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Behind the Numbers:  Elizabeth Hirschman

  (Part Two of a Series)

We interviewed Rutgers marketing professor Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman, author of several books and articles incorporating DNA in her research, to hear her personal story in our continuing series about the people behind the scenes in the field of DNA testing.

Elizabeth Hirschman with MBA students at Rutgers in December 2009.

When did you first get interested in DNA?

ECH: I got interested in DNA testing around 2000 when I discovered I was Melungeon after reading Brent Kennedy's 1994 book. Brent suggested several different ancestries that possibly contributed to the Melungeon population and I wanted to find out which of these were correct and which ones I had. I already suspected Jewish ancestry because of the naming patterns in my family over the past 300 years, as well as some of their habits --e.g., not eating pork, getting married in a home instead of a church, cleaning house on Friday afternoon, no eggs with blood spots, washing all meat, etc. We also had some genetic anomalies -- shovel teeth (sinodonty), palatal tori and large rear cranial extensions, as well as polydactylism.

Tell us more.

ECH:  Over the course of the past decade I have been found to have Native American, Spanish, Ashkenazi Jewish, African, Mediterranean and Gypsy/Northwestern India ancestry. My Dad turned out to have substantial Gypsy and African ancestry. He and I share a large cranial rear extension that I believe likely comes from the African ancestry -- the photos I have seen of the !Kung Bushmen look just like our head shapes. My Mom has Native American and/or Sino-Siberian ancestry. She also possessed the Asian teeth and palatal tori found in this group.

You've written several books and articles with Donald Yates; how did that come about?

ECH:  We shared ancestry from the Coopers, a prominent pioneer family in Daniel Boone’s time. In 2000, I wrote him out of the blue when he was a professor in Georgia and introduced myself and asked if possibly the Coopers were Jewish. We began to correspond by email. I told him I was sure one of the reasons I was working so hard to figure out the Melungeon story was because I had to figure out who I am. “Up until last year,”  I remember telling him, “I thought I was Scotch-Irish, English , white and Presbyterian.” It was a big transition to Sephardic, brown and Jewish. It turned out that we were distant cousins and had numerous links in our Melungeon ancestry.

What was a typical publication?

ECH: One article was called “Suddenly Melungeon! Reconstructing Consumer Identity Across the Color Line.” This was published by Routledge in 2007 in a handbook on consumer culture theory edited by Russell Belk.  

How did the Jewish findings play out?

ECH:  On a personal level, both Don and I, as well as his wife Teresa, returned to Judaism, he and Teresa in Savannah and I in New Jersey. On a professional level, we started the Melungeon Surname DNA Project, which focused on Scottish clan and Melungeon surnames (i.e., male or Y chromosome lines), and later included Native American mitochondrial DNA.  Initially, many people in the genetic genealogy community were frustrated that the incoming Jewish DNA results were not originating in the Middle East, as they had strongly believed and hoped, but were showing a lot of Khazar, Central Asian, Eastern European and Western European/Spanish/French input.

Can you elaborate?

ECH:  Critics were not happy that DNA was proving a wider and more inclusive picture of the Jewish people. Where Don and I have performed a service, I believe, is by just following the DNA trail and accepting new findings (e.g., the Gypsy/Roma) when they come in, instead of clinging to an a priori theory/belief/wish, for instance, the claim of a Middle Eastern origin for the majority of Jews.

What tests have you ordered from DNA Consultants?

ECH: I ordered every test as they became available over the years, first the Y chromosome and mitochondrial or male-line and female-line tests and later the autosomal or DNA fingerprint tests that analyze your total ancestry.  I helped organize the first autosomal Melungeon study by contributing samples from my mother and brother and obtaining samples from well-known Melungeons like Brent Kennedy and his brother Richard. Increasingly, our testing took on the aspect of a family group study. For instance, I was able by comparing multiple results from relatives to reconstruct my father’s ancestry quite satisfactorily, even though he died many years ago. I took the Rare Genes from History for all available family members. There is a streak of the Thuya Gene and First Peoples Gene in all of us, as well as the Sinti Gene (which is Gypsy), while my brother Dick got our father’s Khoisan Gene, which is African. Incidentally, it has the same source as the !Kung people and head shape I mentioned before.

If you had H. G. Wells' time machine where would you go?

ECH: I would love to be able to visit my ancestors and see what they looked like, where they lived, how they lived and learn how they got to Appalachia from such disparate parts of the world. I wish I could talk with them. My project now is to visit all the places they are known to have come from and see what the architecture, climate, food, and people are like. That is about as close to "meeting" them as I will be able to get. So far, I’ve traveled to Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, Spain, Tunisia and Morocco on the trail of my Sephardic Jewish ancestors. I am trying to get to the Silk Road to see Central Asia, Turkey and Northwest India in the near future.

The Cherokee called them the Moon People. The Utes and Paiutes spoke of a hideous race of cannibals ten feet tall living in caves. And the Choctaw also have an account of the race of giants that first colonized the Ohio Valley. 

From Old World Roots of the Cherokee, chapter 5, "America's Middle Ages," pp. 78-79, we read:

What kind of Indians lived in the territory the Choctaw and Chickasaw carved out for their new home? According to their traditions, reports Cushman, as confirmed by excavations of bones in Tennessee, it was a “race of white giants”:

[T]he tradition of the Choctaws . . . told of a race of giants that once inhabited the now State of Tennessee, and with whom their ancestors fought when they arrived in Mississippi in their migration from the west, doubtless Old Mexico. Their tradition states the Nahullo (race of giants [literally, wizards]) was of wonderful stature; but, as their tradition of the mastodon [which used to be found on the Great Plains], so this was also considered to be but a foolish fable, the creature of a wild imagination, when lo! Their exhumed bones again prove the truth of the Choctaws’ tradition (151).

These giants could have been Rafinesque’s Atlans.

Cushman then recounts the discovery in 1880 at a burial mound site near Plano, Texas, of human bones “of enormous size . . . the femoral bones being five inches longer than the ordinary length, and the jaw bones . . . so large as to slip over the face of a man with ease.” Cushman goes on to identify them with the older occupants of North America called Allegewi or Taligewi (Talegans). Many historians, moreover, speculate they were the builders of the Adena mounds.

As for the Chickasaw, Cushman notes that they have no record of their history before the colonial period, although it is assuredly "the same as the Choctaws, being one tribe and people until the division made by their two chiefs Chikasah and Chahtah many years after their arrival and location east of the Mississippi River" (p 358). Of the Natchez, Cushman records that they, "if tradition may be believed, also came from Mexico where they had lived for centuries" (p 440).

A story was told by the Comanches in 1857: 

Innumerable moons ago, a race of white men, ten feet high, and far more rich and powerful than any white people now living, here inhabited a large range of country, extending from the rising to the setting sun. Their fortifications crowned the summits of the mountains, protecting their populous cities situated in the intervening valleys. They excelled every other nation which was flourished, either before or since, in all manner of cunning handicraft—were brave and warlike—ruling over the land they had wrested from its ancient possessors with a high and haughty hand. Compared with them the palefaces of the present day were pygmies, in both art and arms. They drove the Indians from their homes, putting them to the sword, and occupying the valleys in which their fathers had dwelt before them since the world began. At length, in the height of their power and glory, when they remembered justice and mercy no more and became proud and lifted up, the Great Spirit descended from above, sweeping them with fire and deluge from the face of the earth. The mounds we [i.e. the speaker Chief Rolling Thunder and his Spanish listener] had seen on the tablelands were the remnants of their fortresses, and the crumbling ruins that surrounded us all that remained of a mighty city.[i]

The word Nahoolo or Nahullo “is now emphatically applied to the white race and no other . . . The Nahullo were of white complexion, according to Choctaw tradition, and were still an existing people at the time of the advent of the Choctaws to Mississippi,” concludes Cushman (p 153) . In agreement, the Indian trader Adair often refers to the Nani Ishtahoolo as departed white ghosts vested with spiritual powers whose descendants were priests and magicians. Their cries and magic spells could still be heard in the mounds like those at Ocmulgee.[ii] These references contribute to the suspicion that the “Indians” who preceded Asiatic tribes from Mexico were, as we would say today, Caucasian.

About exactly a year ago on this blog, we published a post about "Neanderthals in America," mentioning also the peculiar archaic skeleton that is now a roadside attraction in Arizona, called The Thing. In the meantime, we acquired a copy of Fritz Zimmerman's book, The Nephilim Chronicles, which reproduces over 300 historical accounts of Giant skeletons. Many are associated with the earliest mound sites in America, but Zimmerman's survey of this worldwide phenomenon ranges from the Hunter-Fisher People of northeast Europe and Red Paint People whose movements were circumpolar to the giants of the Bible, noted by the Babylonian Talmud as having double rows of teeth, and "Giants' Remains in the British Isles" (pp. 157-65).

Navajo legends speak of the Starnake People, a regal race of white giants endowed with mining technology who dominated the West, enslaved lesser tribes and had strongholds all through the Americas. They were either extinguished or "went back to the heavens." The name may be a corruption of the Biblical race known as Anakim (Num. 13:33, Deut. 1:28). The name Og (Hebrew "chief") appears to be characteristic (see Zimmerman, pp. 188-91). The ogham alphabet is attributed to this cultural founder. 

Certainly, many of the mound sites uncovered in the nineteenth century tell a story of constant warfare by incoming Asiatic tribes  against the giants occupying the land. One grisly scene showed thousands of skeletons, male, female and young heaped in a mass grave, with warriors' skulls pierced by arrows. It would appear that as these aboriginal inhabitants of the Ohio Valley were gradually displaced, some members of their society went over into the ranks of the new conquerors, bequeathing a strain of great stature still noticeable, for instance, in the Mobilian chief Tuscaloosa and DeSoto's Indian queen Cofitachiqui, both of whom were said to be seven feet tall.

We are struck by the following traits of this giant race or ethnic group from human prehistory:

• Mother Goddess religion
• Copper (not bronze) axes 
• Polished slate tools including fishing plummets, which were apparently regarded as sacred
• Belief that the Grandmother Moon was the repository of souls
• Diet emphasizing shellfish (for which the double row of teeth probably was selected as an evolutionary advantage in their beachcomber origin out of Africa?)
• Building of fish weirs in North American rivers to trap migrating eels
• Certain vegetarian habits (wild rice, for instance)
• Inscriptions on artifacts, especially pipes, often buried with the dead
• Use of coal and petroleum
• Weaving and looms
• Knowledge of seafaring, mathematics and engineering, including canals and irrigation
• Burying of a dog with a child to guard the latter in the afterlife
• A language apparently Afro-Asiatic and close to Semitic tongues
• Kingcraft:  nobles were buried in seated positions on thrones surrounded by a coterie of their retainers

"All the lights in the House of the High Priests of American Anthropology are out; all the doors and windows are shut and securely fastened (they do not sleep with their windows open for fear that a new idea might fly in); we have rung the bell of Reason, we have banged on the door with Logic, we have thrown the gravel of Evidence against their windows; but the only sign of life in the house is an occasional snore of Dogma. We are very much afraid that no one is going to come down and let us into the warm, musty halls where the venerable old ideas are nailed to the walls."

These biting words were penned by Harold Sterling Gladwin in Men out of Asia, the famous archeologist's most popular, non-technical work. Published in 1947, Gladwin's book presented a maverick view of the peopling of the Americas identifying five migrations of diverse races including Negrittoes and Austronesians to the New World. Heretically, he placed the first migration as early as 25,000 years ago and argued that the earliest colonists were Australoid. 

The reaction of his colleagues in the anthropological establishment was stony silence shading off into hrumps and pshaws of injured pride, for Gladwin illustrated Men out of Asia with campy cartoons by Campbell Grant making fun of the sacred keepers of knowledge at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Carnegie Foundation and Smithsonian Institution. In one, the dean of Southwest and Maya archeology Alfred V. Kidder is depicted as Dr. Phuddy Duddy sitting in academic robes atop a whistle sounding the alarm of illogical chronology. In another, a bespectacled Gladwin and his tweedy friend Professor Earnest Hooton of Harvard are shown in the academic doghouse "by request." 

The Establishment is still uncomfortable about Gladwin, who died in 1983 after a distinguished career of more than 60 years. Although willing to praise his meticulous fieldwork on the Hohokam at Snaketown and exacting methodologies developed at the research center he founded at Gila Pueblo outside Globe, Arizona, they do not know quite what to say about his conclusions and hypotheses, which grew more adamant toward the end.  

The destroying angel of unorthodox theories, Stephen Williams of the Peabody Museum, can only think that Gladwin succumbed to his "whimsies" and grew soft-headed in his old age. "I have always regarded Men Out of Asia," Williams writes in Fantastic Archeology (p. 229), "as a sort of 'hyper-diffusionist' spoof."

We wonder whether the laddies in Harvard Yard and Castle on the Mall do not protest too much.

In a similar high-toned snipe, Williams dismisses the author of Pale Ink with its discussions of ancient records of Chinese explorations in America as "a sweet old lady (p. 185)."  Louis Leakey, who believed on the basis of the Calico Early Man excavations he organized in California that humans occupied North America as long ago as 400,000 years, comes in for like treatment. Williams implies that Leakey was senile and hurried in his judgment (p. 303). 

If a controversial interpretation of the archeological record cannot be debunked as lacking "soil truth" or the hard-won verities of the dig and thus being nothing but "armchair archeology," then one must resort to that time-honored device of the Ivy League sneer. For instance, Jeffrey Goodman's controversial American Genesis "mimics a scientific book very well" (p. 303), but it cannot possibly be taken seriously because, well, you know, no person in his right mind subscribes to a North American or Asian origin for humans! In addition to coming from a homely, unpatrician Western background, Goodman was also part Native American, which helped make him a pariah. 

But to the happily hidebound Dr. Phuddy Duddys, we say in the words of Blake:

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.  

The winds of change may have the last laugh.

The tripartite Asian Model of the peopling of the Americas through "Beringia" was re-asserted with "the most comprehensive survey of genetic diversity in Native Americans so far" in a study published in Nature this week, "Reconstructing Native American Population History," by Harvard's David Reich et al.  If ever there was a blue chip study, this is it. Only it is more like junk bonds in which no one should put stock. 

If you read the fine print of this new issue from the Ivy League anthropological establishment, you may discover:

• Although the authors claim to go beyond examining single loci on the mitochondrial genome or Y chromosome and to analyze instead 364,470 SNPs, they are still stuck on the same biased samples. In one of their feats of prestidigitation, they statistically filter out "West-Eurasian-related and sub-Saharan African related ancestry in many Native Americans" (p. 371). They ignore anything that does not support their preconceived conclusions.
• Anthropologists have always insisted on the Bering Land bridge. Geneticists start with anthropologists' assumptions and test their model. Guess what? After enough manipulations you can make it work!
• Whole genome sequencing was adopted because it has become most economical, but half the samples were just adopted into the new study after doctoring the preexisting data. These biased data (Pima, Inuit etc.) were not reliable when they were collected (as far back as the 1990s), and have only been improved through statistical voodoo. The new Indians' samples (heavily geared to Mexico, Central America and northern South America) were probably subjected to SNP investigation out of interest in biodiversity and possible medical applications anyway. The motives of investigators who mostly belong to medical faculties are tainted.

In a review of Chris Stringer's book The Origin of Our Species (Lane, 2011), Jean-Jacques Hublin sides with one of the first promoters of the 30-year old Recent African Origin hypothesis and supports the notion that modern humans out of Africa entirely replaced Neanderthals because they were, well, fitter and superior.

See "Palaeoanthropology:  African Origins" in Nature 476, 395 (August 25, 2011).

But could the true scenario have been that "we" were already hybridized with Neanderthals, and that's why "we" won out? Recent work has brought evidence that Neanderthals gave "us" our immunities to a wide range of disease and thus allowed "us" to survive. The question doesn't have to be an either/or dilemma.

Above:  Krapina Neanderthal Museum. N. Solic.

According to a professor of immunology and microbiology at Stanford University, humans were able to survive, spread and expand their populations once they left Africa because of immunities to disease they acquired from Neanderthals and Denisovans, who had lived in Europe and Asia already for hundreds of thousands of years.

A review of the new research appears in the online science magazine Discover under the date of June 20, 2011. The professor's name is Peter Parham.

Crux of the matter, according to Royal Society report

• Parham began by taking a close look at a family of genes called  human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which play a central role in our body’s immune responses. We are able to react to a wide array of diseases because our HLA genes are highly variable, each containing dozens of  alleles (forms of genes).
• Our ancestors in Africa, however, would have had a small number of HLA alleles because they likely traveled in small bands and had little contact with other groups. Moreover, their HLAs would have only protected them against African diseases.
• When Parham compared the HLAs of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans, he noticed some overlaps. In particular, he found that HLA-C*0702, an allele common in Europeans and Asians but nonexistent in Africans, was also present in the Neanderthal genome. Similarly, HLA-A*11, which is found in modern Asians but not in Africans, popped up in Denisovan DNA.
• Overall, about 50 percent of HLA Class I alleles in Europeans seemed to come from Neanderthals, 70 to 80 percent in East Asians from Denisovans, and 90 to 95 percent in Papuans from Denisovans, Parham said at a recent Royal Society meeting.

DNA Consultants introduced its Neanderthal Index, a measure of affinity with archaic populations of Europe and the Middle East, one year ago this month.

Dr. Donald Yates says he is planning a visit to Vindija cave near Varazdin in Croatia this month to see firsthand the world's most important site for the discovery of Neanderthal bones and lifeways, dating to about 30,000 years ago.

Human history changed drastically with the 1974 Neanderthal discoveries at Vindija Cave. Photo Tomislav Kranjcic.

No scientific work, to our knowledge, has ever hazarded a guess on what the mutation rate for autosomal CODIS-type markers might be. Is it like mitochondrial DNA, which has a molecular clock measured in the thousands or tens of thousands of years, or is it like STRs on the Y chromosome, with its much shorter timeframe? The question is important if you are trying to extrapolate the history of the human race from today's autosomal population statistics.

From what we can see, putting on diachronistic lenses, the mutation rates for the DYS values on what are commonly called CODIS markers or the DNA profile for individuals are very small. The values appear to have been set from the beginning of mankind and to have mutated little in the past 100,000 years.

If this is true -- and it cannot be a very big "if" or we would have more diversity between populations than what is known -- the oldest markers are Sub-Saharan African and the newest European. Statistical divides bear out this reading of the human genetic record, as shown now in our updated map included with the DNA Fingerprint Plus.

We will try to make some notes on the individual markers in future posts.

In 2009-2010, an analysis of 11 royal mummies from around 1300 BCE was carried out by an Egyptian team under the country's chief archeologist Zahi Hawass. A television special was produced, titled "Unwrapping King Tut." Hawass and his colleagues published "Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun's Family," in JAMA, vol. 303, no. 7. (Feb. 17, 2010).

In a fun review article earlier this year, British journal New Scientist's Jo Marchant summarized much of the resulting controversy. See her "Royal rumpus over King Tutankhamun's Ancestry."

We'd be interested in seeing Tut and the other putative family members' DNA fingerprint scores at the bottom of the mystery but are not aware that Hawass and his team actually published the bona fides of their investigations. From a cursory look, it is evident to us that Amenhotep and his descendants, including Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and his unidentified mother (Nefertiti? Tiye?), all bore our marker Asian III.

Unsurprisingly, none of the royal mummies seems to have carried a Jewish marker. It is unclear from the limited data revealed to the world by Hawass whether any had Sub-Saharan African markers.

The new Tut tiff swirls around the question of the pharaohs' African and Western European ethnicity. Without being able to shed light on that, our 18 Marker Ethnic predictor at least suggests they had Asian. Of course, this is not to say they were Asian primarily, since all peoples, ancient and modern, are mixed and may exhibit a variety of ethnic markers in their autosomal DNA.

Above:  British Museum's wood and ivory painted chest lid from the royal tomb shows Tutankhamen leaning on a staff with his sister-wife Ankhesenamun presenting him with a lotus flower. Inbreeding and genetic disease spelled the end of the dynasty.

The timing of the dispersal of anatomically modern humans (AMH) out of Africa is a fundamental question in human evolutionary studies. Existing data suggest a rapid coastal exodus via the Indian Ocean rim around 60,000 years ago. We present evidence from Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, demonstrating human presence in eastern Arabia during the last interglacial. The tool kit found at Jebel Faya has affinities to the late Middle Stone Age in northeast Africa, indicating that technological innovation was not necessary to facilitate migration into Arabia. Instead, we propose that low eustatic sea level and increased rainfall during the transition between marine isotope stages 6 and 5 allowed humans to populate Arabia. This evidence implies that AMH may have been present in South Asia before the Toba eruption (1).

First paragraph.
The deserts of the Arabian Peninsula have been thought to represent a major obstacle for human dispersal out of Africa. AMH were present in East Africa by about 200 thousand years ago (ka) (2). It is likely that the first migration of AMH out of Africa occurred immediately before or during the last interglacial [marine isotope stage (MIS) 5e] (3). During MIS 6, the Afro-Asiatic arid belt was hyperarid, restricting movements of human populations out of Africa. Finds from Qafzeh and Skhul in the Near East, dated between 119 ± 18 and 81 ± 13 thousand years ago (ka) (4, 5), suggest that AMH first migrated along the “Nile Corridor” and into the Levant. 

The location of Jebel Faya, United Arab Emirates, along with key sites mentioned in the text. The dashed line represents the –120-m paleoshoreline, indicating the maximum exposure of land during marine lowstands. Science.

Did Modern Humans Travel Out of Africa Via Arabia?

By Andrew Lawler

Science 28 January 2011: 387. [DOI:10.1126/science.331.6016.387]

JEBEL FAYA, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES—The barren desert and hills here seem wholly inhospitable, with sparse rain and sandy soil supporting only a few nomadic Bedouin. But things were different 125,000 years ago, when the desert was savanna, with plentiful water and game, and under the protection of a rock overhang, a group of hominids whiled away their time making stone tools. A Germanled team argues on page 453 that these tools were made by modern humans who may have crossed directly from Africa as part of a migration spreading across Europe, Asia, and Australia. Although most researchers agree that our species came out of Africa in one or more waves (see p. 392), those dates are more than 50,000 years earlier than most believe our ancestors left the continent.

The audacious claim by Simon Armitage of Royal Holloway, University of London, and colleagues is sparking interest and controversy. “This is really quite spectacular,” says archaeologist Michael Petraglia of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who has previously argued that Homo sapiens left Africa before the massive eruption of an Indonesian volcano 74,000 years ago, a catastrophe thought to have left much of Asia unlivable for early humans (Science, 5 March 2010, p. 1187). “It breaks the back of the current consensus view.” But others, such as archaeologist Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, say that although the discovery is important and well dated, the conclusions are flawed. “I'm totally unpersuaded,” he says. “There's not a scrap of evidence here that these were made by modern humans, nor that they came from Africa.”

The debate centers on a collection of stone tools found here at Jebel Faya, a long limestone mountain an hour's drive from the bustling urban center of Sharjah and 55 kilometers from the Persian Gulf. A rock shelter indents the mountain's end, a few meters above a desolate plain where only camels graze today. The overhang is modest, but it has sheltered humans for millennia, say excavators Hans-Peter and Margarethe Uerpmann of the University of Tübingen in Germany. They began digging here in 2003, uncovering artifacts from the Iron, Bronze, and Neolithic periods before hitting material from the Middle Paleolithic era, roughly 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. Using single-grain optically stimulated luminescence, which measures how much time has passed since materials were last exposed to light, the team dated the oldest set of artifacts, including stone hand axes, blades, and scrapers, to about 125,000 years ago.

Arabia and its fierce deserts have long been seen more as obstacles than conduits to human migration, and most archaeology here has focused on historical times. Recent studies, however, show wetter periods such as one that began around 130,000 years ago. And a spate of findings in the past 25 years show that hominins were in the region during the Middle Paleolithic. Early H. sapiens skulls and tools from Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel are now dated to 100,000 to 130,000 years ago, for example.

Co-author Anthony Marks of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says the combination of artifacts from Jebel Faya, such as two-sided blades and small hand axes, is remarkably similar to assemblages made during this period in East Africa, when our own species was the only known hominin on that continent. Other hominins, such as the Neandertals who populated Europe and north Asia, did not use this combination of tools and were not likely to have been in Arabia, he says. That makes the African origin likely “by process of elimination.”

Marks says the tools don't resemble those from Israel or the Aterian tools from the same era in North Africa (Science, 7 January, p. 20). He suggests that H. sapiens may have left Africa in different waves, with the Arabian tools representing a migration launched from East Africa.

Petraglia agrees that it's likely that H. sapiens made the tools and that they came from Africa. “This is out of the habitat range of Neandertals,” he notes. “So they make a really strong and plausible argument.” The team believes that these early modern humans may have even pushed on across the Persian Gulf, perhaps to India, Indonesia, and eventually Australia. Petraglia claims evidence of early H. sapiens in India both before and after the Indonesian eruption, though others dispute that assertion.

Mellars, in contrast, sees no evidence that the Jebel Faya artifacts are of an East African style. He says one of the bifacials is stout rather than narrow like those common in Africa and adds that the authors have not ruled out Neandertals and even H. erectus as the toolmakers. “Everything hinges on whether that material is explicitly African—and I don't see that.”

Other researchers are enthusiastic about the Jebel Faya discovery but cautious about the conclusions. Archaeologist Mark Beech, a visiting fellow at the University of York in the United Kingdom who has worked extensively in the United Arab Emirates, praises the paper but adds: “One site does not confirm the out-of-Africa-via-Arabia hypothesis.”

Hans-Peter Uerpmann agrees, saying that fossil bones are needed “before we can be absolutely sure” that the tools were made by H. sapiens. Other researchers are hot on the trail: Petraglia leaves this month to continue work in Saudi Arabia, and other archaeologists plan to comb Arabian caves and sands for signs that our ancestors passed this way.

We've been saying as much all along.

See our blog post on Prehistoric Arabia.

Native Hawaiians and Native Americans
Part One

In a previous post, "On the Trail of Spider Woman," we suggested that petroglyphs in Arizona and Utah with female goddess symbolism and birthing ceremonies were connected with the Hohokam ("Sea Peoples") and other Indians who followed in their wake, corresponding to archeology and anthropology's Basketmaker Culture. In this and a series of posts over the next few months, we will show pictures of “emergence” petroglyphs from Hawaii, New Guinea, California, Hopi, Zuni, Pima, Papago, Fremont, Zuni, Mimbres, Palavayu and Eastern Woodlands cultural sites that support our thesis. We believe them to be the footsteps and stepping stones of female haplogroup B and its associated lineages.

Mitochondrial Haplogroup B does not have as its dissemination center Mongolia or Siberia or Central Asia but Southeast Asia, specifically Taiwan and Indonesia, and is characteristic, in contrast with Indian groups emphasizing A, C and D, of the Pueblo Indians and some Southeastern Indians such as the Cherokee and Chickasaw and Choctaw. It entered the Americas in successive waves, some of them seaborne, over many millennia.

The first picture comes from the western coast of the island of Hawaii. It is considered one of the oldest religious shrines in the Hawaiian Islands. It shows a stick figure carved into a rock set in the ground. As we will see, this is a typical "emergence" figure marking the arrival of a people in a new phase of existence. The symbolism is of a female mother figure giving birth, her progeny here depicted by the taillike extension coming from between her legs. There are thousands of variations of this tribal or clan mother iconography scattered over Asia and the Americas (but not apparently found in Europe or Africa).

The Hawaiians considered the western coast of the Big Island their place of emergence. According to their legends, their people came from the sea from the southwest and were noted for their ability to twist plants and fibers into ropes. Their capital was hence called Hilo (twisted, plaited). On account of their subtlety in these arts they adopted the hula (twist) dance as their national dance. Its original purpose was as a fertility ritual to increase population. (Johannes C. Andersen, Myths and Legends of the Polynesians, Tokyo:  Tuttle, 1969.) The main song sung during the enactment of the hula was called The Water of Kane, or Waters of Life.

The Hawaiian Mother symbol illustrated above seems to be connected with a certain clan. As is often the case, the head of the female figure is differentiated to show which clan. This one has horns and could represent a dragonfly. This insect recurs in American Indian petroglyphs where it is associated with the Water Clan and fertility rites. To "read" the Hawaiian petroglyph properly we might say, "Here is the spot where the Head Mother of the Water Clan emerged and gave birth to her people." It is likely (although no legends are preserved regarding its use) that women made offerings here to become fertile, attract husbands and be delivered of healthy children. In similar ceremonial sites, such figures mark an actual birthing stone where women squatted to give birth, attended by midwives and clan mothers.

Native American Parallels

To show the physical resemblance of the Hawaiian design to American Indian symbols we will reproduce  thumbprints below from different traditions. They will be linked together and explicated in subsequent posts in this series.

"Lizard Woman" petroglyphs from Arizona/Utah.