by Brett Stevens on March 17, 2018

Human history is a forgery. We discover a few data points, draw imaginary lines between them with what seems to be likely, and then call the whole thing fact, even though the facts are inseparable from the interpretations that we have advanced. Then along comes new data and upends the whole thing.

Among other things, we keep setting the timeline back as to the date when we became modern humans and not just hominins, hominids, or hominoids (depending on your preferred terminology):

Until recently, H. sapiens was thought to have evolved approximately 200,000 years ago in East Africa. This estimate was shaped by the discovery in 1967 of the oldest remains attributed to H. sapiens, at a site in Ethiopiaâ€™s Omo Valley. The remains, made up of two skulls (Omo 1 and Omo 2), had initially been dated to 130,000 years ago, but through the application of more-sophisticated dating techniques in 2005, the remains were more accurately dated to 195,000 years ago. In June 2017, however, all of this changed. A multiyear excavation led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, revealed that H. sapiens was present at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, more than 5,000 km (3,100 miles) away from East Africa (the region many paleontologists call â€œthe cradle of humankindâ€). The team unearthed a collection of specimens that was made up of skull fragments and a complete jawbone (both of which were strikingly similar to those of modern human beings) as well as stone toolsâ€”all of which dated to about 315,000 years ago, more than 100,000 years earlier than the remains found at Omo. Although this discovery has not yet convinced all paleontologists, it suggests that the species could have been widely dispersed throughout North Africa much earlier than they expected and that East Africa might not have been the only cradle.

Keep in mind that our reasoning here is somewhat backward: we have a general theory, and we rationalize each new data point in the context of the theory, because anything too radical is not only unproven, but also will face opposition from the rest of the human social group known as the scientific community.

This group receives funding from drawing attention to itself by telling people things that they want to hear. The idea of one big human species where everyone is basically the same pleases nearly everyone in an egalitarian time; the notion of complex, nuanced, intricate, and ambiguous links makes people feel stupid and confused, so no one will win a book contract or laboratory funding that way.

As a result, the old Out of Africa theory has great legs because it makes careers. It is politically advantageous to talk about how we all came from one point in Africa and this migration was relatively recent; it is political suicide to say that humanity arose in multiple places, far longer ago, and so our narrative is nonsense. The only way these studies have taken root at all is by extremely cautious wording and the fact that most people have no idea of their significance.

Over the years, through slowly altering what we know of very basic details, some scientists have advanced a different picture: humanity is much older than previously thought, and there are whole eras of history which are unknown to us entirely.

We can see the narrative becoming complex as new discoveries appear, such as evidence of 300,000 year old settlements in Israel:

A newly discovered hearth full of ash and charred bone in a cave in modern-day Israel hints that early humans sat around fires as early as 300,000 years ago â€” before Homo sapiens arose in Africa. …What’s more, its position implies some planning went into deciding where to put the fire pit, suggesting whoever built it must have had a certain level of intelligence. …It’s not entirely clear who was cooking at Qesem Cave. A study published about three years ago in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology described teeth found in the cave dating to between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. The authors speculated the teeth might have belonged to modern humans (Homo sapiens), Neanderthals or perhaps a different species, though they noted they couldn’t draw a solid conclusion from their evidence.

The pre-ancient world thus reveals itself as more complex, with more nuance and variation, than our previous theories implied. Different groups across multiple continents were becoming intelligent long before Homo sapiens, which makes us wonder in turn if these groups did not simply exist in parallel with Homo sapiens much as modern races have coexisted for tens of thousands of years.

If that were the case, we would see a great deal more activity along the lines of civilization, with many of the experiences that we think of as belonging to a certain year having repeated time and again over the millennia. History would appear as cyclic, with groups discovering optimum methods of adaptation and then slowly forgetting.

It could even reveal a situation where multiple origins of modern humans occurred, producing the mixtures or germinal populations that manifest in the races and ethnic groups of today. As more ancient digs are uncovered, usually by those who are not vested in the status quo, we learn more about the world before ours:

For several years he had attempted to persuade experts to take a look at the Wolf Cave. But archaeologists were not interested …During 1997 there was speculation of a much earlier date, but the main candidate now is the Eem Interglacial (130,000-120,000 BP). Also research still has not eliminated the possibility that the find could be from Saale I-II (220,000-200,000) or from the Holstein Interglacial (340,000-300,000 years ago). “The principal tool maker” is Homo neanderthalensis,” also the tool does not represent the classic mousterien- and levallois- technique, but more represents the pebble tools-implements, in particular Clacton-tools.”

If pre-sapiens differentiation resulted in more advanced people engaging in technology and civilization before we thought, and Homo sapiens occurred earlier than we believe, our knowledge of the stone age must expand to include a vision of a more diverse and developed pre-ancient world.

This means in turn that history itself expand because it is likely that, instead of being recent additions, Homo sapiens were one of several advanced groups of humans, and because they grew up long before we thought, had more time as civilization-crafting, history-making, and thinking beings.

With recent attempts to alter history to fit the narrative, we see the necessity of expanding history: the Left wants to take a few facts, spin them into a much broader interpretation, and then exclude dissent.

As history expands, much as happened with science, this leads to a clash between Establishment-approved messages and the newer, wilder knowledge of a world outside of the walled garden of political orthodoxy. In particular, as the timeline expands, we look further into European roots and see a more complex view of our origins.

This will displease the types who wanted to declare “Cheddar Man” a dark-skinned archetype of Britons, instead of a minority ancestor who reflected admixture outside the Island, so that we would all just give up on the majority of our heritage and history.

Newer research shows us that Europeans consisted of several populations with complex histories, joining together into a continent divided between its elites and its rank and file:

We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000â€“5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, âˆ¼8,000â€“7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a âˆ¼24,000-year-old Siberian. By âˆ¼6,000â€“5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact âˆ¼4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced âˆ¼75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least âˆ¼3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans.

As we have known for centuries, our people formed when they broke away from those that would become Asiatics somewhere to the West of Siberia. These then roamed the steppes, visiting China sometime between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago, and then settled in Europe, possibly because they wanted a defensive posture instead of being exposed on the plains.

Since our history beyond the 4,000 year point is fragmentary, and since we have reason to believe that pre-ancient history was a longer time than previously thought, let us for a moment think of the most logical series of events that would have happened.

For hundreds of thousands of years, modern humans and proto-humans co-existed across Africa, Europe, and Asia. Most groups were complex hunter-gatherers, or those who moved from cave to cave while maintaining an only partially agricultural lifestyle. Perhaps they followed prey or moved with the growing seasons.

The group that became Europeans left behind people in each of these areas who then returned to Europe, causing the arrival of a middle eastern group that was fundamentally the same as the original group but with characteristics adapted to the regions in which they had settled.

The two groups then converged on Europe, but the steppe people — Yamnaya — reflected more of the northern heritage, where the farmers from the lands where there was sunlight for more of the year were most likely smaller, darker, and adapted to settled life.

Right now, we are seeing an arc play out that determines which of the two groups will predominate. Will we choose our lawless and feral steppe ancestors, or follow the middle eastern farmers? This has played out through caste revolt, with the less-aristocratic farmers trying to overthrow their Yamnaya cousins for centuries now.

If we expand history to its likely breadth, however, the conflict takes on a new dimension. No longer are we struggling for power; we are struggling for evolution. The root of our conflict are ancient, and will have wide-ranging implications for the future. That is, if we survive this nexus of historical trends.

Tags: africa, complex hunter-gatherers, finland, homo neanderthalis, homo sapiens, israel, neanderthals, yamnaya

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