10-22-2004, 08:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-25-2006, 11:58 AM by acharya.)
This is a recent book sold in Amazon, showing the latest DNA research
Some clear points in this book
So such thing as Aryan Invasion of India
Next ALL non-African humans resided in India from 85k to 60k years ago
The root DNA for all non-africans is in India
The Real Eve : Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa (Paperback)
by Stephen Oppenheimer
<img src='http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0786713348.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />
what is the title or who is the author
"The real Eve"
by Stephen Oppenheimer
Available at Amazon
DNA shows that the non-african world was colonised by different waves of emigrants from India
He has analysed both maternal DNA ( mitochondrial ) and Paternal DNA, the Y chromosome
There is a genetic link indeed between Europe and north west India
However, the DNA shows the roots to lie in kashmir and Punjab
The author specifically debunks the Aryan Invasion Theory
Every single non-african human is traceable to India
which was the only inhabitable place outside africa till about 50k years ago
Most people say that M17 is the Y chromosome genetic marker showing AIT in India. But, he clearely demolishes this myth. (Google for Spencer Wells and find out for yourselves)
From the book. Page 116.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of M17 line in Pakistan, India and eastern Iran and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in south Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a "Male Aryan Invasion" of India. One age estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan through Kashmir, than via Central Asia and Russia, before finally comming to Eruope.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Bye Bye, AI(M)T!
Bengurion.
This trip though genetic and human time has suggested two extraordinary conclusions: first that the Europeans genetic homeland was originally in south asia in the PakistanGulf Region over 50000 year ago; and second that the Europeans ancestors follwoed at least two widely seperated routes to arrive, ultimately in the same cold but rich garden.
<!--emo&:beer--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='cheers.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Bye Bye AIT/AMT.
So has the Indian "intellectual community" started to discuss this further ?
Thanks a Bunch G.S , that was really helpfull.
10-25-2004, 10:36 AM
(This post was last modified: 01-25-2006, 12:01 PM by acharya.)
http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/viv..._viii.htm#blank
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->"Yes, almost all Christianity is Aryan, I believe. I am inclined to think Christ never existed. I have doubted that ever since I had my dream â that dream off Crete!* Indian and Egyptian ideas met at Alexandria and went forth to the world, tinctured with Judaism and Hellenism, as Christianity.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In this thread I am focusing solely on DNA evidence in the book
Real Eve by Stephen Oppenheimer
The book suggests that there was a migration from the Indian subcontinent about 60 to 80, 000 years ago. How does such a migration solve the aryan problem?
GS,
OK we will keep this thread active for a week or so and see if some new info comes out of it ? So far its not too much info ? A book review summarising what evidence has been presented, how does it address the problem and how does it negate some other ideas being presented by other folks would be nice.. I had read somewhere that there was some other DNA evidence that aryans had invaded/migrated from central asia - can somebody post a summary of that also ? And how does this book refute that ?
Regards..
The standard theory is that India was empty and got 'invaded' from the north west
from Central Asian migrants
What is obvious in the book is that thanks to ice ages, outside Africa, the ONLY place inhabitable during ice ages was India
India got occupied by humans from a coastal route out of Yemen
Then DNA shows that every other non-african area got migrated to by Indians
either south east to Australia or north west to Middle east and Europe
Page 83
Mitochondrial DNA study
The main African Eve circa 150k years ago is denoted as L
L had several daughters of which a branch of L3 , rooted in Ethiopia
During the ice age circa 85k years ago, the red sea was shallow and the gulf was above water
A small band of L3 migrated to coastal Yemen and on the beach road and the first inhabitable non-coastal area was India
L3 then splits into N and M lines
N was born near baluchistan and M deeper in India
Europeans and middle eastern people have no M lines
India has the deepest variety of M lines dated to 75k years
M is found in Central Asia, Australia, New Guinea
Page 87
Europeans came from South asia circa 50k years ago
Page 136
N had a daughter lineage R, born in India 65 K years ago
(R is genetically rooted in India )
R had several daughters
U in India, splitting up into several U lines
U5 is the ancestor of kurds, armenians and basques and dates to 50k years
U6 migrated to North African coast
R had another daughter HV, dated 40K years ago
and HV migrated to Europe
N had a daughter I , dated 33K years
who migrated to Europe
R had a daughter J/T who migrated out of India
20K years ago
In short the entire maternal DNA of Europe is rooted in India which in turn is rooted in Africa
Page 178 shows entire global maternal DNA chart
Page 186 shows entire Y chromosome paternal DNA chart
There was an explosion of the Toba volcano in Sumatra, 80k years ago and the ash cloud was 3 feet thick in India and this caused a huge zone of extinction which explains the sudden racial difference as we move from Bengal to Assam
Page 187
The out of Africa Adam, breaks up into 3 paternal lines
YAP, RPSY, and 89
Virtually 97% of Indians are descended from 89
The root for all 3 male lines are in India
Page 192
South Asia is the first homeland for out of Africa humans
All Europeans are descended from various grandsons of 89
10-27-2004, 11:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-27-2004, 12:54 PM by dhu.)
Basically, all the earlier motivated studies of Indian genetics are getting overturned by the new generation of unbiased researchers.....We are seeing a deep genetic diversity in India with the ME and central Asia as the outliers. Europe is too insignificant to even merit discussion.
Kivislid <i>et al</i> From IC group:
Here, however, the clock is just a secondary problem -- the first being 'the Indian reference sample' used. Indeed, the Indians included in this study consisted of a (limited) sample from Gujurat -- one of the western maritime provinces of India. When extending the sample with collections from different states, a quite different, even opposite, picture emerges (Table 17.3). Indians appear to display the higher diversity both in haplogroups 3 and 9 -- even if a pooled sample of eastern and southern European populations was considered. If we were to use the same arithmetic and logic (<i>sensu </i>haplogroup 9 is neolithic) to give an interpretation of this table, then the <i><b>straight-forward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India </i>and from there, spread to Europe. </b>We would also have to add that inconsistencies with the archaeological evidence would appear and disappear as we change rate estimates (Table 17.3).
Table 17.3 <i>Variant and coalescent time estimates on Y-chromosomal STRs.</i>
Age estimates
Variance/ Pedigree rate/ Phylogenetic rate
<i>Haplogroup 9 </i>
Europe 0.44/ 6100/ 42,200
India 0.51/ 7100/ 48,900
<i>Haplogroup 3 </i>
Europe 0.24/ 3300/ 23,100
India 0.37/ 5200/ 35,700
Toba Lake in northern Sumatra is the world's largest active volcanic caldera. The volcanic eruption that resulted in Lake Toba (100 x 30 km) 74,000 years ago, is known to have been by far the biggest eruption of the last 2 million years. This mega-bang caused a prolonged world-wide nuclear winter and released ash in a huge plume that spread to the north-west and covered India, Pakistan, and the Gulf region in a blanket 1â5 metres (3â15 feet) deep. Toba ash is also found in the Greenland ice-record and submarine cores in the Indian Ocean, allowing a precise date marker. In our story the Toba eruption is the most accurately dated, dramatic, and unambiguous event before the last ice age.
Toba is also regarded by some as having caused worldwide population extinctions as a result of the ânuclear winterâ that followed. I have taken this into account in my reconstruction. <b>India bore the brunt of the massive ash fall, and may have suffered mass extinction</b>, since the Toba plume spread north-west across the Indian Ocean from Sumatra. This event may explain why most Indian maternal genetic sub-groups of the two founder lines M & N are not shared elsewhere in Asia and the dates of their re-expansions are paradoxically younger in India than elsewhere in East Asia and Australasia.
Arriving in Asia before Toba
If our ancestors left Africa 85,000 years ago, their descendants would have lived in Asia over 10,000 years before the Toba explosion, and beachcombers around the Indian Ocean would have been in direct line for the greatest volcanic ash fall in the whole of human existence. The Toba eruption is thus a valuable date mark, since the ash covered such a wide area, is accurately dated, and can be identified wherever an undisturbed layer of it is found.
The early archaeological dates for human presence in Australia have been reinforced by an extraordinary reappraisal of the Kota Tampan Palaeolithic culture found in Lenggong Valley, in Perak on the Malay Peninsula, two-thirds of the way from Africa to Australia. This culture first identified by the find of large, curious, and rather crude pebble tools, fashioned on one side only, was thought by archaeologists in the 1960s to be the work of an earlier human species. However, when the geological layers surrounding the tools were reassessed, it became clear they were more recent. Wider interest was sparked in 1975, when Tom Harrison, the colourful curator of the Sarawak Museum, argued that the tools related to the great eruption of the Sumatran volcano Toba.
Archaeological evidence
Malaysian archaeologist Zuraina Majid has explored the remains of this human culture in a wooded valley in Perak State, near Penang. A continuous Palaeolithic tradition known as the Kota Tampan culture goes back tens of thousands of years there. At one site, tools from this tradition lie embedded in volcanic ash from Toba. If the association of the tools with modern humans is confirmed, this means that modern humans got to Southeast Asia before the Toba eruption â more than 74,000 years ago. This, in turn, makes the 85,000-year-old exodus more likely. Genetic and other evidence for a human occupation of Australia by 65,000 years ago fits this scenario.
<b>The Toba event specifically blanketed the Indian subcontinent in a deep layer of ash. It is difficult to see how Indiaâs first colonists could have survived this greatest of all disasters. So, we could predict a broad human extinction zone between East and West Asia. Such a deep east-west division, or âfurrowâ, is still seen clearly in the genetic record.</b>
The Genetic Trail
<b>How does such an early date for the exodus fit with the genetic data? This is perhaps the most controversial and exciting part of the story. The short answer is that the genetic dates and tree fit the early exodus well. This also resolves the question about the origins of the Europeans: why it was that Europe was colonized only after 50,000 years ago, yet arose from the same maternal ancestor as the Australians and Asians.</b>
The South Asian region, the first homeland of that single, successful southern exodus, shows the presence of the genetic roots of that expansion not <span style='color:red'>only in the so-called aboriginal peoples around the Indian Ocean, but among the bulk of the modern populations.</span> Among these roots we can detect genetic base camps for the most westerly of the subsequent pioneer treks inland to the vast Eurasian continent. <b>These treks set off, after a pause, for Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It seems that the vanguard of the beachcombing trail retained a surprising proportion of the original genetic diversity left in the out-of-Africa group and moved rather faster round the shores of the Indian Ocean.</b> So fast, in fact, that they travelled right round to Indonesia and on into Near Oceania, arriving in Australia long before their first cousins made it to Europe.
The exact chronological relationship of the exodus and the subsequent arrival in Southeast Asia to the massive Toba volcanic explosion of 74,000 years ago is critical. First, Toba is one of the most accurately and precisely dated events of the Palaeolithic, and its ashfall acts as a time datum for the whole of southern Asia. Second, the effects of Tobaâs direct ashfall followed by the inevitable ânuclear winterâ would have been disastrous for any life in its path, and pretty bad farther afield. The presence of tools thought to be made by modern humans found with Toba ash in the Malay Peninsula suggests that the beachcombing vanguard had arrived in the Far East before the eruption. Triangulation of this anchor date with other pieces of evidence supports this scenario.
Other clues include:
New dates for the Liujiang skull in South China, luminescence dates from Australia, the date of the lowest sea level enabling passage to Australia at 65,000 years ago, genetic dates of the expansion of the L3 group at 83,000 years ago, and the onset of significant salinization of the Red Sea dated to 80,000 years ago. The best evidence for early modern humans in Asia should come from real fossils and their dated context. Such work is in process at the site of Liang Bua in Flores.
Now, if Toba really did blow its top after India was first colonized, we would expect a mass extinction event on the Indian Peninsula which affected the eastern side more than the west. <b>This is certainly one interpretation of the paradox of the Indian genetic picture, in which the genetic trail of the beachcombers can be detected, but the bulk of Indian subgroups of M and R are unique to the subcontinent, especially among the tribes of the south-east. This is what we would expect for a recovery from a great disaster. The oldest of these local lines have been dated to around 73,000 years ago.</b>
In the next sections we shall see what those pioneers did on the North and East Asian mainland after they arrived, and how they got to those places. Explicit <b>in all these predictions is the central role of South Asiam (particularly India, Pakistan, and the Gulf) as the fount of all non-African dispersals. As far as the gene tree is concerned, the earliest branches of non-African gene lines are in South and Southeast Asia.</b> The dates of first colonization of East and Central Asia by modern humans are problematic, because of uncertain skull dating and the evidence for a more recent Mongoloid replacement, but if the redating of the Liujiang skull at no less than 68,000 years is correct, South China could have been colonized at the same time as Southeast Asia. If modern humans had reached Southeast Asia before the great Toba volcanic explosion, <b>the sharp genetic break between India and the Far East may be explained by the ash cloud that covered India around 74,000 years ago.</b>
Much has been made recently of a 'beachcombing' lifestyle among the first modern Africans as a motive for spreading out of Africa and around the Indian Ocean. For most of their first 2 million years on Earth, humans were roaming the savannah as hunter-gatherers. Like the Kalahari of southern Africa, they exploited the rich nutritional value of group-hunted game, supplemented by salads of roots, fruit, and leaves. As the major glaciation of 130,000 - 190,000 years ago began to reduce their savannah range, someone had the idea of foraging and eating shellfish and other marine produce from the beach. It is always possible that beachcombing started even earlier, but since the beaches are now under water, we will never know. Such a diet, being rich in protein, is nutritious, good for the brain, and easier to obtain than game. Beach tucker has the added advantage of remaining available when the savannah dries up during an ice age.
Evidence for such beachcombing is unexpectedly easy to assess, since characteristic piles of split shells (shell middens) are left behind. There is, however, a problem in knowing just how long humans have been doing it. Shell middens are generally found just above the high-tide line, but for most of the past 200,000 years sea levels have been many metres below today's beaches. This means we would expect to miss most ancient middens except those laid down during the high sea levels of an interglacial, such as the one 125,000 years ago.
Neanderthals combed beaches in Spain and Italy 60,000 years ago, so it is possible that they brought the practice with them from Africa. Until recently, however, the earliest evidence for African beachcombing came from the Klasies River mouth in South Africa, dated to between 100,000 and 115,000 years ago. In 2000, however, new evidence was discovered for early beachcombing at Abdur on the Eritrean west coast of the Red Sea, just to the north of the Gate of Grief. Dated to 125,000 years ago, at the peak of the Eemian interglacial, the same beach site yielded butchered remains of large mammals, indicating a mixed diet. The implements, which included blades made from obsidian, a volcanic glass, are most likely to have been made by modern humans.
The great interest in this site on the Red Sea is twofold: it provides us with the oldest evidence for beachcombing anywhere and it is very close to the southern route out of Africa. Both aspects feed into an attractive model, which may be called the 'beach-buggy to Australia'. We get a compelling story of beachcombers multiplying until their patch of beach could support them no longer, then moving on to the next unexploited beach, and so on. By such rapid progression, once over the Red Sea the vanguard would just have followed the coast of the Indian Ocean, eating their way right down to Indonesia within 10,000 years. The low sea levels of the time would have allowed a dry walk from Aden to the tip of Java, and then easy island hops to Australia, where shell middens are found from the earliest traces of human habitation.
I am pretty sure that this model of the early colonization of Australia is correct, but the dates have to fit, not only for the archaeological evidence but also for the <b>molecular clock on the gene tree for all the other Eurasian dispersals. If, on top of this beach buggy model, we impose only a single out-of-Africa exodus to colonize both Australia and the rest of the world, we can start to make strong predictions for the order and dates of colonization en route of India, Southeast Asia, and the parallel movement to New Guinea. These predictions should be the test of the theory.</b>
EUROPEAN ORIGINS
As we have seen, the teasing issue of European origins is not just a matter of whether the future Europeans migrated out of Africa separately from the future Asians and Australians, or of just burying the myth that they were the first humans to show modern behaviour. It is more than that. Where did their extraordinary flowering of culture originate? Was it entirely home-grown, or was it imported? Why do some archaeologists argue for several different early cultural inputs to Europe in the period between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago - even one from the East? It can be argued that there are precise male and female genetic markers which parallel two different cultural waves that flowed in succession over the European archaeological record of the 25,000 years leading up the Last Glacial Maximum. These reveal that an 'Eastern' origin was no wild guess.
The ancestors of Europeans, the N (or Nasreen) clan, belonged to one of the first branches off the single exodus shoot which arrived in southern Arabia perhaps 80,000 years ago. <b>In spite of this secure position at the root of the Asian maternal genetic tree, the Europeans' ancestors had to wait tens of thousands of years in South Asia. </b>They waited until at least 50,000 years ago, when a moist, warm phase greened the Arabian Desert sufficiently to open the Fertile Crescent and allowed them to migrate north-westwards towards Turkey and the Levant. Such constraints had not affected their cousins - the vanguard of beach-combers who pressed on round the Indian Ocean coast to Southeast Asia and Australia. They arrived in Australia over 60,000 years ago, long before Europe was colonized.
<b>From an Asian point of view, Europe is an inaccessible peninsula jutting out north-west from the Old World, a geographical cul-de-sac. Genetically as well as geographically, Europeans are, similarly, a side-branch of the out-of-Africa human tree. Because the first non-African modern humans were Asians, 'peninsular Europe' was more likely to have been a recipient and beneficiary of the seeds of the earliest Upper Palaeolithic cultural innovations rather than their homeland. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>From this perspective it deconstructs the archaeological/anthropological myth of a major human biological revolution defined in Europe and the Levant, with everyone else in the world following the European lead</span>.</b>
The Fertile Crescent corridor opens
Our maternal gene tree suggests ultimately a 50,000-year-old South Asian origin for our oldest European founders. To arrive further north in Anatolia over 50,000 years ago they would have had to skirt the Libyan and Arabian Deserts, using the Fertile Crescent as a corridor. Given the rather generous margins of error on the molecular clock, for that trek up from the Zagros Mountains and Gulf marshes in south-west Iran, we should look at their migration from the perspective of climatic opportunity which, like the rings on a tree, gives us the most accurate dating. <i>The Fertile Crescent corridor was dry, and was closed during much of the last 100,000 years, opening only briefly during climatic improvements called 'interstadials'.</i>
Between 55,000 and 65,000 years ago the world went through a period of almost unremitting cold and dryness. During this time the Fertile Crescent corridor was shut. <b>Then, from 56,000 years ago onwards, there followed in quick succession a run of four warm and wet periods. The last of these, 51,000 years ago, was the warmest and most prolonged, lasting nearly 5,000 years. In fact, so warm and wet was this interstadial that the Indian monsoon was even wetter than it is today, and so, apart from the opening of the Fertile Crescent corridor, dry areas of the Levant such as the Negev Desert became potentially habitable for our Upper Palaeolithic tool-makers. If there was ever a time for us to multiply in South Asia and spread up to the Levant, this was it. </b>The climatic and archaeological clock timings converge on the lush period between 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. So it looks as though the molecular clock's timing for the arrival of the earliest daughter lines of Nasreen and their families in the Levant is not far off.
Europe's Asian roots
<b>This trip through genetic and human time has suggested two extraordinary conclusions: first, that the Europeans' genetic home-land was originally in South Asia in the Pakistani Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, the Europeans' ancestors followed a corridor from the Gulf through Kurdistan, known as the Fertile Crescent, which opened 51,000 years ago, allowing movement up through Turkey and eventually to Bulgaria and Southern Europe.</b> This seems to coincide with the Aurignacian cultural movement into Europe. The second early route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first started bringing down game as large as mammoths. Some of these hunters with their elaborate technical skills may then have moved westward across the Urals to European Russia and on to the Czech Republic and Germany. A more conservative view of this eastern invasion might be that the Trans-Caucasus, rather than Central Asia, was the earliest route of modern human entry into Russia.
10-28-2004, 12:30 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-28-2004, 12:33 AM by acharya.)
Fifth Daughter of Europa
<b>Perhaps the most stunning conclusion of many reached in this comprehensive review of European maternal genetic prehistory is the identification and dating of Europe's first founder line, U5.</b> Initially it was only U5, a genetic great-granddaughter of one of the four main Levantine founders, who moved into Europe. <b>The Europa clan is characteristic of the Near East and Europe. In spite of its antiquity, it is not found in East Asia, being confined to the Levant and the Gulf western Central Asia, countries round the Mediterranean, and Europe, with an ancient daughter branch, U2i, in India.</b> The clan as a whole has an antiquity of over 50,000 years in the Near East. According to the molecular clock, our fifth daughter of Europa, U5, also dates back 50,000 years and represents by far the earliest line to enter Europe, 15,000 years before the next European founder line. But how it is that Europa's genetic signal spread to the Near East and, through her daughter U5, on to Europe, from 54,400 to 50,000 years ago, when the archaeological dates for the Upper Palaeolithic first appearing in the Levant, and then the earliest Aurignacian in Bulgaria, are respectively only 47,100 and 46,000 years? This difference can be explained by a systematic under-recording of radiocarbon dates for any age over 40,000 years, giving a ceiling effect.
<b>Although U5apparently had her origins in the Near east at roughly the same time as her entry into Europe, her descendants are found there now only in a restricted area in minorities living mainly in Turkey and the Trans-Caucasus region of Turkey and Iran. These minorities include the Turks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Kurds, all of whom still live within the ancient limits of the Fertile Crescent that stretches from Turkey and the Trans-Caucasus south-east along the Zagros Mountains through Iraq and Iran. </b>The Fertile Crescent co-extends with Kurdistan, finally forming a corridor parallel to but north of Mesopotamia, running towards the coast of the Arabian Gulf and thus linking the Levant with the Indian Ocean. Significantly, U5 is almost absent from Arabia, apparently denying those peoples' ancestors as the primary source population for the first Aurignacian colonization of Europe.
Do we have any genetic trail that exactly fits the rapid movement of the Aurignacian tool-makers, westward within central Europe, taking them to the Pyrenees and Spain by 40,000 years ago? Although U5 is now ubiquitous in Europe, we do know that the oldest Europa great-granddaughter, U5a, dating from around 40,000 years ago, is commonest in the Basque country of northern Spain. <b>One of the only European refuges during the last ice age, the Basque region managed to preserve more of its original genetic diversity than did other parts of Western Europe.</b>
U5 is thus the one surviving Europa daughter line that identifies the first European ancestors up to 50,000 years ago, and is an ancestral type shared with Armenians, Turks, Azeris, and Kurds. What do we know of her family, where did she come from, and who were her sisters? Inspection of the gene-line tree gives us a genealogy that we can recount in biblical style: <b>Europa was genetic daughter of R ('Rohani'), who was genetic daughter of Nasreen, who was the genetic daughter of the out-of-Africa L3.</b> By what route, however, did the Europa maternal clan arrive in the Levant, and where was her daughter U5, who colonized Europe, born? Both the N ('Nasreen') and Rohani root types are unknown except in South Asia, where Nasreen root types are found at low rates and Rohani is found in great variety. Most Rohani types in India are found nowhere else, and the great diversity of Rohani in India allows us to estimate when her line began to expand. <span style='color:red'>This was at least 55,000 years ago, thus predating the arrival of Rohani's daughter Europa in the Levant and making a <i><span style='font-family:Geneva'><span style='color:purple'>strong case for South Asia as the ultimate ancestral home of European lines</span></i>. Even this expansion date is likely to be an underestimate of the age of the Rohani clan. Rohani may well be older than 55,000 years in Asia: much older estimates of the ages of two Asian subgroups of Rohani have been obtained in China</span>.</span>
FOUR ROUTES TO CENTRAL ASIA
As with all previous explorations, by both modern and archaic humans, geography and climate decided the newly arrived occupants of Asia where to go next. The rules would have been simple: stay near water, and near reliable rainfall; when moving, avoid deserts and high mountains and follow the game and the rivers. We have seen circumstantial evidence that the beachcombing route round the coast of the Indian Ocean to Australia was the easiest and earliest option. Why should this have been? It was not that easy: For a start, every few hundred kilometres our explorers would have had to ford a great river at its mouth. Yet this is just what they must have done to get to Australia, so it is possible they did the same along the East Asian coast. At each river there was the option for some people to turn left and head inland, harvesting river produce and game as they went.
As one of the earliest European explorers, Marco Polo, found out, mountains and deserts present formidable barriers to those trying to gain access to Central Asia; apart from a few trails, the only routes of entry are along the river valleys. We have seen that our first successful exodus from Africa took the ancestors of all non-Africans south along the Indian Ocean coast perhaps as long ago as 75,000 years. They may also have beachcombed as far as eastern China and Japan rather early on. <b>They would thus have skirted the whole of the Central Asian region. They could have tried to head upriver and inland at any point on their journey.</b>
North of India, with the Himalayas in the way, it was not as straightforward as that. The raised folds of mountains caused by India's ancient tectonic collision with Asia extend either side of Nepal and Tibet well beyond the highest Himalayas. A vast band of mountains, all over 3,000 metres (10,000 feet), blocks Central Asia to access from the Indian Ocean coast for a distance of 6,500 km (4,000 miles) from Afghanistan in the west to Chengdu, in China, to the east. This band is rucked up like a carpet in the east, thus extending the mountain barrier south as a series of north-south ridges over a distance of about 2,500 km (1,500 miles) from the beginning of the Silk Road in northern China south to Thailand.
The Silk Road, first made famous in the West by Marco Polo, is a long trading route, parallel to and to the north of the Himalayas, connecting West with East. It passes right through Central Asia, directly along the southern edge of Guthrie's Mammoth Steppe heartland. The Silk Road was then, as it is now, one of the few links between China and the West, if the long coastal route round south via Singapore was to be avoided.
East along the Silk Road from the
west end of the Himalayas
Today the Silk Road skirts both the southern and northern edges of the Taklamakan Desert of Singkiang. During the Palaeolithic, what is now desert was mostly lush grassland, and farther north a series of waterways, including the Tarim and Dzungaria rivers, provided easy west-east access for hunters from the western Central Asian regions of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kirghistan, and Kazakhstan into Singkiang and Mongolia. These waterways may have been used by earlier humans to get to Central Asia.
To look at Stone Age practicalities, let us take the first access route to Central Asia up the Indus, 8,000 km (5,000 miles) to the west of China at the western end of the Silk Road. Assuming for the moment that we are talking about an offshoot of the first Indian beachcombers, their first task after moving up the Indus would have been to negotiate the mountain barriers to the north of India and Pakistan. These extend as far west as Afghanistan. Bypassing the mountains and moving through Afghanistan too far to the west would have been difficult if not impossible, since it was near-desert. Marco Polo crossed these deserts, leaving from Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf and passing through Afghanistan to Kashmir, crossing a high pass directly into China and the city of Kashgar, to arrive well along the Silk Road and directly in the heartland of the former Mammoth Steppe.
Marco Polo could have followed a much easier route to Kashmir, however. From the coast of Pakistan a little further to the east, the great Indus snakes northward to a point where there is a water connection through to Kashmir. Another lower-altitude route into Central Asia, also via the headwaters of the Indus, would have been to cross the Khyber Pass to Kabul, and thence to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and then east towards Singkiang.
West along the Silk Road from China
<b>Equally, during all of human history, the Silk Road has been the only route west from China into Central Asia. So, an alternative route into the Mammoth Steppe would have been from the East Asian Pacific coast. The vanguard of the earliest beachcombers could have gone all the way to China and then moved west from northern China along the Silk Road into Mongolia, Sinkiang, and southern Siberia.</b>
North into Tibet from Burma
The third access route to the Mammoth Steppe, not much used by traders today, is just to the east of the Himalayas. The eastern edge of the Himalayas consists of multiple folds where the edge of the Indian plate rucked up the Asian continent on collision. These rucks are the conduits for most of the great rivers of South and Southeast Asia. From west to east, these are the Brahmaputra, which flows into Bangladesh, the Salween, which flows into Burma, the Mekong, which flows into Vietnam, and the Yangtzi, which flows into southern China. As they flow out of south-east Tibet these four major rivers run parallel for about 150 km (around 100 miles), separated from one another by only a few kilometres. The last of the four, the Yangtzi, originates in north-east Tibet near the northern edge of the plateau and at the beginning of the Mammoth Steppe.These multiple river routes are important not because many legitimate traders use them today, but because they allow direct access to Tibet, Mongolia, and Central Asia from any of four widely separated river mouths in Southeast and East Asia discharging on to the Indo-Pacific coast. Also, Tibet shares much genetically, with Indo-China and Southeast Asia.
East from Russia
Finally, there is another, more northerly route of migration from the West into East Asia to be considered: via Asian Russia, known as the Russian Altai. The easiest direct land access from the Russian Altai to Central Asia during the milder parts of the Late Stone Age 30,000-50,000 years ago would have been to cross the steppe directly. Travelling east through southern Siberia via a series of lakes and waterways, our ancient explorers could have reached the Lake Baikal region by a route passing north of Singkiang and Mongolia. At that time the steppe covered the whole region in greensward and open woodland. Clearly, for modern humans to have taken this route they must have got to the Russian Altai in the first place; they had reached both the Russian Altai and Lake Baikal in southern Siberia by 40,000 years ago.
<b>To summarize, we have now seen that there are four possible access routes into Central Asia: three from the Indo-Pacific coast (west, south, and east) and one from Russia (north-west). Once in Central Asia, there were three parallel routes along water bodies between East and West Asia which the pioneers could have followed: two southern ones, through Singkiang and Mongolia, and a northern one across Southern Siberia. The northern route would have been accessible only during the milder periods of the Palaeolithic 30,000-50,000 years ago, during the interstadials.</b>
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