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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS - UPDATE
| At the time of the last great glacial period, "humanity" had spread over the globe. These were "humans" in the sense that they could interbreed with any species or subspecies of human present on the planet today, though they may have looked quite a lot different than any group of people alive today (and no doubt came in as many varieties). |
Just an update to the model.
At the time of the last great glacial period, "humanity" was limited to the tropics, though plausibly all continents. This was the only environment suitable for our naked ancestors. This "humanity" was "human" in the sense that its representatives were capable of interbreeding with any species or subspecies of human present on the planet today, though they may have looked quite a lot different than any group of people alive today (and no doubt came in as many varieties).
Then came the great warming.
As the brief glacial period ended, and the long interglacial period began, the equator became increasingly hot and uncomfortable for our warm-blooded ancestors. They moved away from it into temperate climes, along with much of the warm-blooded wildlife. Tropical animals and plants, reduced in number during the glacial period, flourished, and plant life ultimately filled the entire globe. Temperatures rose everywhere but nowhere so high as they did at the equator, which became a torrid barrier to those humans in the northern hemisphere.
Eventually, all around the relatively warm northern pole (relative to today), humanity stratified into population bands, each defined by how well-adapted they were to the north, not just to its lower temperatures, but also to its darkness. Some stayed in southerly latitudes. Others made their homes closer to the poles: Each group subjected to the selective pressures of their particular environment.
At the highest point were the Hyperboreans.
But the differing temperatures and the differing lengths of daylight were not the only qualities differentiating each stratified environment. Not at all. Indeed; what ultimately doomed the Hyperboreans was one of the other differences that made the Hyperborean environment so unique.
And yes. I've gone and spoiled the ending; at the end of the glacial period, the Hyperboreans all died out. Though they left something behind.
And it was considerably more than "fingerprints."
The question: What was it that killed them?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Ishmael wrote: | HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS - UPDATE
At the time of the last great glacial period, "humanity" had spread over the globe. These were "humans" in the sense that they could interbreed with any species or subspecies of human present on the planet today, though they may have looked quite a lot different than any group of people alive today (and no doubt came in as many varieties).
Just an update to the model. At the time of the last great glacial period, "humanity" was limited to the tropics, though plausibly all continents. This was the only environment suitable for our naked ancestors. |
So far, so orthodox.
| This "humanity" was "human" in the sense that its representatives were capable of interbreeding with any species or subspecies of human present on the planet today, though they may have looked quite a lot different than any group of people alive today (and no doubt came in as many varieties). |
Not entirely orthodox. Paleoanthropologists treat all hominid species as species, i.e. they could not interbreed. For reasons I have never been able to fathom, they made an exception with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon (i.e. us). We could interbreed.
| Then came the great warming. As the brief glacial period ended, and the long interglacial period began, the equator became increasingly hot and uncomfortable for our warm-blooded ancestors. They moved away from it into temperate climes, along with much of the warm-blooded wildlife. |
This is the bit I can't fathom. Unless you are positing a very much hotter interglacial than anything we know of, I can't see hominids leaving the equatorial areas that their closest relatives, the great apes, are so fond of.
| Tropical animals and plants, reduced in number during the glacial period, flourished, and plant life ultimately filled the entire globe. |
So not too hot for them.
| Temperatures rose everywhere but nowhere so high as they did at the equator, which became a torrid barrier to those humans in the northern hemisphere. |
I can accept this as a hypothesis. In fact it is quite a useful corrective. There is no reason why terrestrial temperatures should have a maximum and, assuming these periods were quite short lived--and they would only need to be--they would not show up in a climatic record being studied by people who assume today's temperatures are 'normal' temperatures.
| Eventually, all around the relatively warm northern pole (relative to today), humanity stratified into population bands, each defined by how well-adapted they were to the north, not just to its lower temperatures, but also to its darkness. Some stayed in southerly latitudes. Others made their homes closer to the poles: Each group subjected to the selective pressures of their particular environment. |
OK
| At the highest point were the Hyperboreans. But the differing temperatures and the differing lengths of daylight were not the only qualities differentiating each stratified environment. Not at all. Indeed; what ultimately doomed the Hyperboreans was one of the other differences that made the Hyperborean environment so unique. |
I haven't a clue what that might be.
| And yes. I've gone and spoiled the ending; at the end of the glacial period, the Hyperboreans all died out. |
I gathered that.
| Though they left something behind. And it was considerably more than "fingerprints." |
Palm prints? That was one of the early art forms. (Only joking.)
| The question: What was it that killed them? |
That's two questions. Unless what they left behind wiped them out. But I'll let you have your fun.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS PART II
That night that I thought suddenly and nearly inexplicably of the Wallace line, I had been thinking, immediately prior to that, of something else.
What I had been thinking about was the colonization of Africa.
It is said, about that period of European exploration, that the lifespan of a typical White man in the African interior was just two years. Any White man venturing into the heart of Africa was expected to be dead within 24 months.
What has been my own experience?
I nearly died.
I live relatively close to the coast line. It's about a ten minute motorbike ride from my apartment. And yet, even just this far inland proved nearly deadly to me.
The first two years I spent here, I seemed to be sick every other week. And 12 months after my arrival, I caught an infection in my lungs that produced the greatest pain I have ever felt in all my life. Quite honestly; prior to experiencing it, this level of pain had been unimaginable to me. It was so bad that I wondered how it was possible for a human being to feel such agony and remain in a conscious state!
What saved me was what saved the European project of colonization: Antibiotics.
Without antibiotics, the African interior would still be devoid of any white man.
Incidentally; I have been healthy throughout my second 16 month stint. I seem to have acclimated, but who can say if it is permanent.
For the cattle, the adaptation is never permanent. Having gotten involved in the beef industry here, I have learned that no European breed of cattle is capable of surviving except by being crossed with other breeds. They simply lack the constitution for the African environment and quickly die otherwise.
This led me to wonder if continental interiors everywhere were once hostile to human beings. Perhaps even Europe was once a wasteland devoid of human life, simply because no human had the constitution to survive.
It was this thought that immediately preceded thoughts of the Walace Line leaping unbidden into my brain---and everything (and more) I've outlined above sprung forth almost immediately.
It is interesting that Graham Hancock, in his book, "Underworld," speculated that human civilization, during the height of our present glacial period, was limited to the coasts. He lacked an explanation for why that might be, except to point to the ocean as a natural facilitator of trade.
But there may be a more naturalistic explanation.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Then came the great warming. As the brief glacial period ended, and the long interglacial period began, the equator became increasingly hot and uncomfortable for our warm-blooded ancestors. They moved away from it into temperate climes, along with much of the warm-blooded wildlife. |
This is the bit I can't fathom. Unless you are positing a very much hotter interglacial than anything we know of... |
I am.
Essentially, everything warm blooded evacuates the equator during inter-glacials. The cold-blooded creatures, for whom the naturally torrid equator is their true home, flourish there. Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and the other Great Apes are not native to the equator. They are able to live there now only because it is, at present, a virtual icebox compared to what it is typically.
Remember: According to me, what I might call "hothouse Earth" is normative. Inter-glacials are infinitely longer than glacials. Interracials feature a divided planet where an uninhabitable zone runs across the middle and the only forms of life able to survive there are those remaining from prehistoric ages, when the Earth was even hotter. During inter-glacials (Earth's normative state), virtually nothing native to the either hemisphere can get through the torrid barrier. Our modern "glacial" equator is incomparable to the hothouse equator.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS PART III
When I was a child, I owned a book of facts. Something like a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" book, where every fact began or ended with the phrase, "Believe it, or not."
One of the facts from that book that I never forgot: It is impossible to catch cold at the north pole.
Feel free to check this (I haven't) but, according to that book, it is so cold at the north pole that the single-celled organisms, to whom credit is given for the common cold, cannot survive there.
Whether this is true or not, different temperature environments do appear to govern what sorts of bacteria can be present. Raise or lower the temperature and you make a comfortable home to different strains of single-cellular life.
As I understand it though, bacteria generally favor the warm environments. Even seeking out our armpits. Unless the temperature gets to the boiling point, you generally get more bacteria, and more varieties, as the temperature increases.
This is largely why European cows don't make it in Africa. They aren't killed off by roving bands of lions. They are killed off by creatures we cannot see: The same ones that nearly killed me.
Stay near the coast and temperatures might be cool enough to just barely make it almost inhabitable. I suspect it was this effect in Africa that was noticed by European doctors and inspired them to recommend trips to the Cornish Shore to so many Victorian patients (leastwise, they seem always to be making such recommendations in the BBC dramas that once were made, before Britain was colonized).
So the general effect is higher temperatures equal more varieties and greater quantities of bacteria while cooler temperatures equal fewer varieties and lesser quantities of bacteria.
The poles, then, have always had the fewest variety and the least quantity of bacteria on all the planet. Even when it was hotter than it is today. The poor souls who lived there may have enjoyed good health, so long as it lasted, but they made themselves unfit for life anywhere else.
Of course, as they fled south, ahead of the advancing glaciers at the beginning of our present glacial age, their environment followed closely behind. And they quickly learned that the coastlines were the only places suited to them. Nevertheless; the advancing cold never succeeded in recreating a bacteriological environment truly suited to their sort.
And that is why they are no longer with us. In a manner of speaking.
For they didn't disappear completely. A remnant remains.
Can you guess where?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I haven't read any of this yet but I spotted that last question. The Hairy Ainu?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | The Hairy Ainu? |
Partially.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS PART II That night that I thought suddenly and nearly inexplicably of the Wallace line, I had been thinking, immediately prior to that, of something else. What I had been thinking about was the colonization of Africa. |
Having just taken part in it yourself.
| It is said, about that period of European exploration, that the lifespan of a typical White man in the African interior was just two years. Any White man venturing into the heart of Africa was expected to be dead within 24 months. What has been my own experience? I nearly died. I live relatively close to the coast line. It's about a ten minute motorbike ride from my apartment. And yet, even just this far inland proved nearly deadly to me. |
Interesting. Had you taken the routine precautions? After all this is a major area of white tourism.
| The first two years I spent here, I seemed to be sick every other week. And 12 months after my arrival, I caught an infection in my lungs that produced the greatest pain I have ever felt in all my life. Quite honestly; prior to experiencing it, this level of pain had been unimaginable to me. It was so bad that I wondered how it was possible for a human being to feel such agony and remain in a conscious state! What saved me was what saved the European project of colonization: Antibiotics. |
I think you have this the wrong way round. Antibiotics coincided with the start of de-colonisation.
| Without antibiotics, the African interior would still be devoid of any white man. |
Tell that to the Kenyan White Highlanders who lived and prospered 1880-1960.
| Incidentally; I have been healthy throughout my second 16 month stint. I seem to have acclimated, but who can say if it is permanent. |
Hope so.
| For the cattle, the adaptation is never permanent. Having gotten involved in the beef industry here, I have learned that no European breed of cattle is capable of surviving except by being crossed with other breeds. They simply lack the constitution for the African environment and quickly die otherwise. |
That has bemused me also.
| This led me to wonder if continental interiors everywhere were once hostile to human beings. Perhaps even Europe was once a wasteland devoid of human life, simply because no human had the constitution to survive. |
It may not be germane but it has always been a great puzzlement to me that flies are all but intolerable immediately to the north and immediately to the south of the white heartlands. You only have to visit Scotland in the midge season to know what I'm talking about. Yet I've never experience one in any season in England.
| It was this thought that immediately preceded thoughts of the Walace Line leaping unbidden into my brain---and everything (and more) I've outlined above sprung forth almost immediately. |
That's the way it happens!
| It is interesting that Graham Hancock, in his book, "Underworld," speculated that human civilization, during the height of our present glacial period, was limited to the coasts. He lacked an explanation for why that might be, except to point to the ocean as a natural facilitator of trade. But there may be a more naturalistic explanation. |
Coming soon to an AE thread near you.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Then came the great warming. As the brief glacial period ended, and the long interglacial period began, the equator became increasingly hot and uncomfortable for our warm-blooded ancestors. They moved away from it into temperate climes, along with much of the warm-blooded wildlife.
This is the bit I can't fathom. Unless you are positing a very much hotter interglacial than anything we know of...
I am. Essentially, everything warm blooded evacuates the equator during inter-glacials. The cold-blooded creatures, for whom the naturally torrid equator is their true home, flourish there. |
OK. This is your USP.
| Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and the other Great Apes are not native to the equator. They are able to live there now only because it is, at present, a virtual icebox compared to what it is typically. |
OK
| Remember: According to me, what I might call "hothouse Earth" is normative. Inter-glacials are infinitely longer than glacials. |
So we're in a glacial, right? Nobody can argue we're only ten thousand years out of an Ice Age. [Except maybe me, but nobody listens to me.]
| Interracials feature a divided planet where an uninhabitable zone runs across the middle and the only forms of life able to survive there are those remaining from prehistoric ages, when the Earth was even hotter. During inter-glacials (Earth's normative state), virtually nothing native to the either hemisphere can get through the torrid barrier. Our modern "glacial" equator is incomparable to the hothouse equator. |
OK
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS PART III When I was a child, I owned a book of facts. Something like a "Ripley's Believe It or Not" book, where every fact began or ended with the phrase, "Believe it, or not." One of the facts from that book that I never forgot: It is impossible to catch cold at the north pole. |
Not a big sample though. Mainly people in nuclear submarines.
| Feel free to check this (I haven't) but, according to that book, it is so cold at the north pole that the single-celled organisms, to whom credit is given for the common cold, cannot survive there. |
This sounds kinda reasonable. Or maybe to put it another way, nothing that has evolved using human beings (or maybe any mammal) as a host.
| Whether this is true or not, different temperature environments do appear to govern what sorts of bacteria can be present. Raise or lower the temperature and you make a comfortable home to different strains of single-cellular life. |
OK
| As I understand it though, bacteria generally favor the warm environments. Even seeking out our armpits. Unless the temperature gets to the boiling point, you generally get more bacteria, and more varieties, as the temperature increases. |
OK. [You do understand I am using OK to signify 'I understand, I don't have any rooted objection.']
| This is largely why European cows don't make it in Africa. They aren't killed off by roving bands of lions. They are killed off by creatures we cannot see: The same ones that nearly killed me. |
Rinderpest, isn't it?
| Stay near the coast and temperatures might be cool enough to just barely make it almost inhabitable. I suspect it was this effect in Africa that was noticed by European doctors and inspired them to recommend trips to the Cornish Shore to so many Victorian patients (leastwise, they seem always to be making such recommendations in the BBC dramas that once were made, before Britain was colonized). |
Your sources are certainly ingenious.
| So the general effect is higher temperatures equal more varieties and greater quantities of bacteria while cooler temperatures equal fewer varieties and lesser quantities of bacteria. |
OK
| The poles, then, have always had the fewest variety and the least quantity of bacteria on all the planet. Even when it was hotter than it is today. The poor souls who lived there may have enjoyed good health, so long as it lasted, but they made themselves unfit for life anywhere else. |
My theory about reindeer being the first semi-domesticated animals was a lot to do with the fact they are absolutely driven mad by midges at certain stages in their wanderings.
| Of course, as they fled south, ahead of the advancing glaciers at the beginning of our present glacial age, their environment followed closely behind. And they quickly learned that the coastlines were the only places suited to them. Nevertheless; the advancing cold never succeeded to recreating a bacteriological environment truly suited to their sort. |
OK
| And that is why they are no longer with us. In a manner of speaking. For they didn't disappear completely. A remnant remains. Can you guess where? |
I guess, from your answer to my previous guess, they are all the 'remnant' populations who appear to be quite immune to the blandishments of 'civilisation'. So that would include Australian aborigines, Papua New Guineans, Pacific Islanders, Amerindians, Inuit, Asian hill tribes, native Siberians as well as the Japanese Ainu. It has long been a puzzle why none of them seem able to 'make it'. But this list--together with sub-Saharan Africans--are a mixed lot.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I guess, from your answer to my previous guess, they are all the 'remnant' populations who appear to be quite immune to the blandishments of 'civilisation'. So that would include Australian aborigines, Papua New Guineans, Pacific Islanders, Amerindians, Inuit, Asian hill tribes, native Siberians as well as the Japanese Ainu. It has long been a puzzle why none of them seem able to 'make it'. But this list--together with sub-Saharan Africans--are a mixed lot. |
Couldn't be more wrong.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I'm flouncing off in that case. Unless it's the whites. Then I'll flounce back in again.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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It's everyone.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Well.....almost everyone.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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HYPERBOREANS: HUMAN ORIGINS PART III
If we assume that we start from a "human" population that is essentially shameless, and able to make use of only the simplest of tools (no machines of any kind, absent possibly the lever), then all the accoutrements of civilization come to us through exposure to the inter-glacial north. Clothing, machinery, smelting, anticipation of the distant future: All of this evolved by exposure to the north. We can assume that, the greater the exposure to the north, the stronger would be the markers of civilization. The Hyperboreans would have been the most civilized peoples on planet Earth.
Therefore; any remnant population would be the most civilized peoples.
European Whites might be a candidate. The Chinese too. Even the Sumerians (Iraqis) and Egyptians could make a claim. The Africans.... not so much.
However, the answer is that none of these populations are surviving Hyperboreans.
The Hyperboreans could not survive in a non-polar environment. Like European cattle, which cannot be kept alive in Africa, the Hyperboreans were doomed from the start. They didn't die off immediately. Like imported cows, the herd survives for some generations but, always dwindling in number, until none remain.
But yet a remnant did survive.
That remnant is the genes they left in us.
Indeed; I suspect the majority of our genome came from the Hyperboreans, and by "our" genome, I mean everyone on the planet---mostly.
Everywhere the Hyperboreans went, which was practically everywhere, they bred with the local humans. These local humans were all those stratified human beings that had settled at various distances from the poles. Those humans were more robust, having the constitution necessary to flourish in their particular bacteriological environment.
The hybrid children were stronger, smarter, and more gifted than either of their parents. Less civilized perhaps, but better suited to the ice age world. Hybridization was simply the only way those Hyperborean genes had any chance of survival. And not only did the children survive, they replaced the original human populations of each strata. Some by interbreeding; most by out breeding and out competing.
And the Hyperboreans were not merely a different race or sub-species of human. There is some very good evidence that our first parents came from different species; like tigers and lions, capable of interbreeding but producing unexpected results in the first generation: their union produced the demigods of old; the ancient men of renown. For many centuries, such men were born, until the original Hyperborean population was gone, and could produce no more first-generation, monstrous offspring.
So the Hyperborean genome made its way into every niche on the glacial, ice-age Earth. Moving down from the far north into every strata of human north of the equator. Soon too, even the barrier of the equatorial zone subsided and allowed their genome to pass. It passed into sub-saharan Africa via the black Africans, who are no less children of the Hyperboeans.
Every race on Earth can can trace itself back to that "first Adam" who emerged in the lost garden of Hyperboea. However; each race resulted of a combination with a different hybrid parent. To survive in some of Earth's environments, some of those parents had to be very robust indeed.
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