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Gene surfing is a process in population expansion whereby certain variations become prominent and dominant in a short time, appearing to skip the slow, steady, uniform accumulation of variegation and diversification. According to a study of the population structure and genealogies of Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean in Quebec, this type of drastic change accompanied the immigrant wave front that spread over the area in the 17th century. "Deep Human Genealogies Reveal a Selective Advantage to Be on an Expanding Wave Front" in Science magazine describes the resulting demographics.

Abstract
Since their origin, human populations have colonized the whole planet, but the demographic processes governing range expansions are mostly unknown. We analyzed the genealogy of more than one million individuals resulting from a range expansion in Quebec between 1686 and 1960 and reconstructed the spatial dynamics of the expansion. We find that a majority of the present Saguenay Lac-Saint-Jean population can be traced back to ancestors having lived directly on or close to the wave front. Ancestors located on the front contributed significantly more to the current gene pool than those from the range core, likely due to a 20% larger effective fertility of women on the wave front. This fitness component is heritable on the wave front and not in the core, implying that this life-history trait evolves during range expansions.

So gene surfing in an expanding colonization phase can produce a genetic revolution whose effects will be felt for hundreds or thousands of years downstream in history.

We wonder if the same wave front demographics might explain some of the following population phenomena:

• Large scale triumph of Norman male lineages following the conquest of England in 1066.
• Selective expansion of Middle Eastern genes in Tennessee (including Cherokee families, Jewish male and female lines and Melungeons)
• Relatedness among Jews and "Jewish diseases"
• Diversity-within-uniformity of Polynesians
• Population replacement of Old European (U, N) by Middle Eastern genes (T, J)  in Europe as a result of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution

Many students of history are puzzled why old populations have the allele frequencies and heterozygosity clines they have. Genetic drift is only part of the answer. Gene surfing and selection in deep history are the rest of it.

And Now in the Cherokee...

Haplogroup N1a became prominent in genetics literature when Wolfgang Haak et al.'s studies on 7500 year old skeletons in Central Europe revealed that 25% of the Neolithic European population might have belonged to this lineage. The skeletons were found to be members of the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK ware) which is credited with being the first farming culture in Central Europe.

7,000 Year-Old Linearbandkeramik (LBK ware) from Stone Age Germany.

The study was a major development in the debate on the origin of European populations, since Haak et al. argued that "The discovery of mitochondrial type N1a in Central European Neolithic skeletons at a high frequency enabled us to answer the question of whether the modern population is maternally descended from the early farmers instead of addressing the traditional question of the origin of early European farmers."

1. Demic diffusion (in which farming is brought by farmers), for example Renfrew's NDT - Anatolian hypothesis
2. Cultural diffusion (in which farming is spread by the passage of ideas), which is the assumption in Alinei's Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

The study's authors concluded: "Our finding lends weight to a proposed Paleolithic ancestry for modern Europeans."

N currently appears in only .18%-.2% of regional populations. It is widely distributed throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa and is divided into the European, Central Asian, and African/South Asian branches based on specific genetic markers. Exact origins and migration patterns of this haplogroup are still unknown and a subject of some debate.

Although not one of the classic Native American lineages (A, B, C, D, and X -- Schurr), N has been identified in the ancient Southwest in the Fremont Culture centered in Utah. It is one of the Middle Eastern lineages that appear in the Cherokee and other Indians; see DNA Consultants Blog, “Anomalous Mitochondrial DNA Lineages in the Cherokee”. Most investigators attribute this phenomenon to recent European admixture. But such haplotypes  if only instanced in North America without exact Old World matches could just as well be considered Native American.

It has been suggested that N is also characteristic of the Sea Peoples, who may have traveled to the American Southwest in antiquity.

Cherokee or Saponi Wedding Dish from Southwest Virginia in author's possession is glazed black, the color of the Earth Mother, and marked with the "tri-line" signifying the Triple Goddess's power of increase and plenty and rule over all life. The style of pottery is similar to Linearbandkeramik (LBK) ware. This is the female dish of a matched pair. The slightly larger male dish is marked with four lines on each handle. They were used to share food in a wedding or bonding ceremony.

The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula. This paper reviews new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and genetic evidence from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran to explore the possibility of a demographic refugium dubbed the “Gulf Oasis,” which is posited to have been a vitally significant zone for populations residing in southwest Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These data are used to assess the role of this large oasis, which, before being submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, was well watered by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin rivers as well as subterranean aquifers flowing beneath the Arabian subcontinent. Inverse to the amount of annual precipitation falling across the interior, reduced sea levels periodically exposed large portions of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, equal at times to the size of Great Britain. Therefore, when the hinterlands were desiccated, populations could have contracted into the Gulf Oasis to exploit its freshwater springs and rivers. This dynamic relationship between environmental amelioration/desiccation and marine transgression/regression is thought to have driven demographic exchange into and out of this zone over the course of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as having played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of local human populations during that interval.

Purchase article.

Read free report in Live Science.

American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting:
Tracking the Med's Stone Age Sailors

Andrew Lawler

Genetic studies are beginning to fill in the missing pieces in the history and prehistory of seafaring. "By carefully sorting genetic data from living people, a researcher at this recent meeting covered in Science reported that around 6000 B.C.E., early seaferers indeed spread their seed--both agricultural and genetic--from their homeland in the Near East as far west across the Mediterranean as Marseilles, but no farther."

No farther? Could that be because they have looked no farther?

Gunnar Thompson's new study, whose first print runs have already been exhausted apparently, Ancient Egyptian Maize, builds a well-documented and persuasive case that "Indian corn blossomed with equal vigor along the shores of the Nile River and Gulf of Mexico at the very dawn of history."

You may say that Gunnar Thompson is not a "real" researcher but we would counter that 400 corncobs on ancient tombs and papyrus scrolls of Egypt and corncobs depicted with copper weapons on ancient ships are real enough to be remarked upon by anyone with eyes in their head and a brain to think.

"Male regents in the Middle East and India sent mariners overseas in search of the world's purest copper deposits. These were located in the Mediterranean Sea on the Island of Cyprus, in the Persian Gulf on Megan Island, and on Isle Royale in the Upper Great Lakes Region of North America. This worldwide exploration took place in approximately 6000 B.C.E....all the way to the shores of North and South America" (p.2).

You hear a lot of talk about the Neolithic Revolution--the gradual adoption and spread of agriculture, animal husbandry and town life by our prehistoric European ancestors--but the most important epoch in the course of civilization goes largely unnoticed in the history books. That was the abrupt shift from matriarchy and worship of the Great Goddess to the warrior-based governments and language stocks of the steppe-dwelling Indo-Aryan barbarians who invaded Old Europe beginning in the late fourth millennium BCE.

The roots of Europe's original female-oriented religion are lost in the mists of the early Stone Age, and may even precede the arrival of "modern humans" in Europe and be part of the heritage of Neanderthals. This substratum of a long-lasting peaceful hunter-gatherer society organized around the religion of the Great Goddess absorbed the spreading practice of agriculture from the Middle East beginning in the fifth millennium and reached its apogee of development in a pure form in the fourth millennium.

The cult of the Great Goddess, depicted here in an enthroned version with flanking felines from Çatal Hüyük, an 8,000-year-old shrine in present-day Turkey (p. 107), was the lifelong object of study by Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose most influential book is The Language of the Goddess (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2006). 

The axe fell on this ancient civilization--quite literally--around 3000 BCE. As confirmed in Jane McIntosh's Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe (New York:  Facts on File, 2006), there was a clear line of demarcation between old and new Europe, from the Balkans to Britain, Spain and Scandinavia. The archeological record tells the story of a sweeping and abrupt end to things. The first metal weapons appear in the graves of elite males along with hoards of gold and jewels. Axes previously used to clear forests for agriculture are now battle-axes. Burials are single rather than family and clan-oriented. Whole villages were massacred and depopulated. Fortifications grew as violence escalated. The horse, venerated as just one of the totem animals of the Goddess since the early Stone Age, becomes the symbol of the warrior, along with the chariot and boat. Rock art features ithyphallic warriors wielding weapons or shooting arrows at each other. The transition can also be seen in the establishment of the Pharaohs in Egypt about 3500 BCE.

The invaders brought their male pantheon of war gods, Indo-European languages, aristocratic forms of government and Central Asian/Caucasian genes. The goddess cult underwent radical male adaptations, surviving in out-of-the-way places like Crete and Brittany. 

So, rather than one transformation, European civilization first went through a Neolithic Revolution, then conversion to warrior-dominated patriarchal societies. It can be postulated that the matriarchal societies eagerly adopted agriculture but exhausted soils, destroyed vital forests and became weaker and smaller-bodied due to a changed diet, falling prey around 3000 BCE to the barbarian warriors of the steppe, who found the accumulation of wealth and unprotected agrarian settlements of Old Europe easy pickings. Climate change could have been a contributing factor.

James Joyce called history "the nightmare from which one cannot wake." If we take a long view of human events, this nightmare began about five thousand years ago. Other-worldly religions like Christianity introduced a further element of alienation and turning away from the sources of life. Before that, people were happily alive, awake, in tune with nature and celebrated life under the auspices of matriarchy.

Assailants with bows and arrows attack

a fortified Neolithic settlement in Furfooze,

France, who defend themselves by hurling

stones and raising clubs. Reconstruction

from Louis Figuier, Primitive Man (London: 

Chatto and Windus, 1876). 

Mary Settegast is described on the jacket simply as an archeological researcher, the 20-year-old book being Plato Prehistorian; 10,000 to 5,000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology (Hudson:  Lindisfarne, 1990). It's obvious she is not a member of the entrenched academic community of archeologists and prehistorians, for she spends most of the introduction to her fascinating study inveighing against the Old Model and New Archeology and defending the value of myth. She then retells the Egyptian Priest's tale from Plato's Timaeus about how Solon's ancient Greek ancestors defeated an aggressive Atlantic sea-power situated on a now-lost continent beyond the Straits of Gilbraltar--the so-called Atlantis myth, which has no other source but the writings of Plato. Her thesis is that Plato is representing what he believed to be historical fact. Among other arguments, Settegast points out that it would have been impious for him to contrive a political fiction and put it in the mouth of Critias, who attributes the story to his grandfather, who received it from Solon himself, given the occasion of the dialogue, a celebration of Athena's festival day. She asks, "Would Socrates have Critias offer to the goddess as 'a just and truthful hymn of praise' (Timaeus 21) an intentional misrepresentation of Athena's own past history with the Greeks?"

Once Plato's word and intentions are vindicated it is possible to study the scattered clues he gives us to prehistory of the Mediterranean world in a new light. Settegast makes a good case that the Magdalenian cave art of 17,000/15,000 to 9000 BCE preserves the fading glory of an Atlantic culture of enormous power and sophistication that came to an abrupt end toward the end of the tenth millennium. She brackets the question of the location of a sunken continent and dwells instead on the blunders of modern prehistorians who fail to grasp the advanced picture of civilization left to us in Paleolithic remains like the Lascaux paintings. For instance, most anthropologists have explained the paintings as vehicles for sympathetic hunting magic without noting that it is the horse that is most commonly depicted while excavations of Magdlenian sites reveal almost exclusively the remains of reindeer as their principal animal food. The religious significance of the animals is lost on most analysts. Plato, as usual, provides the pertinent clue: the Atlantics worshipped Poseidon and regarded his sacred animal the horse with great awe. A revisionist look at the horses in cave paintings clarifies that the lines on horses' heads represent harnesses, not natural contours or anatomical details, proving that the Magdalenians or Atlantic peoples had tamed the horse by 12,000 BCE, some eight thousand years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model.

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages:  (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

I've just started to read the book and will conclude this "preview" for the blog by mentioning that one obstacle to accepting Plato's story at face value was that he describes the Atlantics as literate. The recent reevaluation of the "magic signs" in Magdalenian caves as a writing system with heirs in many Old World alphabets seems to bear him out once again...and make his detractors look stupid and full of hubris. It is the effect many Socratic dialogues were meant to have on their readers.

Addendum:  One of the offshoots of Atlantic Culture according to Plato Prehistorian was the Çatal Hüyük civilization that flourished in Anatolia from 6200-5300 BCE. Only 2-3 % of the 32 acre site has been excavated, but what has come to light so far includes amazing cyclopean walls, refined wall paintings and peculiar religious practices such as a vulture-bull rite, leopard shrine and Mistress of the Animals cult reminiscent of Venus figurines. It is conceivable that Atlantic Culture itself was spurred to life originally by admixture of Europeans with Neanderthals, since there are numerous signs of Neanderthal culture in  archeological remains. Significantly, the Venus figures once associated with Gravettian Culture now appear to have had their origins with Neanderthals, who occupied Europe for 350,000 years before H. sapiens sapiens. Venus figurines were worn about the neck by Neanderthals, as proved in several excavations in Spain and elsewhere. In 1961, archeologists unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal man in the ancient site of Chalcedon on the east side of the Bosporus in Asia Minor, although the find is seldom mentioned today.

Our Neanderthal Index is based on affinities with archaic populations presumed to carry the highest rate of admixture with Neanderthals. These include many of the Atlantic and Mediterranean populations mentioned in Plato Prehistorian, including Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Arabian, Basque, Egyptian and Berber.