peninsula. The inhabitants of the Japanese islands lived in square-shaped pithouses that were clustered in small villages. A variety of handicrafts, including cord-marked earthenware cooking and storage vessels, woven baskets, bone needles, and stone tools, were produced for daily use.

Middle Jomon (ca. 2500–1500 B.C.). This period marked the high point of the Jomon culture in terms of increased population and production of handicrafts. The warming climate peaked in temperature during this era, causing a movement of communities into the mountain regions. Refuse heaps indicate that the people were sedentary for longer periods and lived in larger communities; they fished, hunted animals such as deer, bear, rabbit, and duck, and gathered nuts, berries, mushrooms, and parsley. Early attempts at plant cultivation may date to this period. The increased production of female figurines and phallic images of stone, as well as the practice of burying the deceased in shell mounds, suggest a rise in ritual practices.

Deep bowl with sculptural rim, late Middle Jomon period (ca. 2500–1500 B.C.), ca. 1500 B.C.
Japan

  Late Jomon (ca. 1500–1000 B.C.).

As the climate began to cool, the population migrated out of the mountains and settled closer to the coast, especially along Honshu’s eastern shores. Greater reliance on seafood inspired innovations in fishing technology, such as the development of the toggle harpoon and deep-sea fishing techniques. This process brought communities into closer contact, as indicated by greater similarity among artifacts. Circular ceremonial sites comprised of assembled stones, in some cases numbering in the thousands, and larger numbers of figurines show a continued increase in the importance and enactment of rituals.

Final Jomon (ca. 1000–300 B.C.).As the climate cooled and food became less abundant, the population declined dramatically. Because people were assembled in smaller groups, regional differences became more pronounced. As part of the transition to the Yayoi culture, it is believed that domesticated rice, grown in dry beds or swamps, was introduced into Japan at this time.

 

 

 

 

Jomon skulls from Hokkaido

 

 

 A recreation of a Jomon house.

Just some storage for Jomon stuff.

http://emishi-ezo.net/Jomon%20origins.htm

 

 

http://www.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publish_db/Bulletin/no27/no27009.html

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/rwar/2006/00000038/00000002/art00007

Abstract:

The Jomon culture of Japan (14,000-2500 bp) is characterized by exceptionally dense and sedentary populations of hunters, fishers and gatherers. Various arguments have been put forward in favour of Jomon agriculture; it is argued here that such arguments are persuasive only if they are based on actual remains of the plants themselves. Recent excavations of wetland sites such as Awazu and Torihama have produced a range of herbaceous plants that were most probably cultivated, and the arboriculture of chestnut and other tree species is also likely. However, many archaeologists think that this cultivation remained on a small scale throughout the Jomon period, and that it was integrated into the predominantly foraging economy rather than precipitating a change to a socioeconomic system based on agriculture. Only in the Yayoi period after c . 2500 bp did agriculture become economically predominant, probably as the result of major immigration of wet-rice-cultivating groups from the Korean peninsula or China.
Keywords: Jomon; paleoethnobotany; plant remains; cultivation; wetland archaeology; yam

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/00438240600708295

Affiliations: 1: Environmental Archaeology, Kyoto University, Japan 2: Environmental Archaeology, University of Education, Japan

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/110485724/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
Article
Dental anthropological indications of agriculture among the Jomon people of central Japan. X. Peopling of the Pacific
Christy G. Turner II
Department of Anthropology, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281
 
This paper is the tenth of a planned series on dental anthropology of the Pacific basin and adjoining areas. The purpose of the series is to develop the use of dental polymorphisms as aids to understanding Pacific, New World, and Asian population origins, formation, and micro-evolution. Most previous papers in this series are identified in Turner and Swindler (‘78).

Keywords
Dentition • Dental anthropology • Asian agriculture • Oral pathology • Japanese
Abstract
The high rate of crown caries (8.6%; 119/1,377 teeth) and other oral pathologies in 101 central Japan Middle to Late Jomon Period (ca. 1000 B.C.) crania indicate a level of carbohydrate consumption consistent with an agriculture hypothesis. Because Jomon dental crown and root morphology shows strong resemblances with past and present Southeast Asians, but not with ancient Chinese or modern Japanese, Jomon agriculture could be of great antiquity in the isolated Japanese islands. These dental data and other assembled facts suggest that ancestral Jomonese might have carried to Japan a cariogenic cultigen such as taro before the end of the Pleistocene from tropical Sundaland by way of the now-submerged east Asian continental shelf.

Spirit Cave Man.

Spirit Cave man skull and reconstruction. 

By Frank X. Mullen
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
GRIMES POINT – Death came for the Spirit Cave Man 10,630 years ago amid waves of pain. His body rested in a shallow grave in a cave near Fallon, but not for eternity. Two Nevada archeologists found his partially-mummified body in 1940, but his antiquity was not known until tests were done in 1994.

Spirit Cave Man’s remains are now the focus of worldwide excitement and a national controversy. The man does not resemble American Indians, anthropologists say, and he may represent a population already established in North America when ancestors of the Indians arrived.

Some anthropologists want to study him further. Nevada Indian leaders want his remains reburied without further testing.

Both sides have presented evidence in the tug-of-war for the ancient remains. The Bureau of Land Management, steward of the federal land near Grimes Point where the remains were found, may make the decision on the future of the remains this summer.

Once Spirit Cave Man’s age was known, scientists studied the remains with X-rays and computer scans, built models of his head, analyzed his dried excrement, and studied the pollen and other materials found with the burial.

In a way, the researchers have partially recreated a Nevada lost to time. “This was a period when people all over the planet were adapting to the end of the Ice Age,” said Amy Dansie, an anthropologist who did some of the first work on the Spirit Cave remains.

“The mega-fauna (mammoths and other giant animals) died out 1,000 years before this culture existed,” Dansie said in a lecture at the museum last year.

“All over the world people were at the same stage of technology and civilization. Everyone was trying to adapt to a much different world.”

From what scientists have learned so far, the first Nevadans adapted to change as well as any people, at any time, anywhere on Earth.

The Spirit Cave Man opens a doorway into a time and a people formerly lost to history. That doorway will be closed forever if ancient remains like those found at Spirit Cave are reburied without study, some anthropologists argue.

Here’s a look through that doorway in time, based on museum reports, lectures and interviews with scientists who have studied the Spirit Cave Man mummy:

The cave man’s world

He was about 45 years old and was probably an elder of his people. His name never will be known, but what scientists have learned about him indicates a hard life and a painful death among people who cared for him.

Spirit Cave man and his clan lived in a marsh at the edges of a receding lake – later to be known as Lake Lahonthan. The lake once stretched across what was to become northwest Nevada. Cattails and bulrushes reached overhead. The water was alive with fish and insects.

The people made use of all the things in their world. They caught fish in nets, harvested edible plants and used stone points to hunt animals. Like most ancient people, they probably believed spirits were all around them, but their beliefs have been lost to time.

They lived in a snapshot of time before written history. The great lake left after the last Ice Age was shrinking. The Great Basin was turning into a desert. Sagebrush mingled with Indian hemp near the people’s camp. The clan lived near a marsh that was moving steadily northward as water evaporated and the climate became warmer and dryer.

This the last era when most of the people of the world were on an equal footing. It was a time before widespread farming and cities and writing. The first step-pyramids of Egypt were 6,000 years in the future. The massive stone monuments of Europe would not be raised for another 4,000 years.

These first Nevadans were Stone Age people, but their weaving was as functional and beautiful as any ever made. They knew each plant and animal in a way modern people can never experience. Yet, for some, it was not a peaceful life.

Spirit Cave Man had a skull fracture from a blow to the head. The break stretched from the left front of his skull to behind his left ear. Two fractures spread out from a circular indentation in his skull, as though he had been hit with a blunt object, like a club or a rounded stone. The head fractures, more than a year old, had partially healed, but he had other medical problems.

His right hand had been broken in two places but had healed. His spine was malformed since birth, leading to conditions and injuries that probably gave him considerable lower back pain. He suffered from frequent dental abscesses, which left jagged edges on his jawbones.

Shortly before he died, three teeth were badly infected. The abscesses drained through an open sore in his cheek. The infection surged through his bloodstream. Fever raged through him. He was dying.

His people cared for him. Shortly before his death they fed him small chub and sucker fish, probably boiled and mashed. It was his last meal. The day he ate it, Spirit Cave Man’s life ended.

His clan members carried his body up an incline from their camp in the marsh. They went to a hillside where shallow caves – most no more than rock shelters – dotted the face of the hillsides. The hollows were dug by the wave action of the giant lake thousands of years before. Then, as now, the roofs and sides of the caves were coated in white tufa, calcium carbonate from the lake’s water.

The people dug a shallow grave and placed their clan member within it. He was lain on his right side with his hand resting beneath his chin. The people wrapped the dead man’s body in a rabbit fur blanket and covered his head with a diamond-plaited mat. It was not a special new mat for a funeral. It showed signs of wear where people – perhaps the dead man himself – had sat and reclined upon it. It, like the other artifacts buried with the man, was a thing of daily use.

The dead man’s moccasins, with tough leather soles and marmot hide tops, remained on his feet. One moccasin had been patched, heel and toe, with antelope hide after long use. Tule reeds inside the moccasins served as socks.

The people covered him with sand and rocks and left him for the ages in a cave where other human remains also would be found. It is not known if the people believed his spirit would go on to an afterlife, but they could not have imagined the kind of resurrection in store for him more than ten millennia after his death. The Discovery

Spirit Cave Man’s clan enjoyed their moist, green world for a brief snapshot in time. The marsh shrank year by year and desert took its place. Many generations later, the Great Basin would become even more inhospitable. About 7,000 to 4,500 years ago a great drought held the basin in its parched grasp.

Yet, people still lived in what was to be called Nevada. By the time the first non-Indian invaders crossed the Great Basin in the early 1800s, the people who wandered the desert and lived around the lakes, marshes and the rivers were well established.

The Numu, as the Paiute people called themselves, lived in the western, southern and central parts of Nevada. The Wa-she-shu, or Washoe people lived in the Sierra Nevada and the valleys to the east of the mountains. The Newe, or Western Shoshone people, lived in what would become western Nevada.

Throughout the basin were the remnants of cultures long vanished. In the caves and other hidden places were artifacts of the ancient ones. The modern Indians said these things were the traces of their ancestors. Scientists began to gather evidence of these Nevadans of so long ago.

Could these Ainu-like remains be from the people that the Paiute people called the Si Te Cah?

According to Paiute oral history, the Si-Te-Cah are a legendary race whose mummified remains were discovered (under 4 feet of guano) by guano farmers in what is now known as “Lovelock Cave” in Lovelock, Nevada. Although the cave had been mined since 1911, it was not until 1924 when miners notified authorities. An archeological excavation ensued producing 10,000 artifacts. “Si-Te-Cah” literally means “tule-eaters” in the language of the Paiute Indians. Tule is a fibruous water plant. In order to escape harassment from the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cahs lived on rafts made of tule on the lake.

According to the Paiutes, the Si-Te-Cah were a hostile and warlike race who practiced cannibalism. The Si-Te-Cah and the Paiutes were at war, and after a long struggle a coalition of tribes trapped the remaining Si-Te-Cah in Lovelock Cave. When they refused to come out, the Indians piled brush before the cave mouth and set it aflame. The Si-Te-Cah were annihilated. She does not say that there were giants and there are no legends that there were giants. Stories on the web that the Paiutes built a pyramid are possibily confusion caused by the existence of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes and the Stone Mother Legend

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, daughter of Paiute Chief Winnemucca, related many stories about the Si-Te-Cah in her book Life Among the Paiutes. “My people say that the tribe we exterminated had reddish hair. I have some of their hair, which has been handed down from father to son. I have a dress which has been in our family a great many years, trimmed with the reddish hair. I am going to wear it some time when I lecture. It is called a mourning dress, and no one has such a dress but my family.

Mungo man, not descended from Mitichondrial Eve.

Mungo man was found in at Lake Mungo, New South Wales in 1974. He was estimated to be a very tall 6′4″, and old when he died, and the most widely accepted date for his death was about 40,000 years ago. He was sprinkled with red ochre, a common practice in many ancient burials.

The really interesting thing about Mungo man is the mitochondrial DNA that was extracted from his ancient bones. Mungo man was not descended from mitochondrial Eve, and yet he was an modern human. In fact his Mt DNA was nearly as distantly related to the modern lineages as a Neanderthals, and it really put a dent in the ‘out of Africa’ theory.

Borrowed from Donsmaps.

 

People in Asia before Toba?

by Stephen Oppenheimer,

Borrowed from The Bradshaw foundation, a site well worth several visits.
Dating the arrival of Anatomically Modern Humans in East Asia: Who made the Kota Tampan tools and when?

No one has done more research into Kota Tampan and the Lenggong Valley culture than archaeologist Zuraina Majid, of the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang. Her extensive work at a number of sites in the Lenggong Valley suggests that a local pebble-tool culture may have existed from the days of that great Toba volcanic eruption right up until 7,000 or even only 4,000 years ago. If that is so, it may provide the answer to one of the most nagging questions about the unifacial oval pebble tools: who made them? On the face of it, these are by no stretch of the imagination sophisticated tools. Better-looking tools were made long before in Africa and Europe by archaic humans, so why should anyone think that the unifacial pebbles encased in volcanic ash had been made by modern humans living at the time of Toba?
 
Two of the highest authorities on the Southeast Asian Palaeolithic, Australian archaeologists Peter Bellwood and Sandra Bowdler, agree with Zuraina Majid and Tom Harrison to the extent that these tools were most likely made by Anatomically Modern Humans. For a start, the dates for most of the pebble tools found in the Lenggong Valley are too recent for them to have been made by anyone else. Second, no pre-modern humans have ever been found in the Malay Peninsula, let alone in the Lenggong Valley.  

Perak Man

Zuraina’s trump card in this respect is the much publicized finding by her team of ‘Perak Man’ in the Gunung Runtuh cave in the Lenggong Valley in 1990. Surrounded by the same class of pebble tools, this complete skeleton of a modern human was described by experts as having Australo-Melanesian characteristics. He was about 10,000 years old. This clear recent association of pebble tools with modern humans undermines the argument that the Kota Tampan pebble tools were too crude to be the work of moderns. The same locality also provides a continuity link with the older tools, which Zuraina argues is supported by technical comparisons. So, for the moment at least, Perak Man is the best local evidence that the older pebble tools encased in ash were made by the same (modern) human species.
 
Another venerable expert on the archaeology of Southeast Asia is Richard Shutler. He makes the more general point that these kinds of tools were first brought to Island Southeast Asia (meaning all the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines) by Homo sapiens about 70,000 years ago. Shutler cautions against the view that such tools reflect cultural backwardness, agreeing with others that the quality of the available raw material determined what could be used for tools, and that for more sophisticated implements such as knives, bamboo was more likely to have been used.
 

So how old was the Kota Tampan ash?

When it was first dated, several decades ago, the result came out at 31,000 years old. This date for ash from the Toba volcano has always worried geologists, and even archaeologists such as Peter Bellwood. The trouble is that Toba did not undergo a massive explosion at that time. Toba’s last big bang, the largest explosion in the world in the past 2 million years, came much earlier, 71,000–74,000 years ago. More recently several geologists, including the one who did the original dating, have agreed that the ash surrounding the tools was indeed 74,000 years old. The dating is critical. If the Kota Tampan pebble tools were made by modern humans, they would be the oldest precisely dated evidence for modern humans outside Africa. It therefore looks as though the ancestors of the Australians could well have left Africa and arrived in Malaysia on their beachcombing trail before the great Toba explosion.
 

Liujiang Skull

Another piece of evidence from the region may help place Anatomically Modern Humans in the Far East over 70,000 years ago. This is the famous southern Chinese Liujiang skeleton. Consisting of a well-preserved skull and a few other bones, Liujiang was discovered in a small cave at Tongtianyan in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 1958 by people collecting fertilizer. There is no doubt that this person was anatomically modern, but from the start there has been controversy over its age.

 

A uranium date of 67,000 years was reported, but has been questioned on the basis of its exact location in relation to dated geological strata. In December 2002, a Chinese group headed by geologist Shen Guanjun reported their reinvestigation of the stratigraphy of the cave and dating of the skull (extending to several neighbouring caves) and claim it should be placed in a time bracket between 70,000 and 130,000, and not less than 68,000, years ago. The skull was found in a so-called intrusive breccia, a secondary flow of debris containing jumbled material of different ages. From their paper in the prestigious Journal of Human Evolution, the lower date bracket of 68,000 years seems solid, since it comes from multiple date estimates of the flowstone above and covering the breccia. (A flowstone forms when flowing water deposits calcite down a wall or across a floor.) Their preferred dating of 111,000–139,000 years ago based on unstratified fragments of flowstone and calcite within the breccia seems more speculative.
 
I have stuck my neck out to place modern humans in Malaysia by this date on the basis of the Kota Tampan site where tools were found under a thick layer of volcanic ash from Toba. The key tools were indisputably artefacts, and the ash did come straight from the sky 74,000 years ago. But in spite of majority view that the Kota Tampan tools were the handiwork of modern humans, they could still theoretically have been made by other humans, since no bones have been found on-site which would confirm the identity of their makers. The only modern human remains of that antiquity found in the region are the now re-dated Liujiang skull and partial skeleton from southern China. The dating of the earliest Flores (Eastern Indonesia) occupation by modern humans remains to be published. I have several corroborating reasons for relying on such a connection. First of all, the logic of the low-water colonization of Australia 65,000 years ago fits; and second, increasing numbers of genetic dates outside Africa easily reach back to this time. The next available low-water slot for the colonization of Australia would have been around 50,000 years ago, but that does not fit the other evidence so well.

The mount Toba event

Borrowed from the Bradshaw Foundation
by Stephen Oppenheimer

The Toba explosion 74,000 years ago and the genetic evidence.
 
Perhaps more important than the precision of the dating, the connection between stone tools and Toba volcanic ash in Malaysia puts the first Indians and Pakistanis in the direct path of the greatest natural calamity to befall any humans, ever. The Toba explosion was that disaster, the biggest bang in 2 million years. Carried by the wind, the plume of ash from the volcano fanned out to the north-west and covered the whole of the Indian subcontinent. Even today, a metres-thick ash layer is found throughout the region, and is associated in two Indian locations with Middle and Upper Palaeolithic tools. An important prediction of this conjunction of tools and ash is that a deep and wide genetically sterile furrow would have split East from West; India would eventually recover by re-colonisation from either side. Such a furrow does exist in the genetic map of Asia.
 
In spite of the proximity of Toba to Perak, the Toba ash plume only grazed the Malay Peninsula. The human occupants of the Kota Tampan site were the unlucky ones – others on the peninsula escaped. Some argue, on the basis of comparing skull morphologies, that the Semang aboriginal ‘Negrito’ hunter-gatherers, who still live in the same part of the dense northern Malaysian rainforest, are descendants of people like Perak Man. The continuity of the Kota Tampan culture as argued by Zuraina Majid provides a link back to the 74,000-year-old tools in the Toba ash.
The Semang are perhaps the best known of the candidate remnants of the old beachcombers. Another relict group possibly left over from the beachcombers in Indo-China and the Malay Peninsula are the so-called Aboriginal Malays, who are physically intermediate between the Semang and Mongoloid populations.
 
For a film documentary, The Real Eve (Out of Eden in the UK), with with which Stephen Oppenheimer ’s book is associated, Discovery Channel helped to fund a genetic survey of the aboriginal groups of the Malay Peninsula which I conducted in collaboration with English geneticist Martin Richards and some Malaysian scientists. This survey was part of a much larger on-going study of East Asian genetics.
 
The mtDNA results were very exciting: three-quarters of the Semang group (i.e. the ‘Negrito’ types) have their own unique genetic M and N lines with very little admixture from elsewhere, which is consistent with the view that their ancestors may have arrived with the first beachcombers. Their two unique lines trace straight back to the M and N roots (the first two daughters of L3 outside Africa). Their M line is not shared with anyone else in Southeast Asia or East Asia (or anywhere else) and, although it has suffered loss of diversity through recent population decline, it retains sufficient diversity to indicate an approximate age of 60,000 years. Their other unique group on the N side comes from R, N’s genetic daughter. This lack of any specific connection with any other Eurasian population is consistent with the idea that after arriving here so long ago, they have remained genetically isolated in the jungles of the Malay Peninsula.
 

The colonisation of Australia over 60,000 years ago was part of the same Exodus

Some are still convinced that Australian aboriginals represent an earlier migration out of Africa than that which gave rise to Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans. Yet again our genetic trail tells us otherwise. Several studies of Australian maternal clans have shown that they all belong to our two unique non-African superclans, M and N, and large studies of Y chromosomes show that male Australian lines all belong to the same Out-of-Africa Adam clan as other non-Africans (M168). The same pattern is seen with genetic markers not exclusively transmitted through one parent. In other words, the combined genetic evidence strongly suggests Australians are also descendants of that same single out-of-Africa migration. The logic of this approach, combined with the archaeological dates, places the modern human arrival in the Malay Peninsula before 74,000 years ago and Australia around 65,000 years ago. It is also consistent with the date of exit from Africa predicted on beachcombing grounds.
 
My date estimates for the trek around the Indian Ocean en route from Africa suggest that the beachcombers could have taken as little as 10,000 years to eat their way down the coastline to Perak and roughly another 10,000 years to reach Australia. Such a time requirement is fulfilled by the difference between leaving Africa around 85,000 years ago and arriving in Australia 65,000 years ago. The former date is consistent with dates estimated for the African L3 cluster expansion using the molecular clock.
 

A genetic furrow in India resulting from the Toba explosion?

There is an abrupt genetic change to the north and east of India. These changes can be inferred even from physical appearance. In Nepal, Burma, and eastern India we come across the first Mongoloid East Asian faces. These populations generally speak East Asian languages, contrasting strongly with their neighbours who mostly speak Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages. By the time we get to the east of Burma and to Tibet on the northern side of the Himalayas, the transition to East Asian appearance and ethnolinguistic traditions is complete, as is the rapid and complete change of the mitochondrial sub-clans of M and N. In Tibet, for instance, the ratio of M to N clans has changed from 1:5 to 3:1, and there is no convincing overlap of their sub-clans with India. Instead, Tibet shows 70 per cent of typical East and Southeast Asian M and N sub-clans, with the remainder consisting of as-yet unclassified M types of local origin. The north-eastern part of the Indian subcontinent therefore shows the clearest and deepest east–west boundary. This boundary possibly reflects the deep genetic furrow scored through India by the ash-cloud of the Toba volcano 74,000 years ago.
 
To the south of the Indian peninsula, the main physical type generally changes towards darker-skinned, curly haired, round-eyed so-called Dravidian peoples. Comparisons of skull shape link the large Tamil population of South India with the Senoi, a Malay Peninsular aboriginal group intermediate between the Semang and Aboriginal Malays (see above).
 

M born in India, N possibly a little farther west in the Gulf.

M, who is nearly completely absent from West Eurasia, gives us many reasons to suspect that her birthplace is in India. M achieves her greatest diversity and antiquity in India. Nowhere elsem does she show such variety and such a high proportion of root and unique primary branch types. The eldest of her many daughters in India, M2, even dates to 73,000 years ago. Although the date for the M2 expansion is not precise, it might reflect a local recovery of the population after the extinction that followed the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago. M2 is strongly represented in the Chenchu hunter-gatherer Australoid tribal populations of Andhra Pradesh, who have their own unique local M2 variants as well as having common ancestors with M2 types found in the rest of India. Overall, these are strong reasons for placing M’s birth in India rather than further west or even in Africa.
 
What is perhaps most interesting about the unique Indian flowerings of the M and R clans is a hint that they represent a local recovery from the Toba disaster which occurred 74,000 years ago, after the out-of-Africa trail began. A devastated India could have been re-colonised from the west by R types and from the east more by M types. Possible support for this picture comes from the recent study by Kivisild and colleagues of two tribal populations in the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh. One of these populations, the Australoid Chenchu hunter-gatherers, are almost entirely of the M clan and hold most of the major M branches characteristic of and unique to India. The other group, the non-Australoid Koyas, have a similarly rich assortment of Indian type M branches (60 per cent of all lines), but have 31 per cent uniquely Indian R types. The Chenchu and Koya tribal groups thus hold an ancient library of Indian M and R genetic lines which are ancestral to, and include, much of the maternal genetic diversity that is present in the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Neither of these two groups holds any West Eurasian N types. The presence of R types in the Koyas but not in the Australoid Chenchus might fit with some component of a recolonization from the Western side of the Indian subcontinent. As evidence of their ancient and independent development, and in spite of their clearly Indian genetic roots and locality, there were no shared maternal genetic types (i.e. no exact matches) between the two tribal groups.

The resulting lake left by the Mount Toba eruption.

The blue dots show the deposition of ash from the eruption. The red line marks the likely zone inside which no-one survived, although this is disputed.
Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans.

 

Extract from “Journal of Human Evolution”

[1998] 34, 623-651

 

The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba’s eruption may have decimated Modern Man’s entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade.Volcanic winter and instant Ice Age may help resolve the central but unstated paradox of the recent African origin of Humankind: if we are all so recently “Out of Africa”, why do we not all look more African?Because the volcanic winter and instant Ice Age would have reduced populations levels low enough for founder effects, genetic drift and local adaptations to produce rapid changes in the surviving populations, causing the peoples of the world to look so different today. In other words, Toba may have caused Modern Races to differentiate abruptly only 70,000 years ago, rather than gradually over one million years.

Volcanic Winter

 

The Mount Toba eruption is dated to approximately 71,000 years ago. Volcanic ash from Mount Toba can be traced north-west across India, where a widespread terrestrial marker bed exists of primary and reworked airfall ash, in beds that are commonly 1 to 3, and occasionally 6 meters [18 feet] thick.Tambora, the largest known historic eruption, displaced 20 cubic kilometres of ash. Mount Toba produced 800 cubic kilometres.* It was therefore forty times larger than the largest eruption of the last two centuries and apparently the second largest known explosive eruption over the last 450 million years.

Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans

 

Mount Toba’s eruption is marked by a 6 year period during which the largest amount of volcanic sulphur was deposited in the past 110,000 years. This dramatic event was followed by 1000 years of the lowest ice core oxygen isotope ratios of the last glacial period. In other words, for 1000 years immediately following the eruption, the earth witnessed temperatures colder than during the Last Glacial Maximum at 18-21,000 years ago.For the volcanic aerosols to be effectively distributed around the earth, the plume from the volcanic eruptions must reach the stratosphere, a height greater than 17 kilometres. Mount Toba’s plume probably reached twice this height. Most solar energy falls at low latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, so eruptions that happen near the Equator cause much more substantial cooling due to the reflection of solar energy. Toba lies 2 degrees north of the Equator, on the Island Sumatra.The reduction in atmospheric visibility due to volcanic ash and dust particles is relatively short-lived, about three to six months. Longer-term global climatic cooling is caused by the highly reflective sulphuric acid haze, which stays suspended in the upper atmosphere for several years.Ice core evidence implicates Mount Toba as the cause of coldest millennium of the late Pleistocene. It shows that this eruption injected more sulphur that remained in the atmosphere fo a longer time [six years] than any other volcanic eruption in the last 110,000 years. This may have caused nearly complete deforestation of southeast Asia, and at the same time to have lowered sea surface temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees centigrade for several years.If Tambora caused the ” The year without a summer” in 1816, Mount Toba could have been responsible for six years of relentless volcanic winter, thus causing a massive deforestation, a disastrous famine for all living creatures, and a near extinction of Humankind.

The Volcanic Winter/Weak Garden of Eden model proposed in this paper. Population subdivision due to dispersal within African and other continents during the early Late Pleistocene is followed by bottlenecks caused by volcanic winter, resulting from the eruption of Toba, 71 ka. The bottleneck may have lasted either 1000 years, during the hyper-cold stadial period between Dansgaard-Oeschlger events 19 and 20, or 10ka, during oxygen isotope stage 4. Population bottlenecks and releases are both sychronous. More individuals survived in Africa because tropical refugia were largest there, resulting in greater genetic diversity in Africa.

 

 

 

I’ve had a dig about, and there does seem to be a recorded ‘volcanic winter’ in the ice cores from that era. I can’t find any evidence for any mass extinctions from that era, and the Neanderthals seem to have survived it fine. But, having read up on ‘the year without a summer’, this would in my opinion, have caused a major population crash. This was caused by about 150 cubic kilometers of ash being ejected into the atmosphere, the Toba eruption ejected 2800 cubic kilometers. That had to have had a serious effect. 

Although…

 Archaeologists found the stone tools at a site called Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh, southern India, above and below a thick layer of ash from the eruption of the Toba volcano in Indonesia — an event known as the Youngest Toba Tuff eruption.The tools from each layer were remarkably similar, and Petraglia says that this shows that the huge dust clouds from the eruption didn’t wipe out the population of tool-using people. “Whoever was there seems to have persisted through the eruption,” he says.This is the first archaeological evidence associated with the Toba super eruption, says Petraglia, and it contradicts theories that the eruption had a catastrophic effect on the area that its ash blanketed.

The super-eruption of Toba, did it cause a human bottleneck?

F. J. Gathorne-Hardy et al.

In summary, we have not been able to find any evidence to support the hypothesis that the Toba super-eruption of 73.5 Ka caused a bottleneck in the human population. The direct effects of the eruption were fairly localised, and at the time probably had a negligible effect on any human population in Asia, let alone Africa. Genetic evidence indicates that the Pleistocene human population bottleneck was not hour-glass shaped, but rather an up-side down bottle with a long neck. Modern humans at that time were adaptable, mobile, and technologically well-equipped, and it is likely that they could have dealt with the short-term environmental effects of the Toba event. Finally, we have found no evidence for associated animal decline or extinction, even in environmentally-sensitive species. We conclude that it is unlikely that the Toba super-eruption caused a human, animal or plant population bottleneck.

The Great Race Debate.

Don’t anyone get excited, it’s just cut and paste with some links for my record.

Race, a proponent’s perspective

by George W. Gill

Slightly over half of all biological/physical anthropologists today believe in the traditional view that human races are biologically valid and real. Furthermore, they tend to see nothing wrong in defining and naming the different populations of Homo sapiens. The other half of the biological anthropology community believes either that the traditional racial categories for humankind are arbitrary and meaningless, or that at a minimum there are better ways to look at human variation than through the “racial lens.”

Are there differences in the research concentrations of these two groups of experts? Yes, most decidedly there are. As pointed out in a recent 2000 edition of a popular physical anthropology textbook, forensic anthropologists (those who do skeletal identification for law-enforcement agencies) are overwhelmingly in support of the idea of the basic biological reality of human races, and yet those who work with blood-group data, for instance, tend to reject the biological reality of racial categories.

 Where does George Gill stand in the “great race debate?” Read on.
 
I happen to be one of those very few forensic physical anthropologists who actually does research on the particular traits used today in forensic racial identification (i.e., “assessing ancestry,” as it is generally termed today). Partly this is because for more than a decade now U.S. national and regional forensic anthropology organizations have deemed it necessary to quantitatively test both traditional and new methods for accuracy in legal cases. I volunteered for this task of testing methods and developing new methods in the late 1980s. What have I found? Where do I now stand in the “great race debate?” Can I see truth on one side or the other—or on both sides—in this argument?

Findings

 First, I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities (white, black, American Indian, etc.) by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. Many well-conducted studies were reported in the late 1980s and 1990s that test methods objectively for percentage of correct placement. Numerous individual methods involving midfacial measurements, femur traits, and so on are over 80 percent accurate alone, and in combination produce very high levels of accuracy. No forensic anthropologist would make a racial assessment based upon just one of these methods, but in combination they can make very reliable assessments, just as in determining sex or age. In other words, multiple criteria are the key to success in all of these determinations.
  While he doesn’t believe in socially stipulated “age” categories, Gill says, he can “age” skeletions with great accuracy.
I have a respected colleague, the skeletal biologist C. Loring Brace, who is as skilled as any of the leading forensic anthropologists at assessing ancestry from bones, yet he does not subscribe to the concept of race. [Read Brace's position on the concept of race.] Neither does Norman Sauer, a board-certified forensic anthropologist. My students ask, “How can this be? They can identify skeletons as to racial origins but do not believe in race!” My answer is that we can often function within systems that we do not believe in.

As a middle-aged male, for example, I am not so sure that I believe any longer in the chronological “age” categories that many of my colleagues in skeletal biology use. Certainly parts of the skeletons of some 45-year-old people look older than corresponding portions of the skeletons of some 55-year-olds. If, however, law enforcement calls upon me to provide “age” on a skeleton, I can provide an answer that will be proven sufficiently accurate should the decedent eventually be identified. I may not believe in society’s “age” categories, but I can be very effective at “aging” skeletons. The next question, of course, is how “real” is age biologically? My answer is that if one can use biological criteria to assess age with reasonable accuracy, then age has some basis in biological reality even if the particular “social construct” that defines its limits might be imperfect. I find this true not only for age and stature estimations but for sex and race identification.

 ”I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains that from looking at living people standing before me,” Gill says.
 
 
The “reality of race” therefore depends more on the definition of reality than on the definition of race. If we choose to accept the system of racial taxonomy that physical anthropologists have traditionally established—major races: black, white, etc.—then one can classify human skeletons within it just as well as one can living humans. The bony traits of the nose, mouth, femur, and cranium are just as revealing to a good osteologist as skin color, hair form, nose form, and lips to the perceptive observer of living humanity. I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains than from looking at living people standing before me. So those of us in forensic anthropology know that the skeleton reflects race, whether “real” or not, just as well if not better than superficial soft tissue does. The idea that race is “only skin deep” is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm.

Position on race
Where I stand today in the “great race debate” after a decade and a half of pertinent skeletal research is clearly more on the side of the reality of race than on the “race denial” side. Yet I do see why many other physical anthropologists are able to ignore or deny the race concept. Blood-factor analysis, for instance, shows many traits that cut across racial boundaries in a purely clinal fashion with very few if any “breaks” along racial boundaries. (A cline is a gradient of change, such as from people with a high frequency of blue eyes, as in Scandinavia, to people with a high frequency of brown eyes, as in Africa.)
  “Clines” represent gradients of change, such as that between areas where most people have blue eyes and areas in which brown eyes predominate.
 
Morphological characteristics, however, like skin color, hair form, bone traits, eyes, and lips tend to follow geographic boundaries coinciding often with climatic zones. This is not surprising since the selective forces of climate are probably the primary forces of nature that have shaped human races with regard not only to skin color and hair form but also the underlying bony structures of the nose, cheekbones, etc. (For example, more prominent noses humidify air better.) As far as we know, blood-factor frequencies are not shaped by these same climatic factors.

So, serologists who work largely with blood factors will tend to see human variation as clinal and races as not a valid construct, while skeletal biologists, particularly forensic anthropologists, will see races as biologically real. The common person on the street who sees only a person’s skin color, hair form, and face shape will also tend to see races as biologically real. They are not incorrect. Their perspective is just different from that of the serologist.

So, yes, I see truth on both sides of the race argument.

Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the “race denial” faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in “race denial” are in “reality denial” as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.

Consequently, at the beginning of the 21st century, even as a majority of biological anthropologists favor the reality of the race perspective, not one introductory textbook of physical anthropology even presents that perspective as a possibility. In a case as flagrant as this, we are not dealing with science but rather with blatant, politically motivated censorship. But, you may ask, are the politically correct actually correct? Is there a relationship between thinking about race and racism?

 Does discussing the concept of race promote racism?
 
Race and racism

 Does discussing human variation in a framework of racial biology promote or reduce racism? This is an important question, but one that does not have a simple answer. Most social scientists over the past decade have convinced themselves that it runs the risk of promoting racism in certain quarters. Anthropologists of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, on the other hand, believed that they were combating racism by openly discussing race and by teaching courses on human races and racism. Which approach has worked best? What do the intellectuals among racial minorities believe? How do students react and respond?

Three years ago, I served on a NOVA-sponsored panel in New York, in which panelists debated the topic “Is There Such a Thing as Race?” Six of us sat on the panel, three proponents of the race concept and three antagonists. All had authored books or papers on race. Loring Brace and I were the two anthropologists “facing off” in the debate. The ethnic composition of the panel was three white and three black scholars. As our conversations developed, I was struck by how similar many of my concerns regarding racism were to those of my two black teammates. Although recognizing that embracing the race concept can have risks attached, we were (and are) more fearful of the form of racism likely to emerge if race is denied and dialogue about it lessened. We fear that the social taboo about the subject of race has served to suppress open discussion about a very important subject in need of dispassionate debate. One of my teammates, an affirmative-action lawyer, is afraid that a denial that races exist also serves to encourage a denial that racism exists. He asks, “How can we combat racism if no one is willing to talk about race?”
  “How can we combat racism,” asks an affirmative-action lawyer, “if no one is willing to talk about race?”
Who will benefit?

 In my experience, minority students almost invariably have been the strongest supporters of a “racial perspective” on human variation in the classroom. The first-ever black student in my human variation class several years ago came to me at the end of the course and said, “Dr. Gill, I really want to thank you for changing my life with this course.” He went on to explain that, “My whole life I have wondered about why I am black, and if that is good or bad. Now I know the reasons why I am the way I am and that these traits are useful and good.”

A human-variation course with another perspective would probably have accomplished the same for this student if he had ever noticed it. The truth is, innocuous contemporary human-variation classes with their politically correct titles and course descriptions do not attract the attention of minorities or those other students who could most benefit. Furthermore, the politically correct “race denial” perspective in society as a whole suppresses dialogue, allowing ignorance to replace knowledge and suspicion to replace familiarity. This encourages ethnocentrism and racism more than it discourages it.
Dr. George W. Gill is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. He also serves as the forensic anthropologist for Wyoming law-enforcement agencies and the Wyoming State Crime Laboratory.

Article
Race in biology and anthropology: A study of college texts and professors
Leonard Lieberman, Raymond E. Hampton, Alice Littlefield, Glen Hallead
Central Michigan University
 

Abstract
Information about social issues is underemphasized in college science education. This article takes the race concept as an example of this neglect. We review the history of the race concept and report the current status of the concept in textbooks and among professors. Responses to surveys of faculty at Ph.D.-granting departments indicate that 67% of biologists accept the concept of biological races in the species Homo sapiens, while only 50% of physical anthropologists do so. Content analysis of college textbooks indicates a significant degree of change over time (1936-1984) in physical anthropology but a lesser degree in biology. We suggest several reasons for the dissimilarity in the two disciplines. We propose continued use of the concept for some infrahuman species, while abandoning its application to Homo sapiens. For those biologists and anthropologists who continue to use the concept, scientific accuracy can be achieved by the presentation in lecture and text of the following ideas: first, consensus among scientists on the race concept’s utility and accuracy does not exist; second, there is more variation within than between so-called races; third, discordant gradations due to natural selection, drift, and interbreeding make consistent racial boundary lines impossible to identify; fourth, past use of the race concept has had harmful consequences; fifth, the most precise study of human hereditary variation maps one trait at a time; and sixth, racial labels are misleading, especially as most populations have a cultural designation.

Categorization of humans in biomedical research: genes, race and disease.

Neil Risch,^1,2 Esteban Burchard,³ Elad Ziv,³ and Hua Tang⁴

Two arguments against racial categorization as defined above are firstly that race has no biological basis [1,3], and secondly that there are racial differences but they are merely cosmetic, reflecting superficial characteristics such as skin color and facial features that involve a very small number of genetic loci that were selected historically; these superficial differences do not reflect any additional genetic distinctiveness [2]. A response to the first of these points depends on the definition of ‘biological’. If biological is defined as genetic then, as detailed above, a decade or more of population genetics research has documented genetic, and therefore biological, differentiation among the races. This conclusion was most recently reinforced by the analysis of Wilson et al. [2]. If biological is defined by susceptibility to, and natural history of, a chronic disease, then again numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races. In this context, it is difficult to imagine that such differences are not meaningful. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of ‘biological’ that does not lead to racial differentiation, except perhaps one as extreme as speciation.
A forceful presentation of the second point – that racial differences are merely cosmetic – was given recently in an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine [1]: “Such research mistakenly assumes an inherent biological difference between black-skinned and white-skinned people. It falls into error by attributing a complex physiological or clinical phenomenon to arbitrary aspects of external appearance. It is implausible that the few genes that account for such outward characteristics could be meaningfully linked to multigenic diseases such as diabetes mellitus or to the intricacies of the therapeutic effect of a drug.” The logical flaw in this argument is the assumption that the blacks and whites in the referenced study differ only in skin pigment. Racial categorizations have never been based on skin pigment, but on indigenous continent of origin. For example, none of the population genetic studies cited above, including the study of Wilson et al. [2], used skin pigment of the study subjects, or genetic loci related to skin pigment, as predictive variables. Yet the various racial groups were easily distinguishable on the basis of even a modest number of random genetic markers; furthermore, categorization is extremely resistant to variation according to the type of markers used (for example, RFLPs, microsatellites or SNPs).

Genetic differentiation among the races has also led to some variation in pigmentation across races, but considerable variation within races remains, and there is substantial overlap for this feature. For example, it would be difficult to distinguish most Caucasians and Asians on the basis of skin pigment alone, yet they are easily distinguished by genetic markers. The author of the above statement [1] is in error to assume that the only genetic differences between races, which may differ on average in pigmentation, are for the genes that determine pigmentation.

Complete item here

Other Niel Risch publications