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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840),
Member of Russian Academy of Sciences,
the German anthropologist, in his work “De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa” (On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1775) based mainly on cranial measurements, called light-skinned people as Caucasian. Blumenbach's definition cites two reasons for his choice--the maximal beauty of people from this small region, and the probability that humans were first created in this area – Blumenbach believed that Homo Sapiens had been created in a single region and had then spread over the globe. Because of Blumenbach's obsession with Georgian "beauty," the word "Caucasian" became a "scientific" synonym for "white."

«Caucasian variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; ...That stock displays...the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge...Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to be the primitive color of mankind and because ... in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.»

ეს მასალა ადასტურებს, რომ კავკასიური წარმოშობის 
ხალხები ფართოდ მონაწილებდნენ ევროპის 
ხალხთმოსახლეობის შექმნაში და რომ, კავკასიური 
მოდგმა მართლაც ევროპული ცივილიზაციის 
დამაფუძნებელთა შორისაა.

Questions - no Replies

• Ursula (45,000) is oldest among “sisters” (4 mutations) - is she “sister” or mother (of whom)

• Xenia (25,000) is twice older (2 mutations) than other “sisters” - is she “sister” or mother (of whom)

www.oxfordancestors.com

According to Oxford's study, the seven matriarchal groups are classified as follows:

Helena - a clan which lived in the Pyrenees some 12,000 years ago. This is the most common of all clans in Great Britain and the United States, but members of this group are now present in all European countries.

Jasmine - people of Syria who migrated across Anatolia, into Greece, and eventually into Spain and Portugal.

Katrine - a clan which occupied what is not Venice about 10,000 years ago. Most of this clan lives in the Alps today.

Tara - a clan of Tuscany which lived about 17,000 years ago. This clan is believed to have ventured across northern Europe and eventually crossed the English Channel.

Ursula - users of stone tools, occupied all parts of Europe, but lived in Northern Greece approximately 45,000 years ago. (In 1998, the skeleton found in Europe known as Cheddar Man was shown to belong to this clan.)

Velda - a clan that lived in Spain about 17,000 years ago, which today, are believed to be the Lapps, or Saami of northern Finland and Norway.

Xenia - the most mysterious of clans, known to have lived about 25,000 years ago in one of the remote wooded valleys of the Caucasus Mountains on the eastern edge of the Black Sea. These people spread East and West, but not only are found all over Europe, but in North America as well. It is believed the North America clan traveled across Asia across the dry Bering land.

The Seven European Daughters of Eve matriarchal groups correspond to Dr. Wallace's lineages above, and were given names by by Prof. Sykes:

Helena: This clan lived in the ice-capped Pyrenees. As the climate warmed, Helena's descendants trekked northward to what is now England, some 12,000 years ago. Members of this group are now present in all European countries.

Jasmine: Her people had a relatively happy life in Syria, where they farmed wheat and raised domestic animals. Jasmine's descendants traveled throughout Europe, spreading their agricultural innovations with them. [The main exception is Jasmine where the modern distribution of the clan follows the two main routes into Europe taken by the earliest farmers - one along the Mediterranean coast and up the Atlantic seaboard to western Britain, the other along the river basins of central Europe to the Baltic and the North Sea. Once again Jasmine is exceptional. Her clan is very rare in the Basque country.]

Katrine: Members of this group lived in Venice 10,000 years ago. Today most of Katrine's clan lives in the Alps.

Tara: Sykes' maternal ancestry goes back to this group, which settled in Tuscany 17,000 years ago. Descendants ventured across northern Europe and eventually crossed the English Channel.

Ursula: Users of stone tools, Ursula's clan members drifted across all of Europe. So Ursula is the oldest of the seven because her clan has accumulated the most mutations and Jasmine is the youngest because her clan shows the least.

Valda: Originally from Spain, Valda and her immediate descendants lived 17,000 years ago. Later relatives moved into northern Finland and Norway.

Xenia: Her people lived in the Caucasus Mountains 25,000 years ago. Just before the Ice Age, this clan spread across Europe, and even reached the Americas. [As Dr. Wallace discovered, the X pattern is a rare European lineage and is also among the northern Native Americans such as the Ojibwa and Sioux.]

ეს მასალა ადასტურებს, რომ ჰურიტები (ქართულად ურიები) 
თავდაპირველად კავკასიური (შესაძლოა სამხრეთკავკასიური 
ანუ ქართველური) მოდგმის ხალხი იყო, რომელიც ფართოდ 
განსახლდა ახლო აღმოსავლეთში და მონაწილეობდა მსოფლიო 
ცივილიზაციის დამაფუძნებლურ პროცესში. სახელმწიფო 
ურარტუც ამ ხალხის სახელს ატარებდა.

Hurri n.
( pl. same or Hurris) a member of a people, originally from Armenia, who settled in northern Mesopotamia and Syria during the 3rd-2nd millennium bc and were later aborbed by the Hittites and Assyrians. (See also Mitanni.) Hittite & Assyrian Harri, Hurri
The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, © Oxford University Press 1996

Hurrians
A people living in E Anatolia and N Mesopotamia during the 2nd millennium bc. The Hurrians probably originated in the Armenian mountains before their expansion. Their language, which is extinct, was neither Indo-European nor Semitic, but may be related to Georgian and the Caucasian languages. It is largely known from cuneiform tablets from Hattusas, the capital of the Hittites, whose civilization the Hurrians greatly influenced. There was never a Hurrian empire, but the powerful kingdom of Mitanni (1550-1400 bc) was largely Hurrian in population. See also Nuzi
The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001, © Market House Books Ltd 2000

Nefertiti (14th century BC)
Wife of King Amenhotep IV of Egypt. Probably born in Mitanni, an empire based in what is now northern Iraq, Nefertiti became the chief wife of the intellectual Egyptian ruler Amenhotep IV (reigned about 1379-1362 BC). She bore him six daughters but no son. His reign was distinguished by a religious revolution, strongly supported by Nefertiti, that renounced the established pantheon of gods in favour of a single, supreme deity, Aton. Aton, represented by a sun disc, was revered as the source of life and the bounties of nature.
The Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women, © Market House Books Ltd 1998

Nuzi
An ancient Hurrian city SW of Kirkuk (N Iraq). Nuzi flourished in the 15th century bc before being absorbed into the Assyrian Empire. Excavations here in the 1920s revealed a prosperous trading centre with archives detailing legal, commercial, and military activities.
The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001, © Market House Books Ltd 2000

Urartu (biblical name: Ararat)
A kingdom flourishing between about 850 and 650 bc in E Turkey. The inhabitants, of Hurrian stock, made their capital at Van (ancient Tushpa). Their metalwork was famous, examples even reaching Etruscan Italy. Urartu was frequently at war with neighbouring Assyria.
The Macmillan Encyclopedia 2001, © Market House Books Ltd 2000

Mitanni n. & adj.
n. ( pl. same)
1 a member of the predominant people of a largely Hurrian kingdom centred on the Khabur and Upper Euphrates rivers which flourished in the 15th and early 14th centuries bc.
2 the language of this people.
adj. of or relating to this people or their language.
Derivative
Mitannian adj. & n.Mitanni or Hurrian
The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, © Oxford University Press 1996

Sumerian
A people speaking a non-Semitic language and civilization native to Sumer in the 4th millennium bc. The Sumerians were a hybrid stock speaking an agglutinative language related structurally to Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and several Caucasian dialects. As the first historically attested civilization they are credited with the invention of cuneiform writing, the sexagesimal system of mathematics, and the socio-political institution of the city-state with bureaucracies, legal codes, division of labour, and a money economy. Their art, literature, and theology had a profound cultural and religious influence on the rest of Mesopotamia and beyond, which continued long after the Sumerian demise c. 2,000 bc, as the prototype of Akkadian, Hurrian, Canaanite, Hittite, and eventually, biblical literature. Two of their main cities were Ur and Lagash.
Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia, © Oxford University Press 1998

Following Genetic Trail
Study Says Ancient Humans Followed Second Route

By Joseph B. Verrengia
The Associated Press

Nov. 30, 2000 — Scientists examining hereditary material in cells suggest that modern humans followed a migration wave from Africa to Asia more than 50,000 years ago after an earlier exodus to the Mediterranean and Greece.

Blood samples of people from east Africa and India showed close genetic similarities that indicate a common African ancestor, according to a research team from the University of Padua in Italy.

The Italian study is reported in the December issue of the journal Nature Genetics.

The researchers examined mitochondria, units outside of the cell’s nucleus that act as a cell’s energy source. They have their own genetic material—passed only by the mother from generation to generation—which lets scientists trace ancestry between geographically distant human populations.

Blood Relations in Asia

In the Italian study, researchers reported that closely related genetic sequences were found in high frequency in blood samples from people in Ethiopia, the Arabian Peninsula and India. The same genetic makers were not found in blood samples from Middle East populations.

The first, and older, human migration route out of Africa is believed to have extended northward around the eastern Mediterranean and Greece more than 100,000 years ago.

Mitochondrial DNA clues were reported in the mid-1980s as scientists speculated on the existence of an African “Eve”, from whom modern humans descended. Since then, the older, northern migration route has been bolstered by fossil discoveries of modern humans bones from the same time period in the Middle East.

These mitochondrial studies of modern humans are separate from anthropological digs establishing that extinct ancestors of humans inhabited Africa 4 million years ago. Larger-brained tool-making human ancestors are believed to have left Africa and spread to Asia and Europe 1.8 million years ago.

Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Found: Possible Pre-Flood Artifacts
By WARREN E. LEARY
[from The New York Times]

ხომ არ ნიშნავს ეს აღმოჩენა, რომ წარღვნა
სინამდვილეში მოხდა სწორედ შავი ზღვის აუზში
და მაშინ მისახვედრია თუ რა ტომისა იყო და
რატომ აღმოჩნდა ბიბლიური ნოე არარატის
მიდამოებში და ბევრი სხვა რამეც (მათ შორის
ატლანტიდის ლეგენდაც)...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Scientists said today that they had discovered remnants of human habitation under the Black Sea that they believe is the first proof that people thrived along an ancient shoreline before it was inundated by a great flood thousands of years ago.

Dr. Robert D. Ballard, the undersea explorer whose robotic devices have resolved many underwater mysteries, including the resting place of the Titanic, said an expedition he is leading had discovered a well-preserved structure that might be thousands of years old 12 miles off the coast of Turkey, near Sinop.

An underwater robot, scouting about 300 feet below the surface two days ago, found a rectangular area measuring about 12 feet by 45 feet on which there appeared to be a collapsed wood and clay structure.

"Artifacts at the site are clearly well preserved, with carved wooden beams, wooden branches and stone tools collapsed amongst the mud matrix of the structure," Dr. Ballard said.

The expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others, is part of a project to survey the coastal waters of northern Turkey for signs of human settlement around the time of a great flood. Some scholars believe that such a flood inspired the biblical story of Noah; it may also be the source of the flood tale in the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh.

Using sonar equipment, the expedition has mapped large areas of the coastline and found hundreds of potential targets to examine more closely with the underwater robots operated from the research ship Northern Horizon.

In a telephone interview from the ship, Dr. Ballard said the site near Sinop could be the first of many in the area that could answer questions about the habits and lifestyles of a little-known ancient culture suddenly uprooted and forced to flee by flooding water.

"Now that we know what these sites look like on sonar, now that we recognize their signatures, we're regrouping to continue the search," he said, noting that the target area was about 200 square miles of what would have been livable terrain before the flood. Researchers have already identified a second site seven miles away. Pieces of ceramics suggest that it, too, may have been an inhabited area, he said.

Dr. Fredrik T. Hiebert of the University of Pennsylvania, chief archaeologist on the project, also was enthusiastic about the find, occurring two weeks into the five-week mission. "This is a discovery of world importance," Dr. Hiebert said from the ship. "We have the first site with direct evidence of human occupation on the old coast.

"Now we can say there were people living around the Black Sea when it was a freshwater lake before it was flooded."

Dr. Hiebert said the underwater structure closely resembled the wood-and-clay "wattle and daub" buildings still common in the area. "This style is distinctively Black Sea," he said.

"This discovery will begin to rewrite the history of cultures in this key area between Europe, Asia and the ancient Middle East," he said.

Dr. Ballard said earlier studies of seashells from the area helped to date the underwater coastline. Shells from an extinct type of freshwater creature are all 7,000 years old or older, and shells from saltwater shellfish date from 6,500 years ago.

"We know that there was a sudden and dramatic change from a freshwater lake to a saltwater sea 7,000 years ago," he said, "And we know that as a result of that flood a vast amount of land went underwater."

Dr. William B. F. Ryan and Dr. Walter C. Pitman 3rd, two geologists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., a branch of Columbia University, speculated in their 1997 book, "Noah's Flood" (Simon & Schuster), that melting European glaciers at the end of an ice age unleashed a great flood that changed a small freshwater lake into the saltwater Black Sea.

According to the book, melting glaciers raised the level of the Mediterranean, causing water to break through the narrow Bosporus and rapidly flood the lake. Water poured in so rapidly, the Columbia researchers said, that it would have widened the surface of the lake by as much as a mile a day, submerging the original shoreline and causing any population to flee.

Dr. Ryan said in an interview that he was thrilled to hear of Dr. Ballard's discovery and was surprised that evidence of human habitation on the old shore had been found so quickly.

Dr. Ryan likened the discovery to finding Pompeii, the ancient city buried by Mount Vesuvius. "Peel away the ash of Vesuvius and you see life on the day of the eruption," he said. "Here you have Neolithic life on the day of the flood."

Dr. Ballard said that no artifacts had been removed from the first site and that it would not be disturbed until it was thoroughly mapped. The first priority, he said, is finding and mapping more sites.

"We're just beginning our work and understanding what we have here," he said. "At some point, after we fulfill all the requirements of mapping the site, we hope to recover some artifacts to learn what kind of people lived here."

Dr. Jerome L. Hall, president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University, praised Dr. Ballard's work.

"According to the scientific method, you formulate a hypothesis, in this case the flood spillage theory for the Black Sea, and then you test it," Dr. Hall said. "One test is finding remnants of a civilization that was affected and looking for evidence to support the flood theory. This is how you do good science."

In a discovery with profound implications for the study of early human history, scientists digging in the republic of Georgia have found 1.7-million-year-old fossil human skulls that show clear signs of African ancestry and so may represent the species that first migrated out of Africa.

The two relatively complete skulls, being described today in the journal Science, begin to put a face, in a sense, to the ancestors who responded to opportunity and necessity by leaving Africa and spreading out over much of the rest of the world. Many paleoanthropologists hailed the discovery as a major advance in their field, and said the skulls were probably the most ancient undisputed human fossils outside Africa.

"It's the first good physical evidence we have of the identity of the first emigrants out of Africa," said Dr. Ian Tattersall, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

The international discovery team, led by Dr. Leo Gabunia of the Georgia National Academy of Sciences, concluded that the age and skeletal characteristics of the skulls linked them to the early human species Homo ergaster, who lived from 1.9 million to 1.4 million years ago and who some researchers think is the African version of Homo erectus. The specimens were said to bear less resemblance to the typical Asian Homo erectus.

"We suggest that these hominids may represent the species that initially dispersed from Africa and from which the Asian branch of H. erectus was derived," the discoverers said in their report.

The findings contradicted the theory that human ancestors left Africa soon after they invented better stone axes and other tools of what archaeologists call the Acheulean culture. The more than 1,000 stone tools found in the sediments with the two skulls were all pre-Acheulean, crudely chipped cobbles that had been made since human ancestors began knapping stone tools about 2.5 million years ago.

The earliest tools of the Acheulean style did not appear in Africa until 1.6 million years ago, and about 100,000 years later outside Africa, in Israel. By contrast, the discovery team reported, the tools found with the Georgian skulls resembled tools found in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania and dated at about 1.8 million years.

So it was not technology, but biology or environment, that presumably set human ancestors off on their migrations, scientists now say.

Dr. Susan C. Anton, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Florida who was a member of the discovery team, said that by this time human ancestors had become more carnivorous and their diets pushed them to expand their home range to match the wider ranges of the animals they preyed on.

"With the appearance of Homo, we see bigger bodies that require more energy to run, and therefore need these higher quality sources of protein as fuel," Dr. Anton said of the adaptation to meat-rich diets.

As long as early human ancestors had smaller bodies and brains, Dr. Tattersall said, they lived mainly on plants and confined themselves to a limited range at the edge of forests, not too deep in or too exposed far out on the savanna. Once they had stronger bodies and high-protein meat diets, they were able to spread out geographically and ecologically.

Dr. Alan Walker, a paleoanthropologist at Pennsylvania State University who specializes in searching for human fossils in Kenya, said he agreed with the interpretation of the Georgian skulls. "The new fossils look exactly like early Homo skulls from Kenya," Dr. Walker said.

He said the implications of the new findings for human dispersal from Africa supported an idea he and his wife, Dr. Pat Shipman, an anthropologist, proposed in 1989. They suggested that once the more apelike australopithecines evolved into the genus Homo and became carnivorous, they were forced to expand their home territory.

"Herbivores are restricted to where the plants are that they eat," Dr. Walker said. "Carnivores are not so restricted. Meat is meat, and you often have to travel far to find it."

The two skulls were uncovered last summer at Dmanisi, on a slope of the Caucasus Mountains 55 miles southwest of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. At the same site in 1991, paleontologists found a jawbone of what was identified as a Homo erectus. Finding the craniums -- one of a young adult male and the other of a female adolescent -- has seemed to quiet skeptics who had disputed the jawbone dating.

The discovery team included scientists from France, Germany and the United States, as well as Georgia. Dr. Carl C. Swisher 3rd of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California determined the approximate age of the skulls by geochemical and paleomagnetic analysis of the sediments and the presence of small rodent bones of a well-established age that were found with the human fossils.

Dr. Philip Rightmire, a specialist in Homo erectus at the State University of New York at Binghamton, said he was impressed by the new discovery's implications for "a pretty quick, really wholesale dispersal of these people, along with other animals," from the time the new species emerged in East Africa.

There is fossil evidence that by the time the individuals the Dmanisi skulls belonged to were living in Georgia, others of their species had already traveled as far east as Java in southeast Asia.

Unlike some scientists, Dr. Rightmire classifies the African ergaster together with the Asian erectus in the same species. To him and many others, they are regional variants of the same species.

Other scientists, often referred to as "splitters" and including discoverers of the Georgian skulls, look at the same fossils and see distinct species in Africa and Asia, with the Dmanisi fossils much more closely related to its African roots.

In their report, the discoverers said, "The Dmanisi site suggests a rapid dispersal from Africa into the Caucasus via the Levantine corridor, apparently followed by a much later colonization of adjacent European areas."

It was somewhat surprising, the discoverers said, to find that the Dmanisi fossils bore so little similarity to later European lineages.

Being close to the boundary between Europe and Asia, Georgia might have been a crossroads of dispersal to the west in Europe as well as to southern and eastern Asia.

Scientists said the discovery left unchanged current interpretations of the origin of anatomically modern humans in Africa some 100,000 years ago.

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