The Morphology of Neolithic Farmers- Brace et al

[djoser-xyyman]

Thank to Swenet of ES for putting me onto this paper


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QUOTE:
The research of Hubbe et. al. indicates that humans migrated out of Africa (OOA) during the Upper Paleolithic with physical characteristics (phenetic affinity) closely resembling recent tropical Africans. Only during the Holocene did these populations begin to diverege phenetically to resemble recent populations from the Americas, Europe and East Asia. As the evidence from the Olmec, Kish, Mohenjo-Darro, Kurgans, etc. indicate, this process of phenetic divergence was still taking place as late as the Iron Age.
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Yes, It is clear that there were dramatic morphological changes beginning in the bronze age.

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The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form - C. Loring Brace*†, Noriko Seguchi


Many human craniofacial dimensions are largely of neutral adaptive significance, and an analysis of their variation can serve as an indication of the extent to which any given population is genetically related to or differs from any other. When 24 craniofacial measurements of a series of human populations are used to generate neighbor-joining dendrograms, it is no surprise that all modern European groups, ranging all of the way from Scandinavia to eastern Europe and throughout the Mediterranean to the Middle East, show that they are closely related to each other. THE SURPRISE IS THAT THE NEOLITHIC PEOPLES OF EUROPE AND THEIR BRONZE AGE SUCCESSORS ARE NOT CLOSELY RELATED TO THE MODERN INHABITANTS, ALTHOUGH THE PREHISTORIC_MODERN TIES ARE SOMEWHAT MORE APPARENT IN SOUTHERN EUROPE. It is a further surprise that the Epipalaeolithic Natufian of Israel from whom the Neolithic realm was assumed to arise has a clear link to Sub-Saharan Africa. Basques and Canary Islanders are clearly associated with modern Europeans. When canonical variates are plotted, neither sample ties in with Cro-Magnon as was once suggested. The data treated here support the idea that the Neolithic moved out of the Near East into the circum-Mediterranean areas and Europe by a process of demic diffusion but that subsequently the in situ residents of those areas, derived from the Late Pleistocene inhabitants, absorbed both the agricultural life way and the people who had brought it.
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It is clear , now, Brace was wrong on the “in situ” assumption. The Farmers replace the HG but apparently there was substantial morphological changes “recently”.

[djoser-xyyman]

From the study:

Here we offer an assessment based on a comparison of a set of metric dimensions of both prehistoric and more recent human craniofacial morphology. Craniofacial analysis has been previously applied to this question, but the comparison to living populations was not done (16). It has already been shown that the quantitative treatment of craniofacial form produces a picture of the movement of human populations from Asia into the New World that is largely compatible with the picture produced by the molecular genetic comparison of nucleotide haplotypes (17, 18)


Here we offer a comparable treatment of samples of recent and prehistoric human populations running from the Middle East to the western edge of the Eurasian continent, north to Crimea, east to Mongolia, and southward through Nubia and Somalia plus samples from North Africa and representatives of the Niger- Congo-speaking peoples of Sub-Saharan Africa (Table 1). Teeth and the tooth-bearing parts of facial skeletons of course do reflect differences in response to the forces of selection on different populations (23), but they were left out of our analysis.(WHY??)

[djoser-xyyman]

from the same part of the world than with more distant peoples. What does come as a surprise is that the Neolithic samples tend to tie with Neolithic samples across the entire range from east to west but do not cluster with the living people in many of the areas tested. There is more of a link between the prehistoric and modern samples in southern Europe as opposed to the picture in central and northern Europe. Much the same is true for the Bronze Age samples, although th

Late Pleistocene Epipalaeolithic (34) of Israel, and there was no usable Neolithic sample for the Near East Despite the small numbers and scattered locations of the Late Pleistocene specimens, they tend to cluster with each other rather than with any groups of more recent date.


These nonmetric attributes all support the view that most of the Neolithic inhabitants of Europe tie more closely together with each other than with the living representatives of the areas in question. The principal exception to this generalization is one of the two

[djoser-xyyman]

The Niger-Congo speakers (Congo, Dahomey, and Haya) cluster closely with each other and a bit less closely with the Nubian sample (both the recent and the Bronze Age Nubians) and more remotely with the Naqada Bronze Age sample of Egypt, the modern Somalis, and the Arabic-speaking Fellaheen (farmers) of Israel. ie BEDOIUNS!!!!!!!. When those samples are separated and run in a single analysis as in Fig. 1, there clearly is a tie between them that is diluted the farther one gets from Sub-Saharan Africa. The other obvious matter shown in Fig. 3 is the separate identity of the northern Europeans. This matter is treated in the next section.


When the Basques are run with the other samples used in Fig. 1, they link with Germany and more remotely with the Canary Islands. They are clearly European, although the length of their twig indicates that they have a distinction all their own. It is clear, however, that they do not represent a survival of the kind of craniofacial form indicated by Cro-Magnon any more than do the Canary Islanders, nor does either sample tie in with the Berbers of North Africa as has previously been claimed (38, 45–46). This is particularly well documented when the 18 variables are used to generate a plot of the first two canonical variates as shown in Fig. 4. In this figure, one can see a clear link between the Niger-Congo sample and the Natufians. The Prehistoric _Recent Northeast African sample also has a subsequent link to the Niger-Congo sample in Fig. 3. Yet the D2 values in Table 3 show that it is slightly closer to Late Prehistoric Eurasia than to the Algerian Neolithic, Modern Europe, and Modern

[djoser-xyyman]

Interestingly enough, Cro-Magnon is not close to any more recent sample. Clearly, Cro-Magnon is not the same as the Basque or Canary Island samples. Fig. 4 plots the
{Xyyman comment: So is cro-magnon WHG – ala La Brana?}

If this analysis shows nothing else, it demonstrates that the oft-repeated European feeling that the Cro-Magnons are ‘‘us’’ (47) is more a product of anthropological folklore than the result of the metric data available from the skeletal remains.


Conclusions
The assessment of prehistoric and recent human craniofacial dimensions supports the picture documented by genetics that the extension of Neolithic agriculture from the Near East westward to Europe and across North Africa was accomplished by a process of demic diffusion (11–15). If the Late Pleistocene Natufian sample from Israel is the source from which that Neolithic spread was derived, then there was clearly a Sub- Saharan African element present of almost equal importance as the Late Prehistoric Eurasian element. At the same time, the failure of the Neolithic and Bronze Age samples in central and northern Europe to tie to the modern inhabitants supports the suggestion that, while a farming mode of subsistence was spread westward and also north to Crimea and east to Mongolia by actual movement of communities of farmers, the indigenous foragers in each of those areas ultimately absorbed both the agricultural subsistence strategy and also the people who had brought it. The interbreeding of the incoming Neolithic people with the in situ foragers diluted the Sub-Saharan traces that may have come with the Neolithic spread so that no discoverable element of that remained. This picture of a mixture between the incoming farmers and the in situ foragers had originally been supported by the archaeological record alone (6, 9, 33, 34, 48, 49), but this view is now reinforced by the analysis of the skeletal morphology of the people of those areas where prehistoric and recent remains can be metrically compared.
{Xyyman comment: modern genetics have clarified a few things. The sub-saharan traces in Europe still do exist}

[djoser-xyyman]

pics to come

[djoser-xyyman]

[djoser-xyyman]

[djoser-xyyman]

[zarahan]

"QUOTE:
The research of Hubbe et. al. indicates that humans migrated out of Africa (OOA) during the Upper Paleolithic with physical characteristics (phenetic affinity) closely resembling recent tropical Africans. Only during the Holocene did these populations begin to diverege phenetically to resemble recent populations from the Americas, Europe and East Asia. As the evidence from the Olmec, Kish, Mohenjo-Darro, Kurgans, etc. indicate, this process of phenetic divergence was still taking place as late as the Iron Age."

^^XYZ where is the above statement from? Is this Swenet or a direct
quote from Hube study? Can you give exact citation? Thanks

[djoser-xyyman]

No it is not from Hubbe et al. It was Evergreen of ES IIRC. Although I am now beginning to agrre with the statement.