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What if the real King Arthur was not the Christian hero we immediately think of but a pagan or Jew? Not a comedic King Arthur like the one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whose possible worst peril was to battle knights who say “Ni.” Or T.H. White’s delightful and imaginary medieval England in “The Once and Future King,” where Arthur as a boy was turned into various creatures like a hawk by Merlin, so that he could learn to fly. That is clearly fantasy. So is Sean Connery as an older Arthur in The First Knight whose adversary is the philosophical Richard Gere as Lancelot.

But what if we could cut and paste some of the Arthurian legend and his tales in Avalon in a history book? This is not beyond possibility. There are historians who have either made the case for resurrecting King Arthur or who have not altogether discounted the possibility of a historical King Arthur. According to the distinguished historian, Geoffrey Ashe, in his book, The Discovery of King Arthur, he was “lucky enough to find a way through, and press on to a fruitful outcome”…giv[ing] Arthur a firmer status in history…mak[ing] him more interesting-more like his legend- than appeared probable a few years ago.”  And he says there are reasons to believe King Arthur may have had descendants. Perhaps King Arthur is in your family tree. Who knows?

Of course, we know the story. According to a recent BBC article, “King Arthur Tales ‘Penned in Oxford Chapel’,” the cleric, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote of King Arthur, and Guinever at St. George’s chapel. However, since he was also the standard for history on British kings, might he have not based it on something he knew that was a fact? He is best known for his work History of the Kings of Britain.

And if there was a real King Arthur, who was he? Even among historians who think a King Arthur is plausible, they do not agree on who the candidate is.

Ashe contends that he was a British king, Riothamus, who was on the continent during the correct time period (469-470) and whose career follows closely to the life of the King Arthur we are familiar with. Indeed, he was the “only British King who led an army into Gaul,” and he “disappears after a fatal battle, without any recorded death” among other coincidences. He argues that Riothamus was a title as its original form would have meant “High King” (96-97).

But there are others with different ideas. Stephen Knight, in his review of the historiographer, N.J. Higham’s, book King Arthur: Myth Making and History says Higham remains unconvinced that we will ever know if there is a King Arthur, or that it is important, but calling him an “agnostic” is not entirely dismissive of a historical King Arthur. However, he is “dismissive of Riothamus” and thinks the next more likely candidate is the historical figure Ambrosius Aurelianus. Aurelianus, according to Princeton University’s webpage, “Ambrosius Aurelianus,” was a “war leader of the Romano-Britsh against the Anglo-Saxons in the 5^th century.” But Higham thinks the most likely candidate for King Arthur is Lucius Artorius Castos, a Roman military commander in the 2^nd – 3^rd century AD (L.A.Malcor in “The Heroic Age”). Unfortunately, Knight notes, although this is a well-researched book, he does not clarify the reasons for his choices.

As if there were not enough, what if one tosses in a bit of the Arabian Nights in the Arthurian legend? According to Donald Yates and Elizabeth Hirschman, in their upcoming book, The Earliest Jews and Muslims of England and Wales, Arthur might have Arabic and North- African roots:

The origin of the name Arthur has been endlessly debated. It is almost certainly not “Celtic,” neither from a P or Q dialect, and cannot be traced further back than post-Roman times. The center of gravity for its appearance is the sixth century. In 1998, archeological excavations at sixth-century Tintagel brought to light a find subsequently dubbed the Arthur Stone, mentioning the name Artognou, claimed to be cognate. Although the reading is questionable perhaps this inscription and milieu are on the right track.

Arthur’s name has become something of a grail quest for modern researchers. Other theories derive the name from Artorius (Roman or Messapic), Arnthur (Etruscan), Arcturus (the “bear star”) or *Arto-uiros in Brittonic (“bear man”).

Perhaps the Gordian knot of the difficulty can be cut if we consider that many of the names in early Welsh history have Arabic and North African roots.

And perhaps we can one day trace the ancestry of King Arthur for sure. Celtic? British? Cornish? English? North African? Roman? Sephardic Jewish? Pick one or more.

Photo:  King Arthur in an eighteenth-century illustration for a play by John Dryden shows him in antique Roman costume. Copyright The Trustees of the British Museum. 

North Africans in Early Britain [blog post]

Were They Possibly Denisovan Hybrids?

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.

In what a December 22 report in RawStory describes as possibly "the most important archeological discovery in recent times," the ruins of a stone city believed to be at least 1,100 years old have come to light in the mountains of North Georgia. Interest in the Kenimer Mound, a large, five-sided pyramid in the foothills of Georgia's tallest mountain, Brasstown Bald, near Blairsville in the Chattahoochee National Forest go back to a 1999 University of Georgia dig led by archeologist Mark Williams.

At least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces were exposed, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system, prompting Richard Thornton to speculate that the site corresponds to Yupaha, a town explorer Hernando de Soto searched for unsuccessfully in 1540. Thornton relates the site to other Maya-like ruins in the Southeast and believes the people who build it were the Itza Maya, a word that carried over into the Cherokee language of the region.

Traditional oral histories such as those recorded by Constantine Rafinesque have always traced the origins of the Natchez and other pre-Muskoghean Native Americans in the Southeastern U.S. to Mexico. Rafinesque thus distinguishes between the Itzcans (or Aztec) and the Oguzhians (Algonquians).

The site is called Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap and is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside.

Photo above:  Blue Rock, a scene nearby.

A Missing Link from Kent's Cavern in Devonshire

A prehistoric maxilla (upper jawbone) fragment was discovered in the cavern during a 1927 excavation by the Torquay Natural History Society, and named Kents Cavern 4. The specimen is on display at the Torquay Museum.

Although previous radiocarbon dating suggested the bone was about 35,000 years old, a new study in Nature redates it securely to 44.2-41.5 kyr. The article by Tom Higham et al., "The Earliest Evidence for Anatomically Modern Humans in Northwestern Europe," also claims that on the basis of dental comparisons it is "human" rather than "Neanderthal."

The Kent's Cavern fragment "therefore represents the oldest known anatomically modern human fossil in northwestern Europe, fills a key gap between the earliest dated Aurignacian remains and the earliest human skeletal remains, and demonstrates the wide and rapid dispersal of early modern humans across Europe more than 40 kyr ago."

A related article in the same issue of Nature is "Early Dispersal of Modern Humans in Europe and Implications for Neanderthal Behavior," by Stefano Benazzi et al. It attempts to place the so-called Cavallo fossil from southern Italy in a timeframe of about 44,000 years ago, thus suggesting a "rapid dispersal of modern humans across the continent before the Aurignacian and the disappearance of Neanderthals."

Neither study considers that the evidence they are examining may be the result of hybridization between "humans" and "Neanderthals." Like most geneticists the authors have rigid categories and do not consider that our definitions of species and sub-species and transitions in technocomplexes and traits are in flux as new discoveries are made.

One man's Mede may be another man's Persian, and we note that the "fossil race" is not devoid of scientific jingoism pitting one country's news-making finds against another's. So far England seems to be winning.

However, the British still have to live down Piltdown Man, a fraud of biblical proportions that fooled the world for almost half a century until the 1950s. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery combining the lower jawbone of an orangutan with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The editors sum up the two new studies by writing, "The reanalysis of findings from two archaeological sites calls for a reassessment of when modern humans settled in Europe, and of Neanderthal cultural achievements." We wish that the paleontological community would think more out of the box and reassess how, when and where "humans" and "Neanderthals" interbred. 


Location of Kent's Caverns in Devon.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Neanderthal fossil record in America. And apparently a Neanderthal hybrid fossil record.

No genetics publication has put all the evidence together: the genetics establishment is still in denial about most things Neanderthal. The evidence is scattered and mostly unrecognized, but, in our opinion, conclusive and compulsive. Consider the following article:

Frank L'Engle Williams and Gail E. Krovitz, "Ontogenetic Migration of the Mental Foramen in Neanderthals and Modern Humans," Journal of Human Evolution 47/4 (Oct. 2004) 190-219. 

The mental foramen (literally "mind's little hole") is an anatomical trait very pronounced in Neanderthals, a small dimple in the lower jaw of the skull beneath the teeth, or mandible. It is found sporadically in humans, where it is classified as archaic. Among the places where it has been identified are the Oleniy Islands and Baltic region, Northwestern Russia in Cro-Magnon like Europoid and Mongoloid types, along with "large and massive" torus occipitalis or Anatolian bumps (Alexander Mongait, 1959; Marija Gimbutas, 1956); Bakhehisarai in the Crimea (Alexander Mongait, 1959); the Joman or Ainu of Japan (Carleton Stevens Coon, 1962); and the "race of giants" continually being unearthed in West Coast, Ohio Valley and New England archeological sites, caves and mounds.

Archaic giant skeletons with mental foramina, occipital bumps, double rows of teeth and other Neanderthal features are reported, in fact, all over the Americas. Fritz Zimmerman has gathered a lot of the evidence in a new book titled Nephilim Chronicles, of which a small excerpt was published in Ancient American magazine, issue 91, pp. 24-27. Here is one of the newspaper reports he cites:

Evening News (Ada, Oklahoma), November 8, 1912. PRIMITIVE MEN OF GIGANTIC STATURE.

Eleven skeletons of primitive men, with foreheads sloping directly back from the eyes and two rows of teeth in the front of the upper jaw, have been uncovered at Craigshill at Ellensburg, Washington. They were found about twenty feet below the surface, twenty feet back from the face of the slope, in a cement rock formation over which was a layer of shale. The rock was perfectly dry. The jawbones, which easily break, are so large that they will go around the face of a man today. The other bones are also much larger than those of the ordinary man. The femur is twenty inches long, indicating a man of eighty inches tall [6' 8"]. The teeth in front are worn almost down to the jawbones, due, it is believed, to eating uncooked foods and crushing substances with the teeth. The sloping skull shows an extreme low order of intelligence.

We note that the female mummy clutching a child known as The Thing on display at a roadside attraction on Interstate 10 north of Tombstone, Arizona, has a double row of teeth. It supposedly was one of three skeletons sold to the operator of the original site for $50 by a Chinese gentleman passing through. The Thing is discussed in several works by David Hatcher Childress. (My son and I paid our two bucks and saw it last Christmas on a road trip.)

Photo above:  Archaic skull from Oleniy Island studied by Marija Gimbutas among other archeologists, showing the position of the mental foramen, the result probably of Neanderthal interbreeding.

Photo below:  The Thing.

Her profession is her religion
Her sin her lifelessness

--Bob Dylan

Will the archeological establishment's obtuseness about prehistory and the religion of the Great Goddess ever falter? In an article titled "Pieces of a Bronze Age Puzzle" in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine (Sept/Oct 2011, p. 15), Jessica Woodard discusses the "enigma" of thousands of broken Cycladic figurines from the tiny, uninhabited island of Keros near Naxos. Summarizing the decades long work of Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew, she dates the site to 2800 to 2300 BCE and (are you ready for this) speculates there was a lot of "social activity as well as ritual activity...relating to beliefs about life, death, and perhaps the hereafter."

This is tantamount to saying that the deliberately broken figurines were broken by people, human beings who lived a long time ago, on purpose. But what kind of rituals and "beliefs"? The word "religion" is mentioned nowhere. Evidently, since archeologists profess no religion themselves they cannot detect it in any of the people whose graves and relics they dig up.

Greek mythology tells how Venus, the eldest of the Fates, was born at sea and stepped ashore on several islands, where her cult continued, notably at Cythera, Crete, Naxos and Cyprus. All the "enigmatic" broken figures clearly relate to the worship of the Mother Goddess. Marija Gimbutas covers the featureless face, arms crossed over breasts and other unmistakable signs of the Goddess or Magna Mater in her voluminous writings, including The Language of the Goddess. We suggest if Colin Renfrew cannot bring himself to read Gimbutas he at least dip into Pausanias, the second century CE author of a guidebook to Greece in ten volumes. There he will find many descriptions of these votive offerings to the Goddess.

Archeologists may also want to acquire at least a bowing acquaintance with Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade. Both Gimbutas and Eisler describe three invasions of the warriors of the steppes with their male gods following the year 3000 BCE that spelled an end to the long period of female-based life-celebrating religion in the Middle East and Old Europe. Only the Minoans, Etruscans and certain other peoples from Asia Minor and the Greek Islands were able to retain the Mother Goddess in the new mostly male pantheon, which was focused more on death than rebirth.

The only puzzling part of the Keros Hoard is how archeologists could overlook its abundant testimony to the Mother Goddess religion.


Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" depicts the Goddess' first coming ashore. (No, this is not the famous original in the Uffizzi Gallery in Florence. This is a cheap reproduction hanging on the walls of a Rome pizzeria.)

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.

A recent comparison of medieval mitochondrial DNA from a Byzantine cemetery with modern populations in Southwest Turkey shows what we have assumed in our population analyses of atDNA 2.0. The integration of historical with archaeological information proves that the little South Anatolian town of Sagalassos has a clearly structured Balkan/Greek maternal population with some ancient Persians and Italians in the mix but no Central Asian (Turkic) contributions discernible. The inference is that when the Turks conquered Anatolia and eventually took control of the Byzantine capital (modern-day Constantinople) they remained largely a ruling class with little penetration into the ancient settlements scattered through Turkey. Even though the general populace accepted their conquerors' religion, Islam, their bedrock DNA did not significantly alter, at least not in the female lines. 

Claudio Ottoni et al., "Mitochondrial Analysis of a Byzantine Population Reveals the Differential Impact of Multiple Historical Events in South Anatolia," Eur. J. of Hum. Genet. (2011) 19:571-76.

Abstract
The archaeological site of Sagalassos is located in Southwest Turkey, in the western part of the Taurus mountain range. Human occupation of its territory is attested from the late 12th millennium BP up to the 13th century AD. By analysing the mtDNA variation in 85 skeletons from Sagalassos dated to the 11th–13th century AD, this study attempts to reconstruct the genetic signature potentially left in this region of Anatolia by the many civilizations, which succeeded one another over the centuries until the mid-Byzantine period (13th century BC). Authentic ancient DNA data were determined from the control region and some SNPs in the coding region of the mtDNA in 53 individuals. Comparative analyses with up to 157 modern populations allowed us to reconstruct the origin of the mid-Byzantine people still dwelling in dispersed hamlets in Sagalassos, and to detect the maternal contribution of their potential ancestors. By integrating the genetic data with historical and archaeological information, we were able to attest in Sagalassos a significant maternal genetic signature of Balkan/Greek populations, as well as ancient Persians and populations from the Italian peninsula. Some contribution from the Levant has been also detected, whereas no contribution from Central Asian population could be ascertained.

The Southern Route “Out of Africa”: Evidence for an Early Expansion of Modern Humans into Arabia

Science 28 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6016 pp. 453-456 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199113

By Simon J. Armitage, Sabah A. Jasim, Anthony E. Marks, Adrian G. Parker, Vitaly I. Usik, and Hans-Peter Uerpmann

Abstract

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.