BAMAD no.63
Brit-Am
DNA and
Anthropology Updates
Updates in DNA studies along with Anthropological Notes of general interest with a particular emphasis on points pertinent to the study of Ancient Israelite Ancestral Connections to Western Peoples as explained in Brit-Am studies.
Brit-Am
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Revelation
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BAMAD no. 63
Brit-Am Anthropology and DNA Update
27 October 2009, 9 Cheshvan 5769
Contents:
1. Modern man 'a wimp', says anthropologist
2. Different [Racial] Ways of Thinking?
3. Mixed Races: The Positive Side
1. Modern man 'a wimp', says
anthropologist
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/modern-man-a-wimp-says-anthropologist-1802501.html
1. Modern man 'a wimp', says
anthropologist
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/modern-man-a-wimp-says-anthropologist-1802501.html
Extract:
Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200
metres record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.
Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45
meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own
height to progress to manhood.
His conclusions about the speed of Australian aboriginals 20,000 years ago are
based on a set of footprints, preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed, of six
men chasing prey.
An analysis of the footsteps of one of the men, dubbed T8, shows he reached
speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. Bolt, by comparison, reached a top
speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last
year's Beijing Olympics.
In an interview in the English university town of Cambridge where he was
temporarily resident, McAllister said that, with modern training, spiked shoes
and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.
"We can assume they are running close to their maximum if they are chasing an
animal," he said.
"But if they can do that speed of 37 kph on very soft ground I suspect there is
a strong chance they would have outdone Usain Bolt if they had all the
advantages that he does.
"We can tell that T8 is accelerating toward the end of his tracks."
McAllister said it was probable that any number of T8's contemporaries could
have run as fast.
"We have to remember too how incredibly rare these fossilizations are," he said.
"What are the odds that you would get the fastest runner in Australia at that
particular time in that particular place in such a way that was going to be
preserved?"
Turning to the high jump, McAllister said photographs taken by a German
anthropologist showed young men jumping heights of up to 2.52 meters in the
early years of last century.
"It was an initiation ritual, everybody had to do it. They had to be able to
jump their own height to progress to manhood," he said.
"It was something they did all the time and they lived very active lives from a
very early age. They developed very phenomenal abilities in jumping. They were
jumping from boyhood onwards to prove themselves."
Manthropology abounds with other examples:
* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more
than half their body weight in equipment.
* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern
oarsmen.
* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current
world javelin record is 98.48).
McAllister said it was difficult to equate the ancient spear with the modern
javelin but added: "Given other evidence of Aboriginal man's superb athleticism
you'd have to wonder whether they couldn't have taken out every modern javelin
event they entered."
Why the decline?
"We are so inactive these days and have been since the industrial revolution
really kicked into gear," McAllister replied. "These people were much more
robust than we were.
"We don't see that because we convert to what things were like about 30 years
ago. There's been such a stark improvement in times, technique has improved out
of sight, times and heights have all improved vastly since then but if you go
back further it's a different story.
"At the start of the industrial revolution there are statistics about how much
harder people worked then.
"The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40
percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular
load placed upon them these days.
"We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in
the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven't developed.
Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn't come close to
replicating that.
"We wouldn't want to go back to the brutality of those days but there are some
things we would do well to profit from."
2. Different [Racial] Ways of Thinking?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/steve-jones/6436114/Its-time-to-lay-this-race-issue-to-rest.html
Extract:
The Chinese author Adeline Yen Mah discussed the differences in the
mental hardwiring of some of her fellow medical students. The Indian med
students for example could easily be hypnotized.
3. Mixed Races: The Positive Side
It's a wonderful, mixed-up world
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6475543/Its-a-wonderful-mixed-up-world.html?state=target#postacomment&postingId=6480122
by
Aarathi Prasad
Extract:
Just two weeks ago in Louisiana, an American Justice of the Peace made
international news for refusing to issue marriage licences to couples who were
not of the same race. He said he had taken the decision because he believed that
mixed-race children would not be accepted by their parents' communities. Whether
this was genuine concern for a real social problem or was born of a more
atavistic notion that there is something inherently, biologically wrong with
mixing races, we can only speculate. Either way, his position was quite illegal,
and his conduct is being challenged.
I can answer that question now. The answer is that my daughter, and
approximately 400,000 other children like her in Britain today, is mixed race.
Families like mine are on the rise, nearly one in 10 British children now lives
in a mixed-race family, a figure that is six times higher than it was when I was
a child. In fact, mixed race people are the fastest-growing minority in this
country, a trend that is set to continue. Even in my community, traditionally
inward-looking when it comes to choosing partners, the proportion of mixed
marriages has increased from 3 per cent to 11 per cent in the space of just 14
years.
On the other hand, nature repeatedly shows us that genetically, diversity must
be better: more diverse genes mean that animals are better at adapting to
changing environmental conditions, and at fighting off and surviving infections.
But the combination of inbreeding being bad and diversity being good has flung
open the doors for another claim about what it means to be mixed-race. The idea
sounds simple enough. If inbreeding is bad, then the opposite, outbreeding,
should be good. It makes sense, some suggest, that people might be genetically
better off if they were mixed race. The anecdotal evidence is writ large in the
over-representation of Britain's tiny mixed-race population in the arts, music,
modelling and sport. Mixed-race people account for 30 per cent of the current
England football team in a country where they make up only 2 per cent of the
general population.
Here's the thing, though. We are different. Some of our genes - albeit a very
small 7 per cent of them, vary between the continental populations, and along
the lines of "races" as they were popularised by Victorian anthropologists. But
we do not fit into tidy boxes as they believed. The map of the human genome has
shown that the DNA of human populations across the globe is a continuum, not
bluntly divided as had been erroneously supposed. ....The genes that are
obviously different between races include those that enabled each population to
adapt to new latitudes; the ones that maximised our success in particular
environments, and protected us from the diseases that we were exposed to.
Shriver's work has uncovered something else that is very interesting. He finds
that mixed-race people are more symmetrical than the rest of us, and being more
symmetrical translates into being more attractive, having less infection, being
less stressed, and having greater genetic diversity.
Professor Bill Amos at Cambridge University has also been studying the genetic
basis of human disease. He finds that in humans, an individual's level of
genetic diversity can predict with astonishing accuracy how likely they are to
survive parasites and infectious disease. In a recent study in Kenya, he found
that low levels of diversity were strongly associated with death before the age
of five.
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