ARCHAI
Gobekli Tepe, world's oldest temple, 10,000 BCE. We don't know if the anthropic pillars -- T-shaped stylized human figures, stone beings -- are venerated ancestors, or archetypal figures, gods, divine ancestors. The massive stone enclosures of the Göbekli Tepe ruins may represent priests, deities or revered ancestors in Neolithic religion.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076477-mystery-invaders-conquered-europe-at-the-end-of-last-ice-age/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076477-mystery-invaders-conquered-europe-at-the-end-of-last-ice-age/
Surprisngly, burying their dead is the main trait we can discern about the South African find of Homo naledi ("naledi" means "star" in the South African language Sotho). A hominin with such a primitive brain carried its dead to the same spot over time. This defies everything we suspected about our early pre-human ancestors.
There have been several instances of archaic human admixture with modern humans through interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and/or possibly other archaic humans over the course of human history. Neanderthal-derived DNA accounts for an estimated 1–4% of the Eurasian genome, but it is significantly absent or uncommon in the genome of most Sub-Saharan African people. In Oceanian and Southeast Asian populations, there is a relative increase of Denisovan-derived DNA. An estimated 4–6% of the Melanesian genome is derived from Denisovans. Recent noncomparative DNA analyses—as no specimens have been discovered—suggest that African populations have a genetic contribution from a now-extinct archaic African hominin population.
Nevertheless, there still are some doubts about the recent admixture events among a number of researchers. Ancient subpopulation structure ancestral to modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other possible archaic humans has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the observed genetic similarities.
http://www.fsmitha.com/time/timeline.htm
Other Theories and Potential Consensus
Mutation rates must be estimated properly for these "clocks" to be reliable. Such estimates suggest that divergence was about 2-4 percent per million years. Some have suggested that if mutation was slower, the date of coalescence would be older, perhaps supporting the multi-regional hypothesis.
Misconceptions include the idea that all modern humans can be traced back to one female, "mitochondrial Eve." The mitochondrial ancestor was not the only female living, or the only one who passed on mtDNA, but part of a population.
These problems have now been addressed, providing a secure basis for estimating coalescence as late as around 150,000 years ago. As coalescence relates to specific genes, not a whole population, there are still some questions. Most genetic evidence is consistent with an African origin, but might include significant genetic contributions from Asia.
High genetic variability in sub-Saharan African still points to primacy. Emerging consensus is that hybridization and replacement is best supported by the data, that long-term population size in Africa was largest, and that genes flowed out of Africa more frequently than into it. Low levels of mtDNA diversity may indicate a population bottleneck, when as few as 1500 female humans lived, perhaps due to environmental conditions, or our population size may always have been small.
There have been several instances of archaic human admixture with modern humans through interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and/or possibly other archaic humans over the course of human history. Neanderthal-derived DNA accounts for an estimated 1–4% of the Eurasian genome, but it is significantly absent or uncommon in the genome of most Sub-Saharan African people. In Oceanian and Southeast Asian populations, there is a relative increase of Denisovan-derived DNA. An estimated 4–6% of the Melanesian genome is derived from Denisovans. Recent noncomparative DNA analyses—as no specimens have been discovered—suggest that African populations have a genetic contribution from a now-extinct archaic African hominin population.
Nevertheless, there still are some doubts about the recent admixture events among a number of researchers. Ancient subpopulation structure ancestral to modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other possible archaic humans has been proposed as an alternative explanation for the observed genetic similarities.
http://www.fsmitha.com/time/timeline.htm
Other Theories and Potential Consensus
Mutation rates must be estimated properly for these "clocks" to be reliable. Such estimates suggest that divergence was about 2-4 percent per million years. Some have suggested that if mutation was slower, the date of coalescence would be older, perhaps supporting the multi-regional hypothesis.
Misconceptions include the idea that all modern humans can be traced back to one female, "mitochondrial Eve." The mitochondrial ancestor was not the only female living, or the only one who passed on mtDNA, but part of a population.
These problems have now been addressed, providing a secure basis for estimating coalescence as late as around 150,000 years ago. As coalescence relates to specific genes, not a whole population, there are still some questions. Most genetic evidence is consistent with an African origin, but might include significant genetic contributions from Asia.
High genetic variability in sub-Saharan African still points to primacy. Emerging consensus is that hybridization and replacement is best supported by the data, that long-term population size in Africa was largest, and that genes flowed out of Africa more frequently than into it. Low levels of mtDNA diversity may indicate a population bottleneck, when as few as 1500 female humans lived, perhaps due to environmental conditions, or our population size may always have been small.
PALEOPOETICS
The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination
Christopher Collins
The inquiry made by Merlin Donald, and which he searches for an answer is: how did humans, given their nonsymbolic mammalian heritage, come to represent their knowledge ins ymbolic form, and through what stages must this development have passed?
Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us.
Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/paleopoetics/9780231160926
Modern humans interbred at least twice with archaic humans—Neandertals and, later, Denisovans—after leaving Africa. What’s more, the Denisova girl seemed to also carry some ancient DNA from an even more archaic hominin, such as the direct human ancestor Homo erectus, which lived 1.8 million to roughly 200,000 years ago. Her ancestors had inherited this “super archaic” DNA within the past 400,000 years, but the Altai Neandertal did not have it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/humans-mated-neandertals-much-earlier-and-more-frequently-thought
The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination
Christopher Collins
The inquiry made by Merlin Donald, and which he searches for an answer is: how did humans, given their nonsymbolic mammalian heritage, come to represent their knowledge ins ymbolic form, and through what stages must this development have passed?
Christopher Collins introduces an exciting new field of research traversing evolutionary biology, anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and literary study. Paleopoetics maps the selective processes that originally shaped the human genus millions of years ago and prepared the human brain to play, imagine, empathize, and engage in fictive thought as mediated by language. A manifestation of the "cognitive turn" in the humanities, Paleopoetics calls for a broader, more integrated interpretation of the reading experience, one that restores our connection to the ancient methods of thought production still resonating within us.
Speaking with authority on the scientific aspects of cognitive poetics, Collins proposes reading literature using cognitive skills that predate language and writing. These include the brain's capacity to perceive the visible world, store its images, and retrieve them later to form simulated mental events. Long before humans could share stories through speech, they perceived, remembered, and imagined their own inner narratives. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Collins builds an evolutionary bridge between humans' development of sensorimotor skills and their achievement of linguistic cognition, bringing current scientific perspective to such issues as the structure of narrative, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the relation of rhetoric to poetics, the relevance of performance theory to reading, the difference between orality and writing, and the nature of play and imagination.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/paleopoetics/9780231160926
Modern humans interbred at least twice with archaic humans—Neandertals and, later, Denisovans—after leaving Africa. What’s more, the Denisova girl seemed to also carry some ancient DNA from an even more archaic hominin, such as the direct human ancestor Homo erectus, which lived 1.8 million to roughly 200,000 years ago. Her ancestors had inherited this “super archaic” DNA within the past 400,000 years, but the Altai Neandertal did not have it.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/humans-mated-neandertals-much-earlier-and-more-frequently-thought
The Genomic Ancient DNA Revolution
A New Way to Investigate the Past
http://edge.org/conversation/david_reich-the-genomic-ancient-dna-revolution
My experience collaborating with Svante since 2007, has been that the data we’ve looked at from the incredible samples they have has yielded surprise after surprise. Nobody had ever gotten to look at data like this before. First, there were the Neanderthals, and then there was this pinky bone from Southern Siberia. At the end of the Neanderthal project, Svante told me we have this amazing genome-wide data from another archaic human, from a little pinky bone of a little girl from a Southern Siberian cave, and asked if I'd like to get involved in analyzing it.When we analyzed it, it was an incredible surprise: This individual was not a Neanderthal. They were in fact much more distantly related to a Neanderthal than any two humans are today from each other, and it was not a modern human. It was some very distant cousin of a Neanderthal that was living in Siberia in Central Asia at the time that this girl lived.
When we analyzed the genome of this little girl, we saw that she was related to people in New Guinea and Australia. A person related to her had contributed about 5 percent of the genomes to people in New Guinea and Australia and related people—an interbreeding event nobody had known about before. It was completely unexpected. It wasn’t in anybody’s philosophy or anybody’s prediction. It was a new event that was driven by the data and not by people’s presuppositions or previous ideas.
This is what ancient DNA does for us. When you look at the data, it doesn’t always just play into one person’s theory or the other; it doesn’t just play into the Indo-European steppe hypothesis or the Anatolian hypothesis. Sometimes it raises something completely new, like the Denisovan finger bone and the interbreeding of a gene flow from Denisovans into Australians and New Guineans.
DAVID REICH is a geneticist
A New Way to Investigate the Past
http://edge.org/conversation/david_reich-the-genomic-ancient-dna-revolution
My experience collaborating with Svante since 2007, has been that the data we’ve looked at from the incredible samples they have has yielded surprise after surprise. Nobody had ever gotten to look at data like this before. First, there were the Neanderthals, and then there was this pinky bone from Southern Siberia. At the end of the Neanderthal project, Svante told me we have this amazing genome-wide data from another archaic human, from a little pinky bone of a little girl from a Southern Siberian cave, and asked if I'd like to get involved in analyzing it.When we analyzed it, it was an incredible surprise: This individual was not a Neanderthal. They were in fact much more distantly related to a Neanderthal than any two humans are today from each other, and it was not a modern human. It was some very distant cousin of a Neanderthal that was living in Siberia in Central Asia at the time that this girl lived.
When we analyzed the genome of this little girl, we saw that she was related to people in New Guinea and Australia. A person related to her had contributed about 5 percent of the genomes to people in New Guinea and Australia and related people—an interbreeding event nobody had known about before. It was completely unexpected. It wasn’t in anybody’s philosophy or anybody’s prediction. It was a new event that was driven by the data and not by people’s presuppositions or previous ideas.
This is what ancient DNA does for us. When you look at the data, it doesn’t always just play into one person’s theory or the other; it doesn’t just play into the Indo-European steppe hypothesis or the Anatolian hypothesis. Sometimes it raises something completely new, like the Denisovan finger bone and the interbreeding of a gene flow from Denisovans into Australians and New Guineans.
DAVID REICH is a geneticist
BRAIDED STREAM
of Human Evolution
of Human Evolution
"Until recently, anthropologists drew the human family tree in the same way that my 10-year-old son solves a maze. He finds it much easier to work from the end to the beginning, because blind alleys lead with depressing sameness away from the start. In just this way, scientists once traced our own lineage from the present into the past, moving backward through a thicket of fossil relatives, each perched upon its own special branch to extinction.
"This approach yielded the now-ubiquitous image of the human family tree, with Homo sapiens – the one and only living hominid – sitting alone, seemingly inevitable, at the top. It’s a powerful metaphor, but it also turns out to be a deeply mistaken one. Where once we saw each branch in isolation, DNA evidence now reveals a network of connections. From an African origin more than 1.8 million years ago, human ancestors flowed into different populations, following separate paths for hundreds of thousands of years, yet still coming together to mix their genes.
"The recovery of ancient DNA from ancient hominins, first by Svante Pääbo’s research group at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and later by others, has started to bring unknown populations into view. Neanderthals provided a proof of principle, showing the recovery of whole-genome evidence from small fragments.
The first high-coverage genome provided the biggest surprise: a tiny piece of a finger bone from Denisova Cave, in southern Siberia, has shown us an unknown population (now called the ‘Denisovans’) who are as different from living people as from the Neanderthals. They make up some 5 per cent of the ancestry of living Aboriginal Australians, and a tiny fraction of more than a billion people across Asia and the New World.
"Once geneticists knew what to look for, they began documenting more such lineages from the scattered traces of their genes in living people, even without DNA from ancient bones. Geneticists began to call these ‘ghost populations’, and quickly showed that many Africans, too, carry a legacy of unknown populations.
"Even ancient genomes have ghosts within them. The Denisovan genome bears the traces of ancient mixture, not only from Neanderthals but with another even more divergent group – some speculate it might have been Homo erectus. Everywhere geneticists look, they see populations more different than any living people, mixing with each other in small fractions. It is no evolutionary tree. Our evolutionary history is like a braided stream.
How could science have missed this?
"Anthropologists spent 100 years looking for signs of Neanderthal traits in later people, poring across old bones for tiny details. There were faint signs, especially in the earliest Europeans who lived more than 25,000 years ago just after the Neanderthals, but in reality bone anatomy is a poor reflection of population mixture even among living people. Many worked to test the hypothesis that fossil skeletons had a small fraction of Neanderthal ancestry, but these efforts locked the field in debate.
"In the 1970s, geneticists noticed that humans are surprisingly inbred for a worldwide species. Other great apes – the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans – each have much more variation, so much that today’s primatologists recognise two species of orangutans, and up to four species of chimpanzees and gorillas. These apes have deep histories, with populations separated for hundreds of thousands of years. By contrast, humans throughout the world look like refugees from a single small part of Africa. Some scientists even wondered if a massive volcanic eruption might have decimated our numbers.
"But deeper gene sequencing and broader samples of people changed the picture. Our population did not originate in a catastrophe. When Neanderthals, Denisovans and ghost lineages, both inside and outside Africa, walked the Earth, their populations were each quite inbred, but collectively they were diverse, more like gorillas or chimpanzees than today’s humans. Across the past 200,000 years, these separate streams were swallowed up by the growth of one African branch of humanity. Humans spread through the world like a broad river delta, carrying slightly different fractions of the flow of ancient streams.
"We don’t yet know what triggered the success of these ancient Africans. But we can see some ways that they benefited from mixing with distant populations. As they mixed, they picked up biological solutions first innovated and road-tested by distant populations. Already, we have found Neanderthal or Denisovan genes contribute to immunity, metabolism and proteins expressed in hair and skin. A gene derived from Denisovans has helped people adapt to the low-oxygen environment of the Tibetan plateau.
"Just last month, two new studies found evidence of yet more Neanderthal and Denisovan genes active in human immune systems. Do we owe our allergies to cavemen, as some press headlines claimed? Probably not. But life outside the tropics does pose unique challenges, including a deficit of vitamin-D production, now known to strongly affect immunity. When Africans encountered these populations, any new immune tricks might have been valuable, especially those field-tested against local parasites. A talent for quickly adapting to new pathogens and parasites might even explain the initial growth of our ancestors within Africa, where they would have encountered pathogen diversity higher than anywhere else in the archaic human range.
"The braided stream of human evolution matches with what we are seeing in other mammals. As geneticists have sampled more and more populations of wild animals, they are finding what has been known for our domesticated plants and animals for a long time: hybridisation and introgression of genes among species and distant populations is ubiquitous in the natural world.
"Eastern coyotes now form a spectrum of populations with a high fraction of wolf and domesticated dog ancestry. European mallard ducks, introduced by hunters into New Zealand, rapidly hybridised with indigenous brown ducks, and now outbreed them. People long ago interbred Indian zebu with taurine cattle, creating arid-tolerant breeds that now are spread across most of Africa. What has changed most is our ability to see small fractions of mixture across whole genomes. Just in the last few years, scientists showed that grizzly bears well south into North America carry genes from polar bears, a legacy of ancient population mixture. Hominins are not exceptional; our mixing is the way that widespread mammals evolve.
"If this is true, should we really be calling these populations different ‘species’ at all? After all, most of us learned that species are defined by their ability to interbreed. For ancient populations known precisely because they bred with humans, it feels wrong to use a term that leads people to assume they could not.
"But anthropologists are just starting to face the question of how we define species with ancient DNA. Faced with the evidence of deep genetic histories of Neanderthals, Denisovans and the ghost populations of Africa, conservation biologists would not hesitate to classify them as species, just as they now recognize several species of gorillas. Before we can settle this, we might need to uncover more about the anatomy and behavior of these ancient people, the consequences of their genetic and historical differences.
"What inspires me most about the braided stream of our origins is what it implies about future discoveries. Tracing ghost lineages has already taken us further into the past than the 400,000 years of the current record for ancient DNA from hominins. Across the 7 million years or more of hominin evolution, there must have been dozens of such long-lasting populations, sometimes mixing and sharing adaptations with each other. As in the case of the Denisovans, we might already have tiny fossil traces of these ancient groups that we cannot yet recognize. Many more are out there, waiting for anthropologists to unearth them.
We are searching."
https://aeon.co/opinions/human-evolution-is-more-a-muddy-delta-than-a-branching-tree
"This approach yielded the now-ubiquitous image of the human family tree, with Homo sapiens – the one and only living hominid – sitting alone, seemingly inevitable, at the top. It’s a powerful metaphor, but it also turns out to be a deeply mistaken one. Where once we saw each branch in isolation, DNA evidence now reveals a network of connections. From an African origin more than 1.8 million years ago, human ancestors flowed into different populations, following separate paths for hundreds of thousands of years, yet still coming together to mix their genes.
"The recovery of ancient DNA from ancient hominins, first by Svante Pääbo’s research group at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and later by others, has started to bring unknown populations into view. Neanderthals provided a proof of principle, showing the recovery of whole-genome evidence from small fragments.
The first high-coverage genome provided the biggest surprise: a tiny piece of a finger bone from Denisova Cave, in southern Siberia, has shown us an unknown population (now called the ‘Denisovans’) who are as different from living people as from the Neanderthals. They make up some 5 per cent of the ancestry of living Aboriginal Australians, and a tiny fraction of more than a billion people across Asia and the New World.
"Once geneticists knew what to look for, they began documenting more such lineages from the scattered traces of their genes in living people, even without DNA from ancient bones. Geneticists began to call these ‘ghost populations’, and quickly showed that many Africans, too, carry a legacy of unknown populations.
"Even ancient genomes have ghosts within them. The Denisovan genome bears the traces of ancient mixture, not only from Neanderthals but with another even more divergent group – some speculate it might have been Homo erectus. Everywhere geneticists look, they see populations more different than any living people, mixing with each other in small fractions. It is no evolutionary tree. Our evolutionary history is like a braided stream.
How could science have missed this?
"Anthropologists spent 100 years looking for signs of Neanderthal traits in later people, poring across old bones for tiny details. There were faint signs, especially in the earliest Europeans who lived more than 25,000 years ago just after the Neanderthals, but in reality bone anatomy is a poor reflection of population mixture even among living people. Many worked to test the hypothesis that fossil skeletons had a small fraction of Neanderthal ancestry, but these efforts locked the field in debate.
"In the 1970s, geneticists noticed that humans are surprisingly inbred for a worldwide species. Other great apes – the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans – each have much more variation, so much that today’s primatologists recognise two species of orangutans, and up to four species of chimpanzees and gorillas. These apes have deep histories, with populations separated for hundreds of thousands of years. By contrast, humans throughout the world look like refugees from a single small part of Africa. Some scientists even wondered if a massive volcanic eruption might have decimated our numbers.
"But deeper gene sequencing and broader samples of people changed the picture. Our population did not originate in a catastrophe. When Neanderthals, Denisovans and ghost lineages, both inside and outside Africa, walked the Earth, their populations were each quite inbred, but collectively they were diverse, more like gorillas or chimpanzees than today’s humans. Across the past 200,000 years, these separate streams were swallowed up by the growth of one African branch of humanity. Humans spread through the world like a broad river delta, carrying slightly different fractions of the flow of ancient streams.
"We don’t yet know what triggered the success of these ancient Africans. But we can see some ways that they benefited from mixing with distant populations. As they mixed, they picked up biological solutions first innovated and road-tested by distant populations. Already, we have found Neanderthal or Denisovan genes contribute to immunity, metabolism and proteins expressed in hair and skin. A gene derived from Denisovans has helped people adapt to the low-oxygen environment of the Tibetan plateau.
"Just last month, two new studies found evidence of yet more Neanderthal and Denisovan genes active in human immune systems. Do we owe our allergies to cavemen, as some press headlines claimed? Probably not. But life outside the tropics does pose unique challenges, including a deficit of vitamin-D production, now known to strongly affect immunity. When Africans encountered these populations, any new immune tricks might have been valuable, especially those field-tested against local parasites. A talent for quickly adapting to new pathogens and parasites might even explain the initial growth of our ancestors within Africa, where they would have encountered pathogen diversity higher than anywhere else in the archaic human range.
"The braided stream of human evolution matches with what we are seeing in other mammals. As geneticists have sampled more and more populations of wild animals, they are finding what has been known for our domesticated plants and animals for a long time: hybridisation and introgression of genes among species and distant populations is ubiquitous in the natural world.
"Eastern coyotes now form a spectrum of populations with a high fraction of wolf and domesticated dog ancestry. European mallard ducks, introduced by hunters into New Zealand, rapidly hybridised with indigenous brown ducks, and now outbreed them. People long ago interbred Indian zebu with taurine cattle, creating arid-tolerant breeds that now are spread across most of Africa. What has changed most is our ability to see small fractions of mixture across whole genomes. Just in the last few years, scientists showed that grizzly bears well south into North America carry genes from polar bears, a legacy of ancient population mixture. Hominins are not exceptional; our mixing is the way that widespread mammals evolve.
"If this is true, should we really be calling these populations different ‘species’ at all? After all, most of us learned that species are defined by their ability to interbreed. For ancient populations known precisely because they bred with humans, it feels wrong to use a term that leads people to assume they could not.
"But anthropologists are just starting to face the question of how we define species with ancient DNA. Faced with the evidence of deep genetic histories of Neanderthals, Denisovans and the ghost populations of Africa, conservation biologists would not hesitate to classify them as species, just as they now recognize several species of gorillas. Before we can settle this, we might need to uncover more about the anatomy and behavior of these ancient people, the consequences of their genetic and historical differences.
"What inspires me most about the braided stream of our origins is what it implies about future discoveries. Tracing ghost lineages has already taken us further into the past than the 400,000 years of the current record for ancient DNA from hominins. Across the 7 million years or more of hominin evolution, there must have been dozens of such long-lasting populations, sometimes mixing and sharing adaptations with each other. As in the case of the Denisovans, we might already have tiny fossil traces of these ancient groups that we cannot yet recognize. Many more are out there, waiting for anthropologists to unearth them.
We are searching."
https://aeon.co/opinions/human-evolution-is-more-a-muddy-delta-than-a-branching-tree
- the human race (homo sapiens sapiens -- our subspecies) evolved around 200,000 years ago (YA) in Africa
- 12% of all humans that have ever lived are alive right now.
- every human on the planet is directly descended from one man who lived in Africa around 60,000 YA. Geneticists call this person Y-Chromosomal Adam (UPDATE: A new study just came out in March 2013 that pushes the date to between 237,000 and 581,000 YA with a 95% accuracy prediction; jury is still out on this one).
THE LONG DEAD
"Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure… follow their wise counsel."
-- "The Book of Kheti," The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
The majority of the human race is descended, according to
the Human Genome project, from about 3,000 people.
An ancestor is a person from whom you have directly descended. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An 'ancestor chart'
shows a person and all of their ancestors in a graphical format.
Family is viewed as a closely united group of living and dead relatives. The ancestors are not limited to our blood and family lineages, but biological ancestors are most influential and important to engage for personal and family healing.
The progenitor (German: Stammvater or Ahnherr) is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group. Genealogy (commonly known as family history), understands a progenitor as the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
Often, progenitors are implied to be patrilineal. If a patrilineal dynasty is considered, each such dynasty has exactly one progenitor. There is a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation.
People love finding out that they have a famous relative, or they’re descended from royalty. Thanks to genetic testing it’s easy to get a rundown of your potentially regal DNA. But being related to long-ago kings doesn’t make us special—it just makes us human.
Geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that family trees grow backwards exponentially, so the amount of ancestors people should have from the ninth century is larger than the amount of people who were alive during the ninth century. That means anyone with European ancestry is related to King Charlemagne.
“Everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne,” Rutherford writes, explaining that Europeans alive today are probably related to the long-dead Holy Roman Emperor even if their DNA test doesn’t show it. The new DNA tests make it possible to determine kinship up to 5-7 generations back.
Because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.
As fun as it is to find out you’re the direct descendant of an old royal line, it’s pretty meaningless. Often genetic ancestry relies on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only via the paternal line, or mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on from mothers. These make for persuasive – but often simplistic – analyses of ancestry. These two chunks of DNA make up 2% of your genome. But the other 98% has to come from somewhere too, and that is a pick-and-mix from all the rest of your ancestors. And you have numerous ancestors from whom you have no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline.
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living." - T. S. Eliot
"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
"Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure… follow their wise counsel."
-- "The Book of Kheti," The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
The majority of the human race is descended, according to
the Human Genome project, from about 3,000 people.
An ancestor is a person from whom you have directly descended. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An 'ancestor chart'
shows a person and all of their ancestors in a graphical format.
Family is viewed as a closely united group of living and dead relatives. The ancestors are not limited to our blood and family lineages, but biological ancestors are most influential and important to engage for personal and family healing.
The progenitor (German: Stammvater or Ahnherr) is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group. Genealogy (commonly known as family history), understands a progenitor as the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
Often, progenitors are implied to be patrilineal. If a patrilineal dynasty is considered, each such dynasty has exactly one progenitor. There is a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation.
People love finding out that they have a famous relative, or they’re descended from royalty. Thanks to genetic testing it’s easy to get a rundown of your potentially regal DNA. But being related to long-ago kings doesn’t make us special—it just makes us human.
Geneticist Adam Rutherford pointed out that family trees grow backwards exponentially, so the amount of ancestors people should have from the ninth century is larger than the amount of people who were alive during the ninth century. That means anyone with European ancestry is related to King Charlemagne.
“Everyone alive in the ninth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne,” Rutherford writes, explaining that Europeans alive today are probably related to the long-dead Holy Roman Emperor even if their DNA test doesn’t show it. The new DNA tests make it possible to determine kinship up to 5-7 generations back.
Because of the way the DNA deck is shuffled every time a sperm or egg is made, it doesn’t keep halving perfectly as you meander up through your family tree. If you’re fully outbred (which you aren’t), you should have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. But their genetic contribution to you is not equal. Before long, you will find ancestors from whom you bear no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline. Even though you are directly descended from Charlemagne, you may well carry none of his DNA.
As fun as it is to find out you’re the direct descendant of an old royal line, it’s pretty meaningless. Often genetic ancestry relies on the Y chromosome, which is inherited only via the paternal line, or mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed on from mothers. These make for persuasive – but often simplistic – analyses of ancestry. These two chunks of DNA make up 2% of your genome. But the other 98% has to come from somewhere too, and that is a pick-and-mix from all the rest of your ancestors. And you have numerous ancestors from whom you have no DNA. They are your family, your blood, but their genes have been diluted out of your bloodline.
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire
beyond the language of the living." - T. S. Eliot
"If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
The Life of the Past Nourishes and Shapes the Present
With an average of fifteen years per generation, the ancestral artists of Lascaux and Chauvet, who painted the living walls of those dim caverns, lived approximately 18,000 and 33,000 generations ago (15,000 - 30,000 or 32,000 years old). Genealogy is the labyrinth of our ancestral self and we leave our handprint at the entrance when we commence our initiatory journey to the depths.
Arche is a Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". (εξ’ ἀρχής: from the beginning, οr εξ’ ἀρχής λόγος: the original argument), and later first principle or element, principles of knowledge (ἀρχαί) (Aristot. Metaph. 995b8). By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ἀρχαί), "command".[1]
The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate undemonstrable principle".[2], designates the source, origin or root of things that exist, the element or principle of a thing.
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
--Richard Dawkins
Bottlenecks
A population bottleneck (or genetic bottleneck) is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events (such as earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, or droughts) or human activities (such as genocide). Such events can reduce the variation in the gene pool of a population; thereafter, a smaller population with a correspondingly smaller genetic diversity, remains to pass on genes to future generations of offspring through sexual reproduction. Genetic diversity remains lower, only slowly increasing with time as random mutations occur.[1] In consequence of such population size reductions and the loss of genetic variation, the robustness of the population is reduced and its ability to survive selecting environmental changes, like climate change or a shift in available resources, is reduced.
Conversely, depending upon the causes of the bottleneck, the survivors may have been the genetically fittest individuals, hence increasing the frequency of the fitter genes within the gene pool, while shrinking it. This genetic drift can change the proportional distribution of an allele by chance and even lead to fixation or loss of alleles. Due to the smaller population size after a bottleneck event, the chance of inbreeding and genetic homogeneity increases and unfavoured alleles can accumulate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade. http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose.php
Volcanic winter and instant Ice Age may help resolve the central but unstated paradox of the recent African origin of Humankind: if we are all so recently "Out of Africa", why do we not all look more African?
Because the volcanic winter and instant Ice Age would have reduced populations levels low enough for founder effects, genetic drift and local adaptations to produce rapid changes in the surviving populations, causing the peoples of the world to look so different today. In other words, Toba may have caused Modern Races to differentiate abruptly only 70,000 years ago, rather than gradually over one million years.
The Toba catastrophe theory, presented in the late 1990s to early 2000s, suggested that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000-30,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory was based on geological evidence of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidence of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation in humans.[3] More recent research shows the extent of climate change was much smaller than believed by proponents of the theory.[5]
However, coalescence times for Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA have been revised to well above 100,000 years since 2011. In addition, such coalescence would not, in itself, indicate a population bottleneck, because mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA are only a small part of the entire genome, and are atypical in that they are inherited exclusively through the mother or through the father, respectively. Genetic material inherited exclusively from either father or mother can be traced back in time via either matrilineal or patrilineal ancestry.[6]
In 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[7] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.[8]
We now have a pretty good estimate of how many ancestors our own species had at various times in the past. Our ancestors went through two different phases of population “bottlenecking” (constriction): one occurred about three million years ago, when a large population declined to around 10,000 individuals. The authors note that while this may reflect population size decline associated with the origin of hominins after our split with the lineage that produced modern chimps, they also say that this could be an artifact of ancient genetic polymorphisms maintained by natural selection.
The second bottleneck is the one of interest, for it’s the one associated with a reduced population size as humans left Africa. For the Chinese, Korean, and European genomes, effective population size fell from about 13,500 (at 150,000 years ago) to about 1200 between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. Now this is the effective population size, almost certainly an underestimate of census size, but that only makes the problem worse:
we never went through a bottleneck of anything near two individuals,
as the Biblical Adam-and-Eve story suggests.
We also see a somewhat less severe bottleneck in the African samples: from about 16,100 people about 100,000-150,000 years ago to 5,700 about 50,000 years ago. It’s not clear why the populations in Africa bottlenecked as well.Finally, we also see the population recover in size, with a huge increase in all populations beginning roughly 20,000 years ago. This clearly reflects population growth in both Africa and in areas colonized from Africa as humans expanded around the globe.
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy: What We Are & Where We Come From
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offering new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers. It is a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. It includes not only the personal connections, but the myths of life-after-death and life-before-birth —the simultaneous reality of spirit and matter.
Commit the Body to the Ground
Genealogy becomes a radical embrace of the earth, our psychophysical ground. By consciously descending into the depths, into our long-buried past, we ignite a light in the darkness. The ancestors are figures of time and meaning.
Everything is already there from the beginning in the unconscious. We now know deep memory and heredity are closely linked. "Retrieval" doesn't mean the *same* but rather a "memory" of behaviors and attitudes that had previously been "forgotten." We dig, then dig deeper, and sift, and sort looking for some shred of new evidence because we feel it in our bones.
Jung notes, "The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning." (Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.) He described his vision: "The bodies are the individual lives, twisting and turning and writhing themselves into a sort of pattern that dissolves and reforms again and again. It is the river of time, of life, in other words." (Visions Seminar, Page 321)
Don't Forget They Were Our Creators
Genealogy is a living demonstration of the newness of the old as well as the oldness of the new. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis. Poetry has a way of "plumbing the depths." Human consciousness is an embodied self-referential system, symbolized in Uroboros.
Esther Harding describes how Jung "found a symbol of the psychic structure which joins into an organic unity everything from the mineral world through the animal, the unconscious and ordinary consciousness up to the Anthropos, which is quality-less and so, like the old Uroboros, touches the primordial condition of Chaos with its forces constituting matter, from which the whole cycle springs again." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters and Encounters, 171-179). Genealogy is a potent symbol of such a notion.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by our own ancestors. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed [epigenetics]. If experience is not coming from the body it's not 'known' and going to change your life. The body contains the feeling which the soul gives the creative opportunity to expand.
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. There is a very good reason we rely on heuristics – evolution. Our distant ancestors when faced with complex life-threatening problems didn’t have time to weigh up the situation, so developed quick-fire methods.
Probabilities
But our ancient ancestors had access to little data other than their own ... Instead, they use quick and dirty heuristics that are less than perfect but that work well. Those that worked were passed down through generations, and we are still relying on them, often when we shouldn’t.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors. The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristic shortcuts evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to.
Sense and Sensibility
True, the "sense" is often something that could just as well be called "nonsense," for there is a certain incommensurability between the mystery of existence and human understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 222
"Sense" and "nonsense" are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 154.
Dreams Reach Forward; Wonder Reaches Back
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms.
Archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions. Our task is to find our destiny lived from the wholeness or totality of our being.
People would rather hang on to the old dogmas than let experience speak.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 598-599
With an average of fifteen years per generation, the ancestral artists of Lascaux and Chauvet, who painted the living walls of those dim caverns, lived approximately 18,000 and 33,000 generations ago (15,000 - 30,000 or 32,000 years old). Genealogy is the labyrinth of our ancestral self and we leave our handprint at the entrance when we commence our initiatory journey to the depths.
Arche is a Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". (εξ’ ἀρχής: from the beginning, οr εξ’ ἀρχής λόγος: the original argument), and later first principle or element, principles of knowledge (ἀρχαί) (Aristot. Metaph. 995b8). By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ἀρχαί), "command".[1]
The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate undemonstrable principle".[2], designates the source, origin or root of things that exist, the element or principle of a thing.
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
--Richard Dawkins
Bottlenecks
A population bottleneck (or genetic bottleneck) is a sharp reduction in the size of a population due to environmental events (such as earthquakes, floods, fires, disease, or droughts) or human activities (such as genocide). Such events can reduce the variation in the gene pool of a population; thereafter, a smaller population with a correspondingly smaller genetic diversity, remains to pass on genes to future generations of offspring through sexual reproduction. Genetic diversity remains lower, only slowly increasing with time as random mutations occur.[1] In consequence of such population size reductions and the loss of genetic variation, the robustness of the population is reduced and its ability to survive selecting environmental changes, like climate change or a shift in available resources, is reduced.
Conversely, depending upon the causes of the bottleneck, the survivors may have been the genetically fittest individuals, hence increasing the frequency of the fitter genes within the gene pool, while shrinking it. This genetic drift can change the proportional distribution of an allele by chance and even lead to fixation or loss of alleles. Due to the smaller population size after a bottleneck event, the chance of inbreeding and genetic homogeneity increases and unfavoured alleles can accumulate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade. http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/stanley_ambrose.php
Volcanic winter and instant Ice Age may help resolve the central but unstated paradox of the recent African origin of Humankind: if we are all so recently "Out of Africa", why do we not all look more African?
Because the volcanic winter and instant Ice Age would have reduced populations levels low enough for founder effects, genetic drift and local adaptations to produce rapid changes in the surviving populations, causing the peoples of the world to look so different today. In other words, Toba may have caused Modern Races to differentiate abruptly only 70,000 years ago, rather than gradually over one million years.
The Toba catastrophe theory, presented in the late 1990s to early 2000s, suggested that a bottleneck of the human population occurred c. 70,000 years ago, proposing that the human population was reduced to perhaps 10,000-30,000 individuals[3] when the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and triggered a major environmental change. The theory was based on geological evidence of sudden climate change and on coalescence evidence of some genes (including mitochondrial DNA, Y-chromosome and some nuclear genes)[4] and the relatively low level of genetic variation in humans.[3] More recent research shows the extent of climate change was much smaller than believed by proponents of the theory.[5]
However, coalescence times for Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA have been revised to well above 100,000 years since 2011. In addition, such coalescence would not, in itself, indicate a population bottleneck, because mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome DNA are only a small part of the entire genome, and are atypical in that they are inherited exclusively through the mother or through the father, respectively. Genetic material inherited exclusively from either father or mother can be traced back in time via either matrilineal or patrilineal ancestry.[6]
In 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[7] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.[8]
We now have a pretty good estimate of how many ancestors our own species had at various times in the past. Our ancestors went through two different phases of population “bottlenecking” (constriction): one occurred about three million years ago, when a large population declined to around 10,000 individuals. The authors note that while this may reflect population size decline associated with the origin of hominins after our split with the lineage that produced modern chimps, they also say that this could be an artifact of ancient genetic polymorphisms maintained by natural selection.
The second bottleneck is the one of interest, for it’s the one associated with a reduced population size as humans left Africa. For the Chinese, Korean, and European genomes, effective population size fell from about 13,500 (at 150,000 years ago) to about 1200 between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. Now this is the effective population size, almost certainly an underestimate of census size, but that only makes the problem worse:
we never went through a bottleneck of anything near two individuals,
as the Biblical Adam-and-Eve story suggests.
We also see a somewhat less severe bottleneck in the African samples: from about 16,100 people about 100,000-150,000 years ago to 5,700 about 50,000 years ago. It’s not clear why the populations in Africa bottlenecked as well.Finally, we also see the population recover in size, with a huge increase in all populations beginning roughly 20,000 years ago. This clearly reflects population growth in both Africa and in areas colonized from Africa as humans expanded around the globe.
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy: What We Are & Where We Come From
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offering new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers. It is a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. It includes not only the personal connections, but the myths of life-after-death and life-before-birth —the simultaneous reality of spirit and matter.
Commit the Body to the Ground
Genealogy becomes a radical embrace of the earth, our psychophysical ground. By consciously descending into the depths, into our long-buried past, we ignite a light in the darkness. The ancestors are figures of time and meaning.
Everything is already there from the beginning in the unconscious. We now know deep memory and heredity are closely linked. "Retrieval" doesn't mean the *same* but rather a "memory" of behaviors and attitudes that had previously been "forgotten." We dig, then dig deeper, and sift, and sort looking for some shred of new evidence because we feel it in our bones.
Jung notes, "The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning." (Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.) He described his vision: "The bodies are the individual lives, twisting and turning and writhing themselves into a sort of pattern that dissolves and reforms again and again. It is the river of time, of life, in other words." (Visions Seminar, Page 321)
Don't Forget They Were Our Creators
Genealogy is a living demonstration of the newness of the old as well as the oldness of the new. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis. Poetry has a way of "plumbing the depths." Human consciousness is an embodied self-referential system, symbolized in Uroboros.
Esther Harding describes how Jung "found a symbol of the psychic structure which joins into an organic unity everything from the mineral world through the animal, the unconscious and ordinary consciousness up to the Anthropos, which is quality-less and so, like the old Uroboros, touches the primordial condition of Chaos with its forces constituting matter, from which the whole cycle springs again." (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters and Encounters, 171-179). Genealogy is a potent symbol of such a notion.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by our own ancestors. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed [epigenetics]. If experience is not coming from the body it's not 'known' and going to change your life. The body contains the feeling which the soul gives the creative opportunity to expand.
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. There is a very good reason we rely on heuristics – evolution. Our distant ancestors when faced with complex life-threatening problems didn’t have time to weigh up the situation, so developed quick-fire methods.
Probabilities
But our ancient ancestors had access to little data other than their own ... Instead, they use quick and dirty heuristics that are less than perfect but that work well. Those that worked were passed down through generations, and we are still relying on them, often when we shouldn’t.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors. The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristic shortcuts evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to.
Sense and Sensibility
True, the "sense" is often something that could just as well be called "nonsense," for there is a certain incommensurability between the mystery of existence and human understanding. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Page 222
"Sense" and "nonsense" are merely man-made labels which serve to give us a reasonably valid sense of direction. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 154.
Dreams Reach Forward; Wonder Reaches Back
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms.
Archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions. Our task is to find our destiny lived from the wholeness or totality of our being.
People would rather hang on to the old dogmas than let experience speak.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 598-599
ENDOGENOUS ANCESTORS
At the End of the Line
The transformation of the libido through symbols has occurred since the beginnings of humanity. Symbols were (and are) never devised consciously but always unconsciously. It is more than probable that most of the historical symbols derive directly from dreams or are at least influenced by them.
--Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1972. 588 p. (p. 45-61
Endogenous means having an internal cause or origin, growing or originating from within an organism, or a disease or symptom not attributable to any external or environmental factor. In some sense, this describes our entanglement with our ancestors all the way back to the dawn of time -- a sort of spiritual endogenesis.
Sometimes large shoots spring from our root, while others are tiny branches. End-of-line ancestors are our research leading edge. Parents of some ancestors are unknown and virtually unknowable, at least at this time. We all have them. We think about them. We study them. We even dream about them. Once we find their parents, we do a quick Genealogy Happy Dance, and then it starts over again - we now have new end-of-line ancestors.
Who are your end-of-line ancestors? "Direct-line ancestors with no parents" option. Your direct-line ancestors who do not have known parents are your end-of-line ancestors. So what is the strategy for extending a line? Especially a line that has reached or nearly reached the theoretical or practical limit. There are a lot of posts and other articles on the so-called brick wall problem.
Historical Fiction
Place your ancestors in time and space. Where were you born? If you don't know, then that is the first step in your genealogical digging. Your mother was there when you were born. Your grandmother was there when your father was born and so forth and so on. So how did your mother get to where you were born? By the way, the same rule does not hold true for your father. He may have been just about anywhere or even deceased when you were born. We spend an awful lot of time looking for male members of our families when it is the females that hold all the links to all the information.
The idea is to locate at least one event in a particular location. The problem in finding your great-great-grandfather isn't really about him, it is about his children, at least one of whom survived to adulthood or you would not be here. There is one more rule, it may seem very cynical, but you have a much better chance of identifying the true mother of your ancestor than you do the true father. No matter how certain you may think you are, there is always a measure of uncertainty in any pedigree where the mothers are not positively identified. If you want to blindly ignore this principle, you do so at your own peril.
If you don't know where a relative was born or where he or she lived, then you are skipping a generation. Focus on the children. Find out as much as you can about the children. Where and when were they born? Where did they live? On and on and on. Focus on those events and places where you can positively identify the time period in which they lived and the place. Look for records at that time and in that place. Instead of spending years looking for your great-great-grandfather, spend you time looking for your great-grandfather and finding your great-great-grandfather just might take care of itself.
First, end-of-line ancestors are part of genealogy. That doesn't mean there is nothing you can do. Most often though people pound against the brick wall that is the end-of-line ancestor, never wavering. This usually results in nothing but frustration. Instead, you may need to attack the problem from a different angle or a different generation. Stand back from your end-of-line ancestor.
Some suffers invent imaginary ancestors or link to unproven connections. This delusion can be seen by the proliferation of ancestors named Mr. or Mrs. End-of-line on many online family trees. Some of these invented individuals take on the same name as the last verified ancestor with the same birthdate, and thereby allow the sufferer to extend the ancestral line for many generations. Both of these situations can be seen in the following screenshot where father and son have the same names and the same wives' names and the line is extended with a Mr. and Mrs.
Evaluate Where You Are
Evaluating where you are in your research means more than just simply looking at your pedigree chart or family group sheet of your end-of-line ancestor. It means reexamining all your research on that line up to this point. To effectively accomplish such a reevaluation requires that you have some method of organization when it comes to the copies you have made.
In addition to organizing the records you have found, you must also be tracking your negative research. After all, with the positive research, you have photocopies or transcriptions that let you know that you looked in a given source. With negative evidence, there is nothing to show for the search unless you are recording that information. Research logs are critical to this. Research logs should be used for both negative and positive research. A research log, when properly kept, can aid you during this time of reexamination.
What Are You Missing?
As you look at your pedigree chart and family group sheets, look at them from the aspect of what you might not have done in your research. With a discerning eye, see if you have jumped over some records in your zeal to get back another generation. It is tempting to skip records if our ancestors are showing up in the census records. But those records we skipped may hold the clues to where you should go next. They may be the records that prove your previous information is in error, especially if all you have has come from the census records.
Perhaps you might want to compare your research to a resources checklist to see what records you may have overlooked in your research. It is natural for us to stick with what we know. When comparing the records we have already checked with such a list, we often discover new resources that may solve the brick wall.
In Conclusion
Usually when you go back and review your past research you will often discover overlooked records or incorrect evaluations in past research. In some instances your ever growing knowledge and experience will give you a better eye to evaluating the information found and not found than you had when you originally did the research. If you find no information, after making a reasonably exhaustive search, you may be at the end of your line.
Pedigree Collapse - http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2011/10/pedigree-collapse-and-end-of-line.html
We are just beginning to learn what lurks in our genome and psyche, and what these ancestral forms or ancestral sequences mean to us today. Some hark back to the macroevolution of our species. Ancient viruses are still with us from our earliest common primate ancestors via proviral insertion. Ancient viral DNA may play a key role in how human stem cells work.
We also have relics from other hominid species, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan. Endogenous substances and processes are those that originate from within an organism, tissue, or cell. Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) are DNA sequences derived from viruses that are ancestrally inserted into the genomes of germ cells. Caused or produced by factors within a model, organism, organization, or system.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/do_shared_ervs_support_common_046751.html
http://www.fsmitha.com/time/timeline.htm
In The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm opens up the world of symbolic language, “the one foreign language that each of us must learn.” Understanding symbols, he posits, helps us reach the hidden layers of our individual personalities, as well as connect with our common human experiences. By grasping the symbolic language of dreams, Fromm explains, we can then also understand the deeper wisdom of myths, art, and literature. This also gives us access to what we, and our society, usually repress.
"The murder of speech is the self-murder of the human animal, a suicidal evisceration of our species' specific endowment. Like tigers losing their stripes, like beached whales and blind eagles are we without our rhetoric. Speech is our body, speech is our shape, speech is our beauty." (James Hillman)
Dead Ends are where real research begins.
What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question. That question neither science, nor worldly wisdom, nor religion, nor the best of advice can resolve for him. The resolution can come solely from absolutely impartial observation of those psychological germs of life which are born of the natural collaboration of the conscious and the unconscious on the one hand and of the individual and the collective on the other. Where do we find these germs of life? One man seeks them in the conscious, another in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 290.
At the End of the Line
The transformation of the libido through symbols has occurred since the beginnings of humanity. Symbols were (and are) never devised consciously but always unconsciously. It is more than probable that most of the historical symbols derive directly from dreams or are at least influenced by them.
--Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 8. 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1972. 588 p. (p. 45-61
Endogenous means having an internal cause or origin, growing or originating from within an organism, or a disease or symptom not attributable to any external or environmental factor. In some sense, this describes our entanglement with our ancestors all the way back to the dawn of time -- a sort of spiritual endogenesis.
Sometimes large shoots spring from our root, while others are tiny branches. End-of-line ancestors are our research leading edge. Parents of some ancestors are unknown and virtually unknowable, at least at this time. We all have them. We think about them. We study them. We even dream about them. Once we find their parents, we do a quick Genealogy Happy Dance, and then it starts over again - we now have new end-of-line ancestors.
Who are your end-of-line ancestors? "Direct-line ancestors with no parents" option. Your direct-line ancestors who do not have known parents are your end-of-line ancestors. So what is the strategy for extending a line? Especially a line that has reached or nearly reached the theoretical or practical limit. There are a lot of posts and other articles on the so-called brick wall problem.
Historical Fiction
Place your ancestors in time and space. Where were you born? If you don't know, then that is the first step in your genealogical digging. Your mother was there when you were born. Your grandmother was there when your father was born and so forth and so on. So how did your mother get to where you were born? By the way, the same rule does not hold true for your father. He may have been just about anywhere or even deceased when you were born. We spend an awful lot of time looking for male members of our families when it is the females that hold all the links to all the information.
The idea is to locate at least one event in a particular location. The problem in finding your great-great-grandfather isn't really about him, it is about his children, at least one of whom survived to adulthood or you would not be here. There is one more rule, it may seem very cynical, but you have a much better chance of identifying the true mother of your ancestor than you do the true father. No matter how certain you may think you are, there is always a measure of uncertainty in any pedigree where the mothers are not positively identified. If you want to blindly ignore this principle, you do so at your own peril.
If you don't know where a relative was born or where he or she lived, then you are skipping a generation. Focus on the children. Find out as much as you can about the children. Where and when were they born? Where did they live? On and on and on. Focus on those events and places where you can positively identify the time period in which they lived and the place. Look for records at that time and in that place. Instead of spending years looking for your great-great-grandfather, spend you time looking for your great-grandfather and finding your great-great-grandfather just might take care of itself.
First, end-of-line ancestors are part of genealogy. That doesn't mean there is nothing you can do. Most often though people pound against the brick wall that is the end-of-line ancestor, never wavering. This usually results in nothing but frustration. Instead, you may need to attack the problem from a different angle or a different generation. Stand back from your end-of-line ancestor.
Some suffers invent imaginary ancestors or link to unproven connections. This delusion can be seen by the proliferation of ancestors named Mr. or Mrs. End-of-line on many online family trees. Some of these invented individuals take on the same name as the last verified ancestor with the same birthdate, and thereby allow the sufferer to extend the ancestral line for many generations. Both of these situations can be seen in the following screenshot where father and son have the same names and the same wives' names and the line is extended with a Mr. and Mrs.
Evaluate Where You Are
Evaluating where you are in your research means more than just simply looking at your pedigree chart or family group sheet of your end-of-line ancestor. It means reexamining all your research on that line up to this point. To effectively accomplish such a reevaluation requires that you have some method of organization when it comes to the copies you have made.
In addition to organizing the records you have found, you must also be tracking your negative research. After all, with the positive research, you have photocopies or transcriptions that let you know that you looked in a given source. With negative evidence, there is nothing to show for the search unless you are recording that information. Research logs are critical to this. Research logs should be used for both negative and positive research. A research log, when properly kept, can aid you during this time of reexamination.
What Are You Missing?
As you look at your pedigree chart and family group sheets, look at them from the aspect of what you might not have done in your research. With a discerning eye, see if you have jumped over some records in your zeal to get back another generation. It is tempting to skip records if our ancestors are showing up in the census records. But those records we skipped may hold the clues to where you should go next. They may be the records that prove your previous information is in error, especially if all you have has come from the census records.
Perhaps you might want to compare your research to a resources checklist to see what records you may have overlooked in your research. It is natural for us to stick with what we know. When comparing the records we have already checked with such a list, we often discover new resources that may solve the brick wall.
In Conclusion
Usually when you go back and review your past research you will often discover overlooked records or incorrect evaluations in past research. In some instances your ever growing knowledge and experience will give you a better eye to evaluating the information found and not found than you had when you originally did the research. If you find no information, after making a reasonably exhaustive search, you may be at the end of your line.
Pedigree Collapse - http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2011/10/pedigree-collapse-and-end-of-line.html
We are just beginning to learn what lurks in our genome and psyche, and what these ancestral forms or ancestral sequences mean to us today. Some hark back to the macroevolution of our species. Ancient viruses are still with us from our earliest common primate ancestors via proviral insertion. Ancient viral DNA may play a key role in how human stem cells work.
We also have relics from other hominid species, such as Neanderthal and Denisovan. Endogenous substances and processes are those that originate from within an organism, tissue, or cell. Endogenous viral elements (EVEs) are DNA sequences derived from viruses that are ancestrally inserted into the genomes of germ cells. Caused or produced by factors within a model, organism, organization, or system.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/05/do_shared_ervs_support_common_046751.html
http://www.fsmitha.com/time/timeline.htm
In The Forgotten Language, Erich Fromm opens up the world of symbolic language, “the one foreign language that each of us must learn.” Understanding symbols, he posits, helps us reach the hidden layers of our individual personalities, as well as connect with our common human experiences. By grasping the symbolic language of dreams, Fromm explains, we can then also understand the deeper wisdom of myths, art, and literature. This also gives us access to what we, and our society, usually repress.
"The murder of speech is the self-murder of the human animal, a suicidal evisceration of our species' specific endowment. Like tigers losing their stripes, like beached whales and blind eagles are we without our rhetoric. Speech is our body, speech is our shape, speech is our beauty." (James Hillman)
Dead Ends are where real research begins.
What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question. That question neither science, nor worldly wisdom, nor religion, nor the best of advice can resolve for him. The resolution can come solely from absolutely impartial observation of those psychological germs of life which are born of the natural collaboration of the conscious and the unconscious on the one hand and of the individual and the collective on the other. Where do we find these germs of life? One man seeks them in the conscious, another in the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Page 290.
ARCHAI & ARCHETYPES
Arche is a Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". (εξ’ ἀρχής: from the beginning, οr εξ’ ἀρχής λόγος: the original argument), and later first principle or element, principles of knowledge (ἀρχαί) (Aristot. Metaph. 995b8). By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ἀρχαί), "command".[1] The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate undemonstrable principle".[2] In the philosophical language of the archaic period (8th-6th century BC), arche (or archai) designates the source, origin or root of things that exist, the element or principle of a thing, undemonstrable and intangible in itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that thing.
The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex ( e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype). Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.[6] At the same time, it has also been observed that evolution can itself be considered an archetypal construct.[7]
Jung states in part one of Man And His Symbols that:
My views about the 'archaic remnants', which I call 'archetypes' or 'primordial images,' have been constantly criticized by people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.
A progenitor is a person or thing from which others are descended or originate.[1] For example, it is used to refer to the ancestor who started the line of a noble family.
In a wider sense today it is used to refer to the person who originates a movement[1] or way of life.
Contents
Genealogy
The progenitor (German: Stammvater or Ahnherr) is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group.[2] Genealogy (commonly known as family history), understands a progenitor to be the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
Progenitors are sometimes used to describe the status of a genealogical research project, or in order to compare the availability of genealogical data in different times and places. Often, progenitors are implied to be patrilineal. If a patrilineal dynasty is considered, each such dynasty has exactly one progenitor.
Aristocratic and dynastic families often look back to an ancestor who is seen as the founder and progenitor of their house (i.e. family line). Even the old Roman legal concept of agnates (Latin for "descendants") was based on the idea of the unbroken family line of a progenitor, but only includes male members of the family, whilst the women were referred to as "cognatic".
It is rarely possible to confirm biological parenthood, however, (see bastardy) in the case of ancient family lines; in addition the progenitor is often a distant ancestor, only known as a result of oral tradition. Where people groups and communities rely solely on a patrilinear family line, their common ancestor often became the subject of a legend surrounding the origin of the family. By contrast, families and peoples with a matrilinear history trace themselves back to an original female progenitrix. Matrilinear rules of descent are found in about 200 of the 1300 known indigenous peoples and ethnic groups worldwide, whilst around 600 have patrilineal rules of descent (from father to son).[3]
In the mythological beliefs of the Romans the god of war, Mars, was viewed as the progenitor of the Romans;[4] which is why the Mars symbol (♂, a shield and spear), is used to refer to the male sex. Besides cities and countries, people groups may also have a progenitor (often a god) in their mythologies, for example, the Hellenistic Greeks look back to Hellen as their progenitor. In Indian Hinduism Manu is the progenitor of all mankind. In the Abrahamic religions, Adam, Noah, Abraham and others are described as progenitors (see also Biblical patriarchy).
In archaeogenetics (archaeological genetics) a human Y-chromosomal Adam has been named as the most recent common ancestor from whom all currently living people are descended patrilinearly. This Adam lived in Africa at a time variously estimated from 60,000 to 338,000 years ago.
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offers new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers -- a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by our own ancestors. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed [epigenetics].
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. There is a very good reason we rely on heuristics – evolution. Our distant ancestors when faced with complex life-threatening problems didn’t have time to weigh up the situation, so developed quick-fire methods.
Probabilities
But our ancient ancestors had access to little data other than their own ... Instead, they use quick and dirty heuristics that are less than perfect but that work well. Those that worked were passed down through generations, and we are still relying on them, often when we shouldn’t.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors. The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristic shortcuts evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to.
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms. Archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions.
People would rather hang on to the old dogmas than let experience speak.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 598-599
Arche is a Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". (εξ’ ἀρχής: from the beginning, οr εξ’ ἀρχής λόγος: the original argument), and later first principle or element, principles of knowledge (ἀρχαί) (Aristot. Metaph. 995b8). By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ἀρχαί), "command".[1] The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate undemonstrable principle".[2] In the philosophical language of the archaic period (8th-6th century BC), arche (or archai) designates the source, origin or root of things that exist, the element or principle of a thing, undemonstrable and intangible in itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that thing.
The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex ( e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype). Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.[6] At the same time, it has also been observed that evolution can itself be considered an archetypal construct.[7]
Jung states in part one of Man And His Symbols that:
My views about the 'archaic remnants', which I call 'archetypes' or 'primordial images,' have been constantly criticized by people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. The term 'archetype' is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs, but these are nothing more than conscious representations. Such variable representations cannot be inherited. The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif—representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.
A progenitor is a person or thing from which others are descended or originate.[1] For example, it is used to refer to the ancestor who started the line of a noble family.
In a wider sense today it is used to refer to the person who originates a movement[1] or way of life.
Contents
Genealogy
The progenitor (German: Stammvater or Ahnherr) is the (sometimes legendary) founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house or people group.[2] Genealogy (commonly known as family history), understands a progenitor to be the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
Progenitors are sometimes used to describe the status of a genealogical research project, or in order to compare the availability of genealogical data in different times and places. Often, progenitors are implied to be patrilineal. If a patrilineal dynasty is considered, each such dynasty has exactly one progenitor.
Aristocratic and dynastic families often look back to an ancestor who is seen as the founder and progenitor of their house (i.e. family line). Even the old Roman legal concept of agnates (Latin for "descendants") was based on the idea of the unbroken family line of a progenitor, but only includes male members of the family, whilst the women were referred to as "cognatic".
It is rarely possible to confirm biological parenthood, however, (see bastardy) in the case of ancient family lines; in addition the progenitor is often a distant ancestor, only known as a result of oral tradition. Where people groups and communities rely solely on a patrilinear family line, their common ancestor often became the subject of a legend surrounding the origin of the family. By contrast, families and peoples with a matrilinear history trace themselves back to an original female progenitrix. Matrilinear rules of descent are found in about 200 of the 1300 known indigenous peoples and ethnic groups worldwide, whilst around 600 have patrilineal rules of descent (from father to son).[3]
In the mythological beliefs of the Romans the god of war, Mars, was viewed as the progenitor of the Romans;[4] which is why the Mars symbol (♂, a shield and spear), is used to refer to the male sex. Besides cities and countries, people groups may also have a progenitor (often a god) in their mythologies, for example, the Hellenistic Greeks look back to Hellen as their progenitor. In Indian Hinduism Manu is the progenitor of all mankind. In the Abrahamic religions, Adam, Noah, Abraham and others are described as progenitors (see also Biblical patriarchy).
In archaeogenetics (archaeological genetics) a human Y-chromosomal Adam has been named as the most recent common ancestor from whom all currently living people are descended patrilinearly. This Adam lived in Africa at a time variously estimated from 60,000 to 338,000 years ago.
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offers new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers -- a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by our own ancestors. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed [epigenetics].
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. There is a very good reason we rely on heuristics – evolution. Our distant ancestors when faced with complex life-threatening problems didn’t have time to weigh up the situation, so developed quick-fire methods.
Probabilities
But our ancient ancestors had access to little data other than their own ... Instead, they use quick and dirty heuristics that are less than perfect but that work well. Those that worked were passed down through generations, and we are still relying on them, often when we shouldn’t.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors. The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristic shortcuts evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to.
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms. Archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions.
People would rather hang on to the old dogmas than let experience speak.
--Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 598-599
HERMENEUTICS
IN GENEALOGY
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offers new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers -- a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by the ancestors of the species over recent evolutionary time. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors? The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristics evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
Intuitive Judgment
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to. Many fallacies are deeply embedded in our psychology. We can incorporate irrelevant anchors as judgments, beliefs, and values.
Liking or loving someone can blind us to their faults.
The mistake is projecting positive traits on someone because you love them. The doubt avoidance tendency can encourage us to disregard the odds and take on challenges with a high risk of failure. It can be a positive force for daring greatly or a catalyst for poorly thought out decision-making. The reciprocation tendency refers to the powerful urge that most humans have to reciprocate favors (and disfavors).
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms; so archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions -- innate psychological mechanisms.
Heuristics of Genealogy
Derived from a Greek word that means "to discover," heuristic describes a rule of thumb or a method that comes from experience and helps you think through things, like the process of elimination, or the process of trial and error. You can think of a heuristic as a shortcut.
A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.
Optimalness
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors.
It may also help to distinguish modern evolutionary psychology from the selective breeding programs in previous eras of human history. There is no teleology in evolution; no person or people are more highly evolved than any other persons or peoples. Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. Yet there may be individual and group differences in psychological domains that are partially a result of differential selection pressures on ancestral populations. Humans have colonized nearly every land area on the surface of the earth, and each of these diverse ecologies could shape our psychological design. Efforts to advance human welfare may benefit from this recognition, as well as the understanding that genes are not the script for a pre-ordained destiny. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed.
Affect heuristics (gut response to solve problems and arrive at conclusions) are subject to confirmation bias, the endowment effect, frequency illusion, and hindsight bias.
Frequency, Probability, Adaptive, Reliable and Unreliable Inferences
As a sort of summary, it's possible in many ways our brain *does* act a certain way because those ancestors of ours whose brain got used that way, survived a bit better and had more offspring than those who didn't. But that isn't about skills or knowledge. It is at best instintive reaction, and at worst, particular ways of leaping to conclusions. [see epigenetics]
These programs were not selected to solve the total array of logically possible computational problems. Instead, they were selected on the basis of how
well they solved the adaptive problems faced by our hunter–gatherer ancestors
(e.g., finding a mate, cooperating with others, hunting, gathering, protecting
children, avoiding predators). Natural selection tends to produce programs that
solve problems like these reliably, quickly, and efficiently.
It could be that at some point in our species’ history, the motivation to see something through to completion had a greater probability of ensuring survival than having a high willingness to cut one’s losses. Given that at least some of our ancestors hunted by chasing their prey for extremely long amounts of time, and that agrarian societies require patience over long time frames, it’s not too hard to see why this could be.
The sunk cost heuristic also appears to me to have something in common with prospect theory; in particular the part that describes our willingness to take greater risks when we are more likely to lose what we already have.
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/zick/content%20gilovich%20et%20al.pdf
Character as Moral FictionBy Mark Alfano
Hermeneutic Union
Hermes was messenger and interpreter between gods and mortals. Hermeneutics is "to make clear." It is an approach cultivating our ability to interpret or understand from another's perspective, and applying that insight, empathy, and understanding to interpretation or making sense of any situation.
Hermeneutics is a technique for background understanding of another’s mind and worldview. It concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations by contextualizing them and comparing them.
Text & Context
Hermeneutics is a research paradigm we can apply in genealogy research. A hermeneutical and less epistemological understanding of the genealogical method avoids the paradoxes of perspectivism and the metaphorics of vision by construing the phenomenon not as a physical object but as a text.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing and the content that is believed. A genealogy explains the advent of a belief, in the sense of a believing, (an attitude) in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications, for the truth of what is believed.
Knowledge Transfer Pathways
Human affairs aren't governed by a set of natural laws, so hermeneutics provides interpretive understanding of the actions and meanings created by historically and culturally situated actors. Our ancestors are symbolically situated along the knowledge transfer pathways of the branches of the family tree, genetic and epigenetic vectors.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
Life, Expression, Understanding
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Interpretive Perspectives
In philosophy and psychology it includes the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning, including experiences. In the domain of genealogy it also includes recognition, metaphors, and insinuation. Psychological hermeneutics is the body of knowledge enabling insight and the discussion of biopsychosocial cause and effect.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
However, we are never other people nor do we ever have access to their consciousness. We cannot feel what they do or have the same life experiences as they. We can only interpret others from our prior understanding. Empathy occurs within oneself but is the central connection to others. To be empathic is to interpret empathy “out of” one’s own experience of other people.
Genealogy As Context
Experiences derive meaning from their overall position in the totality of our involvements in the world. Once born into the specific body, family, place and time in which we live, we have to deal with the details of ordinary life, temporal contexts, and social relationships. In this view there is no doing without being, no thought without feeling, no action without reaction, no values without ethics, no self without others. Being in a context is a multi-faceted whole, classically symbolized in the genealogical chart.
Hermeneutic engagement works with both Above and Below. Hermeneutic union lies in the shared realities through which we create meaning. It amplifies environmental identity for our ancestors. We all create symbolic and imaginal worlds.
Our genealogy personal history is the best promise we have for understanding our shared humanity because it is physiologically grounded. As genealogists we interpret our own psycho-history. Psychogenealogy is a rigorous psychological and historical analysis of our lineage and its interactive effect on ourselves.
The genealogist does claim to be capturing the phenomenon as it really is. Genealogy is not simply another perspective. The only way to challenge the results of one genealogical analysis would be to produce another genealogical analysis either of the original phenomenon or of the initial genealogical account itself. Genealogy is not easy to do successfully.
The Mount Toba eruption is dated to approximately 71,000 years ago. Volcanic ash from Mount Toba can be traced north-west across India, where a widespread terrestrial marker bed exists of primary and reworked airfall ash, in beds that are commonly 1 to 3, and occasionally 6 meters [18 feet] thick.
Tambora, the largest known historic eruption, displaced 20 cubic kilometres of ash. Mount Toba produced 800 cubic kilometres.* It was therefore forty times larger than the largest eruption of the last two centuries and apparently the second largest known explosive eruption over the last 450 million years.
Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans
Mount Toba's eruption is marked by a 6 year period during which the largest amount of volcanic sulphur was deposited in the past 110,000 years. This dramatic event was followed by 1000 years of the lowest ice core oxygen isotope ratios of the last glacial period. In other words, for 1000 years immediately following the eruption, the earth witnessed temperatures colder than during the Last Glacial Maximum at 18-21,000 years ago.
For the volcanic aerosols to be effectively distributed around the earth, the plume from the volcanic eruptions must reach the stratosphere, a height greater than 17 kilometres. Mount Toba's plume probably reached twice this height. Most solar energy falls at low latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, so eruptions that happen near the Equator cause much more substantial cooling due to the reflection of solar energy. Toba lies 2 degrees north of the Equator, on the Island Sumatra.
The reduction in atmospheric visibility due to volcanic ash and dust particles is relatively short-lived, about three to six months. Longer-term global climatic cooling is caused by the highly reflective sulphuric acid haze, which stays suspended in the upper atmosphere for several years.
Ice core evidence implicates Mount Toba as the cause of coldest millennium of the late Pleistocene. It shows that this eruption injected more sulphur that remained in the atmosphere fo a longer time [six years] than any other volcanic eruption in the last 110,000 years. This may have caused nearly complete deforestation of southeast Asia, and at the same time to have lowered sea surface temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees centigrade for several years.
If Tambora caused the " The year without a summer" in 1816, Mount Toba could have been responsible for six years of relentless volcanic winter, thus causing a massive deforestation, a disastrous famine for all living creatures, and a near extinction of Humankind.
The Volcanic Winter/Weak Garden of Eden model proposed in this paper. Population subdivision due to dispersal within African and other continents during the early Late Pleistocene is followed by bottlenecks caused by volcanic winter, resulting from the eruption of Toba, 71 ka. The bottleneck may have lasted either 1000 years, during the hyper-cold stadial period between Dansgaard-Oeschlger events 19 and 20, or 10ka, during oxygen isotope stage 4. Population bottlenecks and releases are both sychronous. More individuals survived in Africa because tropical refugia were largest there, resulting in greater genetic diversity in Africa.
Blombos Cave : 77,000 years old
Small and portable, this red ochre stone is engraved with what must be "tally" marks. It is one of two such stones recently found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa and have been dated as being 77,000 years old, making them the oldest form of recorded counting ever found.
The stone is worn which probably indicated that it wasconstantly handled over a period of time, how long is impossible to tell. It looks as though the stone has been reused at least once before as the lighter marks appear to have been erased rather than worn away naturally.
If the dating is accurate this stone was used 5000 years before the Mount Toba eruption of 71,000 years ago. The evidence from the Toba eruption indicates that the world's population of Modern Manwas reduced to a total of around 10,000 adults.
IN GENEALOGY
ANCESTRAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Genealogy is the archaeology of the soul, offers new depths of insight into ethnography, lineage and kinship, looking beyond regional, continental, and psychic barriers -- a coherence experienced from within, bringing forth that which was formerly hidden. According to Jung, when a personal experience corresponds to a latent primordial image, an archetype is activated. The new model is contemplation, participation, comprehension, poesis.
Gene Tree
The genealogy chart is a way to visualize and navigate the set of reconstructed ancestors, and narratives of pressures faced by the ancestors of the species over recent evolutionary time. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed.
What advantage do we, humans, have? One is the ability to solve new problems, those on which evolution did not train generations of our ancestors? The brain has evolved many mental shortcuts, or heuristics. Heuristics evolved that helped our ancestors deal with political problems in small-scale social groups.
Intuitive Judgment
However, the world we currently live in is radically different from the world our ancestors lived in when these mental heuristics evolved. In some instances heuristics can lead us to misjudge and make mistakes due to the biases that heuristics can blind us to. Many fallacies are deeply embedded in our psychology. We can incorporate irrelevant anchors as judgments, beliefs, and values.
Liking or loving someone can blind us to their faults.
The mistake is projecting positive traits on someone because you love them. The doubt avoidance tendency can encourage us to disregard the odds and take on challenges with a high risk of failure. It can be a positive force for daring greatly or a catalyst for poorly thought out decision-making. The reciprocation tendency refers to the powerful urge that most humans have to reciprocate favors (and disfavors).
How can we look at something and claim to know it if our own flesh isn't included? Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms; so archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions -- innate psychological mechanisms.
Heuristics of Genealogy
Derived from a Greek word that means "to discover," heuristic describes a rule of thumb or a method that comes from experience and helps you think through things, like the process of elimination, or the process of trial and error. You can think of a heuristic as a shortcut.
A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.
Optimalness
Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors.
It may also help to distinguish modern evolutionary psychology from the selective breeding programs in previous eras of human history. There is no teleology in evolution; no person or people are more highly evolved than any other persons or peoples. Everyone alive today is descended from a long, long line of successful ancestors. Yet there may be individual and group differences in psychological domains that are partially a result of differential selection pressures on ancestral populations. Humans have colonized nearly every land area on the surface of the earth, and each of these diverse ecologies could shape our psychological design. Efforts to advance human welfare may benefit from this recognition, as well as the understanding that genes are not the script for a pre-ordained destiny. Everything about us as individuals is a product of complex interactions between our genetic instructions and aspects of the environments in which they are expressed.
Affect heuristics (gut response to solve problems and arrive at conclusions) are subject to confirmation bias, the endowment effect, frequency illusion, and hindsight bias.
Frequency, Probability, Adaptive, Reliable and Unreliable Inferences
As a sort of summary, it's possible in many ways our brain *does* act a certain way because those ancestors of ours whose brain got used that way, survived a bit better and had more offspring than those who didn't. But that isn't about skills or knowledge. It is at best instintive reaction, and at worst, particular ways of leaping to conclusions. [see epigenetics]
These programs were not selected to solve the total array of logically possible computational problems. Instead, they were selected on the basis of how
well they solved the adaptive problems faced by our hunter–gatherer ancestors
(e.g., finding a mate, cooperating with others, hunting, gathering, protecting
children, avoiding predators). Natural selection tends to produce programs that
solve problems like these reliably, quickly, and efficiently.
It could be that at some point in our species’ history, the motivation to see something through to completion had a greater probability of ensuring survival than having a high willingness to cut one’s losses. Given that at least some of our ancestors hunted by chasing their prey for extremely long amounts of time, and that agrarian societies require patience over long time frames, it’s not too hard to see why this could be.
The sunk cost heuristic also appears to me to have something in common with prospect theory; in particular the part that describes our willingness to take greater risks when we are more likely to lose what we already have.
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/zick/content%20gilovich%20et%20al.pdf
Character as Moral FictionBy Mark Alfano
Hermeneutic Union
Hermes was messenger and interpreter between gods and mortals. Hermeneutics is "to make clear." It is an approach cultivating our ability to interpret or understand from another's perspective, and applying that insight, empathy, and understanding to interpretation or making sense of any situation.
Hermeneutics is a technique for background understanding of another’s mind and worldview. It concerns judging psychological accuracy from inaccuracy. Accurate beliefs deliver long-term satisfactions by distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate readings of situations by contextualizing them and comparing them.
Text & Context
Hermeneutics is a research paradigm we can apply in genealogy research. A hermeneutical and less epistemological understanding of the genealogical method avoids the paradoxes of perspectivism and the metaphorics of vision by construing the phenomenon not as a physical object but as a text.
Introspection does not provide full self-knowledge. We want to understand our presuppositions, pivotal experiences and abilities on which our knowledge-claims are based. We seek understanding rather than explanations. Self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.
Genealogical explanations concern the relations between the act or state of believing and the content that is believed. A genealogy explains the advent of a belief, in the sense of a believing, (an attitude) in terms of contingencies of its etiology, appealing exclusively to facts that are not evidence, that do not provide reasons or justifications, for the truth of what is believed.
Knowledge Transfer Pathways
Human affairs aren't governed by a set of natural laws, so hermeneutics provides interpretive understanding of the actions and meanings created by historically and culturally situated actors. Our ancestors are symbolically situated along the knowledge transfer pathways of the branches of the family tree, genetic and epigenetic vectors.
Verification procedures are both internal and relative to the particular kinds of perspectives. We develop systems of meaning and justification to make sense out of the world, understanding perennial aspects of the lived experience of meaning.
Relational hermeneutics is a full-bodied, soul-engaged, heart-transforming encounter that involves the subjective worldview of the interpreter as much as the process of interpretation. Theories of embodiment are grounded in a phenomenological comprehension of the lived-body, including knowledge embedded within our physical form.
Life, Expression, Understanding
The hermeneutic tradition values and explores the meanings of human experiences as they are lived. Such meanings are lived in cultural, sub-cultural, linguistic, religious, and gendered contexts. Sociocultural perspectives on psychological phenomena require careful attention. Not merely inner experience, lived experience recognizes the historical dimension in the psychological.
Hermeneutic philosophy sketches a more balanced and credible approach to finding a genuine alternative to modern individualism and postmodernist relativism. What is the power of interpretation? What can we get at through interpreting? Can we get at Essences of things? Like the difference between symbol and image, hermeneutics subordinates the universal to the particular.
Interpretive Perspectives
In philosophy and psychology it includes the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning, including experiences. In the domain of genealogy it also includes recognition, metaphors, and insinuation. Psychological hermeneutics is the body of knowledge enabling insight and the discussion of biopsychosocial cause and effect.
Whatever is conscious exists along with psychological meanings in relation to present, past and future relationships between people -- and in relation to the relationship that people have with themselves. The ways of making sense of people in all situations is inextricably tied up with emotions and working out what exists for them and about them.
However, we are never other people nor do we ever have access to their consciousness. We cannot feel what they do or have the same life experiences as they. We can only interpret others from our prior understanding. Empathy occurs within oneself but is the central connection to others. To be empathic is to interpret empathy “out of” one’s own experience of other people.
Genealogy As Context
Experiences derive meaning from their overall position in the totality of our involvements in the world. Once born into the specific body, family, place and time in which we live, we have to deal with the details of ordinary life, temporal contexts, and social relationships. In this view there is no doing without being, no thought without feeling, no action without reaction, no values without ethics, no self without others. Being in a context is a multi-faceted whole, classically symbolized in the genealogical chart.
Hermeneutic engagement works with both Above and Below. Hermeneutic union lies in the shared realities through which we create meaning. It amplifies environmental identity for our ancestors. We all create symbolic and imaginal worlds.
Our genealogy personal history is the best promise we have for understanding our shared humanity because it is physiologically grounded. As genealogists we interpret our own psycho-history. Psychogenealogy is a rigorous psychological and historical analysis of our lineage and its interactive effect on ourselves.
The genealogist does claim to be capturing the phenomenon as it really is. Genealogy is not simply another perspective. The only way to challenge the results of one genealogical analysis would be to produce another genealogical analysis either of the original phenomenon or of the initial genealogical account itself. Genealogy is not easy to do successfully.
The Mount Toba eruption is dated to approximately 71,000 years ago. Volcanic ash from Mount Toba can be traced north-west across India, where a widespread terrestrial marker bed exists of primary and reworked airfall ash, in beds that are commonly 1 to 3, and occasionally 6 meters [18 feet] thick.
Tambora, the largest known historic eruption, displaced 20 cubic kilometres of ash. Mount Toba produced 800 cubic kilometres.* It was therefore forty times larger than the largest eruption of the last two centuries and apparently the second largest known explosive eruption over the last 450 million years.
Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans
Mount Toba's eruption is marked by a 6 year period during which the largest amount of volcanic sulphur was deposited in the past 110,000 years. This dramatic event was followed by 1000 years of the lowest ice core oxygen isotope ratios of the last glacial period. In other words, for 1000 years immediately following the eruption, the earth witnessed temperatures colder than during the Last Glacial Maximum at 18-21,000 years ago.
For the volcanic aerosols to be effectively distributed around the earth, the plume from the volcanic eruptions must reach the stratosphere, a height greater than 17 kilometres. Mount Toba's plume probably reached twice this height. Most solar energy falls at low latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, so eruptions that happen near the Equator cause much more substantial cooling due to the reflection of solar energy. Toba lies 2 degrees north of the Equator, on the Island Sumatra.
The reduction in atmospheric visibility due to volcanic ash and dust particles is relatively short-lived, about three to six months. Longer-term global climatic cooling is caused by the highly reflective sulphuric acid haze, which stays suspended in the upper atmosphere for several years.
Ice core evidence implicates Mount Toba as the cause of coldest millennium of the late Pleistocene. It shows that this eruption injected more sulphur that remained in the atmosphere fo a longer time [six years] than any other volcanic eruption in the last 110,000 years. This may have caused nearly complete deforestation of southeast Asia, and at the same time to have lowered sea surface temperatures by 3 to 3.5 degrees centigrade for several years.
If Tambora caused the " The year without a summer" in 1816, Mount Toba could have been responsible for six years of relentless volcanic winter, thus causing a massive deforestation, a disastrous famine for all living creatures, and a near extinction of Humankind.
The Volcanic Winter/Weak Garden of Eden model proposed in this paper. Population subdivision due to dispersal within African and other continents during the early Late Pleistocene is followed by bottlenecks caused by volcanic winter, resulting from the eruption of Toba, 71 ka. The bottleneck may have lasted either 1000 years, during the hyper-cold stadial period between Dansgaard-Oeschlger events 19 and 20, or 10ka, during oxygen isotope stage 4. Population bottlenecks and releases are both sychronous. More individuals survived in Africa because tropical refugia were largest there, resulting in greater genetic diversity in Africa.
Blombos Cave : 77,000 years old
Small and portable, this red ochre stone is engraved with what must be "tally" marks. It is one of two such stones recently found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa and have been dated as being 77,000 years old, making them the oldest form of recorded counting ever found.
The stone is worn which probably indicated that it wasconstantly handled over a period of time, how long is impossible to tell. It looks as though the stone has been reused at least once before as the lighter marks appear to have been erased rather than worn away naturally.
If the dating is accurate this stone was used 5000 years before the Mount Toba eruption of 71,000 years ago. The evidence from the Toba eruption indicates that the world's population of Modern Manwas reduced to a total of around 10,000 adults.