Posted on 09/05/2001 5:05:20 PM PDT by sarcasm
However, it is the ancient practice of humanity to "trade daughters" among and between tribes.
Then there's always the "wondering male hunting party" - no doubt it has an effect. But it's still the female side that is relocated from one group to another. Over time gene combinations that first appeared in Siberia ended up in Kenya. No one had to travel the distance. All they had to do was trade daughters from one tribe to another, whether as captives or wives, or maybe as just "good friends", and next thing you know "Eve" is in Kenya.
Our supposed "nearest simian relatives", the chimps, are also reported to trade the girls.
If these 'people' were modern humans, they had to have been able to speak. Languages seem to be a much more accurate way to trace geopgaphic origins than by using a remarkably few skulls - or more accurately, skull fragments, ie: a few teeth and a piece of jawbone - to reconstruct an entire society of humanlike sub-species.
I think what this article is trying to avoid, and not very well, is that if someone is to believe in MRE they MUST, by definition, believe that not ALL humans are equally evolved. There is no practical way to avoid coming to the conclusion, that if we did not all spring from one evolutionary root, then some of us are more or less evolved than others.
The truth hurts, IF you are an evolutionist!
Just wandering,
Mungo Man could be African: scientists.)
By Richard Macey
Scientists expressed caution yesterday over claims by Australian researchers that cast doubt over the theory that modern man emerged from Africa.
Dr Alan Thorne, an anthropologist with the Australian National University, scored headlines around the globe with findings suggesting that modern humans evolved everywhere.
His claims are based on DNA recovered from the skeleton of Mungo Man, who lived and died about 60,000 years ago near South Australia's Lake Mungo.
That makes the DNA about 32,000 years older than any human DNA found before.
Mungo Man, said to have been physically similar to people living today, had one significant difference. Within his DNA, the scientists found a gene that Dr Thorne described as "unlike any alive today".
The scientists argue that had Mungo Man descended from modern humans flowing out of Africa, his genetic line should have also flowed on, rather than become extinct.
They believe the discovery backs the theory of "regional continuity" that says modern man evolved around the world as people interbred.
They argue that Mungo Man's ancient gene, responsible for supplying energy to the brain, probably became extinct as his descendants mingled with new arrivals.
Scientists around the world lauded the team's success in extracting 60,000-year-old DNA.
But Dr Peter Underhill from California's Stanford University said Mungo Man's ancestors "could have originated in Africa".
"It doesn't mean out of Africa is kaput," he said. "The problem with such ancient DNA is such specimens are few and far between ... it would be nice to see it reproduced independently elsewhere.''
The Australian Museum's head of evolutionary biology, Dr Don Colgan, said there could be another theory on why Mungo Man's gene had become extinct: "Maybe if you looked hard you might find it. It's still one individual."
In April 1999, the discovery of a human skeleton from Lagar Velho in Portugal was announced in the media, followed by a scientific paper a couple of months later (Duarte et al. 1999).
The skeleton is of a young boy, about 4 years in age, who was deliberately buried about 24,500 years ago. According to the paper's authors, which included Neandertal expert Erik Trinkaus, the skeleton contains a mixture of features from both modern humans and Neandertals, and is best explained as being a hybrid.
And because it is dated to be at least 4,000 years more recent than the last known Neandertals, they consider it to be not the result of a direct interbreeding, but the descendant of a hybrid population which persisted for thousands of years.
If true, this would strongly support the claim that Neandertals should be considered a subspecies of modern humans (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis), rather than a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis.
I wonder why recient migrations always seem to be from east to west
This is true. Descendants of this group include Libertaranus Flaccidus, Geekus Wallflowerus, and Startrekus Virginus.
There was another group- "the wandering male hunting party"whose descendants include Bubbus Hillbillus, Lechus Buttofuccus, and the African offshoot, Jexxus Jaksonus.
Indo-European got started in the westernmost part of the Eurasean plains. The words in different Indo-European languages that are related do not fit in with the geography, animals, ect. of Anatolia, but they do fit southern Russia. Now, the actual Indo-European people are mostly descended from Anatolian farmers, but the language was imposed by conquering horsemen.
Indo-European Languages, the most widely spoken family of languages in the world, containing the following subfamilies: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (including the Romance languages), Slavic, and two extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite) and Tocharian. About 1.6 billion people speak Indo-European languages today.
II. Establishment of the Family
Proof that these highly diverse languages are members of a single family was largely accumulated during a 50-year period around the turn of the 19th century. The extensive Sanskrit and ancient Greek literatures (older than those of any other Indo-European language except the then-undeciphered Hittite) preserved characteristics of the basic Indo-European forms and pointed to the existence of a common parent language. By 1800 the close relationship between Sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin had been demonstrated. Hindu grammarians had systematically classified the formative elements of their ancient language. To their studies were added extensive grammatical and phonetic comparisons of European languages. Further studies led to specific conclusions about the sounds and grammar of the assumed parent language (called Proto-Indo-European), the reconstruction of that hypothetical language, and estimates about when it began to break up into separate languages. (By 2000 BC, for example, Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit were distinct languages, but the differences among them are such that the original tongue must have been fairly unified about a millennium earlier, or about 3000 BC.) The decipherment of Hittite texts (identified as Indo-European in 1915) and the discovery of Tocharian in the 1890s (spoken in medieval Eastern Turkistan, and identified as Indo-European in 1908) added new insights into the development of the family and the probable character of Proto-Indo-European.
The early Indo-European studies established many principles basic to comparative linguistics. One of the most important of these was that the sounds of related languages correspond to one another in predictable ways under specified conditions (see Grimm's Law and Verner's Law for examples). According to one such pattern, in some Indo-European subfamilies—Albanian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, and (partially) Baltic—certain presumed q sounds of Proto-Indo-European became sibilants such as s and s (an sh sound). The common example of this pattern is the Avestan (ancient Iranian) word satem ("100"), as opposed to the Latin word centum ("100," pronounced "kentum"). Formerly, the Indo-European languages were routinely characterized as belonging either to a Western (centum) or an Eastern (satem) division. Most linguists, however, no longer automatically divide the family in two in this way, partly because they wish to avoid implying that the family underwent an early split into two major branches, and partly because this trait, although prominent, is only one of several significant patterns that cut across different subfamilies.
III. Evolution
In general the evolution of the Indo-European languages displays a progressive decay of inflection. Thus, Proto-Indo-European seems to have been highly inflected, as are ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Avestan, and classical Greek; in contrast, comparatively modern languages, such as English, French, and Persian, have moved toward an analytic system (using prepositional phrases and auxiliary verbs). In large part the decay of inflection was a result of the loss of the final syllables of many words over time, so that modern Indo-European words are often much shorter than the ancestral Proto-Indo-European words. Many languages also developed new forms and grammatical distinctions. Changes in the meanings of individual words have been extensive.
IV. Ancient Culture
The original meanings of only a limited number of hypothetical Proto-Indo-European words can be stated with much certainty; derivatives of these words occur with consistent meanings in most Indo-European languages. This small vocabulary suggests a New Stone Age or perhaps an early metal-using culture with farmers and domestic animals. The identity and location of this culture have been the object of much speculation. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s, however, suggest the prehistoric Kurgan culture. Located in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between 5000 and 3000 BC, this culture had diffused as far as eastern Europe and northern Iran by about 2000 BC.
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