The modern peopling of Europe

From an earlier map (3.4) the genetic lines VH are indicated along the second wave. These maternal lines are very common in Europe and the following extract elaborates:


Oppenheimer: Out of Africa's Eden, pp145-146

...

The second daughter line, V, did not appear until much
later, in south-West Europe. The H descendants were to provide half
of all western and northern European maternal lines, Slav, Finn, and
Germanic in particular. This is clearly different from the very early
U5 story. The expansion of HV has been dated to around 33,500
years ago - over 15 ,000 years later than U5 , and 7,500 years before
the next entrant. What is really interesting is that HV is considerably
younger in the Near East ( 26,500 years) than in Europe (over
33,000 years), and much of her presence there may have been down
to back-migration from Europe. This tends to rule out the Levant,
Anatolia, and Bulgaria as homeland or source regions for HV, so we
need to look for a route of entry into Europe for HV other than the
Levant and Anatolia.

A team of Estonian geneticists led by Richard Villems and Toomas
Kivisild, whose seminal mtDNA work has brought Indian Palaeo-
lithic genetic prehistory to the fore, have much to say on the origins
and spread of HV. They point out that the earliest roots of HV are
found in South Asia (in north-west India and Kashmir, perhaps
40,000 years ago), but that the Trans-Caucasus was the site of
her first West Eurasian blooming. The Estonian
work has suggested that the region around the Caucasus Mountains
locked between the Black Sea and the Caspian was the Palaeolithic
genetic starting point for several important early European migrant
maternal clans, of which the most important was HV.

To many people, myself included, the word ‘Caucasus’ conjures
up images of fierce and independent peoples in the south-west ofthe
former Soviet Union, a region whose famous mountain range, the
Caucasus, gives us the name ‘Caucasian’ - which for some obscure
reason is used to describe Europeans as a whole. A tight patchwork
of Caucasian languages certainly bears out this sense of ancient
diversity. Hemmed in by a mixture of Indo-European and Altaic
languages to the north and south, the Caucasus has two unique and
ancient language families of its own, North Caucasian and Kartvel-
lian. The region, bounded on the west and east by two inland seas
and spanned by the Caucasus Mountains, forms the only usable
corridor between Armenia and Azerbaijan down in the Levant and
European Russia to the north (see Figure 3.4).

Can the male Chromosome help any in tracing a second migration
to Europe? To make up for the limited accuracy of dating with Y
chromosomes, they are much more illuminating in their intra-
regional specificity than mtDNA. Notable is an enigmatic male clan
(see Figure 3.5) Which I shall call Inos, after Seth’s son Enos. Inos is
almost exclusively European. According to the Leicester-based
geneticist Zoe Rosser and colleagues, the relatively even distribution
of this male clan indicates an early entry to Europe. Italian geneticist
Ornella Semino and her colleagues from America are more specific,
pointing out that the predominance of Inos in Ukraine and the
Balkans suggests an association with the HV maternal clan and with
the Gravettian culture. Like HV, Inos does not have a clear origin
in the Levant, so a Trans-Caucasus route is a possibility.

...

Oppenheimer pours scorn on the idea that the Europeans actually achieved anything. According to him, they benefitted from winning a lottery (chance). It seems to me that there has to be something more to their achievements.

 He does labour the point that all groups are equal.

" inequalities of development and global power are more likely to the result of historical accidents of opportunity rather than of any innate intellectual differences between different populations" (p93). In fact, I read most of his book as a gloating manifesto to idea that Europeans are descended from "backwards" Africans. His preaching, political correctness and moralising drives me up the wall. Even Neanderthals are rehabilitated by him to be the equals of Cro Magnon man. Where he is dead wrong is that despite his repeated assertion that moderns did not interbreed with Neanderthals, it now transpires that they did. In fact, I am beginning to agree with Leakey that there is the possibility that Neanderthals were absorbed into modern man. A recent study also suggests that in the Caucasian mountains Neanderthals were incapable of crossing the mountains while our ancestors did.


www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/adler/assets/Publications/Bar-Yosef2006Anthro.pdf

As for speech, it seems that they could speak (how well, is a question).

thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/02/09/did-neanderthals-speak/

Oppenheimer p92

phys.org/news/2013-07-neanderthals-speech-language-modern-humans.html

In fact, I am beging to wonder whether ancient languages like that of the Basque do not reflect the Neanderthal language.

There are claims that they buried their dead, but that is subject to dispute. The burial of the dead seems to have originated with our European ancestors. That was rather a novelty.

Neanderthals are only found in Eurasia and made extentive use of tools - Mousterian technology.

They left cave "art".

By and large, I think their significance is much more than is commonly imagined

 I may be mistaken about nuances but have no doubt that according to him all people are equal and that the pre-eminence of Europeans is a fluke, a happy accident of history, without any special ability on their part.

I first place the quote



in its fuller context:


 It will be noticed that he makes reference to Jared Diamond's book where these ideas are explained at great length in about 500 pages. The explanation, by the way, Jared gives for the successful conquest of the Americas by Europeans - see quote- is that the indigenous population was decimated by European germs, brought from Europe. The abilities of the Europeans accordingly had nothing to do with their success. Jared, incidently, gives a similar explanation, I seem to recall, for the decimation of the KoiSan by the flu, in South Africa.

The introduction to the chapter (2) where this quote comes from, also makes Oppenheimer's intention and his line of thought quite clear:




 He makes no allowance at all for the possibility that the Europeans by means of culure, hard work or biology could have had some sort of innate advantage. It is all an accident, a fluke of history. All other groups, he argues, has exactly the same ability. He uses Jared's work to bolster this argument. He points out that tools, art etc found in other areas than Europe, in many cases are more modern or on par with that found in Europe. The ice age, he postulates, affected all groups equally &&. I am pretty sure he would argue that, in so far as the Europeans acquired a culture which facilitated their achievements, they were just lucky.

Although Oppenheimer claims at P104 that the interaction between Neanderthals and Europeans was negligible, this thesis seems more and more questionable.  Of some interest also is that Asians have up to 30% more Neanderthal DNA in their genes than Europeans.

Languages such as Basque, which coincide with concentrations of Neanderthals, may well reflect the remains of their language. Similar considerations are present with other non-Indo-European languages which emerged from East Asia.