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African Tmeline| Mesopotamia | Egypt: a Tropical Civ

World Climate map

"About 80 percent of Europeans arose from primitive hunters who arrived about 40,000 years ago, endured the long ice age and then expanded rapidly to dominate the continent, a new study shows. Researchers analyzing the Y chromosome taken from 1,007 men from 25 different locations in Europe found a pattern that suggests four out of five of the men shared a common male ancestor about 40,000 years ago. This scenario supports other studies about the Paleolithic European groups. Those studies suggest that a primitive, stone-age human came to Europe, probably from Central Asia and the Middle East, in two waves of migration beginning about 40,000 years ago. Their numbers were small and they lived byhunting animals and gathering plant food. They used crudely sharpened stones and fire."

"About 24,000 years ago, the last ice age began, with mountain-sized glaciers moving across most of Europe. The Paleolithic Europeans retreated before the ice, finding refuge for hundreds of generations in three areas: what is now Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine."

"When the glaciers melted, about 16,000 years ago, the Paleolithic tribes resettled the rest of Europe. Y chromosome mutations occurred among people in each of the ice age refuges, said Underhill. He said the research shows a pattern that developed in Spain is now most common in northwest Europe, while the Ukraine pattern is mostly in Eastern Europe and the Balkan pattern is most common in Central Europe."

"About 8,000 years ago a more advanced people, the Neolithic, migrated to Europe from the Middle East, bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and a new way of life - agriculture. About 20 percent of Europeans now have the Y chromosome pattern from this migration."

"Archaeological digs in European caves clearly show that before 8,000 years ago, Europeans lived by gathering and hunting. After that, there are traces of grains and other agricultural products."

National Geographic 2000 with data from:
--Underhill, et al 2000. Y chromosome sequence variation and the history of human populations. Nat Genet 26:358–361

"One reasonable hypothesis is that the genetic distance between Asia and Africa is shorter than that between Africa and the other continents in Table 1 because both Africans and Asians contributed to the settlement of Europe, which began about 40,000 years ago. It seems very reasonable to assume that both continents nearest to Europe contributed to its settlement, even if perhaps at different times and maybe repeatedly. It is reassuring that the analysis of other markers also consistently gives the same results in this case. Moreover, a specific evolutionary model tested, i.e., that Europe is formed by contributions from Asia and Africa, fits the distance matrix perfectly (6). In this simplified model, the migrations postulated to have populated Europe are estimated to have occurred at an early date (30,000 years ago), but it is impossible to distinguish, on the basis of these data, this model from that of several migrations at different times. The overall contributions from Asia and Africa were estimated to be around two-thirds and one-third, respectively. Simulations have shown (7) that this hypothesis explains quite well the discrepancy between trees obtained by maximum likelihood and neighbor joining."

--Cavalli-Sforza Genes, Peoples Languages

Early irrigation in Egypt
"It was even proposed by the Polish archaeologist Krzyzaniak that artificial irrigation started as early as the second half of the Predynastic Period. As evidence that canals existed even before the country was unified many writers have adduced the mace-head of King Scorpion, one of the last rulers of a separate Upper Egypt, which may depict him officiating at the ceremonial opening of a new canal."

(Source: Krzyzaniak, L. 1977. Early Farming
Cultures on the Lower Nile: The Predynastic Period
in Egypt. Travaux du Centre d'Archeologie
Mediterrancenne de L'Academie Polonaise des
Sciences. Vol. 21. Warsaw.)

Two German archaeologists, Erika Endesfelder and
Wolfgang Schenkel have also independently found
evidence of canals used for transport and/or marsh
drainage.

Modern DNA analysis debunks simplistic "race" models

quote:

"It also does not mean that no differences whatsoever exist between continental groups. In fact, what Rosenberg et al. (2002) have shown is that given enough markers and the extraordinary power of Structure, the tiny amounts of genetic differences that exist between continents can also be discerned. However, this should not obscure the fact that on a worldwide scale, clines are a better representation of the human diversity than clades, and that continents do not represent more substantial discontinuities in such clines than many other geographical and cultural barriers. That clines are a more adequate representation of human genetic diversity than clades is not unexpected in view of earlier works that show that most genetic variation is found among individuals rather than among continents (e.g., Boyd 1950; Livingstone 1962; Lewontin 1972; Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). 

In fact, also in the current data set, 87.6% percent of the total diversity is found among individuals and only 9.2% among continents (Excoffier and Hamilton 2003), in agreement with many previous studies (e.g. Lewontin 1972; Owens and King 1999; but see also Edwards 2003). The current results are also not unexpected in view of the fact that identical DNA sequences of several kilobases are found on different continents (Kaessmann et al. 1999; Gabriel et al. 2002). In fact, as much as a third of the entire human diversity of common haplotypes may be contained within single individuals (Pääbo 2003). However, in spite of this, there is a great tendency in the literature to use a few populations from the extremes of continental landmasses (such as in Fig. 1A) to make worldwide inferences about substructures in the human gene pool. In fact, because human genetic diversity tends to be distributed clinally, it is especially problematic to sample the extremes of continents because this will create the impression of sharp discontinuities in the distribution of genetic variants... 

Clustering in the human gene pool is of practical importance. It has recently been claimed that “the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level” (Risch et al. 2002). Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that “races” represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. In clinical practice, the “classification” of people into “races,” as recently suggested (Risch et al. 2002; Burchard et al. 2003), could perhaps have some justification as a proxy for differences in environmental and other factors of relevance for public health or to help identify rare disease alleles (Phimister 2003). However, in the absence of other knowledge, most alleles influencing susceptibility to disease or outcome of medical interventions cannot be expected to show significantly different frequencies between “races.” 

An exception may be genes where different selection regimes have acted in different geographical regions. .. even in those cases, the genetic discontinuities seen are generally not “racial” or continental in nature but depend on historical and cultural factors that are more local in nature. For example, the hemoglobin S allele that causes resistance to malaria occurs not only in sub-Saharan Africa but also in southern Europe, the Middle East, and India (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994). Lactose tolerance occurs both in Europe and in Africa (Sahi 1994), and the deleted allele of CCR5 that confers resistance to human immunodeficiency virus occurs in Europe as well as in Asia (Martinson et al. 1997). Thus, even for a rapid and rough evaluation of genetic risk factors, “racial” background is of limited use, and direct analysis of the relevant gene is the only reliable way to evaluate genetic risk in an individual (Cooper et al. 2003)."

Source: 
-- Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents -- David Serre and Svante Pääbo Genome Research. (2004) 14: 1679-1685

Skin color, photo synthesis and vitamin D

Please, show me humans are NOT vitally dependent on the sun, which in turn enables a process which produces vitamin D in the body naturally, can you?

Wherein, if humans are darker-skinned living under cloudier lower UV environments, this ability is decreased since darker skin acts like a sunscreen and blocks out harmful UV rays and prolongs this process. Please show me where this is not true, can you?

What is the reason Inuits retain levels of melanin? Is it their diet? Does their diet consist of high amounts of vitamin d through their hunter gaherers diet? YES!!

Ad nauseum, what would happen if the Inuit were to change their traditional hunter gatherers diet? Would they become vitamin D deficient? YES!!

Why? Is it because naturally their is no sun to produce this vitamin D through UV exposure? YES!!

So what do the Inuit depend on again? Their traditional diets? Yes!!!

What comes naturally from the sun rays hitting the skin? A process in the body that produces vitamin D? YES!!

What happens when darker-skinned populations live in geographical regions wherein their is less UV exposure? Do they produce adequate amounts of vitamin D as fast lighter-skinned individuals? NO!!

What are the necessities a mother needs for her child? Vitamin D? Yes

If this mother is deficient in vitamin D is the baby likely to come out healthy? NO!!

Do darker-skinned mothers to be, and new mothers suffer from vitamin D deficiency more so than their lighter-skinned counterparts during and after pregnancy in northern latitudes, like say north America? YES!!

What would enable these humans who were originally darkly pigmented living in lower UV environments under cloudier skies for a long long time, need to be able to successfully reproduce healthy babies? Lighter skin? Which allows for quicker synthesis of vitamin D, which is vitally needed to produce strong healthy offspring? YES!!

mtdna 2008

mtDNA study finds that today’s Arab world’s Egyptians cluster more with mixed Yemenis rather than Europeans or Arabs, and that Ethiopians cluster more with Nubians rather than Europeans or Arabs. 

Modern Arab Egypt links with other Arab types such as PA- Palestine, but the closest cluster is with mixed Yemen, which is a blend between African and African derived Eurasian lineages (Kivisild 2004 - 'Ethiopian mitochondrial..')

Ethiopian samples cluster closer to Nubians (NU), rather than Europeans or Middle Easterners
--Abu-Amero, et al, (2008). Mitochondrial DNA structure in the Arabian Peninsula. BMC Evo Bio. 8:(45)

Egypt in Africa |  Black-Greek-DNA links | Notes 3 |Notes 4| Misc news clips | Ethiopians