The white female wasn’t sought out or prized for their pale beauty, or because they were perceived as being “more” beautiful simply because they were white. No. They were picked out as sex slaves because they were perceived as more sexually available or permissible because they were free to walk around unaccompanied and uncovered. This is stereotype from the prophet’s era which never lost currency.

The white female wasn’t sought out or prized for their pale beauty, or because they were perceived as being “more” beautiful simply because they were white. No. They were picked out as sex slaves because they were perceived as more sexually available or permissible because they were free to walk around unaccompanied and uncovered.

“The Mediterranean world of the Greco-Roman period was dominated by people who themselves were fair-skinned or relatively so. ”

No really. The Greco -Roman world was dominated by the swarthy, olive-skinned type. The fair type was a minority trait.

That YouTube video took lorenz comments out of context. He said the samples were contaminated with The scientists European DNA. Because they could not replicate those same results. Also, the skulls were Sinodont and and within the variability of Native American morphology.

Does anyone know why he looks more Negroid than Khoisan? My impression was that negroid features were a much later development in West Africa.

[…] http://www.unz.com/pfrost/white-skin-privilege/ […]

It is a good thing to throw out, shred or use as toilet paper any studies and reports before the current date. Why? Because they are based on old data, old ideas and old paradigms. So Brace et al, Angel et al… garbage.

– At one time, before the last ice age, northern Eurasia was home to a population that was ancestral to present-day Europeans, Amerindians, and East Asians.
– Kennewick Man and the Ainu seem to be very close phenotypically to this archaic Eurasian population, probably because they lived in coastal refugia during the last ice age.
– Ancestral Amerindians seem to have branched off during the last ice age but before the peak or perhaps they moved eastward in response to this peak.
– Ancestral East Asians seem to have branched off by moving southward, while remaining within a subarctic or boreal environment.

Wasn’t the Mal’ta specimen found to be unrelated to East Asians?

So have the oldest specimens been found in NE Asia dating to the ice age, or are people just guessing or assuming that Mongoloids evolved in NE Asia during the ice age? Have people just found East Asian and Amerindian specimens and assumed that they must have evolved in NE Asia during the ice age? In which case, what’s the basis for this assumption?

Natural Law proponents make similar claims about Protestantism, that its rejection of natural law leads to fatalism, relativism, and moral nihilism. In the Catholic natural law tradition, natural law complements agent based, virtue ethics and the salvific power of works. Whereas, according to natural law proponents, Protestantism’s rejection of natural law and reduction of morality and salvation to a contractual relationship and faith alone leads to fatalistic views such as predestination and eventually moral relativism and nihilism.

Does this mean that the Windover Hill remains had West Eurasian genes (European) unique from other modern Amerindian populations? Was the testing done by Joseph Lorenz a false positive? I just read an article claiming that the testing done by Lorenz showed DNA too close to his own to rule out contamination. But I understand there was a lack of funding for further testing.

First, I would like to apologize for my use of the word silly. I was the one that was silly plus I was rude.

Second, I would like to make it as clear as I can that I was dwelling upon the idea that cats torment and torture; not that they don’t have some bio-chemical reinforcement mechanisms that influence their behavior. I do not know how instincts are formed and reinforced; it may be that pleasure is the main mechanism.

I know that cats have a predator’s instinct to chase, catch and kill. I am just trying to point out that the play with crippled prey will allow a cat to become better at executing that instinct. It serves a legitimate purpose in their existence.

I also think that humans have a predator’s instinct as well. Whether that derives from a common thread that runs through all predators I don’t know. We execute this instinct in varied ways and I don’t mean just by killing Cecils.

Let me give you a scenario that will very clearly illustrate what I mean. If this doesn’t work, I will stop trying.

Suppose my mother cat brings back a crippled chipmunk and lets her kittens play with it until it is finished off by one of the kittens. I do not consider this to be torture. I do not intervene.

Instead, suppose I take the wounded chipmunk and decide to have some fun. I break a leg and see how far it can get on three legs. Then I poke out both eyes and have a good laugh while watching a three-legged blind chipmunk try to get away. I would be engaging in torment and torture.

I make a very clean, completely unambiguous distinction between what I did and what the kittens did. You can consider them the same if you want.

Natural selection has favored cats that feel intense pleasure when they catch and kill mice. End of story.

Natural selection has favored cats that are the best at catching prey. Practicing on crippled prey hones some of the skills that make a good predator. Mother cats bring crippled prey to their kittens and let them chase and catch in order to teach them how to catch prey. I have watched them do this for over sixty years. Cats do not experience pleasure, nor do they torment or torture, those experiences have been reserved to humans.

I wrote “subsequent in-migration.” The word subsequent means “at a later date.” After the depopulation at the peak of the ice age, other people began to move in from the south, when the climate began to improve.

So wouldn’t this mean that the Mongoloids evolved south of northeast Asia, either in Asia or the Americas or both? And if both, that there was convergent evolution?

The broader natural law tradition, derived largely from the Catholic natural law tradition, is derived from Plato and Aristotle, as well as the later Stoics. The Stoics are often credited as originating natural law, but the tradition has been based on Plato and Aristotle as well.

Protestantism tends to eschew or depart from, either directly or indirectly, classical philosophy and tends to reject natural law, whereas natural law is a major foundation of Catholic theology. This can lead to quite different conceptions of morality.

Ok, but you don’t seem to have a point here.

This is a link to an old Science Channel Special that claims the DNA was of pre Colombian European origin. The special is a bit old so maybe they have done more accurate testing as of late. The Wikipedia account did list that the human remains had haplogroup X which I understand has been hypothesized to be of west Eurasian and possibly Iberian origin as it virtually does not exist in Siberia or East Asia.

I believe Dr. Joseph Lorenz of the Coriell institute made the determination the DNA was of European origin.

No actually they do it because when the cat delivers the killing bite it is exposing vulnerable vital areas like eyes to a mouse attack . Mice like other animals freeze totally when a cat gets them, and many animals will turn and attack a predator when they can’t get away. Tom has to make sure Jerry is dead. So to get cats to avoid injury, they have been selected to enjoy torturing mice.

Cats are trying to improve their owners’ hunting skills by bringing them half dead mice. Having never seen their owners catch anything the cat brings them a prey animal to get the idea across, just as the mother cat did with them. Anyway, stop pestering busy people with irrelevant issues.

The depopulation doesn’t seem to have been total, however. The ancient DNA from 17,000 years ago still looks like something between Europeans and Amerindians, but there does seem to have been subsequent in-migration of people from the south.

If the area was depopulated and there was in-migration from the south, wouldn’t that mean that they evolved elsewhere before the migration?

Also, why would they move north during an ice age, the peak of an ice age no less, where it’s colder and there’s less food?

It just killed for pleasure.

This is silly.

They do it because the cats that do this improve their hunting skills. It trains their young to be better hunters and their descendants will continue with this behavior. The non-descendants of cats that did not do this are not here. There are probably experts in this field that could tell us a lot more. I would guess that repeated activation of the chase and kill behavior has all kinds of benefits for the hunter.

You are an anthropologist. Go get some examples of warrior castes practicing killing on the slave and peon classes before going into battle against other warriors.

If you pick up on minor points of people’s comments it opens the door for others to pick up on yours. For example, they do not accept the Trinity so Unitarians are not even Christians, let alone Protestants.

Alasdair McIntyre makes a good case that the past is another country for morality.

There were odd looking people in the north too. In what was now Sweden 8000 years ago was the Motola hunter gatherers who were of diverse skin colour and 4/7 had the Asian EDAR mutations, which has effects on appearance including hair, teeth, ears, breasts and sweat glands so the Motala people looked (and smelled) unlike any group of modern Europeans.

Interesting. Thanks for the post. Given this information, I found the following news article amusing. I know the people at the Motala site 8000 years ago are different than the people there today, but I still found it amusing 🙂 :

http://www.thelocal.se/20150419/ugly-swedes-offered-total-makeover

now seems to be a kind of postmodern Unitarianism that promises salvation to everyone and everything.

3And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

4But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

5For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.

What’s your point? Thomism isn’t just one aspect of Catholic theology, but a central part of it, and it has a longer history than Protestantism itself.

Also, the Catholic view of a moral universe with natural law predates Aquinas. You’ve never heard of St. Augustine?

Great article!

Mr. Frost,

I was curious as to your impressions of the Windover Hill Bog Mummies of Florida. To my understanding the DNA retrieved from these Bog People was or European origin as well as their skeletal characteristics. Was this due to error in DNA sampling? Or were they different then Kennewick man. How did European DNA get to Pre Colombian Florida? Could they give life to the supposedly dead Soloutrean Hypothesis? Or could they simply show decent from the same population as Mal’ta specimen near lake Baikal?

Morality is something that humans impose on an amoral world. It originally was the set of rules for proper living among humans of the same tribe. It has since become universalized by various religions, i.e., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Bahai, etc

.
Thomas Aquinas’s guide was Aristotle, who referred to non-human creatures as “other animals”. I think you are taking Thomism as a timeless Catholic position .

This is corroborated by archaeological evidence. There seems to have been widespread depopulation in northeast Asia at the peak of the last ice age.

But you said in your previous comment that “The current appearance of Amerindians and East Asians seems to have developed during the last Ice Age in northeastern Asia.”

If NE Asia had depopulated during the Ice Age, how could they have evolved there?

I’m surprised that several commenters have challenged my belief that the universe is fundamentally amoral. This was what I was taught in Sunday School. God’s covenant is only for humans, and only for those who welcome Jesus into their hearts. There now seems to be a kind of postmodern Unitarianism that promises salvation to everyone and everything. Even your kitty cat will get to go to heaven …

Perhaps that is the Protestant view? In Catholicism, the universe is not fundamentally amoral. There is a moral universe, and its Natural Laws can be determined by Reason, like the physical laws. Also, faith in Jesus is not sufficient for salvation in Catholicism.

You misconceive the point of the is/ought distinction. True that science cannot prescribe an ought which is not already in the logical formulation, though it can sometimes tell you what you ought to do if, for moral or other reasons, you wish to achieve a particular end. But that is to concede you were addressing the right point.

The relevant point to address is whether there is any other source of morality than that which our scientific thinking can easily convince us is the source of moral codes, namely what human groups living together agree on as the rules which maintain tolerable social peace and stability and seem to work because adherence has gone with a flourishing tribe or wider ethnic group. It obviously could take some repeated harsh lessons for people who remembered good times when they had been very happy worshipping Baal….

“Kennewick Man. His skull looked European, yet genetically he was closer to Amerindians.”

No, genetically he is NOT related to an American Indian/”native” American group. (They’re not native, they came here from Siberia… You might call them “First Nations” folks, as the Canadians do, but then you’re not aware of the Clovis and pre-Clovis folks, who preceded “native” Americans by many hundreds of years and not by way of Siberia.)

Really good article:
===============
…
Now, though, after two decades, the dappled, pale brown bones are at last about to come into sharp focus, thanks to a long-awaited, monumental scientific publication next month co-edited by the physical anthropologist Douglas Owsley, of the Smithsonian Institution. No fewer than 48 authors and another 17 researchers, photographers and editors contributed to the 680-page Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton (Texas A&M University Press), the most complete analysis of a Paleo-American skeleton ever done.
…
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kennewick-man-finally-freed-share-his-secrets-180952462/#gzY2SujRi5SG7Qo0.99
===============

The current appearance of Amerindians and East Asians seems to have developed during the last Ice Age in northeastern Asia.

What’s the evidence for this view? Have they found remains there? I think you’ve said before that there wasn’t continued settlement there during the Ice Age but continual die offs and resettlement from outside because it was too inhospitable.

@politically motivated BS from religious jews.

It is Philo who utters the “politically motivated BS”. It is all too likely that Philo exaggerates. But in fact, the status of the Jews was that of “foreigners and aliens”, privileged, but not citizens of Alexandria. Some of the Jews acquired citizenship in the city, but not in mass. It is the same problem that affects Jews all along History: dual citizenship.

Look how this situation is presented even today, or rather how the spin is put on the historical records:
“The position of the Jews deteriorated at the beginning of the Roman era. Rome sought to distinguish between the Greeks, the citizens of the city to whom all rights were granted, and the Egyptians, upon whom a poll tax was imposed and who were considered a subject people. The Jews energetically began to seek citizenship rights, for only thus could they attain the status of the privileged Greeks. Meanwhile, however, antisemitism had taken deep root. The Alexandrians vehemently opposed the entry of Jews into the ranks of the citizens…(riots , Flaccus) and all the Jews were confined to one quarter of the city” (it is that Philo says the mobs “drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one). But the Jews were ascribed just one portion of the city from the very beginning of the city, in order to practice their religion uncontaminated by the Goim. Their presence outside was an abuse. In other words they were asking for the rights of the Greeks but asking by the same token to be exempt of the obligations of the Greeks.

Look at Japan during the tsunami. There was no looting or rioting, even though there was nothing to stop looting or rioting. The same in India during recent flooding.

Look at them (and any others you have in mind) before a natural disaster. They are different before, during and after.

The separation between ancestral Amerindians and ancestral East Asians is usually set in the time period of 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, i.e., after the glacial maximum.

That’s before Kennewick man, no? Wouldn’t that suggest that there was either convergent evolution or that Mongoloids evolved in the Americas and then went northwest into Asia?

Our analysis detects a genome-wide signal of selection at this locus, but instead of the signal being one of positive selection with a coefficient of 0.036 as in a previous study of ancient DNA in the eastern Europe steppe8, our signal is of weakly negative selection One possible explanation is local adaptation: that the allele is advantageous in the north and disadvantageous in the south of Europe. [!] This hypothesis is supported by the fact that our data shows that an extreme north-south gradient in allele frequencies has been maintained in Europe for the last 8,000 years (Figure 2C, Extended data Figure 3).

continued

The remaining two genome-wide signals are both located on chromosome 11 in the genes FADS1 and NADSYN1. FADS1 (and its linked family member FADS2), are involved in fatty acid metabolism, and variation at this locus is associated with plasma lipid and fatty acid concentration. The derived allele of he most significant SNP in our analysis, rs174546, is associated with decreased triglyceride levels31. This locus is therefore a plausible target of selection related to changes in diet. Variants at NADSYN1 (and the nearby DHCR1), have been associated with circulating vitamin D levels and the most associated SNP rs7940244 in our dataset is highly differentiated across closely related Northern European populations suggesting the possibility of selection related to variation in environmental sources of vitamin D.

If natural selection has made closely related north European populations highly differentiated in their vitamin d metabolism people, then those adapted to “environmental sources of vitamin D” (ie UVb) near the equator would not do too well, because they are completely lacking the fine metabolic adaptation and light pigmentation. Yet there are black Africans growing up and living in countries like Sweden who are suffering no ill effects at all. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies took years to compile an authoritative report on D for the US and Canadian governments, it recommended no special vitamin D requirements for blacks, even in northern Canada. What the paper is saying is wrong.

So Swedes are mainly Yamnaya. OK how did Swedes get to have their distinctive pigmentation? If it was just living in the latitude of Sweden how come there were 1/7 dark people in Motala. Eight thousand years of natural selection in Europe line 75-92

The derived allele of rs12913832 at the HERC2/OCA2 locus is the primary determinant of blue eyes in Europeans, and may also contribute to light skin and hair pigmentation25-28. Our analysis detects a genome-wide signal of selection at this locus, but instead of the signal being one of positive selection with a coefficient of 0.036 as in a previous study of ancient DNA in the eastern Europe steppe our signal is of weakly negative selection (

That’s very funny.

Both Swedes and Irish are ~50% Bronze Age steppe, but much of the rest of their ancestry is somewhat different.

Also, their more recent ancestry is somewhat different, with Swedes no doubt having a higher proportion of Corded Ware ancestry.

On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin That is why Swedes look so much like west coast Irish, because THEY ARE BOTH MAINLY YAMNAYA?

Another question. Does farming make people more sedentary, and less war-like? And are hunter gatherers more aggressive and roaming?

Generally speaking yes but

1) if there is a particularly valuable static food source, for example a lake, that can support a sedentary HG population then the local HGs may become sedentary to hold onto it so in that regard they are like farmers already. I think any population that made the jump from HG to farmer are likely to have started that way – sedentary HGs.

2) there’s being war-like as an individual and war-like as a group. I think dense sedentary populations need to become less war-like on an individual basis for social peace however if farming creates larger populations then the farmer group gains an advantage in numbers and that advantage can compensate for being less war-like on an individual basis.

Intuitively, the answer seems to be yes, and yet all I hear about early history is that farmers spread and took over everywhere.

Farming produced larger numbers so they greatly outnumbered the HGs and (imo) simply pushed them off any territory that could support farming.

However there was a lot of territory that didn’t support farming where the HGs survived for a time and long enough on the periphery of the farming spread for them to adapt and bounce back in numbers.

Did hunter gatherers ever take over farmers territory?

There may be one or two examples but generally no – hunter-gathering supports too few people per square mile. On the other hand the HGs that turned into herders on the edge of the farming zone did it a lot as (imo) they had the same war-like traits combined with larger numbers.

#

The point about selection for body heat is very interesting. Mobile HGs without a nice warm house might need more of it than sedentary farmers.

There’s no need to limit this discussion to pigmentation SNPs, because we have information from hundreds of thousands of neutral SNPs, both genome wide and Y-chromosome, which clearly show that these massive population turnovers did take place.

That is impossible to argue, because Middle Neolithic Western and Central Europeans did not resemble modern Europeans in the context of modern West Eurasian/European variation.

They were just too western, and that’s because they lacked steppe ancestry. You can see this in any half decent analysis.

But it’s also important to note that the steppe invaders had a very high ratio of European Mesolithic ancestry; higher than most Europeans today.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-homo-sapiens-became-the-ultimate-invasive-species/

This suggests hunter gatherers have nothing to fight over, but experiments in south Africa suggest coastal shellfish exploitation can mean 4000 plus calories for an individual hour’s work. The shellfish grounds were first thing worth fighting over, and that these valuable resources triggered territoriality in early human groups. Here you say

I suspect its origins go back to a unique Mesolithic culture that once existed along the North Sea and the Baltic (Price, 1991). At that time, an abundance of marine resources drew people to the coast each year for fishing, sealing, and shellfish collecting, thus creating large but fluid settlements unlike anything seen in other hunter-gatherers. Social interactions would have largely involved non-kin, and there would have thus been strong selection for mechanisms that could enforce social rules in the absence of kin obligations.

Hmm, as hunter gatherers they would have nothing to fight over, but in the Mesolithic cooperation to ensure food for the family might have required rather more nefarious activities than food processing. The group would need to be big enough to defend the coastal resources, but the members would have to not run away. http://prospect.org/article/evolutionary-roots-altruism

A shorter version comes from a paper he wrote with another famous Wilson, Edward O.: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

But consider for a moment some real human instances. After stealing vast tracts of land from Native Americans, largely slaughtering them in the process, competitive Euro-Americans held land rushes in which the conquerors raced as fast as they could to plant flags and claim hundreds of acres each. This land was stolen from people who lived in far more cooperative groups, believed much less in individual property rights, and often viewed land as a resource held in common. They vied with each other before white culture came, and perhaps more cooperative groups prevailed. But faced with a less cooperative group than any of theirs, the Native Americans lost.

On the other hand, the Nazis who murdered most of the Jews of Europe were very organized indeed, much more so than the communities they destroyed. Some scientists project group replacement back through human evolution. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in A Cooperative Species, explain the evolution of cooperation as a result of what they believe was extreme group conflict, with the elimination of less cooperative groups throughout the formation of our species. […] But altruism is safe in the end, according to Wilson, because only groups that control these disruptive forces can succeed against other groups, which will disintegrate, dwindle, or be destroyed.

Leaving aside how plausible his scenario is, we have known at least since sociologist Lewis Coser published his 1950s classic, The Functions of Social Conflict—backed by long historical experience—that group conflict tends to bring out the best and the worst in people. Sure, groups at war cohere quite beautifully. The difficulty is that the group has to be really nasty to outsiders. If you need group conflict to evolve cooperation, why don’t you need group conflict to sustain it? And if you do, the logic of group selection seems no help in getting to the kind of cooperation that includes all humanity—the group that is not at war because there is no outsider left to fight.

No, that’s not what I think. If we go back in time, we get closer to the time when Amerindians, East Asians, and Europeans were the same population. Kennewick Man was no fluke. This is a general time trend we see in prehistoric Amerindian remains.

Was there convergent evolution for East Asians and Amerindians? Or did Mongoloids evolve in the Americas?

I wish commentators would take their annoyingly combative comments over to the political ideology blogs.

Razib Khan has an excellent blog post on the Genetic Architecture and Natural History of Pigmentation here ww.unz.com/gnxp/the-genetic-architecture-natural-history-of-pigmentation/

We don’t really know why natural selection worked on the very few genes that control skin pigmentation…yet. There are several possibilities. That is the nature of science. What we do know is that very few genes control skin pigmentation and this supports Frost’s statement that replacement of one population by another has quite possibly been exaggerated because natural selection has likely worked to lighten the skin of Europeans over this time frame.

On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin, but with significant Mesolithic and Neolithic admixture from West and Central Europe.

If I’m not mistaken, Peter Frost disputes this and argues that Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Mesolithic ancestry with minor Bronze Age steppe and Neolithic ancestry and primarily cultural imposition of diffusion of the Indo-European languages.

It’s extremely unlikely that any prehistoric Europeans were dark or exotic enough to be called black.

Based on their genotype data it seems that they were mostly of different shades of brown, but quite a few, including both the hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers, probably had fair skin.

Also, it already seems fairly obvious that southern Europeans are in large part of Neolithic Anatolian origin. On the other hand, Northern and Eastern Europeans are mostly of Bronze Age steppe origin, but with significant Mesolithic and Neolithic admixture from West and Central Europe.

When I say steppe, I mean the European steppe and forest steppe in what are now Russia and Ukraine. The people who lived there during the Early Bronze Age (ie. our ancestors) were also probably mostly brown, but also very northern in terms of genome-wide genetic structure.

In any case, it seems that when they moved west their descendants lightened up very quickly, so that by the time of the Andronovo culture, even the Asian steppe was mostly populated by Kurgan people with lots of light hair and eyes and fair skin.

If there was selection for peaceful and submissive, there would never have been any revolutions. Most of which are quite violent and some display savagery that surpasses that of your HGs.

not the lies of the jews

Hmmm, that doesn’t sound right at all. It’s stormfrontish. Painting with a broad, hateful brush. Sorry, I take that back and replace it with: politically motivated BS from religious jews.

Perhaps the diaspora jews in Egypt, whose leader was Philo, were reacting to nazi-like barbarity from the natives?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo

Philo says Flaccus, the Roman governor over Alexandria, permitted a mob to erect statues of the Emperor Caius Caligula in Jewish synagogues of Alexandria, an unprecedented provocation. This invasion of the synagogues was perhaps resisted by force, since Philo then says that Flaccus “was destroying the synagogues, and not leaving even their name.” In response, Philo says that Flaccus then “issued a notice in which he called us all foreigners and aliens… allowing any one who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war.” Philo says that in response, the mobs “drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one ... while the populace, overrunning their desolate houses, turned to plunder, and divided the booty among themselves as if they had obtained it in war.” In addition, Philo says their enemies, “slew them and thousands of others with all kinds of agony and tortures, and newly invented cruelties, for wherever they met with or caught sight of a Jew, they stoned him, or beat him with sticks”. Philo even says, “the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.” Some men, he says, were dragged to death, while “those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces”

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Science is limited and one of its limits is that it does not address a whole lot of things. History cannot be tested by the scientific method (no experiments) and has its own method. Morality is something that is beyond science because science addresses the “is” part of the reality and morality addresses the “ought” part of the reality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem.

The fact that science cannot detect X does not mean that X does not exist. Science is a path (a method) to the truth, not the only path to the truth. In addition, it is not an infallible method. today’s science is different than tomorrow’s science. DNA was not detected by science for longtime so, for a longtime, you could say “our scientific knowledge does not indicate that there are physical things that produce biological inheritance”.

You seem to be affected by a radical scientism, a philosophical position you are not aware of.

In addition, your position is contradictory. The assertion you base your reasoning on:

“If something is not proven by science is false”

Cannot be proven by science so it’s false by your standards and you enter into a contradiction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_contradiction). Your metaphysical assumptions are self-defeating.

The problem with people who think that science is everything and philosophy is useless is that they have a (completely contradictory) philosophy and they don’t even notice.

“The other 60-70% arrived from the East Mediterranean and Russia/Ukraine in the last 8,000 years. ”

Doesn’t that mean that if 40-50% comes from R/U then 20% comes from EM, isn’t that similar to what Peter is saying?

I find Peter’s work interesting because he comes up with plausible hypotheses that take into consideration several disciplines. Over at Eurogenes I find the discussion seems to revolve around the details of stats programmes or, a back and forth debate between statistical and linguistic perspectives. Nothing seems to be certain yet and Peter deserves credit for his holistic approach.

Regarding myths – Maciamo at Eupedia suggested that the Leprechaun myth (little people hiding precious metals) could originate with the arrival of taller people looking for copper. Then there is the Norse cow-god myth which is interesting too.

On the subject of Noah – I watched an interesting documentary last night about Irving Finkel recreating an ark from a Babylonian script that was found on a tablet*. Long story short – the conclusion was that ‘the ark’ is a myth that represents the repeated need of peoples living all around the Tigris-Euphrates region to build large spherical boats to put their families and animals into when the rivers flooded, which they did ever 10 years or so. The myth originated in Babylon and was taken back to Judaea when the Judaeans went back to Judaea.

Also of interest was the conclusion that Judaeans were allowed to till land in Babylon and to paraphrase one archaeologist – the tablet* is left by a man who had a duel identity, he clearly signals his Judaean heritage but he is also showing that he was a Babylonian businessman.

*nb. different tablets

“Indirectly. Farming leads to the creation of a food surplus that can be seized by powerful individuals and used to amplify their power. They now have the means to pay for underlings of all sorts: servants, assistants, soldiers, etc. This is how states come into being. All states originate in gangs of warriors who monopolize the use of violence. The result is a pacification of social relations, which leads to selection for individuals who are more peaceful and submissive.”

That’s the hidden meaning of the Adam and Eve myth (I hypothesize): http://goo.gl/uikvFb

“Morality is something that God gave only to human beings, and not to the universe.”

And in Genesis at least, if you read it literally, a humanoid-looking creature was fully human if only if it “feared God.” See here for details: https://goo.gl/kO3Wzk

“Southern Europe and the Middle East were initially home to dark African-like people, who were then replaced by European-like people, apparently from the north, beginning around 12,000 ago. The process of replacement was still incomplete, however, during the time of those northern Greek farmers 7,500 to 5,500 years ago. That last date is very close to the dawn of history.”

Don’t the Indo-European speaking peoples come into play here?

What would induce hunter/gatherers to take up agriculture? I read that some of the Iroquois who were still into hunting but had started growing corn also were able to militarily dominate neighboring tribes who hadn’t. Maybe because they had a portable food supply they could take with them in the field?

“Indeed, if we look at pre-Columbian America, we see that farming first developed in Mesoamerica and then spread north through cultural diffusion.”

Do you think this might explain why some of the surviving art objects in the Mississippian cultures have a kind of Meso-American look? At least they strike me that way.

“a human is not a chimp with a body shave”

Good line. You should assemble some of your pieces into one or more Kindle books, like I did: http://goo.gl/C4k2H7

,

Ok, I was too harsh.
“I am questioning the degree of replacement and whether it originated in the Middle East.”

Two separate teams have sampled Neolithic Anatolian genomes and have confirmed(with abstracts) they were of the same ancestral stock as Neolithic Europeans. Both teams made it clear they think Neolithic Europeans were from Anatolia after looking at the data.

“Personally, I believe that about 20% of the present-day European gene pool comes from those Middle Eastern farmers”

All of Europe except the Eastern and Northern edges were inhabited by “WHG” in the Mesolithic. Those WHGs-folks contribution to modern Europeans peaks at 30-40% in North and SouthWest Europeans. The other 60-70% arrived from the East Mediterranean and Russia/Ukraine in the last 8,000 years.

Parental markers and Ancient DNA also make it clear the WHG-folk were mostly replaced.

“The genes that make Europeans look European are a tiny subset of the genome. One can look African and still be European when one looks at the whole genome.”

There’s a lot of variation within single populations. You can’t always tell someone is European by looking at their skull. Sometimes the skull might look African, but in life the person looked European.

I have to say. There’s no way Neolithic Greeks looked anything like Africans!! I just don’t see why you think this is likely. Middle Easterns and Europeans share many of the same features, despite sharing little common ancestry in the last 7,000 years.

I mean look at Sardinians!! Once Neolithic Anatolian and Greek genomes are published, we’ll see Sardinians trace 80%+ of their blood to those people. Sardinians have the same basic features as Europeans and Middle Easterns do. Sardinians could actually probably blend in with Middle Easterns if they immigrated there. No surprise, they have shared very ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.

I know you like the idea that physical appearance changes a lot overtime, and that our ancestors looked totally differnt from us. But often this isn’t the case.

“Just as Kennewick Man looks European while being Amerindian when one looks at the whole genome.’

Native Americans and East Asians share a lot of the same features. Do you think they evolved independently in America and Asia? So, Kennewick man is an exception. There certainly were early Americans with the same features as modern ones running around in that era.

“Three of them had white skin, three of them had inconclusive data, and one had dark skin. ”

We can’t predict skin color at all with DNA. A lot more research is needed. There are plenty of Middle Easterns with the two Light skin mutations and they have Brown skin. My brother and I lack one of the mutations and are pale like any-other Europeans. We don’t know what skin color the Motala HGs had. To pronounce it as fact that we know the skin color of each individual isn’t logical.

We can be confident some did have Red hair and therefore pale skin. This is because it has been proven Red hair can be predicted 80%+ of the time.

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe.

Not all scientists would agree with that particular cosmology:

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/#.VdD_iEU0u7Q

So Plato made up the myth of Atlantis. Doggerland?

“Are those African-like people remembered in European myths, legends, and folk tales?”

The short answer is no, Europeans don’t have myths relating to the Indoeuropean migration (oral memories tend to go only a few generations back), so they hardly have memories of the people they replaced.

Your assertion implies that those to whom you are communicating that ‘scientific knowledge of the universe . . . Biological evolution including human history has no moral meaning” is a truth at we are obliged to assent to, to believe.

Do you not realize how the very objective you have expressed of conveying truth to others and the implied obligation of others to accept such contradicts what you are asserting?

You would be on much more secure ground if you were to merely assert that ‘certain focuses’ or ‘certain methods’ or ‘methodologies’ leave moral considerations aside because such does not pertain to their horizons, starting points, etc.

“As late as 8,000 years ago, only the hunting peoples of northern and eastern Europe had white skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors.”
As Scandinavian mythology has it, trolls had dark skin and green eyes. Ancient North Eurasian DNA was in Motala, and admixture with dark ANE influenced trollish folk explains why one of the Motala seven was actually dark. (The dark skinned Swede sinks the reduced melanin for UVb skin synthesis of vitamin D theory.)

Late Mesolithic coastal fishing practices: the evidence from Tybrind Vig, Denmark [2007] : Also suggestive of net fishing at Tybrind Vig is a wood-en float with a single perforation. The form of this float is analogous to the type used in traditional net fishing (e.g. Nelson 1899 ). Similar Mesolithic examples were found at Antrea/Kamennogorsk (near Lake Ladoga in Russian Karelia)

The use of traps and weirs is interesting too. The climate was a few degrees warmer than now, but wading about in the water up there would be require a lot of Thermogenin. The greatest food resources were fish for those who could exploit it . (Neolithic Danish eel spear just like modern ones here).

I think the African-like people would have been found away from the coasts in forested areas. European myths, legends, and folk tales talk about wood-sprites.

The moral codes of the great majority of human cultures in practice strongly distinguish between members of the group and outsiders.

Our scientific knowledge of the universe does not indicate that any morality whatsoever is part of the fundamental structure of the universe. Biological evolution including human history has no moral meaning. This is something that is very hard for many people to accept. It is not at all a “pagan” view as pre-Christian pagans, at least in classical civilization, certainly conceived of their gods as moral agents.

“I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction.”

Isn’t the main benefit of morality to promote the survival of the group in which such behaviors develop and is often at the expense of outsiders?

“. . . one genocide doesn’t justify another. I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction. Everything else is sophistry.”

While these conjectures about genetic diffusions, replacements and assimilations are very interesting, there seems to be a contradiction latent in this sequence of extracted assertions.

Peter Frost,

No offense but a lot of what you say is simply wrong.

http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php/41453-Eurogenes-v3?p=1202944&viewfull=1#post1202944

Ironically or otherwise, the groups now subsuming Europeans and their descendants are gaining their hegemony solely through overbreeding.

And certainly less ironically, but tragically, the same descendants of old-time Europe are facilitating their own extinction. In any other time, groups which overpopulated so far beyond the bounds of sustainability would meet with famine.

Europeans and their descendants, however, are giving–not even selling, but giving–Africans, Latinos, and Asians the rope with which they themselves will be hanged.

@” We are Ethiopians, therefore, who have been transformed from blackness to whiteness. St. Jerome (347-420 A.D.)

Clearly St. Jerome refers to the episode of the baptism of the Ethiopian Eunuch by the Apostle Philip, in the Acts of the Apostles, 8, 26-40.

The Pelasgians were extant in historical times. Most sources on them aren’t mythical. They were linguistically distinct from Greeks. There are undeciphered incriptions in languages that don’t seem Indo-European that were probably left by them. But, as far as I know, the Greeks who wrote about the Pelasgians never described them as being visually distinct.

There is an inscription on Lemnos in a language that resembles Etruscan. The Etruscans in Italy left a lot of pictorial representations of themsleves. They looked modern Mediterranean.

Living a farming lifestyle has a selection pressure on the population. If farming spreads through cultural diffusion to a neighbouring population, who have similar roots, then similar selection pressures will occur, making them more similar to the original farming population. How can you distinguish between this kind of change, and the other kind of change – physical takeover, war etc?

Another question. Does farming make people more sedentary, and less war-like? And are hunter gatherers more aggressive and roaming? Intuitively, the answer seems to be yes, and yet all I hear about early history is that farmers spread and took over everywhere. Did hunter gatherers ever take over farmers territory?

“black heart” … “white heart” …
The term “lily-livered” survives in modern English

Lily-livered

… the liver … It was thought to be the organ that created blood and that a poorly functioning liver was the cause of mental or physical weakness.
…
By contrast, a robust liver supplying ample blood was thought to create rosy cheeks glowing with ruddy good health. References to ‘ruddy’ meaning ‘healthy’ date from the 14th century.

Of their own passions. That’s how the ancient Jews saw it. They felt that the Egyptians were not made for freedom and had to be controlled. Even the Pharaoh was seen as being just another cog in the wheel.

More irrational and ignorant nonsense. Who controlled the Egyptians, their jewish slaves? GTFO…

The Egyptians founded the grandest, and longest lasting, of all the ancient civilizations. The ancient greeks acknowledged their civilizational debt to Egypt, which makes Egypt the grandmother of western civilization. Isn’t it utterly idiotic to call such an influential and impressive civilization a House of Slaves?

Secondly, Noah did not curse the children of Ham to being slaves of passion (as if humans in general are free of passion). But to being slaves of the descendants of Noah’s other sons. As anyone who has read the Bible knows it was the jews who ended up as slaves of the egyptians for many centuries. Not vice versa. Noah’s prophecy failed to materialize. He was no prophet, by definition.

Btw, egyptian must be the mother of the afro-asiatic languages which includes hebrew. Along with ethiopian, arabic, coptic, berber, somali, hausa etc. So the Old Testament itself is written in a language that could be seen as a dialect of ancient egypt. After all, the hebrew slaves must have spoken their egyptian master’s language.

To have a “black rump” meant to be brave and strong; to have a “white rump” meant to be cowardly.

The color is caused by being flushed with blood and not from tanning or pigmentation. When a person exerts himself physically, blood will rush to the surface of the skin to cool the body and will make it flush red. We have the word “ruddy” that has the same meaning. When a person is frightened we say they turned “white as a sheet”. These metaphors require a people whose skin is pale enough to see the blood under the skin.

In Macbeth, the word “black” is used as the opposite of a face turned pale when frightened. He is told to bruise his cheeks so that they will turn red with flushed blood.

Macbeth

May the devil turn you black, you white-faced fool! Why do you look like a frightened goose?
…
SERVANT: There are ten thousand … Soldiers, sir.
…
Go pinch your cheeks and bring some color back into your face, you cowardly boy.

Santa has a healthy, ruddy complexion:

A Visit from St. Nicholas

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;

Note red tiles on cheeks:
sixth-century mosaic of Jesus at Basilica of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy

Note cheeks:
Byzantine Mosaic In Hagia Sophia

Why does a frightened person’s face/skin turn pale?

… because their body turns on the fight or flight response, … all the blood drains from their face and neck and starts circulating around the heart and lungs for increased energy, therefore the person looks pale.

They might be the Pelasgians of the Greek myth, there was people speaking Etruscan-like language in some Greek islands well into the Classical period.

Darker male tones were initially prestigious in Greco-Roman society and, to a lesser extent, in medieval Europe as well. In Greek poetry, a man’s “black” skin symbolized his courage and ability to fight well. To have a “black rump” meant to be brave and strong; to have a “white rump” meant to be cowardly. A “black heart” denoted strong emotions, a “white heart” indifference or a refusal to act. Cowardice resulted from having a “white liver. (The term “lily-livered” survives in modern English). Even today, a fair complexion in a man can be viewed as effeminate.

Yet in this same post you claim that it was the internal wiring of the early christians, not the lies of the jews, that led them to believe that Noah’s curse meant that Egypt was the House of Slaves because of the black color of its denizens . How the heck do you manage to contradict yourself in the same post? Did their internal wiring suddenly mutate when those pagan greeks and romans converted to christianity?

The greeks and romans were big fans of Egypt, and contemptuous of Israel. The rise of christianity changed all that. As the link in my previous post says:

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7641.html

when Christianity and Islam accepted the Jewish Bible as part of their heritage, they inherited as well some of Judaism’s interpretations of its sacred text…..Sometimes these church fathers quote a contemporary, usually anonymous, Jewish source (e.g., “the Hebrew”). Many times they transmit a Jewish interpretation without attribution.

” I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction. Everything else is sophistry.”
That’s a neopagan worldview. The “universe” you are believing in is obviously an “universe” which doesn’t include a Christian god or a Christian heaven. Well, you are entitled to your own worldview, but don’t mix that up with science, please.

The Koch Brothers have recently supported attempts to end or reduce the forced integration and desegregation of schools. But yeah, keep pushing the lie that the Kochs are just like Soros and just as anti-white as Soros.

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/08/koch-brothers-school-segregation-americans-prosperity

In reality, there are deep connections between the Kochs and Wake County, and it’s all about the money. The latest installment in the left-leaning Brave New Foundation’s “Koch Brothers Exposed” video series claims that a Koch-founded and funded outfit, Americans for Prosperity, fueled a campaign to “resegregate” the schools of Wake County, a prosperous area in central North Carolina that’s home to the cities of Raleigh and Cary, among others.

The story starts back in 2009, when elections were held for four of Wake County’s nine school board seats—enough seats to dictate the public school district’s agenda if all four board members wanted the same reforms. That’s where Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, came into play. AFP funded a local grassroots group, WakeCARES, that organized on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district’s policy of busing to ensure diverse, desegregated public schools.* The four candidates ran against what they called “forced busing”—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.

The way that this article reads, it seems that you believe that there are only two options: violent total replacement, or peaceful cultural diffusion. I doubt that you believe this. The third (and probably most common) option is violent partial replacement, which you seem to be lumping in with cultural diffusion.

Take the Norman invasion for example. Apparently DNA studies don’t show the English having much Norman DNA but we know (just look at surnames) that there was an influence. The Norman invasion turned England away from the Germano-Celtic way of life towards the French and resulted in some big cultural changes.

I assume that farming spread north from Mesoamerica in the same way, with the second sons moving a little farther north each generation and marrying into the local populations, with the mesoamerican DNA getting diluted at each stage of the journey.

There were odd looking people in the north too. In what was now Sweden 8000 years ago was the Motola hunter gatherers who were of diverse skin colour and 4/7 had the Asian EDAR mutations, which has effects on appearance including hair, teeth, ears, breasts and sweat glands so the Motala people looked (and smelled) unlike any group of modern Europeans.

The Motala people are only known from an unfortunate group that ended up with their heads mounted on stakes. The time frame suggest Doggerlanders.

THERE would have been huge population shifts,” says Clive Waddington of Derbyshire-based Archaeological Research Services Ltd. “People who were living out in what is now the North Sea would have been displaced very quickly.” Some headed for Britain. At Howick in Northumberland, on the cliffs that run along Britain’s northeast coast and would therefore have been the first hills they saw, his team has found the remains of a dwelling that had been rebuilt three times in a span of 150 years. Among the earliest evidence of a settled lifestyle in Britain, the hut dates from around 7900 B.C. Waddington interprets its repeated habitation as a sign of increasing territoriality: the resident people defending their patch against waves of displaced Doggerlanders

Myths and legends don’t come better than Atlantis.

[…] color. Those character and personality traits impact culture, which in turn has impacted biology. This article by Peter Frost is a great explanation of how biology, culture and environment work on one another simultaneously. […]

The middle class has been declining in all Western countries, all of which have been significantly socialistic in the postwar period.

The fact that they’re able to tithe has everything to do with state socialism. Willing has nothing to do with it. Willing doesn’t matter if you’re unable to do something. They’re enabled by state socialism.

I believe that you’re intellectually dishonest when you imply that Soros and the Kochs are equally anti-white. The Kochs participate in the political game and thus aren’t and can’t be perfect and end up supporting things like “Latino outreach”. Donald Trump is also a billionaire who has been pro-minority and immigrant “outreach” in the recent past. That doesn’t mean Trump is the same as Soros. The Kochs have also in the recent past supported anti-immigration and anti-immigrant legislation such as Arizona’s SB1070 and voter ID laws in states to suppress non-white voting. To suggest that the Kochs and Soros have the same motivations and desires and have and would have the same impact is willful intellectual dishonesty.

The lef-right “consensus” is neo-liberalism. It’s not “right-wing libertarianism”.

I understood Peter’s point to be that while Soros is pro-immigrationist, he is not libertarian, whereas in the case of Koch it is just the other way around. Peter’s conclusion appears to be that this is just a nominal difference – the sum of the evils remains constant.
You, OTOH, had previously expressed your belief in the most salient tenet of libertarianism.
The fact that you just re-paste text shows how difficult it will be to have a discussion.
Re Asian welfare: it is not at all clear why you believe that your laundry list shows what you claim it does. Are you saying that without “small-business laws” etc Asian business owners would not make redistributable profits? Seriously?

The American middle class has been shrinking because of socialism. Costs have been socialized onto the middle class. And the state has become The Man for many women, providing benefits, employment, and favorable legislation that replaces husbands, leading to demographic decline of the middle class.

Mosque or temple welfare depends on tithing, which depends on income earning congregants, who depend on state socialism – favorable family migration policies, government benefits, small business laws, non-discrimination and equality legislation, etc.

Again, it’s completely preposterous and intellectually dishonest to imply that Soros and the Kochs are equally anti-white. Soros aggressively promotes Cultural Marxism, socialism and political power for non-whites, and policies amenable to usurious, rent-seeking financiers like himself, and open borders, in the US, Europe, and throughout the world. The Koch brothers don’t, and they have even funded anti-immigration legislation in the past through the American Legislative Exchange Council and supported Arizona’s SB1070 anti-immigration legislation. Soros has never and will never promote any sort of anti-immigration or pro-discrimination policies and legislation. In fact, Soros promoted opposition to Arizona’s SB1070.

What you label “libertarianism on steroids” is neither libertarian nor what the Kochs support. It’s Soros style neo-liberalism coupled with socialism for non-whites.

This slavery thing: Can you really not imagine why the Egyptians might be called slaves by the Jews – for, well, non-literal reasons?

And this zero tax, zero welfare thing is rather ambitious. I don’t recall any post-tribal culture that did not have some form of them. But maybe you can educate me. Or is it just that you want any solidarity to remain intra-racial?
At any rate, since you have millions of hours of efforts at persuasion before you, why start in a place where it seems to be somewhat offtopic?