A Little Light Reading

Every once and a while, one of my buddies will drop a racist trope into an otherwise congenial conversation. It doesn't mean he (or she) can't be a my buddy? It puts up a roadblock, sure, but I have learned that racism is just a function of our cultural conditioning. We have all been conditioned in one way or another. It might be how we were raised, or where we went to school, or what we read or the media we consume. I have some, you have some, it drives our worldview. Trump voters, religious fundamentalists (of any variety) and racists, can't help themselves. Now because my Aunt Joan made sure there was a shiny new National Geographic on our kitchen table every month for thirty years, I have followed along as science has slowly learned one thing for sure. There is no such thing as race. Anyone who thinks differently has been at best ... misinformed.

So, let's say for the sake of argument, it's 1967, I'm ten and reading about Richard Leakey's new discoveries in the Omo Valley. Sixty years ago they couldn't date those skulls . Radiocarbon was only good for dating things less than 50,00 years old and these were older than that. They were humanoid, but not quite human and at at the time, archaeologists guessed they might be 60,000 to 80,000 years old. A few years later, newly developed Uranium dating techniques told us that they were at least 130,000 years old. Then 38 more years would pass before Argon dating was developed and placed those skulls in the soil more than 195,000 years ago. Finally, geochemical analysis of a fine volcanic layer just above these fossils settled the date at 230,000 ago. This was now becoming a real problem for the Jerry Springer crowd! They had spent over a hundred years getting past Darwin who published The Origins Of Man in 1859. That evolution "theory" might be true and we were descended from the great apes but humans "evolved" different races in different places. White folks. Asian folks. Black folks. Jews. Arabs. Eskimos. Indians. You know, the races? Unfortunately, there was a fly in the ointment? No ancient anatomically modern human fossils were being found anywhere, except in Sub-Saharan Africa? Keep looking, they argued. Then, along came genetics which blew the roof off those arguments. Today. that science is used for fighting horrible diseases, placing people at murder scenes and paternity tests (on The Jerry Springer Show). Now while it was important to know for sure whether Uncle Cletus put that baby into fifteen year old Becky Sue, scientists thought ... "we can get DNA out of ancient teeth and finally and firmly fill in the missing pieces of our origin story. Twenty-five years later, here is where we are:

We can tell from mitochondrial DNA in our X chromosome that a woman lived and had a least one baby in Africa a couple of hundred thousand years ago. She is related to every single one of us. A few years later, the technology existed to do the same for a similar genetic great, great great, etc. ... grandfather. These two were not a couple and probably lived thousands of years and hundreds of miles apart, but if you go back about ten thousand generations, we all arrive ... at these same two people. How weird is that? Having said that, there were different "races" back then. Half a million years before our Adam and Eve couple, there were at least three and probably five races who had diverged from our line and made their own push out of Africa. Neanderthals and Denisovans are the two we know the most about. Our race (Homo Sapiens) had a few faltering waves head north back then, but no descendants of those groups survived to modern days. Finally, about 65,000 years ago a group of perhaps as few as a thousand breeding adults made their way out of Africa. We know it was a small band as there is almost no genetic diversity among any populations these days. You want diversity, you need to go back to Africa and test people who stayed behind. We are all descended from a very small haplogroup. By 58,000 years ago they had moved all the way east along the coast, populating the Indus valley, Indonesia and made it as far as Australia. They moved up through the Arabian Peninsula into southern Europe and eventually we were cave co-owners with our cousins the Neanderthals. What happens in Spain, stays in Spain apparently as there was some serious interracial hanky panky going on. Almost all of us have a tiny fraction of neanderthal DNA in our sordid past as a result. It was a hard life back then and about 35,000 years ago, the last small group of neanderthals failed to leave viable offspring. We were alone. Left to our own devices we quickly spread across Europe and Asia. 30,000 years ago, a mutation gifted the population to the east with straight black hair, dark eyes and an epithantic eye fold. South central Europeans developed a larger nose with an arch in it 17,000 years ago a population in northeast had a mutation for straight blond hair. They were still dark skinned but blondes have more fun ... so that mutation was reinforced. 12,000 years ago, an ice age lowered sea levels (again) and brown people with an epithantic fold walked across the land bridge near Alaska and down into The Americas. 8.000 years ago, a mutation for less melatonin in the skin of northern populations allowed for more vitamin D absorption through their skin. The lighter skinned descendants of those populations would come to survive the dark ages, spark the renaissance and write modern European history. Lest we forget what came before that:

Mesopotamian Empire (c. 3500–539 BCE) Iraq / Tigris-Euphrates Rivers, they invented writing, the wheel, and written laws.
Ancient Egypt (c. 3100–30 BCE) Nile River Valley, monumental architecture, major advances in medicine, and geometry.
Indus Valley (c. 2600–1900 BCE) Pakistan & Northwest India, pioneers in advanced urban planning, sanitation, and grid-based cities and now, a global power.
Mesoamerican (.c 2000 BCE-1521 CE). Mexico & Central America, the Mayans and the Aztecs developed complex mathematical tracking, highly precise calendars, and advanced agriculture.
Chinese Hegemony (c. 1600 BCE–Present Day) East Asia / Yellow & Yangtze Rivers, they invented paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, and now a global power.
Greek then Roman Empire (c. 800–346 CE) Eastern Mediterranean, developed the roots of Western philosophy, the first attempts at democracy, live theater and indoor plumbing.
Andean (c. 1000 BCE–1533 CE) South America / Andes Mountains, the Inca, Nazca, Moche perfected terrace farming, freeze-drying techniques, and massive road networks.
Islamic Golden Age (c. 750–1258 CE) Middle East, North Africa, Spain, algebra, modern optics, and preserved classical world knowledge.
Western (c. 15th Century–Present Day) Europe & North America, the Scientific Revolution, industrialization, modern human rights frameworks and now, a global power.

I combined the Greek and Roman Empire as it didn't seem right to ignore them completely but both petered out after relatively short runs compared to other major civilizations. I did excluded Japan as a strict isolationist policy kept them bundled up inside their own borders for hundreds of years. Does anything else jump off the page for you? If not, then you haven't been following along. I'd talk about which gods were worshiped at each stage of our journey but I have probably ruffled enough feathers for this week. I will just say this: If you are huddled in your pickup truck outside of a mosque or synagogue, let's say in Bellville, clutching a loaded shotgun ... someone has fed you a line. There is no such thing as race. We are one big unhappy family. Except for me. I live in a paradise.

Our Optimum Week

We had a huge uptick in our points this week as all the chickens came home to roost in our long term Offers. I hit all of them except one and actually bought a few groceries. This week, there was little to celebrate in the flyers or in the Offers so I gave you a short list. They will shortly start scrambling for your Thanksgiving dollars so go easy if you can?

We Are Watching

The End Of Oak Street on Netflix - When I pick a bad movie to watch, not only do I have to endure the movie, but also there is the polemic spray of abuse from SWMBO. "I can't believe you are making me watch this!! In 1992 it took a hundred million to generate realistic dinosaurs for Jurassic Park. These days, you can now do it on your little sisters laptop. The question is should you? The answer is hell no. Not even the majesty that is Anne Hathaway in a sun dress can save this little stinker.

The Gentlemen on Amazon Prime - If you missed it last year, go back and watch Season One, then Two. I said they just stuck Guy Richie's name on that crap movie In The Grey, but that is not the case here. You can see his hand in the writing and the directing. If you are a fan, then this is for you. I loved it!

The Frankenstein Chronicles on Netflix - I could watch Sean Bean read the phonebook, so I started this series after giving up on Seal Team. You thought SYMBO complained about Oak Street? Jeesh!

... and finally

The good looking guy in the lead photo was named Cheddar Man after being found in 1903. It had nothing to do with cheese, he was found near the bottom of the Cheddar Gorge, deep inside Gough's Cave. An ancient nearly perfectly preserved skeleton. Facial reconstruction has been around for a while but they had no idea that he had black hair, brown skin and blue eyes when they found him. Being "close to home" as it were, the advances in science I listed above have all been applied to Cheddar man over the decades but the big news came in 1997. A BBC producer filming a documentary about his lineage thought it might be fun to collect DNA from local residents and have it compared to our erstwhile time traveller. Guess what happened? They got a exact match!

42 year old high school teacher Adrian Targett was a direct descendant and lived less than a mile from the actual cave where his ancestor had lain for 300 generations. How cool is that? It wasn't until one of his molars was used for genetic testing in 2018 that science was able to produce the final image you see in the reconstruction. Now that's an empire!

Mitch & Maddie