Attached below is a simple but decent account of the peopling of the European continent.

There were (at least) four major waves of people into Europe. The first to make an appearance in the record were the Neanderthals, who disappeared soon after the arrival of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (HSS). Very little Neanderthal DNA--about 2% in a typical European--was passed down to the present.

The second migration (the first strictly HSS one) occurred when people from Africa moved into the Middle East and then north, splitting into an Asian and a European branch about 45,000 BCE. Those African hunter-gatherers represented the continental substrate, a thin population because nuts, berries, and squirrels cannot support many people relative to land. Third came a wave of farmers from Turkey around 6,000 BCE, soon after the Agricultural Revolution in that area, whose new economy allowed much denser population concentrations and essentially swamped the hunter-gatherers.

The fourth wave came from the Eurasian steppe about 2,500 BCE and comprised nomadic Yamnaya peoples who rode horses and had a largely pastoral economy. These people displaced much of the pre-existing HSS population. The reason for that displacement is unclear since there is not much evidence of large-scale military conflict. A possible explanation, however, lies in an early form of the Plague, which appears to have been endemic among the Yamnaya but may have killed huge numbers of earlier Europeans who lacked immunity or resistance.

The article contains a great chart, mapping both the timing of the three HSS waves and the geographical mixing of the African hunter-gatherer culture, the agricultural peoples, and the Yamnaya folk from the steppes. Besides being interesting per se, the map allows the intrepid Western reader to surmise his own genetic heritage based on the part of Europe from which her ancestors hailed. It shows that, like in other geographical regions, Europeans do not comprise a single race but rather are scattered along a genetic spectrum.

Other intriguing implications include linguistic history. The Yamnaya peoples are widely regarded as the original Indo-Europeans, whose intrusions into India, Persia, and Europe explain why the main languages of those places are all closely related. It follows that Europe's non-Indo-European languages--like Basque, Pictish, and some others--may stem from the earlier waves of Europeans whose tongues survived in remote and inhospitable regions that were not overwhelmed by the Yamnaya and their descendants. It's also worth underscoring the role of germs in history: namely, the possibility that the Yamnaya brought diseases that wiped out much of the existing European population (a mixture of African hunter-gatherers and farmers) just as Asian vectors would subsequently wreck havoc on the late Roman Empire and European germs would annihilate almost all of the Native Americans.




https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/07/first-europeans-immigrants-genetic-testing-feature/

This looks like a really good article, LW.

I can't do more than skim over the material now (I'm in the midst of a project which needs to be completed ASAP), but I am definitely looking forward to being able to read it in detail.

Thank you!!

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Attached below is a simple but decent account of
> the peopling of the European continent.
>
> There were (at least) four major waves of people
> into Europe. The first to make an appearance in
> the record were the Neanderthals, who disappeared
> soon after the arrival of Homo Sapiens Sapiens
> (HSS). Very little Neanderthal DNA--about 2% in a
> typical European--was passed down to the present.

2% ia not 'little'.
It's HUGE.
And it depends upon your source,
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/neanderthal/

I'e seen the perdent is 2%-4% Neanderthal, closer to 3% on average. I'm 2.8% Neanderthal according to my genetic test. That's low. Average is 2.9%.
which us HUGE, considering we're 98% genetically identical to Chimps and Bonobos.

And not a word abut Denisovans, or Homo Sapiens Idaltu, the first Wise Man, who was an African.
Or Homo Hidelbergensis, who lived both in North Africxa and Europe long gefore us.
Or Cro Magnon. lll

"According to one theory, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and all modern humans are all descended from the ancient human Homo heidelbergensis. Between 500,000 to 600,000 years ago, an ancestral group of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and then split shortly after. One branch ventured northwestward into West Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other branch moved east, becoming Denisovans. By 250,000 years ago H. heidelbergensis in Africa had become Homo sapiens.: Nat Geo

Kori,

You are misunderstanding the DNA analysis.

When scientists say that chimps and humans are 98.8% the same, they are taking the shared genetic code and comparing individual sequences. When they say that HSS are 98% the same as Neanderthals, they are doing the same with the much more closely related genetic code those two species share. In other words, they are using different scales, a general one for comparing primates and a much finer one when identifying the differences between humans.

If you use the same standard to differentiate between modern humans that you do to compare humans and chimpanzees, the difference between one person and another is rarely greater than 0.1%. That applies to humans with Denisovan DNA versus those with Neanderthal DNA and both versus Africans with neither.

It's critical when reading this stuff to make sure you know which scale the authors are employing.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Kori,
>
> You are misunderstanding the DNA analysis.
>
> When scientists say that chimps and humans are
> 98.8% the same, they are taking the shared genetic
> code and comparing individual sequences. When
> they say that HSS are 98% the same as
> Neanderthals, they are doing the same with the
> much more closely related genetic code those two
> species share. In other words, they are using
> different scales, a general one for comparing
> primates and a much finer one when identifying the
> differences between humans.
>
> If you use the same standard to differentiate
> between modern humans that you do to compare
> humans and chimpanzees, the difference between one
> person and another is rarely greater than 0.1%.
> That applies to humans with Denisovan DNA versus
> those with Neanderthal DNA and both versus
> Africans with neither.
>
> It's critical when reading this stuff to make sure
> you know which scale the authors are employing.
Why minimize the genetic contribution of Neanderthals/Denisovans?
2% is huge.

The mistake you are making is treating 2% as if it is an absolute number, which it is not.

2% of a billion dollars is 20 million dollars, which is a lot. But 2% of a dollar is two cents, which is very little. You keep acting s if 2% of a big number equals 2% of a little number. That leads to confusion.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The mistake you are making is treating 2% as if it
> is an absolute number, which it is not.
>
> 2% of a billion dollars is 20 million dollars,
> which is a lot. But 2% of a dollar is two cents,
> which is very little. You keep acting s if 2% of
> a big number equals 2% of a little number. That
> leads to confusion.
I know its not absolute. Its actually closer to 3%, according to the genetic testing agencies. And its zero in Africans. Again, 3% is a huge difference, genetically, which you keep minimizing.

I don't minimize anything: I simply apply a unitary standard and hence get the right scale. You, by contrast, are using multiple scales and pretending they are are one, which is why you get confused.

The following is a simple explanation. If you use a single scale for all measurements, the facts emerge:

Difference between individual modern humans (including the contributions from archaic humans): roughly 0.1%

Difference between modern humans and chimps/bonobos: 1.2%

Difference between modern humans, chimps, and bonobos relative to gorillas: 1.6%

Difference between these African Great Apes and the Asian Great Ape, the Orangutan: 3.1%

Difference between all Great Apes and a typical monkey: 7%.

That is the basis for the Primate Family Tree.

Your error is in assuming the 2-3% contribution of Neanderthal genes to your DNA makes you farther from me than from a bonobo. It does not. That 2-3% Neanderthal contribution explains 2-3% of the 0.1% difference between you and me.

The following article explains that. It employs a unitary scale for all comparisons, which is apples to apples. That is what you want to use.




http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics

God bless you.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't minimize anything:

From OP, "Very little Neanderthal DNA--about 2% in a typical European--was passed down to the present."

2% is not "Very little" it's HUGE in genetic terms, especially considering that it's closer to 3% and Africans have zero. That's how you're minimizing the genetic contribution of Neanderthals to European DNA and the even bigger contribution of Denisovan (3-5%) to Asian DNA.

Well, if you want to call 2% "huge" relative to the 98% that is HSS, feel free to do so.

I'm glad, at least, that you are no longer claiming that your 2.9% Neanderthal DNA puts you further from Africans and Asians than they are from chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. That much is progress.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well, if you want to call 2% "huge" relative to
> the 98% that is HSS, feel free to do so.
>
> I'm glad, at least, that you are no longer
> claiming that your 2.9% Neanderthal DNA puts you
> further from Africans and Asians than they are
> from chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. That
> much is progress.

European traits, like skin, hair and eye color, determined by Neanderthal DNA,
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005121106.htm

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> European traits, like skin, hair and eye color,
> determined by Neanderthal DNA,
> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/1710
> 05121106.htm

And it don't mean much.

"For now, knowing which specific genetic variants a person inherited from Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors provides only limited information about a few physical traits."
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/dtcgenetictesting/neanderthaldna

Interesting article LW. Looks like the Americas were peopled before the British Isles, is that correct?

No, Mike.

The map in that article assumes the hunter-gatherers from Africa as a backdrop and then follows the agricultural population from Turkey and the Yamnaya people from the Russian/Ukrainian steppe.
There were several different hominid species in the British Isles before that period, reaching back about 800,000 years.

Britain was connected to Europe at that time, so basically the same groups were present on both sides of what is now the channel. HSS appeared in Britain about 40,000 years ago, which would allow for a gradual migration westward from the time, ca 45,000 BCE, when the European and Asian branches of HSS divided north of the Middle East.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2019 06:10AM by Lot's Wife.

Thanks LW. But it wasn't continuously occupied by HSS until about 11,700 years ago. Is that correct?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Britain#targetText=The%20earliest%20evidence%20for%20modern,41%2C000%20and%2044%2C000%20years%20old.

These things fascinate me.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/first-britons.html#targetText=Modern%20humans%2C%20Homo%20sapiens&targetText=For%20thousands%20of%20years%20the,were%20highly%20adaptable%20hunter%2Dgatherers.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2019 06:39AM by mikemitchell.

I think it was occupied for long stretches of time but with occasional breaks. One such interim was 180,000 BCE to 60,000 BCE, after which Neanderthal returned to the Islands. HSS followed some 20,000 years later, with an ice age later reducing the population greatly until HSS reappeared and finally repopulated the islands, as you suggest, around 11,700 years ago.

That was an important time globally. The easing of climatic conditions around the world enabled HSS to move back into northern Europe and across the channel into Britain while, in Beringia, facilitating easier entry into North America. Now the rigorous passage along the probable coastal route was supplemented by a broad highway from Alaska down into the center of the continent.

Economically, the better conditions led over a few thousand years to agricultural development in Anatolia ca 8,500 years ago, spreading to Mesopotamia and Egypt; and less extensive developments in the rice economies of East Asia. Perhaps supported by the greater social complexity enabled by more productive economics, the Asial Age soon ensued, bringing Confucius and Laozi and the great Indian traditions as well as Greek philosophies and the inception of the YWYH cult and early Judaism. So climatic patterns formed a sort of substructure, on which arose the structure of agricultural economics, and a cultural superstructure.

But I digress. Yes, the current population of Britain began around 11,700 years ago when the ice had retreated sufficiently.

You peaked my interest with your post LW. These are the things I have been reading about since I left the church. Fascinating. I'm glad you clarified what I first said, pointing out that hominid presence in the British Isles goes back so far into the past.

It helps me to have a better perspective on the peopling of the Americas, where no presence of ancient hominids have been found. It was the last major landmass to be peopled, and was isolated from the Old World's spread of agriculture but the people independently domesticated plants.

So much more intriguing than Mormonism's nonsense.

I share your fascination. It used to be that history required archaeology, which doesn't speak clearly, and then languages that evolved almost along genetic lines. Then came genetics, which provide a good picture, one that will continue to evolve for a long time.

I started studying these things to learn the truth of the BOM, and eventually I did--albeit not at all the way I had expected! Mormonism is one of those cases in which the truth really does set us free.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2019 06:57AM by Lot's Wife.

Mormonism ought to be relegated to a 19th century hoax and fraud museum. Anyway, thanks for the link to National Geographic.

Thanks for the discussion. I learned from it.

The devil is in the ... genitalia.

Interesting stuff. Thx.

A comment on Scandinavian origins going back "to at least the Trojans". I'm sure it goes back farther than that, but the Trojan era (1000 to 500 BCE more or less) would have been roughly 2,000 years after the last major influx of people into Europe. The Yamnaya influx (it hardly seems like an invasion) was nearly as far before Troy's peak as Troy is before us.

The Jude's-Christian tradition has trouble dealing with the distant past since their version of human history is a 6,000 year sprint from Eden to Armageddon. Archeologically, 6,000 years ago qualifies in most ways as the recent past. The Roman Empire would be part of the modern era.


Oh, and let's not forget the origin of the American First Nations in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago. ;)


The first thing that made my Mormon shelf crack was linguistics. I grew up around Russian, Polish and Italian immigrants, and I realized early on that those rather disparate languages had the same linguistic roots as English. Plus my parents bought an encyclopedia (remember those?!) that included an indo-European dictionary of word origins.

It seemed to my young mind that if English and Russian still had easily discernible common roots after thousands of years of separation, then the Hebrew roots of Native American languages should be glaringly obvious. That was not the case.

My LDS shelf started to show stress fractures.

Thank you for the post LW. Means a lot to me because I am able to love the information that in my youth, in my Mormondom, I could not. It is a marker to me. It poses no threat to me as it does to some others in this thread. I am no longer Mormon. I no longer feel the need to be superior based on skin color as a marker of some supposed God's favor. I no longer have to feel arrogant that I was valiant in some war in heaven.

I don't usually use the word race at all. I prefer ethnicity.

I worship accomplishment. I crave critical thinking. I am happiest when with those who have had to struggle so hard for acceptance. They know more. They feel more. They love more. Because they know what it means to push your way toward the top against all odds rather than being gifted with the very hollow illusion of superiority based on opalescent skin.

Beautiful things often grow in scars.

Thanks for this Lots Wife.

My pleasure, Saucie!

See David Reich’s book: Who we are and how we got here. Excellent and gives lots interesting details about how studying the genomes of ancient people is done and what it is telling researchers about our origins. The scientists at the Max Planck Institute and Harvard (and other excellent sites) describe what challenges they face, and overcome to make their discoveries. Their methodology is fascinating.

I think that the brain development in the Denisovans and in the Neandrithals was less advanced than in the homo-sapien species at the time. There were overlaps in the times each species was here while other species was coming or going. I read somewhere that homo-sapiens would hunt using weapons that could safely strike their prey at a distance, while Neandrithals would typically choose to fight their prey in close-quarters, thus giving the animal a much better chance of winning. Then homo-sapiens got so good at hunting and winning most of the time that the neandrithals were starved out of existence after the homo-sapiens proliferated and killed all of the easy prey. It's hard to know if there was such a thing as racism at the time, to cause one species to hold prejudice against the other to the point of killing them off. If most of us have around 2% Neandrithal in our gene's, the species must have inter-bred at one time and been close enough of a match to produce fertile offspring.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2019 11:25PM by azsteve.

I am leery of explanations for how HSS displaced Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other hominid species. What is known for sure is that Neanderthals (and Denisovans?) died out soon after HSS arrived in their territories. Why is not really clear.

There have been many attempts to describe the differences between HSS and Neanderthals, none of which are reflected in the archaeological record and few of which are as persuasive today as when they were first articulated. It used to be common sense, for example, that the two species were so different that they could not interbreed. We now know that to be false.

Another theory was that Neanderthals were far less intelligent than HSS and incapable of abstract thought, yet there is now evidence of Neanderthal burial rituals that indicated a belief in life after death and reason to believe that some cave art that was previously attributed to HSS may in fact have been Neanderthal. If so, then Neanderthals were capable of abstract thinking. There were also theories about HSS having much better tools and weapons, but the evidence for that is scant as well--particularly as we learn that a number of species of animals also make and use rudimentary tools. So the lines between closely related groups seem difficult to draw with precision, as one would expect given that they are reproductively compatible.

The theories about how HSS replaced Neanderthals are also largely speculative. All that is clear is that there was a temporal coincidence between the arrival of HSS and the demise of at least some previous hominid species. Whether that occurred through war, occupation of better territory, better hunter-gatherer strategies and tactics, disease, or something else is guesswork.

. . . I wonder if Richard the Bad wants to correct any of this or to add anything else. He's the expert on this stuff.

I've not much to add Lot's Wife. But the atlatl wasn't developed until around 17k ago, so any hominid would have had a throwing spear as it's most advanced distance weapon. Something there is some evidence of Neandertal having.

We do know that Neandertal had art, cared for the injured, and had formal burials. So they weren't really that much culturally different than HSS at the time. The hypotheses as to Neandertals demise are many. It's possible that HSS brought in diseases. Who knows, the skeletal evidence is rather scant I tend to lean towards Neandertal populations being low and absorbed into the HSS population.

David Reich shares your view. He naturally puts the point speculatively but he notes that if you start with a big difference in population size, then add a significant reproductive disadvantage for Neanderthal-HSS couplings and the gradual elimination of unhealthy adaptations, what you would expect to see today is something like HSS with 2-4% Neanderthal DNA. In short, absorption.

I also agree about the cultural similarities. It seems like all notions of HSS superiority--tools, weapons, art, abstract thinking, and some level of religion in burials--have eroded over time. Those who still attempt to draw clear distinctions are bold indeed.

Not one mention of the survivors from the Battlestar Galactica fleet interbreeding with early humans about 500,000 years ago; what kind of scientific research are they doing? :-)

And to you as well, always.

I am fascinated by the 'trending' of this thread.

Look at how it started and compare that with how it ended up.

"Here's what it means!" rapidly changed into, "I wonder what it all means?"

Certainty v. Wonderment.

Prophet v. seeker.

Statements v. questions.


Am I the only one seeing that?

The timeline in the OP leaves out several species of humans (Homos) who populated Europe and Asia prior to Neanderthals.

524,000 year old Box Grove man (Homo heidelbergensis) was discovered near the English Channel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_heidelbergensis#cite_note-Streeter_et_al._2001-29

Homo Erectus was found in China as early as 2.1 Million Years Ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus#cite_note-15

A curious post.

schrodingerscat Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The timeline in the OP leaves out several species
> of humans (Homos) who populated Europe and Asia
> prior to Neanderthals.

Did you glean that from my post in your thread, wherein I said that Homo Erectus and others were present from two million years ago? I didn't hide the ball in either that thread or in this one. See if you can decipher this statement:

"There were (at least) four major waves of people into Europe."

So no, I did not "leave out" other groups. I simply chose to focus on the developments most relevant to modern humans while alluding clearly the many other hominid groups.


------------------
> 524,000 year old Box Grove man (Homo
> heidelbergensis) was discovered near the English
> Channel

Yes, yes. I just said that.


----------------
> Homo Erectus was found in China as early as 2.1
> Million Years Ago

Yes, yes. I'm glad you learned something new from Wikipedia. In your thread you claimed that there were no "permanent" human populations in Europe prior to one million years ago. That was false and I refuted it in that thread.

...and so it was dragged back to "here's what it means!"

Adios, wonderment.

Life is good.

The universe is good because it inclines towards life.

Humans exist because the universe is good.

Disaster is good because nature is restoring balance.

Death is good because nature, which is good, is rectifying imbalances.



"All is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds."

--Voltaire, explaining why Scat is the true Dr. Pangloss, who "glosses" over "everything" to impute normative value to neutral phenomena



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2020 05:12PM by Lot's Wife.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Life is good.
>
> The universe is good because it inclines towards
> life.
>
> Humans exist because the universe is good.
>
> Disaster is good because nature is restoring
> balance.
>
> Death is good because nature, which is good, is
> rectifying imbalances.
>



All the above is bullshit. ~Judic West

How old is Judic now? 11?

Still 12.

EOD is luckier than Homer in that regard. Bart's been stuck at 10 for God knows how long.

taking the gloves off, eh?

Wut

It makes me wonder where we will be as a species 45,000 years from now -- probably populating the galaxy, and on our way to parts unknown. Mars may be fully viable at that point with a functioning (artificially induced) atmosphere.

And the farther north they went, the more white and delightsome they became.

And shorter thumbs.

An excellent book describing this information in more detail, and the tools used to discover this information is David Reich's, WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE.

Agreed emphatically. I've recommended that book four or five times on these pages.

The one problem with the book is that it is so damned rich. I had to read it a few times and I still go back to check underlinings and bookmarked pages to get the details on particular issues.

I hope, perhaps against hope, that he writes another. You gotta know that his and other labs have already refined and extended their arguments prodigiously.

Interesting that this showed up in my news feed today:

Abstract
Documenting the first appearance of modern humans in a given region is key to understanding the dispersal process and the replacement or assimilation of indigenous human populations such as the Neanderthals. The Iberian Peninsula was the last refuge of Neanderthal populations as modern humans advanced across Eurasia. Here we present evidence of an early Aurignacian occupation at Lapa do Picareiro in central Portugal. Diagnostic artifacts were found in a sealed stratigraphic layer dated 41.1 to 38.1 ka cal BP, documenting a modern human presence on the western margin of Iberia ∼5,000 years earlier than previously known. The data indicate a rapid modern human dispersal across southern Europe, reaching the westernmost edge where Neanderthals were thought to persist. The results support the notion of a mosaic process of modern human dispersal and replacement of indigenous Neanderthal populations.

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/09/23/2016062117?fbclid=IwAR3oXP0D864_y7qhb3v16xy957K6ktsq1KdymZXkPmEWklIMPVW4EDN-NjE

Richard, have you read the David Reich book that Kenc and I recommend?

Unfortunately, no I haven't.

I'm confident you would love it. His lab is one of the two best, the other being Planck, in the field and the work is fascinating. His purpose in writing the book was to bridge the gap between their work and yours.

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here-dp-1101873469/dp/1101873469/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

You might look at one or two of these lectures of his to see if you find him interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=david+reich

New dating of Stalagmites puts the creation of these structures at 176,500 bp.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/the-astonishing-age-of-a-neanderthal-cave-construction-site/484070/?fbclid=IwAR3LcoGZJPFqtasbM4pAUCGlupUu0-zu3x5Ynh2QaLRTN0rxcF2qZavsRhM

Wow.

Yet further evidence that the intellectual and spiritual life of Neanderthals was similar to that of HSS. The barriers between the two groups keep falling. . .

Whatever the genetic difference, I'm just glad I'm not human. {Pass the bananas, please.)