Posted on 12/05/2003 5:20:19 PM PST by blam
Stone warrior delights experts
By Paul Rincon
BBC News Online science staff
The style of the armour is unusual for this area of France
Archaeologists are delighted by a 2,500-year-old stone statue that offers a rare insight into life in western Europe before the Roman conquest. The stone torso, unearthed at Lattes in southern France, is one of just a few detailed figurines considered to have been made by the ancient Celts.
The statue of a male warrior wears a style of armour worn in Spain and Italy and was life-size when it was complete.
The "Warrior of Lattes" is described in the scholarly journal Antiquity.
It is around 79 centimetres in height and was discovered in the wall of an Iron Age house where it had been used as a building stone.
Some time after it was created, the statue was mutilated to be re-used in a door opening. The head was removed, the left leg and arm hacked off and the crest of the warrior's helmet smoothed away.
The statue's pose is also unusual for Iron Age sculptures from southern France. Most are shown cross-legged, but the Lattes sculpture was in a crouched position - a pose reminiscent of some Greek sculptures.
Cultural elite
Experts say the statue provides a unique insight into early interactions between the inhabitants of western Europe and the classical world prior to the Roman conquest.
The style of armour worn by the warrior is similar to that found in graves and on statues associated with the Iberian culture of ancient Spain. However, the Iberians may have adopted this style of armour through links with Italy.
The statue may orignally have been kneeling
This is unusual because the people of the eastern Languedoc region of France, where the statue was found, are generally thought to have had a Celtic culture, different from people from the Iberian zone to the west.
Michael Dietler, of the University of Chicago, US, and Michel Py of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Lattes, France, propose that a cultural elite in the eastern Languedoc may have adopted exotic customs, while the majority of the people held on to their old ways.
Professor Greg Woolf, a historian at the University of St Andrews in the UK, told BBC News Online: "I can't think of anything to compare it to. But this could be the result of a broad range of interaction [in the Mediterranean]."
He added that the statue was not necessarily a depiction of someone indigenous to that region.
"Are they sure it's not a god? Not all pictures are self-portraits."
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I believe most of the world's population, including Amerinds, came from the Caucasian area via different paths. Exceptions are the Australian aborigines and a group in India.
An Ice Age at that time caused a major drought in Africa and thus migration through the Middle East to the Caucasus where our ancestors stayed for a while, before spreading out into Europe, Siberia (and thence N. America), India, etc.
We are all related to the Bushmen, but of course that doesn't mean there weren't other hominids before the bushmen living around the world. Clearly, there were. Their genes disappeared, however, either because their progeny ran out of sons (e.g., my Y is going to disappear since I only had daughters) or they couldn't compete with the bushmen. The latter is most likely, tho', since a DNA study done on the matriarchal path also leads to one female bush-person (!) as our common ancestor.
African Click Language 'Holds Key To Origins Of Earliest Human Speech'
It works like this: The Y chromosome is passed from father to son unaltered, since the mother has no Y. However, occasionally, a mutation occurs, and after a string of identical Y chromosomes in succeeding males, there arises one with one small change in it (a marker). This in turn is propagated through many generations until another mutation occurs.
In this way you can track back the chromosomes for two men in different countries to a point where the later different sets of markers do not exist and both men share a common male ancestor. They tracked native Amerinds back to Siberia, then back to Central Asia near Uzhbekastan, (and Europeans back to the same area), and from Central Asia back to this one Bantu tribe in Africa.
Regarding the posted article as a whole, some folks are really uptight about accepting racial differences. Of course, these are the same people who want to list race on the census form and use race in university admissions.
No. They had moved into the Iberian peninsula but did not originate there.
Originally, the Celts conquered northern and central Iberia. The Iberians then reoccupied what is now the Basque region cutting off the Iberian Celts from their Celtic cousins in Gaul.
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