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Also I wonder if that lady relizes Europeans are not the only ones on Earth to have Narrow Noses and thin lips.

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^ thick nose, thin nose, prognathism, orthagonism.....

ah yes, the dog-chases-tail race discourse.

a mark of intelligence is to discontinue this fruitless discourse, and move on.

Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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make tese bogus claims of East Africans not being mixed

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^ Are Europeans mixed. Are they all unmixed?

The blondes and brunettes?

The pale skinned and olive skinned?

The curely haired and the straight haired.

Those who have almost entirely R1b lineaeges from paleolithic Europe, and those who have 25% East African E3b and another 25% Arabian Peninsula J?

Those Europeans with Benin Hbs sickle haplotype?

These Europeans....



Unless you can prove Europeans are not mixed - which you can't - then mixture is irrelevant to your argument, and your reply is retarded.

Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Sekhmet225:
The "race" of Ancient Egyptians will not make it belong to any one race of people because Egypt's greatness belongs to the human race;

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.

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Originally posted by White Nord:
Anton does not explain what makes him North African vs African in general.

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Anton:
"African ancestry, ***possibly** north african.

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"the skull overall, including aspects of the face, spoke fairly strongly of his African origins - the nose was a bit unusual.

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north african came mostly from the shape of the face including the narrow nose opening, that is not entirely consistent with an 'African'designation.

...

I did say that the narrow nose was what led me to suggest North Africa as a possibility and that a narrow nose is more typically seen in Europe.

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One of the human phenotypic traits that holds the greatest diversity is cranial morphology. Because of this fact, cranial features can at times be misleading if not taken into proper context. For example, for a long time features like long narrow faces and narrow noses have been associated with “caucasian” or “caucasoid” people even though such features are present in populations throughout the globe from Africa to the Americas. The same can be said about so-called “negroid” features such as broad faces and noses which are also not just confined to Africans but various peoples in Asia, the Pacific, the Americas ('African' Olmecs anyone?) etc.

Jean Hiernaux
The People of Africa(Peoples of the World Series)

"The oldest remains of Homo sapiens sapiens found in East Africa were associated with an industry having similarities with the Capsian. It has been called Upper Kenyan Capsian, although its derivation from the North African Capsian is far from certain. At Gamble's Cave in Kenya, five human skeletons were associated with a late phase of the industry, Upper Kenya Capsian C, which contains pottery. A similar association is presumed for a skeleton found at Olduvai, which resembles those from Gamble's Cave. The date of Upper Kenya Capsian C is not precisely known (an earlier phase from Prospect Farm on Eburru Mountain close to Gamble's Cave has been dated to about 8000 BC); but the presence of pottery indicates a rather later date, perhaps around 400 BC. The skeletons are of very tall people. They had long, narrow heads, and relatively long, narrow faces. The nose was of medium width; and prognathism, when present, was restricted to the alveolar, or tooth-bearing, region......all their features can be found in several living populations of East Africa, like the Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi, who are very dark skinned and differ greatly from Europeans in a number of body proportions.............
From the foregoing, it is tempting to locate the area of differentiation of these people in the interior of East Africa. There is every reason to believe that they are ancestral to the living 'Elongated East Africans'. Neither of these populations, fossil and modern, should be considered to be closely related to the populations of Europe and western Asia."

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White Nord:Thus she classifies him as “North African.” [...] So is it African or North African? Or more specifically Caucasian [...] why Anton refuses to be specific in designating Tut a racial classification:

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Anton:
I personally don't find that term all that useful and so I don't use it.

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White Nord:
Ironic remark considering this is from someone who was paid to do the

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Susan Anton:
“biological profile (assessment of age at death,sex and ancestry)”

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Which is why we have keen observations like these:

Jean Hiernaux "The People of Africa" 1975
p.53, 54

"In sub-Saharan Africa, many anthropological characters show a wide range of population means or frequencies. In some of them, the whole world range is covered in the sub-continent. Here live the shortest and the tallest human populations, the one with the highest and the one with the lowest nose, the one with the thickest and the one with the thinnest lips in the world. In this area, the range of the average nose widths covers 92 per cent of the world range: only a narrow range of extremely low means are absent from the African record. Means for head diameters cover about 80 per cent of the world range; 60 per cent is the corresponding value for a variable once cherished by physical anthropologists, the cephalic index, or ratio of the head width to head length expressed as a percentage....."

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quote:

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Originally posted by Alive-(What Box):

quote:

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Caucasian 1. adj. Of or being a purported human racial classification traditionally distinguished by light [?] to brown skin color [?] and including peoples indigenous to Europe, N Africa, W Asia, and India. Not in scientific use. 2. Of the Caucasus. n. 1. Anthro. A member of the Caucasian racial classification. 2. A native inhabitant of the Caucasus.

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The Caucasus is a mountain region.

There's more:

quote:

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Caucasoid adj. Of or relating to the Caucasian racial classification. Not in scientific use.

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But most laymen will continue to do what they're free to:

that is believe what they want to believe in regardless of factual basis or lack thereof.

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I think these particular quotes were from my American heritage dictionary.

But you can get them from any modern dictionary.

The reason these terms are no longer in scientific use?

One reason is such skulls can be found all over the world, in the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, and do not imply related ancetry.

For instance, Austrailians and Andaman Islanders may have a bit of a stereotypical African look, but they're actually closest related to Asians.

White Europeans and all shades of people in the Arabian peninsula in fact have more recent African ancestors than do they.

Accepting those types of racial labels is what has led to people claiming this



is a 'negro', when infact it's an indigenous Meso-American.

quote:

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White Nord:Caucasian nose [...] "negroid" or "black,"

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and African does not denote race

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the American and French teams

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..didn't do a double-blinded reconstruction, as did this double-blinded unbias American team:



Here are Africans with more narrow faces, who arez a tad wider in the nasal pathway, and who's noses (nostrils) are wider than that of Prince Tutankhamun.



The thing about racial appearances, is that 99% of the difference is in soft tissue, which skeletons don't have.

Skeleton:



Mummies:

Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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You say North African as if you think it is exclusive of African, she doesn't, that's where you're confused.

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Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Sekhmet225:
The "race" of Ancient Egyptians will not make it belong to any one race of people because Egypt's greatness belongs to the human race; as a people they belong to Egypt. And I'm sure Egypt's seen a pharoah in every shade. There can never be a fine racial line in a place where there was so much power and wealth. This term is evident even today. Egyptians where aware of racial differences but it didn't define or divide them. Let's take credit for Egypt as humanity and live all the details to the rightful owners of that great civilization: The Egyptians in every shade and hue.

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Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Alive-(What Box):
Sundiata.

I have a question for you concerning the demographics of modern Egypt.

I know that no large scale migration from Asia could have happened prior to the Middle Kingdom.

And well into it - even given the Hyksos such a diffusion claim is questionable given the sheer 'bloody', and 'take no prisoners' nature of their invasion and expulsion.

My question is this:

When do we see the most significant shift in terms of Egypt's demographic?

If I'm not mistaken it occured during Greek rule?

This would be consistant with the fact of population continuity in terms of affinities from Pre-Dynastic on through Late Dynastic times.

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Of course, this was a continuity *with gradual change* - there exists today a South-North cline generally with the more indigenous (like those in the Phaoronic era) in the South and those less-so in the North. But all are admixed with foreigners. No one denies this. Heck, the Beja (of Sudan) are believed to bear the closest resemblance to the citizens of ancient Kemet.

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"There is limb ratio and craniofacial morphological and metric CONTINUITY in Upper-Egypt-Nubia in a broad sense from the late paleolithic through dynastic periods, although change occured." - Keita, Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships.

...

"The variability in the population in Upper Egypt increased, as its isolation decreased, with increasing social complexity of southern Egypt from the predynastic through dynastic periods (Keita 1992). The Upper Egyptian population apparently began to converge skeletally on Lower Egyptian patterns through the dynastic epoch; whether this is primarily due to gene flow or other factors has yet to be finally determined. The Lower Egyptian pattern is intermediate to that of the various northern Europeans and West African and Khoisan." - Keita.

And you could still see many of the types of Dynastic times in modern Egypt. There was a wonderfully perfect example of this that Djehuti used to post, of these Egyptian kids wherein you could see individuals of "East African", so-called "Mediteranian", "West African", and traces of so-called 'Asian/Mongoliod/San' physical appearance.

But it got taken down.












...

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Posts: 4021 | From: Bay Area, CA | Registered: Mar 2007  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Sundiata:
I was never really forced to think of it in those terms since as you say in this same post, I'd figured the shift was gradual. But literally, if I were to ponder where that shift was most accelerated, I'd have to agree as this is even reflected in one of Irish's dental studies. He'd found a continuity from the pre-dynastic Badarian, all the way into the late dynastic, that was abruptly broken during this era. The Greco-Roman mummy portraits of al-Fayyum also show some evidence of "mixing" among the Greek settlers (unless some of those Greeks already possessed some degree of African ancestry).

quote:

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Of course, this was a continuity *with gradual change* - there exists today a South-North cline generally with the more indigenous (like those in the Phaoronic era) in the South and those less-so in the North. But all are admixed with foreigners. No one denies this. Heck, the Beja (of Sudan) are believed to bear the closest resemblance to the citizens of ancient Kemet.

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Agreed. That's why it's so complicated though I do put more emphasis on the south when examining the presence of indigenous representatives of the ancient population. Despite the cline, as Keita points out:

"Cosmopolitan northern Egypt is less likely to have a population representative of the core indigenous population of the most ancient times".- Keita (2005), pp. 564

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The Islamic invasions can't be overstated either. Such is ultimately responsible for the most enduring language shift, religious affiliation/shift, and cultural shift. It goes without saying that it was the source of a significant demographic shift as well. Egypt has been through a lot.

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Nice pictures btw..

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Posts: 5555 | From: Tha 5th Dimension. | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by ausar:
From: "Susan C Anton" <susan.anton@nyu.edu> [Add to Address Book] Add to Address Book
To: email withheld


Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 12:26:22 -0400
Subject: Re: North African ''caucasoid'' and European nose opening Tut-ankh-amu

Dear name withheld,,
Thanks for your email. I actually didn't choose the term "North
African
Caucasoid" that is the term used by another team (there were three that
worked on separate reconstructions). The French team was responsible
for the reconstruction that was on the cover of National Geographic
Magazine and they also used that term.

Our team, myself and Michael Anderson of Yale, were the ones that did
the plaster reconstruction without knowledge of whose skull we were
working on. I did the biological profile (assessment of age at death,
sex and ancestry), Michael made the actual reconstruction. Based on
the
physical characters of the skull, I concluded that this was the skull
of
a male older than 15 but less than 21, and likely in the 18-20 year
range and of African ancestry, possibly north african. The possibly
north african came mostly from the shape of the face including the
narrow nose opening, that is not entirely consistent with an 'African'
designation. A narrow nose is more typical of more northerly located
populations because nose breadth is thought to be at least in part
related to the climate in which ancestral populations lived. A narrow
and tall nose is seen most frequently in Europeans. Tut's head was a
bit of a conundrum, but, as you note, there is a huge range of
variation
in modern humans from any area, so for me the skull overall, including
aspects of the face, spoke fairly strongly of his African origins - the
nose was a bit unusual. Because their is latitudinal variation in
several aspects of the skull (including nose size/shape), the
narrowness
of the nose suggested that he might be from a northerly group. This is
also, I presume, what the French focussed on. I have not been in
direct
contact with the French group, but my understanding is that by their
definition of 'caucasoid' they include Peoples from North Africa,
Peoples from Western Asia (and the Caucasus, from where the term
derives), and Eureopean peoples. So I don't think that they were
referring to a specific set of those peoples. I personally don't find
that term all that useful and so I don't use it. That it was
attributed
to me by the media is an incorrect attribution on their part. I also
never said he had a European nose, although I am sure I did say that
the
narrow nose was what led me to suggest North Africa as a possibility
and
that a narrow nose is more typically seen in Europe. Not a great
sound-bit that, so I guess it gets shortened to European nose.

As you also note, skin color today in North Africa can range from much
lighter than what they chose to much darker. And we don't know how
well today's range matches that of the past, although I suspect there
was also a range of variation in the past, as is normal for any
biological population. Michael's reconstruction did not include an
inference of skin color (or eye color), the French team's did and their
inference was, I understand, based on a 'average' skin tone for Egypt
today. I don't know the specifics of how they did that. I think,
however, it would have been as accurate to have had the same facial
reconstruction with either a lighter tone or a darker tone to the skin.
That said, skin and eye color will always be an inference.

I hope that helps explain.
Susan

Susan C. Antón
Joint Editor, Journal of Human Evolution
Director, MA Program in Human Skeletal Biology
Associate Professor, Center for the Study of Human Origins
Department of Anthropology NYU
25 Waverly Place,
New York, NY 10003
(212)992-9786

MA program website http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/anthro/programs/biology/index.html

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Posts: 70 | From: Australia | Registered: Sep 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
^ White Nerd.

Please do not pollute this forum with your retarded replies.

quote:

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make tese bogus claims of East Africans not being mixed

---

^ Are Europeans mixed. Are they all unmixed?

The blondes and brunettes?

The pale skinned and olive skinned?

The curely haired and the straight haired.

Those who have almost entirely R1b lineaeges from paleolithic Europe, and those who have 25% East African E3b and another 25% Arabian Peninsula J?

Those Europeans with Benin Hbs sickle haplotype?

These Europeans....



Unless you can prove Europeans are not mixed - which you can't - then mixture is irrelevant to your argument, and your reply is retarded.

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Posts: 70 | From: Australia | Registered: Sep 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

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Originally posted by Egmond Codfried:
http://sankofaworldpublishers.com/Queen%20Tiye.jpg

Queen Tiye

King Tut's grandmother Queen Tiye

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Posts: 70 | From: Australia | Registered: Sep 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

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Originally posted by qoucela:
The fact that this lady editing a respected and refereed journal on human evolution had the audacity to say that a narrow and tall nose is "more frequently seen among Europeans", as if she had never seen modern Somali, Ethiopian and Eritrean population shows why this debate is still going on after decades. The only difference is earlier physical anthropologists seemed to be more aware of the historical factors (like immigration), and the fact that most Egyptian skeletal remains were indistinguishable from those of 'Abyssinians" whom most of them nevertheless classified as "Caucasoids".

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^^lol.. "most frequently seen among Europeans" is
dubious, if such reasoning is used to justify classifying
clearly African peoples as something other than African.
Sickle cell disease is seen more in Africa than Europe,
but you notice few European scientists are running
around saying "Tut is black" as a result, nor are
they running around saying "Greeks are black" because
Benin sickle-cell is found among Greeks. ANton
does note that the French researchers have very
stereotypical race categorization views. Interesting
particularly in view of how the French pose as such
"liberal" types in other ways. The struggle will
go on, but the Euro establishment has come a long
way since the ludicrously stereotypical claims
of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s.


------------------------------------------------------------



http://news.discovery.com/history/tut-pharaoh-blood-disease.html

King Tut Died of Blood Disorder: Study
The new finding challenges past assertions that the famous pharaoh died of malaria.

Wed Jun 23, 2010 01:55 PM ET
Content provided by AFP

THE GIST

* A new study asserts that King Tutankhamun was likely killed by the genetic blood disorder sickle cell disease.
* A previous examination had revealed that Tut had died of malaria shortly after suffering a fall.


The man who financed the search for King Tut's tomb had his own buried treasures.

Legendary pharaoh Tutankhamun was probably killed by the genetic blood disorder sickle cell disease, German scientists said Wednesday, rejecting earlier research that suggested he died of malaria.

The team at the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in the northern city of Hamburg questioned the conclusions of a major Egyptian study released in February on the enigmatic boy-king's early demise.

That examination, involving DNA tests and computerized tomography (CT) scans on Tutankhamun's mummy, said he died of malaria after suffering a fall, putting to rest the theory that he was murdered.

But the German researchers said in a letter published online Wednesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association that closer scrutiny of his foot bones pointed to sickle cell disease, in which red blood cells become dangerously misshaped.

"We question the reliability of the genetic data presented in this (the Egyptian) study and therefore the validity of the authors' conclusions," the letter said.

"(The) radiological signs are compatible with osteopathologic lesions seen in sickle cell disease (SCD), a hematological disorder that occurs at gene carrier rates of nine percent to 22 percent in inhabitants of Egyptian oases."

Tutankhamun's death at about 19, after 10 years of rule between 1333 to 1324 B.C., has long been a source of speculation.

One of the most common genetic disorders, sickle cell disease causes blood cells to take the shape of a crescent instead of being smooth and round, thereby blocking blood flow and leading to chronic pain, infections and tissue death.

The researchers called for further DNA tests on Tutankhamun's mummy for a definitive cause of death.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Updated data on narrow noses:




Tropical climates are extremely
diverse – from humid rainforest, to
higher altitude cold zones, to arid deserts
with sharply dropping night
temperatures. Scientists find that nose
width is correlated with climate – with
narrower noses seen in dry, conditions
such as desert areas in eastern parts of
Africa.

QUOTE: "Tropical climates range from
oppressively hot and humid lowlands to
cold, snow-covered mountains, from hot,
dry deserts to cold, dry deserts, from
extreme seasonal variability of
precipitation to nearly constant
year-round conditions."
--Huston. M. (1994) Biological diversity:
the coexistence of species on changing
landscapes Cambridge university Press.
p 498

QUOTE: "An important function of the
nose is to warm and moisten inspired air.
When air is exhaled, some heat and
moisture are lost to the surroundings.
The longer the nasal passage, the more
efficient the nose is for warming and
moistening incoming air and also the
less heat and moisture are lost on
exhalation. A narrow, high nose gives a
longer nasal passage than a low, broad
nose. Therefore, in cold or dry
conditions, a high, narrow nose is
preferable for warming and moistening
air before it reaches the lings, and for
reducing loss of heat and moisture in
expired air. In hot, humid conditions a
low, broad nose serves to dissipate heat
(Wolpoff 1968; Franciscis and Long
1991)... The pattern of variation in nasal
index corresponds very broadly to that
expected if nasal form is indeed an
adaptation to regional climate.

The highest nasal index values, representing
broad, low noses, tend to be those of
populations in humid tropical regions of
Africa and south-east Asia. Populations
with low mean nasal indices (high,
narrow noses) tend to be found in the
cold, northern latitudes, and also in arid
regions, such as the desert areas of east
Africa and the Arabian peninsula.
..Davies found the nasal index taken in
the living was closely correlated with
skeletal nasal index. This suggests that
there should likewise be an association
between skeletal nasal index and
climatic zone, and indeed other workers
have found this to be the case.“
-- Mays. S. (2010). The Archaeology of
Human Bones. Pg 100-101


2011 study finds significant
correlation between nasal shape and
climate. Dry areas are common in
tropical zone micro-climates such as
deserts.

QUOTE: “"The nasal cavity is essential
for humidifying and warming the air
before it reaches the sensitive lungs.
Because humans inhabit environments
that can be seen as extreme from the
perspective of respiratory function, nasal
cavity shape is expected to show
climatic adaptation.. We report
significant correlations between nasal
cavity shape and climatic variables of
both temperature and humidity.
Variation in nasal cavity shape is
correlated with a cline from cold-dry
climates to hot-humid climates, with a
separate temperature and vapor pressure
effect. "
-- Noback, M. et al. (2011)
Climate-related variation of the human
nasal cavity. AJPA, 145: 4. 599-614

Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

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quote:

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Originally posted by userman:
Stanley Crouch

The Afrocentric Hustle

Though their claims have little intellectual substance, advocates of Afrocentrism press their agenda by appealing to resentment and guilt.



Our democracy is founded in tragic optimism, an acceptance of human frailty that is not defeatist. Like the blues singer, our American job is to address the universal limitations of life and the foibles of human character while asserting a lyrical but unsentimental high-mindedness. Like the doctor, our democracy must face the unavoidable varieties of disease, decay, and death, yet maintain
commitment to birth, to health, to the infinite possibilities and freedoms that can result from successful research and experimentation.

It is, therefore, our democratic duty to cast a cold eye on the life of our policies. We have to weed out corruption whenever we encounter it and redeem ourselves from bad or naive policy, either by making fresh experiments or by returning to things that once worked but were set aside for new approaches that promised to do the job better. If we don’t accept these democratic duties, we will continue to allow intellectual con artists and quacks to raise their tents and hang their shingles on our campuses.

The emergence of Afrocentrism has revealed a continuing crisis in the intellectual assessment of race, history, and culture in our nation. It is another example of how quickly we will submit to visions that are at odds with the heroic imperative of uniting our society. Quite obviously, when it comes to skin tone and complaint, we remain ever gullible, willing to sponsor almost any set of conceptions that makes fresh accusations against our society. In that sense, Afrocentrism is also a commentary on the infinite career possibilities of our time. Just as almost anything can be sold as art, almost any idea capable of finding a constituency can make its way onto our campuses and into our discussions of policy.

In the interest of doing penance, we will accept a shaky system of thought if it makes use of the linguistic pressure points that allow us to experience the sadomasochistic rituals we accept in place of the hard study and responsible precision that should be brought to the continuing assessment of new claims and new ideas. Our desperate good will pushes us to pretend that these flagellation rituals have something to do with facing the facts about injustice in our country and in the history of the world. The refusal to accept the tragic fundamentals of human life has led to our bending before a politics of blame in which all evil can be traced to the devil’s address, which is, in some way, the address of the privileged and the successful. We have borrowed from the realm of therapy the idea that our parents are to blame for our problems, and projected it onto the larger society, absolving the so-called oppressed from responsibility for their actions. We don’t understand—as did the geniuses who shaped the Constitution—that we must always be so cynical about new ways of abusing power that we remain ever wary of intellectual and political pollution.

As a movement, Afrocentrism is another of the clever but essentially simple-minded hustles that have come about over the last 25 years, promoted by what was once called “the professional Negro”—a person whose “identity” and “struggle” constituted a commodity. James Baldwin was a master of the genre, as a writer, public speaker, and television guest, but he arrived before his brand of engagement by harangue was institutionalized. Now, as for most specious American ideas claiming to “get the story straight,” the best market for this commodity is our universities, where it sells like pancakes, buttered by the naive indignation of students and sweetened by gushes of pitying or self-pitying syrup.

Though at its core Afrocentrism has little intellectual substance, it has benefited from the overall decline of faith that has caused intellectuals to fumble the heroic demands of our time. The discontinuity of ideals and actions and the long list of atrocities committed in the name of God and country have convinced many Western intellectuals that the only sensible postures are those of the defeatist and the cynic. Like the tenured Marxist, the Afrocentrist will use the contradiction to define the whole; he or she asserts that Western civilization, for all its pretty ideas, is no more than the work of imperialists and racists who seek an invincible order of geopolitical domination, inextricably connected to profit and exploitation of white over black. The ideals of Western democracies that have struggled to push their policies closer to the universal humanism of the Enlightenment are scoffed at. Where the Marxist looks forward to a sentimental paradise of workers uber alles, the Afrocentrist speaks of a paradise lost and the possibility of a paradise regained—if only black people will rediscover the essentials of their African identity.

For all its pretensions to expanding our vision, the Afrocentrist movement is not propelled by a desire to bring about any significant enrichment of our American culture. What Afrocentrists almost always want is power—the power to be the final arbiter of historical truth, no matter how flimsy their case might be. Like most conspiracy theorists, Afrocentrists accept only their own sources of argument and “proof”; all else is defined as either willfully flawed or brought to debate solely to maintain a vision of history and ideas in which Europe is preeminent. Thus, the worst insult is that critics are “Eurocentric.” Further, when charged with shoddy scholarship, the Afrocentrist retorts that his purportedly revolutionary work uses means of research and assessment outside “European methodology.” However superficial that defense might seem, an important tradition in our country’s history makes it seem at least plausible at first glance. Americans have, from the sciences to the arts, as often as not had to invent the forms that allowed for the purest expressions of our political imagination, national sensibility, and multiethnic history. The Gettysburg
Address, the Second Inaugural of March 1865, the electric fight, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, the grammar of film, and the improvisational riches of jazz are the creations of homegrown geniuses such as Lincoln, Edison, Griffith, and Armstrong, who made it abundantly clear that the academy isn’t the only path to grand accomplishment.

Jazz is one of the most important examples of this. It is a perfectly democratic music that reached its peaks outside of “European methodology. “ It has both intuitive geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and unarguable intellectuals like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie. Both were rejected by the academy once upon a twentieth-century time. Those with a simple explanation attribute it all to race, which can by no means be left out of the discussion. But we must remember that white jazz musicians were not embraced either, no matter how popular, and that most major aesthetic movements of this century were controversial worldwide. In short, the academic and critical resistance met by jazz musicians was also met by Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky.

Jazz musicians weren’t initially accepted in academic circles because, though they could hear harmonic structures perfectly, the intuitives didn’t use theoretical terminology. The intellectuals could, but it took both to make jazz. The intuitives and the intellectuals had one thing in common, however—the ability to achieve objective aesthetic logic. That is why the music grew with such speed and drew depth and breadth from every kind of talent.

So when Afrocentrists defend low-quality work with assertions about the limitations of “European methodology,” they arc drawing upon the American tradition of achievements in political thought, technology, cinema, and jazz that were developed outside the academy to defend themselves. They ignore, however, the objective quality of those achievements. As Gerald Early points out, Afrocentrists have bootlegged the deconstructionist idea that there is no such thing as objective value; a thing’s “value” is merely the reflection of a cultural consensus.

Afrocentrists also reject education as “Eurocentric indoctrination.” They maintain that Western history as written is an unrelenting cultural war that aims to justify and maintain the subjugation of African peoples, and, when literal subjugation is not the goal, to impose upon them a self-hating idolatry of all that is European or European-derived. Afrocentrism, then, presents itself as ethnic liberation, a circling of the wagons within the academy, a bringing down of Eurocentric authority by black intellectual rebellion.

At the same time, Afrocentrists—like those who promote other protest versions of study—want the respect given to traditional disciplines without having to measure up to the standards of traditional research. Though ever scoffing at the academy, they want the prestige and the benefits that come of being there. Thus, Afrocentrism is the career path of a purported radical who seeks tenure. Its proponents justify this on the grounds that the campaign is at least partially one of evangelizing black people about their African heritage. What better battlegrounds than the campuses of tenuring institutions?

A central tenet of Afrocentrism is that Egypt was black and that Greco-Roman civilization was the result of its influence. The foundation of Western civilization, therefore, is African. This is a relatively sophisticated version of Elijah Muhammad’s Yacub myth in which the white man is invented by a mad black scientist determined to destroy the world through an innately evil creature. Why this obsession with Egypt being African and black? Firstly, monuments. There is no significant African architecture capable of rivaling the grand wonders of the world, European or not. Secondly, Africa has no body of thought comparable to that upon which Western civilization has developed its morality, governmental structures, technology, economic systems, and its literary, dramatic, plastic, and musical arts. None of these facts bespeaks an innate black inferiority, but they were used to justify the barbaric treatment of subject peoples by colonial powers waging ruthless campaigns for chattel labor and natural resources.

In fact, the Afrocentrist argument is not with the Western tradition of inquiry, not with the democratic belief that greatness can arise from any point on the social spectrum, and not with the ideas of the Enlightenment that led to the abolition of slavery. Afrocentrism is a debate with the colonial vision of non-Europeans as inferior that has long been under attack from within Western democracies themselves. The Afrocentrist arguments, which are rooted in nationalism, pluralism, and cultural relativity, have their origins in the Western tradition of critical discourse. Afrocentrism is absolutely Western, despite the name changes and African costumes of its advocates.

Afrocentrism benefits from the obsession with “authenticity” of this mongrel nation of ours. More than a few of us yearn for an aristocratic pedigree. If family won’t do, then we might snatch the unwieldy crown of race to distinguish ourselves. This has been the appeal of both the Ku Klux Man and the Nation of Islam. Membership allows one to rise from the bottom and suddenly become part of an elite. Poor “white trash” become “real” white men when performing violent acts in defense of “white civilization.” Negro criminals, embracing a distorted version of Islam, come to understand that the white man is “the devil” and that the black race is the original parent of humankind. College students swallow Afrocentrism and conclude that all their problems are the result of not possessing an “African-centered” worldview.

These are also responses to humiliation. That humiliation is the source of the hysteria that gives such a terrible aspect to the desire to be done with all niceties, to utterly destroy the structure that has engendered the feeling of inferiority or of helplessly being had from the first encounter up to the present. Such response is an expression of having taken the insults of the opposition too seriously, a retreat from engagement, a dismissal of complexity in favor of the home team, a racial isolationist policy.

To justify the myopic vision that emerges requires a list of atrocities—real, exaggerated, and invented. The great tragedies of the white South were the loss of the Civil War and the humiliations of Reconstruction; for the black nationalist, the great tragedies were slavery, the colonial exploitation of Africa, and the European denial of the moral superiority of African culture and civilization, beginning with Egypt.

Our list of grievances may be specific to our particular ethnic or regional history, but the ideas that lie beneath our response evolved from the conflicts between the French and the Germans following the Thirty Years War. When Frederick the Great invited the French into Germany in the eighteenth century, French culture was the most admired in Europe, while Germany had contributed very little to the Renaissance. In today’s terminology, Germany was “underdeveloped.” Eventually, a whole school of rebellious German thought came into being, attacking the French worship of reason and the idea that there was one cultural standard by which all good, mediocrity, and baseness could be judged. When Isaiah Berlin describes outraged German thinking in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, he could be speaking as easily of Afrocentrism and the cultural relativism that has been absorbed by Western society in general from the discipline of anthropology:

The sages of Paris reduce both knowledge and life to systems of contrived rules, the pursuit of external goods, for which men prostitute themselves, and sell their inner freedom, their authenticity; men, Germans, should seek to be themselves, instead of imitating—aping—strangers who have no connection with their own real natures and memories and ways of life. A man’s powers of creation can only be exercised fully on his own native heath, living among men who are akin to him, physically and spiritually, those who speak his language, amongst whom he feels at home, with whom he feels that he belongs. Only so can true cultures be generated, each unique, each making its own peculiar contribution to human civilization, each pursuing its own values its own way, not to be submerged in some general cosmopolitan ocean which robs all native cultures of their particular substance and colour, of their national spirit and genius, which can only flourish on its own soil, from its own roots, stretching back into a common past.

Afrocentrism’s success is due to the fact that it reiterates those arguments, which have become central to the Western cultural debate. But we fail ourselves if we give in to the idea that because all human communities have equal access to greatness all cultures are equal. They are not, and the ignorance, squalor, and disease of the Third World make that quite obvious, just as the rise of the Third Reich and the recent slide into overt tribalism in Eastern Europe prove that no ideas or traditions make us forever invincible to the barbarian call of the wild. Yet if there were not something intrinsically superior about the way in which the West has gathered and ordered knowledge, other cultures wouldn’t so easily fall under the sway of what André Malraux called “The Temptation of the West.” The West has put together the largest and richest repository of human culture, primarily because the vision of universal humanism and the tradition of scientific inquiry have led to the most impressive investigations into human life and the natural world. It is Western curiosity and the conscience of democracy that have made so many inroads against barbarism within and without.

This is obvious to Afrocentrists, but it is not in their career interests to look with equal critical vision at the West and the rest of the world; it would make things less reducible to soap opera politics, to the maudlin elevation of simplistic good and evil. Then the real question of bringing together one’s ethnic heritage with one’s human heritage would need to be addressed. It wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate the emotions of administrators and insecure students. Embracing a circumscribed ethnic identity wouldn’t be seen as a form of therapy, a born-again experience enabling one to cease being an American shackled by feelings of inferiority and to become a confident, wise African.

The Afrocentrist goal is quite similar to that of the white South in the wake of Reconstruction. Having lost the shooting war, white racists won the policy war, establishing a segregated society in which racial interests took precedence over the national vision of democratic rights. The result was nearly a century of struggle before the Constitution—through blood, thunder, and jurisprudence—took its rightful place as the law of the land, with no states’ rights arguments accepted. Knowingly or not, the Afrocentrist responds to the fact that black nationalists and their “revolutionary” counterparts lost the struggle for the black community in the Sixties. In the wake of submission at a latter-day Appomattox—the dissolution of black nationalism and groups like the Black Panthers—the Afrocentrist wishes to replicate the success of white segregationists. Like the segregationist, the Afrocentrist wants to benefit from the power and prosperity of the country while holding at arm’s length anything incompatible with a vision of race as a social absolute. The Afrocentrist is waging a policy war through a curriculum that preaches perpetual alienation of black and white, no matter how far removed from the truth it may be. By attempting to win the souls of black college students and to fundamentally influence what is taught to black children in public schools, the Afrocentrist seeks a large enough constituency to bring about what white segregationists once promised—a society that is “separate but equal.”

Yet the central failure of Afrocentrism is that it doesn’t recognize what Afro-Americans have done, which is to realize over and over, and often against imposing obstacles, the possibilities inherent in democratic society. Lincoln recognized this when he told his secretary that, given his point of social origin, Frederick Douglass was probably the most meritorious man in the entire United States. Originating in tribes whose levels of sophistication were laughable compared to the best of Europe, black Americans have risen to the top of every profession in our society—as scientists, educators, aviators, politicians, artists, lawyers, judges, athletes, military leaders, and so on.

This achievement was hard-won. At its root was a cultural phenomenon. Instead of expressing their submission to white people by embracing Christianity, as black nationalists always claim, Afro-Americans recognized the extraordinary insights into human frailty that run throughout the Old Testament, and the fact that the New Testament contains perhaps the greatest blues line of all time—”Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” In essence, the harsh insights of the Bible were perfectly compatible with the cold-eyed affirmation of the blues, and from those spiritual and secular foundations an indelibly American sensibility evolved, one perfectly suited to the demands of this society. The result is an incredibly long line of achievements that predate the narrow black nationalism that would segregate the world and its culture into the Eurocentric or Afrocentric, and which are the very best arguments against all forms of prejudice.

We all deny that tradition of hard-won achievement whenever our conciliatory cowardice gets the best of us and we treat black people like spoiled children who shouldn’t be asked to meet the standards that the best of all Americans have met. When the records need to be set straight, set them straight. When there is new information that will enrich our understanding of human grandeur and human folly, make that information part of the ongoing dialogue that has shaped Western civilization’s conscience and will. But we can never forget that our fate as Americans is, finally, collective, and that we fail our mission as a democratic nation whenever we remake the rules or distort the truth in the interest of satisfying a constituency unwilling to assert the tragic optimism so intrinsic to the blues and to the Constitution.

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posted                      

The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...

quote:

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Northern Egypt near the Mediterranean shows the same pattern- limb length data puts its peoples closer to tropically adapted Africans that cold climate Europeans

"...sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline variation along the Nile valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into southern Palestine.

The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans rather than with Europeans."

---

quote:

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"When the Elephantine results were added to a broader pooling of the physical characteristics drawn from a wide geographic region which includes Africa, the Mediterranean and the Near East quite strong affinities emerge between Elephantine and populations from Nubia, supporting a strong south-north cline."

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quote:

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"From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations. From a genetic point of view, several recent genetic studies have shown that sub-Sabaran genetic lineages (affiliated with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade; Underhill et al. 2001) have spread through Egypt into the Near East, the Mediterranean area, and, for some lineages, as far north as Turkey (E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniogclu et al. 2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during several dispersal episodes since the Mesolithic (Cinniogelu et al. 2004; King et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003; Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al. 2001). This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.

Indeed, the rare and incomplete Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal specimens found in Egypt - such as the 33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen (Pinhasi and Semai 2000), the Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton from the late Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian (Faiyum) early Neolithic crania (Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000), and the Nabta specimen from the Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980) - show, with regard to the great African biological diversity, similarities with some of the sub-Saharan middle Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan specimens.

This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic-early Holocene populations from northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations...... This northward migration of northeastern African populations carrying sub-Saharan biological elements is concordant with the morphological homogeneity of the Natufian populations (Bocquentin 2003), which present morphological affinity with sub-Saharan populations (Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005).

In addition, the Neolithic revolution was assumed to arise in the late Pleistocene Natufians and subsequently spread into Anatolia and Europe (Bar-Yosef 2002), and the first Anatolian farmers, Neolithic to Bronze Age Mediterraneans and to some degree other Neolithic-Bronze Age Europeans, show morphological affinities with the Natufians (and indirectly with sub-Saharan populations; Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005), in concordance with a process of demie diffusion accompanying the
extension of the Neolithic revolution (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994)."

---

quote:

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The Upper Palaeolithic Lithic Industry of Nazlet Khater 4 (Egypt): Implications for the Stone Age/Palaeolithic of Northeastern Africa

 
Abstract:

Between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 and 2, Northeast Africa witnessed migrations of Homo sapiens into Eurasia. Within the context of the aridification of the Sahara, the Nile Valley probably offered a very attractive corridor into Eurasia. This region and this period are therefore central for the (pre)history of the out-of-Africa peopling of modern humans. However, there are very few sites from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic that document these migration events. In Egypt, the site of Nazlet Khater 4 (NK4), which is related to ancient H. sapiens quarrying activities, is one of them. Its lithic assemblage shows an important laminar component, and this, associated with its chronological position (ca. 33 ka), means that the site is the most ancient Upper Palaeolithic sites of this region. The detailed study of the Nazlet Khater 4 lithic material shows that blade production (volumetric reduction) is also associated with flake production (surface reduction). This technological duality addresses the issue of direct attribution of NK4 to the Upper Palaeolithic.

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Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...

quote:

---

Northern Egypt near the Mediterranean shows the same pattern- limb length data puts its peoples closer to tropically adapted Africans that cold climate Europeans

"...sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline variation along the Nile valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into southern Palestine.

The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans rather than with Europeans."

---

quote:

---

"When the Elephantine results were added to a broader pooling of the physical characteristics drawn from a wide geographic region which includes Africa, the Mediterranean and the Near East quite strong affinities emerge between Elephantine and populations from Nubia, supporting a strong south-north cline."

---

quote:

---

"From the Mesolithic to the early Neolithic period different lines of evidence support an out-of-Africa Mesolithic migration to the Levant by northeastern African groups that had biological affinities with sub-Saharan populations. From a genetic point of view, several recent genetic studies have shown that sub-Sabaran genetic lineages (affiliated with the Y-chromosome PN2 clade; Underhill et al. 2001) have spread through Egypt into the Near East, the Mediterranean area, and, for some lineages, as far north as Turkey (E3b-M35 Y lineage; Cinniogclu et al. 2004; Luis et al. 2004), probably during several dispersal episodes since the Mesolithic (Cinniogelu et al. 2004; King et al. 2008; Lucotte and Mercier 2003; Luis et al. 2004; Quintana-Murci et al. 1999; Semino et al. 2004; Underhill et al. 2001). This finding is in agreement with morphological data that suggest that populations with sub-Saharan morphological elements were present in northeastern Africa, from the Paleolithic to at least the early Holocene, and diffused northward to the Levant and Anatolia beginning in the Mesolithic.

Indeed, the rare and incomplete Paleolithic to early Neolithic skeletal specimens found in Egypt - such as the 33,000-year-old Nazlet Khater specimen (Pinhasi and Semai 2000), the Wadi Kubbaniya skeleton from the late Paleolithic site in the upper Nile valley (Wendorf et al. 1986), the Qarunian (Faiyum) early Neolithic crania (Henneberg et al. 1989; Midant-Reynes 2000), and the Nabta specimen from the Neolithic Nabta Playa site in the western desert of Egypt (Henneberg et al. 1980) - show, with regard to the great African biological diversity, similarities with some of the sub-Saharan middle Paleolithic and modern sub-Saharan specimens.

This affinity pattern between ancient Egyptians and sub-Saharans has also been noticed by several other investigators (Angel 1972; Berry and Berry 1967, 1972; Keita 1995) and has been recently reinforced by the study of Brace et al. (2005), which clearly shows that the cranial morphology of prehistoric and recent northeast African populations is linked to sub-Saharan populations (Niger-Congo populations). These results support the hypothesis that some of the Paleolithic-early Holocene populations from northeast Africa were probably descendents of sub-Saharan ancestral populations...... This northward migration of northeastern African populations carrying sub-Saharan biological elements is concordant with the morphological homogeneity of the Natufian populations (Bocquentin 2003), which present morphological affinity with sub-Saharan populations (Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005).

In addition, the Neolithic revolution was assumed to arise in the late Pleistocene Natufians and subsequently spread into Anatolia and Europe (Bar-Yosef 2002), and the first Anatolian farmers, Neolithic to Bronze Age Mediterraneans and to some degree other Neolithic-Bronze Age Europeans, show morphological affinities with the Natufians (and indirectly with sub-Saharan populations; Angel 1972; Brace et al. 2005), in concordance with a process of demie diffusion accompanying the
extension of the Neolithic revolution (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994)."

---

quote:

---

The Upper Palaeolithic Lithic Industry of Nazlet Khater 4 (Egypt): Implications for the Stone Age/Palaeolithic of Northeastern Africa

 
Abstract:

Between Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 4 and 2, Northeast Africa witnessed migrations of Homo sapiens into Eurasia. Within the context of the aridification of the Sahara, the Nile Valley probably offered a very attractive corridor into Eurasia. This region and this period are therefore central for the (pre)history of the out-of-Africa peopling of modern humans. However, there are very few sites from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic that document these migration events. In Egypt, the site of Nazlet Khater 4 (NK4), which is related to ancient H. sapiens quarrying activities, is one of them. Its lithic assemblage shows an important laminar component, and this, associated with its chronological position (ca. 33 ka), means that the site is the most ancient Upper Palaeolithic sites of this region. The detailed study of the Nazlet Khater 4 lithic material shows that blade production (volumetric reduction) is also associated with flake production (surface reduction). This technological duality addresses the issue of direct attribution of NK4 to the Upper Palaeolithic.

---

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posted                      

The jealous, unintelligent and untalented stanley VS...

quote:

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Originally posted by Hersi_Yusuf:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvJ0F299kFQ&feature=player_embedded

^^
that is video from a Nubian from Egypt saying they were black who is a actual Egyptologist, not some copt who fancies herself a scholar because she doesn't want to be a Arab because their muslim. Besides copts don't have tropical body plans nor a african skull cavity

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Here is a woman from North Egypt, Cairo who happens to be a trained tour guide in Egyptology.


Population migrations in Ancient Egypt and Arab identity part 5



Am J Phys Anthropol, 2008.

Stature estimation;anatomical method;regression formulae; Egyptians

Abstract

Trotter and Gleser's (Trotter and Gleser: Am J Phys Anthropol 10 (1952) 469–514; Trotter and Gleser: Am J Phys Anthropol 16 (1958) 79–123) long bone formulae for US Blacks or derivations thereof (Robins and Shute: Hum Evol 1 (1986) 313–324) have been previously used to estimate the stature of ancient Egyptians. However, limb length to stature proportions differ between human populations; consequently, the most accurate mathematical stature estimates will be obtained when the population being examined is as similar as possible in proportions to the population used to create the equations. The purpose of this study was to create new stature regression formulae based on direct reconstructions of stature in ancient Egyptians and assess their accuracy in comparison to other stature estimation methods. We also compare Egyptian body proportions to those of modern American Blacks and Whites. Living stature estimates were derived using a revised Fully anatomical method (Raxter et al.: Am J Phys Anthropol 130 (2006) 374–384). Long bone stature regression equations were then derived for each sex. Our results confirm that, although ancient Egyptians are closer in body proportion to modern American Blacks than they are to American Whites, proportions in Blacks and Egyptians are not identical. The newly generated Egyptian-based stature regression formulae have standard errors of estimate of 1.9–4.2 cm. All mean directional differences are less than 0.4% compared to anatomically estimated stature, while results using previous formulae are more variable, with mean directional biases varying between 0.2% and 1.1%, tibial and radial estimates being the most biased. There is no evidence for significant variation in proportions among temporal or social groupings; thus, the new formulae may be broadly applicable to ancient Egyptian remains.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.20790/abstract


An examination of Nubian and Egyptian biological distances: Support for biological diffusion or in situ development?

K. Goddea, b, Corresponding Author Contact Information

a Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee


b Department of Science, South College


Abstract

Many authors have speculated on Nubian biological evolution. Because of the contact Nubians had with other peoples, migration and/or invasion (biological diffusion) were originally thought to be the biological mechanism for skeletal changes in Nubians. Later, a new hypothesis was put forth, the in situ hypothesis. The new hypothesis postulated that Nubians evolved in situ, without much genetic influence from foreign populations. This study examined 12 Egyptian and Nubian groups in an effort to explore the relationship between the two populations and to test the in situ hypothesis. Data from nine cranial nonmetric traits were assessed for an estimate of biological distance, using Mahalanobis D2 with a tetrachoric matrix. The distance scores were then input into principal coordinates analysis (PCO) to depict the relationships between the two populations. PCO detected 60% of the variation in the first two principal coordinates. A plot of the distance scores revealed only one cluster; the Nubian and Egyptian groups clustered together. The grouping of the Nubians and Egyptians indicates there may have been some sort of gene flow between these groups of Nubians and Egyptians. However, common adaptation to similar environments may also be responsible for this pattern. Although the predominant results in this study appear to support the biological diffusion hypothesis, the in situ hypothesis was not completely negated.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19766993











Analysis of Hair Samples of Mummies from Semna South, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, (1978) 49: 277-262


As Brothwell and Spearman (‘63) point out, reddish-brown ancient hair is usually the result of partial oxidation of the melanin pigment. This color was seen in a large proportion of the Semna sample, and also noted by Titlbachova and Titlbach (‘77) on Egyptian material, where it also may have resulted from the mummification process. However, the large number of blond hairs that are not associated with the cuticular damage that bleaching produces, probably points to a significantly lighter-haired population than is now present in the Nubian region. Brothwell and Spearman (’63) noted genuinely blond ancient Egyptian samples using reflectance spectrophotometry. Blondism, especially in young children, is common in many darkhaired populations (e.g., Australian, Melanesian), and is still found in some Nubian villages (J. Zabkar, personal communication).


Only one sample (M197) showed cuticular damage and irregularities definitely consistent with bleaching, although bleaching could not be ruled out in some of the blond samples.


pdf file




Archeological discovery: The Book of the Dead LOL

Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged | 

posted                      

quote:

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Originally posted by Sundiata:


Dear Sustan Anton,

Many people from the horn of Africa have narrower nose
profiles than say a bantu. I feel that perhaps
forensic scientist should have used people from the
Horn of Africa as their model instead of such a narrow
consideration. Are you familiar with the ''Hamitic
myth'' that postulated that caucasoids from early
times came into Africa and civlized the more sedentary
''negriod'' population. Thus all narrow features found
in Nilotic types,Northern Africans,and eastern
Africans were atributed to these Hamitic immigrants.

You might want to consult the works of
bio-anthropologist Dr. Shomarka Keita and also Jean
Hiernax. Are you familiar with these groups.

Let me also point out that many modern Egyptians from
the area Tut-ankh-amun came from have features like
avelouar porgnathism. Was this taken into
consideration?

Yes this is true and this is precisely why I felt (although I did not
know where the individual was from) that this was an individual of
African ancestry, and why I so stated. The problem, as you say, in
trying to fit an individual back into a population of origin is
two-fold. It is the problem of the range of variation available in any
given population and the problem of how you wish to define your groups
and what your comparative samples are. For my 'north african' I will
mean simply those peoples from north of the equator - rather than say
Morocco etc. I should also say that I don't see his narrow nose as an
indication that he is not african or that he or his people had any
genetic input from groups that were not african - it was only another
clue for me to try to narrow the scope somewhat (since I had an unknown
and 'African origin' is a pretty big designation), if imperfectly.

Yes, alveolar prognathism was taken into account (at least by me, I
can't speak for the other groups) and is another part of the reason for
my estimation of African ancestry in this individual. You should
recall
that all the other groups that worked on this individual knew that this
was Tut's skull. We did not know either who this was particularly or
if
it was a forensic case or an archaeological case (I worked from the CT
reconstruction of the skull from which it is impossible to infer such
age clues as you might.) For part of the analysis I ran cranial
metrics
through FORDISC which has two alternative cranial comparative
databases.
One is a modern forensic database from individuals of known cases in
the states. The other is an archaeologically derived sample (the one
that W.W. Howells collected) which does include indviduals from Egypt
among a number of other wordlwide populations. Although I was
convinced
by the nonmetric data (e.g. the alveolar prognathism, the shape of the
cranial vault etc),
that this was an individual of African ancestry, the metric data -
whether compared with the modern sample or the archaeological sample -
did
not place him near any of the comparative groups.

Yes, I'm familiar with the work of the groups you site - and concur
with
Keita that individuals from the whole of Africa should be included in
the construct of what is 'African' in terms of identifying skeletal
remains (rather than the categories which the French team uses) and
this
is why this skull ended up indicating to me its African Ancestry.

I am familiar with Howells database and this same
database has come under fire for correct examination
of individuals. What time period does the FORDISC have
these Egyptian sames. In the study by Dr. Keita it
meantions that it was a late dyanstic period ''Giza
E'' series. According to the study by Dr. Sonia
Zakrzewski the sample in the Howells database came
from the 26th dyansty. According to her study on
pre-dyanstic Egyptian remains there was slight change
in the crania from around the Late Dyanstic period.
This is to be expected because of the migration of
Greeks,Jews,Phonecians and Syrians into Egypt. What
is your opinion on this?

Although not related, I find that forensic
anthropologist and geneticist are often ignorant of
historical population movements in areas they study.
For instance, in modern Egypt there is a village in
southern Egypt called Marris where according to
folklore the local women were raped by French
soliders. These females are typically lighter than the
surrounding Egyptian population. What is your opinion
on this.

Yes, this is the problem with comparative databases. It is not
feasible
to include examples from every possible place and time and so you get
results, like I did in this case, where if you read the statistics
carefully, even though it is giving you an answer (in this case it said
that the skull I was looking at was most like a Berg Male) the specimen
in question doesn't really look like anything in the comparative sample
(recent or the archaeological). It is the case that the Howells
database egyptian sample is the Giza series you refer to and even if
that sample doesn't have influences from the groups that you mention,
there is clearly no reason to expect that a single series from a single
time should tell you about the entire range of variation in that
region.
Since I didn't know where the skull was from there wasn't any way to
say, well, if I had more samples from X place, perhaps I would have a
better read - so all I could deduce from that comparison was that it
wasn't like anything in the comparative databse. But the nonmetric
traits were convincing enough to me that he was of African origin, that
this is what I went with and what Michael worked with.

I think that historic populations movements are only the tip of the
iceberg as to what makes determining ancestral origin from skeletal
remains extremely difficult in most cases and nearly impossible in
others. The biggest reason for this is that humans are all one
species.
And beyond that discrete boundary (that we are humans rather than say
chimps) there are no other discrete boundaries among human groups. So
if boundaries aren't discrete, if there is more variation between than
within groups, then trying to put an individual back into a group is
really problematic. Biologically, there should be no reason you should
be able to do it 100% of the time. Biologically, the most you should
expect would be able to do it maybe 70 or 80% of the time, if there is
no operator error and if your comparative samples are good. There are
good evolutionary reasons why groups whose ancestors have lived in
certain kinds of climates over long periods of time might look, on
average, different than groups evolving in other areas - but there is
no
reason why any given member of either group will look like the 'mean'
of
that group. You see the problem. And that doesn't even address the
issue of trying to infer skin color for which there is no evidence in
the skeleton.

My real name is *****. The reason I don't use
> it in email is for security purposes. I don't trust
> yahoo enough to give out personal information.
>
>
> I appreciate you answering my questions about the
> identification of Tut-ankh-amun. One thing I did
> notice in a Ontario news paper about identification of
> a burn victim that according to forensic officals was
> a ''dark caucasian'' from Egypt,Sudan,Somalia,or
> Ethiopia? I am curious why would foresnic scientist
> use such terms for these following countries?
>
>
> Also do you know how I might contact the French
> examiner of Tut-ankh-amun? I would like to ask them
> also how they came to the conclusions they did.

Hi ****,
Thanks for your answer.

Not knowing the case I don't know the answer. The most straightforward
answer would be that they have unburned skin retained on the corpse and
I can imagine it might be because they have an unidentified person and
they are trying to jog someone's memory about who it might be and they
think that this might help. It could be they were using the same
definition of 'caucasian' as the French did (i.e., including parts of
Africa in the designation) or it could be that they had some other
means
of knowing that the victim was from one of those countries and they
were
specifying 'dark caucasian' based on skin color (from the corpse) to
differentiate from a darker skin tone that they think people might
assume for those countries (i.e., in the latter case they would be
using
caucasian to refer to a light skin color). So much of forensic
evidence
is not based on the skeleton that it's not even possible to know,
unless
the article explicitly said so, whether evaluation of the skeleton had
anything to do with their assessment and categories. There are so many
possibilities it's hard to know. Sorry I can't be more help.

I don't know how to reach the French team, although from the Nat Geo
press releases I know they are Anthropologist Jean-Noël Vignal and
Sculptor Elisabeth Daynès. You might try searching the web - I've seen
her work in museums before so she may have a website. From the Nat Geo
website
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0510_051005_tutsface.html
I extracted the following information. There are also other links
there
to the reconstruction process.

"Led by Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, a
National Geographic Society team commissioned French experts to create
the lifelike bust. Using the CT scans (see "King Tut Mummy Scanned"),
French forensic anthropologist Jean-Noël Vignal determined the basic
measurements and features of Tutankhamun's face. Vignal deduced that
Tutankhamun had a narrow nose, buck teeth, a receding chin, and
Caucasian features. Such features are typical of European, North
African, Middle Eastern, and Indian peoples.

Paris-based forensic sculptor Elisabeth Daynès then created the bust
shown above. She used Vignal's estimates of skin thickness and other
data, plus wooden sculptures of Tut made in his youth. Soft-tissue
features, such as the nose and ears, had to be guessed at, though
within
a scientifically determined range. Daynès based the skin tone on an
average shade of Egyptians today and added the eyeliner that the king
would have worn in life."

btw there is no gag order for Scott Woodard's studies..they are all available online and he does not support your claims for Yuya.

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Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010  |  IP: Logged |