Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man
Page 38
Figure 11.3. Australian with blend of Caucasoid features, note beard.
Before OOA became de rigueur, William Howells reported that the Andaman Islanders “do not at all resemble African Pygmies of the Congo”; they are allied with Africans (by multivariate analysis) “only occasionally. . . . The Andamanese are mysterious.”41 Although these “mysterious” little people do have Bushman-like peppercorn hair and steatopygia, their closest affines reside in Papua, Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Australia, Tasmania, and Sundaland. Cranial morphology links the Andaman Islanders to Australo-Melanesians. Asian (and Oceanic) ancestry is indicated, not African.
The Andaman mtDNA lineage M is common in Asia, not Africa (where lineage I is dominant). Genetic analysis of the Onge people of the Andaman Islands reveals a special change in the Y chromosome, casting the Onge as actually ancestral to the populations of Asia. Indeed, standing OOA on its head, some theories have derived the African Negroes from the East, mankind thought to have “originated . . . somewhere in northern Asia.”42
Figure 11.4. A North Andamanese man and his son.
William H. Flower, late nineteenth-century surgeon, curator, and anatomist, considered “the south of India as the centre from which the whole of the great Negro race spread.” Hooton also speculated, based on blood group B, that Congolese pygmies came from Asia. I present these views only for sake of comparison, not because I agree. Nevertheless it is true that Africa’s pygmies are not racially aligned with Black Africans. They may share some blood types (due to intermixings), but the Negrillo is both racially and linguistically distinct from the tall African.
The tree of life looks different depending on which genes you choose to analyze.
GARRY HAMILTON, “MOTHER SUPERIOR,” NEW SCIENTIST
Geneticist Alan Templeton, entering DNA data to the computer in a different way than the Afrocentrist popularizers, got Europe and Asia for the last common ancestor (LCA), his team ultimately concluding that you cannot pinpoint the location of LCA using living DNA (the OOA method). “An Asian—not African origin”43 is indicated by these alternate mtDNA trees.
Before the first Au (Taung Child) was found in South Africa in the 1920s, most scholars did indeed think the Garden of Eden was in Asia—perhaps in the Pamir Plateau.
Figure 11.5. Map showing theoretical dispersal of man out of Asia (1929).
The favorite cradle for Egyptologists, ever searching for the origin of the Egyptian kingdoms, has been Asia, not sub-Saharan Africa. Shot from the Stone Age, Egyptian civilization “didn’t evolve. . . . Architecture, engineering, medicine, science and well-organized big cities materialized within a century or two—almost as if they had been imported from somewhere else.”44 Somewhere outside Africa. Stephen Oppenheimer and others have identified Southeast Asia as the center of innovations that eventually reached the West, contributing navigation, astronomy and farming to the “historical” cultures.
The people of southern India have been traced to Southeast Asia, not Africa—their languages related to those of Burma and Cambodia. “Java and . . . all of southeast Asia is a serious rival to the [African] cradle of mankind.”45 Dixon’s brachycephalic AMHs came into Europe from the East (Asia Minor, Russia, India), not from Africa. Finally, the disperal of myth cycles (creation legends) seems to have an Austronesian/Asian source: the fact that the Far Eastern stories are “more complex and internally coherent than the Mesopotamian versions supports the view that the diffusion pattern may have been from East to West rather than the other way round.”46 Indeed, Mesopotamia’s monument builders are also traced to the East.
If moderns came out of Africa and spread throughout the world, why should such civilized industries as rice cultivation be evident in China and India47 before they got to Africa? Early rice-growing dates in the Malay Peninsula presage the westward spread of farming into India. Microliths (used on farming scythes?) may be as old as 60 kyr in Sri Lanka, not appearing in the Mediterranean until 10 kya.
The Belgian archaeologist Marcel Otte, in The Aurignacian in Asia, does not accept OOA, pointing instead to the Zagros Mountains as the hub of Upper Paleolithic industries. Michael Cremo has also presented arguments for mods arising not in Africa but in Pakistan, Siberia, and Russia.48 The earliest ivory carving of figurines (a craft developed only by modern humans) is found in Russia and dated 45 kyr. If mods originated in Africa, why are there no such artifacts of ivory south of the Sahara, though they are found in Europe and western Asia? The high art of the French and Spanish caves was, according to Cambridge archaeologist and historian Colin Renfrew, “not a general feature of early Homo sapiens in Africa.” North Africa’s rich heritage of rock art, after all, is of recent date. “Only in France and Spain . . . can the human revolution be generally associated with the appearance of art. Elsewhere at this time there was little or no.”49 Contemporary South African sites were still using Middle Stone Age technologies at this time.50
Why is there no Homo sapiens explosion in Africa? Instead there are signs of it at such places as Russia, Czechoslovakia, the Americas, Turkey, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Oceania.
NO ONE KNOWS
Where he [Cro-Magnon] came from or how he came about we have not the slightest idea.
ASHLEY MONTAGU, MAN: HIS FIRST TWO MILLION YEARS
Those cave artists in Western Europe were, of course, the Cro-Magnon people, the first known edition of true modern man. But “no one knows where the Cro-Magnon came from.”51 Guesses include: “The Cro-Magnon race is thought to have emigrated to North Africa from Europe”52 (to, not from). In Afghanistan (at Kara Kamar), Coon found remains of Aurignacian Cro-Magnons older than the European ones, suggesting again an eastern origin. Arthur Keith, for his part, predicted that when digs are undertaken in Asia, “we may expect to find the earlier history of the Cro-Magnon race,” who he thought resembled today’s Sikhs.53
The unanswered question is: Why do we find their Upper Paleolithic industries (fine tools, artistic works, quarries, and so on) starting abruptly in western Europe around 40 or 35,000 BP and somewhat earlier to the east? The answer: Because they represent a hybrid (instant) race—the second wave (39 kyr) of Ihuans, the fount of Aurignacian culture. One of the earliest models of European man was found in the 35 kyr mandible at Pestera cu Oase (Southwest Romania); then moving west of the Danube, AMH fossils begin to appear, dating to 32 kya and getting younger the farther west we go.
Now it is plain that for out-of-Africa (part two) to be right, mods must be earliest in Africa, having evolved only there. But consider the Ainu of Japan, a very old race, indigenous to the East, though made over to represent an “ancient migration” from Europe, simply because of their (taxonomically) troublesome light color and “Caucasian” features. But how could they be from Europe when Europe was swarming with Neanderthals (not mods) at the same time the Ainu stock took form? No, Europe was the last place to be settled by Cro-Magnon AMHs: Ainu migration from Europe? No way, their skulls are Asiatic.
Figure 11.6. A major racial enigma, the Ainu combine Mongoloid and Caucasoid features, not African ones.
Neither do we find the earliest mods of China or Europe or Australia or Indonesia resembling (facially, cranially) any fossil men of Africa. Nor do “the languages of East Africa have [any] demonstrable relation to the languages of Asia.”54 China’s sites at Jinniushan, Dali, and Maba all have archaic H. sapiens types, which show continuity from China’s own (indigenous) erectoid forms. Jinniushan woman, for instance, (dated 250 kya) has a large cranial cap, thin cranial bones, and much reduced supraorbital region, clearly someone in between the old erectoid type and today’s Chinese. Nothing African about it. Chinese paleontologists have pointed out this continuity from Peking Man (Sinanthropus) to the present people of China, indicating local development only. Indeed, a real problem (for Afrocentrists, anyway) is the persistence of Sinanthropus’s shovel-shaped incisors (and several other features) in modern Mongoloid populations. This continuity comes under the multiregional (and polygenet
ic) approach, sometimes called Noah’s Sons, which, in opposition to OOA (sometimes called Noah’s Ark), holds that mod characteristics arose independently in different parts of the world.
TABLE 11.1. EARLY AMH FEATURES IN PLACES OUTSIDE AFRICA
Where/Who Feature Date
Borneo, Niah Cave/Deep Skull Mod skull 52 kyr
China/Dali, Maba, Liujiang fossils Mod features ca 75 kyr
France/Fontéchevade Man Mod features 70 kyr
France, Nice, Terra Amata Borderline between H. erectus and H. sapiens 400 kyr
Germany/Hamburg Carvings of mods 200 kyr
Germany/Heidelberg Man Mod dentition 400 kyr
Germany/Steinheim Man Mod forehead 300 kyr
Hungary/Vertesszollos Man 1,500 cc brain 100–700 kyr
India/Narmada skull Mod feature Mid-Pleistocene
Iran, Hotu Cave/skeletal
remains Mod skulls 100 kyr
Israel, Qafzeh/skeletal remains AMH 78 kyr
Italy/Castenedolo skulls Modern Pliocene
Java/Sangiran 17 Robust H. sapiens 700 kya*139
UK, England/Swanscombe Man 1,325 cc; the first “cast-iron”
case of early AMH 250 kyr†140
UK, Wales, Pontnewydd Cave/teeth Mod mandible and vertebrae 225 kyr
Franz Weidenreich, the brilliant German-Jewish anatomist and paleoanthropologist who inspired today’s multiregional approach, traced the earliest Javanese H. erectus up to Sangiran, Wadjak, and Ngandong, and right on up to the tribal people of today’s Java. Continuity. Milford Wolpoff, a leader of today’s multiregional school, questions the dating of putative earliest man in Africa and argues persuasively for H. erectus populations moving in the modern direction, not only in Africa but also in Europe and Asia, with “occasional interbreeding” (getting along)—versus the OOA replacement (extirpation) model. “I see continuity everywhere,” says Wolpoff. He is right. In fact, the independent and worldwide (not just African) appearance of early AMHs can be seen in Java, America, and Europe, putting paid to OOA and its Africa-only origin of mods.
South Africa is not the only area yielding earlier origin dates for modern man. Very early dates for fully modern man are also coming in from Australia and America.
JEFFREY GOODMAN, THE GENESIS MYSTERY
Fagan has written that the study of African Adams (meaning mods), using Y chromosome, yeilds dates to only 59 kya. Well, if this is right, why do we find AMH features that age or older in regions outside Africa? Why does the genetic line of the Malaysian Semang (Negritos) as well as Australia’s Negritos go back more than 60 kyr?
HAM, SON OF NOAH
With several different kinds of humans running around early Africa, the question has been posed: What caused this wonderful proliferation of types? The usual answer is that some environmental change created new selective pressures for gene mutation. The climate card. This brings us right back to the unsolved problem of radical variability. And some new answers.
There is general recognition that Africans have greater genetic diversity than other people, but the significance of that fact remains unclear.
MARVIN L. LUBENOW, BONES OF CONTENTION: A CREATIONIST ASSESSMENT OF HUMAN FOSSILS
Ham’s habits, as we will come to see, explain that “significance.” We have mentioned Noah’s sons Jaffeth (in Asia) and Shem (in India and the Near East). The third son was Ham (in Africa, see Genesis 10:6–14). Now, with genetics as handmaiden of OOA, mtDNA studies claim that mods have lived in Africa longer than anywhere else. This assumption is based on the following observation: As distance and time removed from Africa increases, diversity diminishes. Native Americans, for example, have much less variety in their genomes than Africans.
It was this great diversity in Africa that moved theorists to suppose that Africa is both the oldest population and the founder population of our species, Homo sapiens. A University of Cambridge study, for example (which used data from thousands of skeletons all less than 2,000 years old), determined that the farther a population was located from Africa, the fewer variations in skull shape; and this was apparently corroborated by DNA, which said that mods arose in Africa 200,000 or 150,000 BP and spread out (migrated) about 50,000 years ago.
In my view, however, variations and diversity appear simply by mixing different races, not by mutations or climate changes. This is where the sons of Ham enter the picture. From Ham’s unique history, we will discover why the East African “Hamitic strain” is associated with Caucasoids, and why Saharan and Sudanese tribes are an exact cross between Caucasoids and African Negroes. In the quote that follows, the key word is interbreeding: “The entire area from North Africa to the Sudan is one of the major zones of interbreeding in the world. . . . A massive interchange of genes between Caucasoids and Africans has clearly taken place in Africa in the past.”55
The gloriously mixed Berber have wavy or curly hair, heavy beards, hawk and straight noses, and lightish eyes. The Somalis have black skin and frizzy hair combined with facial features of the European mold. And along the Nile, between Cairo and Khartoum, we find nothing but an intermediate series between the South European type and Negro.
Stretching from the east coast of Africa (the point of Ham’s entry from Pan), from Cameroon to Senegal, the people are “extremely black in the west; they tend to become slightly lighter eastward”—and also shorter. Both paleness and shortness are signs of Ihins, in this case, the Hamitic sons of Noah who settled Africa 24 kya. A further example is the Tibbus tribe of the Sahara, a mixture of proto-Negroid and Caspian—tall and very black, yet the hair is not woolly, the nose is aquiline, and prognathism is absent. “All Negros are partly Caucasoid by interbreeding,”56 which is further indicated by common blood groups and architecture of the teeth.
Of all colors were the tribes of Ham . . . with hair red, and white, and brown, whereby might be traced in after ages the genealogy of nations.
OAHSPE, THE LORDS’ FIFTH BOOK 3:3 AND 3:13
The White Lady of Brandberg is a rock painting in southwest Africa, showing Bushmen standing next to white women with European profiles and yellow or red hair. Kalahari cave art in Damarland, according to the world’s leading authority on these paintings, Henry Breuil, was unmistakably the work of a mysterious race of white people. But not so mysterious, once Ham, Noah’s son in Africa, is factored in.
A British major stationed at Africa’s Gulf of Guinea once saw the members of a tribe marching toward the shore as a canoe was approaching, with white-painted natives. He asked what the apparent ritual was about and was told that “it was a custom handed down from the very earliest times, perpetuating the tradition that white men had come once from . . . an island now no longer in existence.”57 Those men were lawgivers and teachers of justice.
Another telling tradition, that of the African Herreros, a Bantu tribe, says that after a great deluge, white men came and mingled among them. Were they the teachers and lawgivers we so often hear about in world traditions, founders who came from across the sea? One great puzzle is how Africa’s Ituri forest Efe people have long known of planet Saturn as “the star of nine moons.” (Its nine moons were not discovered in the West until 1899.) How did the Efes know this? Well, the Dogon of Africa also claim to have received cosmic information from teachers who gave them knowledge of the stars. Local legends of white gods have long intrigued scholars of Africa, and if oral history be credited, those gods (the euhemerized sacred tribes of Ham) once inhabited their country. (Also deified was Chamha, the solar god of Syria, called Hama in Persia; while the name Ham itself is the Zeus of ancient Greece.) But they were Ihins, mortals, the holy sons of Noah, called Ham.
One way or another, Caucasoids and their ancestors have played a major role in the genetic history of sub-Saharan Africa.
JOSEPH THORNDIKE, MYSTERIES OF THE PAST
And this is the key to Africa’s mysteries: When the Caucasian-like Hamites reached Africa, they ignored the rules given to all the Ihins, and mixed freely with the indigenous b
lack people (Genesis 9:25–27). No, Africans are not the oldest people in the world, but the most varied by reason of admixture.*141 For the Ihins who settled Africa “broke the law of God more than all other Faithists, being of warm blood—and they mixed greatly with the [African] Ihuans . . . and they ceased to exist as a separate people, because of their amalgamations.”58 For the “warm-blooded” Ham (the name for the Ihins who settled Africa) mingled with aboriginal types. This Hamitic Cro-Magnon Man, as the patriarchs took every opportunity to stress, was the most rebellious, licentious son of Noah. His descendants, as these old stories claim, “married a thousand wives.”
My point is this: Greater genetic variation in African populations represents neither deeper time nor more mutations, but crossbreeding only. In fact, this unbridled mixing is exactly the opposite of the “persistent isolation” posited by the mtDNA people to explain the greater genetic diversity in Africa! Diversity (variation) is the face of nothing more complicated than amalgamation.
“Africa is racially the most confusing of all continents.”59 African blood proteins and mtDNA are more varied than elsewhere, yet this is due neither to immensity of time, greater population, environmental instability, nor mutations—but simply to Ham, the mixer. The full impact of this mingling in Africa is evidenced by the fact that here “the Chellean, Acheullean and Mousterian [material] cultures are not sharply defined . . . as in Europe.”60 Admixture is also expressed in the blurring of borders: the indigenous populations of Africa are mostly clinal, that is, blending, overlapping from one region to the next.
Greater variability in Africa? Not according to Stephen Oppenheimer’s work, which has shown it is actually the least in Africa, from the point of view of tribal legends: Tracing origin myths to their geographical root, Oppenheimer found they spread from Oceania across the Indian Ocean to Africa. “In looking for a homeland . . . look for the region with the deepest and greatest diversity of story-types. . . . Africa clearly has the least diversity, Australasia . . . has the most.”61 Even geneticists have gotten a similar result in connection with the path of disease-related molecules: “The greatest diversity in the frequency of gene variants lay outside Africa . . . Oceania . . . had much more variation.”62