Music.Earth

Happy New Year, everyone!

I did not manage to post this message yesterday, as finally the Music.Earth site access overshot its monthly cap :-@

But I would like to briefly recap the year that was 2011 – and say that for me personally, it was pretty monumental in the way my thinking about life and other things suddenly shifted. I cannot say that it was better or worse than the previous years (and unfortunately, the arrows of time always move in a single direction until the Large Hadron Collider teaches us how to violate spacetime!), but I did have an epiphany of sorts and I now just see things differently.

Or perhaps I am just growing older – the possibilities are endless…

Enough of rankling you with personal musings…what really matters to us all was that 2011 fortuitously provided us with yet more genetic and evolutionary nuggets for consideration. For one thing, we learnt that while we modern humans are the only surviving members of our lineage, other kinds of humans once roamed the Earth, including familiar Neanderthals and the newfound Denisovans, who lived in what is now Siberia.

Although some researchers once scoffed at the notion that our ancestors interbred with such extinct lineages, genetic analysis suggests that Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes, while Denisovan DNA makes up 4 percent to 6 percent of modern Melanesian genomes.

Personally, I think that this is simplifying the whole deal to a point that some brain is going to stand up on some vaunted stage and say “See! Here is the evidence that we can be distinguished as a subspecies! There are 5 races globally…” Well, the research does NOT indicate that. Note that this admixture happened very early, just around the time of the the first departures from the African continent and subsequently, there was forward and back migration, so its likely that we all carry a bit of the DNA.

Moving along -  scientists also suggested that evidence points to at least two waves of migration of modern humans into Asia. The first gave rise to the aboriginal populations that currently live in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and later migrations gave rise to relatives of East Asians who now are the primary population of Southeast Asia.

Such findings support the idea of modern humans dispersing eastward to Asia by a southern route through India to Australia and Melanesia. This concept was previously supported by archaeological evidence, but never had strong genetic support until now.

“The archaeological evidence suggested that the first people got to Australia and New Guinea incredibly early, with tools that were less advanced technologically than later seen in the Middle East, Europe and Asia…the genetic work now supports that, showing there were multiple waves of migration to Asia and Oceania, with some quite earlier than others.” said researcher David Reich, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical School, told LiveScience.

The researchers now want to pinpoint the time at which interbreeding with Denisovans occurred and to figure out if the genes that modern humans received from Denisovans have contributed anything of importance.

Does this snap in the face of a the single-migration wave theory? I think not, in a sense. Admittedly, admixtures abound in more recent times and the genomic quantum would suggest if it did happen, it happened relatively early and possibly did not give rise to any physiognomic features. Either way, we are now a pretty homogenous species and getting more so.

What needs to be studied or challenged is whether population bottlenecks, arising from land-locking gave rise to these so-called “waves”. Did forceful displacement occur? Was it only confined outside of Africa? Genetically, can we separate the various tribes of man? Research is being done on multi-loci genetic cluster analysis and the findings are rather purposeful, however, this applies more towards specific ethnically isolated populations, rather than those drawn along racial lines.

When and how modern humans dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial, but past evidence had suggested an exodus along the Mediterranean Sea or Arabian coast some 60,000 years ago. However, stone artifacts unearthed in the Arabian Desert at least 100,000 years old now suggest modern humans first left Africa by at least 40,000 years earlier than researchers had expected.

When these artifacts were made, it has been ascertained that copious rain fell across the area, making it a verdant paradise rich in resources. This is likely why humans leaving Africa traveled across Arabia instead of hugging the coast…possibly along the routes of long-vanished rivers.

“I hope that our findings will stimulate research in South Asia — India in particular — to find the remains of early anatomically modern humans in that part of the world,”says archaeologist Hans-Peter Uerpmann from Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany.

In the light of all this controversy, we at Music.Earth have decided to complete and publish our first draft of another bit of Esoterica – debunking the issue of race and racial ideology – in the article ” The Long, Slow Death of Race”.

We explore the prevalent race attitudes and racist sentiments that make up political ethos even now in the 21st century and call for you, dear reader, to denounce the notion of race for what it is – a complete fabrication, of political, unscientific persuasions.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

This week, rather than discovering a new twist in the tale of mankind’s migration to populate the world (and closing one eye on the worsening economic conditions the world over) we turn our attention to the one piece of furniture that we all have a very intimate relationship with – I speak of the humble bed, but in this case, the oldest bed yet discovered.

Not only is it old – close to 77 kya, more than 50ky older than any previously identified lay-me-downer – it is also pretty advanced, as it was retrofitted with evergreens which potentially warded off insects.

The ‘bed’ was found  in a cave in Sibudu, South Africa, which is near Durban and signifies that the troglodytes were indeed men (or perhaps more likely, women) of some sophistication. Another myth bites the dust!

As first reported in Science, an international team, led by Lyn Wadley of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, found fossilized mats in a South African cave that are believed to have been used as beds in prehistoric time. Excavation efforts found at least 15 layers of sediment, which included plant bedding dated between 77,000 and 38,000 years ago. Many of the properties of the unearthed samples are composed of Cryptocarya woodii, a river wild-quince which, Wadley said, in modern day is used in traditional pain killers and other medicines.

Wadley is quoted as saying, “”the selection of these leaves for the construction of bedding suggests that the early inhabitants of Sibudu had an intimate knowledge of the plants surrounding the shelter, and were aware of their medicinal uses,” Wadley said. “Herbal medicines would have provided advantages for human health, and the use of insect-repelling plants adds a new dimension to our understanding of behavior 77,000 years ago.”

It is highly possible that these people had a fair understanding of primary healthcare and were pretty self-sufficient – but it is pointless to speculate further. All told, it forces us to rethink (again) about the ‘primitiveness of prehistoric man’ – ’nuff said…