Full Thread: Human Origins
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Old March 26th, 2008 #7
Francis Playfair
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Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
I would be interested in what some of you think are the real origins of the White race, from these pre-races, so to speak. It appears to me the record is a handful of fossils and lungfuls of speculation. Anyone can take a shard of jawbone and turn it into a theory that surprise, surprise, has white men tracing back to Africa.
I spent a while working on the Island of Santorini. The rules on the island were very strict, non-locals were not allowed to move to the island, except in extreme circumstances, so to allow me to stay on the island I had to work with the archaeological teams at Akrotiri.

It's actually a fascinating island, it's the scene of the largest natural disaster to occur in the history of mankind, and also reputed by many to be the site of Atlantis.

Here's a picture of the island from wiki:



The circular area in the middle of the picture is the caldera, a volcanic feature formed by the collapse of land following the volcanic eruption. They are often confused with volcanic craters. The word 'caldera' comes from the Spanish language, meaning "cauldron".

Before the eruption the island was an almost perfect circular shape, so you only need to look at the image above to see the size and velocity of the explosion.

The impact of the eruption of Santorini was immense, and global.

The climatic effects of the Minoan eruption have been correlated with a frost event recorded in tree rings in the western USA and dated by dendrochronology as 1626 +/- 2 yrs BC (LaMarche and Hirschboeck 1984). Narrow tree rings have also been identified in Irish oak trees from the period 1626 to 1628 BC and attributed to the Santorini event (Baillie and Munro 1988.). These frost events are within the limits of 14C dating of 1615 +/- 17 yrs BC of Santorini vegetation carbonized by the eruption (Hammer et al. 1987).

It is evident that many notable frost ring events recorded in trees correlate with volcanic eruptions, and from the data of LaMarche and Hirschboeck (1984) it appears that approx. 60% of frost ring events correlate with major volcanic eruptions.

On a global scale, this means the climate would have changed for some years, causing colder weather and failed crops, which would have lead to starvation, and massive population movements.

In the Aegean these people movements lead to the rise of the Sea people, who invaded and attacked the then still primarily Caucasian Egypt a number of times in that time period.

Further afield, in the region of the Turanianian plain, soil analysis shows that there was large disruption caused by the volcanic activity, and that there would have been harsh climate conditions, crops would have failed, and that animals would have died.

Basically this Caucasian population would have suffered, and been left with no choice but to move on, or die out.

It is recorded, both by the finds of remains, human and other, and by the dispersal of language, cultures and genetics, that the first option prevailed.

The Caucasian population, or parts of, migrated from the Turanian plains, and moved southward to the plateau of Iran. From this point some stayed put, some moved west and some moved east.

So where am I going with any of this?

The digs were confined to one small area on the island, although everyone knew the best sites were elsewhere.

Why wasn't anyone digging in the other sites?

Because they were buried deep beneath rocks, and debris, at the heart of the caldera, under the sea.

In other words it was hard.

The majority of archeology is done where it's easy.

In Africa one only needs to brush away a little sand, or dirt, to find some old bone, or fossil, where as in Europe, where the landscape is more rugged, where cities have flourished, and where big business has an investment, the digs are rarer, and harder, and this doesn't even begin to consider mans propensity to settle in coastal, or river areas, and so therefore the majority of good European sites would be under water.

Because of the costs involved, and the higher chance of success, digging in favorable areas, the majority of archeology is geared to places like Africa, and theories that give increased importance to this areas.

It's one of the reasons that dates are forever being revised, because the theories are known to be false, but constructed to favor what people want, and therefore when a new tooth, or bone, is found in Europe, they have to reinvent their African theories again.

What is the truth of the origins of the White race?

In reality, all theories aside, no one can be absolutely certain of the origins of our race, although the most popularly held theory is that we probably originated, as a distinct entity, sometime between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago.

During this period of time there were two distinct cultural traditions which entered Europe, the first was the Aurignacian, which arrived shortly after 40,000 years ago. The Aurignacians were the earliest modern humans in Europe, which had previously been inhabited only by Neanderthals. The second was the Gravettian, which displaced the Aurignacian starting about 29,000 years ago.

When the Gravettian cultural explosion began, Europe was still dominated by the Aurignacian culture. However, after 30,000 BP, the climate began falling back into extreme Ice Age conditions which the Aurignacians were not prepared to withstand.

The last of the Neanderthals died off at this time, and it has recently been suggested that the Aurignacians would have perished as well if the Gravettians had not come to their rescue.

The fact that Gravettian lineages provide well over half the genetic endowment of present-day Europeans, while the Aurignacian lines account for only about 10%, may give some indication of the survival advantages of the Gravettian way of life.

Let us look back for a moment to 29,000 years ago. At that time, Europe had already begun returning to full Ice Age conditions, but the newly-arrived Gravettians took the changes in stride, and they continued to flourish, despite the climate becoming increasingly cold and dry.

The majority of the famous "Venus" statuettes were produced between about 24,000 and 22,000 BP, mainly in an area of central and eastern Europe stretching from the Danube to the Volga.

From around 21,000 to 17,000 years ago, glacial conditions grew so extreme that Europe was almost completely cut off from the outside, and this isolation is probably the final piece in the jigsaw, that sees the final steps in the evolution of the modern White man.

However, as the harsh conditions continued, Ice fields spread south from Scandinavia and north from the Alps, and the narrow corridor between them became a bleak polar desert. This created an impassable barrier between eastern and western Europe which destroyed the cultural unity that had endured for thousands of years, so that almost immediately, after that final evolutionary step, the modern White race became divided.

At the absolute peak of the cold, human habitation was reduced to a few relatively temperate refuges, one such refuge was in southern France and northwestern Spain and a second in Italy. A third was in the northern Balkans, and a fourth in the Ukraine.

Eastern Europe held onto much of its Gravettian heritage during this period, so the culture there is described as epi-Gravettian. However, in the extreme west, two new cultures developed -- the Solutrean, about 20,000 years ago, which produced the finest tools of the Late Paleolithic, and the Magdalenian, in which the art of the deep caves reached its peak.

The Solutreans, are now know to have turned to harvesting the resources of the sea as the land became barren, and there is now even serious speculation that they crossed the Atlantic Ocean, working their way along the edge of the ice cap, and introducing the Clovis culture to North America.

When the ice started retreating about 16,000 years ago, people gradually moved north. The first to repopulate the northern European plains were Magdalenian reindeer hunters from southern France, and by 14,000 years ago they had reached England (which was then attached to the continent, due to lowered sea levels), the Netherlands, and Germany. A thousand years later, they had also pushed north into Denmark and southern Sweden and east as far as Poland and southern Lithuania.

By that time, a second wave of expansion had begun spreading northwest from the Dniepr River in the Ukraine, carrying an offshoot of the epi-Gravettian culture of eastern Europe to Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. From Poland, this culture expanded further into Germany and Scandinavia, ultimately reaching northern Norway and Finland as the Ice Age came to a close about 10,000.

Thus we see the origins of our race, and how it was almost immediately divided, how it developed over a period of up to 10,000 years, isolated from the other branches of it's family, before spreading our and repopulating the continent.

As Europe became reconnected to the rest of the world again, having survived this extreme natural occurrence, that helped to meld and shape us into the people we are today, some of our people also ventured east, and began settling in the vast empty areas they found there, which gave birth to some of the earliest cities, and civilizations discovered by archaeologists.