I’ve been a bit remiss in blogging recently. A variety of reasons account for this-but in sum, I’ve just been busy…. Thanks to David B & Jason S for filling in with some meaty pieces.
I am reading three books that might be of interest to GNXP readers. First, Journey of Man by Spencer Wells. I’ve read part of it already and he seems to be elaborating on the idea of a north-south split in the Out-of-Africa thesis. Then, Nature via Nurture by Matt Ridley and finally Redesigning Humans by Gregory Stock. These three books are nice together, Wells’ book is more esoteric, and something that might interest those with an antiquarian streak, while Ridley speaks of the now and Stock will address the then [1].
Yesterday I read a book titled Life in the Near East. A nugget that I found interesting, it seems quite clear that much of Egyptian civilization was stimulated by cultural diffusion from Mesopatamia. Of course the speed at which Egyptians transformed themselves from hunter-gatherers to builders of pyramids is indicative of this, but there is some very specific information that points to exchange of ideas. The Early Dynastic Period saw the construction of buildings with notches-though this practice eventually disappears. In Mesopatamia notches were important to strengthen the brick buildings while Egypt with plenty of limestone did not need this. The presence of notches indicates a borrowing from the original Mesopatamiam source. I don’t mean to imply that ancient Egyptians didn’t produce anything of value or that they couldn’t have been capable of such innovations themselves-but it seems to me that historians have swung too far away from diffusion, partially in the fear that they are devaluing the indigenous culture. Culture spread the other way too-the Indus Valley civilization, though indigenous, had clear connections to Mesopatamia. In fact there is now some evidence for an Elamo-Dravidian language family, Elam being the ancient nation that bordered Sumeria in modern day Khuzistan in southwestern Iran [2]. Along with Brahui in Baluchistan this argues for the presence of Dravidian far to the west of South Asia. Additionally archeologists have always been a bit surprised at the abrupt rise of iron wielding higher civilization in southern India. Though the fleeing of the dausas before Aryan hordes seems a bit melodramatic, the evidence is pointing toward migrations and diffusions of technique & trade in a way in vogue earlier in the century, though at that time they were connected with race theory [3].
This gets to me another point in the ideas around ethno-genesis and culture formation. Dr. Snell (the author of the aforementioned book) indicates quite clearly that the ideas of “ethnicity” and “race” were fuzzy at best in the ancient Near East-that differentiation between Sumerians, who spoke an agglutinative language unrelated to any other, and Akkadians, who spoke a Semitic language, seems to have been difficult to ascertain as an individual could pick up names of the other group through adoption. Very early on in the King’s List of the Sumerians there are men with clear Semitic names as rulers. There seems little mention of the ethnic tension and modern ideas of racial or ethnic consciousness are clearly out of place. It also begs the question as to why the Sumerians faded from history while the Semitic peoples did not. On a speculative note I might wonder if an accident of location might have contributed to this. While the Semitic peoples center of gravity was to the western edge of the core of agricultural innovation and the proto-Dravidian peoples to the east, the Sumerians were located in the center. While the Semitic peoples bordered “savage” tribes who they could assimilate or out-reproduce because of their cultural superiority (at least in manipulation of grains), the Sumerians were hemmed in by groups who were only a slight notch below them and so did not have the option of expanding in such a fashion. Over time the reservoir of uncivilized Semites in the Levant tipped the balance in favor of Akkadian, and later Aramaean, as the Semitic indigenes of Mesopatamia were reinfused with fresh settlers in a way the Sumerians were not.
Moving to more contemporary issues, race & the ancient world. The fact that the Sumerians called themselves the “black headed people” has been grist for the mill of Afro-centrists. Of course the Sumerians looked like Middle Easterners, in fact, the reconstruction of the Queen of Ur looks very much like my part-Lebanese friend’s sister! The ancients knew of other races, the Greeks differentiated between the brownish peoples of Egypt, India and Ethiopia as different types, something many whites of the modern age tend not to do (no GNXP readers of course!). And yet how did the ancients view themselves? Not as members of a race. The common-folk probably saw themselves as members of a village, clan or locality as they do today. Elites could identify with the city, and on some level the nation [4]. “Racism” or racialism is harder when your neighbors look just like you. Some groups, like Egyptians, lived in areas where there was a lot of phenotypic change over small areas, so they envisaged their neighbors as being of various colors, Middle Easterners as “yellow,” Nubians as “black,” and Egyptians as “red.” Though there was no idealistic concept of race the divergent phenotypes of humanity render themselves to common-sense interpretations.
Human beings are collections of reassorting genes that act in concert to form what we see as the individual. Our consciousness seems to at least present the simulacrum of unity and so we tend to view individuals as atomic units of organization even though we are a collective of genes supported by attendent cells that might very well have developed in the process of symbiogenesis [5]. Because in the past most people mated with those who were near them, cosmetic markers, skin color, hair form, etc. were excellent proxies for someone’s “race.” To some extent they still are. These cosmetic markers show incredible ranges, from black skin to white, tall to short, wooly hair to straight. Though most people still mate with those of similar race, a non-trivial portion do not. These cosmetic markers are being mixed together in a fashion that makes race more difficult to ascertain, and in fact recent evidence from Brazil or among African-Americans indicates that social factors are pushing a decoupling of cosmetic markers from ancestry [6]. Additionally, because cosmetic factors have been so important in the past, and so accurate as a proxy for ancestry, complex properties that are emergent from basic phenotypes such as personality, intelligence, etc. might decouple from appearence [7].
And it is the complex features that interest me. While some have asserted that a clear & well delineated number of races can be defined by classical phenotypic traits (color, skull form, hair form, etc.)-I am more interested in complex traits that show great overlap between “races.” This blog has tended to focus on “intelligence,” where it seems clear to me that the mean g between various populations are naturally different, some of this overlapping with classical races. But my rejection of organic mythic conceptions of race grounded in ideal types is due the fact that complex traits that are defined by mental functions are not so sharply differentiated even if they a
re statistically significant. It is these higher mental functions that define our humanity despite our preoccuption with cosmetic forms.
That’s all for now….
[1] A lot of Stock’s stuff can be found in godless’ posts. Just use google and dig them up.
[2] I have just read that Elam practiced matrilineal royal succession. This is interesting of course because matrilineal traditions exist in southern India among the Dravidian speaking people.
[3] Colin Renfrew posited that Indo-Europeans spread agriculture through demic diffusion into Europe. He left unanswered the Indian part of the equation-but the presence of Dravidian relatives near the source of the Neolithic revolution seems to make the case for Dravidian demic diffusion into India as they spread agriculture and pushed the “tribal” people into the marginal lands. It was probably the Dravidians as well would brought a more unequivocally “Caucasoid” strain into the Indian subcontinent sometime after 10,000 BP.
[4] Apparently there was a shift in ideology during the height of the Assyrian Empire. The king of kings switched from calling everyone who was in Assyria Assyrians a century or so after mass deportations has changed the ethnic make-up. Obviously on some level they understood that Medes or Israelites were not “Assyrian” in the same way as the military families that supplied the soldiers, but it took some time to internalize this difference.
[5] In short I’m alluding to the origins of the organelles in the cell as independent organisms and the subsequent specialization of tissues into organs.
[6] Elaboration-white or black physical appearence is a far weaker predictor of African or European ancestry than once thought. This might mean that a “black” American could get cystic fibrosis despite overwhelming black appearence or a “white” American could suffer from sickle cell anemia without Sicilian ancestry. The drive behind this is probably assortive mating. Though this might be dismissed as a minor occurrence I would argue that assortive mating is becoming very powerful as a driver of “race” formation and re-formation.
[7] What I’m saying is that the super-high IQ Asians, Jews and WASP are assorting by intelligence, creating a new “race” defined more by their complex phenotypes that mark them as outliers among their natural “race.” Of course the heritability of these phenotypes is tenditious-though g and Plomin’s work seems to indicate that there are some central root properties at work that might be highly heritable.
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