Farming in the Far East
Twenty-three thousand years ago farmers in the valley of the Yellow River in China were using stones to grind foods that they gathered, including grasses, beans, wild millet seeds, wild yams and snakegourd root. As they gathered, processed and cooked these foods from wild plants they discovered that the plants could be encouraged to grow again by dropping seeds on the ground. Moreover, plants that produced edible seeds often grew better seeds if only the best seeds were replanted. This was particularly true of millet. As these onetime hunter gatherers improved their crops they became farmers.
Consistent access to energy-rich foods caused human populations to expand rapidly, until human populations became so large that animals were overhunted, so the farmers began to trap pigs and keep them captive, so as to ensure access to meat throughout the year. These
processes were similar to the ones that led to farming in the Middle East, and farming started about the same time in the Far East as it did in the Middle East.
Anatolian roots of Chinese culture
Ironically the most brilliant stage of this early development of Chinese culture was reached by the Hongshan, who farmed in the West Liao Basin of what is now Inner Mongolia. It is ironic because it was founded by farmers from Anatolia. We know that Anatolian farmers formed the nucleus of this brilliant early Chinese culture because simple words in the Korean language, which descended from that of the Hongshan, have Indo European roots. These include the numbers "one", "two" and "three" and words that identify close family relations.
In spite of its brilliance the Hongshan culture seems to have given rise to no kingship. This is not surprising, because all of the early agricultural societies were governed by matriarchal elites. (This includes the early Sumerians, the early Minoans and the early Egyptians.) However, the Hongshan did seem to give rise to other features of early Chinese society, including burial practices that were intended to ensure a continuing relationship between the living and the dead. The concept of the Lucky Dragon also had its origin in the Hongshan culture.
The concept of the Lucky Dragon is unlikely to have sprung from a purely fictional creature. Hongshan models of this creature, sculpted in jade, show a snakelike creature with a head and snout like that of a pig, and this might just be a fairly accurate renditions by craftsmen who haven't actually seen the creature. Capture of such a creature would be a lucky event if the creature were large enough to feed an entire village. Capture of a Lucky Dragon could be the occasion for a great feast.
The Hongshan culture ended very unluckily when the monsoon changed its yearly course and their homeland turned into a desert, and this prompted many of them to move far to the east, to the region that is north of the Korean Peninsula. As their population expanded in that region they pushed into the Korean Peninsula itself.
Those who pushed on still further, across a land bridge to the Japanese Archipelago, combined forces with fishermen (from the Ryukyu Islands to the south) to push the indigenous hunter gatherers north, into Hokkaido. At the same time the new immigrants discarded their Koreanic language for that of the fishermen.
The language spoken by the fishermen who had joined with those who had crossed the land bridge was a Ryukyuan language that the fishermen had brought from the Ryukyu Islands to the south of the Japanese Archipelago, and this was the seed from which the Japanese language grew.
A surviving Anatolian population in Central China
While the Korean and Japanese people had deep racial ties with many people who had moved from elsewhere in Eastern Asia and from Island Southeasr Asia, the original Hongshan population had been relatively isolated, and had largely retained the racial characteristics of the original population influx from Anatolia. While very few of these Anatolian farmers remained in Inner Mongolia while that region turned to desert, some of them simply moved a little bit south, to the edge of the Gobi Desert and established themselves there, again in an isolated place, and they remained there until an American sinologist by the name of Homer Dubs noticed European traits such as blue eyes and fair hair of people in the village. (I might interject that these were prominent features of the animal herders that moved into Anatolia through the Caucasus region.)
Mr. Dubs also noticed that the architecture of many buildings in the village was distinctly different from anything that he had seen elsewhere in China so he wrote a paper in which he proposed that people in the village were descended from Roman soldiers who had been defeated in battle and had fled to this remote place -- but this theory has been disproven by DNA tests.
The scientists should take another look.
Merging of peoples and technologies
Millet-growing technology was developed along the Yellow River where the climate was cool and dry, while rice-growing technology was developed along the Yangtze River where the climate was warmer and wetter. Combined with other crops, these grains fed all of China. Similarly, sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated in the Middle East while while pigs were domesticated in both Europe and Asia. Chickens were first domesticated from the beautiful red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, which were at first treasured for their exotic beauty. Chickens are now valued mostly for their meat and eggs, and the beauty of their ancestors, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, is seldom seen in domesticated chickens today. Meanwhile, fishing technology which had been developed in Island Southeast Asia was brought to the Japanese Archipelago where it was combined with rice cultivation to feed the people of Japan.
People from the fishing cultures of Island Southeast Asia had been cruising along the eastern coast of Asia for fifty thousand years, fishing in the rich coastal waters there, but they didn't know how to deal with the bitterly cold and wet winter storms that they encoun north of the main Japanese islands -- until they met up with people from Siberia, most likely on Sakhalin Island or the Kamchatka. From the Siberians they learned how to make all-weather garments and how to survive in the region. After that they conquered the New World by sailing along the glaciated coasts of Beringia and along the coasts of North and South America. They left their footprints near the tip of South America.
Self domestication and modernity
Tribal societies, besides helping our ancestors to take over Africa, affected them more directly: institutions of government such as councils of elders sometimes imposed penalties on their members, such as ostracism. Imposing such penalties, which could affect an individual's ability to procreate, tended to weed out individuals who tended to react violently, and this amounts to selection for tameness, the precondition for domestication syndrome to appear in a population, because the least reactive individuals in a population tend to be those in which precursors to fetal neural cells and certain other kinds of cells (such as pigment-producing cells and bone-producing cells) are delayed in their development during the embryonic stage of development. The delayed development of the neural cells then results in immature behaviors, like a less reactive personality, to persist even into adulthood, and the delayed development of other kinds of precursor cells can result in anatomic and other consequences.
For example, if precursor cells to pigment-producing cells do not fully mature, the pigments produced by the pigment-producing cells may be altered, and likewise if precursors to bone-producing cells are delayed in their development bones might not fully develop at later stages of life. As a result, the skeleton may not be fully developed even in adulthood. If no outside agent is responsible for selection for tameness this suite of characteristics is called self-domestication.
Domestication syndrome is also observable in domesticated animals, which tend to be tamer than their wild counterparts but also tend to have altered coat colors and rounder heads. These characteristics can show up in he course of only a few generations, but many of them interfere with the viability of the domesticated or self-domesticated animal, and subsequent evolution eliminates many of these in the course of time.
For instance, slow maturation of pigment-producing cells can alter or reduce the number of pigment-producing cells in the skin, hair or eyes. But the eyes of newborn human infants are particularly vulnerable to damage by ultraviolet light from the noonday sun, especially in the tropics, and reduced or altered pigmentation can make their eyes even more vulnerable to damage. Such damage to the eyes can reduce the ability of individuals to pass on their genes, and this can lead to positive selection for those whose eyes are better protected by pigmentation.
We might note in this connection that many modern people whose ancestors lived along the northern coast of western Europe have retained the varied eye colors of their self-domesticated ancestors. This is because oceanic and atmospheric conditions melted the glaciers along the Atlantic coast, and this enabled large numbers of people to live far to the north, where sun does not rise so high in the sky, and where ultra-violet light is filtered out as it passes through the atmosphere at shallow angles. Moreover, infants lying on their backs are less prone to being blinded from staring up at the noonday sun, if the sun does not rise so high in the sky. Thus far-northern people with blue eyes were less vulnerable to eye damage and blue eyes were retained in far-north people.
Incidentally, reduced skin pigmentation was favored in the far north for another reason altogether: heavy pigmentation of the skin reduced exposure to the sun’s rays of deeper layers of the skin, where Vitamin D is produced. Slowed maturation of these cells caused altered skin pigmentation, and this altered pigmentation was retained among far-north people, who benefitted from it. In the last few thousand years lack of sufficient dietary sources of Vitamin D have become a problem further south, as wild animals such as aurochs and antelope became scarce. As a result, people throughout the rest of Europe have also lost much of their skin pigmentation.
Other accidental consequences of slowed maturation at the embryonic stage of development were also retained in the far north, as well: lightened hair pigmentation tended to be retained and baldness at birth tended to be retained in the far north. (Freckles and red-colored hair, on the other hand, were consequences of interbreeding with Homo neanderthalensis.)
Some of the symptoms of self-domestication faded rapidly, especially in the tropics.
Self domestication and farming
Humans were already super-competitive among the medium-sized species of the Earth when increased consumption of grass seeds and other farm products led to even higher population densities among them. This, in turn, led to further intensification of self-domestication.
High population density and stable societies had prompted modern qualities of mind to emerge, especially along the southern coast of Africa and in other refugia, and the same high population densities had caused these same populations to be strongly affected by self-domestication.
One result of self-domestication was that juvenile characteristics such as playfulness tended to be retained into adulthood, and this playfulness is an aspect of the modern mind. Another result of self-domestication was a longer period of immaturity early in life, which prompted more extensive brain remodeling during that period. This also helped to drive the emergence of the modern mind. Thus, we can see that self domestication and the modern mind were (and are) deeply entangled with each other.
Whiter skin in Europe and the far north
Millet was later imported into Europe, and this was probably one reason for dramatic changes there, because millet grew faster and had a higher energy content than wheat and barley. As a result of This resulted in a dramatic increase in in population in some parts of Europe, and fields were subdivided into smaller plots. The farmers moved closer to their small plots of ground and defended them fiercely, so that the elites lost the ability to tax the small farmers, who would harvest their crops quickly and hide the grain in small bundles. Consequently, the elites lost their ability to tax the farmers, and were often unable to maintain themselves in power.
Some rootless people who had been squeezed out by rising populations began to not only steal crops from the larger fields, but to squat on land owned by the elites and dispossess tenant farmers. that was being farmed by tenant farmers. This made it impossible for many elites to maintain themselves except by joining the lower classes and farming their own land.
Men were often afraid to leave their land even for short periods in order to go hunting, nor did they have extra land on which to raise domesticated animals, and this often resulted in a shortage of Vitamin D in their diet. Many of the farmers had weak bones, and their children had weak bones and often were unable to acquire and defend even small plots of land. The survivors often had whiter skin, with less pigment, that could absorb more sunlight to manufacture Vitamin D. The European population gradually became whiter, and they became better able to endure poor diets.
Bantu expansion
There was no such whitening of the skin in "armpit" of western Africa, where the original Bantus lived; the original Bantu speakers in this small part of Africa were probably among the darkest-skinned people of Africa, and they quickly moved from the late stone age (with polished stone tools) to early Neolithic and early Iron Age (when they cultivated crops with when they began to cut away underbrush to protect oil palms and yams
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