Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World

by Oppenheimer, Stephen

  4. For an in-depth study of modern human cranial variation, see Lahr, M. (1996) The Evolution of Modern Human Diversity: A Study of Cranial Variation (Cambridge University Press); for Mongoloid superficial features and a discussion of northern and southern Mongoloids, see ibid. pp. 316–20.

  5. physically somewhat nearer to the first out-of-Africa people: Bulbeck, D. (1999) ‘Current biological anthropological research on Southeast Asia’s Negritos’ SPAFA Journal 9(2): 15–22. skulls of 100,000 years ago: Brown, P. (1999) ‘The first modern East Asians? Another look at Upper Cave 101, Liujiang and Minatogawa 1’ in K. Omoto (ed.) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto) pp. 105–30; see also Bulbeck op. cit.

  6. Bulbeck op. cit.

  7. For a comparative discussion see Lahr op. cit.

  8. Ulijaszek, S. (2001) ‘Ethnic differences in patterns of human growth in stature’ in R. Martorell and F. Haschke (eds) Nutrition and Growth, Nestlé Nutrition Workshop Series, Pediatric Program, Vol. 47 (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia) pp. 1–15; Ulijaszek, S. (1994) ‘Between-population variation in pre-adolescent growth’ European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 48(supp.1): S5–S14.

  9. Australian skull reduction: Lahr op. cit. fossil skulls from Australia were actually gracile, Australians as somewhat ‘changed’: for other reasons for recent Australian Aboriginals not to look like the first colonizers see the discussion in endnote 6, in Chapter 4.

  10. Tierra del Fuegans: Lahr op. cit. the Ainu: ibid. p. 319.

  11. marked shortening of the skull: ibid. This is most pronounced in Neolithic populations: Ishida, H. and Dodo, Y. (1996) ‘Cranial morphology of the Siberians and East Asians’ in A. Takeru and E. Szathmary (eds) Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersal (Oxford University Press) pp. 113–24; see also Hanihara, T. (2000) ‘Frontal and facial flatness of major human populations’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 111: 105–34.

  12. first modern human arrival in China: see the discussion of the new minimum 68,000 year age of the Liujiang skull in Chapter 4; but see also the discussion of Liujiang and Upper Cave 101 skulls in Brown op. cit. Upper Palaeolithic technology and modern human remains appear at the northern Chinese site of Salawasu between 35,000 and 50,000 years ago – Chen, C. and Olsen, J.W. (1990) ‘China at the Last Glacial Maximum’ in C. Gamble and O. Soffer (eds) The World at 18,000 bp Vol. 1 (Unwin Hyman, London) pp. 276–95. earliest undisputed Mongoloid remains: Brown op. cit. an isolated find of disputed significance: described as ‘a portion of frontal bone identified as having affinities to East Asians because of its flat upper nasal regions’ in Wolpoff, M.H. (1999) Paleoanthropology (McGraw-Hill, New York) p. 740; and discussed by Alekseev, V. (1998) ‘The physical specificities of Paleolithic hominids in Siberia’ in A.P. Derev’anko (ed.) The Paleolithic of Siberia: New Discoveries and Interpretations (University of Illinois Press, Urbana) pp. 329–35. It should be noted that several other old East Asian skulls have been claimed to have ‘pre-Mongoloid’ status. The Okinawan Minatagowa skull (16,600–18,250 years old) has a remarkably flat nasal saddle too. These skulls differ from modern Mongoloid populations in many other respects (see the discussion in Brown op. cit.). So, although the flat nasal saddle trait may be a feature, it is not clear how discriminating it is for Mongoloids.

  13. retention of several ancestral skeletal traits in modern Europeans: Lahr op. cit. [Europeans . . . southern Indians . . . Semang . . . New Guineans] retained more African ancestral dental [features]: Rayner, D. and Bulbeck, D. (2001) ‘Dental morphology of the “Orang Asli” aborigines of the Malay Peninsula’ in M. Henneberg (ed.) Causes and Effects of Human Variation (Australasian Society for Human Biology, The University of Adelaide) pp. 19–41. and cranial features: A recent craniometric study identified a cluster consisting of Andamanese, Semang, South Indian Tamils, and coastal New Guineans which hints at the retention of certain ancestral skull features as well as dental features – Bulbeck op. cit.

  14. Aboriginal Malay peoples: also known as Proto-Malay, based on an old theory that two waves of Malays entered the region, see Carey, I. (1976) Orang Asli: the aboriginal tribes of peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur). various remnant Pacific Rim populations such as the aboriginal Ainu in Japan: Hanihara, T. et al. (1998) ‘Place of the Hokkaido Ainu (Northern Japan) among peoples of the world’ International Journal of Circumpolar Health 57: 257–75, here pp. 273–4.

  15. See Hanihara (1992) op. cit. on claims for Sundadonty in Australia. Australians’ robusticity and their dental and hair changes could all potentially be explained on the basis of (contentious) secondary, robust colonizations of Australia from Southeast Asia within the last 20,000 years (Wolpoff (1999) op. cit. p. 740). Birdsell suggested as many as three successive colonizations into Australia: a first of ‘Oceanic Negritos’ or Barrineans, last represented by the now extinct Tasmanians, a second of Ainu-like Murrayians, and a third of Veddoid-like Carpentarians – Birdsell, J.B. (1977) ‘The recalibration of a paradigm for the first peopling of Greater Australia’ in J. Allen et al. (eds) Sunda and Sahul (Academic Press, London), pp. 113–67. There is some archaeological and genetic support for a much more recent such intrusion during the Holocene, but the cultural impact would have been greater than the genetic one, which was relatively minor –Oppenheimer, S.J. (1998) Eden in the East (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London), pp. 203–4. While secondary colonizations of Australia are out of fashion at present, and Birdsell’s and Wolpoff’s views are in the minority, I suspect the issue will not go away and that genetic evidence may yet provide support for several colonizations by different routes.

  16. Sundadonty/Sinodonty may be an artificial categorization of a continuum. See on the one hand discussion in: Hanihara, T. (1992) ‘Negritos, Australian Aborigines, and the “Proto-Sundadont” dental pattern: The basic populations in East Asia, V’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 88: 183–96; see also: Scott, G.R. and Turner II, C.G. (1997) The Anthropology of Modern Human Teeth (Cambridge University Press). Rayner and Bulbeck (op. cit.), on the other hand, clearly regard the discrete distinction between Sundadonty and Sinodonty as artificial. They suggest more of a clinal continuum, with Sundadonty being intermediate between the undifferentiated circum-Indian Ocean type and Sinodonty. The south–north Asian cline is still preserved in this view. They also argue for a more complex variation between these Pacific Rim peoples. Although I agree with Rayner and Bulbeck on this, I continue to use the terms Sinodont and Sundadont for simplicity.

  17. genetic evidence Northern and Southern Mongoloid populations can indeed be separated: Yong-Gang Yao et al. (2002) ‘Phylogeographic differentiation of mitochondrial DNA in Han Chinese’ American Journal of Human Genetics 70: 635–51. children in the south, although well nourished, are smaller than those from Beijing in the north: Leung, S. (1990) ‘Auxological and nutritional status of Hong Kong Chinese infants: Birth to two years’ MD Thesis, Chinese University of Hong Kong. It may be thought that smallness and gracility are Mongoloid features. However, if Northern Mongoloids represent an exaggeration of Southern Mongoloid features, we should expect them to be smaller and more gracile rather than larger and more robust, but it should be borne in mind that Northern Mongoloid populations are admixed with Central Asian groups related to West Eurasians, as discussed later in this chapter.

  18. The other theory [adaptation to cold]: Ishida and Dodo op. cit.; see also Coon, C.S. (1962) The Origin of Races (Alfred A. Knopf, New York); Akazawa, T. (1996) ‘Introduction: Human evolution, dispersal, and adaptive strategies’ in T. Akazawa and E. Szathmary (eds) Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersal (Oxford University Press); and Guthrie, D. (1996) ‘The Mammoth Steppe and the origin of Mongoloids and their dispersal’ in Akazawa and Szathmary op. cit. Guthrie has persuasively described: Guthrie op. cit.

  19. Hanihara (2000) op. cit. p. 117.

  20. Ishida and Dodo op. cit. An alternative view (see Fig. 8 in Hanihara (2000) op. cit.) is that these
groups have retained an ancestral Homo sapiens condition with regard to facial flatness, even while upper facial breadths have dramatically decreased and jaw size has just as dramatically decreased.

  21. e.g. Montagu, A. (1989) Growing Young (McGraw-Hill, New York) p. 40; see also Gould, S.J. (1977) Ontegeny and Phylogeny (Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA). For those who are interested in more recent serious literature on the interactions, positive and negative, of neoteny and human evolution, see: Bemporad, J.R. (1991) ‘Dementia Praecox as a failure of Neoteny’ Theoretical Medicine 12: 45-51; Crow, T.J. (2002) ‘Sexual Selection, Timing and an X-Y Homologous gene: did Homo sapiens Speciate on the Y Chromosome’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 106: 197-216. Several rather heuristic ‘reviews’ on this theory may be found at www.neoteny.org/a/stephenjgould.html and www.humanevolution.net/a/asianoriental.html

  22. Chou, A. (2001) ‘Migration of early hominids during the Pleistocene’, paper presented at the Paleoanthropology Society Annual Meeting, 27–28 March 2001, Kansas City, Missouri.

  23. arrived there by 43,000 years ago . . .: Goebel, T. et al. (1993) ‘Dating the Middle-to-Upper-Palaeolithic transition at Kara Bom’ Current Anthropology 34: 452–8 Upper Palaeolithic transition across southern Siberia: Goebel, T. and Aksenov, M. (1995) ‘Accelerator radiocarbon dating of the initial Upper Palaeolithic in southeast Siberia’ Antiquity 69: 349–57.

  24. Otte, M. and Derevianko, A. (2001) ‘The Aurignacian in Altai’ Antiquity 75: 44–8; Kozlowski, J.K. and Otte, M. (2000) ‘The formation of the Aurignacian in Europe’ Journal of Archaeological Research 56: 513–33; Otte, M. (2000) ‘The history of European populations as seen by archaeology’ in C. Renfrew and K. Boyle (eds) Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe (MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 139–41; and Otte, M. (2003) ‘The Aurignacian in Asia’ (in press) citing inter alia to Olszewski, D.I. and Dibble, H.L. (1994) ‘The Zagros Aurignacian’ Current Anthropology 35(1): 68–75.

  25. Goebel et al., op. cit.; Otte and Derevianko op. cit.

  26. The caves in the Russian Altai show . . . Middle Palaeolithic tradition underlying: Otte, M. and Derevianko, A. (1996) ‘Transformations techniques au Paléolithique de 1’Altai (Sibérie)’ Anthropologie et Préhistoire 107: 131–43. continuous indigenous graded change towards the later technology or . . . intrusive[?]: Otte and Derevianko (1996) op. cit. earlier modern human occupation of the Altai[?]: Goebel and Aksenov op. cit. p. 356; Goebel et al., op. cit.; see also Derevianko, A.P. et al. (2000) Archaeological Studies Carried out by the Joint Russian–Mongolian–American Expedition in Mongolia in 1997–98 (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Novosibirsk) pp. 161, 168.

  27. Middle Palaeolithic tradition: Blackwell, B.A.B. et al. (1998) ‘ESR (Electron Spin Resonance) dating the Palaeolithic site at Tsagaan Agui, Mongolia’, Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Archaeometry, 27 April–1 May 1998, Budapest. Upper Palaeolithic (microlithic) traditions: Tang Hui Sheng (1995) ‘Lithic industries of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau’ The Artefact 18: 3–11.

  28. Soffer, O. (1993) ‘Upper Paleolithic adaptations in Central and Eastern Europe and man-mammoth interactions’ in O. Soffer and N.D. Praslov (eds) From Kostenki to Clovis: Upper Paleolithic-Paleo-Indian Adaptations (Plenum Press, New York) pp. 33–49.

  29. Cavalli-Sforza, L. et al. (1994) The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princetown University Press, Princetown) pp. 223–38.

  30. Chan Wing-hoi (1995) ‘Ordination names in Hakka genealogies: A religious practice and its decline’ in D. Faure and H. Siu (eds) Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford University Press, Stanford) pp. 65–82. The myth of a homogenous mix throughout China is still promoted for whatever reason (see e.g. Yuan-Chun Ding et al. (2000) ‘Population structure and history in East Asia’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 97: 14003–6) and then demolished, sometimes by the same authors (see e.g. Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.

  31. Su, B. et al. (1999) ‘Y-chromosome evidence for a northward migration of modern humans into East Asia during the last ice age’ American Journal of Human Genetics 65: 1718–24.

  32. palaeoclimatological studies: see the maps at http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/NEW_MAPS/eurasia1.gif and http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/euras(2.gif deep genetic diversity of south-west Central Asia: see Fig. 2 in Metspalu, E. et al. (1999) ‘The Trans-Caucasus and the expansion of the Caucasoid-specific mitochondrial DNA’ in S.S. Papiha et al. (eds) Genomic Diversity: Applications in Human Population Genetics (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York) pp. 121–34. See specific maps on Jonathan Adams’ ESD ORNL reference website: www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/euras18k.gif and www.esd. ornl.gov/projects/qen/euras(2.gif. See also the archaeological evidence presented in the next chapter.

  33. Groups A and X are first-generation from N/Nasreen, while B and F derive from Nasreen through Rohani. Groups C, D, E, G, and Z all derive directly from M/Manju (see Figures 5.9 and 5.10). The first full description of Groups A to G all shown on one tree was by Torroni, A. et al. (1994) ‘Mitochondrial DNA analysis in Tibet: Implications for the origins of the Tibetan population and its adaptaton to high altitude’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 93: 189–99. For the first naming of Group X, see Forster, P. et al. (1996) ‘Origin and evolution of Native American mtDNA variation: A reappraisal’ American Journal of Human Genetics 59: 935–45. A further group, Y, appears almost exclusively among the Nivkhs of Sakhalin Island in the north; it is a very young group, and therefore peripheral to this discussion (see below). For Groups Y and Z and the most recent published updates of the Asian mtDNA tree, see Kivisild, T. et al. (2002) ‘The emerging limbs and twigs of the East Asian mtDNA tree’ Molecular Biology and Evolution 19(10): 1737–51; Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.; and Fig. 2 in Forster, P. et al. (2003) ‘Asian and Papuan mtDNA evolution’ in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds) Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 89–98.

  The first task is to identify distinct northern and southern genetic lines among Mongoloid populations. C and Z are both related M types (on newly identified parent group M8, Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.), and are found almost entirely in North Asia (and C also in the Americas), and not in Southern Mongoloids. A, although common in north-east China, north-east Siberia, and North America (Kolman, C.J. et al. (1996) ‘Mitochondrial DNA analysis of Mongolian populations and implications for the origin of New World founders’ Genetics 142: 1321–34) is also found at appreciable frequencies and diversity in south and south-west China, Tibet, and Xinjiang (Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.), but is absent from India and West Eurasia (Kivisild, T. et al. (1999) ‘The place of the Indian mitochondrial DNA variants in the global network of maternal lineages and the peopling of the Old World’ in S.S. Papiha et al. (eds) Genomic Diversity: Applications in Human Population Genetics (Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York), pp. 135–52). So, a south-west China source, with movement up the Yangtzi to Tibet and thence to Central and North Asia, seems more likely for the A group origins than either an Indian or North Asian source. Y, a daughter of N, is found only in Northeast Asia (Stariovskaya, Y.B. et al. (1998) ‘mtDNA diversity in Chukchi and Siberian Eskimos: Implications for the genetic history of Ancient Beringia and the peopling of the New World’ American Journal of Human Genetics 63: 1473–91; Torroni, A. et al. (1993) ‘mtDNA variation of aboriginal Siberians reveals distinct genetic affinities with Native Americans’ American Journal of Human Genetics 53: 591–608). But Y has an age of only around 5,000 years, and is ultimately derived from a Southeast Asian N branch, N9. X, another daughter of N, is limited to Europeans and Americans (Brown, M. et al. (1998) ‘mtDNA Haplogroup X: An ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?’ American Journal of Human Genetics 63: 1852–61), and there is one reported instance in Siberians (see below). Although any of these three northern lines (C, X, and Z) could theoretically be characteristic Mongoloid genetic l
ines, they are absent from Southern Mongoloids, and also are found in other populations, thus making this less likely. Several more Asian clades found throughout China have recently been added: three are from M (M7, M9 and M10) and a fourth is from N (N9, estimated age 64,300 ± 20,000 years and ancestral to Group Y): see Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.

  The two Asian granddaughters of N (B and F) are the only known East Asian offspring of R/Rohani (except for a newly described but ancient clade, R9, estimated age 81,000 years ± 24,600years: see Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit., which has been shown to be ancestral to F in the south and thus has already been relabelled F4 in: Hill, C. et al. (2003) ‘Mitochondrial DNA variation in the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula’ (in preparation); See also Fig. 5.6). B and F have their greatest diversity and frequency in Southern Mongoloids of Southeast Asia (Torroni et al. (1994) op. cit.; Yong-Gang Yao et al., op. cit.). They are also both found north of the Himalayan barrier in Central Asia (Fig. 2 in Metspalu et al., op. cit), Mongolia (Kolman et al., op. cit.), and Tibet, Korea, and Japan (Torroni et al. (1994) op. cit.; Horai, S. et al. (1996) ‘mtDNA polymorphism in East Asian populations’ American Journal of Human Genetics 59: 579–90). They are not, however, found farther north in Siberia in the Subarctic region. Of these southern lines, B is also found in America, although again below the Subarctic region (see Chapter 7). Since B and F are present on both sides of the Himalayas, they are potential candidate original Mongoloid lines, but there is still a question mark over whether they define all Mongoloids (F is absent from America).