What DNA Says About Aryan Invasion Theory -2

[Husky]

Not about AIT.



Post 1/2



www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129542.600-neanderthalhuman-sex-bred-light-skins-and-infertility.html

via rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/whites-are-descended-from-neanderthals.html





(Wasn't it already long hypothesised that neanderthals may have interbred with homo sapiens? Is it that now's the first time they have genetic evidence?)





IMO the article's interesting not for the conclusions that Rajeev initially drew from it (especially since the subsequent article that he found stated that all non-Africans are thought to genetically be between 1%-3% Neanderthal - though only European and E Asian genomes were mentioned as having been considered in the study - and that the E Asians in the study had on avg more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans), but for the red bit below.

Neanderthal-human sex bred light skins and infertility

29 January 2014 by Michael Marshall

Magazine issue 2954. Subscribe and save



For similar stories, visit the Neanderthals , Genetics and Human Evolution Topic Guides



IT IS surprising what a little hanky-panky can do. A handful of sexual encounters between humans and Neanderthals made many of us what we are today, affecting both our appearance and our vulnerability to disease. But the genetic legacy left by the Neanderthals also highlights just how different we are from our sister species.



Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia between about 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. Our species – sometimes dubbed "modern humans" – made it to Eurasia about 65,000 years ago, and so the two species had plenty of time to cosy up. In 2010, geneticists discovered that they had been very close neighbours indeed. They sequenced a Neanderthal genome and discovered it carried genes that also appear in the genomes of people of European and Asian descent: our species must have interbred with Neanderthals.



Now, by studying Neanderthal genes in people alive today, researchers are beginning to appreciate how that interbreeding influenced our species.



In one new study of 1000 human genomes, Sriram Sankararaman and David Reich of Harvard Medical School and colleagues found that Neanderthal DNA is most common in regions of the genome with the greatest genetic variability, making them a prime target for natural selection. While Neanderthal DNA may make up only 1.6 to 1.8 per cent of the Eurasian genome, it punches above its weight in terms of biological impact, says Reich (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12961).



Joshua Akey and Ben Vernot of the University of Washington in Seattle have analysed the Neanderthal DNA in a further 665 humans (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1245938). Both their study and the Harvard one found a hotspot of Neanderthal ancestry in genes relating to keratin, a fibrous protein found in our hair, skin and nails.



One of the genes, BNC2, is involved in skin pigmentation. That implies that Eurasians owe their paler skins partly to Neanderthals. Light skin is an advantage at higher latitudes because it is more efficient at generating vitamin D from sunlight, so Neanderthal DNA may have helped modern humans to adapt to life outside Africa.



If so, the adaptation took thousands of years to become universal. A third study published this week describes a DNA analysis of one person who lived in Stone Age Europe about 7000 years ago – 40,000 years after any Neanderthal interbreeding. His genes suggest his skin was dark (Nature, doi.org/q74). It may be that the Neanderthal keratin affected early Eurasians' hair instead, perhaps straightening it.





Not all of the Neanderthal genes are beneficial. Sankararaman and Reich found that our Neanderthal inheritance includes several genes that make us susceptible to diseases including type 2 diabetes, lupus and Crohn's disease.



Some of the genes, meanwhile, appear to have led to fertility problems. For instance, Sankararaman found that the X chromosome is almost devoid of Neanderthal DNA. This suggests that most Neanderthal DNA that wound up on the X chromosome made the bearer less fertile – a common occurrence when related but distinct species interbreed – and so it quickly disappeared from the human gene pool. "Neanderthal alleles were swept away," says Sankararaman.



"This underlines that modern humans and Neanderthals are indeed different species," says Fred Spoor of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in any of the studies.



The genetic evidence further backs this up. Neanderthal DNA is irregularly spaced through the modern human genome rather than being fully mixed. That implies that interbreeding occurred very rarely. Sankararaman estimates it may have happened just four times.



"But these relatively few matings obviously were an important event in the history of non-Africans," says Reich.



This article appeared in print under the headline "Neanderthal sex, the aftermath"

economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21595403-genetic-contribution-neanderthal-man-made-modern-humanity

via rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/more-on-interspecies-hanky-panky-of-out.html

Human evolution

Kissing cousins

[color="#0000FF"]The genetic contribution Neanderthal man made to modern humanity is clearer[/color]

Feb 1st 2014 | From the print edition



HOW Neanderthal are you? That question sounds vaguely insulting. But unless you are African, or of recent African ancestry, the answer is likely to be 1-3%.



Though Homo sapiens is the only type of human around at the moment, that was not true until recently. Sixty thousand years ago, when modern humans first left Africa, they encountered other species of humanity, such as Neanderthals (imagined above, in an artist’s interpretation), in Europe and Asia. In some cases, they interbred with them. The genetic traces of those encounters remain in modern human genomes. And two studies, one just published in Nature, and one in Science, have now looked in detail at this miscegenation, and tried to understand its consequences.





The Nature study, conducted by Sriram Sankararaman of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues, looked at the genomes of 1,004 living people of European and Asian descent and compared them with Neanderthal DNA from a 50,000-year-old toe bone found in a Siberian cave, and also with the genomes of 176 west Africans. This latter group, Dr Sankararaman assumed, could have little Neanderthal DNA in them because Neanderthals, as far as can be determined from the fossil record, lived only in Europe and western Asia.



Dr Sankararaman and his colleagues certainly did find plenty of DNA which seems to have come from Neanderthals in their Eurasians. Tellingly, it was not sprinkled evenly throughout the modern human genome. That let them make educated guesses about the effects it is having on those who carry it. For instance, genes affecting the production of keratin—an important component of hair and skin—showed more Neanderthal influence than most. Neanderthals, whose homeland was much colder then than it is now because of the ice age, were hairier (and thus better insulated) than Homo sapiens. Retaining Neanderthal traits of this sort, in an African species that was trying to make good in sub-Arctic conditions, would thus be encouraged by natural selection.



More surprisingly, Dr Sankararaman also found Neanderthal DNA in genes associated with diabetes, Crohn’s disease, lupus and even the propensity to smoke. This does not necessarily mean such DNA was bad for those who inherited it. A gene which increases the risk of diabetes in modern circumstances of abundant food might, for example, have had benefits in a more austere environment.



Indeed, truly deleterious DNA would be expected to be noticeable by its absence, because natural selection would have worked to eliminate it in the 30,000 years since Neanderthals died out. And Dr Sankararaman found evidence for exactly that, as well.

(So any Neanderthal interbreeding with homo sapiens who had moved out of Africa would have had to take place 30,000 years ago at latest?)



There is, for example, little Neanderthal DNA on the X chromosome (which, along with the Y chromosome, determines an individual’s sex). Nor is there much in genes that are expressed in the testicles. Studies from other hybrid animals, which are frequently sterile, suggest genes which reduce male fertility are often found on the X chromosome. Since few things are a bigger evolutionary no-no than being unable to produce children, tremendous selective pressure would have existed to remove the offending DNA from the hybrid descendants of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.



The study published in Science, by Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, in Seattle, reaches similar conclusions to Dr Sankararaman’s. Dr Vernot and Dr Akey hunted down Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of 665 Europeans and East Asians. They, too, found evidence of its having inserted itself into genes associated with the skin, and that not all of the newly arrived genetic material is helpful to its current bearers.



They made other discoveries, too. With the help of computer models, they concluded that there were probably several pulses of interbreeding over the millennia, rather than a steady stream of it. Both they and Dr Sankararaman also found that, on average, East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans do—which is odd, because Neanderthals are not known to have lived in East Asia.



The ghost in the machine



Dr Vernot and Dr Akey also used their data to try to improve understanding of the Neanderthal genome itself, by combining the bits and bobs scattered among modern humans. Though both their study and Dr Sankararaman’s depended on being able to identify what was Neanderthal by comparing modern human genomes with fossil DNA, the fossil material available is imperfect. Looking at the exact sequence of DNA “letters” (the chemical bases which carry the genetic message) in areas identified as Neanderthal in modern genomes can therefore improve understanding of the Neanderthal original.



Crucially, though the amount of Neanderthal DNA in any individual is small, the exact bits vary a lot from person to person. Look at enough people, then, and it becomes possible to rebuild quite large swathes of the Neanderthal genome. Dr Vernot and Dr Akey reckon that from their sample of 665 they have recovered around 20% of it.



This is an impressive figure for an extinct species. It shows just how much the concept of a “species” is a construct of human thinking rather than a truly natural category. Technically, Neanderthals may be gone. But their DNA ghosts linger on.



From the print edition: Science and technology

Before continuing, first the aside. Concerning these 2 statements in the 2nd article:

1. "The study published in Science, by Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey of the University of Washington, in Seattle, reaches similar conclusions to Dr Sankararaman’s. Dr Vernot and Dr Akey hunted down Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of 665 Europeans and East Asians. They, too, found evidence of its having inserted itself into genes associated with the skin, and that not all of the newly arrived genetic material is helpful to its current bearers."



2. "They made other discoveries, too. With the help of computer models, they concluded that there were probably several pulses of interbreeding over the millennia, rather than a steady stream of it. Both they and Dr Sankararaman also found that, on average, East Asians have more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans do—which is odd, because Neanderthals are not known to have lived in East Asia."



(The fact that they find this odd - does it mean they know for certain that ancestors of E Asian populations could not have had Neanderthal input before they moved into E Asian regions? Alternatively, maybe a cluster of Neanderthals did live in their vicinity but no evidence of Neanderthals' historical presence has yet been found in the fossil record there?

Why is my suspicious mind thinking they will namedrop the Ainu of Japan or the Kennewick Man of North America next?

And there's another suspicion. It's probably an irrational fear.)

Anyway. The opening statement that all non-Africans tend to have 1% to 3% Neanderthal DNA... yet most of the article only speaks of Europeans and E Asians. What is the % in native Australians or native Americans or other Asian (incl. Indians) or Middle East? Were these even studied? But surely they must have been, else why generalise for "all non-Africans"?





Moving on. Want to draw attention again to the 3 studies mentioned in the first link, in order to discuss the red bit - which I think is rather interesting:

1. "In one new study of 1000 human genomes, Sriram Sankararaman and David Reich of Harvard Medical School and colleagues found that Neanderthal DNA is most common in regions of the genome with the greatest genetic variability, making them a prime target for natural selection. While Neanderthal DNA may make up only 1.6 to 1.8 per cent of the Eurasian genome, it punches above its weight in terms of biological impact, says Reich (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12961)."



2. "Joshua Akey and Ben Vernot of the University of Washington in Seattle have analysed the Neanderthal DNA in a further 665 humans (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1245938). Both their study and the Harvard one found a hotspot of Neanderthal ancestry in genes relating to keratin, a fibrous protein found in our hair, skin and nails."



3. "A third study published this week describes a DNA analysis of one person who lived in Stone Age Europe about 7000 years ago – 40,000 years after any Neanderthal interbreeding. His genes suggest his skin was dark (Nature, doi.org/q74). It may be that the Neanderthal keratin affected early Eurasians' hair instead, perhaps straightening it."

Notice how the first 2 studies specifically went looking for and noticed Neanderthal DNA. The *third* study does not mention anything about neanderthal DNA (and was not looking for it) as per what's in the news article. All the text says about the 3rd study is that the DNA analysis of one person who lived in Stone Age Europe about 7000 years ago had genes that suggest his skin was dark. It is *NewScientist* that has decided to tie the discoveries in studies 1 and 2 about Neanderthals, into what study 3 says, and where/how Neanderthal genetics may fit into the picture that study 3 reveals.



Study 3's actual discovery in itself - which said nothing about Neanderthals though - is what's really interesting: they found a native of Europe 7000 years ago that likely had dark skin. And 7000 years is not at all long ago:



E.g. "Kurgan culture" in Southern Russia according to Elst in his Sati article was "definitely IE":

From archaeological excavations in Southern Russia it appears that widows were already climbing the funeral pyres of their deceased husbands in the fourth millennium before our chronology, in the so-called Kurgan-culture, an apparantly proto-Scythian and definitely Indo-European culture.

While cases of "Sati" like practices among them occurred in the 4th millennium BCE, Kurgan kultur's origins are itself dated to 5th millennium BCE. Which is between 6000 and 7000 years ago.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan

Those scholars who follow Gimbutas identify a "Kurgan culture" as reflecting an early Indo-European ethnicity which existed in the steppes and southeastern Europe from the 5th to 3rd millennia BC.

Anyway. Confirmed: no Neanderthal stuff mentioned in the paper on the dark-skinned European -



nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12960.html

(doi.org/q74)

Derived immune and ancestral pigmentation alleles in a 7,000-year-old Mesolithic European



Iñigo Olalde,1, 18 Morten E. Allentoft,2, 18 Federico Sánchez-Quinto,1 Gabriel Santpere,1 Charleston W. K. Chiang,3 Michael DeGiorgio,4, 5 Javier Prado-Martinez,1 Juan Antonio Rodríguez,1 Simon Rasmussen,6 Javier Quilez,1 Oscar Ramírez,1 Urko M. Marigorta,1 Marcos Fernández-Callejo,1 María Encina Prada,7 Julio Manuel Vidal Encinas,8 Rasmus Nielsen,9 Mihai G. Netea,10 John Novembre,11 Richard A. Sturm,12 Pardis Sabeti,13, 14 Tomàs Marquès-Bonet,1, 15 Arcadi Navarro,1, 15, 16, 17 Eske Willerslev2 & Carles Lalueza-Fox



Ancient genomic sequences have started to reveal the origin and the demographic impact of farmers from the Neolithic period spreading into Europe1, 2, 3. The adoption of farming, stock breeding and sedentary societies during the Neolithic may have resulted in adaptive changes in genes associated with immunity and diet4. However, the limited data available from earlier hunter-gatherers preclude an understanding of the selective processes associated with this crucial transition to agriculture in recent human evolution. Here we sequence an approximately 7,000-year-old Mesolithic skeleton discovered at the La Braña-Arintero site in León, Spain], to retrieve a complete pre-agricultural European human genome. Analysis of this genome in the context of other ancient samples suggests the existence of a common ancient genomic signature across western and central Eurasia from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. The La Braña individual carries ancestral alleles in several skin pigmentation genes, suggesting that the light skin of modern Europeans was not yet ubiquitous in Mesolithic times. Moreover, we provide evidence that a significant number of derived, putatively adaptive variants associated with pathogen resistance in modern Europeans were already present in this hunter-gatherer.

Grief, every interesting journal article requires membership/pay access. Why can't this information be free for all to read?





[color="#0000FF"]Question: What bearing does the time-frame have on the common white-supremacist version of PIE-ism: that Proto-Indo-Europeans were "white". (Or that Europe is "white" even originally. Etc.*)

Am I right in thinking that such data actually indicates both an upper limit (and at least one lower limit - to be found in the IE Kurgans) on an all-white PIE population in the urheimat scenario?[/color]

I mean, there's not much time for dark European (from 7000 years ago) to turn all-white in time for - as white supremacists claim - an all-white PIE or IE=post-PIE Kurgan kultur (from between 7000 and 6000 years ago). And their darkness / the frequency of dark Europeans is only going to be greater *before* that - which says something about any PIE that is set earlier - so...



[* NewScientist choosing to tie the Neanderthal studies into the "Dark-skinned European" study - with the "maybe they started Europeanising by getting straight hair at this period"* - seems almost to imply a subconcious need to clearly delineate in some other way between Europeans and Africans. Perhaps since 7000 years ago is rather all too recent?]

His genes suggest his skin was dark (Nature, doi.org/q74). It may be that the Neanderthal keratin affected early Eurasians' hair instead, perhaps straightening it.

[Husky]

Post 2/2



The fact that study 3 was indeed conducted independent of Neanderthal considerations is also apparent from another article found linked off the Rajeev2004 blog, in a comment this time. It has more to say:



rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/ns-rajaram-on-aryan-debate.html

non-carborundum said...

[...]

Recently I read that the first blue eyed human may have been as recent as 7,000 years old.



independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-first-ol-blue-eyes-is-7000-years-old-and-lived-in-a-cave-9086310.html

[...]

Don't know how Non-carbo managed to leave out the most interesting bits in the article:



independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-first-ol-blue-eyes-is-7000-years-old-and-lived-in-a-cave-9086310.html

Revealed: First Ol’ Blue Eyes is 7,000 years old and was a caveman living in Spain



DNA analysis of the man’s tooth has also disclosed that he had the dark-skinned genes of an African



A Stone Age man who lived about 7,000 years ago and whose buried bones were discovered in 2006 has turned out to be the earliest known person with blue eyes, a physical trait that evolved relatively recently in human history, a study has found.



A DNA analysis of the man’s tooth has also revealed that although he was more closely related to modern-day Scandinavians that to any other European group, he had the dark-skinned genes of an African, though scientists do not know his precise skin tone.

(Everything about that statement is fascinating. Read and read and read again.)



The man, who was about 1.7m (5ft 7in) tall and aged 30-35, was a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer rather than a farmer. He did not have the “lactose-tolerance” genes that allowed him to digest milk as an adult – a key sign that he had little or no contact with domesticated livestock.

(Come by me again? Another fascinating statement, when read with the previous one. Does that mean he's not one of the "pastoralist nomads" [yet]? And no sign of this man being part of the IE dispersal of neolithic farming from Anatolia outward - as per the Anatolian PIE hypothesis of Renfrew? Intriguing.)



His well-preserved skeleton was one of two discovered in 2006 in a deep cave system called La Braña-Arintero near León in north-west Spain, which is 1,500m above sea level and cold enough to limit the bacterial decay of DNA.



Dating has placed the skeletons in the middle of the Mesolithic period, which lasted between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago and represents the interlude between the older Palaeolithic and the more recent Neolithic, when agriculture and livestock farming spread from the Middle East and became widespread across Europe



Artist's impression of the 7,000 year-old man (independent.co.uk/news/science/artists-impression-of-the-7000-yearold-man-9086359.html)



The study, published in the journal Nature, sequenced fragments of DNA extracted from the man’s tooth, revealing that he carried an unusual combination of genes for blue eyes and dark skin – as well as for slightly curly, dark-brown hair and lactose intolerance.



“The biggest surprise was to discover that this individual possessed African versions of the genes that determine the light pigmentation of the current Europeans, which indicates that he had dark skin,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona.



“Even more surprising was to find that he possessed the genetic variations that produce blue eyes in current Europeans, resulting in a unique phenotype [physical type] in a genome that is otherwise clearly northern European,” Dr Lalueza-Fox said.



“Blue eyes in modern humans are related to the same mutation in a gene called HERC2. If you have this mutation in both copies of the chromosome, you will have blue eyes for sure. This was the case with this man, who is so far the oldest known individual with blue eyes,” he said.



Previous research published in 2008 found that the earliest mutations in the eye-colour genes that led to the evolution of blue eyes probably occurred about 10,000 years ago in individuals living in around the Black Sea.



This study suggested that everyone with blue eyes today can trace their ancestry back to the same family in which this mutation first arose – and that the gene had travelled across Europe before the shift from hunting to farming, which is known to have spread from the east to the west.



It is not clear why blue eyes spread among ancient Europeans. One theory is that the gene could have helped to prevent eye disorders due to low light levels found in European winters, or that the trait spread because it was deemed sexually attractive.

So, to revise the interesting points made in this, the more interesting news article (i.e. assuming internal consistency):

1. "A DNA analysis of the man’s tooth has also revealed that although he was more closely related to modern-day Scandinavians that to any other European group, he had the dark-skinned genes of an African, though scientists do not know his precise skin tone."



2. "he possessed the genetic variations that produce blue eyes in current Europeans, resulting in a unique phenotype [physical type] in a genome that is otherwise clearly northern European."



3. "this individual possessed African versions of the genes that determine the light pigmentation of the current Europeans, which indicates that he had dark skin,”



4. "If you have this mutation in both copies of the chromosome, you will have blue eyes for sure. This was the case with this man, who is so far the oldest known individual with blue eyes,”



5. "Previous research published in 2008 found that the earliest mutations in the eye-colour genes that led to the evolution of blue eyes probably occurred about 10,000 years ago in individuals living in around the Black Sea. This [2008] study suggested that everyone with blue eyes today can trace their ancestry back to the same family in which this mutation first arose – and that the gene had travelled across Europe before the shift from hunting to farming, which is known to have spread from the east to the west."



6. "The man, who was about 1.7m (5ft 7in) tall and aged 30-35, was a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer rather than a farmer."



7. "He did not have the “lactose-tolerance” genes that allowed him to digest milk as an adult – a key sign that he had little or no contact with domesticated livestock."

Things one can conclude or infer from the above statements:



- From point 5, we know the origin of the blue eyes of the Stone Ager in Spain of 7000 yrs ago traces to the gene pool of his blue-eyed ancestors in the Black Sea of 10,000 yrs ago.



- His African genes for skin colour would have similarly come from the ancestral population in the Black Sea that he derived his eye colour from (as opposed to having an injection of fresh African genetic input sometime between his lineage travelling from the Black Sea to Spain): since he has blue eyes, and blue eyes are supposedly super-recessive, so both sides of his parentage (all his ancestors) need to be carrying the blue eye alleles: i.e. both sides should trace back to that unique Black Sea ancestral gene pool of blue eyes. It's either that, or the contention that all blue eyes trace to that Black Sea population from 10,000 years ago is wrong. [Unless blue eyes are suddenly super dominant for this exceptional case? Let's stick with the rule instead.]

So as a result, can conclude that it's highly likely he got his African genes for skin colour from the Black Sea population too. Which means they had dark people among them also:



- Note, the article says about the 7000 year old Stone Ager in Spain: "he had the dark-skinned genes of an African, though scientists do not know his precise skin tone" but it also quotes Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona (one of the people who did the study and wrote the paper on it) as saying the Stone Age man's genes indicated that "he had dark skin". Dark is a relative word, what do they mean? Let's hypothesise: dark with respect to a European. (And possibly as dark as his African genes for skin colour would imply, since they keep mentioning that he had "African genes" for skin pigmentation.) In any case, his ancestral gene pool in the Black Sea was not uniformly "white" yet at the time his ancestors left in the direction of Spain: i.e. the Black Sea population had darker individuals (and perhaps they were all dark, considering he was so still - and for some 3000 years after leaving them behind: have they sequenced more Stone Agers of this period and place to know if any were yet "white" at this point in time?) In any case, we know the Black Sea population 10,000 years ago - the ancestral gene pool/home of blue eyes - were not all white then.



- Point 6 states that the Stone Age European's lactose intolerance* - not having the genes to comfortably ingest milk as an adult - is "a key sign" that he had no contact with domesticated livestock. It seems to me to be a fair indication that he may be of a community that also had not yet domesticated livestock. And indeed, that seems to be what they imply with the statement "Mesolithic hunter-gatherer rather than a farmer" - that his whole community was not familiar with farming (he was still foraging etc). Yet at the same time, the Scandinavian genome is 'fixed' already: being sufficiently distinct to distinguish him as particularly Scandinavian otherwise: since the man from 7000 years ago is specifically stated as being more related genetically to Scandinavians than to other Europeans.

[Note the article does not specifically allude to Finnish or Saami people but "Scandinavians" and "northern Europeans". The IE Scandinavians seem to be more populous and the Finno-Ugric Scandinavians more scarce: Finland appears to have 1/5th the total population of Scandinavia. (Some Norwegians and perhaps Swedes are Saami, but some Finnish people are Swedes - so I'm hoping these last 2 cancel out.) What proto-language group do they suppose the Stone Ager was? This is relevant since his genome is "otherwise" - i.e. despite his African genes for skin colour - quite part of the "Scandinavian/northern European" genome.]





* On lactose intolerance and what it means/doesn't mean in genetics:



- evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/070401_lactose

- sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050602012109.htm

- npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/12/27/168144785/an-evolutionary-whodunit-how-did-humans-develop-lactose-tolerance

which further mentions a relevant instance:

An Evolutionary Whodunit: How Did Humans Develop Lactose Tolerance?

by Helen Thompson, December 28, 2012 9:56 AM

[...]

It's hard to tell how prevalent lactose tolerance has been over time. But so far scientists have found evidence of adult lactase persistence in ancient skeletons in Northern Europe, Scandinavia, southern France and elsewhere. Thomas and his colleague Oddný Sverrisdóttir of Uppsala University in Sweden recently discovered lactase persistence in Spanish remains from about 5,000 years ago and hope to publish their research next year.

So, 2000 years after the Stone Age genomically-Scandinavian Spanyard that we've already met - the one with the blue eyes but dark skin and lactose intolerance - there's remains of another man in Spain with lactase persistence -> domesticated livestock -> (presumably) neolithic farming.

("Have we found PIE in the interrim?" [Since IIRC neolithic farming in Europe is associated with the spread of IE])



- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance

Lactose intolerance

Lactose intolerance, also called lactase deficiency and hypolactasia, is the inability to digest lactose, a sugar found in milk and to a lesser extent milk-derived dairy products. It is not a disorder as such, but a genetically-determined characteristic.

[...]

Most mammals normally cease to produce lactase, becoming lactose intolerant, after weaning,[4] but some human populations have developed lactase persistence, in which lactase production continues into adulthood. It is estimated that 75% of adults worldwide show some decrease in lactase activity during adulthood.[5] The frequency of decreased lactase activity ranges from 5% in northern Europe through 71% for Sicily to more than 90% in some African and Asian countries.[6] This distribution is now thought to have been caused by recent natural selection favoring lactase-persistent individuals in cultures in which dairy products are available as a food source.[7] While it was first thought that this would mean that populations in Europe, India, Arabia and Africa had high frequencies of lactase persistence because of a particular mutation, it was later shown that lactase persistence is caused by several independently occurring mutations.[8]

[...]

Lactase persistence

Lactase persistence is the phenotype associated with various autosomal dominant alleles prolonging the activity of lactase beyond infancy; conversely, lactase non-persistence is the phenotype associated with primary lactase deficiency (see above). Among mammals, lactase persistence is unique to humans — it evolved relatively recently (in the last 10,000 years) among some populations, and the majority of people worldwide remain lactase non-persistent.[11] For this reason lactase persistence is of some interest to the fields of anthropology and human genetics, which typically use the genetically derived persistence/non-persistence terminology.



Genetic analysis shows that lactase persistence has developed multiple times in different places independently in an example of convergent evolution.[52]

Anyway.



So there existed a dark European some 7000 years ago, with blue eyes, who was distinctly closest to modern Scandinavian in terms of his genome and found living in Spain (far off the course of a C-Asian urheimat) - whereto his ancestors had wandered from the Black Sea - who was Lactose Intolerant <-> "a key sign he had little to no contact with domesticated livestock" AND who was not a farmer but a hunter-gatherer?



(Doesn't seem to fit Renfrew's Anatolian Hypothesis for PIE, or its timeframe ... unless I misunderstood as usual.)



[color="#0000FF"]- So is this European - with dark skin and Scandinavian genome - supposed to be a pre-PIE, post-PIE, or PIE European (in that last case: is Spain the urheimat then)? [Note that each of the 3 considerations has implications and specific constraints associated with their theorising.]

- Or is he maybe non-IE? Like the Norwegians with Basque-like, non-IE, Iberian input as per that old article on Stephen Oppenheimer's findings concerning Britain's Basque-like non-IE ancestry: [/color]



spiegel.de/international/british-irish-brotherhood-a-united-kingdom-maybe-a-470186.html

In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.



The British Isles were unpopulated then, wiped clean of people by glaciers that had smothered northern Europe for about 4,000 years and forced the former inhabitants into southern refuges in Spain and Italy. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, people moved back north. The new arrivals in the British Isles would have found an empty territory, which they could have reached just by walking along the Atlantic coastline, since the English Channel and the Irish Sea were still land.



This new population, who lived by hunting and gathering, survived a sharp cold spell called the Younger Dryas that lasted from 12,300 to 11,000 years ago. Much later, some 6,000 years ago, agriculture finally reached the British Isles from its birthplace in the Near East. Agriculture may have been introduced by people speaking Celtic, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s view. Although the Celtic immigrants may have been few in number, they spread their farming techniques and their language throughout Ireland and the western coast of Britain. Later immigrants arrived from northern Europe had more influence on the eastern and southern coasts. They too spread their language, a branch of German, but these invaders’ numbers were also small compared with the local population.



In all, about three-quarters of the ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, when rising sea levels split Britain and Ireland from the Continent and from each other, Dr. Oppenheimer calculates in a new book, “The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story” (Carroll & Graf, 2006).



[...]

A different view of the Anglo-Saxon invasions has been developed by Mark Thomas of University College, London. Dr. Thomas and colleagues say the invaders wiped out substantial numbers of the indigenous population, replacing 50 percent to 100 percent of those in central England. Their argument is that the Y chromosomes of English men seem identical to those of people in Norway and the Friesland area of the Netherlands, two regions from which the invaders may have originated.



Dr. Oppenheimer disputes this, saying the similarity between the English and northern European Y chromosomes arises because both regions were repopulated by people from the Iberian refuges after the glaciers retreated.

And again the question: what do these things have to say - if anything - about an all-white PIE urheimat? (Or even how intrinsically related the Scandinavian genome is to the IE language of its speakers.) And what is the upper time limit then for an all-white PIE urheimat?

And what did the people of the "definitely IE" Kurgan culture of the 5th millennia BCE* of Southern Russia - that's around 7000 years ago too - look like? Just asking.



Have they re-sequenced more European bodies from a timeframe of around 7000 years before present, such as say those of the Kurgans etc? Wonder what they look like?





Hmmm, PIE (and consequently the urheimat) is apparently postulated to have existed between 4500-2500 years BCE:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis

Most estimates from Indo-Europeanists date PIE between 4500 and 2500 BC, with the most probable date falling right around 3700 BC. It is unlikely that late PIE (even after the separation of the Anatolian branch) post-dates 2500 BC, since Proto-Indo-Iranian is usually dated to just before 2000 BC. On the other hand, it is not very likely that early PIE predates 4500 BC, because the reconstructed vocabulary strongly suggests a culture of the terminal phase of the Neolithic bordering on the early Bronze Age.

So now I have another stupid question:



If the dark-skinned Stone Age European with the blue eyes from about 7000 years ago has a genome generally distinguishable as specifically "Scandinavian/northern European", how come (if the Scandinavian genome is not non-IE) his type went into the alleged PIE urheimat ("PIE homeland") as a distinct Scandinavian genome 6500 years ago (4500 BCE) and re-emerged from it as a still-recognisable Scandinavian genome when this linguistic branch of IE (Nordic/Germanic ancestor) formed in time from the shared PIE language? That is, 7000 yrs ago, the genome he had is largely recognisable as "Scandinavian/northern European" and not other European. Yet, PIE is estimated at earliest to 6500 years ago (though 3700 BCE is preferred which then is 5700 years ago). The story was always that PIE is a divergence (split) from common origins and not a convergence/meeting place of different populations/communities that took to a common language. So if PIE split in time into various proto IE subgroups which eventually split into Scandinavian speaking group + other IE language subgroups, how come the Scandinavian population's genome is recognisably the same after as before PIE? Did they not mix with PIE speakers in the ur-heimat, that afterward their genome is still peculiarly related to/identifiable with their blue-eyed dark-skinned ancestral relative from pre-PIE, 7000 years ago? To repeat: Did they not mix with PIE speakers in the ur-heimat - then where's the common genetic ancestral relation between IE Europeans, since that's what's always at least implied by IE Studies people who as a consequence start speaking of "our [shared]oryan ancestors" for PIE/urheimat and of "our cousins" for other IE speaking populations?



That is, *before* PIE, the genome of 7000 yr old Stone Ager is already identifiable as Scandinavian and not 'other European' - i.e. his genome is identifiably related to *modern*, post-PIE Scandinavians.... <- There's a "uniquely Scandinavian genomic continuity"/ a unique segregation of the Scandinavian genome from other (IE and non-IE) Europeans both before and after PIE.



Frustrating: I can't formulate the question properly.





Of course the Anatolian and Kurgan hypotheses are just two of the PIE hypotheses. A less popular one (not generally accepted) is the Paleolithic Continuity Theory, something about stone age man in Europe already being IE. Essentially something about deeper time frames: that IE developed shortly after humans left from Africa and invaded - I mean - migrated into Asia and Europa.



- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis

- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_Urheimat_hypotheses

Check the locus of PIE homeland=urheimat and the timeframes for each theory in the last.

- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory



(Interesting that none of them mentions India and barely mentions Iran - everything is Euro-centric onlee: about where their [European] ancestors came from, how their ancestors are interrelated, the historical geographic movement [mainly within Europe] of their ancestors.)



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory

The PCT posits that the advent of Indo-European languages should be linked to the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia from Africa in the Upper Paleolithic.[2] Employing "lexical periodization", Alinei arrives at a timeline deeper than even that of Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis.[3]

(PCT page gives no information on what PIE is supposed to be.)



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Paleolithic

dates to between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of agriculture.

But:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_Urheimat_hypotheses

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory, with an origin before the 10th millennium BCE.

Uh, I'm afraid pushing things further back is going to result in still larger numbers of (IE / PIE / non-IE) Europeans being dark .... White supremacists won't be happy. :uh-oh: Too bad.



I really want to know now what all the Europeans looked like - especially at the variously postulated "urheimat" sites - at 10,000, 7,000, 5,000 and every date ever claimed for PIE. Should be fun.

I think this neanderthal theory could be very important for Europe to bolster its uniqueness again. Sad (for them) that the E Asians and other non-Africans are equally unique in just this matter, also having neanderthal DNA.



But since, you know, Neanderthals were "uniquely" found in Europe - as per the so-far discovered fossil record - maybe that will allow a specifically-European input for all of Eurasia / non-Africa. Where specifically-European will be defined as Neanderthal and not Homo Sapiens.

This is turning into a bad comedy.

[Husky]

The important posts are the 2 preceding this one. This one's just an addendum.



The Independent.co.uk news article said:

the gene [for blue eyes] had travelled across Europe before the shift from hunting to farming, which is known to have spread from the east [Black Sea] to the west.

One already knew blue eyes couldn't be claimed as an 'oryan innovation/uniquely oryan/oryan genetics', of course: Basques, Saami, Finnish and the Estonians among the Baltics are non-IE speakers. And at least the Finnish have high frequencies of blue eyes still, And as seen of the Saami actors in a very famous Saami film, blue eyes occurs among the Saami too. (Would make sense that if it occurs among Finnish, that it should occur among Saami too: not just their language - also called Saami - is to be related to the Suomi language of the Finnish and I think the Estonians*, but the Finnish and Saami populations are considered to be related too I think, though the Saami were heavily discriminated against and persecuted by the invading so-called "white" Scandinavians like Norse, Swedes etc for the crime of seeming too indigenous to Europe. Essentially, they gave the appearance of native European versions of native North Americans, being "circum-polar tribes". In fact, the Icelander Bjork reminds me a bit of Saami. Anyway, the Saami religion - called a Shamanism I think and related to Siberian religion (and some say related to Korean religion and pre-Tengiri Mongolian religion) - seems to be reminiscent of native American religion and even Shinto.





* Practically off-topic:

I have been told that Finnish (Suomi) has "long consonants" (e.g. a double T - like Indian languages including Samskritam and Tamizh as well as like Japanese). But Estonians apparently have extra-long consonants: triple-T. (I have no idea how you even begin to pronounce a triple-T. :Respekt

I have not heard of W-European languages having long consonants (except when you by coincidence pronounce 2 distinct words together): w-European use of double consonants serves a different purpose. They write double-consonants to indicate that the preceding vowel is short (e.g. hotter gets a double t because if it had only one then it would sound like hoter and rhyme with motor. Instead, the short o in hotter sounds like the short o of bother. hence the double-t. This rule is more universally true in the case of sane W-European languages like Dutch.)

Note that the above is different to the use of double-consonants in Skt, Tzh, Japanese, Finnish (and Estonian), where the double character is pronounced as double/as long consonant.



From what I understood, where Skt and Tzh differs from Finnish (and presumably Estonian) is that the latter don't have double-s [and perhaps other sibilant cases], where Indian languages do. E.g. Skt does have double-s at least in certain join/sandhi cases. (Tamizh makes prodigious use of double consonants... Note that not all of it is owing to the Prakritic nature of Tzh at all - i.e. not all double-consonants in Tzh is owing to Tamizh Prakritising Skt words. Tamizh words tend to have double-consonants too as far as I know, and even has a tendency to introduce a double consonant at joins of separate words. I can't explain this, it makes sense when you read Tamizh print.)



Another possible difference is that Finnish can have double-consonants even after another (different) consonant. Since I found this a bit difficult to imitate* - unless I took my time over the word - I started thinking about whether this occurs in Tzh or Skt. And for the life of me I couldn't come up with any examples. I should keep an eye out for this. Can't think of any cases in JP either, although I've encountered double-consonants less frequently in JP than in Skt or Tzh.



* But my inability in this means nothing: I can't even pronounce the Marati double mahaapraaNam in viThThala. I mean, how does that pronunciation even work / how does one even do that??? While Tzh doesn't even have mahaapraaNas (officially), and while I haven't encountered double-mahapraaNas in Skt [yet?], I hear MSS even singing Marati "viThThala" correctly, so it's not like it's a handicap of Tamizh Hindus in general, just my own. :forlorn:



Ironically, I never thought about the nature of how long consonants varied from W-European languages that I'm quasi-familiar with not having double-consonants vs how some other languages including our own do have long/double-consonants, until 1. I noticed how pronunciation of Japanese Romaji showed up how that their double consonants worked different from how double consonants in W-European words worked (though I didn't tie it back to Indian languages at that point) and 2. when I was told of the double-consonant feature in Finnish. It was then that the rather obvious struck me at last*: that this was behaviour that Hindus know from their own languages, although my first mental connection to a pre-existing example was Japanese. (*I'm dense that way. Alternatively it may be natural: I never consciously think of how sounds in native languages work, until I am observing pronunciation in other languages.)





The important posts are the 2 preceding this one.

[Husky]

Post 4



More spam. On stuff from 2 posts up. The Palaeolithic Continuity Theory (of IE languages and the people speaking them)



The one thing that does not add up (in my mind) with other PIE hypotheses is that our African->European Stone Ager from 7000 years ago is already identifiably Scandinavian in genome at that early point in time. On its own - ignoring PIEism - this would mean nothing more than that Europe had already started getting a bit genetically diversified (or at least the Scandinavians did) all the way back 7000 yrs ago.



But when considering PIE, his genome being more Scandinavian than other European has a lot of implications. So unless I'm missing something:



- That means if he's post PIE, then PIE did not spread with neolithic farming, and indeed farming words would be local "IE" (post-PIE) developments (and not of shared PIE origins in a shared urheimat/homeland).



- If he's pre-PIE, then again: his genome goes into the PIE urheimat as mostly Scandinavian and comes out after the PIE urheimat as mostly Scandinavian (unless the Scandinavian genome is not of PIE and their language is borrowed)



- If he IS PIE, then - besides Spain being the unexpected urheimat (or the Scandinavian quarter of the urheimat?) - his peculiarly-Scandinavian genome is again distinct in PIE from other European genomes. Unless the Scandinavian genome is argued as the ancestral IE genome from which other Europeans derived. [I'm not even going to bother mentioning Indian and Iranian - they're always afterthoughts to European history telling anyway.]



(And other considerations that escape me now.)



- If he's non-IE (being Iberian/related to Basques or something, see the link to Oppenheimer 2 posts above again), then Scandinavians are not native IE speakers and borrowed IE.



What other options are there? Only those 4, right?







The only PIE theory that then still holds good at such an early time is the PCT one - the one about local IE continuity from before 10,000 BCE. Repeating:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_Urheimat_hypotheses

The Paleolithic Continuity Theory, with an origin [presumably of PIE] before the 10th millennium BCE.

That way, if 7000 yrs back, the Stone Age hunter-gatherer in Spain had an identifiably Scandinavian genome, his language if it were IE need not have been borrowed: it just traces back to some older time.



Does it trace back to the Black Sea population from 10,000 yrs back where the blue eyes came from? (All we know is the Scandinavian Spanyard can be derived from there. But if white supremacists can't date PIE to white skin, they may want to date it to blue eyes: something Oryan being better than nothing. And so need to consider it.)

So was that Black Sea area PIE urheimat?



Again no clue, but if it was, it still does not work out all that great for oryanism/white supremacists:

+ it would not be all-white and is perhaps likely to have some unknown frequency of dark people (again: perhaps even all dark - gasp) and be as dark as the 7000 yr old Stone Ager or darker still, since he himself appears (and dark) 3000 years after the Black Sea population where the origins of blue-eyes are to have been attested



+ stone age accomplishments - not to knock them - are not what the Oryanists had in mind when dreaming up Oryanism. They saw their glorious all-founding ancestors with chariots and horses ("damn it!") and being all heroic with metal weapons etc and swooping in on -what was it- "Vedic Tanks" and stealing women (suppressing hysterical laughter) instead of as hunter-gatherer tribes till way after PIE (when the Stone Ager had moved into Spain).

And what about animal domestication skills and all, I ask you? No horsies, no moos, no sheep, no goats? No claims to fame? :Tragic:



+ And so if chariots and horses (and neolithic farming and a zillion post-Stone Age things etc) were later=post-PIE developments - since our 7000 year old hunter-gatherer was found to have moved off to Spain from the putative Black Sea PIE urheimat of 10,000 yrs Before Present where his tentatively PIE ancestors were from and was still being a hunter-gatherer with no contact with domesticated livestock - then all such post-PIE developments belong to their own local communities. Or else they are borrowed from later developments/radiations of farming knowledge and certain kinds of metal weaponry etc not associated with the spread of IE languages. [This is in contrast to the Anatolian PIE Hypothesis where IE Languages spread with neolithic farming.] Oh Boo-hoo.

That is to say, either the Scandinavian genome and the Scandinavian IE language branch go together or they don't and they borrowed the language if the Anatolian Hypothesis is still true. Unless I've missed something.



+ That means oh so much for local cultural developments of various peoples who were until now lumped into some PIE-ism.



Again, unless I'm overlooking the obvious, the PCT version of the PIE theory is the only one that still allows Scandinavians to own their own "IE" language while not contradicting the find of the 7000 yr old dude.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory

General lines

The framework of PCT is laid out by Alinei in four main assumptions:[2]



1.Continuity is the basic pattern of European prehistory and the basic working hypothesis on the origins of IE languages.

2.Stability and antiquity are general features of languages.

3.The lexicon of natural languages, due to its antiquity, may be "periodized" along the entire course of human evolution.

4.Archaeological frontiers coincide with linguistic frontiers.



The continuity theory draws on a Continuity Model (CM), positing the presence of IE and non-IE peoples and languages in Europe from Paleolithic times and allowing for minor invasions and infiltrations of local scope, mainly during the last three millennia.[6]



Arguing that continuity is "the archeologist's easiest pursuit," Alinei deems this "the easiest working hypothesis," putting the burden of proof on competing hypotheses as long as none provide irrefutable counter-evidence. Alinei also claims linguistic coherence, rigor and productivity in the pursuit of this approach.[2]



Historical reconstruction

Associated with the Paleolithic Continuity Theory (PCT) is the historical reconstruction proposed by Alinei, which suggests that Indo-European speakers were native in Europe since the paleolithic. According to this reconstruction, the differentiation process of languages would have taken an extremely long time; by the end of the Ice Age the Indo-European language family had differentiated into proto Celtic/Italic/Germanic/Slavic/Baltic speakers occupying territories within or close to their traditional homelands. The rate of change accelerated when (Neolithic) social stratification and colonial wars began. Summarizing:[2]



1.The colonial expansion of the Celts started much earlier than La Tene and proceeded (generally) from West to East, not vice versa.

2.The Mesolithic cultures of Northern Europe are identified with already differentiated Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Uralic groups.

3.Scandinavia was colonized by Germanic groups "only" after deglaciation, and was better able to preserve its original character in isolation. Germany, in contrast, suffered fragmentation as a result of the Neolithic appearance of the Linear Pottery culture, and developed a wealth of dialects.

4.The prehistoric distribution of proto-languages akin to Italic was an important factor underlying the current distribution of Romance languages throughout Europe.

5.The Slavic languages originated in the Balkans and became linked with the Neolithic expansion. This group would be especially identified by the Baden culture.[7]



The Paleolithic Continuity hypothesis reverses the Kurgan hypothesis and largely identifies the Indo-Europeans with Gimbutas's "Old Europe."[8] PCT reassigns the Kurgan culture (traditionally considered early Indo-European) to a people of predominantly mixed Uralic and Turkic stock. This hypothesis is supported by the tentative linguistic identification of Etruscans as a Uralic, proto-Hungarian people that had already undergone strong proto-Turkic influence in the third millennium BC,[7] when Pontic invasions would have brought this people to the Carpathian Basin. A subsequent migration of Urnfield culture signature around 1250 BC caused this ethnic group to expand south in a general movement of people, attested by the upheaval of the Sea Peoples and the overthrow of an earlier Italic substrate at the onset of the "Etruscan" Villanovan culture.[7]



Genetics

In introduction to PCT Mario Alinei argues, following Cavalli Sforza, that the distribution of genetic markers largely corresponds to that of languages. He further contends that 80% of Europe's human genetic material dates back to the Paleolithic, and cites Bryan Sykes in claiming that only a fifth of European DNA can be traced back to neolithic incomers.[2]



A 2009 study comparing mitochondrial DNA lineages of late hunter-gatherers, early farmers, and modern Europeans found large differences between the three groups. In particular, 82% of hunter-gatherers had maternal lineages that are rare in modern central Europeans.[9]



The origin of paternal lineages remains difficult to prove because modern science is unable to extract Y-DNA haplogroups from Paleolithic samples. However, the recent analysis of Arredi, Poloni and Tyler-Smith (2007) suggests that R1b-M269, the most common western European haplogroup, may have entered Europe only in the Neolithic.[10]



Reception

Alinei's Origini delle Lingue d’Europa was reviewed favourably in 1996 by Jonathan Morris in Mother Tongue, a journal dedicated to the reconstruction of Paleolithic language, judging Alinei's theory as being

"both simpler than its rivals and more powerful in terms of the insights it provides into language in the Meso- and Palaeolithic. While his book contains some flaws I believe that it deserves to be regarded as one of the seminal texts on linguistic archaeology, although given its lamentable lack of citation in English-language circles, it appears that recognition will have to wait until a translation of the original Italian appears."

Morris's review was reprinted as the foreword to the 2000 edition of Alinei's book.[11]



Renzi (1997) sharply criticized Alinei's book, refuting in particular the claim of the presence of Latin and of its different territorial forms in Italy in the 2nd millennium BC. Renzi argues that this theory would subvert firmly established concepts of Romance philology and dialectology, such as the concepts of substratum, vulgar Latin and so on.[12]



Alinei's theory was again critically reviewed by Adiego Lajara (2002):[13]

Although some of Alinei's reflections on linguistic change are very interesting, it should be said that certain conceptions in his work -- such as the excessive immobility of languages or the relationship between types of language and progress in the prehistoric lithic industry -- are very debatable. Alinei's core theory -- continuity from the Palaeolithic --, runs into a serious difficulty: it obliges us to deal with words traditionally reconstructed for Indo-European, referring to notions that did not exist in the Palaeolithic as loans, when from the formal standpoint they are indistinguishable from those Alinei sees as being Indo-European in the Palaeolithic period.

[color="#800080"]("Ja, hoe zit dat nou?")[/color]

And if you note, all the talk above is about Europa onlee. There's no mention of India and Iran (C-Asia is regarded as Europa's backyard). So the same rules of "continuity from the Palaeolithic" won't apply for India (and probably Iran).

I'm sure they - or anyone who hereafter subscribes to PCT - will still insist on some later oryan invasion for India. Maybe the Kurgan Kultur. Oder etwas.

(You didn't think they'd let you off the hook, right? You're just brown people. You have no rights.

Besides, some modern Indians just *want* a Euro origin - something that I hadn't originally realised before tupid me

[Husky]

(Split from previous)

Post 5





Oooh, I guessed it right - and how sad to be right (how sad to read the European mind so well): that India/Iran will be declared to be derived while only Europa gets to claim continuity from the Ur-Zeit (=prehistory).

They'll argue it logically of course - with reference to "internal PCT logic" (rules are bendable and rewritable only for Europa):



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkaleolithic_Continuity_Theory/Archive1

Asian IE languages

This page is noticeably missing a PCT explanation for the placement of the Indo-Iranian and Tocharian languages. Does the "continuity" logic apply to them too, or are they explained away as a result of more recent migrations away from Europe? --86.135.181.234 (talk) 00:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)



No, Alinei is silent on this point and when I asked him about it, he just said that he didn't have time to deal with everything.



Evidently, I think that this is a serious sin of omission (as is his failure to deal with Iberia, Greece, Iran and only cursory treatment of Turkey).



My own view, FWIW (and NOT Alinei's) - is that while I tend to support his premise about IE being present in Europe by the Mesolithic, there is no a priori reason for assuming that the same holds for India. This, however, is a logical consequence of his theory, since evidently, one of his key arguments is the absence of convincing evidence for a pre-IE substrate in Scandinavia. It must thus logically follow that if you find a substrate then PCT doesn't apply, and there's been some very good work done by Frank Southworth & Michael Witzel to demonstrate Munda and Dravidian substrates in the Rg Veda. In any case, you have an instant clue to suggest that an IE PCT in India is unlikely, simply because there's only one big IE family, Indo-Aryan - if IE had a palaeolithic time-depth, you would expect to find several.Jonathan Morris2 (talk) 03:31, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh but someone observes that the Indian version of a 'Palaeolithic Continuity' theory pre-existed the formulation of such a theory for Europe (which last has subrules to negate the Indian case), as accidentally indicated by slights in the following (does it count as some backhanded credit for inspiration? It's all that Indians can expect):

status of PCT

thanks for the 'review' link (more properly 'self-promotion' I suppose, since it is hosted on their own site and does not appear to have been published elsewhere (?)). Looking it over, I am now quite convinced that PCT can be dismissed as fringy nonsense. It appears to propose linguistic change with geological slowness miley: no matter what your take on glottochronology (error margin of 50% or 200%?), I don't think any self-respecting historical linguist would endorse anything like this: Renfrew's timeframe is already borderline acceptable, but this is completely bat-shit beyond the pale. PCT appears, after all, to be the European answer to "Paleolithic Aryan" nonsense in India. It is at least reassuring to see that crackpottery knows no boundaries <smiley in original> dab (ᛏ) 09:35, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

How do you derive the age of a proto language? How old is spoken language and how is the date arrived at? Is there any reading material available for non-linguist? --UB 10:59, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

try (the references at) historical linguistics and glottochronology. The accuracy of such estimates depends decisively on the age of the earliest sources. For PIE in particular, see Proto-Indo-European language and Proto-Indo-Europeans. The error margin is frequently admitted to be as high as 100% (i.e. a factor of 2). For PIE, dates between 8000 BC and 2500 BC are possible (10000-4500 BP, i.e. a factor of 2.2): 8000 BC is extremely early and 2500 is extremely late, most people will agree that a 6000-3000 BC range (factor of 1.6) still has a very high confidence. [color="#FF0000"]All we know with dead certainty is that the proto-language must have split up by 2000 BC, since our earliest text fragments date to shortly thereafter.[/color] [color="#800080"](= "PIE must have existed, since an 'IE' language has been attested afterwards." Well, uh, 'IE' languages have indeed been attested, duh.)[/color] Claiming paleolithic age of PIE simply amounts to rejecting wholesale all efforts at dating language change and taking an agnostic position of "prove that it isn't paleolithic". It would entail that languages stayed essentially unchanged for at least 10,000 years, over vast areas of Eurasia. All known language histories show that a language usually changes beyond comprehensibility (meaning it doesn't just 'change', it becomes a wholly different language) over 1,000 years, in rare cases of stability maybe over 2,000 years. Note that in this case, evidence for dating is not restricted to pure glottochronology. For example, since there is a very good reconstruction of PIE terms for "wheel", it seems evident that (late) PIE must post-date the invention of the wheel in around 4500 BC. The evidence for "metal" (Bronze) is less clear, it is possible that some branches had already separated before Bronze became known (after around 3300 BC): these dates dovetail perfectly with a 5000-3500 range of early to late PIE fully consistent with the (wider) glottochronological estimate. dab (ᛏ) 11:35, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

[color="#0000FF"]-It must be remembered that he is a distinguished academic at the end of his life (he's over 80), so age is a major factor in explaining why he has failed to discuss with certain key areas of IE (like Iberia, Persia, India). It also explains why he finds it difficult to get to grips with the intricacies of mtDNA.

- At the same time, I think that the advances so far in mt/YDNA tend to bear him out. If you read Sykes book (good but lamentable for its lack of bibliography), he describes very clearly that Cavalli-Sforza violently opposed mtDNA and then seeing he was defeated, decided to start supporting it and claim the idea as his own. This marks a major change in favour of the PCT, in that if the mesolithic hunter gatherers were a tiny majority overwhelmed by a massive influx of farmers, the idea of IE speakers in Europe prior to the Neolithic would have been hard to believe. The consensus in genetics is now fairly solid that 80% of the population is pre-farming and if you study the models of diffusion advanced e.g. by Zvelebil, then you come to the clear conclusion that it was very much a piecemeal process. Hence, as Alinei points out, Renfrew has a real problem in explaining why there's no substrate in the last areas to be neolithicised e.g. Norway, why there's a long-standing linguistic boundary in N Latvia (i.e. why don't the farmers manage to impose IE on the "Estonians", etc. Furthermore, the theory is actually starting to creep in via the back door - a specific prediction of PCT is the presence of Germanic speakers in Neolithic Britain, and I see that Stephen Oppenheimer has mentioned this in his new book (unfortunately without citation). What you have to remember is that the world is Anglophone, IE studies is a sleepy field, so that anyone writing in a language other than English gets no "air time", with the possible exception of the Russians. There are some Spanish linguists doing excellent work, notably Francisco Vilar who has shown that the oldest toponyms even in Andalusia are IE[/color] [color="#800080"](:oooohhh: Je meent 't?)[/color] - but because he doesn't write in English, no-one is even aware of his work. For those people interested in PCT, the figure to watch, and the "heir" to Alinei seems to be Xaverio Ballester.

- Secondly, Alinei has a problem in that his method of linguistic archaeology only really works where you have peoples with defined territories, hence you have a paradox of someone proposing conjectures about the languages spoken during the Palaeolithic with a methodology which only really works from the Mesolithic onwards. As a result, when discussing pre-LGM, he tends to rely on other people's ideas and frankly hasn't chosen very wisely, appearing to be bogged down in a tool making equals syntactic structure equation which leads him to view Chinese as a kind of ur-language. This is the old Schlegelian bear-trap of the Monosyllabic/Agglutinative/Inflectional classification which captivated mid-19th century figures such as Haeckel and Schleicher, but had already been dismissed by e.g. Trombetti/Jespersen/Saussure in the early 20th century who realised that Chinese was the result of a long-process of simplifying an inflected language (see Classical Tibetan). Alinei seems to be obsessed by the stability of lithics in E Asia since Homo Erectus and imho is assuming without foundation that the original inhabitants of S China were Sino-Tibetan speakers. People who want to dismiss him seize on this older stuff and his claims that IE had differentiated 100,000 years ago. Indeed, the response to my Mother Tongue article was that most of the readers are interested in deep prehistory and Asia, so they assumed that what is actually a fairly marginal part of Alinei's work was the main part and dismissed all his extremely detailed linguistic archaeology relating to the mesolithic and neolithic.



[color="#0000FF"]In other words, I think that Renfrew and Gimbutas theories don't stand up at all, but if you modify PCT to take into account modern advances in genetics, you actually come up with a plausible theory.[/color]



Also: - I am not aware of Alinei ever suggesting that the PCT applied to India. I asked him about this and his comment was that he wasn't a Sanskritist and someone else should take up the torch. The PCT is purely about whether or not IE languages had differentiated and spread into Europe by the end of the ice age. - The comment above that the Thracians were Slavs is entirely inaccurate and I refer the person in question to pp. 222-223 of vol. 2 of Origini. What he actually says is that he thinks that Herodotus probably used the term 'Thracians' as a blanket term to refer to Slavs. He actually regards it as a third differentiated branch of a proto-Balto-Slavic family subject to influence from an Altaic elite. (20:39, 16 January 2007 (UTC)) - Jonathan Morris.

(And more dialogue - an interminable page - at the link)



(By the way, Brian Sykes was mentioned in that excerpt on Oppenheimer from Spiegel.de that was quoted for the nth time some posts back.)





[color="#0000FF"]But Oh isn't this just great? I love it!

- Everything can be rewritten. If PCT is right, rules on time for linguistic changes may well have to be rewritten etc. (As long as "Europe is oryan." And tomorrow the Basques too will be oryan.)

- Except the one constant: AIT/AMT on India.[/color]



So fascinating.

I have no issues with Alinei: if he's old and has no time to contemplate Iberia and Iran and I forget that other country's name - oh yeah India (or something). [Nice to know he was interested in China though. That's something isn't it?]

But it's amazing how that one rule remains constant. I'm not saying that everyone is consciously biased, but there is something. Anyway it doesn't matter. It's all about Europeans after all. Can't turn the camera to film anything else.



Now, based on my own logical reasoning - in Posts 1 and 2 of this set of spam - I personally think the Stone Ager from 7000 years ago bears out PCT*, well certainly more than the other PIE theories, but admittedly I'm not really familiar with PIE-ism. (*It says nothing about India of course. Which of course means the one constant will still apply - as it already was doing - but at least we have a better picture on Europa. And Europa is all that matters in the end, no? Am I wrong?)



Hysterisch.





En kijk hier 'ns:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_Continuity_Theory

Linguist Mario Alinei - University of Utrecht.

Utrecht? Niet Italië? Dat had ik dus nóóit kunnen raden...

[Husky]

Post 6

(The posts numbered 1, 2 and 4 and 5 above are more important than this one. They contain actual content - i.e. all the stuff in blockquotes - stolen from somewhere else.)





+ PCT's urheimat for PIE sounds like it is all of Europa now (the then-inhabitable parts thereof) with perhaps some overflow onto "central Asia". Very convenient.

This will allow a genetically-Scandinavian quarter of Europe, to a genetically Greek quarter, to... etc.





+ Intriguing how Oppenheimer's conclusion - that British and Irish natives are largely speakers of an indigenous ancestral language related to (the very non-IE) Basque, and that they are genetically related to the Norwegians and the Fries (implying Norse and Fries were 'indigenous' Europeans the way Basques are) - has been turned around to mean that it proves the PCT version of PIE, as seen in:



1. Oppenheimer said:

spiegel.de/international/british-irish-brotherhood-a-united-kingdom-maybe-a-470186.html

In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.

[...]

Dr. Oppenheimer [says] the similarity between the English and northern European Y chromosomes [color="#800080"][of Norse and Fries of NL][/color] arises because both regions were repopulated by people from the Iberian refuges after the glaciers retreated.

[color="#0000FF"]ADDED, missed out:[/color] And in that light, it continues with (still from spiegel.de/international/british-irish-brotherhood-a-united-kingdom-maybe-a-470186.html)

“Once you have an established population, it is quite difficult to change it very radically,” said Daniel G. Bradley, a geneticist at Trinity College, Dublin. But he said he was “quite agnostic” as to whether the original population became established in Britain and Ireland immediately after the glaciers retreated 16,000 years ago, as Dr. Oppenheimer argues, or more recently, in the Neolithic Age, which began 10,000 years ago.



Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.



English is usually assumed to have developed in England, from the language of the Angles and Saxons, about 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Forster argues that the Angles and the Saxons were both really Viking peoples who began raiding Britain ahead of the accepted historical schedule. They did not bring their language to England because English, in his view, was already spoken there, probably introduced before the arrival of the Romans by tribes such as the Belgae, whom Caesar describes as being present on both sides of the Channel.

2. PCT proponent construed it as:

Furthermore, the [PCT] theory is actually starting to creep in via the back door - a specific prediction of PCT is the presence of Germanic speakers in Neolithic Britain, and I see that Stephen Oppenheimer has mentioned this in his new book (unfortunately without citation).

+ And this statement below again - why does it hold?

My own view, FWIW (and NOT Alinei's) - is that while I tend to support his premise about IE being present in Europe by the Mesolithic, there is no a priori reason for assuming that the same holds for India. This, however, is a logical consequence of his theory, since evidently, one of his key arguments is the absence of convincing evidence for a pre-IE substrate in Scandinavia.

It must thus logically follow that if you find a substrate then PCT doesn't apply, and there's been some very good work done by Frank Southworth & Michael Witzel to demonstrate Munda and Dravidian substrates in the Rg Veda. In any case, you have an instant clue to suggest that an IE PCT in India is unlikely, simply because there's only one big IE family, Indo-Aryan - if IE had a palaeolithic time-depth, you would expect to find several.

But in India the population rigorously tried to keep Skt together, consistent, preferrably sounding the same. Defining and defining and defining the grammar. Etc. They also tried to keep the Vedam chanted rather consistently with not too great a variation. And they weren't great fans of the Prakritising of Skt and so maintained Skt in its various forms or "stages" (Vedic, classical etc) even after multiple copies of Prakritas were spun. Seems to me like there was a conscious human force in trying to limit Skt from disappearing and from becoming something else entirely. What I just said proves nothing, of course - other than to observe that Germanic tribes never maintained Gothic etc alongside the modern Germanic languages nor did any Proto-Scandinavian or Proto-Germano-Scandinavian-Celtic survive (forgot the Proto group name for NW languages that one or more PIE models suggested). Whereas India has maintained Skt long after many an official Prakrita died a natural death. I mean to say, there is no consistent pattern of behaviour in Europe vs India.



So why do they make such assumptions then? Or maybe it's just another stupid question. I'm just trying to understand their logic in denying that outside of Europe, the Indian and Iranian so-called "IE" languages could have an ancientry indigenous to the subcontinent that goes back just as far.



As for the whole Munda and Dravidian substrate threat, well if PCT holds good, then PIE has to have some kind of origins right? It can't forever have had the hallmarks of IE backwards in time. Unless they want to trace it back to the African Urheimat. At some point these languages must have been generated from some origin that is not clearly defined as IE. (Unless they mean to say PIE speakers invented it from some vacuum - from pure silence they started speaking in PIE? Or that they mathematically generated the language after completely dumping whatever language their African or Asian/Sundaland ancestors had spoken in Africa and Asia/Sundaland.) I mean, where do these people draw the line? And what lay beyond that line in pre-Proto-Indo-European (in Renfrew's thesis this pre- population was I think, Anatolian, the pre-Urheimat-Urheimat where the proto-proto speaking ancestors of PIE lived [but still IE], in order to explain why Hittites weren't as far "advanced" in tech as the texts of other IE groups seemed to indicate of said other IE groups).



See, if they said that all major ancient language groups have had some level of deep continuity since mankind started in Africa or eventually left Africa, I could sort of follow that type of "all else being equal" type of logic: that Finno-Ugric and PIE and Austro-Asiatic etc were all original branches that some state of Africans in some stage of leaving Africa/entering the neighbouring landmass had generated from their speech in some point in Ur-Zeit (pre-history). But that's not what they're saying. European history and identity begins and ends with Europeans, in Europe (+ a bit of overflow in "white" C Asia), and with IE languages (the Finno-Ugrics and the Basques were always just in the way of grand storytelling, "couldn't they just have been IE?").



It's great they pushed PIE even further back into pre-history where you have even less chance of working out what happened (and I have no problem with earlier timelines - though of course I still want *proof* that no one is just making up a new version of the story to fit the data, and proof remains the one thing no one wants to give - and clearly when there are so many competing hypotheses, I think that's saying something). But how is the Indo-Iranian "subbranch" of IE supposed to be younger than the European branches of the "IE" languages? I mean, that's what they're claiming with PCT, right? That Scandinavian and Germanic (including British-Germanic=English now as a new, 4th ancient Germanic linguistic branch as opposed to 5th or 6th century CE when English was first attested as per BBC docos on the English language) all date into the Stone Age. All European "IE" all date to the Stone Age and before. Yet Skt and Avesta are supposed to be relatively recent from when the Oryans invaded again. Really? Are they serious?

Sometimes I think these people are just so far gone in trying to remain consistent to their rules as new data appears that they don't seem to notice the obvious staring them in the face.





As for Scandinavian not showing any non-IE substratum and this being proof of PCT (I refer to this next statement):

one of his key arguments is the absence of convincing evidence for a pre-IE substrate in Scandinavia.

Well just to be contrary:

The famous Saami film I mentioned before is based on an ancient Saami narrative from about 1000 years ago or more, which shows Euro invaders entering into Saami space in Scandinavia and brutally murdering off Saami villages. Now, the subtitles didn't refer to these invaders as the Norse/Swedes (or Danes or IE Scandinavians) but 1. they were at least played by very Norse-looking actors while the Saami played the Saami (and I don't think the Norse were hired as stand-ins when the film was going for historical realism) and 2. I didn't much understand the language the invaders spoke, but from my recollection of the sounds it could pass for some IE Scandinavian language, rather than Finnish or some other language and 3. it seems these raids by invaders on Saami habitations had been going on for a long time, as each village had heard of these dreaded invaders committing their genocidal acts in earlier villages whenever their cycle of invasion re-started.



Anyway, what I mean to say is that 1. Saami recollect when the invaders came into the areas of the region inhabited by Saami. And that 2. the invaders just replaced the natives. There was barely any talking by the invaders with the Saami, no trading, just looting and murdering and taking over/tramping over the habitat.

Now if these invaders were repeated waves of raiding parties of IE Scandinavians settling further and further into Scandinavian lands and therefore ethnically cleansing whoever had lived there before, well no wonder there is no Saami (or other non-IE/non-IE-Scandinavian) substrate in Scandinavian languages. It was a straightforward replacement/ethnic cleansing, driving remaining Saami further off and into hiding.





I'd thought of more to whine about but I can't remember now.

But does Dhu ever visit IF anymore? I haven't seen him posting recently. I'm sure he would have a logical and consistent explanation for the discovery of the 7000 year old dark-skinned stone age European found in Spain with a genome that's Scandinavian other than its African genes for skin-colour, who had lactose intolerance, was from a pre-farming era and before domestication of livestock and who was a hunter gatherer. And Dhu could explain how all this relates back to Oppenheimer.

And then there won't be stupid questions anymore, but coherent explanations at last.





+ Personally, I think the time is now ripe for Hindoos to use the current genetic and archaeological etc data to work on re-defining a logically-consistent (internally logically consistent) Palaeolithic Continuity Theory for Skt in India. Don't leave it too late and end up letting aliens inundate the field and fill in the gap on the Indian side with their storytelling. If you see any tendency toward general acceptance of PCT among the larger set of PIE-ists - either covertly or overtly starting to propound it - you need to be ready with a case for the Indian situation.



+ You don't need to bother thinking of PIE: the PCT version for Europe says nothing about PIE, just that IE goes back way-way in European space. Just do the same for Skt in India.

I don't know, maybe you can use the fact that archaeology bears out that the Tarim dwellers in China* matched the people of IVC etc. (* Hardcore PIE-ists/supremacist Victor Mair had wrongly pounced on these as being "IE Celts and Germanics" in China, but others - archaeologists was it not? - had thereafter set the matter straight: that they were IVC people. Surely the fact that Mair pounced on the Tarim dwellers as specifically "IE" - when it turned out to be IVC people - puts an equation between IVC people and Skt?)

Also, if Europeans can claim Cernunnos is ancient Celtic, then IVC's Pashupati-like imagery proves something or other about IVC and ancient local continuity of Hindoodom based on Vedic stuffs. Oh you know what I mean.



+ And you *don't* need to (and actually never needed to) prove OIT. You just need to show ancient continuity in India, and the rest can be revealed (or not) in time as data comes in. If PCT does not speak on the details concerning PIE and urheimat - at least, from the bits of the wacky links on PCT it didn't appear to speak on these matters - then why should Indians be bothered to bring in PIE, let alone to come up with theories about PIE locus/urheimat?



OIT makes others' heathenisms derived and negates the validity of their religions and Gods as real and distinct. It turns their religions into shadow copies of yours. (Same as PIE-ism does to your Hindoo religion (and all attested so-called "IE" religions): it denies the validity of your Gods by making these derived and into shadow copies of the allegedly "truer", "more accurate" because "more original" reconstructed PIE gods that no known living or dead culture ever knew of.) If Hindus were heathen, they wouldn't do that to European heathens and their heathenisms. You get nothing from invalidating their religions or E Asian religions or other heathenisms. (I don't care about bad reconstructions/reconstructionists, but I care about genuine NW European heathens. They exist. And I most certainly care about Daoists and Shintos - oddly as much as I care about Hindoos.)

If you were heathen, you would seek to protect and defend other heathenisms - as hard as you would your own - even when you knew yours was dying. Firstly, because they matter in their own right and one delights in their existence and in other heathens' endearing, steadfast and unwavering attachment to their Gods with unsubverted views. And secondly, because were only one of us - only one heathenism - to defeat and survive christoislamania and all subversions, it would be a victory for all of us, and we - and all other murdered heathenisms - would be avenged. But better than that would be for all of us to collectively survive and emerge out of this together. Daoists, Shintos, Hellenes, Hindoos, African heathenisms, native Americans N & S, Australian, Pacific, and of course all the various European heathenisms.

A pox on monogawdism and all missionary=replacement religion.

[G.Subramaniam]

Brown-skinned, blue-eyed, Y-haplogroup C-bearing European hunter-gatherer from Spain (Olalde et al. 2014)



There is nothing like a little ancient DNA weirdness to start off 2014, which promises to be as exciting as 2013 was.



The new study La Brana 1 identifies it as ancestral in the SLC24A5 locus in which virtually all Europeans are derived. This comes in the heels of the Loschbour preprint which identified that sample from Luxembourg as also being ancestral. Taken together, it's now clear that hunter-gatherers from Mesolithic Western Europe were brown.



Curiously, it now seems that both Europe and India were (in part) inhabited by brown people and became lighter by a process of admixture + selection. The process went "all the way" in Europe, but a cline of pigmentation was sustained in India.



--



Summary, White skin in Euro is derived from light brown Indian skin

the mutant gene is SLC24A5, even in Tamil Nadu, 35% have the newer gene

it rises as you go north east, for example 80% in Guj



But in India it is constrained due to being nearer to Equator, whereas in Europe it evolved further towards even lighter skin

Original non - Aryan Euro were black

[Husky]

Post 1/2

This post is related to posts 585, 586, 588-590 above - in particular any that mentioned PCT.

(This one is unlikely to make sense without reading those.)



An almost live-development that is really interesting to see. But that comes in point 2 below.



1. First the digression.

When I looked up the source for the statements in the post directly above (Kowshika's post), some western people seemed rather desperate to latch onto the new excuse that these dark Europeans were not really native Europeans/must have been visitors to Europe, by deciding that burial practices - i.e. disposing the body by means of only one of the 4 reasonably-tangible primary elements - was specifically not as per the "oldest oral European literature" and that burial practices must have been imported, and that disposing the body by means of the 3 remaining primary elements (fire, water, wind) were now suddenly the only true representative native primordial Euro practices. Apparently only/all because the 2 preserved buried European natives of this time-depth that were studied both turned out to be dark or have their genes indicate they were dark. (Seems that only for 5300 years before present have they found have an actual light-skinned European - but I only skimmed, so may have misread that.)



But uh, mounds are *very* European. The Celts etc had it, which is why Tolkien used burial mounds ("Haudh-en-eleth", "Haudh-en-arwen" etc) profusely in his literature.

Anyway, tracked down the comment:

Annie Mouse said...

I think we should be cautious with these La Brana folk. They may not be typical of the area. I have long felt that our view of mesolithic Europeans is possibly being distorted by imported burial practices (as opposed to air, fire and water rituals as mentioned in our oldest oral European literature). Burials and entombment (as in La Brana) create more durable remains.



La Brana could represent nomadic folk following game back and forth across Europe and Asia.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fileistribution_of_Haplogroup_C-M217_Y-DNA_-_worldwide.png



In my opinion that still makes them mesolithic Europeans or accurately Eurasians, but they may not have been typical, or even resident. Just part of the rich milieu.



Sunday, January 26, 2014 11:49:00 pm

That is just so funny. So anyone who is buried is not native European? Then why is the Kurgan Kultur - which almost every alien swore was (Proto) "Indo-European" - typified by Kurgans which are mounds, and IIRC not usually the kind to contain cremated remains (but of the Tolkien variety: i.e. of burial of unburnt whole-body remains, apparently not dispersed bones possible with cremation but whole skeletons)?



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan

Kurgan barrows were characteristic of Bronze Age peoples, from the Altay Mountains to the Caucasus, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria. Burial mounds are complex structures with internal chambers. Within the burial chamber at the heart of the kurgan, elite individuals were buried with grave goods and sacrificial offerings, sometimes including horses and chariots. Kurgans were used in the Ukrainian and Russian Steppes but spread into eastern, central, and northern Europe in the 3rd millennium BC.

Two examples of Kurgan excavations on the wacky page mention skeletons. And when a "kurgan cremation" case is finally mentioned, it is not very ancient plus the line itself specifically contrasts "kurgan cremation" with the more usual case of "kurgan burial", leaving little doubt as to what the reference to "burial mounds" in the general case of Kurgans is to have meant:

A kurgan burial site at Łubna-Jakusy and a kurgan cremation near Guciów are examples of Trzciniec culture of c. 1500 BC.

Back to Annie Mouse denying burials as suddenly un-European (un-IE?)

Why do western people always want to have things both ways, and so keep changing the story whenever archaeo-genetic finds don't go the way they want it to?



Annie Mouse has clearly not read - or decided to ignore and hide - that La Brana's genome is significantly European and particularly Scandinavian.



Admittedly, if really desperate, one could stretch the interpretation on the info thus-far revealed in mainstream news about the dark European Stone Ager - "La Brana" - from 7000 yrs ago (the one with the African genes for skin colour). The only way such commenters as Annie Mouse - desperate to have all-"white" Europeans 7000 yrs ago - can then still make it all fit is if they hid behind the "But what if La Brana was actually an ancient Finn/Saami type?" If one were to suppose it, then it would mean that the statement in the news articles somewhere above that declared the Euro Stone Ager's genome being more "Scandinavian" than any other type of European could technically still hold true, while no other European (i.e. the IE types) would yet have to be lumped with "dark" ancestors as recently as 7000 years ago (unless more finds appear) - since recent dark ancestors is clearly a notion too disturbing for some in the west. (Though Finns and Saami are no less native to Europe. And La Brana's genes were specifically described as European, especially Northern European/Scandinavian.) And Finns/Saami being non-IE, IE-Europeans can still hold on to the Anatolian PIE theory and also the Kurgan hypothesis and especially an all-white PIE population (and I'm sure that at that point, "Annie Mouse" would return to Kurgan mounds/burials being very "IE/traditionally European after all").

Of course, there is the slight problem to this convenient retelling - though only implicit: that had La Brana been more Finnish/Saami in terms of his genome than "other" (=IE) Scandinavian, the researchers would *very* likely have specifically stated so: after all, such info is very much what the west is interested in. The west only cares about "Is it IE or Not?" It's the first and last question on their minds. Since in their minds IE=white civilisation. So anything that shakes the foundations of either side of that equals sign is bound to be considered explosive news and would not result in ancient Finns/Saami being packaged under generic Scandinavian. Hence it's likely that when they said the Stone Age European from 7000 years BP had a "Scandinavian genome", they would really have meant the majority "IE" Scandinavians' genome (too) and not (just) the minority (non-IE) Scandinavians' genome.







2. Anyway, that was not the point of this post.



The main point of this post was that when I visited the wackypedia page on "Kurgan" (mounds) I discovered something really hysterical. And predictable.

It becomes apparent from the wackypedia Edit History Differences.

You need to bear in mind that until recently Kurgan was firmly associated in the minds of all mainstream PIE-ists with IE and especially with the Kurgan - and Anatolian - PIE theories. Remember, Elst himself declared that the Kurgan kultur was "definitely" IE.



So keeping that in mind then, now compare:





a ) [color="#0000FF"]en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurgan&oldid=593454147[/color]

Kurgan

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Fraggle81 (talk | contribs) at 17:27, 1 February 2014. It may differ significantly from the current revision.



Revision as of 17:27, 1 February 2014 by Fraggle81 (talk | contribs)



(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Kurgan (disambiguation).



Sarmatian Kurgan 4th century BC, Fillipovka, South Urals, Russia. This kurgan was excavated in a dig led by Russian Academy of Sciences Archeology Institute Prof. L. Yablonsky in the summer of 2006. It is the first kurgan known to be completely destroyed and then rebuilt to its original appearance.Kurgan is the Turkic term for a tumulus. These are mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Originating with its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.



The word kurgan ‘funerary mound’, is, as well as Central Asia and Anatolia used in Russia and Ukraine, but throughout South-Eastern Europe (Ru. kurgán, ORu. kurganu, Ukr. kurhán, BRu. kurhan, Pol. kurhan, kurchan, kuran ‘mound’; Rumanian gurgan, dial. Hung. korhány), from Tatar, Tat., Osm., Kum. kurgan, Old Turkic kurgan "fortification", Kirg. and Jagat. korgan, Karakirg. korgon, all from Turkotat. kurgamak "fortify", kurmak "erect".[citation needed][1]



The distribution of such tumuli in Eastern Europe corresponds closely to the area of the Pit Grave or Kurgan culture in South-Eastern Europe.[2]



[...]

[color="#800080"](At the bottom of the page, the footnote to that last finally mentions Alinei, the promulgator of the PCT/Palaeolithic Continuity Theory of P/IE in Europe - that was brought up in some posts above[/color]

2.Jump up ^ Mario Alinei 'Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Paleolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia', 2003

The thing to note is that the above text was the last Wacky edit NOT to mention the additions that follow in (b ) below.

Note also that the above was the edit from Feb 1.





b ) Now things get really interesting. Several consecutive edits, all on March 1st, - by one "Hirabutor" - follow the above edit. The first couple or so edits are not relevant to my point.

Two consecutive by this "Hirabutor" show the following appear and then evolve:



en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurgan&oldid=597693785

Kurgan

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Hirabutor (talk | contribs) at 17:43, 1 March 2014. It may differ significantly from the current revision.



Revision as of 17:43, 1 March 2014 by Hirabutor (talk | contribs)



(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Jump to: navigation, search For other uses, see Kurgan (disambiguation).



Sarmatian Kurgan 4th century BC, Fillipovka, South Urals, Russia. This kurgan was excavated in a dig led by Russian Academy of Sciences Archeology Institute Prof. L. Yablonsky in the summer of 2006. It is the first kurgan known to be completely destroyed and then rebuilt to its original appearance.Kurgan is the Turkic term for a tumulus. These are mounds of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Originating with its use in Soviet archaeology, the word is now widely used for tumuli in the context of Eastern European and Central Asian archaeology.



According to Mario Alinei's [color="#FF0000"]Paleolithic Continuity Theory[/color] the distribution of such tumuli in Eastern Europe corresponds closely to the area of the Pit Grave or Kurgan culture in South-Eastern Europe. [color="#FF0000"]PTC reassigns the Kurgan culture (traditionally considered early Indo-European) to a people of predominantly mixed Uralic and Turkic stock.[1][/color]



Kurgans were built in the Eneolithic, Bronze, Iron, Antiquity and Middle Ages, with old traditions still active in Southern Siberia and Central Asia. Kurgan cultures are divided archeologically into different sub-cultures, such as Timber Grave, Pit Grave, Scythian, Sarmatian, Hunnish and Kuman-Kipchak.



A plethora of placenames that include the word "kurgan" appear from Lake Baikal to the Black Sea.

And this is the final current text of [color="#0000FF"]the intro to the Kurgan page at wackypedia as it exists at present.[/color]



Note the above was added by Hirabutor just 20 mins after previous (minor-looking) edits. Notice particularly the message Hirabutor records for the edit - so innocuous - between the previous edit at 17:23 and this significant one at 17:43:



[color="#0000FF"]en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kurgan&diff=597693785&oldid=597691175[/color]



Where the text went from (at 17:23):

The distribution of such tumuli in [[Eastern Europe]] corresponds closely to the area of the [[Pit Grave]] or [[Kurgan culture]] in [[South-Eastern Europe]].<ref>[[Mario Alinei]] 'Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Paleolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia', 2003</ref>

(The stuff between <ref></ref> tags would generate a link to a footnote: the footnote would contain the text between the ref tags, not the intro section itself. This is confirmed by how at 17:23, the intro section did not contain the text in the <ref>, which only contained a link to where it was displayed in the page's footnotes.)



The above was changed to (17:43):

Revision as of 17:43, 1 March 2014 (edit) (undo)

Hirabutor (talk | contribs)

[color="#FF0000"](improving style of writing (feel free to move this part to other sections))[/color]

Next edit →



According to [[Mario Alinei]]'s [[Paleolithic Continuity Theory#Historical_reconstruction|Paleolithic Continuity Theory]] the distribution of such tumuli in [[Eastern Europe]] corresponds closely to the area of the [[Pit Grave]] or [[Kurgan culture]] in [[South-Eastern Europe]]. PTC reassigns the Kurgan culture (traditionally considered early [[Indo-European]]) to a people of predominantly mixed [[Uralic]] and [[Turkic languages|Turkic]] stock.<ref>[[Mario Alinei]] '[http://www.continuitas.org/texts/alinei_...linary.pdf Interdisciplinary and linguistic evidence for Paleolithic continuity of Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic populations in Eurasia, with an excursus on Slavic ethnogenesis]', 2003</ref>

And just a carefree edit message by Hirabutor about how his colossal change was merely for "improving style of writing (feel free to move this part to other sections)". Meanwhile, [color="#0000FF"]his edit was to insert the PCT - Pal(a)eolithic Continuity Theory - take on Kurgan burial mounds into the very introduction of the Kurgan page.[/color]

I mean, previously the whole topic of Kurgan mounds was practically dominated by the prevailing version of PIE-ism - the Kurgan hypothesis (and IIRC the Anatolian PIE theory didn't disagree about the Kurgans being IE). Until the above wackypedia edit, the only place in the main body of the wacky Kurgan page's text where the Paleolithic Continuity Theory was described was in the Kurgan (PIE) Hypothesis subsection of the page - far from the intro - where the Anatolian Hypothesis and PCT were merely mentioned as opposing PIE theories to Kurgan culture being PIE. (Note that IIRC the Anatolian hypothesis still had Kurgan as IE, but not as PIE. That is, Kurgan was to have descended from an earlier PIE culture, whereas the Kurgan Hypothesis had Kurgan culture being PIE culture. PCT doesn't have Kurgan as PIE or even IE at all, but - as seen above - PCT has Kurgan being mixed Uralic-Altaic, i.e. non-IE.)



Again, the significance is that the wackypedia Kurgan page's Intro is headlining with PCT (again, it's the page's intro section), attempting to pass this off as the New Old "Received Wisdom". And someone just snuck that massive change in, as if was just a minor text edit and as if it was the original Euro position on PIE all along. Like I said, hysterical. And so predictable. Personally, I think we'll see more of this changeover in future. IMO, it is an inevitable fallout from discovering that dark stone age European (and the other apparently dark European from about the same period). Europeans having been a not all-white population just 7000 years ago is too close for some people.



Who knows, if this wacky edit wasn't just an individual's attempt to sneak past the radar but suddenly actually has higher-level support in the west (implying that it is the west making a move to prop PCT up as the New Eternal Original PIE Theory), maybe tomorrow they will sneakily rewrite the rules for IE-language-change-over-time to suddenly support PCT too (whereas IE linguists until now adamantly argued that PCT was in contradiction to the current IE linguistic rules), so that, from that angle too, they can pretend that PCT was the only argument they ever made.





Time to parrot my statement from 2 posts up:

Personally, I think the time is now ripe for Hindoos to use the current genetic and archaeological etc data to work on re-defining a logically-consistent (internally logically consistent) Palaeolithic Continuity Theory for Skt in India. Don't leave it too late and end up letting aliens inundate the field and fill in the gap on the Indian side with their storytelling. [color="#0000FF"]If you see any tendency toward general acceptance of PCT among the larger set of PIE-ists - either covertly or overtly starting to propound it - you need to be ready with a case for the Indian situation.[/color]

[Husky]

Post 2/2



1. Not related to the previous. But putting this here since the Anatolian PIE hypothesis spoke of IE languages spreading with neolithic farming (implicitly drawing a connection between IE and farming technology, that IE people were the ones who invented and at least dispersed farming in Europe).

IIRC, Renfrew/Anatolian hypothesis has Anatolia as the proto-PIE homeland, with Hittites as a less techy (more stone-agey, less metallurgy) early "IE" population branch. Or something.



The timeframes concerning the Hittites are interesting.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites

History[edit]

Background[edit]

[IMG: Map of Indo European migrations from circa 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan model. The Anatolian migration (indicated with a dotted arrow) could have taken place either across the Caucasus or across the Balkans. The magenta area corresponds to the assumed Urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture). The red area corresponds to the area that may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to circa 2500 BC, and the orange area by 1000 BC.]



Around 5000 BC, the region centered in Hattusa, that would later become the core of the Hittite kingdom, was inhabited by people with a distinct culture who spoke a non-Indo-European language. The name "Hattic" is used by Anatolianists to distinguish this language from the Indo-European Hittite language that appeared on the scene at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC and became the administrative language of the Hittite kingdom over the next six or seven centuries.



The early Hittites, whose prior whereabouts are unknown, borrowed heavily from the pre-existing Hattian and Hurrian cultures, and also from that of the Assyrian colonisers — in particular, the cuneiform writing and the use of cylindrical seals.[citation needed]



Since Hattic continued to be used in the Hittite kingdom for religious purposes, and there is substantial continuity between the two cultures, it is not known whether the Hattic speakers — the Hattians— were displaced by the speakers of Hittite, were absorbed by them, or just adopted their language.[citation needed]



Origins[edit]It is generally assumed that the Hittites came into Anatolia some time before 2000 BC.[citation needed] While their earlier location is disputed, there has been strong evidence for more than a century that the home of the Indo-Europeans in the fourth and third millennia was in the Pontic Steppe, present day Ukraine around the Sea of Azov.[citation needed] This is known as the Kurgan Hypothesis.



The arrival of the Hittites in Anatolia in prehistoric times was one of a superstrate imposing itself on a native culture, either by means of conquest[8] or by gradual assimilation.[9] In archaeological terms, relationships of the Hittites to the Ezero culture of the Balkans and Maikop culture of the Caucasus have been considered within the migration framework.[10] The Indo-European element at least establishes Hittite culture as intrusive to Anatolia in scholarly mainstream[9] (excepting the opinion of Colin Renfrew, whose Anatolian hypothesis assumes that Indo-European is indigenous to Anatolia[11][12]).



The Hittites and other members of the Anatolian family then came from the north, possibly along the Caspian Sea. Their movement into the region may have set off a Near East mass migration sometime around 1900 BC.[citation needed] The dominant inhabitants in central Anatolia at the time were Hurrians and Hattians who spoke non-Indo-European languages (some have argued that Hattic was a Northwest Caucasian language, but its affiliation remains uncertain). There were also Assyrian colonies in the country; it was from the Assyrians that the Hittites adopted the cuneiform script. It took some time before the Hittites established themselves, as is clear from some of the texts included here. For several centuries there were separate Hittite groups, usually centered on various cities. But then strong rulers with their center in Boğazköy succeeded in bringing these together and conquering large parts of central Anatolia to establish the Hittite kingdom.[13]



Early period[edit]

Hittite chariot, from an Egyptian reliefThe early history of the Hittite kingdom is known through tablets that may first have been written in the 17th century BC, possibly in Hittite;[14] but survived only as Akkadian copies made in the 14th and 13th centuries BC. These reveal a rivalry within two branches of the royal family up to the Middle Kingdom; a northern branch first based in Zalpa and secondarily Hattusa, and a southern branch based in Kussara (still not found) and Kanesh. These are distinguishable by their names; the northerners retained Hattian names, and the southerners adopted Hittite and Luwiyan names.[15]

So considering the timeframes given by the Kurgan and Anatolian PIE hypotheses for both 1. the Hittites (above) AND 2. PIE (4500 and 2500 BCE)

the following certainly can't be swallowed up for oryanism:

[color="#0000FF"]"Gobekli Tepe" - located in what's now Turkey - "contains some of the oldest buildings in the world" (btw, with intricately carved animal figurines on pillars) "dating to nearly three times the age of the first Egyptian pyramids": Gobekli Tepe buildings are dated to "12000 years before present". The people farmed wheat, already ushering in the Neolithic. The wheat had a mutation which became widespread owing to human dispersal/artificial selection.[/color]

(HTGAP-3)

(In case anyone didn't yet know: Anatolia is now ~Turkey.

And IIRC Turkey is not even included in the countries of the "Fertile Crescent", wherefrom farming is to have emanated in at least non-Anatolian Hypotheses.)



Anyway, the point was, at least we know that Renfrew's version of Oryanism in Anatolia can't claim that farming was *invented* by Oryans. 12000 years BP=10,000 years BCE of the civilisation at Gobekli Tepe predates not just the Hittites - regardless of whether they were native (Anatolian Hypothesis) or invading (Kurgan Hypothesis) IE-speakers, but also predates the commonly assigned dates for the existence of PIE language, Kultur und Urheimat as accepted by the mainstream (i.e. the Anatolian, Kurgan hypotheses for PIE).

Of course, Next (aka "tomorrow"), the oryanists - say, Victor Mair's equivalent for Turkey - will pounce on Gobekli Tepe as "Oryan". Nothing, but nothing is safe from oryanising, after all.



2. At that western blog alluded to in Kaushika's post further above, in its blog entry discussing the dark La Brana Stone Age European, it had people rushing to declare that the Tarim basin mummies had red hair. But - as IF member dhu had pointed out long ago - hair of the mummified turning red (and even yellowish) over time is a natural chemical process. Nevertheless, oryanists and other white supremacists would rather be ignorant about such inconvenient facts and insist on seeing oryans/European populations not just in the Tarim Basin in China's vicinity or in Egypt but also in the mummified Peruvians. I'm not kidding. The web is full of people - only western people, note - declaring that since all these mummies have red hair (never mind that it is owing to mummification) that this all points to some grand "white" civilisations that in ancient times had settled the world and built the pyramids in Egypt, the grand structures in Peru niggers: and oh yeah, hung out in the Tarim basin.



chemistry.about.com/b/2013/02/27/haircolor-changes-after-you-die.htm

"Haircolor Changes After You Die

By Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.

February 27, 2013

If you've ever seen a mummy in a museum, you might have thought the ancients went a little overboard with henna and other red dyes. While people have colored their hair practically forever, it's more likely what you're seeing is the change in haircolor that occurs after a person dies. The color of hair comes from the mixture of two melanin pigments: eumelanin (yellow-brown-black) and pheomelanin (red). Pheomelanin is more stable, so over time the eumelanin oxidizes while most of the pheomelanin remains. This is reason most [color="#0000FF"]Egypian mummies[/color] appear to have reddish hair. The change occurs more slowly under dry oxidizing conditions, such as burials in ice or sand, than under wet reducing conditions, such as burials in wooden coffins or damp caves. Therefore, you would expect to see a more faster or more dramatic haircolor change in a body from the jungle, for example, than a corpse from the desert."



Photo: [color="#0000FF"]Pre-Columbian Peruvian mummy.[/color]

Of course that hasn't prevented the west from peddling that these mummies were all "Europeans" originally. Again: I don't know why oryanists didn't claim the red and fairer-haired mammoths that have been found were "oryans (mammoths) too"? (Although the palaeontologists who found those mammoths said the hair lightening in their case could be owing to environmental conditions like discolouration from the soil, and thus need not be inherent to those mammoths either.) Also, to repeat: never mind that:

Hemphill's biodistance analysis of cranial metrics, however, provides compelling evidence that the ancestry of the Tarim Basin groups was non-European (Hemphill, 2000). Rather, his analysis reveals a biological affinity with the Indus Valley population of northern India for the earlier groups, whereas the later groups show affinity to populations of the Oxus River valley in south-central Asia."

(Clark Spencer Larsen's "Bioarchaeology: The Lives and Lifestyles of Past People", from "Journal of Archaeological Research". June 2002, Vol. 10, No. 2. [color="#0000FF"]www.clas.ufl.edu/users/davidson/Arch%20of%20Death/Week%2007/Larson%202002%20bioarchaeology.pdf )[/color]

Sounds like the Tarim basin entities are likely to have had their hair discoloured by the mummification/natural process too...

Though I wouldn't put it past oryanists/other aliens in the west to next start claiming that "therefore" the IVC was populated by red-haired Europeans and must have been "Euro-Oryan" and Skt speaking (while, when native Hindus claimed a continuity of their ethnic native Vedic ancestors in the IVC, this was dismissed as "of course IVC is not 'IE' and hence didn't speak Skt and is not Vedic". The minute the oryans want to claim IVC as part of their European ancestors' stuff, IVC will magically become IE.)





3. And more "white"-centrist stupidity at

[color="#0000FF"]economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21597881-homo-sapiens-became-black-beat-cancer-skinny-skin-colour[/color]

(found via rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/black-is-right-color-for-humans-helps.html)

Human evolution

The skinny on skin colour

[color="#0000FF"]Homo sapiens became black to beat cancer[/color]

Mar 1st 2014 | From the print edition Tweet..



Protect and survive

[color="#0000FF"]SHAVE a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is white.[/color]

The people at the economist are obviously morons.

- Zebras have actually white and actually black stripes.

- The so-called self-declared "white" people - i.e. Europeans - are a range of pinkish-orange skintones. Anyone who has ever done photo-realistic painting will know that much (but not "white"-centrist aliens of course).

- Some very fair Korean people look closer to the colour of white paper (or white snow) than many European populations do. And I'm not talking about absolute skin-reflectivity here, but about nearness to perceived paper/snow colour.

- Sub-Saharan Africans are a range of browns. Not "black".

(- Indians and a whole bunch of other populations on the planet are ranges of browns. At times mixed with different/custom ranges of oranges. E.g. Indians have brown and orange ranges that are different from Europe's orange range of skintones. Likewise Chinese and Japanese populations cover brown, orange and pink ranges that are different again from Europe's pink-orange ranges and India's brown and orange ranges.

- Etc.)

I've seen many European and African people, but I've never seen a person who was actually black or actually white.





The skin of chimpanzees - as is visible on parts of their bodies where they have no fur - ranges from some non-descript shades of brown to colours that come closer to black (or grey) than anything I've seen in humans.

See pictures at link below. The pics at this link happen to be of the Fongoli Chimpanzees, but other chimpanzees share these skintones. [Note that Fongoli chimpanzees are very like us humans/our monkey ancestors: not only have they left the trees and taken to live on the savannah as our own ancestors did, sometimes the Fongoli chimpanzees stand and walk *upright* for a brief time, to see over the high grass of the savannah. And they have likewise been caught on film making and using spears - tools! - to kill bushbabies, other mammals. (HTGAP-3.) And no, tool-making and usage is not unique to humans among the apes. With any luck these chimps will give rise to some sane humanoids that will replace homo sapiens when the niche becomes free...] Anyway, the pictures:

[color="#0000FF"]ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/04/chimps-with-spears/frans-lanting-photography.html[/color]



(Actually, people can just google for "chimpanzee" images and see for themselves how far they agree with the Ecomonist's silly statement.)



As is obvious, where the skin on these chimps is visible, it is some shades of brownish - with even pinky edges on the ears and lips at times (also seen in humans wherever the blood is somewhat visible past these areas of thinner membrane*) - ranging to very dark skin.

[*Palms are another area where humans and IIRC some monkeys too tend to be more pinkish - perhaps the skin is less thick/more translucent here and we can see through to the flesh; maybe less thick skin in the inner hand/fingers area is to improve tactile sense- in any case, it once again doesn't mean that the colour of humans' or monkeys' palms is representative of their "actual" skintone. (It is representative only of the skintone of their palms.) <- This is why when Hindoos colour Krishna blue or Meenakshi green, they still seem to consistently colour the palms of these Gods a somewhat ruddy or pinkish colour.]





Anyone who pretends that chimps have "white" skin is therefore obviously a "white"-centrist moron. The proof is in the pictures combined with the fact that anyone who wants to make a photo-realistic painting of these chimps will *never* colour these animals "white" in the fur-less areas (btw, they're not even really the colours of European pinkish-orange tones...)



And I don't understand why people conclude that humans are the only ones that "became 'black' (to beat skin cancer)". As seen in some of the chimp photos, many chimps (definitely among the adult-sized ones) are really dark in their fur-less areas and closer to the actual colour black than any human I've ever seen.



I wonder whether the whole "chimps were originally 'white', and humans 'became' 'black' to beat cancer" spin - I'm not denying that evolving high pigmentation is to cope with cancer risks from the sun, which is known, my issue concerns the Economist's silly phrasing on colour in an article that's supposed to be about science - I'm wondering whether that whole spin is in order to sinisterly declare that "humans were/would have been 'white' originally and only became 'black' thereafter" in order to compensate for the Stone Age La Brana European turning out to be some shade of "dark", as also mankind's ancestors in the African Urheimat...

I mean, there's no other reason for the Economist to declare chimps to be "white" 'underneath', is there? (Especially when - as seen in chimpanzee photos in web search images - the exposed skin areas like face, hands and feet of some chimps' are darker than human ranges of dark skintones...)





[color="#0000FF"]The previous post is more relevant to this thread than this one.[/color]

[Husky]

Back to that western blog's entry which was alluded to in Kaushika's post somewhere above.



Once more about the following comment at that blog entry:

Annie Mouse said...

I think we should be cautious with these La Brana folk. They may not be typical of the area. I have long felt that our view of mesolithic Europeans is possibly being distorted by imported burial practices (as opposed to air, fire and water rituals as mentioned in our oldest oral European literature). Burials and entombment (as in La Brana) create more durable remains.



La Brana could represent nomadic folk following game back and forth across Europe and Asia.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fileistribution_of_Haplogroup_C-M217_Y-DNA_-_worldwide.png



In my opinion that still makes them mesolithic Europeans or accurately Eurasians, but they may not have been typical, or even resident. Just part of the rich milieu.



Sunday, January 26, 2014 11:49:00 pm

I'm going to skip past the pretence in their statement of "our oldest oral European literature". Europe is a modern invention, and so speaking of a shared oral corpus as if there was one set of people in Europe with related beliefs and practices (before christendom) is odd, not just because La Brana 7000 years ago already turned out to genetically line-up more closely with Scandinavians than other Europeans, but especially since Annie Mouse is not referring to "IE people" (who as per PIE are supposed to have started off with one kultur etc): rather, the above seems to be saying that Mesolithic Europeans are specifically not the same as the "IE" people who invaded Europe - since IE being connected to Kurgan Kultur by non-PCT are certainly supposed to have known burial practices. (And does Annie Mouse etc really know of oral traditions that touch on the Mesolithic? It's not impossible, but I did hear people in the British Isles could barely remember the details of the culture and traditions of the Picts - the pre-Angle, pre-Saxon and even pre-Celt natives of the Isles - and have to rely on scarce and dubious Roman sources concerning these. And even Picts are nowadays supposed to have been IE. So - at least as per non-PCT - Picts too are therefore supposed to have invaded Europe post-Mesolithic and hence would be supposed to have had some Kurgan kultural influences etc.)



As for Celts at least, cremation seems to have been introduced later (post burial, and certainly post Kurgan-type mound burials) - note, well past the Mesolithic:



ivargault.com/kelterne/celts.html

Around 1250 BC traces of change in the archaelogical material indicate the development of a Celtic-speaking branch of Indo-European. The so-called Urnefelt-Culture is considered a continuation of the Unetice-Culture. [color="#FF0000"]The most striking change is the introduction of a new burial practice - cremation.[/color] The cinerary urns were placed in special graveyards.** Most linguists are of the opinion that these people must have spoken an early form of Celtic - proto Celtic.

(** Seems somewhat comparable to the funerals of Greek warriors in the Trojan war, like the description of Patroklos' funeral: burnt and then the bones were collected and IIRC preserved/buried. In some parts of ancient Tamizh Nadu too - at about 2800 years ago/800 BCE - urns containing bones of (cremated) dead were buried, as per archaeological digs.)



However, even afterward the introduction of cremation, Celts for some time apparently continued regular burial without cremation: there were still burial chambers of Continental Celts found where the dead were buried with stuff (presumably for the afterlife?):



dw.de/archeologists-revise-image-of-ancient-celts/a-16528844

(Deutsche Welle) -

Archeology

Archeologists revise image of ancient Celts

The Celts were long considered a barbaric and violent society. But new findings from a 2,600-year-old grave in Germany suggest the ancient people were much more sophisticated than previously thought.

conjure.com/whocelts.html

Hallstat culture (800-250 BCE), named after a type-site at Hallstatt, Austria, is the name given to the material culture of the early Iron Age Celts. Their range spanned from the Paris basin to valley of Morava in Eastern Europe and from the Alps to the north European plain. During early Hallstat (800-600 BCE) there is little evidence of great distinctions of wealth in burials. A few people are buried with wagons and horse gear, rather more are warriors (both genders) buried with their swords, most people are buried with personal ornaments and pots containing food. Cemeteries are small and associated with small settlements, perhaps one family or a group of related families.



Then between 600-450 BCE things begin to change as Mediterranean luxury goods begin to appear. Hilltop forts and a hierarchy of rich graves begins to appear. These aristocratic burials are associated with much larger residences inspired by Greek architectural styles. Archaeologists have suggested that paramount chief burial is accompanied by inhumation in a wooden chamber with wagon and horse trappings as before, but now there would also be a wide range of imported goods including bronze wine drinking vessels, silk, gold, amber, glass and coral. A vassal chief would be similar but the goods are more of local manufacture without the wide range of imports. Sub-chiefs are again similar but less elaborately furnished with totally local manufacture. Below this status wagon burials are not present. This type of burial and the prestige goods economic system it represents was spread from Burgundy to the middle Rhine. The economy was based on conspicuous consumption and potlatch-style distribution of goods. This is an unstable system relying on a continuing stream of imports and exports. Around this core, warrior societies arose whose wealth came from raiding the settled traders. This was an unstable equilibrium which was unbalanced by political changes in the Mediterranean and population growth among the Celtic tribes. After the collapse, the Celtic migrations began (circa 400 BCE).

sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/rac/rac25.htm

Certain passages in Irish texts also describe burials, and tell how [color="#FF0000"]the dead were interred[/color] with ornaments and weapons, while it was a common custom to bury the dead warrior in his armour, fully armed, and facing the region whence enemies might be expected. Thus he was a perpetual menace to them and prevented their attack. 1 Possibly this belief may account for the elevated position of many [color="#FF0000"]tumuli[/color]. Animals were also sacrificed. Hostages were buried alive with Fiachra, according to one text, and the wives of heroes sometimes express their desire to be buried along with their dead husbands. 2



[...]



The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared by many peoples, that they lived on in the grave. This conception was never forgotten, even in regions where the theory of a distant land of the dead was evolved, or where the body was consumed by fire before burial.

(Tumuli=kurgan-type mounds, further indicating that kurgan burials were originally more often to do with interring bodies in mounds than cremating them and then burying the crematury urns in the mounds.

And the case of cremation is not mentioned as the rule, let alone as the only means of disposing of the bodies of the dead. But rather that cremation occurred in some Celtic regions at this time.)



And now even more off-topic, but about this in the above quoteblock:

Animals were also sacrificed. Hostages were buried alive with Fiachra

C.f. how at Patroklos' funeral in the Iliad, some of his hounds have their necks slit and then join his pyre, and the bodies of some horses are thrown on the edges of the pyre also, and then Achilles further kills (was it by cutting the throats of?) some 12 Trojan POW warriors that he had captured for this specific purpose in his anger/in vengeance for Patroklos' death. Although this last may not be Greek tradition: Achilles was out for revenge and may have acted outside of normal Greek custom (?) Anyway, a sort of involuntary suttee of men. C.f. the involuntary suttee of serfs among Germanics in Elst's example, and involuntary suttee of some of the serfs/retinue of Chinese emperors. [Unlike wives who may choose to join their deceased husbands on the pyre, I suspect serfs - like POWs/hostages - are unlikely to volunteer to die. But since Elst referred to even the serfs getting stabbed to join some German nobleman as being a "suttee", then I suppose the POWs in Achilles' case are a "suttee" too, and so too I guess are the hostages in the case of Fiachra above.

So by such argument, the Greeks did have a type of "suttee" too then, though Elst said they did not. Admittedly, the wife didn't join a dead husband. But there's a case of POWs being made to join a dead warrior, which IMO is sort of equidistant from Sati to Germanic serfs being made to join their master. (Again: the Germanic case is more like the Chinese emperor's case.)

Personally, I think Sati should not have been re-defined past the voluntary self-immolation - and not self-stabbing etc as in the German or other cases - of the wife/wives, within the appointed period of her husband's death. Else further expansions to the definition of suttee should be equally-admissible, IMO, like male POWs getting their necks slit in the Iliad, or like the male serfs getting stabbed to join a dead Germanic aristocrat. Not the meaning of Sati to Hindus - and it is Hindus' word for a Hindu tradition.]

[ramana]

Husky, Can you put together a ten-twenty slides presentation on the DNA evidence and how it debunks the AIT?

This is for hosting on slideshare.



Thanks, ramana

[Husky]

Am sure you'll do a better job of it. Or you could ask Dhu.



I only spammed this thread and another thread on PIE-ism, not really AIT. And only because PIE-ism is eyeing E Asia - and especially E Asian heathenism - now. Am hoping Hindus will warn any E Asians they know about PIE-ism/the AIT tactic, with the Indian case as the tragic example/case study for all Asians to learn from: "Don't allow yourselves to get turned into an AIT by-product like Indians did. Look what happened to the Indians and their heathenism." I've found that it - and examples of changes in individual Indians and their thought patterns over time - serve as a good warning for E Asian heathen friends.

[dhu]

I'll work on it for a while then give a commitment.

[ketan]

[quote name='Mudy' date='21 August 2006 - 05:07 AM' timestamp='1156116583' post='55941']

rkumar/romani/....

There was no Aryan invader. In Sanskrit "Arya" is used to give respect.

There is NO ARYAN race. Hitler is dead and so his theory.

So don't bring same crap again and again..............

[/quote]

yes there is no evidence of something called aryan invaded india.

So don't try to bring up this topic and divide indians into aryan & dravidians...

This is the politics what english people played while leaving india.

They ill minded people just wanted to make sure that we did not stay happy and they saw we have capability to rule world, so they just planted such non-sense in India...

[Husky]

[color="#0000FF"]Ramana, please see Dhu's post 597 a couple of posts up.[/color]





Post 1/2



1. On this in post #593:

"Gobekli Tepe"* - located in what's now Turkey - "contains some of the oldest buildings in the world" (btw, with intricately carved animal figurines on pillars) "dating to nearly three times the age of the first Egyptian pyramids": Gobekli Tepe buildings are dated to "12000 years before present". The people farmed wheat, already ushering in the Neolithic. The wheat had a mutation which became widespread owing to human dispersal/artificial selection.

(HTGAP-3)

[*There may be a trema - or umlaut or whatever - on the o in Gobekli Tepe. I'm not sure.]



Gobekli Tepe buildings unearthed are at present thought to be temples or for some such mystical purpose. Carvings of presumably vultures in a certain setting are currently interpreted as being an indication of a funeral rite where the dead are left to - that other common practice - [color="#0000FF"]exposure and hence carion fowl (as opposed to burial or cremation or a watery grave).[/color]



More to be said on Gobekli Tepe which knew wheat farming back in 12000 years BP: everyone else probably knew already, but it [color="#0000FF"]turns out that it's genetically proven that wheat farmed anywhere in the world is originally derived from the wheat that emanated from Gobekli Tepe (IHJ-3) - apparently all other wheat has been shown to trace back to the one mutation that occurred at Gobekli Tepe. Again, the time is important: 12000 years before present for farming this wheat at Gobekli Tepe.[/color]



[color="#0000FF"]Now, this affects stuff like:[/color]



a. As stated before, [color="#0000FF"]Gobekli Tepe did not have PIE-speakers, because "PIE couldn't have existed then" as per IE linguistics[/color] as wacky entities explained in arguing against PCT version of PIE (already quoted in some post above) - of course, tomorrow they'll change the PIE linguistics rules just in order to claim Gobekli Tepe for Oryanism/PIE-ism next:

For PIE, dates between 8000 BC and 2500 BC are possible (10000-4500 BP, i.e. a factor of 2.2): 8000 BC is extremely early and 2500 is extremely late, most people will agree that a 6000-3000 BC range (factor of 1.6) still has a very high confidence.

Since Gobekli Tepe is dated 2000 years before the earliest allowed date of 10000 BP (aka 8000 BCE) of PIE - and 8000 BCE for PIE is further said to "stretch" it - Gobekli Tepe is obviously not PIE speaking. Not IE.



[color="#0000FF"](And by implication, (the farmed, mutated) wheat - and wheat farming - is not IE in origin.)[/color]



b. Next, the news item in #586 said:

A Stone Age man who lived about 7,000 years ago and whose buried bones were discovered in 2006 has turned out to be the earliest known person with blue eyes, a physical trait that evolved relatively recently in human history, a study has found.



A DNA analysis of the man’s tooth has also revealed that although he was more closely related to modern-day Scandinavians that to any other European group, he had the dark-skinned genes of an African, though scientists do not know his precise skin tone.



[...]

Previous research published in 2008 found that the earliest mutations in the eye-colour genes that led to the evolution of blue eyes probably occurred about 10,000 years ago in individuals living in around the Black Sea.

That is, they guesstimated that 10,000 years BP was when the blue eye mutation arose. But the first guy they have so far actually found having the genes for the blue eye phenotype is from 7,000 years ago, though we are also repeatedly told by the news article that he had African genes for skin colour.



Now, [color="#0000FF"]the Gobekli Tepe (GT) neolithic civilisation in modern-day Turkey that is from 12000 years BP - when they were already into wheat farming - therefore GT did not have a single blue-eyed individual and had an even even larger number of "dark" individuals (with "African genes for skin-colour") than 2000 years later when "blue eyes first arose 10,000 years ago in individuals living around the Black Sea" - assuming for the moment there were any fair-skinned people back at that time, let alone specifically anywhere in or near that area. (And Gobekli Tepe of 12,000 yrs before present would have had far larger numbers of dark people still than even at 7000 years BP when the dark-skinned Stone Age European with blue eyes was found in Spain.)[/color]



In fact, it is not impossible that there may have been barely any (or any at all for that matter) "white" people in Gobekli Tepe. And certainly none with blue eyes. That is to say, more people back in 12,000 BP (and especially in the Anatolian region of Gobekli Tepe) would have had "African genes for skin colour" than in 7000 BP Spain/Europe proper.

The point being, [color="#0000FF"]we won't hear that Gobekli Tepe was part of "white civilisation" any time soon. And "white civilisation" theories, as you know, rest on notions of homogenous white societies, not societies that look miscegenated let alone mostly/all "dark"[/color] (now I didn't make the rules - I don't actually care - but even sticking within their idiot logic, things aren't working out in favour of for white supremacists and their notions). I mean, no blue eyes and no homogeneous "white" skin. Oh how tragic.

Worse still, [color="#0000FF"]the origins of the farming of wheat is not just non-IE, it is also not "white civilisation".[/color]



Since I seem to always be rooting for the underdog, I think African claimants should pounce all over this thing. I mean, Gobekli Tepe was populated by some intermediate stage of the Modern Humans that left Africa and who likely hadn't yet started looking European in any important sense, right? GT's population are even more likely to have had the "African genes for skin-colour" than even the European 'distinctly Scandinavian' La Brana Spanyard had 5000 years later. And all this makes Gobekli Tepe - a civilisation - up for grabs, just screaming to be claimed, surely? (Since neither oryanist nor other white supremacists can claim it :mwahahahaha. So - even if it's all the way in "Anatolia" and not in mainland Africa, a minor detail - as Gobekli Tepe certainly isn't some "white civilisation", I think Africans should just put their flag on it already. And if they won't, then I'm going to put a flag for Africans on GT. (Unless people have already researched the genetics of its inhabitants from 12000 years ago and worked out which modern population they cluster closest too? Make it in terms of phenotype [of skin-colour etc]. Isn't that what white supremacists always do? :evil grin: "Red-haired mummies! Red-haired mummies!" indeed.)





As to this statement I made in #593:

(In case anyone didn't yet know: Anatolia is now ~Turkey.

And IIRC Turkey is not even included in the countries of the "Fertile Crescent", wherefrom farming is to have emanated in at least non-Anatolian Hypotheses.)

Supporting data:

britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/205250/Fertile-Crescent

Fertile Crescent, the region in the Middle East where the civilizations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin began. The term was popularized by the American Orientalist James Henry Breasted.



The Fertile Crescent includes a roughly crescent-shaped area of relatively fertile land which probably had a more moderate, agriculturally productive climate in the past than today, especially in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley. Situated between the Arabian Desert to the south and the mountains of Armenia to the north, it extends from Babylonia and adjacent Susiana (the southwestern province of Persia) up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to Assyria.

And these next are Encyclopedia Britannica's maps for "Fertile Crescent":



media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/53/64953-004-9F75721A.jpg

media-3.web.britannica.com/eb-media/69/569-004-2B15D15E.jpg

media-1.web.britannica.com/eb-media/50/64950-004-EAA1108C.jpg [Note lists biblical tribes like "Hittites", and "Elamites" for Susa.]



Hmmm, there's a possible close shave with Turkey on the map (am bad at geography and too lazy to look it up), so don't know if Gobekli Tepe (GT) falls right there in the border region of the Fertile Crescent - but GT was only found in the '90s (1990s) whereas the phrase "Fertile Crescent" was coined quite some time earlier on, if that counts for anything. Plus the Turkey/Anatolia region doesn't appear to be included in Brittannia's textual listing above of the countries making up "the Fertile Crescent"...



Either way, the major point still stands: Gobekli Tepe is not a "white civilisation" in any sense of the words.





[[color="#0000FF"]Digression.[/color] "IIRC" -

Susiana in Persia I think refers to the city of Susa (?): ancient population native to Iran that spoke a non-IE language and IIRC which language is so far thought to be independent of other language families. Susa was famous for veneration of the dog (which seems to be inherited in Zoroastrianism) - IIRC engravings from 10,000 to 8,000 BCE from Susa showed that dogs were part of the religion of Susa. They seem to have been one of the populations that domesticated the dog early on. The others being Africans - who IIRC have the oldest type of domesticated dog - various E Asians (Japan, China) and Tibet and of course the many Spitz types like huskies and malamutes and Greenland snowdogs of the various Circum-Polar peoples - Inuit in Canada/Alaska and the many related ancient native populations of Siberia. (North American native Americans have a deep connection with wolves and it is a sacred totem animal there :cheer: Also among Chinese vanavaasis IIRC.)

As mentioned, huskies are one of these earliest type of domesticated wol.. I mean dogs. Japan's Sakhalin Husky too. (And IIRC even the cuddly ancient breed of African dog has a tail that curled attractively over onto the body of the dog.)



I suspect that the position of snow dog/Spitz types like huskies in Shamanistic societies traces back to a long connection between man and wolf kind there, until the point where these became fully domesticated and which thereafter officially formed breeds of dogs.



The Afghan dog - another early dog breed - seems related to the Iranian dog that the people of Susa had venerated/started domesticating. It looks very similar and is shown in the genetics maps about these earliest dog breeds as being a "cousin" to the Persian breed. Both breeds certainly look unlike the E-Asian/Circum-polar dogs.

I guess I was disappointed at some level when the top 10 ancient dog breeds as per the current status of genetics did not show any to have been domesticated in India. Sigh. Never mind, we seem to have always had Wolves. Indian dogs - as seen in images of Dattatreya's dogs or Kovil moorties of Bhairava's Shvaana vahanaam in Kovils - do look, at least in terms of appearance, more like they could be derived from the Susa-n and related Afghan kind, than the Tibetan, E/Asian or Circum-Polar kind.]







2. BTW: [color="#0000FF"]from memory, Stephen Oppenheimer said that migrations could be dated with genetics.(IHJ-4-24)[/color] But no mention of the degree of accuracy/amount of leeway for dates: 100s of years, 1000s? (May paste a literal quote eventually.)

If it's not already been done, should look into what genetics has to say for migrations 4000 BCE and 6000 BCE for India. (Or even all the way to 12000 BP/10,000 BCE and beyond to cover more of the stone age.) Want to know what those earlier dates say about any "invasions" of the notorious variety so far alleged as being at around 1800 BCE or later. Around 1800 BCE and later dates it is clear: no invasions.

But I think Indians should move past the AIT dates and be more curious about the part of the archeological record that was not covered by J Schaffer and Lichtenstein (was it? sorry, I am lousy at remembering people's names or anything that I'm neutral about): need to look for whether there's any evidence for migrations vs proof of indigeneity earlier. Why are Indians not curious about these earlier dates (or maybe I'm wrong and Indians have already tested for this timeframe)? At a minimum, these will be the next alleged dates for Oryan invasions/migrations/miscegenations, after all.





3. [color="#0000FF"]And another inadvertently funny (hysterical!) side-effect of the realisation that even at 7000 years BP, native Europeans weren't yet a homogeneous "white" looking population. Again, the thing to remember at this point is that Da Definition of "white race/people" (and civilisation) was always that it refers to a *homogeneous* "white" population.[/color] (Since anything else was conceived of by the original formulators of "whiteness" - all the way down to the one-drop rule and beyond - as being "miscegenated" or "half-formed", or even de-formed and malformed if you will - again: I never made these rules, and they're as tacky to me as they are to any other sane person. I'm just being spiteful with them). And now this definition seems to me to be working against its peddlers. Because, remember this old article:



prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/

Myths of British ancestry

by Stephen Oppenheimer / October 21, 2006 / 288 Comments

[...]

[color="#0000FF"]The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago[/color], after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.



Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.

[color="#0000FF"]Wait wait wait. So let me get that straight. Is Oppenheimer's data saying that when Britain was first peopled - and which population were the native ancestors of 3/4 of the current natives of Britain - these 3/4ths of all the ancestors of the modern natives of the British Isles weren't part of the alleged "white race"....? Well, not yet anyway, not by Da Definition.[/color] Oh, how sad. "Boohoo."

And that everything ever achieved by said original British population until such a moment that it turned homogeneously "white" at last... is not the achievement of the alleged "white" race? "But that's so unfair."

Now, if they had individuals with "African genes for skin-colour" back when much of Britain was peopled - and who went back and forth between Iberia during the last ice age - just as the Stone Age La Brana man from 7000 years BP still had, then by definition does this not mean that Africans have a right to claim Brits' ancestors and their achievements right up to the point in time where the natives of Britain finally became a homogeneous "white" population. Surely? (By logic)



Hysterisch. Obviously I'm being sarcastic for such parts of this post. And yet, I can't see that my application of the logic that's been dictated by other people's deeply-lame rules folds anywhere. (Am I wrong?)



There's just so many ways that the whole "white" thing can be lampooned. [color="#0000FF"]Some crazy comments at that western blog page alluded to in Kaushika's post further above showed that the La Brana discovery turned into some deeply existential crisis for Whitists (=the subset of Europeans obsessed with self-perceptions of "white race"/"white civilisation" as some entity separate from the rest of the human species).[/color] I mean, their desperate excuses to explain away La Brana and the genes for lightening that became fixed in Europeans is just ... wow. I can't even believe these are adults - being, presumably, over 18.

(I suspect the whole Neanderthal interspecies mingling thing is being treated as a windfall to mitigate this horrific discovery that Europe wasn't very "white" - let alone distinct/unique - 7000 years ago.)



Nothing like stupid memes to permanently debilitate human minds. Deserves to be lampooned.





Disclaimer: This post is not remotely directed at western heathens. They never invented "white" race nonsense. (Or even "Europeans". Or PIE/IE.)

These disclaimers should be regarded implicit, IMO.







[color="#0000FF"]Ramana, see Dhu's post 597.[/color]

[Husky]

[color="#0000FF"]Ramana, see Dhu's post 597.[/color]





Post 2/2



Sorry, seems I wasn't finished rambling just yet. To explain what I actually meant to say in the following from the above and to expand on it:

There's just so many ways that the whole "white" thing can be lampooned. Some crazy comments at that western blog page alluded to in Kaushika's post further above showed that the La Brana discovery turned into some deeply existential crisis for Whitists (=the subset of Europeans obsessed with self-perceptions of "white race"/civilisation as some entity separate from the rest of the human species). [color="#0000FF"]I mean, their desperate excuses to explain away La Brana and the genes for lightening that became fixed in Europeans is just ... wow.[/color] I can't even believe these are adults - being, presumably, over 18.

It should read more like:

'Desperate excuses to explain away La Brana man's "African genes for skin colour" by trying to argue that the genes [or rather alleles] for lightening that became fixed in modern Europeans were at least known to not be fixed in the 7000 year old La Brana Stone Ager, the way they are in modern Europeans. (And which consequently are known to have made La Brana "dark" to whatever extent - uncharacteristically for a modern European.'



Will track down stuff I think I read in that blog. [I think that I read that these skin lightening mutations - the ones that became fixed in Europeans - were said to be missing altogether in La Brana (?)]



<So deleting a lot of the rest of this post, since I don't want to make vast claims based on something without properly remembering what I think I had read. (Since that's usually the sort of thing I make fun of in other people. Then again, everyone else always makes vast claims and usually runs away with it.)>



The desperate at that western blog were arguing that "But but but, can't he have been white in some other way" - such as "the E Asian way". Except that E Asians turned light owing to *other* (non-European) lightening mutations, as per more learned comments at that very blog.

And other desperate excuses followed. "He was not representative of Europeans". (Except there's mention in the very opening blog post there of some other find from around that timeframe that also turned out to be an example of what was phenotypically a "dark" European. And I can't make out that there have been any finds so far for that time period that were fair/on the way to being fair like modern Europeans.***)

And the other excuse "Maybe the 7000 year old European was 'white' with freckled skin already, so that when lightening genes did finally appear/did get turned on, then they merely lightened away the freckles". Good grief.



One of the commenters had to repeatedly explain that La Brana either didn't possess the necessary mutations for skin lightening (or these were not turned on or whatever) that made Europeans light.

But that didn't stop pleadings of: "Please please please, can't it be that we don't know *all* the genes that lighten Europeans and hence it may be that La Brana may have had exactly any/all the other potential genes that could exist that lighten Europeans - but not any of the particular ones that have so far been discovered as lightening Europeans." Except that no such genes were known and the present lightening genes identified account for most of the lightening seen in Europeans.



I don't get why these people are so hung up**. Everyone knew that Europeans were merely Modern Humans who had turned fairer. But it really bothers them - and surprising how much - that this was quite so recently. As recently as some time around/post 7000 years ago. (Was it Stuttgart man or someone who was to have lived 5300 years back who was said to be lighter/more European looking in terms of complexion/qua skincolour?)



** Actually, it's their lame identification with "whiteness". They've built entire castles in the air about "white civilisation" and the "white race" being the only creative population and civilisational force etc etc etc that, you know, when the entire edifice they've built up is called into question by such inconvenient things like timing, it's really affecting their psyche.

Don't know why these people can't just wait for data instead of starting to make up stories and excuses about it already.



*** I agree that they only found some 2 individuals from this early time frame/stone age era - and not sure whether these 2 are to have been representative of all areas of what's now considered Europe, e.g. has anything in E Europe from around about that time been looked at so far? - and so there's no reason to jump to conclusions IMO about what all the rest of the European population looked like. (Unless they've definitely dated the appearance of the lightening mutation genes to such a late time. Otherwise All that can be said at most - with some degree of high likelihood/certainty even - is that the population (of inhabitants of Europe) certainly wasn't homogenously fair or rather "white" at that point in time/in the stone age. Plus that La Brana's ancestors must likely trace to the Black Sea because La Brana possessed the blue eye mutation which was estimated to have first showed up among humans in the Black Sea area 3000 years before him, which also says something about the (im)possibility of a homogenously "white" population in that ancestral Black Sea population, since La Brana himself was dark/didn't have the lightening mutations.





[color="#0000FF"]Ramana, see Dhu's post 597.[/color]

[ramana]

Thanks Dhu.

Thanks Husky for the diligence to ensure I read Dhu's post.

[ramana]

Husky for you diligence:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarama

In Hindu mythology, Sarama (Sanskrit: सरमा, Saramā; Tamil: Carapai; Thai: Trichada; Malay: Marcu Dewi) is a mythological being referred to as the bitch of the gods, or Deva-shuni (देव-शुनी, devashunī). She first appears in one of Hinduism's earliest texts, the Rig Veda, in which she helps the god-king Indra to recover divine cows stolen by the Panis, a class of demons. This legend is alluded to in many later texts, and Sarama is often associated with Indra. The epic Mahabharata, and some Puranas, also make brief reference to Sarama.



Early Rig-Vedic works do not depict Sarama as canine, but later Vedic mythologies and interpretations usually show her as a bitch. She is described as the mother of all dogs, in particular of the two four-eyed brindle dogs of the god Yama, and dogs are given the matronymic Sarameya ("offspring of Sarama"). One scripture further describes Sarama as the mother of all wild animals.



....

[Husky]

Many thanks for the excerpt on Sarama. [Yama's dogs sadly tend to be pounced on by aliens for PIE-ism, since they choose to draw a straight line to Kerberos dwelling in Hades. Kerberos BTW is where Tolkien obviously plagiarised his Carcharoth from.]



It's not that there are no ancient references to dogs (hence domesticated) among Hindus, it's that research has not (yet) found any ancient founding lineages of domesticated dogs in India. So that was the source of my disappointment. I don't know why it should matter, why I should be so petty about it. But on the bright side, India and Nepal natively have the Lesser Pandas aka Red Panda. core: The Hindu variants have a browner coat than their redder Daoist counterparts in China.



There were some very good documentaries on the domestication of the dog - it's a fascinating story, on the extent that dogs contributed to (and instigated, and even controlled) the process of their domestication.







[color="#0000FF"]Concerning post 600[/color], here are some of the excerpts from that blog page that mention the relevant mutations that lightened Europeans (I searched for the gene name prefix and chose mostly comments by one Tobus since at least he sounds like this may be closer to his field - well, at least more than in the case of the others who mentioned the gene there - plus he sounded like he would let the data lead him on the matter of La Brana man's skintone):

Tobus said...

@Eurologist:

> Of course - but not in the European context, as I have stated numerous times



I'm not sure what you mean by "in the European context" here... do you mean skin colour differences between "white" Europeans? Nearly all of the difference in European skin colour is environmental - studies of unexposed skin show very similar melanin levels from Ireland to Spain. It's tanning ability that largely produces the North/South difference, although both TYR and SLC45A2 show a slight cline (from 100-80% frequency) as you move south, which may explain what you are talking about.



There is no way these alleles come even close to being responsible to extant Central or N/ NW European skin color.



What do you base this on? Those populations are fixed for the light skin SLC24A5 and SLC45A2 variants and most of them have the TYR allele as well... every study on these alleles has confirmed that they are directly responsible light skin, so on what basis do you claim the opposite?



> there are populations in NE Asia that rival the lightest in the world and don't harbor those mutations.



Which populations are you talking about? Jablonski (2000) took skin reflectance measurements from all over the world and found the darkest Europeans are lighter than the lightest East Asians. Is this just a subjective observation you've made yourself or do you have some evidence to support it?



In any case, East Asian populations evolved a separate genetic mechanism for light skin (proven in OCA2 and possibly in MC1R and DCT) so phenotype comparisons between East Asians and Europeans doesn't contradict the role of the SLCs and TYR in Europeans - you'd need to find a dark-skinned population that has the European alleles to do that.



> It is mind-bogglingly ridiculous to assert that Mesolithic Europeans at the common 50 to 60+ degree (i.e., easily-habitable Northern-most PNW and Alaska-like)latitudes had anything else but light skin color



Why do you say it's ridiculous? It'd be much more mind-bogglingly ridiculous to ignore the facts just because they don't agree with our preconceived notions... all the evidence I've seen says that La Brana and Loschbour had dark skin - do you have any actual facts that show they had light skin, or is it just a personal theory of yours?



For the record I'll also point out that the two "dark-skinned" mesolithics found were in Spain (43 degrees) and Luxembourg (49 degrees), so (just) outside your 50-60+ range, and that people don't immediately change colour when they enter a new enviroment - it takes a random mutation plus scores of generations to spread it. People could retain dark skin in high UV enviroments for thousands of years before experiencing depigmentation on a population-wide scale.



Thursday, February 06, 2014 2:34:00 pm





Tobus said...

@Grey:

Which ancient writers are you talking about? Since farming came first then writing, I suspect the references to "red hair, light skin, grey/green eyes" are relatively recent, thousands of years after the depigmentation. There are several variants of MC1R are responsible for red hair and non-tanning (pale) skin but none of them are widespread and none show signs of positive selection.



The Neanderthal MC1R variant that suggests they had red hair/pale skin is not one that is found in Sapiens.



The East Asian alleles for light skin are different to the Europeans - light skin evolved separately via different genetic pathways in those two populations, European skin colour isn't due to East Asian admixture.





Tobus said...

> @eurologist: Nothing could be further from the truth. We know that extant Northern Europeans are much, much lighter in skin color than N Africans, SW Asians, or S Asians that share their SLC24A5 allele. Ergo, we know that the SLC24A5 allele is not responsible for the light pigmentation of N Europeans.



There have been a number of papers directly associating SLC24A5 (along with SLC45A2 and TYR) with melanin levels in a number of admixed** populations with a range of skin pigmentations (such as Stokowski 2007 on South Asians) - there is simply no question that each derived allele of these genes will lighten the carrier's skin colour to some degree. I note that all the populations you refer to as "sharing SLC24A5" show a range of skin colours as well as a range of SLC24A5 frequencies - and you can be 100% sure that those individuals with derived SLC24A5 (and/or SLC45A2/TYR) alleles directly coincide with those individuals exhibiting lighter pigmentation, since that's how the connection between these alleles and skin colour was determined in the first place. Given that each allele acts differently, independently and additively and that any individual can have one of 3 configurations of each of the 3 genes (both dark, both light or one of each), this gives us 27 possible pigmentation phenotypes - Europeans are at one extreme with all derived, Sub-saharan Africans, Sri Lankans and Melanesians are at the other with all ancestral, and populations in North Africa, West Asia, South Asia etc are in between with various combinations of ancestral/derived, typically becoming more derived as you move towards Europe. Most studies attribute the bulk of the African/European melanin difference to these 3 genes however one study (Belaza 2012 on Cape Verdeans) suggested the combined effect was less than half.



It's certainly possible (probable even) that further genes will discovered in the future that will give us a better picture of La Brana's skin colour than we do now, but given what we know at this point we have to accept the possibility (and perhaps I should stress possibility) that La Brana had the same skin colour as modern Papuans and Australian Aborigines - he certainly has the same genetic profile as these populations in terms of skin colour alleles known to science today. If this DNA was from a murder weapon recovered in NY this morning, the police would definitely be looking for a black man, it's only our presupposed notion of Europeans being "white" that makes us question these results in regard to La Brana.



I'm happy to post links to the papers that confirm what I'm saying but you should be able to find most of them with Google/Pubmed - the "Human Skin Color" page on Wikipedia cites most of them in it's Genetics section as well.



Tuesday, February 04, 2014 9:30:00 am



[color="#800080"](** Isn't 'admixed' when used concerning Indians in such a context [such as for skin-lightening mutations, which Europe seems to claim exclusively for themselves] a euphemism for miscegenation, i.e. specifically an allusion to AIT? Has the final/conclusive genetic data already come in, did I just miss it, or are they just still assuming that it is the case? But there can have been no oryan invasions in 1800 BCE or later, and I doubt they've looked for anything in much earlier periods, since they have never thought of looking there: if there had been any oryan migration or invasion - but telepathic knowledge transfer for the telepathic super-oryans leaves no trail of course - they'd have to be looking for such things at a much earlier timeframe. But they won't, since they're oh-so-certain that AIT happened and moreover happened in 1800 BCE+, because they've been indoctrinated into this. Sigh.)[/color]





Tobus said...

> @Grey: If SLC24A5 is 100% fixed in Europeans then you're just assuming that the underlying color was brown and these alleles lightened it.



I suggest you read some scientific papers on the topic - SLC24A5 (as well as SLC45A2 and TYR) has been conclusively associated with light skin multiple times in multiple admixed populations (African-Americans, South Asians and Melanesians). There is simply no doubt that each ancestral allele you have will lighten your skin to a noticable degree - it's a fact, not an assumption. The assumption is to what degree, not if it has an effect. Given what we know at this point in time, La Brana and Loschbour share the same skin pigmentation alleles as Australian Aboriginals, Sri Lankans and Papuans. We may undercover futherer contributors in the future, but at present we have to accept the possibility that Mesolithic inhabitants in Europe had very dark skin.



Freckle/tanning genes like EFR1 and MCR1 variants are also found in dark-skin populations - freckling is not a "white" person phenomenon and neither is tanning, although both are obviously more visible on depigmented skin.



Sunday, February 02, 2014 3:52:00 am





Tobus said...

Typo: You say "SLC45A5" in the text but but I think you mean SLC24A5 judging by the link... The other "SLC" gene associated with European light skin is SLC45A2 and these results show La Brana had the ancestral allele at this site too.



Monday, January 27, 2014 3:06:00 am





Mark D said...

As the article is behind a pay wall, can someone verify what the authors mean by carrying "ancestral alleles" in what I assume are, as Dienekes mentions them, the SLC24A5 and SLC24A2 genes. SNPedia has this regarding the SNP rs1426654(A)on the SLC24A5 gene:



[color="#0000FF"]"It appears as if this SNP is a relatively new one in human evolution; one estimate [PMID 17182896] is that the rs1426654(A) allele, in other words, light skin pigmentation, spread through the European population around 6,000 - 12,000 years ago. Prior to that, "European ancestors" were most likely relatively brown-skinned. Another study ([PMID 24048645OA-icon.png]) has concluded that almost individuals carrying the A111T variant can trace ancestry back to a single person who most likely lived at least 10,000 years ago."[/color]



Is the "ancestral alleles" A,G or G,G rather than A,A?



SNpedia's chart on allele frequency shows Europeans as having practically no A,G or G,G.



The answer begs the question, did those with the A,G or G,G alleles simply die off and were replaced by, as "barackobama" suggests, Near Easterners, or did the SNP originate with this individual's descendants, or someone similar, who spread throughout Europe?





Monday, January 27, 2014 6:57:00 pm







Tuesday, January 28, 2014 1:30:00 am

Tobus said...

@Terry: It's not just SLC24A5, La Brana also has the ancestral alleles of SLC45A2 and TYR as well. There may well be other undiscovered factors to European light skin, but based on what we know about the genetics of skin pigmentation at this point in time we'd expect him to have dark skin. He has the same genetic skin pigmentation profile that we see in Australian Aboriginals, Papuans and Sri Lankans.



Tuesday, January 28, 2014 2:02:00 am





Tobus said...

@Grey:

Loschbour has pretty much the same pigmentation genetics as La Brana, dark skin, blue/light eyes. Stuttgart has one and a half of the light skin alleles so was probably a bit lighter. SLC24A5 is fixed in Ireland and Scotland, but I agree the 8 plex system isn't particularly comprehensive.



Friday, January 31, 2014 1:08:00 am

[Husky]

1. About this:

[quote name='Husky' date='18 March 2014 - 09:42 PM' timestamp='1395158672' post='117136']

BTW: [color="#0000FF"]from memory, Stephen Oppenheimer said that migrations could be dated with genetics.(IHJ-4-24)[/color] But no mention of the degree of accuracy/amount of leeway for dates: 100s of years, 1000s? (May paste a literal quote eventually.)[/quote]

In the following excerpt, SO stands for Dr Stephen Oppenheimer. And Dr AR is the anatomist/medical doctor and anthropologist who is the narrator. Oppenheimer and Bradshaw foundation - or one Paul(?) Bradshaw certainly - were mentioned in the credits, with the latter being instrumental in commissioning this, I think.



(In the excerpt below, AR is the narrator where none is mentioned. At this point she's looking at how and when the Semang of Malaysia got there, as part of a larger story of how and when the native Australians got to Australia.)

Amazingly, through their DNA, it might be possible to trace that first great journey through Malaysia.



Genetics expert Stephen Oppenheimer has flown in from Oxford. His work is helping revolutionise the story of our human journey.

[Dr Stephen Oppenheimer, University of Oxford:] "I guess it's something tile a detective story where you've got a very specific trail that you can measure, just like traditional trackers will follow a trail no one else can see."



Combining genes and geography, Stephen has mapped out a route from Africa, across the Red Sea and around the edge of the Indian Ocean.

By looking at the DNA of the Semang [ancient natives of Malaysia], Stephen hopes to find evidence of that early migration towards Australia.



[color="#0000FF"]SO: "The new genetics is extraordinarily powerful for looking at ancient migrations, because not only can you trace very specific migrations, but you can actually attempt to date them as well."[/color]

[color="#800080"](Again, I can't work out the degree of precision with the dating. How far off can they be, max? For such early migrations, being off by a few 1000 years is not a terrible deal. E.g. "60,000 years +/- 5000". But in proving or disproving post/neolithic migrations at a certain date, such large margins can hardly be helpful.)[/color]



Stephen has been looking for unique genetic markers that will tell him when the ancestors of the Semang first arrived here.



AR: "What about dates?* Because they certainly think they've been here forever. You know**, they think they're ancient."

SO: *"Well..."

SO: **"Yes, well, I agree with them."

AR: "You do?"

SO: "Yes." [SO laughs good-naturedly.]

[color="#800080"](Comments after this blockquote.)[/color]



AR: "So they've been here 60,000 years? Their ancestors have been here..."

SO: "At least 60,000. I suspect it was much much more."

AR: "I mean that's amazing, because if their uniqueness goes back that far and if they, you know, if we can say that they have probably been here in this sort of area for 60,000 years, that means they were very close to the wave of colonisation, doesn't it?"

SO: "They were part. They were part of it. They were the vanguard. They were just a colony dropped along the way as the vanguard advanced (*) towards New Guinea and Australia.

[color="#800080"][* Can't make out the (1 or 2) words here, because she interrupts him with a "yeah" and he therefore takes down the volume of what he is saying to allow for her interjection. The missing word may be "then", but sounded like 2 syllables. (?)][/color]



AR: It's incredibly frustrating that the first family groups pushing through these new lands left so little for us to find. But genetics has come to the rescue.



Stephen's research tells us that the ancestors of the Semang were probably amongst the first Modern Humans to come through here. And not only that: the genetics suggests that that vanguard

moved surprisingly rapidly, getting all the way from Africa to Malaysia in a space of just a few thousand years.

[color="#800080"][Map showing arrow incoming from African direction into India into the SE coast where 3 sites (of early settlement) are marked in Red (one labelled Jwalapuram). Another site in red in Sri-Lanka and then Red dots in SE Asia incl. Malaysia.][/color]



There are other tribes thought to have ancient roots as well. Together, they're the distant echoes of that first migration, a journey that began in Africa, continued through India* and round the coast to Malaysia.

[color="#800080"][*Map shows Modern Humans/ancient Africans' entry from NW into SE coast of India - where the original settlements were marked in red - with subsequent movement up India's E coast, into the coastal areas of neighbouring SE Asian lands (what was human movement via I think Burma and S Thailand, in the direction of Malaysia).][/color]

Note, in an exchange between Oppenheimer and AR in the middle somewhere above, Stephen starts responding to AR's questions at the points marked with * and **. The timing of his responses matter IMO, because they show exactly what question by AR he is responding to at each point:

That is, she asks "What about dates?" ("Well") "Because they certainly think they've been here forever." And it is then at this point that the Dr Oppenheimer answers rather genially - and not remotely insincerely - with "Yes well, I agree with them". And then he repeats "Yes" to her subsequent question to confirm the view he just expressed yet again, with the aforementioned good-natured laugh. If he'd been a heathen, I'd have said it was a heathen response by Oppenheimer.



Of course, in doing so he's talking about the larger picture of the Semang's ancientry being indeed so ancient in their Malaysian homeland - in terms of Modern Humans - that, where human history is concerned, it could reasonably be expressed as sort of "forever". But I liked the quickness and eagerness of his response, because you could really see he was very consciously and willingly chiming in with their self-perceptions and their view of their history in the place. It was just a few brief moments but I really liked that about him.

I've not read either of his books - I so should buy them hereafter - but when reading his articles for ProspectMagazine.uk and Spiegel.de, his advocacy for the ancient nativeness of the current population of the British Isles seemed even then to indicate someone who was pleased to discover that the locals were indeed largely local - even if they've been brainwashed out of it - and have long been natives together. People don't seem to realise not just the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions but that "IE" invasions themselves make lots of Europeans non-natives and set up indigenous vs alien strifes and offer little in return for the theory. Well, owing to IE-ism there was a last boost to white supremacism and a 'respectable' looking one at that - to give it the definition of all of Europe including the Irish, the Slavs and even the Serbian Slavs now, but not Yesterday - but little else that Europe got out of IE-ism as far as I can tell. Even most of their ancient religions are dismissed as IE-derived, and with that the seal is forever placed on heathenisms in Europe.





2. Back in post 589, excerpts were posted from the Wacky Talk Page for the PCT (Palaeolithic Continuity Theory for PIE). Concerning this statement from the excerpts:



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkaleolithic_Continuity_Theory/Archive1

The consensus in genetics is now fairly solid that 80% of the population is pre-farming and if you study the models of diffusion advanced e.g. by Zvelebil, then you come to the clear conclusion that it was very much a piecemeal process. Hence, as Alinei points out, Renfrew has a real problem in explaining why there's no substrate in the last areas to be neolithicised e.g. Norway, why there's a long-standing linguistic boundary in N Latvia (i.e. why don't the farmers manage to impose IE on the "Estonians", etc.

Estonians are no less Baltic than their Lithuanian and Latvian counterparts (and my childhood book of Baltic folk tales - many of which are pre-Christian, IIRC showed what looked like common pre-Christian traditions - common themes and patterns - which perhaps indicates kinship), BUT Estonians are Finno-Ugric speakers unlike modern Lithuanians and Latvians. Personally, I suspect that IE languages are not the native/ancestral languages of any of the Baltic population, but that the two more southern populations did adopt IE languages unlike Estonians. The alternative is less likely IMO: Finno-Ugric does seem native to at least the Estonian region as these do seem somewhat related to the Finns, besides, unless they are next going to claim that farming (or some other major early technological innovation) dispersed with Finno-Ugric, why would Estonians have "adopted" Estonian? It seems far more likely to wonder why Lithuanians and Latvians gave up their own ancestral tongues to adopt the languages of others.





3. About these 2 statements stolen from comments at that blog entry on the La Brana man:

Tobus said...

[...]

It's certainly possible (probable even) that further genes will discovered in the future that will give us a better picture of La Brana's skin colour than we do now, but given what we know at this point we have to accept the possibility (and perhaps I should stress possibility) that La Brana had the same skin colour as modern Papuans and Australian Aborigines - he certainly has the same genetic profile as these populations in terms of skin colour alleles known to science today. If this DNA was from a murder weapon recovered in NY this morning, the police would definitely be looking for a black man, it's only our presupposed notion of Europeans being "white" that makes us question these results in regard to La Brana.



Tobus said...

@Terry: It's not just SLC24A5, La Brana also has the ancestral alleles of SLC45A2 and TYR as well. There may well be other undiscovered factors to European light skin, but based on what we know about the genetics of skin pigmentation at this point in time we'd expect him to have dark skin. He has the same genetic skin pigmentation profile that we see in Australian Aboriginals, Papuans and Sri Lankans.

(I think his Sri Lanka reference as implied in his sequence is to the Veddas alone and not any other kinds of Sri Lankans.)



It's really disturbing to think that the KKK and other early slave-holder types (and all extant white-supremacists too, since the phenotypic descriptions of La Brana and other such are quite recent) would have lynched their own recent ancestors in European space living around say 7000 years ago, after first screeching various racial slurs at them. Which would prove my contention that Africans - if they're ever in the mood to annoy just for the hell of it - should claim European populations right until (the rather recent time) these turned homogeneously white. After all, Africans didn't invent the one-drop rule, but to the KKK etc, "if it looks African, it's an African", right? Hold them to it.





4. A pity the following doesn't sound like it will be very effective in conclusively or at least further narrowing down the phenotype of comparatively very ancient human remains, else it may have helped resolve the lay-level controversy surrounding La Brana man's appearance (the "was he or wasn't he" dark in an uncharacteristically European sense):



huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/dna-hair-color-eye-human-remains_n_2475208.html

DNA Reveals Hair, Eye Color Of Centuries-Old Human Remains, Researchers Say

Posted: 01/15/2013 8:22 am EST



By analyzing genes from a tooth of Polish Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, researchers confirmed he had the blue eyes and blond hair seen in portraits painted many years after his death in 1943.



By: Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

Published: 01/14/2013 03:58 PM EST on LiveScience



The color of the eyes and hair of ancestors dead for hundreds of years can now be revealed from their DNA alone, researchers say.



These findings suggest investigators not only can uncover new details from centuries-old human remains, but can also help identify crime victims, scientists added.



By comparing genomes across thousands of people, researchers identified genetic variations at 24 different points in the human genome that are linked with eye and hair colors, which past studies used to help determine the appearance of people who had died relatively recently. Now a team of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands have developed this system further to reveal the appearance of people long dead.



"We were able to look at the appearance of people who died several hundred years ago," researcher Wojciech Branicki, a geneticist at the Institute of Forensic Research and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, told LiveScience.



For instance, the researchers analyzed DNA from Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, who was born in 1881 and died in 1943. During World War II, Sikorski was commander-in-chief of the Polish Armed Forces and was also prime minister of the Polish government in exile. He died in an airplane crash at Gibraltar. By analyzing genes from one of his teeth, the researchers confirmed he had the blue eyesand blond hair seen in portraits painted many years after his death.



"This system can be used to solve historical controversies where color photographs or other records are missing," Branicki said.



The researchers say their system, called HIrisPlex, can predict either blue or brown eye colors with about 94 percent accuracy. When it comes to hair color, it has accuracies of 69.5 percent for blond, 78.5 percent for brown, 80 percent for red and 87.5 percent for black.



For medieval samples, where DNA is relatively degraded, [color="#0000FF"]this system was still capable of predicting eye and hair color from remains about 800 years old.[/color] For instance, the researchers identified one mysterious woman from between the 12th and 14th centuries A.D. who was buried in a crypt of the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec near Kraków, where only remains of male monks were expected. The results hint that she had dark blond or brown hair and brown eyes. [Science of Death: 10 Tales from the Crypt & Beyond]

[color="#800080"](So, is it merely that the above method has not yet been tried out on 7000+ year old remains such as La Brana - or even various mummies - or that its accuracy goes to below a point where it ceases to be useful when applied to earlier and/or more degraded samples?)[/color]



Although this research can help reveal what ancient human ancestors might have looked like based on their DNA alone, Branicki thinks the most practical aspect of their work is how it can help identify corpses for forensic analysis. For instance, "some of our samples were from unknown inmates of a World War II prison," he said. "In these cases, HIrisPlex helped to put physical features to the other DNA evidence."



In the future, the system may look at more than 24 points in the human genome — "from research carried out on the mouse, we estimate that 127 genes may be involved in human pigmentation," Branicki said. Still, "although research on eye and hair color prediction is ongoing, and we may expect some new predictors, it seems that the main predictors have been already identified, and especially in case of eye color, we should not expect any breakthrough in prediction in the near future."



The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 13 in the journal Investigative Genetics.