Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World (56 page)

28.
McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

29.
Bednarik, R. (1993) ‘Palaeolithic art in India’
Man and Environment
18
(2): 33–40.

30.
evidence for it from 40,000 years ago
: Table 8.2 in Gamble op. cit.
Here, 24,000 years ago
: Pettitt, P.B. and Bader, N.O. (2000) ‘Direct AMS radiocarbon dates for the Sungir mid-Upper Palaeolithic burials’
Antiquity
74
: 269–70.

31.
McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

32.
Adapting to new and varied foods
: ibid.
Neanderthals also practised beach-combing
: ibid.; Stringer, C. (2000) ‘Coasting out of Africa’
Nature
405
: 24–7.

33.
McBrearty and Brookes op. cit.

34.
Here, around 125,000 years ago
: Walter, R.C. et al. (2000) ‘Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial’
Nature
405
: 65–9.
occurred in Africa by 110,000 years ago
: McBrearty and Brookes op. cit. p. 530.

35.
Microliths start appearing
: McBrearty and Brooks op. cit.
the earliest microliths outside Africa
: Joshi op. cit.; see also a report of non-geometric microliths in a beach layer dated to 64,000–75,000 years ago in Sri Lanka: Deraniyagala, S.U. (2001)
Prehistory of Sri Lanka
(Department of Archaeological Survey, Government of Sri Lanka) pp. 685–702.

36.
McBrearty and Brooks op. cit.

Chapter 3

1.
The first of these waves
: ‘Earliest Upper Palaeolithic/Earliest Aurignacian’ in Table 6.5 in Gamble, C. (1999)
The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe
(Cambridge University Press); see also Davies, W. (2001) ‘A very model of a modern human industry: New perspectives on the origins and spread of the Aurignacian in Europe’
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
67
: 195–217.

2.
after 50,000 years ago
: Uncorrected radiocarbon date, 46,000 ± 8,000 years. The earliest Aurignacian artefacts were found at Temnata, south of the Danube, west of the Black Sea in Bulgaria. There are no earlier Aurignacian tools outside Europe. See Table 6.1 in Gamble op. cit.
Fairly soon after this
: 44,300 ± 1,900 years, ibid.
to Willendorf, in Austria
: 41,700 ± 3,700 years
ago, ibid.
at Geissenklösterle, Germany
: By 36,500 ± 1,500 years ago, ibid.
from Austria into northern Italy
: at Riparo Fumane 40,000 ± 400 years ago, ibid.
through El Castillo in northern Spain
: 40,000 ± 2,100 years ago, ibid. 38,000 years ago: at Gato Preto, 38,000 ± 2,100 years ago, ibid.; see also Davies op. cit.

3.
until much later
: Later Aurignacian, 25,000–33,000 years ago, Gamble op. cit. p. 287.
core homeland for the Aurignacian culture
: described as ‘core typological region’ in Otte, M. (2003)
The Aurignacian in Asia
(in press), citing inter alia Olszewski, D.I. and Dibble, H.L. (1994) ‘The Zagros Aurignacian’
Current Anthropology
35
(1): 68–75. The so-called ‘transitional’ Upper Palaeolithic industries are also found 500–5,000 years earlier than the Temnata site (i.e. 47,200 ± 9,000 years ago, see Gamble op. cit.) in the Near East at a site called Boker Tatchit in the Negev Desert.

4.
Some population geneticists still regard the use of the molecular clock and the phylogeographic method as anathema.

5.
Richards, M. et al. (2000) ‘Tracing European founder lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA pool’
American Journal of Human Genetics
67
: 1251–76.

6.
J, T, U5, and I in the figure
: and in Richards et al., op. cit.
the earliest Upper Palaeolithic dates
: e.g. from the Negev Desert of 47,100 years ago – see above.

7.
over 50,000 years in the Near East
: 54,400 years ago (95% credible region (CR) 50,400–58,300 years ago), Richards et al., op. cit.
Europa, U5, also dates back 50,000 years
: 95% CR 45,100–52,800 years ago, Richards et al., op. cit. (A 95% ‘credible region’ is analogous to a 95% ‘confidence interval’, but has a different mathematical basis.)
under-recording of radiocarbon dates
: It would be easy to dismiss such a discrepancy of 4,000–7,000 years by blaming the notoriously wide error margins of the molecular clock. Another more definite reason has to do with the archaeological dating. Archaeological dates for Upper Palaeolithic sites have almost all been obtained by radiocarbon dating, the precision and accuracy of which drops off markedly for objects older than 40,000 years. In objects that old there is very little radiocarbon left to decay, and by the time we get back to 40,000 years ago, the radiocarbon dates are systematically underestimating the true age. Using other methods of dating the same sites, archaeologists have shown the radiocarbon underestimates to be 2,000–3,500 years for dates between 20,000–40,000 years ago, and as much as 5,600 years for dates between 38,000 and 40,000 years. After 40,000 years the systematic error rises even more. With such underestimates of archaeological dates, the genetic dates (which do not have this age ceiling problem) for modern human colonization of the Levant and Europe start to look quite reasonable. See also Gamble op. cit. p. 273.

8.
Europa was genetic daughter of Rohani . . . Nasreen . . . L3
: Richards, M. and Macaulay, V. (2000) ‘Genetic data and the colonization of Europe: Genealogies and founders’ in C. Renfrew and K. Boyle (eds)
Archaeogenetics: DNA and the Population Prehistory of Europe
(McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge) pp. 139–41. Note that ‘generation’ is not used in a literal sense here. Each ‘generation’ of the gene line represents one or more new mutations and may cover a period of well over 10,000 years.
This was around 55,000 years ago
: Kivisild, T. et al. (1999) ‘The place of the Indian mitochondrial DNA variants in the global network of maternal lineages and the peopling of the Old World’ in S.S. Papiha et al. (eds)
Genomic Diversity: Applications in Human Population Genetics
(Kluwer Academic/Plenum, New York) pp. 135–52. The estimate in this publication is based on a poorly resolved R tree in India, and an older age of R is possible, perhaps nearer to 70,000 years. One estimate was even as much as 73,000 years in a more recent paper by Kivisild et al.: see the discussion on p. 322 of Kivisild, T. et al. (2003a) ‘The genetic heritage of the earliest settlers persists both in Indian tribal and caste populations’
American Journal of Human Genetics
72
: 313–33.
the ages of two Asian subgroups of Rohani
: e.g. R9 (81,400 years ago) and B (74,600 years ago) – Yong-Gang Yao et al. (2002) ‘Phylogeographic differentiation of mitochondrial DNA in Han Chinese’
American Journal of Human Genetics
70
: 635–51.

9.
U6 moved west round the southern shore of the Mediterranean
: Rando, J.C. et al. (1998) ‘Mitochondrial DNA analysis of northwest African populations reveals genetic exchanges with European, near-Eastern, and sub-Saharan populations’
Annals of Human Genetics
62
: 531–50. Note that U6 is present in Bedouin and Syrian Arabs at low rates of 4–7%, which is consistent with a route for U6 into North Africa via the Levant: data from Richards, M. et al. (2000), further reported in: Richards, M. et al. (2003) ‘Extensive female-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa into Near Eastern Arab populations’
American Journal of Human Genetics
72
: 1058–64.
Early Upper Palaeolithic tools
: blades and burins – Close, A.E. and Wendorf, F. (1989) ‘North Africa at 18,000 BP’ in C. Gamble and O. Soffer (eds)
The World at 18,000 BP
(Unwin Hyman, London) p. 47. Other evidence for early modern human presence in North Africa includes the Taramsa Hill child on the Nile, dated by Optically Stimulated Luminescence to 50,000–80,000 years ago but associated, in this case, with Middle Palaeolithic technology: Vermeersch, P.M. et al. (1998) ‘Middle Palaeolithic burial of a modern human at Taramsa Hill, Egypt’
Antiquity
72
: 475–84.

10.
U2i is clearly home grown . . .
: Bamshad, M. et al. (2001) ‘Genetic evidence on the origins of Indian caste populations’
Genome Research
11
: 994–1004.

11.
Apart from R, U2, and U7, other N groups and subgroups may have a claim of ancient origin in South Asia, in particular W. Groups H, Ö, X, I, J, and T are also found in India. Kivisild et al. (1999) op. cit. pp. 137–50.

12.
Between 55,000 and 65,000 years ago the world went through a period of almost unremitting cold and dryness. During this time the Fertile Crescent corridor was shut
: For a graphic colour map description of the effect of glacial cycles on the Fertile Crescent corridor see Jonathan Adams’ webpage,
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEURASIA.html
four warm and wet periods
: Interstadials (IS – not
OIS
) numbered 17–14 and dated as in Dansgaard, W. et al. (1993) ‘Evidence for general instability of past climate from a 250-kyr ice-core record’
Nature
364
: 218–20; see also Schultz, H. et al. (1998) ‘Correlation between Arabian Sea and Greenland climate oscillations of the past 110,000 years’
Nature
393
: 54–7. The last of these, 51,000 years ago: IS numbered 14 (= Glinde according to Dansgaard et al., op. cit); see also Schultz et al., op. cit.
the Indian monsoon was even wetter
: See Schultz et al., op. cit. esp. Fig. 2, p. 55.
The climatic and archaeological clock timings converge
: With correction of the radiocarbon dates – see note 7 above.
the earliest daughter lines of Nasreen
: I, and the U/Europa derivatives of R/Rohani: U/Europa root and U5, U7 (Richards et al. (2000) op. cit.).

13.
The African branch that encompasses all non-Africans is defined by one bi-allelic marker, M168. Underhill, P.A. et al. (2000) ‘Y chromosome sequence variation and the history of human populations’
Nature Genetics
26
: 358–61. So far the root type for this ‘Adam’ marker has not been found either within or outside Africa. The three primary branches C, D/E (or YAP), and F, which account for all non-Africans, I have chosen, for simplicity, to call Cain, Abel, and Seth respectively. The letters C–F refer to the new
consensus nomenclature
. For the consensus nomenclature, see The Y Chromosome Consortium (2002) ‘A nomenclature system for the tree of human Y-chromosomal binary haplogroups’
Genome Research
12
: 339–48.

14.
J, but I shall call him Jahangir
and
north-east coast of the Mediterranean
: The
consensus nomenclature
haplogroup J (Jahangir) line is defined by M89, p12f2, and M172 (haplotypes 54–64 in Underhill et al., op. cit.) and is equivalent to Eur9 in Semino, O. et al. (2000) ‘The genetic legacy of Paleolithic
Homo sapiens sapiens
in extant Europeans: A Y-chromosome perspective’
Science
290
: 1155–9, and equivalent to haplogroup 9 according to the nomenclature of Tyler-Smith and Jobling (see Rosser, H.Z. et al. (2000) ‘Y-chromosomal diversity in Europe is clinal and influenced primarily by geography, rather than by language’
American Journal of Human Genetics
67
: 1526–43).
high frequencies in the Near East
: 57% in Syria, 51% in Palestinians, 28–45% in Jews, and 46% among Lebanese (‘Med’ type in Hammer, M. et al. (2000) ‘Jewish and Middle Eastern non-Jewish populations share a common pool of Y-chromosome biallelic haplotypes’
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
97
: 6769–74) and 33% among Georgians (Semino et al., op. cit.).
highest European frequency is in Turkey
: ibid.
followed by the Balkans and Italy
: ibid.; Rosser et al., op. cit.
high frequencies in North African countries
: ibid.

15.
M172 (J/Jahangir) less than 20%, Quintana-Murci, L. et al. (2001) ‘Y-chromosome lineages trace diffusion of people and languages in Southwestern Asia’
American Journal of Human Genetics
68
: 537–42; see also Underhill et al., op. cit.; Kivisild, T. (2003b) ‘Genetics of the language and farming spread in India’ in P. Bellwood and C. Renfrew (eds)
Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis
(McDonald Institute for Archaeology, Cambridge) pp. 215–222.

16.
Diversity of Jahangir
: Quintana-Murci et al., op. cit. The biggest problem comes in dating the M172 (J/Jahangir) clan. Hammer and colleagues put a date of 15,000–20,000 years on
the European expansion, although the original mutation may have been much earlier (Hammer et al., op. cit.). Hammer dated M172’s immediate ancestor (DYS188
₇₉₂
) to 60,000 years. However, there are serious problems still with Y-chromosome dating. Kivisild (2003b) op. cit. compares different methods of dating, showing age estimates for the M172 coalescent as much as 54,700 years in Iran and 49,000 years in India, similar to the older Hammer figure. Quintana-Murci in contrast, using ‘pedigree rate’ to estimate time, suggests a Neolithic agricultural expansion, but the origins of this clan clearly go much further back in time and space. The people who have the highest rate of M172, the Kurds, are long-time residents of the hilly part of the Fertile Crescent who until fairly recently were nomadic herders of sheep and goats with only marginal agriculture. Descendants of M172 spread to the East as well, into Central Asia (see
Chapters 4
and
5
).