Peopling of the Earth

[Robert Vermaat]

Recommended site: Peopling of the Earth. This is a very interesting model of the first humanoids and their journey across the Earths, starting 150.000 years ago. The presentation is dotted with reference-links.


Part of the Bradshaw Foundation website, which also supports Stephen Oppenheimer's new book, The Origins of the British - A Genetic Detective Story, in which he claims that the ‘Anglo-Saxon invasion’ contributed only a tiny fraction to the English gene pool. In fact, three quarters of English people can trace an unbroken line of genetic descent through their parental genes from settlers arriving long before the introduction of farming.

And that the Welsh, Irish and other Atlanticfringe peoples derive from Ice Age refuges in the Basque country and Spain.They came by an Atlantic coastal route many thousands of years ago, though the Celtic languages we know of today were brought in by later migrations, following the same route, during Neolithic times.

Well Tarby, looks like you and Aitor are distant cousins after all!!

[Jona Lendering]

This is really beautiful. Thanks Robert! I'm surprised by the late occupation of the valley of the Nile, but illustrations like these make me realize again why I like the internet so much.

[Dan Diffendale]

Fascinating!

[Goffredo]

I liked it very much!

By the way read on italian news that in italy there has been some level of approval (financing) of a genetic and linguistic mapping of the italian population. I hope this does occur because much history "is in them genes".

[Jona Lendering]

I am always a bit surprised about so many Italians knowing their ethnic past, and using to explain things. "I am a Sicilian, so I am of Norman descent", etc. In my opinion, it does not say very much. All Australians are descendants of criminals that were deported, but that does not explain modern Australian criminal statistics. This being said, I would love to know more about the ethnic composition of Italy because it appears that many people have settled over there, and I would not be surprised if there was a considerable overlap with southern Greece.

[Goffredo]

Yes I agree

italians of various areas are really proud of their heritage and go to great and sometimes unlikely extremes just to stress the differences from other italians of other areas, even very near by.

But there are indeed many italians of the deep south that are not short and dark skinned. Some, many, relatively tall, blond or red beards and hair, fair skin and blue eyes. They are proud to say they are of norman descent. Only a gene mapping could prove such a statement but they thrive on their heritage. So smile and let them be and let us all wait for the results of a detailed study.

I travel very much in italy and believe me over the years I've seen guys and gals that look just off etruscan frescos, I've seen people in rome that are more roman than roman busts! I've seen italians that look like berbers and even darkers arabs and others that look very germanic. Italians are very diverse and they enjoy pointing out and continuously re-invent their diversity.

[tlclark]

Goffredo,

What's amazing to a visitor to Italy (or at least to me) is the intesity of that association. To most outsiders most italians are just varying shades of olive, but Italians can clearly tell the difference and were offended if you couldn't!

What's amazing about this is just how little real genetic diversity there really is out there.

Any two Africans from the same village will be likely more diverse genetically than any two persons chosen at random from opposite sides of the globe!

We really are all mutts!

[Jona Lendering]

What's amazing to a visitor to Italy (or at least to me) is the intesity of that association.

Perhaps it is related to another aspect of Italian culture that I can not really fathom, their love for jokes about dialects. Roberto Benigni's Tuscan Italian is quite different from Napolitan or Rrrrroman, and in many movies Italians make jokes about it (which I usually do not recognize). In my opinion, Italy does not really exist; local patriotism appears to stronger than in other countries. I suppose the expression is campanillismo.

[Tarbicus]

Well Tarby, looks like you and Aitor are distant cousins after all!!

I knew Uncle Alf was up to no good.

That's a superb website, thanks! Scary bit: 74,000 years ago. Talk about "How we almost never made it" hock:

[Restitvtvs]

This thread reminds me of an "old" English quote:

"The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors, is like a potato—the only good belonging to him is underground." ~ Thomas Overbury (England, 1581–1615).

Variation:

"The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part of him is underground."

My initial thoughts:

If we go back far enough into time, considering our many ancestors and what they did, we may all have the blood of "Kings" & slaves flowing through our veins.

It's not only about the cards that we are dealt, but also about we play them.

Related Quotes:

[quote]“Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.â€

[tlclark]

I cover human evolution every year for my Art Survey class. We begin with language and cognition because mental abstraction is at the root of visual culture. If I have a word for an object, I probably have a mental image of it, if I have a mental image, I can replicate it, or I can see a pattern in objects. Either way, by creation or attachment and interpretation, I can create art.

I bore my students to tears but I really love the prehistoric era because all the greatest human questions were answered then and art is one of the biggest mysteries.

One thing I would really like to know is what the heck happened during the ice ages. We speculate that art and language go back VERY early, maybe even to the very beginnings of modern humans, but monumental art is very late, only about the last 40,000 years or so. All the cave paintings, rock art, complicated stone tools date after that period which coincides with the interglacial period of the ice age.

We guess that body art, body paint, ritual, performance, music - all things which wouldn't survive - probably existed since forever, but what on earth made them make permanent massive works of art. What just clicked and made it happen? We would love to know.

Best guesses are, it was either concieved before (heck, it had to happen sometime) or there was some subtle evolutionary or perceptual shift that allowed us to do it. In one case, art is an invention, like the wheel or the lever or anything else. Someone thought it up and only after that could people emulate it. In the second case, it's not an invention, but innate, some neurological process that urges us on to make representations. One is a historical argument arguing from cultural change, the other an ahistorical arguing from nature.

Either way, it has huge implications for us as humans.

[Robert Vermaat]

All the cave paintings, rock art, complicated stone tools date after that period which coincides with the interglacial period of the ice age.

How DO they date a rock painting? Is the paint c14-datable? Artefacts on the cave floor may not be related to the painting, and dating on grounds of style is very dangerous. So how do they do it? I've heard dating guesses about Australian cave art that are more than 10.000 years apart! hock:

[tlclark]

Couple of different ways...

The most obvious is carbon-14 from finds in the cave. That's if we find fire hearths in the cave, problem is, most caves don't have them. These were not habitations but shrines which means that most often there aren't a lot of finds. Charcoal is used as a pigment but most of the black you are seeing is actually magnesium oxide, which is darker and more resilient than charcoal. They went out of their way to find the best pigments.

There are various other oxidation rates and chemical processes that are helpful as well as obsidian hydration and calcite formation all of which happen at more or less given rates. Even then, the ranges are huge. Chauvet and Cosquer are some of the oldest and they have a debatable range of 30-38,000 years. Carbon 14 dates are far more accurate but then we have no idea what the "curve" is for those times. Carbon 14 rates are not static, and we have to adjust those dates for known periods of hyper volcanic activity, etc with other methods. There ARE no other solid methods for way back then, so we guess.

Travis

[Restitvtvs]

Travis: Thank you for your very good overview. Some additional details below.

The "deposition" or "precipitation" rates of calcite (CaCO3, Calcium Carbonate) and other forms of calcium carbonate (grouped together with "calcite" here) in caves are usually directly correlated with precipitation rates (not as much with very high precipitation rates). So, as tree ring thickness usually increases with increased precipitation, so cave calcite layer thicknesses also usually increases. Layer thickness may vary only slightly between some years, and be more than double between other years. (Very wet years in normally dry to moist climate zones can decrease layer thickness by literally washing out more calcite.

Yes, in addition to carbon dating, we can also use oxygen dating and Thorium dating to cross-check cave calcite age, but these also yield approximate ages.

[Robert Vermaat]

Travis, William,
thank you both for that very helpful answer. I'm a total novice when it comes to rock art and dating cave finds! Laudes to you both.

So, it's possible to date the material used for making the cave art?