Wednesday 1 April 2015

Cro-Magnons


"What the White whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at dies, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or ether vague, nameless honor concerning  him,  which  at  times  by  its  intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible foci. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appdled me. But how can I hope to explain...

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own Kim and kin!   It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears, The Albino is as well made as other men - has no substantive deformity - and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abonion. Why should this be so?"

Herman Melville,
"On the Whiteness of the Whale",
Moby Dick

And incidentally, do you know the main reason why Nazi Germany never attempted to attack, invade or incorporate Fascist Spain or Fascist Portugal into the Reich or draw them into involvement in the war on their side?

It's pretty amazing.

The Portuguese were the first European maritime nation to begin establishing a global empire based on exploration, exploitation, conquest, colonialism, chattel slavery and White Supremacy (with a Papal Bull to back it up) in the 1460s, and Lisbon is the closest European capital to the former location of Atlantis.

The Canary Islands, the Basque region and the French Pyrranees are crammed full of the remains of advanced Cromagnon settlements and Nazi archeologists and anthropologists that studied them determined that these were refugee colonies of  Atlanteans and that a variety of European groups, specifically including the Basques and Normans, plus the white Berbers of North Africa were directly descended from Atlantean Cromagnon survivors.

That is, after all what Plato says.

And he got it from Solon, the Lawgiver of Athens.

Just as Moses-Akenhaten was the Lawgiver of the Hebrew-Israelites.

It may therefore be a very worthwhile exercise in historical analysis to reexamine more closely the attitude  and treatment of the Berber population by the Germans under the military occupation by the Afrika Korpa - under Fascist Italy, it had certainly not been good, but then again Mussolini was certainly uncommitted to and likely did not believe in any of this Atlantis stuff - it's an interesting and open question as to whether a Prussian military aristocratic officer class and doctrinaire non-Nazi professional soldier like Erwin Rommel would have even known about these beliefs or engaged with that kind of thinking, or let it influence his thinking or political and military philosophy even if it did.

We know, for example, that the Serphardic Jews across all of North Africa fared remarkably well during these years - in fact, far better than the Jewish population of the Dutch East Indies under Japanese occupation, after German diplomatic insistence that they be all interred by the Japanese, dispatching small squad of SS during the war by U-Boat during 1942 to supervise the operations and ensure that the work was done and the actions carried out.



Why Don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore?

What Are Cro-Magnons?

Cro-Magnon is the informal word once used by scientists to refer to the people who were living alongside Neanderthals at the end of the last ice age (ca. 35,000-10,000 years ago). They were given the name 'Cro-Magnon' because in 1868, parts of five skeletons were discovered in the rockshelter of that name, located in the famous Dordogne Valley of France.

Scientists compared these skeletons to Neanderthal skeletons which had earlier been found in similarly dated sites such as Paviland, Wales; and a little later at Combe Capelle and Laugerie-Bassein France, and decided they were different enough from the Neanderthals, to give them a different name.

Recent research over the past 20 years or so, however, has led scholars to believe that the physical dimensions of so-called 'Cro-Magnon' are not sufficiently different enough from modern humans to warrant a separate designation. Scientists today use 'Anatomically Modern Human' (AMH) or 'Early Modern Human' (EMH) to designate the Upper Paleolithic human beings who looked a lot like us, but did not have the complete suite of modern human behaviors.

Physical Characteristics of EMH

The physical characteristics of Early Modern Human are quite similar to modern humans, although perhaps a bit more robust, particularly seen in femora--the leg bones. The differences, which are slight, have been attributed to the shift away from long distance hunting strategies to sedentism and agriculture.

A recent study by Trent Holliday comparing early and late Upper Paleolithic skeletal materials provided an average male height of 170 centimeters (early) and 168 centimeters (late), and average female height of 157.6 cm (early) and 158.4 (late). However, Formicola and Giannecchini's data revealed that "EUP [Early Upper Paleolithic] males are much taller (176.2 cm) and LUP [Late Upper Paleolithic] shorter (165.6 cm), with an average difference of 10.6 cm. Similarly EUP females (162.9 cm) largely exceed LUP females (153.5 cm)." I think the jury is still out.

Where Did EMH Come From?

In Africa, early modern humans appeared at least as long ago as 160,000 years BP at sites such as Bouri in Ethiopia, and perhaps as long ago as 195,000 years ago, if the dating of Omo Kibish, also in Ethiopia, is correct. The earliest sites outside of Africa with early modern humans are at Skhul and Qafzeh caves in what is now Israel about 100,000 years ago. There's a large gap in the record for Asia and Europe, between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, a period in which the Middle East seems to have been occupied by Neanderthals; but around 50,000 years ago, the EMH appear again and flow back into Europe.

This is problematic, because there's very little data for these periods of time. In addition, the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is hotly debated in some circles. Behaviorally, in Africa and the Middle East, the Neanderthals and EMH were pretty much the same; they were physically quite different and different scholars debate on our exact relationship with them.

Before the return of EMH to the Middle East and Europe, early technological glimmers of modern behavior are in evidence at several South African sites of the Still Bay/Howiesons Poort tradition, about 75,000-65,000 years ago. But it wasn't until about 50,000 years ago or so, that a difference in tools, in burial methods, in the presence of art and music, and probably some changes in social behaviors as well, became apparent. At the same time, early modern humans left Africa.

[OR, The Flood came and decimated The Earth, Utnaprishtem (the town drunk), his wife and family were rescued and spared from the Extinction Level Event (ELE) by the Annunaki Lord Ennki and his wife Ninhassan, after having their genome augmented with acoustic harmonic waveform technology at sites like the Annunaki colonies of Kmet, Kush and Great Zimbabwe, upgrading them by means of directed mutation from Neanderthal Hominds to the first generation of AFRICAN Early Modern Humans, as distinct from the Cro-Magnons, descendent fromsurvivors of the last generation of ATLANTEAN Early Modern Humans, that eventually became decadent and recessive...]

What were the Tools Like?

Beginning about 50,000 years ago, the tool kit associated with EMH is the Aurignacian, characterized by what archaeologists call a 'blade industry'. In blade technology, the knapper has sufficient skill to purposefully produce a long thin sliver of stone that is triangular in cross-section. Blades were then converted into all kinds of tools, sort of the Swiss army knife of early modern humans.
Other things associated with early modern humans include ritual burials, such as that at Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal, where a child's body was covered with red ochre before being interred 24,000 years ago. The invention of the atlatl was at least as long as 17,500 years ago, the earliest having been recovered from the site of Combe Sauniere. Venus figurines are attributed to early modern humans of about 30,000 years ago; and of course, let's not forget the amazing Lascaux Cave.

So Why Don't We Still Call Them Cro-Magnon?

The more we learn about early modern humans, the less we feel confident about the early classification systems we developed more than 130 years ago. The term Cro-Magnon doesn't refer to a particular taxonomy or even a particular group located in a particular place. The word is not precise enough, and so most paleontologists prefer to use Anatomically Modern or Early Modern Humans.

Early Modern Human Sites

Sites with EMH human remains include: Predmostí and Mladec Cave (Czech Republic), Cro-Magnon, Abri Pataud, Brassempouy (France), Cioclovina (Romania), Qafzeh CaveSkuhl Cave, and Amud (Israel), Vindija Cave (Croatia), kostenki(Russia), Bouri and Omo Kibish (Ethiopia)
See Page 2 for bibliographic sources for this project.
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com Guide to the Middle Paleolithic, and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.

Early Modern Human Bibliography

This bibliography was built for the About.com glossary entry for Cro-Magnons, or what scholars now call Early Modern Humans. See specific site descriptions for additional articles.

Sources for Early Modern Human

This bibliography is a part of the About.com Guide to the Middle Paleolithic, and part of the Dictionary of Archaeology.
PNAS Early Edition November 11, 2005. Free download.
Brantingham, Jeffrey, Steven L. Kuhn, and Christopher W. Kerry (editors). 2004. The Early Upper Paleolithic Beyond Western Europe. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Goudot, Patrick 2002 The mandibular canal of the "Old Man" of Cro-Magnon: anatomical-radiological study. Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery 30:213-218.
Holliday, Trenton W. 2002 Body size and postcranial robusticity of European Upper Paleolithic hominins. Journal of Human Evolution 43(4):513-528.
Thanks to Dar Habel for an update on Omo Kibish.

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