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The Peopling of the Aleutians
Michael Balter
Few Aleuts still live in their ancestral homeland, but their genetics and archaeology offer a rare glimpse into one of humanity's last great migrations-and into the mysterious peopling of the Americas.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/335/6065/158

Recent genetic studies have tended to throw cold water on the size and decimation of American Indian populations on European contact after 1492. A new study shows the falsehood of this thinking, and perhaps we are back to using the word "conquest" instead of the euphemistic term "contact." The conqueror of the Americas was not Europeans, though, but the diseases they unleashed on Indians.

According to Science magazine, "a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pushes the pendulum back toward dramatic population declines. Using both modern and ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Native Americans, an international team concludes that about 500 years ago, the number of reproductively active Native American women quickly plunged by half, indicating a 'widespread and severe' contraction in population size."

The study summarized is:  Brendan O'Fallon and Lars Fehren-Schmitz, "Native Americans Experienced a Strong Population Bottleneck Coincident with European Contact," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Dec. 5, 2011);  doi:  10.1073/pnas.1112563108.

Critics of the study say that the conclusions may be illusory since we do not have a lot of ancient Native American DNA. But we will never have a lot of Native American DNA. That objection seems lame, and we applaud the new study as at least a step in the right direction of rectifying the true story of the Americas and escaping the apologist blinkers of colonial "Smithsonian-styled" methodologies and mindsets.

 

A Missing Link from Kent's Cavern in Devonshire

A prehistoric maxilla (upper jawbone) fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, and named Kents Cavern 4. The specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum.

Although previous radiocarbon dating suggested the bone was about 35,000 years old, a new study in Nature redates it securely to 44.2-41.5 kyr. The article by Tom Higham et al., "The Earliest Evidence for Anatomically Modern Humans in Northwestern Europe," also claims that on the basis of dental comparisons it is "human" rather than "Neanderthal."

The Kent's Cavern fragment "therefore represents the oldest known anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe, fills a key gap between the earliest dated Aurignacian remains and the earliest human skeletal remains, and demonstrates the wide and rapid dispersal of early modern humans across Europe more than 40 kyr ago."

A related article in the same issue of Nature is "Early Dispersal of Modern Humans in Europe and Implications for Neanderthal Behavior," by Stefano Benazzi et al. It attempts to place the so-called Cavallo fossil from southern Italy in a timeframe of about 44,000 years ago, thus suggesting a "rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals."

Neither study considers that the evidence they are examining may be the result of hybridization between "humans" and "Neanderthals." Like most geneticists the authors have rigid categories and do not consider that our definitions of species and sub-species and transitions in technocomplexes and traits are in flux as new discoveries are made.

One man's Mede may be another man's Persian, and we note that the "fossil race" is not devoid of scientific jingoism pitting one country's news-making finds against another's. So far England seems to be winning.

However, the British still have to live down Piltdown Man, a fraud of biblical proportions that fooled the world for almost half a century until the 1950s. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery combining the lower jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The editors sum up the two new studies by writing, "The reanalysis of findings from two archaeological sites calls for a reassessment of when modern humans settled in Europe, and of Neanderthal cultural achievements." We wish that the paleontological community would think more out of the box and reassess how, when and where "humans" and "Neanderthals" interbred. 


Location of Kent's Caverns in Devon.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Neanderthal fossil record in America. And apparently a Neanderthal hybrid fossil record.

No genetics publication has put all the evidence together: the genetics establishment is still in denial about most things Neanderthal. The evidence is scattered and mostly unrecognized, but, in our opinion, conclusive and compulsive. Consider the following article:

Frank L'Engle Williams and Gail E. Krovitz, "Ontogenetic Migration of the Mental Foramen in Neanderthals and Modern Humans," Journal of Human Evolution 47/4 (Oct. 2004) 190-219. 

The mental foramen (literally "mind's little hole") is an anatomical trait very pronounced in Neanderthals, a small dimple in the lower jaw of the skull beneath the teeth, or mandible. It is found sporadically in humans, where it is classified as archaic. Among the places where it has been identified are the Oleniy Islands and Baltic region, Northwestern Russia in Cro-Magnon like Europoid and Mongoloid types, along with "large and massive" torus occipitalis or Anatolian bumps (Alexander Mongait, 1959; Marija Gimbutas, 1956); Bakhehisarai in the Crimea (Alexander Mongait, 1959); the Joman or Ainu of Japan (Carleton Stevens Coon, 1962); and the "race of giants" continually being unearthed in West Coast, Ohio Valley and New England archeological sites, caves and mounds.

Archaic giant skeletons with mental foramina, occipital bumps, double rows of teeth and other Neanderthal features are reported, in fact, all over the Americas. Fritz Zimmerman has gathered a lot of the evidence in a new book titled Nephilim Chronicles, of which a small excerpt was published in Ancient American magazine, issue 91, pp. 24-27. Here is one of the newspaper reports he cites:

Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), November 8, 1912. PRIMITIVE MEN OF GIGANTIC STATURE.

Eleven skeletons of primitive men, with foreheads sloping directly back from the eyes and two rows of teeth in the front of the upper jaw, have been uncovered at Craigshill at Ellensburg, Washington. They were found about twenty feet below the surface, twenty feet back from the face of the slope, in a cement rock formation over which was a layer of shale. The rock was perfectly dry. The jawbones, which easily break, are so large that they will go around the face of a man today. The other bones are also much larger than those of the ordinary man. The femur is twenty inches long, indicating a man of eighty inches tall [6' 8"]. The teeth in front are worn almost down to the jawbones, due, it is believed, to eating uncooked foods and crushing substances with the teeth. The sloping skull shows an extreme low order of intelligence.

We note that the female mummy clutching a child known as The Thing on display at a roadside attraction on Interstate 10 north of Tombstone, Arizona, has a double row of teeth. It supposedly was one of three skeletons sold to the operator of the original site for $50 by a Chinese gentleman passing through. The Thing is discussed in several works by David Hatcher Childress. (My son and I paid our two bucks and saw it last Christmas on a road trip.)

Photo above:  Archaic skull from Oleniy Island studied by Marija Gimbutas among other archeologists, showing the position of the mental foramen, the result probably of Neanderthal interbreeding.

Photo below:  The Thing.

As Revealed by Autosomal Markers

No scientific work, to our knowledge, has ever hazarded a guess on what the mutation rate for autosomal CODIS-type markers might be. Is it like mitochondrial DNA, which has a molecular clock measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of years, or is it like STRs on the Y chromosome, with its much shorter timeframe? The question is important if you are trying to extrapolate the history of the human race from today's autosomal population statistics.

From what we can see, putting on diachronistic lenses, the mutation rates for the DYS values on what are commonly called CODIS markers or the DNA profile for individuals are very small. The values appear to have been set from the beginning of mankind and to have mutated little in the past 100,000 years.

If this is true -- and it cannot be a very big "if" or we would have more diversity between populations than what is known -- the oldest markers are Sub-Saharan African and the newest European. Statistical divides bear out this reading of the human genetic record, as shown now in our updated map included with the DNA Fingerprint Plus.

We will try to make some notes on the individual markers in future posts.

A recent comparison of medieval mitochondrial DNA from a Byzantine cemetery with modern populations in Southwest Turkey shows what we have assumed in our population analyses of atDNA 2.0. The integration of historical with archaeological information proves that the little South Anatolian town of Sagalassos has a clearly structured Balkan/Greek maternal population with some ancient Persians and Italians in the mix but no Central Asian (Turkic) contributions discernible. The inference is that when the Turks conquered Anatolia and eventually took control of the Byzantine capital (modern-day Constantinople) they remained largely a ruling class with little penetration into the ancient settlements scattered through Turkey. Even though the general populace accepted their conquerors' religion, Islam, their bedrock DNA did not significantly alter, at least not in the female lines. 

Claudio Ottoni et al., "Mitochondrial Analysis of a Byzantine Population Reveals the Differential Impact of Multiple Historical Events in South Anatolia," Eur. J. of Hum. Genet. (2011) 19:571-76.

Abstract
The archaeological site of Sagalassos is located in Southwest Turkey, in the western part of the Taurus mountain range. Human occupation of its territory is attested from the late 12th millennium BP up to the 13th century AD. By analysing the mtDNA variation in 85 skeletons from Sagalassos dated to the 11th–13th century AD, this study attempts to reconstruct the genetic signature potentially left in this region of Anatolia by the many civilizations, which succeeded one another over the centuries until the mid-Byzantine period (13th century BC). Authentic ancient DNA data were determined from the control region and some SNPs in the coding region of the mtDNA in 53 individuals. Comparative analyses with up to 157 modern populations allowed us to reconstruct the origin of the mid-Byzantine people still dwelling in dispersed hamlets in Sagalassos, and to detect the maternal contribution of their potential ancestors. By integrating the genetic data with historical and archaeological information, we were able to attest in Sagalassos a significant maternal genetic signature of Balkan/Greek populations, as well as ancient Persians and populations from the Italian peninsula. Some contribution from the Levant has been also detected, whereas no contribution from Central Asian population could be ascertained.

Thoughts about the origin of mitochondrial haplogroup B and Mother Earth symbolism among the Hopi, Zuni, Hohokam, Fremont Indians and others

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

Neanderthal Brain Growth Shows A Head Start for Moderns

Ann Gibbons

With brains as big as ours, Neanderthals were no dumb brutes. But they may not have used their brains the same way we do. In the crucial first year of life, their brains developed dramatically differently from the way ours do, according to a report in this week's issue of Current Biology.

Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/330/6006/900-a?sa_campaign=Email/sntw/12-November-2010/10.1126/science.330.6006.900-a

They Probably Always Talked Like That

One of the startling revelations by Stephen Oppenheimer is that a form of English was probably spoken from the beginning of the colonization of the British Isles. Just as genetic bedrock was laid down by the earliest inhabitants, to persist relatively unchanged through subsequent invasions by other peoples like the Romans, the English tongue has been dominant as the language of the land, admitting little admixture with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. (See Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, pp. 303ff.)

Pretty heady stuff, but Mick Harper, author of The Secret History of the English Language (Hoboken:  Melville 2008), goes Oppenheimer one better by proposing that it was not proto-Anglo Saxon that the Ice Age inhabitants of Britain spoke but something very like Chaucer’s pilgrims, only lacking, clearly, later invasive elements due to the Celts, Belgae, Romans and Normans.

Harper compares a sample of Old English (which we are taught is the same as “Anglo-Saxon”) with Middle English and Modern English to show that Anglo-Saxon does not appear to be the same language as English—something all English graduate students suspect from the moment they are forced to read Beowulf for their comps. In the Anglo-Saxon epic (which survives in a single copy turning up in suspicious circumstances in Tudor England and is set in Sweden and never mentions England), “virtually every single word is incomprehensible except by translation,” while in “the early English poetry of Chaucer and Piers Plowman…virtually every single word is comprehensible except for spelling.”

In case you do not believe it, here are the samples:

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,

Metudaes maeti end his modgidanc,

Uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,

Eci dryctin, or astelidae.

(Caedmon, ca. 8^th cent.)

A swerd and bokeler bar he by his side…

A whit cote and a blew hood wered he.

A bagpipe wel koude he blow and sowne,

And therwithal he brought us out of towne.

(Chaucer, The Prologue, 14^th cent.)

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

(T. S. Eliot, 20^th cent.)

Harper’s comment is:  “If Anglo-Saxon/English is one language, it’s unique in the entire annals of languages on this our Earth, since it changes every goddamn word of itself” (p. 44). (Yes, he writes like that, too.)

The Anglo-Saxons were a small, obscure and illiterate tribe from, well, no one is quite sure, but perhaps northeast Germany, who arrived in waves after the Romans abandoned Britain in the fifth century, and who conquered most of the land and held it until the Danes and Norse (ca. 900) and Normans (1066) replaced them as rulers. In Harper’s view, they were just like the previous invaders, the Romans, Belgae and Celts, in having little effect on the language and customs of the populace. Just as there are only a handful of Celtic words in the English language, there was little impact on the linguistic bedrock of the kingdom the Anglo-Saxons carved out before they too had had their day. The fact that they left few monuments is unsurprising.

Which brings us to questions about the depth and breadth of Celtic heritage in Britain. If you are a Celtic fan (I’m not referring to the basketball team) you will not want to read The Secret History of the English Language. This book will disabuse you of many cherished notions. In Harper’s view, the Celts were just one of the alternating foreign conquerors of the long-suffering English-speaking peoples. Their numbers were few, even on the Continent, and they left little genetic or cultural footprint except on the “Celtic fringe” where they were squeezed in their final days.  

England has always been England. It’s always spoken English. And France has always spoken French. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."We will have to save the French linguistic heresy for another post.

If you like the unusual and provocative ideas of M. J. Harper, who lives in London, check out the community of people who have bid farewell to the dunciad of academic research and unleashed their own personal pursuit of truth on a variety of intellectual topics at The Applied Epistemology Library. You can browse on the sly but must register (for free) to post your own comments and questions on threads.

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.