SC poudre forte Re: SC - Spice cabinet-what do we stock?

[LrdRas@aol.com]

Just to feed the fire a little more I found this article that may be of some
interest to people.

DNA research at Oxford suggests that 70 per cent of  the genetic make-up of
modern Europeans dates from the last Ice Age. Less than a third of our
ancestry stems from the Neolithic farmers who brought the new economics of
arable and stockbreeding to Europesome 8,000 years ago. 

There is no evidence at all for Neanderthal genes in our genealogy, Dr Bryan
Sykes told a Royal Society conference recently, but about 10 per cent of
European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) survives from the first wave of
settlement by modern human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, some 50,000 years
ago. Since  mtDNA is transmitted
only through the female line, it is European women's ancestry that has been
traced to the Ice Age; but the input of male genes is likely tohave been
similar. 

Dr Sykes's new data suggest a later origin than his initial results last
year, which indicated that 85 per cent of Europeans had a common ancestry
between 25,000 and 20,000 years ago. Encouragingly, however, the evidence
now matches more closely the archaeological dating for the repopulation of
much of northern and western Europe after the bitter cold of the glacial
maximum drove people southwards to take refuge in Provence (The Times,
February 11, 1997). 

In English Heritage's Science in Archaeology: an agenda for the future, just
published, Dr Rupert Housley of Glasgow University uses radiocarbon dating
patterns to document what he calls "the return of the  natives" as
temperatures began to rise again. By combining multiple dates into a "moving
sum" for each region, Dr Housley shows that there was an initial pioneer
phase when only small hunting parties moved north to explore and exploit the
rich animal life of regions where no humans had lived for several thousand
years. 

That was followed between four and six centuries later by a phase when
larger camps were established, he says. The rate at which those colonists
moved on was up to two kilometres a year, double the speed with which
farmers were thought to have shifted cultivation into virgin territory. That
was probably because the latter found foraging societies already in partial
possession of the land, even though they were not using the cultivable
soils, Dr Housley says. 

Separate estimates by Dr Sykes and Professor Luca Cavalli-Sforza for the
genetic input of those farmers to present Europeans range from 20 to 28 per
cent. The social implication is
that existing hunters and gatherers were integrated with the new arrivals
into a single European identity which owed much to the people who had dwelt
there for millennia before.

Found at:

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/Times/timcrtcrt01005.html?2177977

Be careful of the wrap.

Mic aylah



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