what do you folks think of this? I thought we all "came from Africa?"

I thought different species couldnt interbreed?

Gee, those ancient Cromagnons, why didnt they respect the Neandertal diversity?

Redheads 'are Neanderthal'.

RED hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals, scientists believe. Researchers at the John Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford say that the so-called "ginger gene" which gives people red hair, fair skin and freckles could be up to 100,000 years old.

They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200,000 years before Homo Sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40,000 years ago.

Rosalind Harding, the research team leader, said: "The gene is certainly older than 50,000 years and it could be as old as 100,000 years. "An explanation is that it comes from Neanderthals." It is estimated that at least 10 per cent of Scots have red hair and a further 40 per cent carry the gene responsible, which could account for their once fearsome reputation as fighters. Neanderthals have been characterised as migrant hunters and violent cannibals who probably ate most of their meat raw. They were taller and stockier than Homo Sapiens, but with shorter limbs, bigger faces and noses, receding chins and low foreheads.

The two species overlapped for a period of time and the Oxford research appears to suggests that they must have successfully interbred for the "ginger gene" to survive. Neanderthals became extinct about 28,000 years ago, the last dying out in southern Spain and southwest France.

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2001.

Source: THE TIMES UK 16/04/2001

They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200,000 years before Homo Sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40,000 years ago.
The writer is being sneaky. European H. sapiens arose autochthonously in Europe from H. erectus that migrated thither about 1 million years B.P.

The phrase "modern man" ought to refer only to humans descended from the prototype of modern men: Cro-Magnon. Those descendants include primarily the European White peoples, secondarily (in lesser part) the lightest races remaining among the Greeks, Persians and Afghanis, and tertiarily (in still lesser part) the Iroquois, the Japanese, and other Asians who resulted from a hybridization with wandering caucasoids perhaps between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago.

The dark niggers aren't modern men. The yoyoi Asians aren't modern men. The Australian/Indonesian aborigines aren't modern men. The negritos of the Philippines aren't modern men. These are all archaic types: primitive men.

Jerry Abbott

So you think that Homo Neander branched off Homo Erectus, and Homo Sapiens too? Do you think that Homo Neander was like a Homo Sapiens subspecies? Or a separate Homonid species altogehter?

Do you think that the Aryans evolved from this root stock of Homo Erectus, separately but contemporaneously to the indigenous non-Aryan Europeans, (such as represented by the Basque, the Etrustcans, the Minoans, or the Pelasgians ) -- or, do you think that the indigenous non-Aryan Europeans evolved first as homo sapiens, and these-- I think maybe this time frame would coincide with wandering Caucasoids such as Tocharians-- anyhow, thence these Caucasioids migrated to the steppes or wherever, there to further evolve as Aryans, which tribes then returned to conquer Europe and elsewhere?

I'm thinking that there may be a kind of Caucasoid root-stock, that the Aryans and non-indigenous of Europe evolved from-- which was already divergent from Negroes and Asians. Also, I would think that this indigenous European pre-Aryans were distinct from Semites, because of hints from the unique Basque language, and the indecipherable Etruscan one-- which were distinct from the Semitic languages as they were from the Aryan ones.

Here is a little chronological hypothesis I have worked out.

I - homo erectus becomes "Cromagnon" or homo sapiens.

II - early: indigenous European root stock differentiated from Semites, Negroes, Asians.
later: wandering Caucasoids amalgamate with non-Caucasoids-- (remnants of lesser evolved Homo erectus?)

III early Aryan conquerors: Dorics, Latium, Scythians, Celts, Aryans of India, Persians.

IV late phase Aryan conquerors: Germanics

I am trying to work out II. That seems the most sketchy to me. For example, are the ancient Egyptians closer to the indigenous European root stock, or the semitic? Or were they semites themselves? Based on language differences one would think they were different from Semites.

It's hard to find decent reading on this topic from the post war period. For example, here is one I dug up and I can barely figure out what the hell they're trying to say:

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/gimbutas.html

Here is an excerpt from that article. I guess the author is trying to say, he wants to revisit questions of physical anthropology which the Jews made off limits after the war.

In 1987, Colin Renfrew proposed that Indo-European languages were conducted north by the Neolithic farmers of the Middle East. In chapter 4, I mentioned his influential book, which corroborated our hypothesis that Neolithic agriculture spread by a demic and not a purely cultural process. It is tempting to champion the correspondence between the spread of Indo-European languages and the diffusion of agriculture, which geography brings clearly to light. However, in my discussions with Albert Ammerman, my archeological collabolator in the initial research on the spread of farming and farmers, we avoided linguistic correlations because archeology cannot tell us about them in the absence of a written record. Nevertheless, on the basis of theoretical anthropological considerations, archeologist Renfrew came courageously to the conclusion that Indo-European was spread by Middle Eastern farmers.

I learned about Renfrew's hypothesis before he published it, on the occasion of a visit to Cambridge. Further connection between the spread of agriculture and language came to mind when I learned from linguistic literature that the language written in a cuneiform script around 5,000 years ago in the region of Elam (southwestern Iran) was Dravidian {the language of the Harappa civilization, related to Tamil as still spoken in South India}. Both Renfrew and I independently suggested

{p. 160} that Dravidian may have originated in the Middle East and been spread by mideastern farmers east toward Pakistan and India. But in the last section of this book I tried to shift the origin of Dravidian away from the Fertile Crescent further east, either to the south Caspian, eastern Iran, or northern India. It seems very reasonable to assume that agricult-lral developments helped spread the languages spoken by the first farmers. This must have happened repeatedly, and we will see other examples. But agriculture developed no earlier than 10,000 years ago, and therefore the relevant linguistic families are late ones. If Greenberg is right in stating that Dravidian as well as Afroasiatic is older than Eurasiatic, then the center of origin of Dravidian is not necessarily connected with the Middle East, and may be further to the east.

Another interesting question related to the difficult problem of centers of origin of linguistic families arises with Renfrew's hypothesis that the Indo-European languages originatted in Turkey, and then spread into Europe with Neolithic peasants. Obviously, all immigrants bring their language with them, and have no reason to learn a new one if they fail to encounter anyone in their new territory. It is worth pointing out that the inhabitants of Europe before the agricultural expansion (often called Mesolithics) usually had a very low population density. Since they were hunter gatherers, they may have preferred living in areas that were geologically different from agriculturally suitable Llnd. These earlier inhabitants and the new settlers, the Neolithic farmers, did not therefore have much contact, especially at the beginning of the agricultural expansion, when the density of farmers was lower than at later stages.

Renfrew's hypothesis, if correct, provides a date for the dissemination of Indo-European languages equivalent to that of the initial spread of farming, around 9,500 to 10,000 years ago. This date may seem to be problematic, since old linguistic estimates (although very approximate) suggested an earlier date (6,000 years ago). Moreover, this latter date would fit more comfortalbly Gimbutas' hypothesis of a Kurgan origin 5,000 to 5,500 years ago (kurgans are tombs in the form of mounds, which have been quarries of art objects in Southern Russia). As we see, however, there is no

{p. 161} necessary contradiction between Gimbutas and Renfrew. On the contrary, Alberto Piazza and I believe that their proposals reinforce each other. If we accept this idea, it may be useful to refer to the original Indo-European spoken in Turkey 10,000 years ago as the primary Indo-European, pre-proto-Indo-European, and to that spoken 4,000 to 5,000 years later in the Kurgan region as secondary or proto-Indo-European.

It is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey. To arrive north of the Black Sea farmers from Turkey may have expanded west of the Black Sea, through Romania, and/or along the eastern coast of the Black Sea. Shortly after their arrival, these Neolithic farmers domesticated the horse, which was not as abundant elsewhere, and developed a predominantly pastoral economy. This allowed them to survive and even prosper in an environment ill suited to an exclusively agrarian life. This adaptation took time, but with the first development of bronze (around 5,000 years ago), they were on the brink of an expansion. They had food, a means of transport, and powerful new weapons. Actually, the Kurgan region extended fairly widely, and generated many expansions after this first one, over the next 3,000 or 4,000 years. The very first area of origin may have been between the rivers Volga and Don, but there were many expansions, both eastward to Central Asia and westward toward Europe. Kurgans are found over much of the steppe in both western and eastern directions.

The eastward expansion may have been first. It led east and south through Central Asia toward Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, generating the "Indo-Iranian branch" of Indo-European. These languages later completely replaced almost all the Dravidian languages previously spoken from Iran to Pakistan and in northern India, but not those in southern India. Most inhabitants of India are Caucasoid, even if their skin is darker than that of northern Europeans. Populations in the south that speak Dravidian languages are genetically slightly different from, and darker than, northern Indians. At least three different ethnic layers are superimposed on this part of the

{p. 162} world. The oldest and the most limited (the pre-Dravidians, or Australoid) ... are said to resemble Australian Aborigines ...

The expansions {of the Kurgan people} in the opposite direction, westward, toward central and northern Europe, generated, one after another, the Celtic, Italic, and Germanic branches of Indo-European languages. Northward expansions may have originated the Balto-Slavic expansion, which was perhaps the last. The southward expansion was less successful, as the area was already heavily inhabited, but from the second millenium B.C. there were various Indo-European speaking peoples and dynasties in Turkey and the Middle East - the Hitittes and the Mitanni - whose probable origin was from the Kurgan. {end of selection}

(2) Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, Penguin, London 1987.

{p. 3} Over the past two decades, archaeology has looked with considerable disfavour on the work of those earlier generations of scholars who sought to explain the changes observed to have taken place in the archaeological record in terms mainly of migrations. We see now that the particular kinds of pottery so meticulously studied in the past are not necessarily secure indicators of particular groups of people - the pots themselves may have been traded, or a fashion in pot-making adopted, without any change in population. We see more clearly that social groups are not necessarily precisely the same thing as linguistic groups, and we are much more willing to accept changes in the archaeological record as the result of locally-occurring developments within the societies concerned rather than as the result of outside influences, or immigration.

All this has made unfashionable the kind of work prevalent fifty years ago, when the leading scholars of the day would write books with such titles as The Coming of the Greeks, or Prehistoric Migrations in Europe. We are now aware that major developments in human history, such as the emergence of early urban society in the East Mediterranean, were the products of the interplay of social and economic factors, and are not usually explained adequately simply by documenting the migrations of groups of people.

But have we thrown the baby out with the bathwater? For while we are surely right in looking to social and economic causes for most of the major developments, are not questions of national or ethnic identity (and hence of linguistic identity) often an important element in the social reality? This book sets out to argue that this is indeed the case, and that archaeologists have, with a few notable exceptions, failed in recent years to take adequate account of the linguistic evidence in building up our picture of the past. Of course there are sound reasons for that. Along with the enlightened interest in early Europe which led the great Australian archaeologist, V. Gordon Childe, to publish

{p. 4} his book The Aryans in 1926, arose a much more tendentious inclination to use (and sometimes to distort) the historical evidence for partisan political ends. ... Small wonder; then, that archaeologists have avoided so emotive a topic. Childe subsequently avoided all mention of his book The Aryans, although in fact it offered no evidence in favour of the delusion of racial superiority and was very careful to distinguish between language and culture and supposed racial classifications.

{p. 5} Re-reading today Gordon Childe's The Aryans, one can see that some of the questions which he posed remain entirely valid, and in most cases unanswered. So it is time, I feel, to return to some of those old questions, as well as to several new ones, without incurring the opprobium which such discussions understandably, and perhaps rightly, earned at the end of the Second World War.

Based upon "received knowledge" now accepted I think it is impossible to make any serious analysis of the age of Aryan or Indo-Aryan people or of their original locations. Haven't they just found evidence of Pyramids and cities in Eastern Europe that seem to be between 10 and 20 thousand year old? Somewhere on the forum is a thread on this. I recall the 10 to 20 thousand year old site is co-located with evidence of an earlier 27,000 year old city or temple.

found it: http://www.vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=25090

Enkidu

Me had red hair when me boy and grow up have red beard. Little stupid man wrong. Me not dumb Neander... Nean...what him say.