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I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.

Nature 468: 1053-60.

Published online

22 December 2010

Using DNA extracted from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia, we have sequenced the genome of an archaic hominin to about 1.9-fold coverage. This individual is from a group that shares a common origin with Neanderthals. This population was not involved in the putative gene flow from Neanderthals into Eurasians; however, the data suggest that it contributed 4–6% of its genetic material to the genomes of present-day Melanesians. We designate this hominin population ‘Denisovans’ and suggest that it may have been widespread in Asia during the Late Pleistocene epoch. A tooth found in Denisova Cave carries a mitochondrial genome highly similar to that of the finger bone. This tooth shares no derived morphological features with Neanderthals or modern humans, further indicating that Denisovans have an evolutionary history distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans.

Using mitochondrial DNA to test the hypothesis of a European post-glacial human recolonization from the Franco-Cantabrian refuge

O García^1,4, R Fregel^2,4, J M Larruga², V Álvarez³, I Yurrebaso¹, V M Cabrera² and A M González²

Abstract

It has been proposed that the distribution patterns and coalescence ages found in Europeans for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroups V, H1 and H3 are the result of a post-glacial expansion from a Franco-Cantabrian refuge that recolonized central and northern areas. In contrast, in this refined mtDNA study of the Cantabrian Cornice that contributes 413 partial and 9 complete new mtDNA sequences, including a large Basque sample and a sample of Asturians, no experimental evidence was found to support the human refuge-expansion theory. In fact, all measures of gene diversity point to the Cantabrian Cornice in general and the Basques in particular, as less polymorphic for V, H1 and H3 than other southern regions in Iberia or in Central Europe. Genetic distances show the Cantabrian Cornice is a very heterogeneous region with significant local differences. The analysis of several minor subhaplogroups, based on complete sequences, also suggests different focal expansions over a local and peninsular range that did not affect continental Europe. Furthermore, all detected clinal trends show stronger longitudinal than latitudinal profiles. In Northern Iberia, it seems that the highest diversity values for some haplogroups with Mesolithic coalescence ages are centred on the Mediterranean side, including Catalonia and South-eastern France.

Mitochondrial testing specialists better get busy revising their haplogroup theories! Another Western European, Atlantic-facing prejudice has been disproved.

Wrong. According to a correction in Nature, it was discovered by Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher in 1869, nearly a hundred years before. James Watson, Francis Crick and the less often mentioned Rosalind Franklin were responsible for determining DNA's structure, a double helix shape.

Maybe I do not understand "classic Darwinism," but I am puzzled by the claims of numerous articles in leading scientific journals that evolutionary change in human beings is "accelerating." Since when? One such article was published several years ago by the National Academy of Sciences, "Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution." It claims an acceleration in evolution in the last 1000 years, on an inferred and theoretical, not observed basis, needless to say. Its projections are based on the 4 million SNP database called HapMap, a collection of mostly European and American gene irregularities. Several books and a slew of articles in journals like Nature and Science have jumped on the scientific bandwagon. But we have a few embarrassing questions.

If the "classic" model of Darwinism was based on primitive man, New Guinea orchids and Galapagos turtles, wouldn't we need to redefine what selection and survival of the fittest and its other tenets really mean for, say, a Harvard or Stanford white male Ph.D. who sits in front of his computer most of the time or the current population of the United States, few of whom qualify as hunter-gatherers or tribal or starved or threatened by predators?

Isn't there rather a disconnect today between surviving and your genetic composition? Pretty much anyone can marry and have children with pretty much anyone they want to, and few people are dying off without issue from bad genes or fatal decisions.

If genes are supposed to mutate and produce more "fit" and eligible marriage partners because of "pressure" from the environment like drought or low-protein diets or too much or too little sunshine, how does evolution operate on a level playing field where the environment is a shopping mall or suburbia?

World population has increased from 200 million in the year 1 to nearly 7 billion. Perhaps the presumed rise in SNPs is an effect of population growth? Evolution was supposed to operate on the basis of selection, not indiscriminate proliferation.

Evolution, it is claimed, has now sublimated beyond the physical realm. It is internal, or mental, or spiritual, or cultural, or social, or political, or even (God help us) scientific. This was the super-clever dodge favored by Teilhard du Chardin, a Catholic missionary to China who wrote The Phenomenon of Man. He called it the noosphere. Whatever else, this latest Big Science Fair project requires a new definition. There are no measures possible beyond our present lifetime. We have no way of judging a Neanderthal's consciousness.

I'm sorry but I just don't get it. I wish someone would please explain it to me so I do not need to feel guilty about not reading all those pat-me-on-the-back and pip-pip-don't-you-know-old-man Victorian recidivist articles that I find, somehow, very self-serving.

I am an avid follower of the Darwin Awards but the only thing I can see accelerating are modern American and European scientists' delusions of grandeur.

The emerging picture of prehistoric Arabia suggests that early modern humans were able to survive periodic hyperarid oscillations by contracting into environmental refugia around the coastal margins of the peninsula. This paper reviews new paleoenvironmental, archaeological, and genetic evidence from the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran to explore the possibility of a demographic refugium dubbed the “Gulf Oasis,” which is posited to have been a vitally significant zone for populations residing in southwest Asia during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene. These data are used to assess the role of this large oasis, which, before being submerged beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, was well watered by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Batin rivers as well as subterranean aquifers flowing beneath the Arabian subcontinent. Inverse to the amount of annual precipitation falling across the interior, reduced sea levels periodically exposed large portions of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, equal at times to the size of Great Britain. Therefore, when the hinterlands were desiccated, populations could have contracted into the Gulf Oasis to exploit its freshwater springs and rivers. This dynamic relationship between environmental amelioration/desiccation and marine transgression/regression is thought to have driven demographic exchange into and out of this zone over the course of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, as well as having played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of local human populations during that interval.

Purchase article.

Read free report in Live Science.

American Schools of Oriental Research Annual Meeting:
Tracking the Med's Stone Age Sailors

Andrew Lawler

Genetic studies are beginning to fill in the missing pieces in the history and prehistory of seafaring. "By carefully sorting genetic data from living people, a researcher at this recent meeting covered in Science reported that around 6000 B.C.E., early seaferers indeed spread their seed--both agricultural and genetic--from their homeland in the Near East as far west across the Mediterranean as Marseilles, but no farther."

No farther? Could that be because they have looked no farther?

Gunnar Thompson's new study, whose first print runs have already been exhausted apparently, Ancient Egyptian Maize, builds a well-documented and persuasive case that "Indian corn blossomed with equal vigor along the shores of the Nile River and Gulf of Mexico at the very dawn of history."

You may say that Gunnar Thompson is not a "real" researcher but we would counter that 400 corncobs on ancient tombs and papyrus scrolls of Egypt and corncobs depicted with copper weapons on ancient ships are real enough to be remarked upon by anyone with eyes in their head and a brain to think.

"Male regents in the Middle East and India sent mariners overseas in search of the world's purest copper deposits. These were located in the Mediterranean Sea on the Island of Cyprus, in the Persian Gulf on Megan Island, and on Isle Royale in the Upper Great Lakes Region of North America. This worldwide exploration took place in approximately 6000 B.C.E....all the way to the shores of North and South America" (p.2).

A Change of Biblical Proportions Strikes Mideast Archaeology

There have been many biographies of Cleopatra, called the Fatal Monster by the Roman poet Horace. About the author of this newest one, we are informed, "Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow at the center for Scholars & Writers, and received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schiff has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times, where she has been an op-ed columnist. She lives in New York City."

A blurb on the back of my copy, which my wife gave me for Hanukkah at my hinting, Joseph J. Ellis oozes, "It is a beautiful pairing--the most alluring and elusive woman in recorded history, and one of the most gifted biographers of our time. Style, like leadership, is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We see it here on every page."

Indeed.

Am I the only one to be irritated by Ms. Schiff's much vaunted style or pretense to scholarship (she is called a "great historian" in another blurb on the book jacket)? Is it too late to get the Putlitzer Prize Committee to reconsider? Is this the way books are now marketed, trumpeted about like digital reality choices or teenage girls' ring tones?

I haven't made it past Chapter 2 (which has the Harry Potter title of "Cleopatra Captures the Old Man by Magic"), but I have been repeatedly arrested in my attempt to read the peculiar style of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, not by admiration and awe but shock and misunderstanding. Here is a sample that stopped me on p. 20:

She hailed instead from a line of rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged Macedonian queens, a line that included the fourth-century Olympias, whose greatest contribution to the world was her son, Alexander the Great. The rest were atrocities.

There are several things wrong with these two sentences (ask my wife, who teaches Freshman Composition at a community college, bless her heart). Let me list some, in the spirit of an old-fashioned schoolmaster:

• "Hails" for "comes from" is a cliche which, since the nineteenth century, has been avoided by all those except high school newspaper interns. Even then, it is usually caught by their instructors.
• "Instead" if you read the previous sentence to which it refers is not clear. Did Cleopatra come from not-an-Egyptian background or not come from the not-Egyptian background everyone in Egypt thought?
• "Rancorous, meddlesome, shrewd, occasionally unhinged": from whose point of view? Ours? Posterity's? Cicero's? Her brother's? Ours after Ms. Schiff has made her case? People magazine's? Wikipedia? One cannot imagine a "great historian" saying this on p. 20 of their "dazzling" and "enduring" masterpiece, calling on "considerable powers to bring Cleopatra back to life for us." One can also not excuse, even if one can imagine, an author praised for "what only the best writers can do...making the world new again" sprinkling so many loaded and stale epithets around like that. Mark Twain said read and reread your work. If you find an adjective kill it. Ms. Schiff's style crawls with adjectives. If it were to be disinfected we would be left with little at the core, rather like peeling back the layers of an onion.
• Olympias...her son:  lack of pronoun agreement
• The rest:  the rest of what? The rest of the Olympias? The rest of the Macedonian queens? Oh, I see. I had to reread the passage. Schiff means "the rest of the various Olympias' contributions to the world." Atrocities? That seems a pretty harsh verdict. Particularly for unknown and undiscussed persons. Perhaps it is an allusion to the Olympias of the U.S. Senate. or minor actresses in Hollywood who co-star with Cher? One of Jackie O's rivals?

Well, you get the idea. Schiff has read too many historical novels and obviously been to too many writing workshops and written too many grants, but what about her content and scholarship? Having read several books on Cleopatra, including Michael Grant's biography published, lo! these forty years ago, and having a doctorate in classical studies, I was keen on seeing if the new stupor mundi did its subject justice from a factual or evaluative point of view. I am sorry I can't give a good report.

My old Swiss Doktor Mutter in grad school used to say of a recommended source it was "steeped in the literature." If the author of this new "definitive" biography is steeped in anything it is Celestial Seasonings. The book reads as though it were written between emails and then tweeted to her fans in breathless acts of self-admiration.

The reason I am interested in Cleopatra is that was the name of Pocahontas' Cherokee mother. The real Pocahontas, her real mother. Cherokee stories are full of the Macedonians, Jews and Thracians; witness the many tales of Stone Finger or the many Greek names. I am Cherokee, and a Pocahontas descendant, so I would like to find out all I can about my kinswoman's namesake. My interest goes beyond following the latest trend or craze in historical fiction.

I was particularly interested in the Ptolemies' habit of sister-brother marriage or incest. What does Schiff make of this? Before I answer that question, what does Schiff say of Cleopatra's parentage and genealogy? It is all very lurid and sketchy to be sure, or to put it in the words of the publisher, just, you know, "astonishing if rare historical facts meticulously and lovingly excavated." The afterword thanks a zillion people, including "big names" like Sarah B. Pomeroy (an authority on women in classical antiquity) and "the late Lionel Casson" (born Lionel L. Cohen, who died at age 94 on July 18, 2009). Included are a passel of editors at Little, Brown ("At every stage they have set the gold standard"), as well as a publicist, Jessica Almost, at the literary agency William Morris "for shepherding book and author along." Stop! That's more than we wanted to know.

First, who was Cleopatra's mother? Any "definitive" biography ought to address this subject. Here's what Schiff says:

Of Cleopatra's mother we have neither glimpse nor echo; she disappears from the scene early in Cleopatra's childhood and was dead by the time Cleopatra was twelve (p. 26).

Here's what Michael Grant wrote in 1972 (described accurately as "an eminent historian who has held distinguished academic posts"),

We do not know who Cleopatra VII's mother was. In view of her daughter's subsequent fame this is rather strange (p. 3).

On the whole, then, it seems most likely that Auletes' first wife and sister, Cleopatra V Tryphaena, was the mother of our Cleopatra (p. 4).

What of the Ptolemies' incestuous practice of marrying brother and sister over many generations? Schiff writes that there is no word for "incest" in the Greek language. Really? What was the Oedipus cycle about? Something Sophocles, Euripides and the other playwrights had no word for among the tens of thousands they expended on the theme? She also writes,

The practice resulted in no physical deformities but did deliver an ungainly shrub of a family tree (p. 21).

Grant straightforwardly writes, on the other hand,

Since the time of Ptolemy II there had been many...brother-sister marriages in the same royal house, and, in spite of obscurities regarding her pedigree, there is no doubt that Cleopatra VII, for all her outstanding intellectual and physical endowments, was the product of generations of incest. As those who breed cattle are well aware, the marriage of near relations, although it gives a double chance for blemishes to appear, also makes the recurrence of initial excellences more probable, without necessarily impairing fertility

And as to the question of whether Cleopatra was tainted or twisted by her genealogy (one Schiff skirts):

It is doubtful, however, if the Ptolemies escaped genetic trouble altogether, for a number of them were abnormally fat. This characteristic had been present in the family since its first emergence upon the historical scene, and then Ptolemy VI Philometor, and Cleopatra's great-grandfather Ptolemy VIII Euergetes (Physcon), and her great-uncle Ptolemy X Alexander I, were all monstrously overweight. It is not clear if this disability also appeared on the female side of the family; at any rate there is no record of Cleopatra, who only lived to the age of thirty-nine, becoming gross. Nevertheless, it is a possibility that certain elements in her character may have been due to this persistent in-breeding -- notably her total absence of moral sense, and a tendency to murder her brothers and sisters which may have been partly an inherited family habit (p. 27).

But for the battle of Actium, it would have been the Egyptian Empire, not the Roman Empire, that dominated the last 2,000 years of "Western Civilization," as it had the previous 3,000 before the Common Era. Instead of the voodoo vamp sport of scribblers and schoolboys, Cleopatra would be the most revered political figure of our educational institutions and popular culture, akin to Elizabeth I for the British and English-speaking peoples. Schiff's book does not do Cleopatra or Ptolemaic history justice.

The only thing we know for sure about her is that she committed suicide with the bite of a snake after her peace overtures were spurned by Octavian, the future Augustus. It was a noble gesture, refused, and a death undeserved. Her children were accepted into the Roman nobility and raised by Octavian's half-sister Octavia. Their blood flows in the genealogies of many nations today.

It is sad to see Cleopatra VII reduced to a tawdry reality show star by the modern American publishing industry.

Surely Not "Ancestry Painting and Global Similarity"

We were surprised to see what DNA testing companies are calling their autosomal products these days. Ours is the DNA Fingerprint family of products, but 23&me calls their entry "Ancestry Painting and Global Similarity" and "Personal Genome Service." Others offer "Genetic Ancestry Analysis," "Family Finders," and "Ancestral Origins."

Before the introduction of DNA fingerprinting for ancestry purposes, DNA testing was limited to the father’s male line or mother’s mitochondrial lineage. Newer autosomal tests can be taken by a male or female. They analyze all your lines at once, not just the two traditional ones of genetic genealogy. Autosomal DNA is the great equalizer, but it's not being marketed very adroitly.

A beginner’s class titled "Ancestry Tracing with an Autosomal DNA Test:  Conceptions and Misconceptions" will be presented by DNA Consultants principal investigator Donald N. Yates, Ph.D., at the upcoming Arizona Family History Expos. It will provide an overview of autosomal DNA tests that are capable of yielding a more complete picture of your family tree and its roots. Covered are the science and history of DNA fingerprinting, what markers are delineated, the databases used for finding matches, and methods and strategies for interpreting your results, including follow-up websites, social networking and readings.

The event takes place at the Arizona Family History Expo 2011, Lecture 73, Conference Theater, 11:00 a.m., Saturday, Jan. 22, 2011, Mesa Convention Center, 263 North Center Street, Mesa, Arizona 85201. For information on attending, visit Family History Expos or contact Holly T. Hansen at info@fhexpos.com.