Is there any clue to where this substrate may be oriented?
There has been theories about tocharian/tibetan influences…

This is a basic issue in the field of anthropology – biological as well as cultural.

The discovery of Luzia and a row of other “anomalies” constitute a clean proof that the amerindians have a separate history from both africans, australians and eurasians – until the end of ice-time.

Somewhere between the older and the elder Dryas there seem to have been contacts though – through the northern corridors of the North Atlantic (Solutrean artefacts) as well as via the Beringia. The latter are probably post Younger Dryas.

Since the discovery of 11.000 year old archaic amerindians in Brazil there is ample evidence that the OoA-theory propagated by National Geographic is outdated.

Another blow to the OoA is the updates from hominid genetics, outlining that the Orangutangs are distinctivly closer to the human being than any chimp or gorilla.

If we are to go by empirical evidence there is still no reason to jump to the conclusion of an African origin for the human specie. Even Darwin were aware of that…

BTW.: Darwin considered that a doctrine of Origin, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory unless the ALL the causes at work were correctly identified…

Still his theory of modification by natural selection was of such absolute importance that he would formulate it without the neccesary body of experimental evidence to support the theory. Thus he fell back on speculative arguments, placing his faith in “common sense”.

His code of argumentation is still used by evolutionists and their modern adepts, the geneticans. The simplicity of their models may help to create the answers that create the same sense of “commons sense” – helping the professional biologists create order and present a viable “understanding” of the human evolution. That may make the discussion of these (their!) ideas extremely difficult.

Personal convictions, simple possibilities, are presented as if they were proofs, or at least valid arguments in favour of the theory.

Without Lamarc old Darwins theory can still be modified without difficulty to fit any conceivable case. Thus it is without clearly defined scientific value, since it cannot be verified by experiment. Though, since the imagination has free rein, it is easy to convey the impression that concrete examples of real, irreversabel transmutations has been given. In fact we have no such evidences – still…!

Though – to follow in Darwins exact foot-steps with the dna-material is still the more appealing because of the fundamental simplicity of A explanation. Thus antropologists, archaologists and the general public alike may be completely ignorant of biological processes and yet FEEL very well with a easy-to-understand theory that seem to put evrything in place.

Today we have a growing number of non-biologists peeping into the field of human genetics to learn all the neccesary elements and principles described by the leading authorities. By mastering the elementary terms and maths one may feel that one understand what causes and determinates the variety of plants, animals and human beings.

This blending of simplification, sense and “reasonability” was certainly a major cause for the success of Darwins “flawless” theory. Still, in the hands of amateurs, it becomes a deception. Or self-deception.

That seems to be even more the case for the present view on human origin and genetic evolution. There’s still three kinds of lies though. Outrigth lies, hidden lies and popularized statistics…

That’s were I live. Could you please explain – in a sentence or two…?!

Best regards

I just got your website at

http://music000001.blogspot.com/2007/07/44-cantometric-map.html,

by googling “interlock and yodel”. I also had my wife play a “hocket” piece, so I knew what on earth you were talking about. You are in such an esoteric field; I imagine you’re in near ecstasy when you find someone like German, who can intelligently read what you have to offer. I’m rather awestruck, considering the amount of work that must have been involved at collecting data from all over Africa.

Good research is such a slow and tedious process. I am reminded of chemists who dedicated much of their academic careers to the pursuit of understanding one protein, only to see the whole field explode into frenzied activity with the arrival of new investigative techniques. Even so, the academics of today seem unable to assemble this plethora of data into meaningful models. What we’ve come up with is something of a Monet painting: It can only be appreciated from a distance, yet the academic community rewards those most adept at analyzing the colors in the individual squiggles of paint.

You two pictures of groups of Africans and Alpine Europeans, both performing with identical instruments in their respective native surroundings, speaks volumes about cultural dispersal — or incredible coincidence. It’s not my field, so I can’t say which it is.

I’m writing this nearly a year after you posted, so you may never read it. Just a reality check on the tens of thousands of years you mention for these mutation events to happen. I couldn’t let that slide. One problem with genetic studies, is that there is NO absolute time scale to work with. Mutations are individual chemical events which do NOT require hundreds or thousands of years to happen.

I worked for a while as an organic chemist, and am familiar with some long-lasting chemical reactions — namely, the manufacture of resins. Resins require a LONG time to react (by which I mean, sometimes over a day at kettle temperature), because they grow into very large, unweildy molecules that are slow to properly present reactive sites at the appropriate orientation towards incoming reactants. Some other reactions, such as those in pharmaceutical-type syntheses, are purposely made to react slowly (a matter of a few days), in order to minimize the production of unwanted side products.

I also spent a few years in solid-state inorganic chemistry, doing high-temperature oven reactions to produce crystals. These mimiced, after a fashion, rock-forming reactions in nature, which usually occur under conditions of great temperature and pressure. They don’t take a long time to happen in a geological sense: Once the reactants arrive at the appropriate conditions of temperature and pressure, they don’t take any longer to completely react than my laboratory experiments. Even long processes such as erosion of rocks do not take long in a geological timeframe: Try reading a marble tombstone from only 100 years ago, and you will see that this process happens rather quickly.

Mutations of DNA base pairs happen almost instantaneously, in comparison to the above reactions. DNA molecules are repeatedly being “unzipped” and reconstructed as twins through reaction with reactant molecules in the cell. It’s not a slow, sloshy affair like the making of a paint resin: every unzipped base pair is a highly reactive site. The reactants have a shape specificity that makes the process something like a child assembling a jigsaw puzzle through trial and error. Occasionally, a “near fit” gets let slip; but the body has control mechanisms to minimize this sort of thing, such as proteins that zip along the DNA strand at lightning speed to make repairs.

What takes a lot of “time” in making a mutation, is actually the extremely low PROBABILITY of a mis-matched base pair escaping detection long enough to survive to the next “unzipping”, at which time it can perpetuate itself by pairing with its natural mate. Other unusual ambient events could occur to cause mutations, such as the presence of free radicals. I’m not familiar enough with the subject to freely discourse on it.

The bottom line is that these processes are not slow, drawn-out processes, but nearly instantaneous events, which happen or don’t happen because of some aberration in the system: a protein malfunctioning, or an ambient free radical; and these aberrations are much more likely to be the result of changing ambient conditions than they are of time. The bulk of human mutations could actually have occurred during a period of intense solar radiation, or because of some social habit such as wearing trousers, or because of a geologic or near-space catastrophe such as a meteor impact, which momentarily altered atmospheric radiation levels; or of eating a peculiar free-radical-rich diet. There is no smoothness or regularity in this matter, so there is no actual “clock” to date things by. This is the great pitfall of studying genetic data in isolation, divorced from corraborating evidence from other disciplines such as linguistics, genealogy and archealogy.

“I am sympathetic with Stock’s separation of Pygmy music from Khoisan music, just because I think Pygmies share ancestry with Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan, while Khoisans (at least in my data are closer to North America and Australia; for instance, they share such a unique grammatical feature as “kinship verbs” with North American and Australian languages).”

This blows me away! you’re connecting Khosians with Australians with North Americans! I’m not an anthropologist nor linguist; just an interested onlooker; but years ago I noticed a superficial resemblance between Niger-Congo and Austronesian languages. I can’t remember what the connections was, other than the initial “ng” and tonality. Of course, my greatest foreign language exposure was with Vietnamse, which has both features, so you can understand my interest. I remember seeing some sort of Australian-American connection as well, but can’t remember what it was. The explanation that intuitively came to mind was that this was something of a “fairy ring” effect. “Fairy rings” are growth patterns of some mushrooms, which advance on a “ring” front over the years, as the “core” area of soil gets depleted. I thought these were caused by successive waves (literally) of migration from a central area in the Middle East. Doesn’t that make more sense than a beachcombing espedition from Mombassa to Venice Beach? I admit, I’m just a duffer.

Victor: “And it was not based on how one practice is derived from another, but on how a certain set of practices might have survived intact over tens of thousands of years and tens of thousands of miles. Resulting in the existence of an “archaic” cultural practice at the endpoint of a long migration rather than at the beginning.”

German: But my immediate thoughts are: “But how would we document this early migration that resulted in such a dramatic inversion of cultural properties beyond postulating it apriori? At the same time, how would we explain the loss of all those very properties in the homeland?”

German, I was raised in Milwaukee, WI, which was at that time the most German city in America. In school, all my close friends played a card game called “schafkopf”, which at the time was only played in Wisconsin. It was a very popular game in the 1800s in Germany, but had become unpopular ther in the 20th century. When I became a chemist, I worked with a fellow chemist who was very fond of his German heritage, and had made many trips to the “old country”. Once, someone from the “old country” came over and noted some of the “German” things we did in Milwaukee. He said, “Ah — that’s the way we USED TO do such and such; but we don’t do that anymore.”

There was another incident, where the US President hired on a Polish-American as an interpreter. He drew guffaws from the crowd at something he interpreted, but was at a loss as to why. Later, someone informed him that what he said, while considered very proper decades ago, was now spoken only in dirty jokes.

Cases of the most ancient custom getting dispersed, where it is lost in the homeland, abound everywhere. I’m told that Icelandic is more conservative than any other Scandanavian language, and that Lithuanian (far from the epicenter of Indo-European language spread) was the most conservative IE language. Applying this reasoning to your statement,

“Africans contain only 25% of “human” mtDNA markers, Europeans 50%, Asians 75% and American Indians close to 100%”,

I think I’m beginning to see possibilities: Native Americans may indeed be the “oldest” race on earth, in that they retain the most original mtDNA markers. That does not preclude their having migrated to America from somewhere else. Of course, the same conditions would have to apply as in the “schafkopf” case: their retention of the markers would have to have come through lack of contact with conditions that would lead to attrition of the markers. In the case of our playing schafkopf, we were somehow more interested in preserving a unique German (and therefore “Milwaukean” — I’m not even German) identity than the Germans were. I can understand how this could happen with cultural items: The Germans were secure in their identity, and therefore less concerned about losing it than we were; but how can this thinking be extended to something physical such as DNA markers?

If the American Indians were an “old” population living originally in, say, Siberia, what caused other peoples to lose their markers while they retained them? Perhaps their isolation in Siberia, or the Caucasus, or wherever they originally came from, had a conserving quality; while founder effects and bottlenecks attritted the others.

There you have it — a theory that is neither MRE, OOAf nor OOAm, that accounts for the “genetic markers” problem. It’s “OOTME” (out of the Middle East), which I’m pre-disposed towards. The greatest bottleneck would then have been the Sahara, which may have been crossable at some point only by the Nile valley.

“I think it unfortunate that you are going to be spending so much of your energy defending what looks like an indefensible interpretation”.

So far, there’s nothing German said that looks “indefensible”. He isn’t foisting OOAm as a “done deal”; he’s just proposing it as a counter to OOAf, so a legitimate debate can take place that examines ALL the evidence from a diversity of disciplines. I think, therefore, that you didn’t use the term “indefensible” because you thought German’s theories were unbelievable or wrong; you simply viewed German’s position as a scientist being judged by a haughty, intractible scientific aristocracy. You’re advising German, in essence “not to make waves”.

I only have a MS in Chemistry, Victor, because I spent my life doing things I thought were more important: building relationships, helping people in need, raising my children. I couldn’t see a direct connection between those things — which I felt and still feel to be eminently important — and getting a sheepskin. But I did rise high enough in the academic community, to see the infighting, backslapping and backstabbing that goes on, along with the horrendous pride of many. They equate having dozens or hundreds of students looking at them and hanging on their every word (so they get a good grade on the next test) with wisdom and greatness; and the industry just reeks with evil. You want to spare German of the consequenses of rubbing that beast the wrong way; but I’m afraid that for some, truth actually matters more than this; truth is more beautiful than a gorgeous woman, more valuable than a house full of gold. German might just be one of these; and your well-intended admonition may come to nought…

…but I’ll be glad: not because German has suffered, but because he’s free!

Regarding L-diversity in mtDNA, I very much agree that mutation rate diversity COULD explain the whole phenomenon. DNA molecules have:

(1) a primary structure, a “ladder”-like affair, with the “bases” as “rungs”,

(2) a secondary structure, the “alpha-helix” which winds mainly as a result of energetics within the two stems of the “ladder”, and

(3) a tertiary structure, caused by the DNA strand interacting with neighboring parts of the strand, and with neighboring entities such as proteins.

Each of these structures affects the reactivity of a particular base or strand section towards mutation. We have become familiar with certain “hot” spots on the chain, and base-pair combinations, which are more reactive than others. It wouldn’t surpize me at all, if parts of the “L” strain are extremely reactive.

Another factor, which I have never heard espoused, is the effect of environment on mutation rate. Millions of people put on sunblock every year to avoid exposure to mutation-causing solar radiation. I even heard that the fact that men wear trousers, and therefore inhibit their testes from cooling, produces more mutations than all the atmospheric nuclear testing of the 1950s and 60s. How much more, might the movement of humans from more equable climates to hot places like India and Africa have caused more mutations? Diet is also a potential culprit. The bottom line is, that mutation rates need not be and are not identical to one another.

By the way, a mutation takes only nanoseconds, if that, to happen: It doesn’t take tens, hundreds or thousands of years. What we call a mutation “rate”, is more properly called a mutation “probability”; and that probability must be applied to ambient conditions.

I have encountered DNA studies quit often in my genealogical research. The DNA testing service provides “ballpark” estimates about probable times to the “most recent common ancestor”; but when comparing these to the paperwork data, based on contemporary records, some of these results were clearly hit “out of the ballpark”. Moreover, there are many, many cases where definitely unrelated individuals are closer matches than definitely related ones (because of back-mutations). You no doubt know all this; I’m only mentioning it, to reinforce what you said about the need for an interworking on these matters between people in widely differing disciplines.