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Home  Blog From 1995 Articles Section form this Web Site
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From 1995 Articles Section form this Web Site |
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Written by Alvah Hicks
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Monday, 13 February 2006 |
Barton Childs - The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore - AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN GENETICS pg. 595 - BOOK REVIEW.
"Human ecology shares interests with physiologists, geneticists, epidemiologists, demographers, anthropologists, nutritionists, and others, all of whom are trying to explain "how we have adapted, adjusted and coped with our natural and social environment through time" (p. 445).
NOTE Pleistocene New World archaeological signatures may not have engendered refined stone tool industries. These bone tools may have given way to stone with the adoption of U. Paleolithic hunting during the accession to "Paleoindian Traditions" when introduced into the Americas at the end of the last Ice Age. AMH
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Stoneking, Mark. Ancient DNA: How Do You Know When You Have It and What Can You Do with It? 1995. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 57:1259-1261, 1995.
Archeologists are traditionally interested in the same sorts of questions about their skeletal populations that human population geneticists are generally interested in when surveying their contemporary populations, questions such as: Who are these people? Where did they come from? How long have they been here? How did they get here? How much variation is there in this population? How are they related to surrounding populations? Is there any tendency for males or females to marry into or out of the community? If there are recognizable social classes in the population, do they tend to be structured along kinship lines (p. 1261).
NOTE We should first measure our own data in accordance with the beliefs of those we study. AMH
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Howell, F.C., 1984, "Preface" to The Origins of Modern Humans: A World Survey of the Fossil Evidence, Eds. Smith FH, F. Spencer, New York: Alan R. Liss, Inc. 1984
"There is now a near consensus among students of human evolutionary biology that the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, is somehow intimately linked with the first intercontinental ancient hominid, Homo erectus. However, neither the transformation of erectus to sapiens nor the transformation of ancient (archaic) populations of Homo sapiens to their anatomically modern successors (H s sapiens) are matters of agreement in this scientific fraternity. Undoubtedly, there are many factors that make this the case, and any reader of this volume will discern some of those that are most obvious. In fact, there is no consensus among the authors represented in this volume, although the major issues are generally well delineated, and the limitations of the diverse and often disparate lines of evidence are usually apparent (p. xiii.)."
NOTE Are alternatives to H. erectus available? Amerindians? AMH
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Robert S. Corruccini, 1992. Metrical Reconsideration of the Skhul IV and IX and Border Cave 1 Crania in the Context of Modern Human Origins; AJPA April
"Skhul IV and IX, meanwhile, ...join the cluster of supposedly early African/Mideastern AMHS (*my "pre-sapiens"), and then the above-described, increasingly heterogeneous Neandertal grouping. The Upper Paleolithic true AMHS exclusively cluster with one another, relatively far removed from these other groupings. Thus, the picture is one of overriding affinity among all the crania earlier than the European Upper Paleolithic, whether they be considered Classic Neandertal, Progressive Neandertal, AMHS, presapiens, or whatever."..."Continued facile reference to Skhul and Qafzeh as craniometrically "fully anatomically modern" is not responsible to the craniometric data (pg. 437)."
The Border Cave cranium, so central to the course of "out-of-Africa" thinking despite its uncertain age, can support no special relationship to living African Homo sapiens.
(pg. 441)
"Qafzeh 6 as well as Skhul IV and V are well separated from later European AMHS. This calls into question blithe assumptions that Skhul and Qafzeh are, cranially, anatomical moderns." (pg. 441)
NOTE Transitional forms where in the Levant and/or Africa -- Corruccini casts doubt! AMH
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Pilbeam, David; In Major topics in Primate and Human Evolution, editors Wood, Martin, and Andrews, published by Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) New York 1986. pg. 335.
"Whatever the exact nature of the behavioral differences between modern humans and their ancestors, and of the transition between them there is a plausible case to be made for the argument that the biobehavioral gap was wide, that 'archaic' human behavior was different from the behavior of anatomically modern groups, and that we see in the 'archaic' the final representatives of a very long phase of human evolution, during which only limited changes took place... A case can be made that the nomen H. sapiens should apply only to hominids for which modern behavior patterns can reasonably be inferred: another name would then be needed for 'archaic' H. sapiens [Homo erectus].
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Frank Spencer, The Neandertals and Their Evolutionary Significance: A Brief Historical Survey in Smith /Spencer , 1984 pg. 7
Another problem confronting late 19th century human evolutionists was the incipient argument for the relative stability of the human form. From accumulating skeletal evidence it appeared as if the modern human skeleton extended far back in time, an apparent fact which led many workers to either abandon or modify their views on human evolution. One such apostate was Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913). In 1887, Wallace examined the evidence for early man in the New World, and like the German anatomist Julian Kollman (1834-1918), who three years earlier had made a similar survey, found not only considerable evidence of antiquity for the available specimens, but also a continuity of type through time. In an effort to explain this, Wallace [1889, pp. 454-461] suggested that once man had become morphologically differentiated from his apish kin (during the mid-Tertiary period), he had remained physically stable. emphasis added
NOTE Differing opinions can be found to support "multiregional evolution" and "rapid replacement," the two main camps defining modern human evolutionary studies. The testing of hypotheses concerning the initial presence of mankind in the Western Hemisphere are however, first defined solely against the backdrop of migrations from Asia. These theories are often based on linguistic, genetic, dental, archaeological, or ethno-historical surveys, being cast from the nineteenth century British-school's contention that Homo s.s. could not pre-date the Neandertals. The fact remains that all fossil man finds in the Americas are of anatomically modern humans. Since modern man is known to have replaced Neandertals the consensus has followed that anatomically modern man in the Americas could not predate the European antiquity of Cro-Magnon Man.
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Allman, William F., "Who WE Were" in U.S. News and World Report, 1991, Sept. 16
Research by University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca Cann suggests that the newcomers' germs may have played a divisive role as modern humans swept into Europe and around the world. Just as European colonists of the 15th century are thought to have killed off more American natives with smallpox and measles than with warfare, Cann believes that an influx of new diseases came with the arrival of the Cro-Magnons, contributing to the demise of the Neanderthals (pg. 57).
NOTE These mutational advancements in Old World people may have led to adaptations to pathogens that, when introduced into Amerindian Populations, led to similar catastrophe the a proposed New World origin and Amerindian arrival might have caused Neandertals. Bob Boker's Dinosaur syndrome revisited! AMH
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Invited Editorial, Emoke Szathmary; Am. J. Hum. Genet. 1993b pg. 796
"If Chakraborty and Weiss's (1991) findings apply in general to the Americas, it means that not only is there no evidence for the presence of major bottlenecks in the evolutionary history of the mtDNA in the New World but also that it is not possible to establish the evolutionary source of mtDNA mutations. They are as likely to be the product of new mutations as of ancient founder effects."
NOTE The only cladistic evidence of an Asian/Amerindian affinity is to be found in the discovery of the four rare Asian mtDNAs. These proposed founding Amerindian lineages (see Schurr et al. 1990; Torroni et al. 1993a), are not descendent of the derived (post-nodal) Asian lineages, those described in the trees generated by Cann et al. (1987); Johnson et al. (1983) and Excoffier and Langaney (1989). The two subgroups common to Central and Southeast Asian populations are found in 36.1% of the Siberians studied while "surprisingly" they are not found in Native Americans. Contrarily, the presence of rare Asia mtDNA in the Americas does not specifically identify that their origin must be Asian in that admixture from the Americas could be suggested for some populations inhabiting Siberia (Hicks, in submission). An alternative explanation could be proposed in the movements of Amerindians into northeast Asia following or during the formation of contemporary Circumpolar peoples in post glacial times (Boas 1905; 1910, his "Eskimo wedge theory"). Should this be the case, then any evidence for an Asian (or for that matter, African or European), origin for the Eskimos, Na-Dene, and/or Amerindian would be, cladistically, unsustainable. AMH
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 15 February 2006 )
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