Was this the region which Dr Anthony was suggesting spoke an Afro-Asiatic language? I recall he said the Indo-European word "tauros" (bull) was borrowed from that.

Qaf (the letter Q) is sura 50, and different from Kahf (the Cave) which is sura 18. Sura 18 deals with the Alexander Romance. I wrote on the tafsir of sura 18. In a former life, one might say. 
 
In that former life I cared about Islamic history. Now, rather less. Had my papers rejected a few too many times. Either I'm just nuts or else I'm not as good at history and textual-criticism as I thought I was. There's the obvious paranoiac alternative, which is that the whole of the academy is biased toward progressivism and Islam; but even if this were true there's always the nagging probability that even if the colleges were all run by a coalition of the Elders of Zion and Ibn Warraq I'd still be getting my stuff thrown away. 
 
With that primal scream of despair out of the way: my thought is that I have no way of knowing what Muhammad himself thought. I do think several of the suras are post-Muhammadan though. No: not "think" - I've concluded, based on the best evidence I can find. Sura 3, the second part of it anyway, is transparently a reaction to Muhammad's death. (Ignore what the Sira claims about "Uhud" - a name not used in sura 3 - and just reread the thing.) Crossroads to Islam got a lot wrong, but did successfully prove sura 48 as a late insertion. Joseph Schacht's Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence found that suras 2 and 33 were not being used for legal purposes in Iraq and the Hijaz until about 100 AH which implies those two suras weren't widely canonical until then, hinting at decades before that when they were disputed, hinting that they might have come in later. On the topic of sura 33 it rather looks like an attempt to defend the sira - the Zayd episode - from the complaints of John of Damascus. (You might want to google that guy, he's got... interesting things to say.) That would put sura 33 into the time of post-Muhammad debate as well. 
 
To me all this seems obvious. Maybe I can blame Asperger's. 
 
If you accept the above comments, and I'll repeat there is no reason you should just based on my say-so: Arab warlords and propagandists had a large impact on the Qur'an and on how the Sira was composed. Muhammad seems like a cipher after the warlords get through with him. y.m.m.v

"did the ancestral South Indians speak Dravidian languages?" I doubt it, 
 
Right: because current thought is that the Dravidian speakers started in the northwest, Indus region; and that the Aryan-speaking invaders pushed them into South India. (Except for the Brahui.) Before that, the Indus developed independently of South India [South India; by Paul Harding, Patrick Horton, Amy Karafin; p. 34; citing, India: A History by John Keay] 
 
After that, over millennia, the Dravidians would have got the South Indians to speak their language. 
 
I get the impression from a reference to cattle-herding that South India wasn't heavily populated before the Dravidians showed up. 
 
Anyway, I'd check the loanwords in non-Brahui Dravidian (Sangam literature), and earliest Prakrit as well, for non-Dravidian elements. I expect Sanskrit to be more archaising and so to be more of a "north" language, with few borrowings outside Dravidian.

When I was a kid I used to visit Portugal a lot. Last time was in 2001 (and I suppose I wasn't a kid anymore). 
 
In 2001, there was a STARK height difference between adults over 30 or so, and the late adolescence / 20-something crowd. This was within the native Portuguese population, not immigrants from Africa, Ecuador etc. 
 
I think something drastic changed in Portugal during the 1970s...

bioI is right. If alumni are ignorant of the Earth's axial tilt and its effects, they need to repeat the third grade and never mind college. 
 
I'm not sure how accurately Google tracks interest. These factors must be taken into account: 
 
1. Interest in anything is going to flag during summer in most of North America; because it's HOT here, and heat is enervating. 
 
2. The "term paper and finals" effect you point to is also a misleading marker of interest. It is a marker of life and death. I might be genuinely interested in Roman history (as can be attested through my posts here). But I did a lot more research per day when I had a paper due.

To your readers who own that (dense) book, this would fall under chapter 10. The Botai hypothesis is in it, pp. 216-220. But that is late in the chapter. 
 
For background, chapter 4 had already made clear that the wheel was invented 3500 BCE. (p. 66) Chapters 5-7 are mostly methodological but we do get a regional definition of "eneolithic"; by 3500 BCE, they had arsenic bronze in Europe, but this was still a copper age in Botai. (p 125) Chapters 8-9 deal with developments from 6500-4500 BCE. 
 
So, chapter 10: it first explains that horses may have been herded centuries earlier - fenced up, like cattle, for food. The impetus for this was a cold spell 4200-3800 BCE. (p 200) 
 
The chapter then looks into harnessing and riding; to that, it first debunks a size-variance method which (he says) had dated this to 2500 BCE. (p 203) That year is in any case incompatible with the Indo-European vocabulary which, by then, had accumulated many technical terms dealing with chariotry. (p 64) 
 
The book thinks that people were riding horses before 4000 BCE. (pp 221, 223) That is based on a stallion with weathered teeth dug up in Armenia. (p 221) This is the part your article addresses.

MAJOR discrepancy between males and females here. More evidence for the social nature of the female brain?

Southeast Oklahoma is upland south. The Arbuckles are a drier spur of the Ozarks. 
 
The rest of Oklahoma is much like New Mexico, except without the artsy crowd that came to Santa Fe, and also without (as many) Hispanics and Navajo. What Oklahoma does have are a lot of Alberta / Texas oil types, and Comanche. Oilmen in the private sector dislike socialists; Comanche respect warriors.

They seem to be concentrating on speaking the language, not on reading / writing it.

Admittedly my studies stop around 700 AD. 
 
But from my reading of the 600s: the Ecclesiastic History of Bede, the Ulster Chronicle, Bar Penkaye, the Life of Saint Eligius, and various Syriac chronicles are all in agreement that life as a Christian was violent, plague-ridden, and short. The plague of 664 AD in England and (maybe) France was particularly awful. And that's not even getting into the constant warfare and oppression among the Merovingians or, for that matter, Umar and Uthman and cetera. 
 
Most of these sources I cited also mention famines. Famine is a supply / demand issue. If the balance is so precarious that a long winter can starve out a population, then the population (I would expect) should have been close to capacity even in years of plenty. 
 
Were the Christian sources hyping the problem?

"China Probrem"? Ugh. 
 
The Chinese language doesn't have a problem distinguishing R from L. The "probrem" exists in Japanese (and Korean IIRC - also, interestingly, in the Linear B script for Greek, presumably a hangover from Minoan). But hasn't all this come up in GNXP before?

I have to say, this picture is NSFW. My company is good enough not to have a diversity policy, so I can at least visit this site (thank God) but they'd surely draw the line here...

diana, Star Trek DS9 had the Dax clan: pale dark-brunettes with very blue eyes. What that meant was six seasons of the tall, athletic Terry Farrell and then one season of the small, page-boyish Nicole de Boer. The Daxes were symbionts ("joined Trill"), who bore all the memories of previous Dax hosts. 
 
The intention of casting these two women in that role was so to strike the audience with the contrast of blue eyes on a brunette. Sort of an "eyes as window to the soul" theme.

John Emerson, but this period - 650-850 - includes the Umayyads, who often used Islam as a cover for Arab supremacism. They didn't even encourage conversions, which is why so many non-Arab Muslims at this time came from households of prominent Arab families (mawla clients, ex-slaves and such). 
 
Informed, the word for slave is just the standard Semitic 'abd (compare Hebrew theophoric 'Obadiah). I am interested in when 'abd was used as a synonym for black-person. I assume it came about in the Zanj. 
 
The Zanj would be the forerunner of Caribbean sugar plantations, and we can definitely use modern understandings of "racism" for the period when they were churning out a profit. The famous rebellion broke out in 869, a little after the period we're discussing here. But Wikipedia claims the first rebellion broke out in 696. 
 
Away from the Zanj, "racism" among Arabs is the more Roman-era, xenophobic sort found everywhere else in history; and I really don't want to get into the flame war over whether this counts. Relevant to blacks, several hadiths say that Hijazi Arabs feared that Ethiopians were going to invade the Kaaba and bring about the end of the world.

"When Baghdad Ruled" reminded me of a Gospel or of Tabari, in cobbling together anecdotes rather than attempting a coherent history. Which is okay if you like that sort of thing; but you're much better off actually reading Tabari, who at least gives his chain of isnad. 
 
As for the Rashidun age, I'm waiting for a full translation of Baladhuri. Too much of Tabari's military history here derives comes from Sayf b. Umar, whose work is almost totally discredited. Oh yeah, and Tabari and Sayf have instructed modern Wahhabis that Shi'ism was founded by a renegade Jew. To the extent that life as a Shi'a in Sunni states is a nightmare, much of the blame is Tabari's.

er, bioIgnoramus, the hadith on the subject of Muhammad's appearance all point out that he was, below the desert tan, very light skinned. Also his particular tribe of Arab was north Arabian, and pretended to descent from Abraham like the Jews. Muhammad had negligible Yemeni / Ethiopian / Nubian ancestry. 
 
More interesting to me is to what degree his ancestors were Hellenistic. (Maybe he was an Atreides? :^)

Did anyone ever check the Indonesian "hobbit" for LHX4 versus VLDLR and EXT2? or was there not enough squishy material? I recall there being a debate over whether he was a mutant homosapiens or a homoerectus offshoot. 
 
As for the myxovirus which gives you the flu, that can come from birds. The flu could spread all over the islands without any person coming in contact with another person. Granted, I would expect that the 2000 BCE wave of settlement and intermarriage came out of an Indochina with a closer relationship to domesticated fowl than did the ~50000 BCE wave, and that would increase the risk of flu quite a bit.

The "key" to improving Africa is "education" - how can one educate someone whose capacity to be educated is equivalent to an IQ between 70-85? 
 
On Ethiopia, which on the map has the lowest IQ on the continent - "So they test very low on IQ, but I know enough of them—they're bright". Unless I miss my guess, the Ethiopians he knows are the elite who fled the place leaving the lower-testing people behind. So how is the sample of "people Watson knows" representative? 
 
"Throw more money at a boondoggle to assuage my guilt" - check. "They're not unintelligent, IQ doesn't matter, some of my best friends are...." 
 
Yep, he's broken.

I don't like terms like "out-of-Africa". Unless Mungo Man grew up in his mother's pouch, or evolved from an orang utan, or bore a suspiciously elongated quartzite skull then his ancestry is ultimately African as well. 
 
The question is when (not if) his matrilineal ancestors left Africa. Are there features in his DNA which correlate to bottlenecks in the development of other 40000-year-old control samples? If this hasn't even been tested then Mr Mungo can tell us nothing pro or con about any form of out-of-Africa.

The one case I can think of where men will form "small-scale [social] groups where they are deep but few" is family. This is especially binding if the family is alienated from the culture at large, such as the Mafia. Steve Sailer has noted a number of such groups on his blog. 
 
How come female networks haven't spawned more criminal enterprises?