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You'd love Lorenzo's recent post here: helendale.substack.com/… Thanks for the source by the way; in the comments I tried explaining to him that those Hazda ladies were producing the calories, but he wasn't having it.
> Any other suggestions for the Paleolithic Model Pageant Top 10 Ranking?
Khoi-san, who preserve a large amount of genetic …
You'd love Lorenzo's recent post here: https://helendale.substack.com/p/feminisation-has-consequences-i Thanks for the source by the way; in the comments I tried explaining to him that those Hazda ladies were producing the calories, but he wasn't having it.
> Any other suggestions for the Paleolithic Model Pageant Top 10 Ranking?
Khoi-san, who preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost in other groups and, in many if not all cases, preserve ancient lifeways abandoned by their neighbors.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dwindling-african-tribe-may-have-been-most-populous-group-planet
(I'm biased here, though; I like the Khoi-san, and it saddens me that their numbers are dwindling. I have this feeling that something should be done, but I'm just not the person to do it.)
Khoi-san is probably just another name for the Kalahari Bushmen from "The Kalahari Debate".
Sort of. The Kalahari Bushmen don't get along well with the Khoi, but anthropologists group them together. They aren't Bantus, anyway.
I'm a bit concerned that Lorenzo does the usual thing and explains away ancient Australia as an exception. I think Australian Aborigines should be considered the norm if there is not a very good excuse not to. I have read too little about them, mostly because too little accessible text has been written about them. From what I have read, females made a very important part of food acquisition in pre-modern Australia.
But the Khoi-san are the Bushmen? I would say they are too pacified, but I must admit I like them too.
He scarcely mentions the Australians; his post focuses on gender issues, but it has a great deal of anthropology in it. And the Khoi-san are a cluster of people, including the Khoekhoen and the San; the latter group are more properly called Bushmen, but I think if everybody called me an AmerCanadian, I'd probably not get worked up about it. Older literature finds these people cluster genetically with East Africans, and Wikipedia has them preparing poisoned arrows, so I don't know if they're *that* peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#Society
And Cavalli-Sforza has: "Data... give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitivev human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses..." (From 1993 History & Geography of Human Genes, p 176)
Now that we know these people preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost to later humans, we can see that they probably aren't an admixed population. Culturally speaking, I'll admit the Australians look quite paleolithic (or at least, they did until very recently), but they had to do a lot of seafaring to get where they ended up; the San have been hangin' out south of the Sahara for a long time - if the original Garden of Eden can be said to have some geographic existence, it's the homeland of the San.
"Data... give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitive human ancestors."
But this is true of literally every human on Earth.
I didn't quote the entire section:
"The map of the early distribution of Khoisanids [across south and East Africa] shows the sites of presumed skeletal remains of the San. The proximity of East and North Africa to Southwest Asia makes it extremely likely that there was admixture between Africa and West Asia.
"An alternative hypothesis should be considered. Some peculiar external characteristics of Khoisans, and the uniqueness of clicks, have struck the imagination of many anthropologists to the point that some scholars have considered the Khoisan a separate race of very remote origin. In line with this, some linguists have seen the clicks as primordial sounds of human language, preserved only in Khoisan. Data from the analysis of an approximately 700-nucleotide region of mtDNA, already discussed in section 2.4, seem to give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitive human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses that Khoisans are the root of all humans or result of an admixture, for in many respects these two hypotheses give the same expectations, especially looking at gene frequencies. At this time and until further data accumulate and other analyses are made, it may be useful to consider both hypotheses possible and wait for further elements that may help in distinguishing them." (Cavalli-Sforza, 1993)
But again, we now have evidence that the Khoisan conserve alleles lost to other populations. For example:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692
"After the earliest split, between the ancestral Khoisan and non-Khoisan populations ~100–150 kyr ago, the ancestral Khoisan population maintained their high genetic diversity, while the effective population size of the non-Khoisan continued to decline for 30~120 kyr ago and lost more than half of its diversity. The ‘Out of Africa’ migration ~40–60 kyr ago (ref. 20) accounts for the observed population split between African and non-African populations, and the subsequent smaller effective population size of non-Africans compared with non-Khoisan Africans."
This retention of older alleles lost to other populations is inconsistent with the idea that the Khoisan are a mixture of two other populations; if these findings are correct, other populations emerged from the Khoisan.
Why don't you want to be a AmerCanadian? (or, more normally speaking, a North American?) I'm fine being a Scandinavian, a European, a Westerner and so on, although my ancestors probably didn't think they were all of those.
The Bushmen used poisoned arrows to hunt. Most probably they killed other people too, before the Bantus took the commando over them.
And yes, I think the Bushmen are the oldest now-living people on Earth. I think Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis is outdated: The Bushmen only look Asian. They have been isolated from other human populations since long before Asians existed: From 100 000 to 200 000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people (the section on genetics) I still think modern Bushmen are rather disqualified as paleolithic ancestor models because the Bantu supervise their affairs.
It's an interesting question how the Australian Aborigines reached Australia. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich writes that they took the road over the Eurasian landmass, mixed up with Neanderthals (like the rest of us), then mixed up with some Denisovans and got isolated from other populations about 30 000 years ago. If I remember it right. Reich said earlier estimates claim Australians become isolated earlier than that because they didn't know about all the admixture with Denisovans.
> Why don't you want to be a AmerCanadian?
Maybe it didn't come across well - I'd be fine with that. People offline call me "dude," Mr. *name of someone else*, and even Mrs. *name of someone else.* I know who they mean.
Ah, sorry, I read too sloppily.
You should watch out for that. Sloppy reading is implicated in 160% of Bushmen related accidental poisonings.
Yeah. And many other misfortunes too.