As I’ve been reporting, the burgeoning science of ancient DNA (aDNA) is puncturing a whole lot of ideological conceits.
One of the first was the obviously ludicrous denial of race from within the scientific establishment. As aDNA and the proliferation of genetic geneology is now showing, far from a ‘social construct’, race is as objectively real as the gender binary.
Next to fall is the bizarre ideology of Afrocentrism. Commonly lampooned as the ‘We Wuz Kangz’ movement, this is the racist ideology that claims that sub-Saharan black Africans were the ‘real’ originators of everything from the pyramids of Egypt, to Greek philosophy, and even Stonehenge. As for legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal? Of course he’s been blackwashed by Netflix.
The reality, as I reported recently, is the Hannibal and the rest of the Punic people of North Africa, mostly originated from the Iberian peninsula, the Levant, Sicily and the Aegean. In other words, they were mostly European, with an admixture from the Near East – definitely not black sub-Saharans.
Now, another newly published aDNA study demolishes the Afrocentrists’ proudest boast: that they ‘built the pyramids’. In fact, as previous DNA studies have shown, sub-Saharan Africa contributed almost nothing to the population of Egypt. The new study shows that, in fact, from the very beginnings of Egypt, its founding populations came from the Near East. Indeed, the cradle of civilisation itself.
Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt.
The remains are 4800 to 4500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as to people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature.
Particularly important is that the result comes not from the pharaonic elite, but from much more common stock. Because earlier studies looked at the DNA of nobility, the excuse peddled was that these weren’t representative of the majority of Egyptian commoners.
The rest of the ancient Egyptian man’s bones revealed more details about his life. Evidence of arthritis and osteoporosis suggest he died at an advanced age for the time, possibly in his 60s. Other signs of wear indicate a life of physical toil, sitting hunched over on hard surfaces. On the basis of this and imagery from other tombs from this period, he might have been a potter, said co-author Joel Irish, a bioarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University, at the press briefing.
Still, he was wealthy enough to afford mummification, which supports the idea that he was a potter: an artisan, who manufactured high-value goods, rather than a peasant labourer. Nonetheless, as a commoner, he was clearly representative of the common ruck of the Egyptian population.
The majority of his DNA resembled that of early farmers from the Neolithic period of North Africa around 6000 years ago. The rest most closely matched people in Mesopotamia, a historical Middle Eastern region that was home to the ancient Sumerian civilization, and was where some of the first writing systems emerged.
aDNA from further south, at a time when the Sahara was a lush savannah rather than the hostile desert of today, demolishes another popular recent conceit. The claim that Australian Aborigines have inhabited the continent for 60,000 years is parroted mindlessly by the chattering classes, despite the fact that the ‘evidence’ is thin to non-existent and generally regarded as unconvincing by the archaeological community.
aDNA from North Africa levels another blow at the claim.
Ancient DNA extracted from two women who died in what is now Libya around 7,000 years ago is now helping researchers to reconstruct the origins of these early Saharans. The women’s DNA profiles, described in a study published on 2 April in Nature, represent the first full Saharan genomes from the African Humid Period – and reveal that the people were remarkably isolated from other African populations.
The African Humid Period, between 14,500 and 5,000 years ago, was a warm, wet period that saw the Sahara turn green. Remains from 15 people buried at the Takarkori site in south-western Libya, between 8,900 and 4,800 years ago are providing a tantalising timeline of humanity’s diaspora from the African cradle.
This revealed that the women belonged to a population that broke off from sub-Saharan Africans 60,000 years ago, around the same time as the ancestors of all modern humans who settled outside of Africa. This hinted that ancient North Africans remained genetically isolated from almost all other Africans for most of prehistory […]
The analysis further suggested that the Takarkori women were more closely related to a person who died 45,000 years ago in what is now the Czech Republic than to a person whose 4,500-year-old remains were found in East Africa.
So, humans only began to spread from Africa 60,000 years ago and over the next 15,000 years spread north into Central Europe – but are supposed to have practically teleported to the other side of the globe and over the formidable barrier of the Wallace Line in almost no time at all?
Hands up who really believes that?
