Discussing Ancient North Eurasians migrations: genetics, religion, and rape; (rape 25,000 years ago?) from a lingering patriarchal past, can we find a humanistic secular feminist future?

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“MA-1 genetic affinities of Mal’ta–Buret’ culture.” ref 

Mal’ta–Buret’ culture of Siberia near Lake Baikal

“The Mal’ta–Buret’ culture is an archaeological culture of c. 24,000 to 15,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic on the upper Angara River in the area west of Lake Baikal in the Irkutsk Oblast, Siberia, Russian Federation. The type sites are named for the villages of Mal’ta, Usolsky District, and Buret’, Bokhansky District (both in Irkutsk Oblast). And a buried boy whose remains were found near Mal’ta is usually known by the abbreviation MA-1, remains have been dated to 24,000 years ago. According to research published since 2013, MA-1 belonged to a population related to the genetic ancestors of Siberians, American Indians, and Bronze Age Yamnaya and Botai people of the Eurasian steppe. In particular, modern-day Native Americans, Kets, Mansi, and Selkup have been found to harbor a significant amount of ancestry related to MA-1.” ref

“MA-1 is the only known example of basal Y-DNA R* (R-M207*) – that is, the only member of haplogroup R* that did not belong to haplogroups R1, R2, or secondary subclades of these. The mitochondrial DNA of MA-1 belonged to an unresolved subclade of haplogroup U. The term Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) has been given in genetic literature to an ancestral component that represents descent from the people similar to the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture or a population closely related to them. A people similar to MA1 and Afontova Gora were important genetic contributors to Native Americans, Siberians, Northeastern Europeans, Caucasians, Central Asians, with smaller contributions to Middle Easterners and some East Asians. Lazaridis et al. (2016) notes “a cline of ANE ancestry across the east-west extent of Eurasia.” MA1 is also related to two older Upper Paleolithic Siberian individuals found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site called Ancient North Siberians (ANS).” ref

“Do you know what science is? So, do you subscribe to the pseudoscientific general theory of relativity? Do you subscribe to the doctrine of the ground accelerating up at 9.8 m/s per second?” – Christian Troll 

My response, It is archaeology artifacts and DNA. So, you admit, “Christian beliefs” are pseudoscience? Great to hear. I will now give you “my art” with “science facts.”

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref

Ancient North Eurasian (ANE)

Ancient Beringian/Ancestral Native American (AB/ANA)

Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG)

Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG)

Western Steppe Herders (WSH) 

Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer (SHG)

Early European Farmers (EEF)

Jōmon people (Ainu people OF Hokkaido Island) 

Neolithic Iranian farmers (Iran_N) (Iran Neolithic)

Amur Culture (Amur watershed)

Haplogroup R possible time of origin about 27,000 years in Central Asia, South Asia, or Siberia:

• Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (24,000-15,000 years ago)
• Afontova Gora culture (21,000-12,000 years ago)
• Trialetian culture (16,000–8000 years ago)
• Samara culture (7,000-6,500 years ago)
• Khvalynsk culture (7,000-6,500 years ago)
• Afanasievo culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)
• Yamna/Yamnaya Culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)
• Andronovo culture (4,000–2,900 years ago) ref

Mal’ta–Buret’ culture of Siberia and Basal Haplogroup R* or R-M207

Groups partially derived from the Ancient North Eurasians

Ainu people, Sámi people, Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasians, and Paganistic-Shamanism with Totemism

The Mytheme of Ancient North Eurasian Sacred-Dog belief and similar motifs are found in Indo-European, Native American, and Siberian comparative mythology

“The ANE lineage is defined by association with the MA-1, or “Mal’ta boy”, remains of 24,000 years ago in central Siberia Mal’ta-Buret’ culture 24,000-15,000 years ago. The Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) samples (Afontova Gora 3, Mal’ta 1, and Yana-RHS) show evidence for minor gene flow from an East Asian-related group (simplified by the Amis, Han, or Tianyuan) but no evidence for ANE-related geneflow into East Asians (Amis, Han, Tianyuan), except the Ainu, of North Japan.” ref 

“The ANE lineage is defined by association with the MA-1, or “Mal’ta boy”, remains of 24,000 years ago in central Siberia Mal’ta-Buret’ culture 24,000-15,000 years ago “basal to modern-day Europeans”. Some Ancient North Eurasians also carried East Asian populations, such as Tianyuan Man.” ref

“Bronze-age-steppe Yamnaya and Afanasevo cultures were ANE at around 50% and Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) at around 75% ANE. Karelia culture: Y-DNA R1a-M417 8,400 years ago, Y-DNA J, 7,200 years ago, and Samara, of Y-haplogroup R1b-P297 7,600 years ago is closely related to ANE from Afontova Gora, 18,000 years ago around the time of blond hair first seen there.” ref 

Ancient North Eurasian

“In archaeogenetics, the term Ancient North Eurasian (often abbreviated as ANE) is the name given to an ancestral West Eurasian component that represents descent from the people similar to the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture and populations closely related to them, such as from Afontova Gora and the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site. Significant ANE ancestry are found in some modern populations, including Europeans and Native Americans.” ref 

“The ANE lineage is defined by association with the MA-1, or “Mal’ta boy“, the remains of an individual who lived during the Last Glacial Maximum, 24,000 years ago in central Siberia, Ancient North Eurasians are described as a lineage “which is deeply related to Paleolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in Europe,” meaning that they diverged from Paleolithic Europeans a long time ago.” ref

“The ANE population has also been described as having been “basal to modern-day Europeans” but not especially related to East Asians, and is suggested to have perhaps originated in Europe or Western Asia or the Eurasian Steppe of Central Asia. However, some samples associated with Ancient North Eurasians also carried ancestry from an ancient East Asian population, such as Tianyuan Man. Sikora et al. (2019) found that the Yana RHS sample (31,600 years ago) in Northern Siberia “can be modeled as early West Eurasian with an approximately 22% contribution from early East Asians.” ref

“Populations genetically similar to MA-1 were an important genetic contributor to Native Americans, Europeans, Central Asians, South Asians, and some East Asian groups, in order of significance. Lazaridis et al. (2016:10) note “a cline of ANE ancestry across the east-west extent of Eurasia.” The ancient Bronze-age-steppe Yamnaya and Afanasevo cultures were found to have a noteworthy ANE component at ~50%.” ref

“According to Moreno-Mayar et al. 2018 between 14% and 38% of Native American ancestry may originate from gene flow from the Mal’ta–Buret’ people (ANE). This difference is caused by the penetration of posterior Siberian migrations into the Americas, with the lowest percentages of ANE ancestry found in Eskimos and Alaskan Natives, as these groups are the result of migrations into the Americas roughly 5,000 years ago.” ref 

“Estimates for ANE ancestry among first wave Native Americans show higher percentages, such as 42% for those belonging to the Andean region in South America. The other gene flow in Native Americans (the remainder of their ancestry) was of East Asian origin. Gene sequencing of another south-central Siberian people (Afontova Gora-2) dating to approximately 17,000 years ago, revealed similar autosomal genetic signatures to that of Mal’ta boy-1, suggesting that the region was continuously occupied by humans throughout the Last Glacial Maximum.” ref

“The earliest known individual with a genetic mutation associated with blonde hair in modern Europeans is an Ancient North Eurasian female dating to around 16000 BCE from the Afontova Gora 3 site in Siberia. It has been suggested that their mythology may have included a narrative, found in both Indo-European and some Native American fables, in which a dog guards the path to the afterlife.” ref

“Genomic studies also indicate that the ANE component was introduced to Western Europe by people related to the Yamnaya culture, long after the Paleolithic. It is reported in modern-day Europeans (7%–25%), but not of Europeans before the Bronze Age. Additional ANE ancestry is found in European populations through paleolithic interactions with Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, which resulted in populations such as Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers.” ref

“The Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) split from the ancestors of European peoples somewhere in the Middle East or South-central Asia, and used a northern dispersal route through Central Asia into Northern Asia and Siberia. Genetic analyses show that all ANE samples (Afontova Gora 3, Mal’ta 1, and Yana-RHS) show evidence for minor gene flow from an East Asian-related group (simplified by the Amis, Han, or Tianyuan). In contrast, no evidence for ANE-related geneflow into East Asians (Amis, Han, Tianyuan), except the Ainu, was found.” ref

“Genetic data suggests that the ANE formed during the Terminal Upper-Paleolithic (36,000 years ago) period from a deeply European-related population, which was once widespread in Northern Eurasia, and from an early East Asian-related group, which migrated northwards into Central Asia and Siberia, merging with this deeply European-related population. These population dynamics and constant northwards geneflow of East Asian-related ancestry would later gave rise to the “Ancestral Native Americans” and Paleosiberians, which replaced the ANE as dominant population of Siberia.” ref

Groups partially derived from the Ancient North Eurasians

“Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) is a lineage derived predominantly (75%) from ANE. It is represented by two individuals from Karelia, one of Y-haplogroup R1a-M417, dated c. 8,400 years ago, the other of Y-haplogroup J, dated c. 7,200 years ago; and one individual from Samara, of Y-haplogroup R1b-P297, dated c. 7,600 years ago. This lineage is closely related to the ANE sample from Afontova Gora, dated c. 18,000 years ago. After the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, the Western Hunter-Gatherers (WHG) and EHG lineages merged in Eastern Europe, accounting for early presence of ANE-derived ancestry in Mesolithic Europe. Evidence suggests that as Ancient North Eurasians migrated West from Eastern Siberia, they absorbed Western Hunter-Gatherers and other West Eurasian populations as well.” ref

“Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) is represented by the Satsurblia individual dated ~13,000 years ago (from the Satsurblia cave in Georgia), and carried 36% ANE-derived admixture. While the rest of their ancestry is derived from the Dzudzuana cave individual dated ~26,000 years ago, which lacked ANE-admixture, Dzudzuana affinity in the Caucasus decreased with the arrival of ANE at ~13 kya Satsurblia.” ref

“Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer (SHG) is represented by several individuals buried at Motala, Sweden ca. 6000 BCE. They were descended from Western Hunter-Gatherers who initially settled Scandinavia from the south, and later populations of EHG who entered Scandinavia from the north through the coast of Norway.” ref

“Iran Neolithic (Iran_N) individuals dated ~8,500 years ago carried 50% ANE-derived admixture and 50% Dzudzuana-related admixture, marking them as different from other Near-Eastern and Anatolian Neolithics who didn’t have ANE admixture. Iran Neolithics were later replaced by Iran Chalcolithics, who were a mixture of Iran Neolithic and Near Eastern Levant Neolithic.” ref

“Ancient Beringian/Ancestral Native American are specific archaeogenetic lineages, based on the genome of an infant found at the Upward Sun River site (dubbed USR1), dated to 11,500 years ago. The AB lineage diverged from the Ancestral Native American (ANA) lineage about 20,000 years ago.” ref

“West Siberian Hunter-Gatherer (WSHG) are a specific archaeogenetic lineage, first reported in a genetic study published in Science in September 2019. WSGs were found to be of about 30% EHG ancestry, 50% ANE ancestry, and 20% to 38% East Asian ancestry.” ref

“Western Steppe Herders (WSH) is the name given to a distinct ancestral component that represents descent closely related to the Yamnaya culture of the Pontic–Caspian steppe. This ancestry is often referred to as Yamnaya ancestry or Steppe ancestry.” ref

“Late Upper Paeolithic Lake Baikal – Ust’Kyakhta-3 (UKY) 14,050-13,770 years ago were mixture of 30% ANE ancestry and 70% East Asian ancestry.” ref

“Lake Baikal Holocene – Baikal Eneolithic (Baikal_EN) and Baikal Early Bronze Age (Baikal_EBA) derived 6.4% to 20.1% ancestry from ANE, while rest of their ancestry was derived from East Asians. Fofonovo_EN near by Lake Baikal were mixture of 12-17% ANE ancestry and 83-87% East Asian ancestry.” ref

“Hokkaido Jōmon people specifically refers to the Jōmon period population of Hokkaido in northernmost Japan. Though the Jōmon people themselves descended mainly from East Asian lineages, one study found an affinity between Hokkaido Jōmon with the Northern Eurasian Yana sample (an ANE-related group, related to Mal’ta), and suggest as an explanation the possibility of minor Yana gene flow into the Hokkaido Jōmon population (as well as other possibilities). A more recent study by Cooke et al. 2021, confirmed ANE-related geneflow among the Jōmon people, partially ancestral to the Ainu people. ANE ancestry among Jōmon people is estimated at 21%, however, there is a North to South cline within the Japanese archipelago, with the highest amount of ANE ancestry in Hokkaido and Tohoku.” ref

“Haplogroup R1 is very common throughout all of Eurasia except East Asia and Southeast Asia. Its distribution is believed to be associated with the re-settlement of Eurasia following the last glacial maximum. Its main subgroups are R1a and R1b.” ref  

“The split of R1a (M420) is computed to ca 25,000 years ago or roughly the last glacial maximum. A large study using 16,244 individuals from over 126 populations from across Eurasia, concluded that there was compelling evidence that “the initial episodes of haplogroup R1a diversification likely occurred in the vicinity of present-day Iran.” ref 

“A subclade of haplogroup R1a (especially haplogroup R1a1) is the most common haplogroup in large parts of South Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Western China, and South Siberia.  One subclade of haplogroup R1b (especially R1b1a2), is the most common haplogroup in Western Europe and Bashkortostan which is a federal subject of Russia. It is located between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.” ref 

Haplogroup R possible time of origin about 27,000 years in Central Asia, South Asia, or Siberia:

• Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (24,000-15,000 years ago)
• Afontova Gora culture (21,000-12,000 years ago) 
• Trialetian culture (16,000–8000 years ago) 
• Samara culture (7,000-6,500 years ago) 
• Khvalynsk culture (7,000-6,500 years ago) 
• Afanasievo culture (5,300-4,500 years ago) 
• Yamna/Yamnaya Culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)  
• Andronovo culture (4,000–2,900 years ago) ref 

“Sequencing of another south-central Siberian, Afontova Gora-2 dating to approximately 17,000 years ago, revealed similar autosomal genetic signatures as MA-1, suggesting that the region was continuously occupied by humans throughout the Last Glacial Maximum.” ref 

“Afontova Gora is a Late Upper Paleolithic Siberian complex of archaeological sites located on the left bank of the Yenisei River near the city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Afontova Gora has cultural and genetic links to the people from Mal’ta-Buret’.  Afontova Gora II consists of 7 layers. Layer 3 from Afontova Gora II is the most significant: the layer produced the largest amount of cultural artefacts and is the layer where the human fossil remains were discovered. Over 20,000 artefacts were discovered at layer 3: this layer produced over 450 tools and over 250 osseous artefacts (bone, antler, ivory).  The human fossil remains of Afontova Gora 2  discovered at Afontova Gora II dated to around 16,930-16,490 years ago.  The individual showed close genetic affinities to Mal’ta 1 (Mal’ta boy). Afontova Gora 2 also showed more genetic affinity for the Karitiana people versus Han Chinese. Moreover, human fossil remains  consisting of five lower teeth of a young girl (Afontova Gora 3) estimated to be around 14–15 years old is dated to around 16,130-15,749 BCE.” ref  

“The great majority of European ancestry derives from three distinct sources. 177 First, there is “hunter-gatherer-related” ancestry that is more closely related 178 to Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from Europe than to any other population, and that can be 179 further subdivided into “Eastern” (EHG) and “Western” (WHG) hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. 7 180 Second, there is “NW Anatolian Neolithic-related” ancestry related to the Neolithic farmers of northwest Anatolia and tightly linked to the appearance of agriculture.9,10 181 182 The third source, “steppe-related” ancestry, appears in Western Europe during the Late 183 Neolithic to Bronze Age transition and is ultimately derived from a population related to Yamnaya steppe pastoralists. 184 Steppe-related ancestry itself can be modeled as a mixture of 185 EHG-related ancestry, and ancestry related to Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers of the Caucasus (CHG) and the first farmers of northern Iran.” ref 

Map showing Afontova Gora (27) and Mal’ta (29), both circled. 

“Afontova Gora is an important site has cultural ties with Mal’ta and Buret’, hundreds of kilometres to the south east. It is on a north flowing river, the Yenisei, Енисея.
The settlement is dated to 20,000 – 18,000 years ago.” ref 

Haplogroup R1b (R-M343), is the most frequently occurring paternal lineage in Western Europe, as well as some parts of Russia (e.g. the Bashkir minority) and Central Africa (e.g. Chad and Cameroon). The clade is also present at lower frequencies throughout Eastern Europe, Western Asia, as well as parts of North Africa and Central Asia. R1b also reaches high frequencies in the Americas and Australasia, due largely to immigration from Western Europe. There is an ongoing debate regarding the origins of R1b subclades found at significant levels among some indigenous peoples of the Americas, such as speakers of Algic languages in central Canada. It has been found in Bahrain, Bhutan, Ladakh, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Western China. The point of origin of R1b is thought to lie in Western Eurasia, most likely in Western Asia.” ref   

“Within haplogroup R1b, there are extremely large subclades, R-U106 and R-P312. While these subclades are important to the overall picture, their size leads tonoise in the analysis of an R1b origin. It isthe minority branches of R1b (R-L278*, R-V88, R-M73*, R-YSC0000072/PF6426 andR-L23-) that provide the resolution required.(While the data from R-V88 supports anIberian origin, and along the Western Atlantic coast, with R-L278 origins south of the Pyrenees. And the  Pyrenees, Spanish Pirineos, French Pyrénées, Catalan Pireneus, mountain chain of southwestern Europe that consists of flat-topped massifs and folded linear ranges. It stretches from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea on the east to the Bay of Biscay on the Atlantic Oceanon the west. The Pyrenees form a high wall between France and Spain that has played a significant role in the history of both countries and of Europe as a whole.” ref, ref 

“R1b-V88 originated in Europe about 12 000 years ago and crossed to North Africa by about 8000 years ago; it may formerly have been common in southern Europe, where it has since been replaced by waves of other haplogroups, leaving remnant subclades almost excusively in Sardinia. It first radiated within Africa likely between 7,000 and 8 000 years ago – at the same time as trans-Saharan expansions within the unrelated haplogroups E-M2 and A-M13 – possibly due to population growth allowed by humid conditions and the adoption of livestock herding in the Sahara. R1b-V1589, the main subclade within R1b-V88, underwent a further expansion around 5,500 years ago, likely in the Lake Chad Basin region, from which some lines recrossed the Sahara to North Africa.” ref 

“The majority of modern R1b and R1a would have expanded from the Caspian Sea along with the Indo-European languages.  And genetic studies support the Kurgan hypothesis regarding the Proto-Indo-European homeland. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the West Eurasian Steppe, along with the Indo-European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.” ref 

The oldest human remains found to carry R1b include:

• Villabruna 1 (individual I9030), found in an Epigravettian culture setting in the Cismon valley (modern Veneto, Italy), who lived circa 14,000 years years ago and belonged to R1b-L754,
• numerous individuals from the Mesolithic Iron Gates culture of the central Danube (modern Romania and Serbia), dating from 10,000 to 8,500 years ago – most of them falling into R1b-L754;
• two individuals, dating from circa 7,800–6,800 years ago, found at the Zvejnieki burial ground, belonging to the Narva culture of the Baltic neolithic, both determined to belong to the R1b-P297 subclade, and;
• the “Samara hunter-gatherer” (I0124/SVP44), who lived approximately 7,500 years ago in the Volga River area and carried R1b-L278. ref 

“This burial is from the early Mesolithic stage which is proto-Lepenski Vir. Whereas, the general Lepenski Vir, located in Serbia, Mesolithic Iron Gates culture of the Balkans. Around 11,500/9,200–7,900 years ago.” ref,ref, ref 

“A particularly important hunter-gatherer population that we report is from the Iron Gates region that straddles the border of present-day Romania and Serbia. This population  (Iron_Gates_HG) is represented in our study by 40 individuals from five sites. Modeling Iron  Gates hunter-gatherers as a mixture of WHG and EHG (Supplementary Table 3) shows that  they are intermediate between WHG (~85%) and EHG (~15%). However, this qpAdm model 244 does not fit well (p=0.0003, Supplementary table 3) and the Iron Gates hunter-gatherers carry mitochondrial haplogroup K1 (7/40) as well as other subclades of haplogroups U (32/40) and H (1/40). This contrasts with WHG, EHG and Scandinavian hunter-gatherers who almost all carry haplogroups U5 or U2. One interpretation is that the Iron Gates hunter-gatherers have ancestry that is not present in either WHG or EHG. Possible scenarios include genetic contact between the ancestors of the Iron Gates population and Anatolia, or that the Iron Gates population is related to the source population from which the WHG split during a reexpansion into Europe from the Southeast after the Last Glacial Maximum.” ref   

“A notable finding from the Iron Gates concerns the four individuals from the site of Lepenski Vir, two of whom (I4665 & I5405, 8,200-7,600 years ago), have entirely NW Anatolian Neolithicrelated ancestry. Strontium and Nitrogen isotope data indicate that both these individuals were migrants from outside the Iron Gates, and ate a primarily terrestrial diet. A third individual (I4666, 8,070 years ago) has a mixture of NW Anatolian Neolithic-related and hunter-gatherer-related ancestry and ate a primarily aquatic diet, while a fourth, probably earlier, individual (I5407) had entirely hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. We also identify one individual from Padina (I5232), dated to 7,950 years ago that had a mixture of NW Anatolian Neolithic-related and hunter-gatherer-related ancestry. These results demonstrate that the Iron Gates was a region of interaction between groups distinct in both ancestry and subsistence strategy.” ref 

“R-M173, also known as R1, has been common throughout Europe and South Asia since pre-history. It is the second most common haplogroup in Indigenous peoples of the Americasfollowing haplogroup Q-M242, especially in the Algonquian peoples of Canada and the United States. There is a great similarity of many R-M173 subclades found in North America to those found in Siberia, suggesting prehistoric immigration from Asia and/or Beringia.” ref 

Picture links: ref, ref, ref, ref

“The Dyuktai culture was defined by Yuri Mochanov in 1967, following the Dyuktai Cave discovery on the Aldan River, Yakutia. In the Pleistocene deposits, at a 2-m depth, lithic tools and Pleistocene animal bones were exposed, radiocarbon dated to 14,000-12,000 years ago. Further research in Yakutia resulted in the discovery of other Dyuktai culture sites on the Aldan, Olenyok, and Indigirka rivers. The sites are located along the banks and at the estuary capes of smaller tributaries. The Dyuktai culture tool assemblage is represented by choppers, wedge-shaped cores, microblades, end scrapers on blades, oval bifaces, points, as well as angle, dihedral, and transversal burins on flakes and blades. The emergence of the Dyuktai culture defines the time when the microblade technique first appeared in northeast Asia. Judging by bones found in the same layers with tools, the Dyuktai people used to hunt mammoth, wooly rhino, bison, horse, reindeer, moose, and snow ram. Fishing tools have not been excavated, although a few fish bones were found in the Dyuktai cave Pleistocene cultural levels.” ref 

“The cultural materials at the sites were concentrated around small hearths with no special lining. The question of whether the bow and arrow existed in the Dyuktai culture has so far been open, because just a few stone points small enough to be used on arrows were found. Yu. Mochanov associates the Dyuktai culture emergence in Yakutia with the bifacial Paleolithic cultures coming from the southern Urals, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and northern China. From Dyuktai materials of some stratified sites, Yu. Mochanov dated the Dyuktai culture to 35,000-11,500 years ago. This date was broadly discussed by scholars within the debates on the question of the microblade industry emergence in Siberia and aroused some serious objections. The dates exceeding 25,000 years ago are deemed to be erroneous, so the microblade technique appeared in Siberia no earlier than 25,000 years ago. A. Derevyanko supposes that the origin of the Dyuktai culture can be found on the Selemja River, tributary of the Amur, in the Selemja culture, by 25000-11000 years ago.” ref 

“The Dyuktai tradition was spread over all of northeast Asia. In Kamchatka, it has been represented by the materials of the Late Ushki Upper Paleolithic culture in levels V and VI of the Ushki I-V sites. It determines the latest period in the Dyuktai tradition development, 10,800-8800 years ago. Its general outlook differs significantly from that of the Dyuktai culture in Yakutia. The sites are located on the bank of a small lake in the valley of Kamchatka’s largest river in its medium flow. The exposed dwellings are represented by surface, teepee-type, 8-16 m2, and semi-subterranean with the corridor, 10-44 m2, with circular stone hearths in the center. Several inhabited horizons exposed on the site and numerous stone tools, burials, and caches found in the dwellings testify to its long-term use, perhaps even as a winter camp.” ref 

“Judging by tooth remains in the cultural level, its people hunted for reindeer, bison, and moose. Burned salmon and other fish bones found in the hearths as well as the sites location at the spawning lake confirm the existence of fishing. The tool assemblage of the Ushki culture consisted of small- and medium-sized bifacial projectile points; end scrapers; angle, transversal, and dihedral burins; semilunar and oval bifaces; end scrapers on blades and flakes; microblades and wedge-shaped cores; and grooved pumice shaft straighteners. Ornaments were represented by oval pendants. In the dwellings, a pair and a group (as many as five human bodies) children’s burial were found. The corpses in both graves were in a flexed position and covered with ochre. The bottom of the pair-burial grave was covered with lemming incisors; the group burial was covered with a large animal’s scapula. The rich burial inventory included arrow and spear points, leaf-shaped knives, grinding plates, grooved pumice shaft.” ref 

“To help with geography, the following google map shows the following locations: A=the Altai Republic, in Russia, B=Mal’ta, the location of the 24,000 year old skeletal remains and C=Lake Baikal, the region from where the Native American population originated in Asia.” ref

The genome from Ust’-Ishim (Main Semi-Related Ancestor DNA Branch) 

“The Ust’-Ishim DNA was from northern Siberia that dates to 45,000 years ago, from the bank of the Irtysh River, which is in the Siberian plain near Omsk. Its source lies in the Mongolian Altai in Dzungaria (the northern part of Xinjiang, China) close to the border with Mongolia. The Ob-Irtysh system forms a major drainage basin in Asia, encompassing most of Western Siberia and the Altai Mountains.” ref, ref  

“Ust’-Ishim is more similar to genomes of non-Africans than it is to sub-Saharan African genomes. Ust’-Ishim is not more like the Mal’ta genome than it is like any other genomes of Asians or Native Americans. It is not like any living population of Asians or Native Americans more than any other.” ref 

 Link to Enlarge Population history inferences

“The MA-1 sequence compare to that of another 40,000-year-old individual from Tianyuan Cave, China whose genome has been partially sequenced. This Chinese individual has been shown to be ancestral to both modern-day Asians and Native Americans. This comparison was particularly useful, because it showed that MA-1 is not closely related to the Tianyuan Cave individual, and is more closely related to Native Americans. This means that MA-1’s line and Tianyuan Cave’s line had not yet met and admixed into the population that would become the Native Americans. That occurred sometime later than 24,000 years ago and probably before crossing Beringia into North America sometime between about 18,000 and 20,000 years ago.” ref 

“A basal Ancestral Native American (ANA) lineage. This lineage formed by admixture of early East Asian and Ancient North Eurasian lineages prior to the Last Glacial Maximum, ca. 36–25 kya. Basal ANA diverged into an “Ancient Beringian” (AB) lineage at ca. 20 kya. The non-AB lineage further diverged into “Northern Native American” (NNA) and “Southern Native American” (SNA) lineages between about 17,500 and 14,600 years ago. Most pre-Columbian lineages are derived from NNA and SNA, except for the American Arctic, where there is evidence of later (after 10kya) admixture from Paleo-Siberian lineages.” ref 

“DNA of a 12,500+-year-old infant from Montana was sequenced from a skeleton referred to as Anzick-1, found in close association with several Clovis artifacts. Comparisons showed strong affinities with DNA from Siberian sites, and virtually ruled out that particular individual had any close affinity with European sources (the “Solutrean hypothesis“). The DNA also showed strong affinities with all existing Amerindian populations, which indicated that all of them derive from an ancient population that lived in or near Siberia, the Upper Palaeolithic Mal’ta population.” ref 

“Native Americans descend of at least three main migrant waves from East Asia. Most of it is traced back to a single ancestral population, called ‘First Americans’. However, those who speak Inuit languages from the Arctic inherited almost half of their ancestry from a second East Asian migrant wave. And those who speak Na-dene, on the other hand, inherited a tenth of their ancestry from a third migrant wave. The initial settling of the Americas was followed by a rapid expansion southwards, by the coast, with little gene flow later, especially in South America. One exception to this are the Chibcha speakers, whose ancestry comes from both North and South America.” ref 

“Linguistic studies have backed up genetic studies, with ancient patterns having been found between the languages spoken in Siberia and those spoken in the Americas. Two 2015 autosomal DNA genetic studies confirmed the Siberian origins of the Natives of the Americas. However an ancient signal of shared ancestry with Australasians (Natives of Australia, Melanesia and the Andaman Islands) was detected among the Natives of the Amazon region. The migration coming out of Siberia would have happened 23,000 years ago.” ref 

“R1 is very common throughout all of Eurasia except East Asia and Southeast Asia. R1 (M173) is found predominantly in North American groups like the Ojibwe (50-79%), Seminole (50%), Sioux(50%), Cherokee (47%), Dogrib (40%) and Tohono O’odham (Papago) (38%). Skeletal remain of a south-central Siberian child carrying R* y-dna (Mal’ta boy-1) “is basal to modern-day western Eurasians and genetically closely related to modern-day Amerindians, with no close affinity to east Asians. This suggests that populations related to contemporary western Eurasians had a more north-easterly distribution 24,000 years ago than commonly thought.” Sequencing of another south-central Siberian (Afontova Gora-2) revealed that “western Eurasian genetic signatures in modern-day Amerindians derive not only from post-Columbian admixture, as commonly thought, but also from a mixed ancestry of the First Americans.” It is further theorized if “Mal’ta might be a missing link, a representative of the Asian population that admixed both into Europeans and Native Americans.” ref 

Swan Point 15,000 – 14,200 years ago

“It is significant that Swan Point is not only the oldest site (radiocarbon dated between circa 15,000 and 14,200 years ago), but also contains microblade technology throughout the multiple components.  This makes the site comparable with the other Tanana Valley sites, yet distinctive- a position that may be advantageous for testing theories on site formation, group mobility, and landscape exploitation patterns.” ref 

“Microblade technology, exemplified by the Dyuktai culture of Siberia, has been seen as linked to early cultures in Alaska, e.g., Denali complex and American Paleoarctic tradition. Clovis-like characteristics (e.g., blades, bifaces, scrapers and gravers) found in the Nenana complex, have been argued as evidence for a regional presence of the Paleoindian tradition. Swan Point appears to have aspects of both of these complexes at the earliest levels, as well as multiple occupation levels that range from the terminal Pleistocene to the late Holocene.  Swan Point has the potential to provide information on past life ways that would be of interest locally, regionally, and hemispherically.” ref   

“Evidence of charcoal that has been radiocarbon dated to approximately 14,000 years ago. The charcoal dating makes this the oldest known site in the Tanana River Valley.  The mammoth artifacts found in the Latest Pleistocene zone date to approximately 14,000 cal  years ago. With no other mammoth remains found beyond tusk ivory, it is assumed that the people who lived on the site scavenged the ivory rather than hunting the mammoth themselves.” ref 

Terminal Pleistocene

“This is the oldest cultural level from approximately 11,660 – 10,000 years ago. Artifacts found at this level include worked mammoth tusk fragments, microblades, microblade core preparation flakes, blades, dihedral burins, red ochre, pebble hammers, and quartz hammer tools and choppers. The microblades found at this zone are significant as they are the oldest securely dated microblades in eastern Beringia.” ref 

Latest Pleistocene

“A variety of bifacial points were found at this level, which dates to approximately 10,230 years ago, including lanceolate points with convex to straight bases, along with graver spurs, quartz pebble choppers and hammers.The mammoth artifacts found in the Latest Pleistocene zone date to approximately 14,000 years ago. With no other mammoth remains found beyond tusk ivory, it is assumed that the people who lived on the site scavenged the ivory rather than hunting the mammoth themselves.” ref 

Migration map of Y-haplogroup R1b from the Paleolithic to the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1000BCE) ref 

Paleolithic mammoth hunters

“Haplogroup R* originated in North Asia just before the Last Glacial Maximum (26,500-19,000 years ago). This haplogroup has been identified in the remains of a 24,000 year-old boy from the Altai region, in south-central Siberia. This individual belonged to a tribe of mammoth hunters that may have roamed across Siberia and parts of Europe during the Paleolithic. Autosomally this Paleolithic population appears to have contributed mostly to the ancestry of modern Europeans and South Asians, the two regions where haplogroup R also happens to be the most common nowadays (R1b in Western Europe, R1a in Eastern Europe, Central and South Asia, and R2 in South Asia).” ref 

“The oldest forms of R1b (M343, P25, L389) are found dispersed at very low frequencies from Western Europe to India, a vast region where could have roamed the nomadic R1b hunter-gatherers during the Ice Age. The three main branches of R1b1 (R1b1a, R1b1b, R1b1c) all seem to have stemmed from the Middle East. The southern branch, R1b1c (V88), is found mostly in the Levant and Africa. The northern branch, R1b1a (P297), seems to have originated around the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia or northern Mesopotamia, then to have crossed over the Caucasus, from where they would have invaded Europe and Central Asia. R1b1b (M335) has only been found in Anatolia.” ref 

Neolithic cattle herders

“It has been hypothetised that R1b people (perhaps alongside neighbouring J2 tribes) were the first to domesticate cattle in northern Mesopotamia some 10,500 years ago. R1b tribes descended from mammoth hunters, and when mammoths went extinct, they started hunting other large game such as bisons and aurochs. With the increase of the human population in the Fertile Crescent from the beginning of the Neolithic (starting 12,000 years ago), selective hunting and culling of herds started replacing indiscriminate killing of wild animals. The increased involvement of humans in the life of aurochs, wild boars and goats led to their progressive taming. Cattle herders probably maintained a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence, while other people in the Fertile Crescent (presumably represented by haplogroups E1b1b, G and T) settled down to cultivate the land or keep smaller domesticates.” ref 

“The analysis of bovine DNA has revealed that all the taurine cattle (Bos taurus) alive today descend from a population of only 80 aurochs. The earliest evidence of cattle domestication dates from circa 8,500 BCE in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic cultures in the Taurus Mountains. The two oldest archaeological sites showing signs of cattle domestication are the villages of Çayönü Tepesi in southeastern Turkey and Dja’de el-Mughara in northern Iraq, two sites only 250 km away from each others. This is presumably the area from which R1b lineages started expanding – or in other words the “original homeland” of R1b.” ref 

“The early R1b cattle herders would have split in at least three groups. One branch (M335) remained in Anatolia, but judging from its extreme rarity today wasn’t very successful, perhaps due to the heavy competition with other Neolithic populations in Anatolia, or to the scarcity of pastures in this mountainous environment. A second branch migrated south to the Levant, where it became the V88 branch. Some of them searched for new lands south in Africa, first in Egypt, then colonising most of northern Africa, from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahel. The third branch (P297), crossed the Caucasus into the vast Pontic-Caspian Steppe, which provided ideal grazing grounds for cattle. They split into two factions: R1b1a1 (M73), which went east along the Caspian Sea to Central Asia, and R1b1a2 (M269), which at first remained in the North Caucasus and the Pontic Steppe between the Dnieper and the Volga. It is not yet clear whether M73 actually migrated across the Caucasus and reached Central Asia via Kazakhstan, or if it went south through Iran and Turkmenistan. In any case, M73 would be a pre-Indo-European branch of R1b, just like V88 and M335.” ref 

“R1b-M269 (the most common form in Europe) is closely associated with the diffusion of Indo-European languages, as attested by its presence in all regions of the world where Indo-European languages were spoken in ancient times, from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Indian subcontinent, which comprised almost all Europe (except Finland, Sardinia and Bosnia-Herzegovina), Anatolia, Armenia, European Russia, southern Siberia, many pockets around Central Asia (notably in Xinjiang, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan), without forgetting Iran, Pakistan, northern India and Nepal. The history of R1b and R1a are intricately connected to each others.” ref 

The Levantine & African branch of R1b (V88)

“Like its northern counterpart (R1b-M269), R1b-V88 is associated with the domestication of cattle in northern Mesopotamia. Both branches of R1b probably split soon after cattle were domesticated, approximately 10,500 years ago (8,500 BCE). R1b-V88 migrated south towards the Levant and Egypt. The migration of R1b people can be followed archeologically through the presence of domesticated cattle, which appear in central Syria around 8,000-7,500 BCE (late Mureybet period), then in the Southern Levant and Egypt around 7,000-6,500 BCE (e.g. at Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba). Cattle herders subsequently spread across most of northern and eastern Africa. The Sahara desert would have been more humid during the Neolithic Subpluvial period (c. 7250-3250 BCE), and would have been a vast savannah full of grass, an ideal environment for cattle herding.” ref 

“Evidence of cow herding during the Neolithic has shown up at Uan Muhuggiag in central Libya around 5500 BCE, at the Capeletti Cave in northern Algeria around 4500 BCE. But the most compelling evidence that R1b people related to modern Europeans once roamed the Sahara is to be found at Tassili n’Ajjer in southern Algeria, a site famous pyroglyphs (rock art) dating from the Neolithic era. Some painting dating from around 3000 BCE depict fair-skinned and blond or auburn haired women riding on cows. The oldest known R1b-V88 sample in Europe is a 6,200 year-old farmer/herder from Catalonia. Autosomally this individual was a typical Near Eastern farmer, possessing just a little bit of Mesolithic West European admixture.” ref 

“After reaching the Maghreb, R1b-V88 cattle herders could have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, probably accompanied by G2 farmers, J1 and T1a goat herders. These North African Neolithic farmers/herders could have been the ones who established the Almagra Pottery culturein Andalusia in the 6th millennium BCE. R1b-V88 would have crossed the Sahara between 9,200 and 5,600 years ago, and is most probably associated with the diffusion of Chadic languages, a branch of the Afroasiatic languages. V88 would have migrated from Egypt to Sudan, then expanded along the Sahel until northern Cameroon and Nigeria. However, R1b-V88 is not only present among Chadic speakers, but also among Senegambian speakers (Fula-Hausa) and Semitic speakers (Berbers, Arabs).” ref 

“R1b-V88 is found among the native populations of Rwanda, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau. The wide distribution of V88 in all parts of Africa, its incidence among herding tribes, and the coalescence age of the haplogroup all support a Neolithic dispersal. In any case, a later migration out of Egypt would be improbable since it would have brought haplogroups that came to Egypt during the Bronze Age, such as J1, J2, R1a or R1b-L23.” ref 

The maternal lineages associated with the spread of R1b-V88 in Africa are mtDNA haplogroups J1b, U5 and V, and perhaps also U3 and some H subclades (=> see Retracing the mtDNA haplogroups of the original R1b people). ref 

The North Caucasus and the Pontic-Caspian steppe : the Indo-European link

“Modern linguists have placed the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a distinct geographic and archeological region extending from the Danube estuary to the Ural mountains to the east and North Caucasus to the south. The Neolithic, Eneolithic and early Bronze Age cultures in Pontic-Caspian steppe has been called the Kurgan culture (4200-2200 BCE) by Marija Gimbutas, due to the lasting practice of burying the deads under mounds (“kurgan”) among the succession of cultures in that region. It is now known that kurgan-type burials only date from the 4th millenium BCE and almost certainly originated south of the Caucasus. The genetic diversity of R1b being greater around eastern Anatolia, it is hard to deny that R1b evolved there before entering the steppe world.” ref 

“Horse domesticated around 4600 BCE in the Caspian Steppe, perhaps somewhere around the Don or the lower Volga, and soon became a defining element of steppe culture. Nevertheless it is unlikely that R1b was already present in the eastern steppes at the time, so the domestication of the horse should be attributed to the indigenous R1a people, or tribes belonging to the older R1b-P297 branch, which settled in eastern Europe during the Late Paleolithic or Mesolithic period. Samples from Mesolithic Samara (Haak 2015) and Latvia (Jones 2017) all belonged to R1b-P297. Autosomally these Mesolithic R1a and R1b individuals were nearly pure Mesolithic East European, sometimes with a bit of Siberian admixture, but lacked the additional Caucasian admixture found in the Chalcolithic Afanasevo, Yamna and Corded Ware samples.” ref 

It is not yet entirely clear when R1b-M269 crossed over from the South Caucasus to the Pontic-Caspian steppe. This might have happened with the appearance of the Dnieper-Donets culture(c. 5100-4300 BCE). This was the first truly Neolithic society in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. Domesticated animals (cattle, sheep and goats) were herded throughout the steppes and funeral rituals were elaborate. Sheep wool would play an important role in Indo-European society, notably in the Celtic and Germanic (R1b branches of the Indo-Europeans) clothing traditions up to this day. However, many elements indicate a continuity in the Dnieper-Donets culture with the previous Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, and at the same time an influence from the Balkans and Carpathians, with regular imports of pottery and copper objects. It is therefore more likely that Dnieper-Donets marked the transition of indigenous R1a and/or I2a1b people to early agriculture, perhaps with an influx of Near Eastern farmers from ‘Old Europe’. 

“Over 30 DNA samples from Neolithic Ukraine (5500-4800 BCE). They belonged to Y-haplogroups I, I2a2, R1a, R1b1a (L754) and one R1b1a2 (L388). None of them belonged to R1b-M269 or R1b-L23 clades, which dominated during the Yamna period. Mitochondrial lineages were also exclusively of Mesolithic European origin (U4a, U4b, U4d, U5a1, U5a2, U5b2, as well as one J2b1 and one U2e1). None of those maternal lineages include typical Indo-European haplogroups, like H2a1, H6, H8, H15, I1a1, J1b1a, W3, W4 or W5 that would later show up in the Yamna, Corded Ware and Unetice cultures. Indeed, autosomally genomes from Neolithic Ukraine were purely Mesolithic European (about 90% EHG and 10% WHG) and completely lacked the Caucasian (CHG) admxiture later found in Yamna and subsequent Indo-European cultures during the Bronze Age.” ref 

“The first clearly Proto-Indo-European cultures were the Khvalynsk (5200-4500 BCE) and Sredny Stog (4600-3900 BCE) cultures in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. This is when small kurgan burials begin to appear, with the distinctive posturing of the dead on the back with knees raised and oriented toward the northeast, which would be found in later steppe cultures as well. There is evidence of population blending from the variety of skull shapes. Towards the end of the 5th millennium, an elite starts to develop with cattle, horses and copper used as status symbols. It is at the turn of the Khvalynsk and Sredny Stog periods that R1b-M269’s main subclade, L23, is thought to have appeared, around 4,500 BCE. 99% of Indo-European R1b descends from this L23 clade. The other branch descended from M269 is PF7562, which is found mostly in the Balkans, Turkey and Armenia today, and may represent an early Steppe migration to the Balkans dating from the Sredny Stog period.” ref 

“Another migration across the Caucasus happened shortly before 3700 BCE, when the Maykop culture, the world’s first Bronze Age society, suddenly materialised in the north-west Caucasus, apparently out of nowhere. The origins of Maykop are still uncertain, but archeologists have linked it to contemporary Chalcolithic cultures in Assyria and western Iran. Archeology also shows a clear diffusion of bronze working and kurgan-type burials from the Maykop culture to the Pontic Steppe, where the Yamna culture developed soon afterwards (from 3500 BCE). Kurgan (a.k.a. tumulus) burials would become a dominant feature of ancient Indo-European societies and were widely used by the Celts, Romans, Germanic tribes, and Scythians, among others.” ref 

“The Yamna period (3500-2500 BCE) is the most important one in the creation of Indo-European culture and society. Middle Eastern R1b-M269 people had been living and blending to some extent with the local R1a foragers and herders for over a millennium, perhaps even two or three. The close cultural contact and interactions between R1a and R1b people all over the Pontic-Caspian Steppe resulted in the creation of a common vernacular, a new lingua franca, which linguists have called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It is pointless to try to assign another region of origin to the PIE language. Linguistic similarities exist between PIE and Caucasian and Hurrian languages in the Middle East on the one hand, and Uralic languages in the Volga-Ural region on the other hand, which makes the Pontic Steppe the perfect intermediary region.” ref 

“During the Yamna period cattle and sheep herders adopted wagons to transport their food and tents, which allowed them to move deeper into the steppe, giving rise to a new mobile lifestyle that would eventually lead to the great Indo-European migrations. This type of mass migration in which whole tribes moved with the help of wagons was still common in Gaul at the time of Julius Caesar, and among Germanic peoples in the late Antiquity. The Yamna horizon was not a single, unified culture. In the south, along the northern shores of the Black Sea coast until the the north-west Caucasus, was a region of open steppe, expanding eastward until the Caspian Sea, Siberia and Mongolia (the Eurasian Steppe).” ref 

“The western section, between the Don and Dniester Rivers (and later the Danube), was the one most densely settled by R1b people, with only a minority of R1a people (5-10%). The eastern section, in the Volga basin until the Ural mountains, was inhabited by R1a people with a substantial minority of R1b people (whose descendants can be found among the Bashkirs, Turkmans, Uyghurs and Hazaras, among others). The northern part of the Yamna horizon was forest-steppe occupied by R1a people, also joined by a small minority of R1b (judging from Corded Ware samples and from modern Russians and Belarussians, whose frequency of R1b is from seven to nine times lower than R1a). The western branch would migrate to the Balkans and Greece, then to Central and Western Europe, and back to their ancestral Anatolia in successive waves (Hittites, Phrygians, Armenians, etc.). The eastern branch would migrate to Central Asia, Xinjiang, Siberia, and South Asia (Iran, Pakistan, India). The northern branch would evolve into the Corded Ware culture and disperse around the Baltic, Poland, Germany and Scandinavia.” ref 

The Maykop culture, the R1b link to the Steppe?

“The Maykop culture (3700-2500 BCE) in the north-west Caucasus was culturally speaking a sort of southern extension of the Yamna horizon. Although not generally considered part of the Pontic-Caspian steppe culture due to its geography, the North Caucasus had close links with the steppes, as attested by numerous ceramics, gold, copper and bronze weapons and jewelry in the contemporaneous cultures of Mikhaylovka, Sredny Stog and Kemi Oba. The link between the northern Black Sea coast and the North Caucasus is older than the Maykop period. Its predecessor, the Svobodnoe culture (4400-3700 BCE), already had links to the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka and early Sredny Stog cultures. The even older Nalchik settlement (5000-4500 BCE) in the North Caucasus displayed a similar culture as Khvalynsk in the Caspian Steppe and Volga region. This may be the period when R1b started interracting and blending with the R1a population of the steppes.” ref 

“The Yamna and Maykop people both used kurgan burials, placing their deads in a supine position with raised knees and oriented in a north-east/south-west axis. Graves were sprinkled with red ochre on the floor, and sacrificed domestic animal buried alongside humans. They also had in common horses, wagons, a heavily cattle-based economy with a minority of sheep kept for their wool, use of copper/bronze battle-axes (both hammer-axes and sleeved axes) and tanged daggers. In fact, the oldest wagons and bronze artefacts are found in the North Caucasus, and appear to have spread from there to the steppes.” ref 

“Maykop was an advanced Bronze Age culture, actually one of the very first to develop metalworking, and therefore metal weapons. The world’s oldest sword was found at a late Maykop grave in Klady kurgan 31. Its style is reminiscent of the long Celtic swords, though less elaborated. Horse bones and depictions of horses already appear in early Maykop graves, suggesting that the Maykop culture might have been founded by steppe people or by people who had close link with them. However, the presence of cultural elements radically different from the steppe culture in some sites could mean that Maykop had a hybrid population. Without DNA testing it is impossible to say if these two populations were an Anatolian R1b group and a G2a Caucasian group, or whether R1a people had settled there too. The two or three ethnicities might even have cohabited side by side in different settlements. The one typical Caucasian Y-DNA lineage that does follow the pattern of Indo-European migrations is G2a-L13, which is found throughout Europe, Central Asia and South Asia. In the Balkans, the Danube basin and Central Europe its frequency is somewhat proportional to the percentage of R1b.” ref 

“Maykop people are the ones credited for the introduction of primitive wheeled vehicles (wagons) from Mesopotamia to the Steppe. This would revolutionise the way of life in the steppe, and would later lead to the development of (horse-drawn) war chariots around 2000 BCE. Cavalry and chariots played an vital role in the subsequent Indo-European migrations, allowing them to move quickly and defeat easily anybody they encountered. Combined with advanced bronze weapons and their sea-based culture, the western branch (R1b) of the Indo-Europeans from the Black Sea shores are excellent candidates for being the mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided the eastern shores of the Mediterranean during the second millennium BCE.” ref 

“The rise of the IE-speaking Hittites in Central Anatolia happened a few centuries after the disappearance of the Maykop and Yamna cultures. Considering that most Indo-European forms of R1b found in Anatolia today belong to the R1b-Z2103 subclade, it makes little doubt that the Hittites came to Anatolia via the Balkans, after Yamna/Maykop people invaded Southeast Europe. The Maykop and Yamna cultures were succeeded by the Srubna culture (1600-1200 BCE), possibly representing an advance of R1a-Z282 people from the northern steppes towards the Black Sea shores, filling the vacuum left by the R1b tribes who migrated to Southeast Europe and Anatolia.” ref 

Trialetian culture (16,000–8000 years ago)

“Trialetian is the name for an Upper Paleolithic–Epipaleolithic stone tool industry from the area south of the Caucasus Mountains and to the northern Zagros Mountains. It is tentatively dated to the period between 14,000 / 11,000 BCE and 6,000 BCE.  The Trialetian culture was preceded by the Baradostian culture and followed by the Nemrikian culture. The name of the archaeological culture derives from sites in the district of Trialeti in south Georgian Khrami river basin. These sites include Barmaksyzkaya and Edzani-Zurtaketi. Major sites Trialeti, Shanidar Cave, Huto and Kamarband Caves, Kotias Klde. In Edzani, an Upper Paleolithic site, a significant percentage of the artifacts are made of obsidian. The Caucasian–Anatolian area of Trialetian culture was adjacent to the Iraqi–Iranian Zarzian culture to the east and south as well as the Levantine Natufian to the southwest. Alan H. Simmons describes the culture as “very poorly documented”. In contrast, recent excavations in the Valley of Qvirila river, to the north of the Trialetian region, display a Mesolithic culture. The subsistence of these groups were based on hunting Capra caucasica, wild boar and brown bear.” ref 

“Early Anatolian farmers derived the vast majority of their ancestry (~90%) from a population related to the Anatolian hunter-gatherer in the study. “This suggests a long-term genetic stability in central Anatolia over five millennia, despite changes in climate and subsistence strategy.” ref

“The Proto-Neolithic begins about 12500 cal BC and ended about 8400 cal BC, spanning more than four millennia. Therefore, we must acknowledge that this period, which includes the Natufian in the Levant and other contemporary cultures in the East (Zarzian and Trialetian) and also the PPNA (Period 2) in the Levant, and other contemporary cultures in the East (Mlefatian and Nemrikian). In the period begins about 14,500 – 11,500 cal years ago there are two noticeable peaks: the first one around 14,000 cal years ago  applies to the Ancient Natufian culture found in the Levant, as confirmed by the dates from Hammeh, Mallaha, Beidha, the Hayonim cave or El Wad. It is interesting to note that sites further east that belong to different cultures such as Belt (the Trialetian culture), Shanidar (the Zarzian culture) or Okuzini are also occupied during this period. Ali Tappeh, on the Caspian Sea.” ref 

“The second peak, around 13,000 cal years ago corresponds to the Recent Natufian culture where the majority of sites are found. The central point of the period is at around 13,098 cal  years ago. Rosh Horesha, Nahal Oren, Mureybet, and Abu Hureyra stand out as being of a somewhat later Natufian culture. The two sites on the Euphrates mark the northern boundary of the Natufian region. At Abu Hureyra though, most of the dates are clustered between 13,000 – 12,000 cal years ago, a series of accelerated dates (OxA) would suggest occupation continued there until beyond 11,500 cal years ago. These could be indicative of a problem with the samples or the stratigraphy. At Mureybet, occupation would have taken place between 12,600 – 11,600 cal years ago.” ref 

This could relate to the “Urfa Man and Gobekli Tepe both in the similar region and at a seeming similar time as the Trialetian culture.

“13,500-year-old statue, the world’s oldest, discovered during an excavation in Balıklıgöl.” ref 

Shown in Turkey from the Province of Şanlıurfa

“Urfa man, known formally as the Balikligöl statue, is the oldest human-size statue of a man yet discovered in the world. If Urfa man embraced a notion of fertility, and if he depicts a deceased person, it might not directly relate to the human, but symbolise the annual reappearance of the seasons, comparable to the Egyptian god Osiris who mysteriously germinated the world from his invisible realm of the dead. In relation to this, we recall the theme of a headless, ithyphallic man on pillar 43 (the ‘vulture-stone’) at Göbekli Tepe. This image merges a figure of death with a continuity of fecundity. Conversely, so to speak, there have been detached stone phalluses discovered at the site. It is likely that Urfa man, fervent in deceptive silence and stood at the boundary of the living and the dead, was consulted at night.” ref 

“The European takeover of the Colony of Vancouver Island began in 1851. First Nations peoples vastly outnumbered settlers in 1860, yet almost no sign of their presence can be seen in the panorama of Victoria. The commonly used term Totem Pole refers to the tall cedar poles with multiple figures carved by Native people of the northern Northwest Coast. Several different types of monumental poles include: Mortuary poles made in the nineteenth century which housed the coffins of important people in a niche at the top; free standing memorial poles placed in front of houses to honor deceased chiefs; house frontal poles placed against the house front, often serving as doorways of houses; carved interior house posts that support roof beams. Carved of red cedar logs, the figures on totem poles are inherited crests, which identify the pole owners and tell their family histories.” ref, ref 

“Totem poles (Gyáa’aang in the Haida language) are monumental carvings, a type of Northwest Coast art, consisting of poles, posts or pillars, carved with symbols or figures. They are usually made from large trees, mostly western red cedar, by First Nations and indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coastincluding northern Northwest Coast Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshiancommunities in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia, Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulthcommunities in southern British Columbia, and the Coast Salish communities in Washingtonand British Columbia.” ref, ref 

“Totem poles have been made throughout the history of the Inuit People. When christian settlers, missionaries, invaded these areas they either convinced the Inuits to destroy them (seeing them as heathen forms of worship) or destroyed them themselves. Currently the oldest still standing totem’s are from the mid 1800’s.  While poles made by Native American tribes are the most famously known, the Mayans, Aztecs, Native Canadians, Native Australians, Maori, ingenious Koreans and ingenious Chinese are also known to have built totem poles. Totem poles are an ancient cultural practice of the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska. They have probably been made for as long as these areas have been inhabited but then don’t tend to last over 100 years.” ref, ref  

“Anybody who claims the Native Americans were the first to build totem poles are actually incorrect. Truth is, we don’t know where they originated from. The empires of ancient China and ancient Korea have existed long before the native Americans settled. Ancient ingenious Chinese and Koreans erected small totems to signify their obedience to their Gods and respect to their ancestors. They were often also used by Native Australian tribes and Maori tribes to mark their territories, warning rival tribes that they are entering their land, as well as to tell stories like most totem poles. Aztec and Mayan totem poles were carved from stone, mostly limestone. The poles are carved with images or representations of great battles and representations of Gods.” ref 

“The word totem derives from the Algonquian word odoodem [oˈtuːtɛm] meaning “(his) kinship group”. The carvings may symbolize or commemorate ancestors, cultural beliefs that recount familiar legends, clan lineages, or notable events. The poles may also serve as functional architectural features, welcome signs for village visitors, mortuary vessels for the remains of deceased ancestors, or as a means to publicly ridicule someone. They may embody a historical narrative of significance to the people carving and installing the pole. Given the complexity and symbolic meanings of totem pole carvings, their placement and importance lies in the observer’s knowledge and connection to the meanings of the figures and the culture in which they are embedded.” ref 

“‘Urfa Man’ is not from Göbekli Tepe and was found in the area of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site at Urfa-Yeni Mahalle / Yeni Yol, broken in four nearly equal pieces. The settlement was largely destroyed, but it featured a small T-shaped pillar similar to those from Göbekli Tepe’s Layer II.  This speaks for a PPN B date, as does the archaeological material recovered. The presence of a sculpture like the ‘Urfa Man’ and of T-shaped pillars are strong evidence for the presence of a special building inside the settlement at Urfa-Yeni Yol. It may have been comparable to the PPN B ‘cult buildings’ of Nevalı Çori.” ref 

“New Neolithic cult centers and domestic settlements in the light of Urfa Region Surveys:  The study concerns Neolithic period cult centres and settlements discovered recently during surface surveys in the central district of Urfa (Sanlıurfa) region in south-eastern Turkey. The presence of T-shaped pillars was ascertained at Ayanlar Höyük and Kurt Tepesi cult sites. Other settlements are domestic settlements arranged around cult centre settlements. Some sites belong to Pre Pottery Neolithic, and the others to Pottery Neolithic. They are believed to be coeval with Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çori cult sites. Nineteen Neolithic sites were examined as a result of the studies conducted in the Urfa region, at Kurt Te-pesi, Guhera Abid Mevkii, Selamet Kuzey Mevkii, Se-lamet Kuzey Höyügü, Çam-çak Tepesi, Terzi Village Batı Mevkii, Sıluba Tepesi, Asagı Yazıcı Güney Mevkii, Mınzilit Feris, Mınzilit Hıleyil, Mınzilit I ·sa, KarakusKuzeybatı Mev-kii, Çillo Mevkii 1, Çillo Mev-kii 2, omuzcurnu Tepesi, Ne-bi Tarlası, Ömer AltundagTar-lası, Hasan Sırtı and Ayanlar Höyük, respectively.” ref   

“Among these sites, T-shaped pillars were discovered at Kurt Te-pesi. At Ayanlar Höyük, on the other hand, a pedestal piece of what are thought to be T-shaped pillars and a lion head used for cult purposes have been unearthed. Based on these finds, Ayanlar Höyük is also thought to be a cult center. Flintstone tools and ceramics with characteristics of the Neolithic have been found at other sites. Selamet Guhera Abid Mevkii is one of the interesting sites discovered, and is thought to be a large snare area designed for catch-ing animals during this period.” ref 

Assessment and conclusion of the 19 Neolithic sites in Urfa

“Circular building architecture was unearthed at Se-lamet Kuzey Höyügü and Çamçak Tepe amongst the recently discovered sites. The remains of circular buildings were observed at Herzo Tepe, I ·nanlı Tepe, Hamzan Tepe and Sanlıurfa-Yeni Mahalle during studies conduct-ed in the region in previous years. Both T-shaped pil-lars and remains of circular buildings were encountered at Hamzan Tepe. Likewise, a body piece of a T-shaped pillar as well as the remains of circular ar-chitectural buildings were also discovered at Yeni Mahalle.” ref  

“The number of examples of this architectural tradition, which also resembles the circular cult buildings from Layers II and III of Göbekli Tepe, is gradually rising every day as a result of surface surveys. Examples of such buildings should date to the early stages of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period. Similar buildings were also encountered at settle-ments such as Çayönü, Hallan Çemi, Gusir Höyük, Hasankeyf Höyük and Körtik Tepe. The presence of T-shaped pillars is a feature com-mon to the Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori, Karahan Te-pe, Sefer Tepe, Taslı Tepe, Hamzan Tepe and Adıya-man Kilisik settlements. These pillars were also en-countered at Kurt Tepesi.” ref   

“One of the pillars unearth-ed at Kurt Tepesi has necktie-shaped groove and chevron pattern relief that we recognise from Göbekli Tepe and Nevali Çori. The chevron pattern on the pillar at Kurt Tepesi is dis-tinct from the pattern on the pillars at Nevali Çori, as this pattern has a single strip. However, this pat-tern is similar to the single-strip pattern on pillar 18 at the center of building D in Göbekli Tepe. In particular, the T-shaped pillars un-earthed at Kurt Tepesi have several characteristics in common with Layer II of Göbekli Tepe and the cult building at Nevali Çori. Due to such similarities, Kurt Tepesi should be dated to the late PPPA and early PPNB.” ref  

“Located approx. 10–15 km southeast of Karahan Te-pe, the Mınzilit  I ·sa, Mınzilit Feris, Mınzilit Hıleyil and Asagı Yazıcı Güney Mevkii settlements present, due to their location, characteristics distinct from the Neolithic settlements. The common feature of these settlements is that they are generally found on the southern slope of a rocky plateau and that they were inhabited in all periods. No architectural ele-ments were encountered, as agricultural activities are being conducted on the land where the settle-ments are located. The fact that such small-scale set-tlements are located in the vicinity of Karahan Tepe, and that such settlements contain no cult finds sug-gest they might have been domestic settlements af-filiated with Karahan Tepe cult center.” ref   

“Studies are being conducted at an area located ap-prox. 25km west of Sanlıurfa city centre in order to understand the discovery site of two artefacts from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic brought to Sanlıurfa Mu-seum in 2013 (Ercan, Çelik 2013.Figs. 1a–d, 3a–d). The studies conducted revealed that Ayanlar Höyük extends over an area of approx. 14ha. As a result of the research, the settlement was identified as a set-tlement inhabited during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Furthermore, seven additional satellite settlements thought to be affiliated to this settlement were also discovered during the surface survey carried out south of the Ayanlar Höyük.” ref  

“Domuzcurnu Tepesi, Nebi Tarlası, Ömer AltundagTarlası, Hasan Sırtı, Çil-lo Mevkii 1 and Çillo Mevkii 2 settlements, located at distances varying from 2–7km from Ayanlar Hö-yük. Finds from both the Pre-Pottery and Pottery Neolithic were unearthed at these settlements. These settlements are arranged in the form of a large set-tlement site at the centre with smaller domestic set-tlements arranged around it, as at Karahan Tepe and Kurt Tepesi. Guhera Abid Mevkii was probably used for mass hunting and snaring of wild animals. The site is lo-cated approx. 3km southeast of the Selamet Kuzey Mevkii, Selamet Kuzey Höyügü and Kurt Tepesi set-tlements. This large snare area, the largest encoun-tered in the region so far, lies in a pass that sepa-rates the Harran Plain and Viransehir plain.” ref   

“This site was most probably used for hunting antelope during the Neolithic period. The Çamçak Tepesi and Terzi village Batı Mevkii Neolithic settlements are located approx. 7km north- west of the Sefer Tepe site. These settlements were also probably domestic settlements of Sefer Tepe, like the Kocanizam, Basaran Höyük, Herzo Tepesi and I·nanlı Tepesi settlements. The Kurt Tepesi site has T-shaped pillars. An inter-esting fact is that this settlement is located at equal distances from both Karahan Tepe and Taslı Tepe. Karahan Tepe, Taslı Tepe and Kurt Tepesi are align-ed in a north-south direction, with 15km distance between the settlements.” ref  

“Another common aspect of these settlements, which are not yet excavated, is that probably all three were constructed only for cult purposes. The studies conducted indicate that the number of settlements in the region from the Neolithic period is considerable. Moreover, the finds unearthed from several settlements not only represent the Pre-Pot-tery Neolithic but also the Pottery Neolithic period. The surface surveys revealed new cult buildings and domestic settlements that we believe were affiliated with such cult buildings. Research will continue in the future around the previously discovered cult buildings.” ref 

“During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected – the world’s oldest known megaliths. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are currently known through geophysical surveys. Each pillar has a height of up to 6 m (20 ft) and weighs up to 10 tons. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock. In the second phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime. The site was abandoned after the PPNB.” ref  

Layer I

“Layer I is the uppermost part of the hill. It is the shallowest, but accounts for the longest stretch of time. It consists of loose sediments caused by erosion and the virtually-uninterrupted use of the hill for agricultural purposes since it ceased to operate as a ceremonial center. The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BCE: the buildings were buried under debris, mostly flint gravel, stone tools, and animal bones. In addition to Byblos points (weapon heads, such as arrowheads etc.) and numerous Nemrik points, Helwan-points, and Aswad-points dominate the backfill’s lithic inventory.” ref 

Layer II

“Creation of the circular enclosures in layer III later gave way to the construction of small rectangular rooms in layer II. Rectangular buildings make a more efficient use of space compared with circular structures. They often are associated with the emergence of the Neolithic, but the T-shaped pillars, the main feature of the older enclosures, also are present here, indicating that the buildings of Layer II continued to serve the same function in the culture, presumably as sanctuaries. Layer II is assigned to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB).” ref 

“The several adjoining rectangular, doorless and windowless rooms have floors of polished lime reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors. Carbon dating has yielded dates between 8800 and 8000 BCE. Several T-pillars up to 1.5 meters tall occupy the center of the rooms. A pair decorated with fierce-looking lions is the rationale for the name “lion pillar building” by which their enclosure is known. A stone pillar resembling totem pole designs was discovered at Göbekli Tepe, Layer II in 2010. It is 1.92 metres high, and is superficially reminiscent of the totem poles in North America. The pole features three figures, the uppermost depicting a predator, probably a bear, and below it a human-like shape. Because the statue is damaged, the interpretation is not entirely clear. Fragments of a similar pole also were discovered about 20 years ago in another Turkey site at Nevalı Çori. Also, an older layer at Gobekli features some related sculptures portraying animals on human heads.” ref  

Layer III 

“At this early stage of the site’s history, circular compounds or temene first appear. They range from 10 to 30 metres in diameter. Their most notable feature is the presence of T-shaped limestone pillars evenly set within thick interior walls composed of unworked stone. Four such circular structures have been unearthed so far. Geophysical surveys indicate that there are 16 more, enclosing up to eight pillars each, amounting to nearly 200 pillars in all. The slabs were transported from bedrock pits located approximately 100 metres (330 ft) from the hilltop, with workers using flint points to cut through the limestone bedrock. Two taller pillars stand facing one another at the centre of each circle. Whether the circles were provided with a roof is uncertain. Stone benches designed for sitting are found in the interior.” ref  

“Many of the pillars are decorated with abstract, enigmatic pictograms and carved animal reliefs. The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithiccave paintings elsewhere. The reliefs depict mammals such as lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, and donkeys; snakes and other reptiles; arthropods such as insects and arachnids; and birds, particularly vultures. At the time the edifice was constructed, the surrounding country was likely to have been forested and capable of sustaining this variety of wildlife, before millennia of human settlement and cultivation led to the near–Dust Bowl conditions prevalent today. Vultures also feature prominently in the iconography of Çatalhöyük and Jericho.” ref  

“Few humanoid figures have appeared in the art at Göbekli Tepe. Some of the T-shaped pillars have human arms carved on their lower half, however, suggesting to site excavator Schmidt that they are intended to represent the bodies of stylized humans (or perhaps deities). Loincloths appear on the lower half of a few pillars. The horizontal stone slab on top is thought by Schmidt to symbolize shoulders, which suggests that the figures were left headless. Whether they were intended to serve as surrogate worshippers, symbolize venerated ancestors, or represent supernatural, anthropomorphic beings is not known.Some of the floors in this, the oldest, layer are made of terrazzo (burnt lime), others are bedrock from which pedestals to hold the large pair of central pillars were carved in high relief. Radiocarbon dating places the construction of these early circles in the range of 9600 to 8800 BCE. Carbon dating suggests that (for reasons unknown) the enclosures were backfilled during the Stone Age.” ref 

“Karahan Tepe is the sister site to the enigmatic Göbekli Tepe, that sits around 23 miles southeast of Göbekli, upon an elevated limestone ridge. It has many striking similarities to Göbekli. Firstly, it consists of T-Shaped pillars – 266 of them that mostly form parallel rows. The pillars have relief carvings, and the site appears, like Göbekli, to be deliberately buried under a great artificial mound, although this could be natural, as after 10,500 years the accumulation of dirt, combined with high winds, could have covered it back up. The comparisons do not end there. It also has serpent relief carvings, strange rock indentations, large cup-marks, porthole stones, and an unfinished T-shaped pillar still in the quarry.  Like Göbekli Tepe it is located within the boundaries of Sanliurfa (ancient Edessa – the birthplace of Abraham) around 30 miles from the city.” ref 

“One T-shaped pillar measure it and discovered it was indeed 18 feet (5.5 metres) in length with a maximum width of 6.6 feet (2 metres) across its T-shaped head. This is similar in size to the twin monoliths at the centre of Göbekli’s Enclosure C and D. (3). The weathering was vey bad, much like the exposed parts of the pillars on the main hill. However, what lies underneath could be as well preserved as Göbekli Tepe.  There was further evidence of another unfinished T-shaped pillar on the eastern slope, next to other carvings, and what looked like a water channel leading through the bedrock. This pillar was smaller, perhaps 12-14ft long, and was more difficult to discern to the naked eye.  As with Göbekli Tepe, there are cup-marks all over the bedrock, which indicates this was in use long before the cup-mark phenomenon began in Britain, and could have even been the inspiration for it. Altogether, Karahan Tepe is a fascinating site that begs excavation, as the significance of the nearby Göbekli Tepe has now hit the headlines.” ref   

“The Tektek Mountains are  a range of mountains located east of Şanlıurfa (Urfa, formerly Edessa) in southeastern Turkey near the border with Syria known for the proliferation of large stone markers and cairns at summit of every height. There are also at least two ancient sites located there: Karahan Tepe and Sumatar Harabesi. The Tektek Mountains are located on the northern border of the Urfa-Harran plain, between the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, some 63 kilometers (39 mi) east of Urfa, and Sumatar Harabesi, some 60 kilometers (37 mi) from the same. Sumatar Harabesi is an oasis that served as an ancient watering hole for semi-nomadic peoples, as well as a sacred site with baetyls and altars dedicated to the worship of the deity, Sin.” ref 

“This entire complex was buried around 10,000 years ago.” ref 

“Haplogroup X is subdivided into two major branches, here defined as “X1” and “X2.”  Subhaplogroup X1 diversity indicates an early coalescence time and is restricted to the populations of North and East Africa and the Near East.” ref 

“X2 encompasses all X mtDNAs from Europe, western and Central Asia, Siberia, and the great majority of the Near East, as well as some North African samples. X2 has apparently undergone a more recent population expansion in Eurasia, most likely around or after the last glacial maximum. It is notable that X2 includes the two complete Native American X sequences that constitute the distinctive X2a clade, a clade that lacks close relatives in the entire Old World, including Siberia. The position of X2a in the phylogenetic tree suggests an early split from the other X2 clades, likely at the very beginning of their expansion and spread from the Near East.” ref 

“Haplogroup X is an exception to this pattern of limited geographical distribution. It is found, generally at low frequencies, in both West Eurasians but, intriguingly, it is absent in modern north Siberian and East Asian populations which are genetically and geographically closest to those of Native Americans. Among Siberians, haplogroup X mtDNAs have only been detected in some Altaian populations of southwestern Siberia.” ref 

“Haplogroup X mtDNAs from Europe and the Near East are found to yield similar coalescence times: 17,000–30,000 years before present (YBP) and 13,700–26,600 YBP, respectively. These estimates are consistent with a pre-Holocene origin and spread of this haplogroup into West Eurasia. For Native Americans, the relatively old presence of haplogroup X is confirmed by the analysis of ancient human remains. Moreover, Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs form a clade distinct from that of West Eurasians and with coalescence time estimates varying widely depending on both the method of estimation and the number of assumed founders. Thus, the coalescence times ranged from 12,000–17,000 YBP to 23,000–36,000 YBP, times that are consistent with both a pre- and a postglacial population diffusion.” ref   

“Virtually all (97.2%) haplogroup X mtDNAs from the Near East, the South Caucasus, and Europe were found to belong to subhaplogroup X2, as did all (100%) of those from Siberia and Central Asia and some (36.8%) of those from North Africa (table 2). Thus, subhaplogroup X2 is characterized by a very wide geographic range but also by an infrequent occurrence. Indeed, it generally comprises <5% of the mtDNAs in West Eurasian and North African populations (table 1). Three exceptions include the Druze, the Georgians, and the Orkney Islanders, among whom the frequency of X2 reaches 11%, 8%, and 7%, respectively. The high frequencies of X2 in the Druze and the Orkney Islanders are combined with a low haplotype diversity (0.400 and 0.473, respectively), and the relatively high frequency in these populations is most likely due to genetic drift and founder events. 

“Overall, it appears that the populations of the Near East, the Caucasus, and Mediterranean Europe harbor subhaplogroup X2 at higher frequencies than those of northern and northeastern Europe (P<.05) and that X2 is rare in Eastern European as well as Central Asian, Siberian, and Indian populations and is virtually absent in the Finno-Ugric and Turkic-speaking people of the Volga-Ural region. Coalescence time estimates based on HVS-I and coding region variation—17,900 ± 2,900 YBP and 21,600 ± 4,000 YBP, respectively and are consistent with the range expansion of X2 around or after the last glacial maximum (LGM). It is intriguing that the estimated coalescence time for X2 alone is very close to that obtained from HVS-I data for the entire haplogroup X (20,200 ± 3,100 YBP) (fig. 2). However, the latter is probably an underestimate due to both the higher proportion (>90%) of X2 mtDNAs included in the calculations and the fact that the HVS-I consensus sequence of X2 is completely identical to that of the overall haplogroup X. ” ref 

“Two-thirds of the subhaplogroup X2 sequences fall into the five clades X2b–X2f (fig. 2). Two sequences—one from Lebanon and one from Georgia—lacked the transition at np 1719, suggesting either the presence of an early X2 branch or a reversion at that nucleotide position. The sister groups X2b and X2c (X1 and X2, respectively, encompass one-third of the European sequences (excluding the samples from the North Caucasus). It is of interest that some North African sequences (from Morocco and Algeria) belong to X2b as well. Subhaplogroup X2b shows a diversity that is consistent with a postglacial population expansion in both West Eurasia and North Africa.” ref  

“Clades X2e and X2f encompass the majority (87.1%) of the sequences from the South Caucasus area and show coalescence times (12,000 ± 4,000 YBP and 10,800 ± 5,000 YBP, respectively) consistent with a Late Upper Paleolithic (LUP) origin and a subsequent spread in the region. We found significant differences between the haplogroup distribution between the North and the South Caucasian samples, a result that indicates a major geographical barrier between the two regions. The South Caucasian sample is enriched in mtDNAs belonging to clades X2e and X2f (P<.01), whereas the North Caucasian sample shows a higher proportion of sequences derived at nps 225 and 16248 (P<.01).” ref 

“Clade X2e, defined by the synonymous substitution at 15310, encompasses all haplogroup X sequences in the Altaians (fig. 2). Among the nine Altaian X sequences, eight harbor the founder HVS-I motif of X2e, and seven of these eight also carry the HVS-II founder motif. As a result, a very low haplotype diversity of haplogroup X (0) in the Altaian region was obtained, making it significantly different from the haplotype diversities for haplogroups C and D (0.835 and 0.943, respectively) in the same region. Moreover, the nine Altaian mtDNAs do not harbor any nucleotide difference between nps 16090 and 16365.” ref   

“Therefore, under the assumption that these sequences are a random sample of the Altaian haplogroup X, an estimated ρ value <0.33 (P<.05) was obtained. This value corresponds to a time depth of <6,700 years, and it would suggest that Altaians have acquired haplogroup X2 only relatively recently. This scenario is supported by the concomitant presence in the Altaians of a wide range of other West Eurasian haplogroups (H, J, I, T, U1, U4, and U5) that comprise ∼27% of their mtDNAs. Indeed, any recent migration (for example, from the [southern] Caucasus region) that might have carried X2e mtDNA sequences to the Altai region would also explain the presence of the other West Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups in modern Altaians.” ref 

“Further northeast of the Altai area, haplogroup X sequences were detected in the Tungusic-speaking Evenks, of the Podkamennaya Tunguska basin (Central Siberia). In contrast to the Altaians, the Evenks did not harbor any West Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups other than X. However, neither of the two Evenk X haplotypes showed mutations characteristic of the Native American clade X2a. Instead, one sequence was a member of X2b and the other of X2* (fig. 2). Thus, one possible scenario is that several X haplotypes arrived in Siberia from western Asia during the Palaeolithic, but only X2a crossed Beringia and survived in modern Native Americans. Alternatively, the presence of two phylogenetically different haplogroup X mtDNA sequences in this particular subpopulation of Evenks might be due to recent gene flow. ” ref 

‘The Native American–specific clade X2a appears to be defined by five mutations, three in the coding region (8913, 12397, and 14502) and two in the control region (200 and 16213) (fig. 1). The transition at np 200 was seen in virtually all previously analyzed Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs, whereas the transition at np 16213 was absent in some of the Ojibwa. We surveyed our Old World haplogroup X mtDNAs for the five diagnostic X2a mutations (table 2) and found a match only for the transition at np 12397 in a single X2* sequence from Iran.” ref   

“In a parsimony tree, this Iranian mtDNA would share a common ancestor with the Native American clade (fig. 2). Yet, the nonsynonymous substitution at np 12397 converting threonine to alanine cannot be regarded a conservative marker, as it has also been observed in two different phylogenetic contexts—in haplogroups J1 and L3e—among 794 complete mtDNA sequences. Therefore, the scenario that the threonine to alanine change in the haplogroup X background is indeed due to recurrence appears most plausible.” ref 

“These findings leave unanswered the question of the geographic source of Native American X2a in the Old World, although our analysis provides new clues about the time of the arrival of haplogroup X in the Americas. Indeed, if we assume that the two complete Native American X sequences (from one Navajo and one Ojibwa) began to diverge while their common ancestor was already in the Americas, we obtain a coalescence time of 18,000 ± 6,800 years ago, implying an arrival time not later than 11,000 years ago. ” ref 

“The results of this study point to the following conclusions. First, haplogroup X variation is completely captured by two ancient clades that display distinctive phylogeographic patterns—X1 is largely restricted to North and East Africa, whereas X2 is spread widely throughout West Eurasia. Second, it is apparent that the Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs derive from X2 by a unique combination of five mutations. Third, the few Altaian and Siberian haplogroup X lineages are not related to the Native American cluster, and they are more likely explained by recent gene flow from Europe or from West Asia. Fourth, the split between “African” X1 and “Eurasian” X2 subhaplogroups of X is phylogenetically as deep as that within the branches of haplogroup U that also differ profoundly in their phylogeography.” ref  

“Thus, subhaplogroup U6 is largely restricted to North Africa (as X1), whereas subhaplogroup U5 is widespread in West Eurasia (as X2). The phylogeographic patterns and the coalescence times that we obtained here suggest that the basic phylogenetic structures of the mtDNA haplogroups in West Eurasia and North Africa are as ancient as the beginning of the spread of anatomically modern humans in this region. Finally, phylogeography of the subclades of haplogroup X suggests that the Near East is the likely geographical source for the spread of subhaplogroup X2, and the associated population dispersal occurred around, or after, the LGM when the climate ameliorated. The presence of a daughter clade in northern Native Americans testifies to the range of this population expansion.” ref  

mtDNA haplogroup X: An ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America?

Brown MD1, Hosseini SH, Torroni A, Bandelt HJ, Allen JC, Schurr TG, Scozzari R, Cruciani F, Wallace DC.

Author information

Abstract

“On the basis of comprehensive RFLP analysis, it has been inferred that approximately 97% of Native American mtDNAs belong to one of four major founding mtDNA lineages, designated haplogroups “A”-“D.” It has been proposed that a fifth mtDNA haplogroup (haplogroup X) represents a minor founding lineage in Native Americans. Unlike haplogroups A-D, haplogroup X is also found at low frequencies in modern European populations. To investigate the origins, diversity, and continental relationships of this haplogroup, we performed mtDNA high-resolution RFLP and complete control region (CR) sequence analysis on 22 putative Native American haplogroup X and 14 putative European haplogroup X mtDNAs. The results identified a consensus haplogroup X motif that characterizes our European and Native American samples.” ref  

“Among Native Americans, haplogroup X appears to be essentially restricted to northern Amerindian groups, including the Ojibwa, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth, the Sioux, and the Yakima, although we also observed this haplogroup in the Na-Dene-speaking Navajo. Median network analysis indicated that European and Native American haplogroup X mtDNAs, although distinct, nevertheless are distantly related to each other. Time estimates for the arrival of X in North America are 12,000-36,000 years ago, depending on the number of assumed founders, thus supporting the conclusion that the peoples harboring haplogroup X were among the original founders of Native American populations. To date, haplogroup X has not been unambiguously identified in Asia, raising the possibility that some Native American founders were of Caucasian ancestry.” ref  

Early agriculture from Iran

A quite useful map from the press release of this paper:

“The following map from an accompanying perspective is also quite interesting; “Dates in blue denote early cultivation of wild cereals” but “Ongoing excavations in central Anatolia and Cyprus are pushing dates back in these areas.” ref 

“The issue of whether there was a single or (more likely multiple) areas of early agriculture is potentially important as it would imply that there were genetically differentiated (due to geographic distance) populations in the Neolithic womb of nations. In a global, or even a Eurasian context, these populations would be relatively genetically close, but not identical; it would be interesting to see to what extent present-day differentiation in the Near East reflects those early differences as opposed to more recent events. 

Science 5 July 2013: Vol. 341 no. 6141 pp. 65-67

Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran

Simone Riehl et al.

“The role of Iran as a center of origin for domesticated cereals has long been debated. High stratigraphic resolution and rich archaeological remains at the aceramic Neolithic site of Chogha Golan (Ilam Province, present-day Iran) reveal a sequence ranging over 2200 years of cultivation of wild plants and the first appearance of domesticated-type species. The botanical record from Chogha Golan documents how the inhabitants of the site cultivated wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and other wild progenitor species of modern crops, such as wild lentil and pea. Wild wheat species (Triticum spp.) are initially present at less than 10% of total plant species but increase to more than 20% during the last 300 years of the sequence. Around 9800 calendar years before the present, domesticated-type emmer appears. The archaeobotanical remains from Chogha Golan represent the earliest record of long-term plant management in Iran.” ref 

How Agriculture Changed the Life of Paleo Indians

Human societies evolve for a number of reasons. Economic shifts, religious influences, leadership changes, environmental impacts and the availability of food all play a role in the changes that take place within a culture. We see these changes, or at least the evidence of them, within any number of different modern cultures, but within Paleo-Indian cultures the change was less dramatic and a good deal less wide-spread.” ref  

“Agriculture first began developing in the Americas approximately 10,000 years ago. Beginning as hunter-gatherer societies, groups of people began by simply collecting wild resources, from game to tubers, nuts, berries and later grass seeds. In time, through selective seed use, the first crops began providing a sedentary source of food. The primary source of food for these groups shifted from the herds of buffalo, elk and deer to those things that could be easily harvested or collected. The shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society did not take hold with all Paleo-Indian groups though, taking root, so to speak, in the Eastern United States, the Mississippi floodplain, and to a lesser extent along the Pacific coast.” ref  

“It wasn’t just food that changed, though. Where once it was necessary to be mobile, agrarian tribes began changing their building techniques, adapting to a more stationary existence. We see evidence of this in the long houses of the Iroquois, and the Temple Mounds of Cahokia. Permanent structures built of earthworks, or painstakingly crafted from readily available resources. Homes and structures which, unlike the hide lodges of the nomadic plains groups, could not be taken along with them if the need to move arose. Agricultural societies expected to be in one place for a long time, because that was where their food was.” ref  

“The last thing to change was the expression of their spirituality. Where nomadic groups kept small trinkets and fetishes as a representation of their beliefs or religion, the sedentary agrarian societies erected monuments, and towering structures to demonstrate their link to the spiritual aspects of life. Indeed, the Iroquois even adopted gods to match with the predominant plants they were harvesting. The Three Sisters of the Iroquois were a spiritual expression of their planting practices, where beans, squash and corn were all planted within the same hill and each helped the other two to grow and flourish. These three plants were also the result of the previous 9,000 years of human influence. Through careful seed selection, and harvest, corn changed from a willowy grass into what we enjoy today while squash and beans evolved from a floodplain weed into hardy staples of agriculture. So, while agriculture changes society, so too does human society change agriculture.” ref 

Foundation, N. S. (2005, May 27). Scientists Trace Corn Ancestry from Ancient Grass to Modern Crop. Retrieved from NSF.ORG: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=104207 

“The Yamna descended partially from the Ice Age Mal`ta Buret culture that existed on the western side of lake Baikal 15.000 years ago. Genome studies of skeletons from this culture show that these Baikal people of East Central Asia were also among the ancestors to Siberian and Native American peoples. Some 15.000 years ago, some of these East Asians moved further east and north and entered the American continent, others moved north and became Siberians, while others still moved west and roamed the Pontic Caspian steppes until they reached the area to the north of the Caucasus, where they mingled with descendants of Ice Age Europeans and Ice Age Middle Eastern peoples. By 6.000 years ago, this mix of three different geographical and ethnic origins, all Ice Age hunter-gatherers, had become a culture in their own right, the shepherding Yamna, and the first speakers of an Indo-European language.” ref  

“One of the earliest cultures known to archaeology that is associated with the Indo-European language family is the Yamna. This culture is now regarded as the most likely candidate for a Proto-Indo-European culture which existed between 6.000 and 4.300 years ago (4.000-2.300 BCE). The name of this culture is Ukrainian for “Pit Grave” culture, a name given by archaeologists based on their burial customs. It is also associated with (identical to) the Kurgans.” ref 

My response, Here are some scientific facts and a good explanation for why so many of the world’s mythology seem similar, because it actually is. Religion including your Christian mythology is but part of a larger web of related mythology. Religion is a cultural product.

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art 

ref, ref, ref 

• Ancient North Eurasian(ANE)
• Ancient Beringian/Ancestral Native American(AB/ANA)
• Eastern Hunter-Gatherer(EHG)
• Western Hunter-Gatherers(WHG)
• Western Steppe Herders(WSH) 
• Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer(SHG)
• Early European Farmers(EEF)
• Jōmonpeople (Ainu people OF Hokkaido Island) 
• Neolithic Iranian farmers(Iran_N) (Iran Neolithic)
• Amur Culture(Amur watershed) 

 Haplogroup R possible time of origin about 27,000 years in Central Asia, South Asia, or Siberia:

• Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (24,000-15,000 years ago)
• Afontova Gora culture (21,000-12,000 years ago)
• Trialetian culture (16,000–8000 years ago)
• Samara culture (7,000-6,500 years ago)
• Khvalynsk culture (7,000-6,500 years ago)
• Afanasievo culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)
• Yamna/Yamnaya Culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)
• Andronovo culture (4,000–2,900 years ago) ref

• Mal’ta–Buret’ culture of Siberia and Basal Haplogroup R* or R-M207
• Groups partially derived from the Ancient North Eurasians
• Ainu people, Sámi people, Native Americans, the Ancient North Eurasians, and Paganistic-Shamanism with Totemism
• The Mytheme of Ancient North Eurasian Sacred-Dog belief and similar motifs are found in Indo-European, Native American, and Siberian comparative mythology

“The ANE lineage is defined by association with the MA-1, or “Mal’ta boy,” remains of 24,000 years ago in central Siberia Mal’ta-Buret’ culture 24,000-15,000 years ago. The Ancient North Eurasians (ANE) samples (Afontova Gora 3, Mal’ta 1, and Yana-RHS) show evidence for minor gene flow from an East Asian-related group (simplified by the Amis, Han, or Tianyuan) but no evidence for ANE-related geneflow into East Asians (Amis, Han, Tianyuan), except the Ainu, of North Japan.” ref  

“The ANE lineage is defined by association with the MA-1, or “Mal’ta boy,” remains of 24,000 years ago in central Siberia Mal’ta-Buret’ culture 24,000-15,000 years ago “basal to modern-day Europeans.” Some Ancient North Eurasians also carried East Asian populations, such as Tianyuan Man.” ref 

“Bronze-age-steppe Yamnaya and Afanasevo cultures were ANE at around 50% and Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) at around 75% ANE. Karelia culture: Y-DNA R1a-M417 8,400 years ago, Y-DNA J, 7,200 years ago, and Samara, of Y-haplogroup R1b-P297 7,600 years ago is closely related to ANE from Afontova Gora, 18,000 years ago around the time of blond hair first seen there.” ref  

“Haplogroup R1 is very common throughout all of Eurasia except East Asia and Southeast Asia. Its distribution is believed to be associated with the re-settlement of Eurasia following the last glacial maximum. Its main subgroups are R1a and R1b.” ref   

“The split of R1a (M420) is computed to ca 25,000 years ago or roughly the last glacial maximum. A large study using 16,244 individuals from over 126 populations from across Eurasia, concluded that there was compelling evidence that “the initial episodes of haplogroup R1a diversification likely occurred in the vicinity of present-day Iran.” ref  

“A subclade of haplogroup R1a (especially haplogroup R1a1) is the most common haplogroup in large parts of South Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Western China, and South Siberia.  One subclade of haplogroup R1b (especially R1b1a2), is the most common haplogroup in Western Europe and Bashkortostan which is a federal subject of Russia. It is located between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.” ref  

Haplogroup R possible time of origin about 27,000 years in Central Asia, South Asia, or Siberia:

• Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (24,000-15,000 years ago)
• Afontova Gora culture (21,000-12,000 years ago) 
• Trialetian culture (16,000–8000 years ago) 
• Samara culture (7,000-6,500 years ago) 
• Khvalynsk culture (7,000-6,500 years ago) 
• Afanasievo culture (5,300-4,500 years ago) 
• Yamna/Yamnaya Culture (5,300-4,500 years ago)  
• Andronovo culture (4,000–2,900 years ago) ref 

• Ancient North Eurasian
• Ancient Northern East Asian/ later became Ancient Northeast Asian
  Ancient Paleo-Siberian
  Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (Mal’ta boy MA-1)
• Kolyma Region– “Kolyma River“
• The Kolyma Shaitans: Legends and Reality(I only use just a small part)

“A unique “shaitan” burial was discovered on the bank of Omuk-Kuel Lake in the Middle-Kolyma ulus in Yakutia. According to the legends, buried in it are mummified remains of a shaman woman who died during a devastating smallpox epidemics in the 18th c. In an attempt to overcome the deadly disease, the shaman’s relatives used her remains as an emeget fetish. The author believes that these legends reflect the real events of those far-away years. The Arabic word “shaitan” came to the Russian language from Turkic languages. According to Islamic tradition, a shaitan is a genie, an evil spirit, a demon. During Russian colonization and Christianization of Siberia, all sacred things used by the aborigines as fetishes, patron spirits of the family, and the tribe, grew to be called “shaitans.” There are various facts, dating to the 18th and 19th cc., confirming that this word also referred to the mummified remains of outstanding shamans.” ref 

“In the 1740s, a member of the Second Kamchatka Expedition Yakov Lindenau wrote, “Meat is scratched off the [shaman’s] bones and the bones are put together to form a skeleton, which is dressed in human’s clothes and worshipped as a deity. The Yukagirs place such dressed bones…in their yurts, their number can sometimes reach 10 or 15. If somebody commits even a minor sacrilege with respect to these bones, he stirs up rancor on the part of the Yukagirs… While traveling and hunting, the Yukagirs carry these bones in their sledges, and moreover, in their best sledges pulled by their best deer. When the Yukagirs are going to undertake something really important, they tell fortune using these skeletons: lift a skeleton up, and if it seems light, it means that their enterprise will have a favorable outcome. The Yukagirs call these skeletons stariks (old men), endow them with their best furs, and sit them on beds covered with deer hides, in a circle, as though they are alive.” (Lindenau, 1983, p. 155)” ref 

“In the late 19th c., a famous explorer of aboriginal culture V. I. Jochelson noted the changes that occurred in the ritual in the last century and a half. So, the Yukagirs divided among themselves the shaman’s meat dried in the sun and then put it in separate tents. The dead bodies of killed dogs were left there as well. “After that,” V. I. Jochelson writes, “they would divide the shaman’s bones, dry them and wrap in clothes. The skull was an object of worshipping. It was put on top of a trunk (body) cut out of wood. A caftan and two hats – a winter and a summer one – were sewn for the idol. The caftan was all embroidered. On the skull, a special mask was put, with holes for the eyes and the mouth… The figure was placed in the front corner of the home. Before a meal, a piece of food was thrown into the fire, and the idol was held above it. This feeding of the idol… was committed before each meal.” (V. I. Jochelson, 2005, pp. 236—237)” ref 

“The idol was kept by the children of the dead shaman. One of them was inducted into the shamanism mysteries while his father was still alive. The idol was carried in a wooden box. Sometimes, in line with the air burial ritual, the box was erected on poles or trees, and the idol was taken out only before hunting or a long journey so that the outcome of the enterprise planned could be predicted. With time, the Yukagirs began using wooden idols as charms. V. I. Jochelson notes that by the late 19th c. the Yukagirs had developed a skeptical attitude towards idols and referred to them as “shaitans.” In this way, under the influence of Christianity, the worshipped ancestor’s spirit turned into its opposite – an evil spirit, a devil, a Satan.” ref 

Ancestral Native American, Ancient Beringian

14,000-year-old Ust-Kyakhta-3 (UKY) individual found near Lake Baikal

Amur River Region

Chertovy Vorota Cave/Devil’s Gate Cave

Afanasievo culture

Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex

My response, Here science facts explain the related DNA around the world and helps explain how most religious beliefs share related connections.

ref

“The mutation for blond hair is thought to have originated among the Afontova Gora population of the Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) cline of south-central Siberia.” ref

The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers further East

“Highlights:

• Increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry in Bronze Age Eastern Baltic genomes
• Genetic input from Siberia to the Eastern Baltic during the transition to Iron Age
• Arrival of Siberian ancestry coincides with the proposed arrival of Uralic languages
• Light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance become frequent in the Bronze Age” ref

“In this study, we compare the genetic ancestry of individuals from two as yet genetically unstudied cultural traditions in Estonia in the context of available modern and ancient datasets: 15 from the Late Bronze Age stone-cist graves (1200–400 BCE) (EstBA) and 6 from the Pre-Roman Iron Age tarand cemeteries (800/500 BCE–50 CE) (EstIA). We also included 5 Pre-Roman to Roman Iron Age Ingrian (500 BCE–450 CE) (IngIA) and 7 Middle Age Estonian (1200–1600 CE) (EstMA) individuals to build a dataset for studying the demographic history of the northern parts of the Eastern Baltic from the earliest layer of Mesolithic to modern times. Our findings are consistent with EstBA receiving gene flow from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer (WHG) affinities and EstIA from populations related to modern Siberians. The latter inference is in accordance with Y chromosome (chrY) distributions in present-day populations of the Eastern Baltic, as well as patterns of autosomal variation in the majority of the westernmost Uralic speakers. This ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BCE; i.e., in the same time window as the diversification of west Uralic (Finnic) languages. Furthermore, phenotypic traits often associated with modern Northern Europeans, like light eyes, hair, and skin, as well as lactose tolerance, can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic.” ref

“The Eastern Baltic has witnessed several population shifts since people reached its southern part during the Final Paleolithic ∼11,000–10,000 BCE and its northern part during the Mesolithic ∼9000 BCE. No genetic information is available from Paleolithic populations, but Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the Kunda and Narva cultures were genetically most similar to Western hunter-gatherers (WHGs) widespread in Europe. A genetic shift toward Eastern hunter-gatherer (EHG) genetic ancestry occurred with the arrival of the Neolithic Comb Ceramic culture (CCC) people ∼3900 BCE. The Late Neolithic (LN) Corded Ware culture (CWC) people of Ponto-Caspian steppe origin brought farming into the Eastern Baltic ∼2800 BCE, contrary to most of Europe, where the Neolithic transition was mediated by Aegean early farmers. Human remains radiocarbon dated to the Early Bronze Age (ca. 1800–1200 BCE) are rare from this region, and no ancient DNA (aDNA) data are currently available. Genetic data from succeeding Bronze Age (BA) layers in Latvia and Lithuania indicate some genetic affinities with modern Eastern Baltic populations but also notable differences.” ref

“In this study, we present new genomic data from Estonian Late Bronze Age stone-cist graves (1200–400 BCE) (EstBA) and Pre-Roman Iron Age tarand cemeteries (800/500 BCE–50 CE) (EstIA). The cultural background of stone-cist graves indicates strong connections both to the west and the east. The Iron Age (IA) tarands have been proposed to mirror “houses of the dead” found among Uralic peoples of the Volga-Kama region. As this time window matches the proposed diversification period of western Uralic languages and the arrival of Proto-Finnic language in the Eastern Baltic from the east, our study considers linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to inform on this. One of the most notable genetic features of Eastern Baltic populations is a high frequency of Y chromosome (chrY) haplogroup (hg) N3a (nomenclature of Karmin et al.), a characteristic shared mostly with Finno-Ugric-speaking groups in Europe and several populations all over Siberia. The rapid expansion of people carrying these lineages likely took place within the last 5,000 years, but their arrival time in the Eastern Baltic remains unresolved. The gene flow from Siberia to western-Uralic-speaking populations has also recently been inferred using autosomal data. However, available aDNA data have not revealed chrY hg N lineages in Eastern Baltic individuals.” ref 

“To characterize the genetic ancestry of people from the so-far-unstudied cultural layers, we extracted DNA from the tooth roots of 56 individuals (Figure 1A; Table S1; STAR Methods). No individuals were included from later IA in Estonia because people were mostly cremated during that period. Individuals morphologically sexed as males were prioritized in sampling to make comparisons using autosomal and both sex chromosomes. We shotgun sequenced all samples and they formed 3 groups: (1) 15 with low endogenous DNA content and resulting coverage, which were excluded from further analyses; (2) 8 with sufficient mtDNA (and in some cases, chrY) coverage for determining hgs, but not for informative autosomal analyses; and (3) 33 that yielded sufficient autosomal data for informative analyses. The 33 individuals included 15 from EstBA, 6 from EstIA, 5 from Pre-Roman to Roman Iron Age Ingria (500 BCE–450 CE) (IngIA), and 7 from Middle Age Estonia (1200–1600 CE) (EstMA) and yielded endogenous DNA ∼4%–88%, average genomic coverages ∼0.017–0.734×, and contamination estimates <4% (Table S1). We analyzed the data in the context of modern and other ancient individuals, including from Neolithic Estonia.” ref

“We identified chrY hgs for 30 male individuals (Tables 1 and S2; STAR Methods). All 16 successfully haplogrouped EstBA males belonged to hg R1a, showing no change from the CWC period, when this was also the only chrY lineage detected in the Eastern Baltic. Three EstIA and two IngIA individuals also belonged to hg R1a, but three EstIA males belonged to hg N3a, the earliest so far observed in the Eastern Baltic. Three EstMA individuals belonged to hg N3a, two to hg R1a, and one to hg J2b. ChrY lineages found in the Baltic Sea region before the CWC belong to hgs I, R1b, R1a5, and Q. Thus, it appears that these lineages were substantially replaced in the Eastern Baltic by hg R1a, most likely through steppe migrations from the east. Although we did not detect N3a chrYs in our BA sample, unlike in BA Fennoscandia, we cannot rule out its presence due to small sample size. However, the frequency should not exceed 0.17 with 95% and 0.25 with 99% confidence. The frequency of hg N3a was significantly higher in our IA than our BA group (Fisher’s exact test p value 0.013). Our results enable us to conclude that, although the expansion time for R1a1 and N3a3′5 in Eastern Europe is similar, hg N3a likely reached Estonia or at least became comparably frequent to modern Estonia only during the BA-IA transition.” ref

“To assess whether the Eastern Eurasian influence indicated by chrY hg N3a is apparent elsewhere in the genome, we first applied principal-component analysis (PCA). We projected ancient genomes from previous studies (Table S3) and this study on two axes inferred using Estonian Biocenter Illumina genotyping array data (EBC-chipDB) of modern Western Eurasian individuals (Table S3) (Figure 1C). A clear shift toward West Eurasian hunter-gatherers is visible between European LN and BA (including Baltic CWC) and EstBA individuals, the latter clustering together with Latvian and Lithuanian BA individuals. EstIA, IngIA, and EstMA individuals project between BA individuals and modern Estonians, partially overlapping with both. We performed ADMIXTURE analysis by projecting aDNA data on worldwide EBC-chipDB modern data (Figures S1C and S1D; Table S3) and present results at K = 9 (Figures 1B, S1A, and S1B; STAR Methods). EstBA individuals are clearly distinguishable from Estonian CWC individuals as the former have more of the blue component most frequent in WHGs and less of the brown and yellow components maximized in Caucasus hunter-gatherers and modern Khanty, respectively. The individuals of EstBA, EstIA, IngIA, EstMA, and modern Estonia are quite similar to each other on average, indicating that the relatively high proportion of WHG ancestry in modern Eastern Baltic populations compared to other present-day Europeans traces back to the BA.” ref 

“When comparing Estonian CWC and EstBA using autosomal outgroup f3 and Patterson’s D statistics (Table S3), the latter is more similar to other Baltic BA populations, to Baltic IA and Middle Age (MA) populations, and also to populations similar to WHGs and Scandinavian hunter-gatherers (SHGs), but not to Estonian CCC (Figures 2A and S2A; Data S1). The increase in WHG or SHG ancestry could be connected to western influences seen in material culture and facilitated by a decline in local population after the CCC-CWC period. A slight trend of bigger similarity of Estonian CWC to forest or steppe zone populations and of EstBA to European early farmer populations can also be seen. These differences remain when over 900,000 positions of the ‘1240k’ capture are used instead of ∼500,000 positions of the EBC-chipDB (Figure S2B; Data S1). When comparing to modern populations, Estonian CWC is slightly more similar to Caucasus individuals but EstBA to Baltic populations and Finnic speakers (Figure 2B; Data S1). Outgroup f3 and D statistics do not reveal apparent differences when comparing EstBA to EstIA, EstIA to IngIA, and EstIA to EstMA (Data S1). These results highlight how uniparental and autosomal data can lead to different demographic inferences—the genetic change between CWC and BA not seen in uniparental lineages is clear in autosomal data and the appearance of chrY hg N in the IA is not matched by a clear shift in autosomal profiles.” ref

“We imputed the genotypes of 37 phenotype informative SNVs from the HIrisPlex-S system, two from TLR1, and one from MCM6 gene and a 32-bp deletion (rs333) in the CCR5 gene for Mesolithic and Neolithic individuals from Latvia and Estonia and the individuals of this study. We inferred a sharp increase to >50% in the frequency of the lactase persistence variant (MCM6/rs4988235) in the Baltic area after the LN (Data S2), in line with previous indications of this variant becoming common in Europe in the last 4,000–3,500 years and of its fast increase in populations with steppe ancestry due to local adaptation. In contrast, the rs333, responsible for HIV resistance, which we first detect in a CWC individual, remains at 10%–25% frequency since then (Data S2), comparable to its present-day 14.8% frequency in Estonia. Both TLR1 variants involved in the protection against leprosy were already present in Europe at medium-high frequencies since the Mesolithic (Data S2). Notably, we infer a high proportion (40%–60%) of dark skin pigmentation in the hunter-gatherers and CWC farmers (Data S2). We infer dark skin and blue eyes for two individuals, similarly to another European Mesolithic individual. However, from BA onward, we infer pale or intermediate skin pigmentation for all individuals and an increase in the proportion of blue eyes and lighter shades of hair (Data S2). This is in line with previous suggestions that light skin pigmentation alleles reached high frequencies in Europe only recently.” ref 

Conclusions

“We show that a component of possibly Siberian ancestry was added to the gene pool of the Eastern Baltic during the Bronze to Iron Age transition at the latest. This component is present in the autosomes and chrY of many northeastern European Uralic-speaking populations today but arrived in the Eastern Baltic probably later than 3,500 years ago (ya), when it reached Fennoscandia. Considering the archaeological context of the individuals, this seems to have followed the so-called southwestern route from the Volga-Ural region. Notably, the Bronze to Iron Age transition period also coincides with the hypothesized arrival of westernmost Uralic (Finnic) languages in the Eastern Baltic, supporting the idea that the spread of these languages was mediated by IA migrants from the east. The EstBA individuals of this study, as other Baltic BA individuals, display more WHG ancestry compared to both earlier CWC and modern Estonians. Interestingly, we do not detect this change in their uniparental lineages. However, half of the admittedly small EstIA sample and over one-third of modern Estonian men share a hg N3a chrY—common in other Uralic-speaking populations living much further east and not found in the Eastern Baltic earlier—although the autosomes of EstIA individuals only show 3%–5% Siberian ancestry on average. Furthermore, phenotypic characteristics often associated with modern Northern Europeans (light eyes, hair, and skin pigmentation, and lactose tolerance) can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic.” ref

My response, And yet again, more facts about the many far-reaching migrations that helped spread religious mythology all over. Including mythology that later became the Christian mythology, you believe in.

Pic ref, ref

Bridging the Boreal Forest: Siberian Archaeology and the Emergence of Pottery among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of Northern Eurasia

• Globalization and the Emergence of Ceramic-using Hunter-gatherers in Northern Eurasia
• A comparative perspective on the ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Neolithics of Eurasia: Ceramics; agriculture and sedentism
• The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers

Pottery before the Pre-Pottery Neolithic? Pre-Pottery Neolithic (10000 – 6500 BCE) and Pottery Neolithic (7000–5000 BCE)

Ancient mDNA “N1a1a1” and Pottery from Turkey to Europe? People likely descended from central Anatolian populations with Pottery and mDNA “N1a1a1” such as Boncuklu/Çatalhöyük, spread to central Europe through NW Anatolia thousands of years later?

First Pottery of Europe and the Related Cultures

7,522-6,522 years ago Linear Pottery culture which I think relates to Arcane Capitalism’s origins

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

My response, Here are more scientific facts showing how human migrations helped spread a web or similar religious mythology across thousands of miles.

Japan’s population Origins and Religious Beliefs from around 35,000 to 500 years ago

“Pottery dating from 20,000 years ago was found at the Xianrendong Cave site in Jiangxi province, making it among the earliest pottery yet found. Another reported find is from 17,000 to 18,000 years ago in the Yuchanyan Cave in southern China.” ref

“The earliest pottery from the Russian Far East, Osipovka and Gromatukha cultural complex, was radiocarbon-dated to c. 13 300-12 300 years ago. In Siberia, the earliest pottery is known from the Ust-Karenga complex, dated to c. 11 200-10 800 years ago. The Osipovka and Gromatukha complexes belong to the Initial Neolithic, and they are contemporaneous with the earliest Neolithic cultures in southern China and Japan. In spite of the very early emergence of pottery in the Russian Far East, there is no evidence of agriculture at the beginning of the Neolithic, and subsistence remains based on hunting and fishing, including anadromous salmonids in the Amur River and its tributaries.” ref

Amur River Basin Pottery (from 14,300 BCE)

“A new analysis of 12,000- to 16,000-year-old pottery fragments, recovered from the banks of the Amur River suggests ancient Siberians navigated the harsh ice age climate with the help of “hot pots.” ref 

“What does this have to do with science, history is not science!? Atheists like you, want to kill God.” – Christian Troll 

My response, No, atheists like me, are at war with theistic propaganda, because there is no god to kill as no supernatural anything even exists. My war is against faith in fantasy and mythology, that people believe making them think made up gods are real. Ignorance commonly speaks loudly but only with undeserved assumptions. I will reply to those misinformed or uninformed. Trolls get a few responses, as I try to give others a chance, but then I block. And don’t feel bad at all about it.

People like to say history is not science but hide what is really going on, to unjustly dismiss it, or maline it. Every experiment and every measurement in science is a particular event. And by the time we can use them they are in the past or then “history” facts. A science without these past particulars related to history is no science at all. Science involves history. https://www.aaas.org/history-part-science

I eventually blocked him. Trolls’ waste my time, but my response to him inspired another person, to comment to what I said. 

Christian Nationalists, are now starting to take over government and society at large, with goals of total control and forced subjugation to their beliefs. Supporting Christian-only symbols in the public square, schools, and state. As an atheist and secularist, I feel this coming horror. 

Colonization and Colonialism of Canada: learning about Indigenous Peoples of Canada and Saskatchewan (VIDEO)

Colonization and Colonialism of the USA: learning about Indigenous Peoples of America and Florida (VIDEO)

Colonization and Colonialism of Florida, its Indigenous Peoples, and a little on Masculinity (VIDEO) 

ref

ref

辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

“I think your pictures are good, and the Mammoth Hunter Group (ANE) should be the key to unlocking the similarities in many prehistoric remains. Ancient North Eurasian People (ANE) hold the key to unlocking many questions. For example, the similarities between the Egyptian pyramids and the American pyramids, Stonehenge in England, Göbekli Tepe, Native American ring-shaped wooden pillar buildings, and Gosseck Circle in Germany are all similar. Comparison of American mythology, Nordic mythology, and Indian mythology. Thanks to molecular anthropology and archeology, we can now learn more about. The ancestors of the Indo-Europeans were in Sundaland more than 40,000 years ago and had not yet migrated to Central Asia. There are groups in Europe that are different from the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans. Forty thousand years ago Iran seemed inhospitable to humans.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

My response, This involves more than 30 people, the earliest of whom lived around 4,000 years ago, with a genetic makeup that represented a genetic bottleneck, essentially derived from Ancient North Eurasians.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaohe_Cemetery

“ANE men do snatch women from all directions. This could explain the different appearances and skin tones of Native American stone statues. Because ANE males go everywhere to snatch females, Olmecs are also very rich in maternal genes. Most of the women who are snatched may suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, and only a few may be in consensual unions. Bride kidnapping is one of the important characteristics of the primitive Indo-Europeans and has been recorded in the history of the East and the West.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“Bride kidnapping, also known as marriage by abduction or marriage by capture, is a practice in which a man abducts and rapes the woman he wishes to marry. Bride kidnapping (hence the portmanteau bridenapping) has been practiced around the world and throughout prehistory and history, among peoples as diverse as the Hmong in Southeast Asia, the Tzeltal in Mexico, and the Romani in Europe. Bride kidnapping still occurs in various parts of the world, but it is most common in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Africa. In most nations, bride kidnapping is considered a sex crime because of the implied element of rape, rather than a valid form of marriage. Some types of it may also be seen as falling along the continuum between forced marriage and arranged marriage.” ref

“Bride kidnapping is often (but not always) a form of child marriage. It may be connected to the practice of bride price, wealth paid by the groom and his family to the bride’s parents, and the inability or unwillingness to pay it. Bride kidnapping is distinguished from raptio in that the former refers to the abduction of one woman by one man (and his friends and relatives), and is still a widespread practice, whereas the latter refers to the large scale abduction of women by groups of men, possibly in a time of war. Rituals indicating a symbolic bride kidnapping still exist in some cultures (such as Circassians), as part of traditions surrounding a wedding. According to some sources, the honeymoon is a relic of marriage by capture, based on the practice of the husband going into hiding with his wife to avoid reprisals from her relatives, with the intention that the woman would be pregnant by the end of the month.” ref

“Though the motivations behind bride kidnapping vary by region, the cultures with traditions of marriage by abduction are generally patriarchal with a strong social stigma on sex or pregnancy outside marriage and illegitimate births. In some modern cases, the couple colluded to elope under the guise of a bride kidnapping, presenting their parents with a fait accompli. In most cases, however, the men who resort to capturing a wife are often of lower social status, because of poverty, disease, poor character or criminality. They are sometimes deterred from legitimately seeking a wife because of the payment the woman’s family expects, the bride price (not to be confused with a dowry, paid by the woman’s family). In agricultural and patriarchal societies, where bride kidnapping is most common, children work for their families. A woman leaves her birth family, geographically and economically, when she marries, becoming instead a member of the groom’s family. (See patrilocality for an anthropological explanation.)” ref

“Due to this loss of labor, the women’s families do not want their daughters to marry young, and demand economic compensation (the aforementioned bride price) when they do leave them. This conflicts with the interests of men, who want to marry early, as marriage means an increase in social status, and the interests of the groom’s family, who will gain another pair of hands for the family farm, business or home. Depending on the legal system under which she lives, the consent of the woman may not be a factor in judging the validity of the marriage. In addition to the issue of forced marriage, bride kidnapping may have other negative effects on young women and their society. For example, fear of kidnap is cited as a reason for the lower participation of girls in the education system. The mechanism of marriage by abduction varies by location. This article surveys the phenomenon by region, drawing on common cultural factors for patterns, but noting country-level distinctions.” ref

“Marriage by abduction also occurs in traditional Hmong culture, in which it is known as zij poj niam. As in some other cultures, bride kidnapping is generally a joint effort between the would-be groom and his friends and family. Generally, the abductor takes the woman while she is alone. The abductor then sends a message to the kidnap victim’s family, informing them of the abduction and the abductor’s intent to marry their daughter. If the victim’s family manage to find the woman and insist on her return, they might be able to free her from the obligation to marry the man. However, if they fail to find the woman, the kidnap victim is forced to marry the man. The abductor still has to pay a bride price for the woman, generally an increased amount because of the kidnapping. Because of this increased cost (and the general unpleasantness of abduction), kidnapping is usually only a practice reserved for a man with an otherwise blemished chance of securing a bride, because of criminal background, illness or poverty.” ref

“The Hmong people are an ethnic group currently native to several countries, believed to have come from the Yangtze river basin area in southern China. The clan (xeem; 姓) has been a dominant organizing force in Hmong society. There are about eighteen Hmong clans that are known in Laos and Thailand. Clan membership is inherited upon birth or occasionally through adoption. All children are members of the father’s clan, through which they will trace their ancestors. Women become members of their husband’s family upon marriage but will retain their clan name of their father. Members of the same clan consider each other to be kwv tij, translated as “brothers”, “siblings,” and they are expected to offer one another mutual support. The term kwv tij is regarded as one’s father’s family or in the case of women who are married it refers to their in-laws. A related term neej tsa is the wife family after marriage. However, she regards her birth family to be her kwv tij until she is married. Also, many clans even consider each last name as kwv tij Example: Khang, Kue, and Kong are kwv tij because they share a history of helping each other and respect for each other.” ref

“Respected clan leaders are expected to take responsibility for conflict negotiation and occasionally the maintenance of religious rituals. Members of a clan who share the same ritual practices may identify as a group on the sub-clan level. Clan groups are exogamous: that is, Hmong may not marry within their own clan group; a marriage partner must be found from another clan. For example, a Xiong may not marry another Xiong. However, they are allowed to marry blood relatives from their mother’s side (Neejtsa). This allows for such cases as two cousins related through their mother to marry, so long as they are in different clans. Traditionally, when a boy wants to marry a girl, he will make his intentions clear, and will “zij” or snatch (In western countries this act is not popular and is considered to be illegal) her at any opportunity that is appropriate. This is traditionally only a symbolic kidnapping.” ref

“Before he may “zij” her, the boy must first give a gift to the girl whom he wants to marry. After waiting a few days, the boy may then “zij” the girl. If the boy never gave the girl a gift, she is allowed to refuse and return home with any family member who comes to save her. The parents are not notified at the time of the “zij”, but an envoy from the boy’s clan is sent to inform them of the whereabouts of their daughter and her safety (fi xov). This envoy gives them the boy’s family background and asks for the girl’s in exchange. For example, the envoy may tell the girl’s family that the groom is from a Stripe Hmong family from Luang Prabang, Laos; the bride’s parents may then reply that they are Moob Leej/Mong Leng from Nong Het, Xieng Khouang, Laos. Before the new couple enters the groom’s house, the groom’s father performs a blessing ritual, asking the ancestors to accept the new bride into the household (Lwm qaib). The head of the household moves the chicken in a circular motion around the couple’s head. The girl is not allowed to visit anyone’s house for three days after this.” ref

“After three days or more, the groom’s parents will prepare the first wedding feast for the newlywed couple (hu plig nyab tshiab thaum puv peb tag kis). The wedding is usually a two-day process. At the end of this first wedding feast, the couple will return to the bride’s family’s home, where they spend the night preparing for the next day. On the second day, the family of the bride prepares a second wedding feast at their home, where the couple will be married (Noj tshoob). Hmong marriage customs differ slightly based on cultural subdivisions within the global Hmong community, but all require the exchange of a bride price from the groom’s family to the bride’s family. The bride price is compensation for the new family taking the other family’s daughter, as the girl’s parents are now short one person to help with chores (the price of the girl can vary based on her value or on the parents). The elders of both families negotiate the amount prior to the engagement and is traditionally paid in bars of silver or livestock. In modern times, settlements made in monetary terms are also common.” ref

My response, Or some may have liked ANE men, both are possible even together. But yes, I also think rape was a common thing that could explain different haplogroups interrelating and sex partners.

“Most of the women who are snatched may suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, and only a few may be in consensual unions. BRIDE KIDNAPPING is one of the important characteristics of the primitive Indo-Europeans and has been recorded in the history of the East and the West. It may be that children cause women to suffer from Stockholm syndrome, but I think there will still be many women who want to escape. There are also such cases among Native Americans. Xiaohe Cemetery is an archaeological case. The women in Xiaohe Cemetery are supposed to be the last remnants of feminists who resisted male dominance. The closed environment of East Turkestan, surrounded by desert, also allows them to avoid harassment by men for a certain period of time.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

My response, I said I don’t doubt rape was common. I am a Feminist, so I, too, hate the patriarchal oppression of women.

“Even though tens of thousands of years have passed, I’m still angry. I want more people to understand that the background of many religions is the result of the patriarchal oppression of women established by mammoth hunters. This is the difference from primitive shamanism. I think it was the mammoth hunters who built Göbekli Tepe and developed agriculture. With the spread of agriculture, this patriarchal system gradually replaced the matriarchal society, and the status of women gradually decreased. Mammoth hunters migrated to Africa. This was the R1b group. They influenced the formation of ancient Egyptian religion. Akhenaten’s religious reform was also to strengthen patriarchy, which subsequently affected the emergence of Abrahamic religions. Religion is a way for men to oppress women. Totalitarianism is based on male rulers. The seemingly beautiful communist utopia combined with patriarchy and totalitarianism everywhere to create greater evil and became a new cult.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art 

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

Here are Shaman Headdresses from Siberia, Africa, and Mongolia showing the covering of the eyes and may thus, to me relate to why the Venus of Willendorf has a hat that covers the face, meaning I speculate that this hat, also seen in the possible shaman burials in Italy all are related to shamanism. 

Venus of Willendorf: Shamanism Headdresses that Cover the Eyes? 

“Venus figurines have been unearthed in Europe, Siberia, and much of Eurasia. Most date from the Gravettian period but start in the Aurignacian era, and lasts to the Magdalenian time.” ref 

Rape 25,000 years ago (Tied up women/sex slave Venus figurines Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological complex)?

ref, ref, ref, ref

Slavery or Shamanism Controlling Magic, or Both?

“Bracelets and necklaces are found on a number of Central and Eastern European Paleolithic female figurines but absent from Western Europe.” ref

Venus figures from the Kostenki – Borshevo: link

“The Venus figurines of Kostenki are prehistoric representations of the female body, usually in ivory and usually dated to between 25,000 and 20,000 years ago, making them part of the Gravettian industry of the Upper Palaeolithic period. Found in the Kostyonki-Borshchyovo archeological complex in Russia.” ref

“Kostenki is a very important Paleolithic site on the Don River in Russia. It was a settlement which contained venus figures, dwellings made of mammoth bones, and many flint tools and bone implements. Kostenki / Kostienki is not actually a single site but really an area on the right bank of the Don River in the regions of the villages of Kostenki and Borshevo, consisting of more than twenty site locations, all dating to the Paleolithic.” ref

“The Kostyonki–Borshchyovo archaeological complex is an area where numerous Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites have been found, located around the villages of Kostyonki (also Kostenki) and Borshchyovo (also Borshchevo). The area is found on the western (right) bank of the Don River in Khokholsky District, Voronezh Oblast, Russia, some 25 km south of the city of Voronezh. The 26 Paleolithic sites of the area are numbered Kostenki 1–21 and Borshchevo 1–5. It is known for its high concentration of cultural remains of anatomically modern humans from the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era, before 40,000 years ago. Finds are on exhibit in situ, at the State Archaeological Museum–Reserve Kostyonki built atop the mammoth bone circle Kostenki 11. Kostyonki is considered as belonging to the Aurignacian culture.” ref

“Kostenki-1/2 (site Kostenki-1, layer 2), Kostenki-1/3, Kostenki-6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki-11 and Kostenki 12/3 below the volcanic CI tephra layer are associated to the nontransitional local “Strelets culture”, analogous to early Upper Paleolithic cultures from central and western Europe such as the Szeletian culture. This initial cultural development might be attributable to local Neanderthals. Ornaments predating the volcanic eruption, found at Kostenki 17/2 (“Spitsyn culture”, 38–32 ka), were apparently perforated by a hand-operated rotary drill or drills; these may suggest that the population was technologically capable of preparing for a volcanic winter. Just above the ash layer sewing needles were found. Kostenki 1/1, Kostenki 4/2, Kostyonki 8/2 and Kostenki 21/3 belong to the eastern Gravettian (24 to 22 ka). Kostenki 2, Kostenki 3, Kostenki 11-1a and Kostenki-19 belong to the Zamyatino culture (22 to 17 ka). Kostenki 8/2 (Telmanskaya) is eponymous of “Telman culture.”As of 2016, archaeological work is done at Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora), Kostenki-6 (Streletskaya), Kostenki-15 (Gorodtsovskaya), Kostenki-16 (Ugljanka), Kostenki-17 (Spitsynskaya) and Kostenki-21 (Gmelinskaya).” ref

“Some of the earliest directly dated human remains from this site are dated to 32,600 ± 1,100 14C years and consist of a tibia and a fibula, with traits classifying the bones as European early modern humans. In 2009, DNA was extracted from the remains of a male hunter-gatherer from Kostenki-12 who lived circa around 30,000 years ago and died aged 20–25. His maternal lineage was found to be mtDNA haplogroup U2. He was buried in an oval pit in a crouched position and covered with red ochre. Kostenki 12 was later found to belong to the patrilineal Y-DNA haplogroup C1* (C-F3393).” ref

“A male from Kostenki-14 (Markina Gora), who lived approximately 38,700–36,200 year ago, was also found to belong to mtDNA haplogroup U2. His Y-DNA haplogroup was C1b* (C-F1370). The Kostenki-14 genome represents early evidence for the separation of Europeans and East Asian lineages. It was found to have a close relationship to both “Mal’ta boy” (24 ka) of south-east Siberia (Ancient North Eurasian) and to the later Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of Europe and western Siberia, as well as with a basal population ancestral to Early European Farmers, but not to East Asians. Yang et al. 2020 found that the early hunter-gatherers lineage of Kostenski-14 may have contributed (c. 68%) ancestry to the Ancient North Eurasian Yana and Mal’ta samples, with the remainder ancestry (c. 32%) being contributed from an East-Eurasian Tianyuan-related population. Kostenki-14 had some level of ancient Neanderthal admixture, which has been dated as going back to circa around 54,000 years ago.” ref

“Hello Damien. Have you done any research into the history of transgenderism and the belief in reincarnation? Another thought, is there a link between shamanism and transgenderism? I see a lot of the persecution of trans people nowadays is also a persecution of non-Abrahamic beliefs?” – Questioner on Twitter

Damien’s response, Transgenderism and the belief in reincarnation? I don’t know. Shamanism and transgenderism/gender-switching? I think so, in some versions of shamanism, yes, and especially it seems so in Siberian shamanism.

Animism and Gender?

“Among the Ojibwe and speakers of cognate Algonkian language, a grammatical distinction is made between animate and inanimate genders, not between male and female genders. Persons and personal actions are talked about in a different way from objects and impersonal events. As demonstrated in the work of such scholars as Marjorie Balzer, Marie Czaplicka, and Bernard Saladin D’Anglure, these and other indigenous conceptions of gender, sex, and sexual orientation, tend to disrupt Western binary conventions of “male” and “female,” conflations of sex and gender, and heterosexuality as normative.” ref

Shamanic Gender Identities?

“Shamanic behavior necessitates a broadening of the notion of gender to be more fluid and dynamic, to include not only male and female but also various mediating identities. Czaplicka, for example, notes that Siberian shamans are a “third class,” separate from males and females, and Saladin D’Anglure proposes a “ternary” model for Inuit shamans wherein shamans are “in between” persons (by persuasion or initiation) who embody a “third gender” due to their ability to mediate. The “third gender” status of Inuit shamans is part of wider gender concepts: children are understood to have decided which gender to be before or at birth, their genitalia adapting to their decision. Other children are given the name of a deceased relative of the opposite gender, performing that gender identity for the time that they hold the name.” ref

Third Gender and Changing Ones?

“Third gender” (shamans in other instances may have a fourth or even multiple gender identity) overlaps in some examples with homosexuality, with the marriage of some shamans to same-sex “spirit” partners involving, in some examples, homosexual marriages in the “ordinary world.” Shamans’ costumes may combine features peculiar to the dress of both men and women. Early explorers assumed biological males dressed in women’s clothing (some of whom were shamans) were transvestites, and the pejorative French term berdache (“male prostitute,” “transvestite”) entered anthropological literature. The more sensitive “two-spirit” was proposed by Native Americans in the 1990s, referring to the individual having two spirits, although “changing ones” more successfully avoids reproducing a Western binary opposition.” ref

Nonhuman Sexual Relations?

“Cross-dressing may indicate shamans’ difference from the rest of the community or show that they have formed an intimate, sexual, and/or marital relationship with a nonhuman person of the same gender. Transvestitism may be temporary, a part of specific performances, or permanent as a sign of a distinctive everyday identity. Shamans may undertake marriage to non-human persons of the same gender as themselves and, for example, a female shaman may sometimes be “male” in relation to a spirit wife: a Sora shaman of the Indian subcontinent marries a man, and the “spirit son” of her predecessor, who is her own aunt. The tightly bound relationship between shamans and their other world helpers, especially those with whom they form sexual and/or marital relationships, may mean that secrets are kept, and the revealing of such secrets may lead to the withdrawal of assistance from a nonhuman helper, thus compromising the shaman’s ability to shamanize. Sex has been theorized as key to understanding shamanism by Roberte Hamayon, who attends to shamans, sex, and gender in Siberian shamanism. She argues that shamanic séances among the Evenk and Buryats are “sexual encounters” in themselves. She views the “marriage” between shamans and their non-human helpers as more significant in understanding what these shamans do than the “ecstasy,” “mastery of spirits,” “altered states” or “journeying” emphasized by other scholars.” ref

Gender Identities Conclusion?

“Early work on Siberian shamans by Sergei Shirokogoroff demonstrated that shamans may be either (or both) “hostages to the spirits” and their sexual and/or marital partners. Shamans might, then, be defined as people who welcome “possession” as an embodiment of (sexual and/or marital) relationship with otherthan-human-persons. As the most effective mediators, then–between genders, between humans and nonhumans, the living and dead, and so on–shamans mediate between all the many constituent elements, beings, and situations of the cosmos. They thereby actively accomplish meanings through the construction of relations between human and other-than-human worlds.” ref 

History of  Rape

“Rape is a type of sexual assault involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or against a person who is incapable of giving valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, has an intellectual disability, or is below the legal age of consent.” ref

“The concept of ‘rape culture’ refers to a cultural environment in which sexual violence is not only common but also normalized and therefore largely invisible and unreported. While it might be anachronistic and provocative to label the ancient Mediterranean world in general as a ‘rape culture’, we believe the concept can be useful in exploring the literary narratives and visual representations of gender-based violence in the surviving ancient sources. As various studies have demonstrated, sexual violence is one of the most predominant themes in ancient narrative traditions. Not only is the phenomenon common, but in both mythical and historical storylines it is often naturalized as an essential part of the world, and as a defining element of its hierarchies and power structures. Furthermore, in ancient storytelling, sexual violence wields great narrative significance: it is often an act that sets the events in motion and motivates the actions of the heroes and the protagonists.” ref

“Ancient narratives have had a profound influence on the ways in which sexual and gender-based violence have been represented in the later Western culture. The “Ancient Rape Cultures: Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian” legacy foments interdisciplinary discussion of the similarities, differences, and connections between the different ancient narrative traditions: Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian. The conference will examine how gender-based violence has been narrated and represented in different cultural contexts in antiquity, and how the theme has been utilized to construct cultural, ethnic, and religious identities.” ref

“Rape as an ancient Weapon of War. We have something in common with ants: Our wars are driven by the same principle, winner take all. Including, in our case, the human body. When it comes to waging war, we have a lot in common with social insects. We both build infrastructure and follow “traffic rules.” We participate in complex teamwork and allocate workers for effective division of labor. The feisty insect soldiers, like humans, can be extremely calculated and brutal: they raid, slay, take slaves, and take over territory (warfare is ferocious even on a micro-scale). Rape as a weapon of war. It goes back at least as far as recorded history, and continues to this day. Rape arguably constitutes a different level of atrocity in the “game of war” and when it comes to sheer scale and geographic extent, the Roman armies were among the most “experienced.” ref

“Genocidal rape, a form of wartime sexual violence, is the action of a group which has carried out acts of mass rape and gang rapes, against its enemy during wartime as part of a genocidal campaign. During the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the second Sino-Japanese war, the Holocaust, the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, the Congolese conflicts, the South Sudanese Civil War, the Yazidi Genocide, Rohingya genocide, and the Uyghur genocide, the mass rapes that had been an integral part of those conflicts brought the concept of genocidal rape to international prominence. Although war rape has been a recurrent feature in conflicts throughout human history, it has usually been looked upon as a by-product of conflict and not an integral part of military policy. Per the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1820 (declared on 2008) rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide. According to Amnesty International, the use of rape during times of war is not a by-product of conflicts but rather a pre-planned and deliberate military strategy.” ref

“For the Roman war machine, rape was more than just a weapon of terror: it was the right of the victorious. Some even referred to it as an “expression of victory.” “Sometimes rape is used deliberately as an instrument of terror,” points out the renowned political theorist Francis Fukuyama. “The primary purpose of the state is to control violence by creating a legitimate monopoly of force. However, historically this has simply tended to push violence to higher levels of social organization, i.e., inter-state war. Potentially, this makes the overall incidence of violence much greater.” To return to the mindset at the time, for the historian Livy, who wrote histories of Rome and its people, rape was essentially synonymous with the capture of a city.” ref

As Professor Kathy L. Gaca, an authority on ancient sexual violence puts it, evidence from the 8th century B.C.E indicates that martial rape was a top-down part of the orders given. It was integral to waging warfare, not a “boys will be boys” accompaniment to war. For instance, in the Iliad, Agamemnon’s most senior adviser, Nestor, threatens the Achaean Greek soldiers with death if they try to go home before “properly” conquering Troy, meaning raping Trojan women: “Therefore let none make haste to go till he has first lain with the wife of some Trojan” – Iliad 2.354-359

Arguing that Nestor’s warning wasn’t an example of early literary license – there are accounts of Scipio giving a similar order. Polybius, one of the most respected military historians, portrays Roman forces practicing conquest rape. He further elaborates that it was a standard condition of female war-captives to be subjected to sexual licentiousness by their conquering forces. Because war has often been used as an excuse for defending the sexual integrity of the “weaker sex,” consequently, rape represents the defeat of men, literally and figuratively. Livy recounts the story of a Capuan who chooses death rather than having to watch his wife and children being raped.” ref

Tacitus, widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians, tells about 40,000 Roman soldiers tearing women and children to pieces upon their arrival at Cremona. He also claims that in the Roman-occupied Batavia, soldiers were seizing boys deemed too young to join the army yet “old enough” for the company of men. Among the other disturbing accounts in ancient literature, Herodotus, describes the gang rape of Greek women to death by Persian soldiers, and Diodorus Siculus, the author of the Library of History, reveals the ultimate meaning of rape as a weapon of war: Greek women and youths are raped by Carthaginians as a prelude to captivity.” ref

“Rape did not only serve as an instrument of sexual gratification or a tool for anger relief management; it embodied revenge, subjugation, and the enslavement of the defeated. Rape could also serve a more “ambitious” role. When Athenian armed forces ravaged Miletus in the early Iron Age, they killed all the Carian males – and also the mothers of the unmarried young girls. The women became procreative dispensers for the enforcement of Ionian supremacy. Essentially, the Athenian forces raped Miletus into becoming a Greek city.” ref

“In so doing, the Athenians forcibly converted Miletus from the Carian city it used to be to the Greek city. They literally raped it into becoming, for the Athenian men brought no women with them on this colonizing expedition,” writes Kathy Gaca in “The martial rape of girls and women in antiquity and modernity.” Every first-generation Ionian Greek girl and boy born in Miletus was the daughter/son of a raped Carian girl. Several centuries later, the Persian king Darius ravaged Miletus, at that point his subject city, as punishment for initiating the Ionian Greek rebellion. The sentence was lethal. His forces slaughtered the fighting-age males and enslaved the all the rest.” ref

“To put things into context, fighting-age males in antiquity represented about 25 percent of the population, the 75 percent left were the women, children, and elders. The women and girls were yet again used as reproductive intermediaries, this time for the Persians. The Athenians were deeply outraged by the Persian conduct, as if they hadn’t slaughtered and raped in Miletus a few centuries before. Women and children were not the only victims. Sexual assault of adult men remains one of the most closely kept secrets of ancient wars (and remains so today) possibly because even for the ancient writers, it was incompatible with the notion of masculinity: being penetrated/submissive was the most unmanly thing. The acclaimed Roman statesman and orator Cicero was among the few to speak up against war atrocities, urging generals to control their soldiers’ savage tendencies. Yet, Cicero had no illusion; rape was a war custom and an instrument among generals who used it to reward their troops. Rape at a time of war is no longer legal, let alone openly encouraged, but it’s still happening.” ref

“According to Scholz (2021), the only law in the Code of Hammurabi (composed c. 1750 BCE) that scholars universally agree relates to rape is § 130:

If a man force the (betrothed) wife of another who has not known a male and is living in her father’s house, and he lie in her bosom and they take him, that man shall be put to death and that woman shall go free. — Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Ḫammurabi King of Babylon, about 2250 BCE. (1904) p. 45″ ref

“This law is similar to §6 of the Code of Ur-Nammu from Sippar (c. 2100–2050 BCE or around 4,100-4,050 years ago), and §26 of the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BCE). The latter has also been compared to Deuteronomy 22:25–27 by Craig S. Keener (1996), who considered both of them rape scenarios; it states the following:

26. If a man gives bride-money for a(nother) man’s daughter, but another man seizes her forcibly without asking permission of her father and her mother and deprives her of her virginity, it is a capital offence and he shall die.” ref

Another provision, generally regarded as a marry-your-rapist law, is found in §55 of the Middle Assyrian Laws (c. 1450–1250 BCE):

55. In the case of a seignior’s daughter, a virgin who was living in her father’s house, whose [father] had not been asked (for her in marriage), whose hymen had not been opened since she was not married, and no one had a claim against her father’s house, if a seignior took the virgin by force and ravished her, either in the midst of the city or in the open country or at night in the street or in a granary or at a city festival, the father of the virgin shall take the wife of the virgin’s ravisher and give her to be ravished; he shall not return her to her husband (but) take her; the father may give his daughter who was ravished to her ravisher in marriage. If he has no wife, the ravisher shall give the (extra) third in silver to her father as the value of a virgin (and) her ravisher shall marry her (and) not cast her off. If the father does not (so) wish, he shall receive the (extra) third for the virgin in silver (and) give his daughter to whom he wishes. — Theophile J. Meek, in James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (1969), p. 185.” ref

“Similarly, several provisions in the Hittite laws (also known as the ‘Code of the Nesilim’; developed c. 1650–1500 BCE, in effect until c. 1100 BCE) are usually categorized by scholars as dealing with either incest, adultery, or bestiality; § 197 is the only undisputed rape law:

197. If a man seizes a woman in the mountain, it is the man’s crime and he will be killed. But if he seizes her in (her) house, it is the woman’s crime and the woman shall be killed. If the husband finds them, he may kill them, there shall be no punishment for him. — Albrecht Goetze, in James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (1969), p. 196.” ref

“Because the Hittite word for ‘woman’ in this case does not indicate any status, such as whether she is married or unmarried, widowed, free or enslaved, the law seems to have referred to all women in general, and thus that raping a woman was always a crime, not just when she was married or engaged. In some rare cases, ancient laws did consider the (lack of) consent of a person (particularly a woman) involved a relevant factor in determining whether or not a sexual offence had occurred. Examples include §190 and §191 of the Hittite laws, and §12 of the Middle Assyrian Laws (this one involves a combination of lack of consent on the one hand, and force on the other).” ref

• “Hittite laws §190. ‘If a man and a woman come willingly, as men and women, and have intercourse, there shall be no punishment. (…)’
• Hittite laws §191. ‘If a free man picks up now this woman, now that one, now in this country, then in that country, there shall be no punishment if they came together sexually willingly.’
• Middle Assyrian Laws §12. ‘If, as a seignior’s wife passed along the street, a(nother) seignior has seized her, saying to her, ‘Let me lie with you’, since she would not consent (and) kept defending herself, but he has taken her by force (and) lain with her, whether they found him on the seignior’s wife or witnesses have charged him that he lay with the woman, they shall put the seignior to death, with no blame attaching to the woman.” ref

“Scholz (2021) stated that the texts of Deuteronomy 22:25–29 ‘are widely recognized as rape legislation’, while Deuteronomy 22:22–24 as well as Deuteronomy 21:10–14 ‘are more contested and are not usually characterized as rape laws’. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica rape itself is not considered to be a criminal offense in Jewish law. The rapist will only be held liable to pay the girls father 50 shekels of silver (as a bride-price), “and she shall be his wife, because he has humbled her; and he may not put her away all his days” (Deut.22:28–29). According to a Sunni hadith, the punishment for committing rape against a fellow Muslim is death, there is no sin on the victim, nor is there any worldly punishment ascribed to her. Most scholars treat rape as hirabah (disorder in the land). Rape is defined as zina bil jabr, fornication/adultery with the use of coercion or compulsion. Note that it has to be extra-marital, i.e. fornication/adultery; the rape charge cannot be brought against the husband by the wife, i.e. it cannot be within marriage.” ref

“The exceptions to this are when either the rape is a case of adulterous or incestuous intercourse, or a married woman is found not to have been a virgin (though claiming to be one at the marital stage of her Erusin (kiddushin) she and her seducer are to be stoned to death if the intercourse was consensual (Deut. 22:23–24); however if the woman did not consent only the rapist is to be executed (Deut. 22:25–27). Under talmudic law, the rapist must also compensate the woman for physical and psychological damage (Ket. 42a–43b). If the victim refuses to marry him, he is then not compelled to marry her (Ket. 39b). If a girl was raped by several men, she can choose which one to marry (TJ, Ket. 3:6, 27d)” ref

“From the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome into the Colonial period, rape along with arson, treason, and murder was a capital offense. “Those committing rape were subject to a wide range of capital punishments that were seemingly brutal, frequently bloody, and at times spectacular.” The rape of women or youths is a common theme in Greek mythology. Among the rapes or abductions committed by Zeus, the supreme deity of the Greek pantheon, are Europa, Ganymede, and Leda the Nymph. The rape of Chrysippus by Laius was known as “the crime of Laius”, a term which came to be applied to all male rape. It was seen as an example of hubris in the original sense of the word, i.e., violent outrage, and its punishment was so severe that it destroyed not only Laius himself, but also his son, Oedipus, his wife Jocasta, his grandchildren (including Antigone), and members of his extended family.” ref

“In some cultures, rape was seen less as a crime against a particular girl or woman than as a crime against the head of the household or against chastity. As a consequence, the rape of a virgin was often a more serious crime than of a non-virgin, even a wife or widow, and the rape of a prostitute or other unchaste woman was, in some laws, not a crime because her chastity could not be harmed. Furthermore, the woman’s consent was under many legal systems not a defense. In seventeenth-century France, even marriage without parental consent was classified as rape. The penalty for rape was often a fine, payable to the father or the husband, as they were in charge of household economy. In some laws, the woman might marry the rapist instead of his receiving the legal penalty. This was especially prevalent in laws where the crime of rape did not include, as a necessary part, that it be against the woman’s will, thus dividing the crime in the current meaning of rape, and a means for a couple to force their families to permit marriage.” ref

“Rape, in the course of war, dates back to antiquity, ancient enough to have been mentioned in the Bible. When Amazon‘s Yanomami tribes fought and raided nearby tribes, women were often raped and brought back to the shabono to be adopted into the captor’s community. The Mongols, who established the Mongol Empire across much of Eurasia, caused much destruction during their invasions. Historian Jack Weatherford said that the earliest incident of mass rape attributed to Mongols took place after Ogodei Khan sent an army of 25,000 soldiers to North China, where they defeated an army of 100,000. The Mongols were said to have raped the surviving soldiers at the command of their leader. Ogodei Khan was also said to have ordered mass rapes of the Oirat. According to Rogerius of Apulia, a monk who survived the Mongol invasion of Hungary, the Mongol warriors “found pleasure” in humiliating local women.” ref

“The systematic rape of as many as 80,000 women by the Japanese soldiers during the six weeks of the Nanking Massacre is an example of such atrocities. During World War II, an estimated 200,000 Korean and Chinese women were forced into prostitution in Japanese military brothels as so-called “comfort women.” French Moroccan troops, known as Goumiers, committed rapes and other war crimes after the Battle of Monte Cassino. (See Marocchinate.) French women in Normandy reported rapes during the liberation of Normandy.” ref 

“Rapes were committed by Wehrmacht forces on Jewish women and girls during the Invasion of Poland in September 1939;  they were also committed against Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian women, and girls during mass executions which were primarily carried out by the Selbstschutz units, with the assistance of Wehrmacht soldiers who were stationed in territory that was under the administration of the German military; the rapes were committed against female captives before they were shot. Only one case of rape was prosecuted by a German court during the military campaign in Poland, and even then the German judge found the perpetrator guilty of Rassenschande (committing a shameful act against his race as defined by the racial policy of Nazi Germany) rather than rape. Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to rape during The Holocaust.” ref

“Rapes were also committed by German forces stationed on the Eastern Front, where they were largely unpunished (as opposed to rapes committed in Western Europe). The Wehrmacht also established a system of military brothels, in which young women and girls from occupied territories were forced into prostitution under harsh conditions. In the Soviet Union, women were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution as well; one report by the International Military Tribunal writes “in the city of Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair.” Rapes happened in territories occupied by the Red Army. A female Soviet war correspondent described what she had witnessed: “The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists.” According to German historian Miriam Gebhardt, as many as 190,000 women were raped by U.S. soldiers in Germany.” ref

“According to researcher and author Krisztián Ungváry, some 38,000 civilians were killed during the Siege of Budapest: about 13,000 from military action and 25,000 from starvation, disease and other causes. Included in the latter figure are about 15,000 Jews, largely victims of executions by Hungarian Arrow Cross Party militia. When the Soviets finally claimed victory, they initiated an orgy of violence, including the wholesale theft of anything they could lay their hands on, random executions, and mass rape. An estimated 50,000 women and girls were raped, although estimates vary from 5,000 to 200,000. Hungarian girls were kidnapped and taken to Red Army quarters, where they were imprisoned, repeatedly raped, and sometimes murdered.” ref

Rape victims from Ancient History and Mythology

“Scholars of the Ancient Near East debate whether certain pieces of legislation regarding sexual offences from various states and cultures that have survived to the present day are about “rape” or about various other offences that the individuals involved may have consented to. There are many literary problems that make interpretation of these sex laws difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context, and the laws often do not provide information about what the people (especially the women) involved in the acts wanted or did not want, and were more concerned about which combinations of individuals were illegitimate in view of the social order. They tended to focus on what a man might do to/with a woman he was not married to, especially if this resulted in the loss of virginity, regardless of whether she consented to it or not. Consequently, one scholar may interpret a law as being about rape, while another scholar concludes it is about consensual adultery, premarital sex etc.” ref

“Rape is a common topic in history and mythology. A list of notable survivors from history and mythology includes:

• Noah; mocked by Ham, in some interpretations he is either raped by him or by Canaan, his son, and grandson respectively.
• Dinah; raped by a Canaanite prince and avenged by her brothers.
• Lot; seduced by his daughters by means of alcohol
• Tamar; raped by her half-brother Amnon and avenged by her brother Absalom.
• Boudica‘s two daughters, raped by Roman soldiers
• Rogneda of Polotsk from Belarus/Scandinavian history; raped by Vladimir, half-brother of her betrothed Yaropolk I of Kiev, in the presence of her parents (10th century)
• Li Zu’e, an empress who was raped by her brother-in-law and became pregnant
• Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c. 1656), Italian Baroque artist
• Xenia Borisovna, Russian princess, forcibly taken as a concubine by False Dmitry I
• Rindr; raped by Odin in Saxo Grammaticus‘ version of the engendering of Baldr‘s avenger” ref

Rape in Greek mythology

Females

• Alcippe a daughter of Ares; raped by Halirrhothius, the son of Poseidon.
• Alcmene; raped by Zeus in form of her husband Amphitryon, resulting in the birth of Heracles.
• Apemosyne; raped by Hermes, after slipping on skinned hides that he placed on her path.
• Atalanta; raped by Hippomenes when they married.
• Auge; raped by Heracles.
• Aura; raped by Dionysus while she was drunk.
• Callisto; raped by Zeus in the form of Artemis or Apollo, resulting in the birth of Arcas.
• Cassandra; raped by Ajax the Lesser during the Sack of Troy.
• Chione; raped by Hermes in her sleep.
• Cassiopeia; raped by Zeus in the form of her husband Phoenix.
• Cyrene; raped by Apollo in the form of a wolf.
• Danae; raped by Zeus in the form of golden rain, resulting in the birth of Perseus.
• Demeter; according to an Arcadian myth, Demeter was being pursued by her brother Poseidon, and she changed into a horse to escape him. Poseidon, however, transformed himself into a horse and, after cornering Demeter, raped his older sister, resulting in her giving birth to Despoina, a mysterious goddess, and Arion, a divine horse.
• Dryope; raped by Apollo in the form of a snake.
• Europa; abducted by Zeus in the form of a white bull, then raped, resulting in the birth of Minos.
• Halie; a Rhodian woman raped by her own sons.
• Harpalyce; raped by her own father.
• Hera; raped by her brother (and later husband) Zeus.
• Io; pursued and eventually raped by Zeus, transformed into a heifer.
• Leda, raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. This resulted in the birth of Helen of Troy and Polydeuces (Pollux).
• Liriope; raped by the river god Cephissus, resulting in the birth of Narcissus.
• Medusa; raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple.
• Metis; pursued and eventually raped by her cousin (and later husband) Zeus, resulting in the eventual birth of Athena.
• Nemesis; raped by Zeus, her first cousin once removed, who relentlessly pursued her, changing many forms. In some versions, Nemesis is the mother of Helen of Troy rather than Leda.
• Nicaea; raped by Dionysus while she was unconscious.
• Persephone; raped by her uncle Hades and in Orphic tradition by her father Zeus disguised as a snake or as Hades himself. This resulted in the birth of Zagreus and Melinoë.
• Philomela; raped by her brother-in-law Tereus.
• Procris; raped by Minos.
• Rhea; raped by her son Zeus.
• Tyro; raped by Poseidon in the form of her beloved, the river-god Enipeus.” ref

Males

• Adonis; in some versions, raped by Aphrodite.
• Bellerophon; raped by (and later accused of doing the same by) Anteia.
• Caeneus raped while still appearing female by Poseidon.
• Cephalus; raped by Eos
• Chrysippus of Elis; raped by King Laius of Thebes, father of Oedipus by Jocasta.
• Cinyras raped by his daughter, Myrrha, via deception and alcohol.
• Endymion raped by Selene as he slept.
• Ganymede raped by Zeus
• Hermaphroditos; raped by (and later merged with) the nymph Salmacis.
• Hylas raped by naiads.
• Odysseus; in some versions, raped by Calypso on the island of Ogygia in his seven-year stay.
• Silenus; raped by the cyclops Polyphemus.” ref

Rape in Roman mythology

• Lucretia; raped by a prince, Sextus Tarquinius.
• The Sabine women; raped by the founders of Rome
• Rhea Silvia, raped by Mars.
• Medusa; raped by Neptune in Minerva’s temple, as the rape happens in Ovid‘s version.
• Lara; raped by Mercury as he escorted her to the Underworld.
• Caeneus; formerly known as Caenis raped by Neptune in Ovid‘s version.
• Endymion; raped by Selene while he was sleeping.” ref

Sociobiological Theories of Rape

“Sociobiological theories of rape explore how evolutionary adaptation influences the psychology of rapists. Such theories are highly controversial, as traditional theories typically do not consider rape a behavioral adaptation. Some object to such theories on ethical, religious, political, or scientific grounds. Others argue correct knowledge of rape causes is necessary for effective preventive measures. Behavior resembling rape in humans can be seen in the animal kingdom, including ducks and geese, bottlenose dolphins, and chimpanzees. Indeed, in orangutans, close human relatives, such copulations constitute up to half of observed matings. Such ‘forced copulations’ involve animals being approached and sexually penetrated while struggling or attempting to escape. Observations of forced sex in animals are uncontroversial; controversial are the interpretation of these observations and the extension of theories based on them to humans. “Thornhill introduces this theory by describing the sexual behavior of scorpionflies. In which the male may gain sex from the female either by presenting a gift of food during courtship or without a nuptial offering, in which case force is necessary to restrain her.” ref

“Rape is hypothetically homologous to similar behavior in animals. “Human rape appears not as an aberration but as an alternative gene-promotion strategy that is most likely to be adopted by the ‘losers’ in the competitive, harem-building struggle. If the means of access to legitimate, consenting sex is not available, then a male may be faced with the choice between force or genetic extinction. Thornhill and Palmer write that “In short, a man can have many children, with little inconvenience to himself; a woman can have only a few, and with great effort.” Females thus tend toward selectivity with sexual partners. Rape could be a reproductive strategy for males. They point to several other factors indicating that rape may be a reproductive strategy. Most rapes occur during prime childbearing years. Rapists usually use no more force than necessary to subdue, argued to be since physically injuring victims would harm reproduction. Moreover, “In many cultures rape is treated as a crime against the victim’s husband.” ref

“A 2003 study found that the frequency of pregnancy from rape is significantly higher than that of pregnancy in non-coercive intercourse, and advanced the hypothesis that male rapists disproportionately target women exhibiting biological indications of fertility. Anthropologist Edward H. Hagen states in his Evolutionary Psychology FAQ from 2002 that he believes there is no clear evidence for the hypothesis that rape is adaptive. He believes the adaptivity of rape is possible, but claims there is not enough evidence to be certain one way or the other. However, he encourages such evidence to be obtained: “Whether human males possess psychological adaptations for rape will only be answered by careful studies seeking evidence for such cognitive specializations. To not seek such evidence is like failing to search a suspect for a concealed weapon.” ref

“He also describes some conditions in the ancestral environment during which the reproductive gains from rape may have outweighed the costs:

• “High status males may have been able to coerce matings with little fear of reprisal.”
• “Low status women (e.g., orphans) may have been particularly vulnerable to being raped because males need not have feared reprisals from the woman’s family.”
• “During war, raping enemy women may have had few negative repercussions.”
• “Men who were low status, who were likely to remain low status, and who had few opportunities to invest in kin may have realized reproductive benefits that outweighed the considerable costs (e.g., reprisal by the woman’s family).” ref

“McKibbin et al. (2008) argue that there may be several different types of rapists or rape strategies. One is rape by disadvantaged men who cannot get sex otherwise. Another is “specialized rapists” who are more sexually aroused from rape than from consensual sex. A third type is opportunistic rapists who switch between forced and consensual sex depending on circumstances. A fourth type is psychopathic rapists. A fifth type is partner rape due to sperm competition when the male suspects or knows that the female has had sex with another male. There are varying degrees of empirical support for the existence of each of these types. More generally, they mention research finding that at least one-third of males “admit they would rape under specific conditions” and that other surveys find that many men state having coercive sexual fantasies. They, as have others, “propose that rape is a conditional strategy that may potentially be deployed by any man.” ref

“Thornhill and Palmer write that “Rape is viewed as a natural, biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage.” They further state that by categorizing a behavior as “natural” and “biological” they do not in any way mean to imply that the behavior is justified or even inevitable. “Biological” means “of or pertaining to life,” so the word applies to every human feature and behavior. But to infer from that, as many critics assert that Thornhill and Palmer do, that what is biological is somehow right or good, would be to fall into the so-called appeal to nature. They make a comparison to “natural disasters as epidemics, floods and tornadoes”. This shows that what can be found in nature is not always good and that measures should be and are taken against natural phenomena.” ref

“They further argue that a good knowledge of the causes of rape, including evolutionary ones, are necessary in order to develop effective preventive measures. Evolutionary psychologists McKibbin et al. argue that the claim that evolutionary theories are justifying rape is a fallacy in the same way that it would be a fallacy to accuse scientists doing research on the causes of cancer that they are justifying cancer. Instead, they say that understanding the causes of rape may help create preventive measures. Wilson et al. (2003) argue that evolutionary psychologists like Thornhill and Palmer use the naturalistic fallacy inappropriately to forestall legitimate discussion about the ethical implications of their theory. According to Thornhill and Palmer, a naturalistic fallacy is to infer ethical conclusions (e.g., rape is good) from (true or false) statements of fact (e.g., rape is natural).” ref

“Wilson et al. point out that combining a factual statement with an ethical statement to derive an ethical conclusion is standard ethical reasoning, not a naturalistic fallacy, because the moral judgment is not deduced exclusively from the factual statement. They further argue that if one combines Thornhill and Palmer’s factual premise that rape increases the fitness of a woman’s offspring with the ethical premise that it is right to increase fitness of offspring, the resulting deductively valid conclusion is that rape has also positive effects and that its ethical status is ambiguous. Wilson et al. state that Thornhill and Palmer dismiss all ethical objections with the phrase ‘naturalistic fallacy’ although “it is Thornhill and Palmer who are thinking fallaciously by using the naturalistic fallacy in this way.” ref

“The 2003 book Evolution, Gender, and Rape, written in response to A Natural History of Rape, compiles the views of twenty-eight scholars in opposition to sociobiological theories of rape. One contributor, Michael Kimmel, criticizes Thornhill and Palmer’s argument that female rape victims tend to be sexually attractive young women, rather than children or older women, contrary to what would be expected if rapists selected victims based on inability to resist. Kimmel argues that younger women are the least likely to be married and the most likely to be out on dates with men, and therefore are the most likely to be raped because of opportunity arising from social exposure and marital status. Palmer and Thornhill responded to these critics in an article in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.” ref

“Smith et al. (2001) criticized Thornhill and Palmer’s hypothesis that a predisposition to rape in certain circumstances is an evolved psychological adaptation. They developed a fitness cost/benefit mathematical model and populated it with estimates of certain parameters (some parameter estimates were based on studies of the Aché in Paraguay). Their model suggested that generally only men with a future reproductive value of one-tenth or less of a typical 25-year-old man would have a net positive cost/benefit fitness ratio from committing rape. On the basis of their model and parameter estimates, they suggested that this would make it unlikely that rape generally would have net fitness benefits for most men.” ref

“While defending the evolutionary psychology theory of rape against its more vehement critics, Vandermassen (2010) provides a critique of some aspects of the view. She characterizes the view of Thornhill and Palmer as “extreme” (p. 736), as they fail to allow for the influence of any non-sexual motivations in the crime of rape. Vandermassen also notes two problems with the data cited by Thornhill and Palmer regarding the psychological trauma caused by the violence associated with rape: firstly, the data is inaccurately and confusingly presented in the book, often obscuring the fact that they do not support Thornhill and Palmer’s “counterintuitive hypothesis” (p. 744) that more physical violence during rape is associated with less psychological pain. Secondly, more recent research has failed to support this hypothesis. A more moderate position, integrating the evolutionary psychology and feminist theories on rape, is presented by Vandermassen, based in part on the work of feminist evolutionary researcher Barbara Smuts.” ref

“Hamilton (2008) has criticized Thornhill and Palmer’s definition of rape as the coerced vaginal penetration of women of reproductive age. He has suggested that the exclusion of male rape, rape of women outside the reproductive age range, murderous rape, and non-vaginal forms of rape virtually guaranteed the confirmation of their hypothesis that rape is an evolved reproductive strategy and not a crime of violence. Hamilton has argued that evolutionary psychology fails to explain rape because, by evolutionary psychology’s own criteria, an adaptation to rape children or men, or non-vaginal rape, would have been eliminated in the course of evolution because it did not confer reproductive advantage on our ancestors. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss states that clear-cut evidence for or against rape as an adaptation is lacking. He states that rape may instead be a non-adaptive by-product of other evolved mechanisms, such as desire for sexual variety and for sex without investment, sensitivity to sexual opportunities, and a general capacity for physical aggression.” ref

Caveman Courtship and its Mythology

“Somewhere we got the idea that “caveman” courtship involved a man clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her by the hair to his cave where he would, presumably, copulate with an unconscious or otherwise unwilling woman. Of course, we have little to no knowledge of the social lives of early humans.  First, long-buried bodies and archeological dig sites simply can’t tell us much about how men and women interacted.  Second, to speculate about early humans based on humans today is to project the present onto the past.  To speculate about early humans based on today’s apes is (at least) as equally suspect.  Ape behavior varies tremendously anyway, even among our closest cousins. Which type do we choose?  The violent and hierarchical chimp or the peace-loving Bonobos who solve all social strife with sex?” ref

“In other words, the caveman-club-‘er-over-the-head-and-drag-her-by-the-hair narrative is pure mythology. The mythology, nonetheless, affirms the idea that men are naturally coercive and violent by suggesting that our most natural and socially-uncorrupted male selves will engage in this sort of behavior. Rape, that is. The idea also affirms the teleological idea that society is constantly improving and, therefore, getting closer and closer to ideals like gender equality.  If it’s true that “we’re getting better all the time,” then we assume that, whatever things are like now, they must have been worse before.  And however things were then, they must have been even worse before that.  And so on and so forth until we get all the way back to the clubbing caveman.” ref

“Thinking like this may encourage us to stop working to make society better because we assume it will get better anyway (and certainly won’t get worse).  Instead of thinking about what things like gender equality and subordination might look like, then, we just assume that equality is, well, what-we-have-now and subordination is what-they-had-then.  This makes it less possible to fight against the subordination that exists now by making it difficult to recognize. The idea of caveman courtship, in other words, seems silly and innocuous. But it actually helps to naturalize men’s aggressive pursuit of sex with women.  And that naturalization is part of why it is so difficult to disrupt rape myths and stop rape.” ref

 ref

Venus figurines are Upper Paleolithic statues

My response, There are both female-like first and then later some male-like ones come later. I added the seeming sex of the notable figurines. H=Human-shaped, F=Female-like, and M=Male-like.

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref

40,000 – 35,000 years ago “first seeming use of a Totem” ancestor, animal, and possible pre-goddess worship?

Stars: Ancestors, Spirit Animals, and Deities (around 6,000 years ago, with connections to shamanism at 30,000 years ago and possibly further back to 40,000 years ago with totemism)

Could Aurignacian, Gravettian, and Magdalenian cultures’ art from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago relate to Later Goddess/God and Bull cults?

Paleolithic Totem Venuses become the later Goddesses of the Neolithic and beyond? 

Aurignacian Period female ‘Venus’ carvings start at 35,000 years ago, then Transfer on to Other Cultures?

Starting 30,000 Years Ago is the Sitting Venus Phenomena

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref, ref  

“This picture makes sense if analyzed from the iconography of prehistoric Venus, but it is not reasonable from the analysis of the ANE ancient genes in Xiaohe Cemetery. Genetic analysis at Xiaohe Cemetery has proven that the ANE population has a single paternal genetic trait, while maternal genetics is more diverse. This should be caused by mammoth hunters robbing marriages.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang, in the heart of Inner Asia, and the languages that they spoke have long been debated and remain contentious. Here we present genomic data from 5 individuals dating to around 3000–2800 BCE from the Dzungarian Basin and 13 individuals dating to around 2100–1700 BCE from the Tarim Basin, representing the earliest yet discovered human remains from North and South Xinjiang, respectively. We find that the Early Bronze Age Dzungarian individuals exhibit a predominantly Afanasievo ancestry with an additional local contribution, and the Early–Middle Bronze Age Tarim individuals contain only a local ancestry. The Tarim individuals from the site of Xiaohe further exhibit strong evidence of milk proteins in their dental calculus, indicating a reliance on dairy pastoralism at the site since its founding.” ref 

“Our results do not support previous hypotheses for the origin of the Tarim mummies, who were argued to be Proto-Tocharian-speaking pastoralists descended from the Afanasievo or to have originated among the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex or Inner Asian Mountain Corridor cultures. Instead, although Tocharian may have been plausibly introduced to the Dzungarian Basin by Afanasievo migrants during the Early Bronze Age, we find that the earliest Tarim Basin cultures appear to have arisen from a genetically isolated local population that adopted neighbouring pastoralist and agriculturalist practices, which allowed them to settle and thrive along the shifting riverine oases of the Taklamakan Desert.” ref

ref

Haplogroup migrations related to the Ancient North Eurasians: I added stuff to this map to help explain. 

People reached Lake Baikal Siberia around 25,000 years ago. They (to Damien) were likely Animistic Shamanists who were also heavily totemistic as well. Being animistic thinkers they likely viewed amazing things in nature as a part of or related to something supernatural/spiritual (not just natural as explained by science): spirit-filled, a sprit-being relates to or with it, it is a sprit-being, it is a supernatural/spiritual creature, or it is a great spirit/tutelary deity/goddess-god. From there comes mythology and faith in things not seen but are believed to somehow relate or interact with this “real world” we know exists.

Both areas of Lake Baikal, one on the west side with Ancient North Eurasian culture and one on the east side with Ancient Northern East Asian culture (later to become: Ancient Northeast Asian culture) areas are the connected areas that (to Damien) are the origin ancestry religion area for many mythologies and religious ideas of the world by means of a few main migrations and many smaller ones leading to a distribution of religious ideas that even though are vast in distance are commonly related to and centering on Lake Baikal and its surrounding areas like the Amur region and Altai Mountains region. 

To an Animistic Thinker: “Things are not just as they seem, they may have a spirit, or spirit energy relates to them” 

To a Totemistic Thinker: “Things are not just as they seem, they may have a spirit, or spirit energy relates to them; they may have religio-cultural importance.” 

My response, “Ancient North Eurasian population had Haplogroups R, P, U, and Q DNA types: defined by maternal West-Eurasian ancestry components (such as mtDNA haplogroup U) and paternal East-Eurasian ancestry components (such as yDNA haplogroup P1 (R*/Q*).” ref 

“The Haplogroup U of Gravettian mtDNA appears in both the Xiaohe Cemetery and the Mal’ta Cemetery, but the prehistoric Venuses in the Mal’ta Cemetery are not all female, there are also males, which should be a sign of transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. Not all Siberian Venuses are female, many are male.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

“On closer inspection, the so-called Venuses in the Mal’ta have been unmasked as a group of ordinary-looking people of all ages, including men, women, and children, from 20,000 years ago.” ref 

ref

Mal’ta burials, Artifacts, and Statuettes

My response, I know a lot on different paleolithic to neolithic figurines. There are few males overall and they seem to mainly start in Kostenki Russia 25,000 years ago then spread to the ANE Mal’ta-Buret’ Cultures. I think it is from there totem poles may have been inspired from.

Mal’ta–Buret’ culture

“The Mal’ta–Buret’ culture (also Maltinsko-buretskaya culture) is an archaeological culture of the Upper Paleolithic (generally dated to 24,000-15,000 years ago). It is located roughly northwest of Lake Baikal, about 90km to the northwest of Irkutsk, on the banks of the upper Angara River. The type sites are named for the villages of Mal’ta (Мальта́), Usolsky District and Buret’ (Буре́ть), Bokhansky District (both in Irkutsk Oblast).” ref

“A boy whose remains were found near Mal’ta is usually known by the abbreviation MA-1 (or MA1) dated to 24,000 years ago. According to research published since 2013, MA-1 belonged to the population of Ancient North Eurasians, who were genetically “intermediate between modern western Eurasians and Native Americans, but distant from east Asians”, and partial genetic ancestors of Siberians, American Indians, and Bronze Age Yamnaya and Botai people of the Eurasian steppe. In particular, modern-day Native Americans, Kets, Mansi, and Selkup have been found to harbor a significant amount of ancestry related to MA-1. MA-1 is the only known example of basal Y-DNA R* (R-M207*) – that is, the only member of haplogroup R* that did not belong to haplogroups R1, R2, or secondary subclades of these. The mitochondrial DNA of MA-1 belonged to an unresolved subclade of haplogroup U.” ref

“Mal’ta consists of semi-subterranean houses that were built using large animal bones to assemble the walls, and reindeer antlers covered with animal skins to construct a roof that would protect the inhabitants from the harsh elements of the Siberian weather. These dwellings built from mammoth bones were similar to those found in Upper Paleolithic Western Eurasia, such as in the areas of France, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine. Evidence seems to indicate that Mal’ta is the most ancient known site in eastern Siberia, with the nearby site of Buret’.” ref 

“However, relative dating illustrates some irregularities. The use of flint flaking and the absence of pressure flaking used in the manufacture of tools, as well as the continued use of earlier forms of tools, seem to confirm the fact that the site belongs to the early Upper Paleolithic. Yet it lacks typical skreblos (large side scrapers) that are common in other Siberian Paleolithic sites. Additionally, other common characteristics such as pebble cores, wedge-shaped cores, burins, and composite tools have never been found. The lack of these features, combined with an art style found in only one other nearby site (the Venus of Buret’), make Mal’ta culture unique in Siberia.” ref

“There were two main types of art during the Upper Paleolithic: mural art, which was concentrated in Western Europe, and portable art. Portable art, typically some type of carving in ivory tusk or antler, spans the distance across Western Europe into Northern and Central Asia. Artistic remains of expertly carved bone, ivory, and antler objects depicting birds and human females are the most commonly found; these objects are, collectively, the primary source of Mal’ta’s acclaim.” ref

“In addition to the female statuettes there are bird sculptures depicting swans, geese, and ducks. Through ethnographic analogy comparing the ivory objects and burials at Mal’ta with objects used by 19th and 20th-century Siberian shamans, it has been suggested that they are evidence of a fully developed shamanism. Also, there are engraved representations on slabs of mammoth tusk. One is the figure of a mammoth, easily recognizable by the trunk, tusks, and thick legs. Wool also seems to be etched, by the placement of straight lines along the body. Another drawing depicts three snakes with their heads puffed up and turned to the side. It is believed that they were similar to cobras.” ref

“Perhaps the best example of Paleolithic portable art is something referred to as “Venus figurines“. The Mal’ta boy (dated 24,000 years ago) was buried with various artifacts and a Venus figurine. Until they were discovered in Mal’ta, “Venus figurines” were previously found only in Europe. Carved from the ivory tusk of a mammoth, these images were typically highly stylized, and often involved embellished and disproportionate characteristics (typically the breasts or buttocks). It is widely believed that these emphasized features were meant to be symbols of fertility. Around thirty female statuettes of varying shapes have been found in Mal’ta. The wide variety of forms, combined with the realism of the sculptures and the lack of repetitiveness in detail, are definite signs of developed, albeit early, art.” ref

“At first glance, what is obvious is that the Mal’ta Venus figurines are of two types: full-figured women with exaggerated forms, and women with a thin, delicate form. Some of the figures are nude, while others have etchings that seem to indicate fur or clothing. Conversely, unlike those found in Europe, some of the Venus figurines from Mal’ta were sculpted with faces. Most of the figurines were tapered at the bottom, and it is believed that this was done to enable them to be stuck into the ground or otherwise placed upright. Placed upright, they could have symbolized the spirits of the dead, akin to “spirit dolls” used nearly worldwide, including in Siberia, among contemporary people.” ref

“The Mal’ta figurines garner interest in the western world because they seem to be of the same basic form as European female figurines of roughly the same time period, suggestion some cultural and cultic connection. This similarity between Mal’ta and Upper Paleolithic Europe coincides with other suggested similarities between the two, such as in their tools and dwelling structures. A 2016 genomic study shows that the Mal’ta people have no genetic connections to the Dolní Věstonice people from the Gravettian culture. The researchers conclude that the similarity between the figurines may be either due to cultural diffusion or to a coincidence, but not to common ancestry between the populations.” ref

“Discussing this easternmost outpost of paleolithic culture, Joseph Campbell finishes by commenting on the symbolic forms of the artifacts found there:

We are clearly in apaleolithicprovince where theserpent,labyrinth, and rebirth themes already constitute a symbolic constellation, joined with the imagery of the sunbird andshamanflight, with the goddess in her classic role ofprotectress of the hearth, mother of man’s second birth, andlady of wild thingsand of the food supply.” ref

“The term Ancient North Eurasian (ANE) has been given in genetic literature to an ancestral component that represents descent from the people similar to the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture and the closely related population of Afontova Gora. A people similar to MA1 and Afontova Gora were important genetic contributors to Native Americans, Siberians, Europeans, Caucasians, Central Asians, with smaller contributions to Middle Easterners and some East Asians. Lazaridis et al. (2016) notes “a cline of ANE ancestry across the east-west extent of Eurasia.” The “ANE-cline”, as observed among Paleolithic Siberian populations and their direct descendants, developed from a sister lineage of Europeans with significant admixture from early East Asians. MA1 is also related to two older Upper Paleolithic Siberian individuals found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site called Ancient North Siberians (ANS).” ref

Afontova Gora

“Afontova Gora is a Late Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic Siberian complex of archaeological sites located on the left bank of the Yenisei River near the city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Afontova Gora has cultural and genetic links to the people from Mal’ta-Buret’. The complex was first excavated in 1884 by Ivan Savenkov. Afontova Gora is a complex, consisting of multiple stratigraphic layers, of five or more campsites. The campsites shows evidence of mammoth hunting and were likely the result of an eastward expansion of mammoth hunters. The human fossils discovered at Afontova Gora, a male and a girl dated to 17,000~15,000 years ago.” ref

“Afontova Gora I is situated on the western bank of the Enisei River and has yielded the remains from horse, mammoth, reindeer, steppe bison, and large canids. A canid tibia has been dated 16,900 years old and the skull has been taxonomically described as being that of a dog, but it is now lost. Its description falls outside of the range of Pleistocene or modern northern wolves. (The name Afontova Gora 1 refers to the remains of a canid.)” ref

“Afontova Gora II is the site human fossil remains were found, and remains of mammoth, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, reindeer, bison, and horse were discovered at the site. Afontova Gora II consists of 7 layers. Layer 3 from Afontova Gora II is the most significant: the layer produced the largest amount of cultural artifacts and is the layer where the human fossil remains were discovered. Over 20,000 artifacts were discovered at layer 3: this layer produced over 450 tools and over 250 osseous artifacts (bone, antler, ivory). The fossils of two distinct individuals were discovered in the initial excavations: the upper premolar of an 11-15-year-old child and the left radius, ulna, humerus, phalanx, and frontal bone of an adult.” ref

“The bodies of two individuals, known as Afontova Gora 2 (AG2). The human fossil remains of Afontova Gora 2 were dated to around 17,000 years ago. DNA from the humerus of Afontova Gora 2, despite significant contamination, DNA analysis confirmed that the individual was male. The individual showed close genetic affinities to Mal’ta 1 (Mal’ta boy). Afontova Gora 2 also showed a greater genetic affinity for the Karitiana people than for the Han Chinese. Around 1.9-2.7% of the genome was Neanderthal in origin. More human fossil remains were discovered at Afontova Gora II, The remains belonged to two different females: the atlas of an adult female and the mandible and five lower teeth of a teenage girl (Afontova Gora 3) estimated to be around 14–15 years old. Initially, the new findings were presumed to be roughly contemporaneous with Afontova Gora 2.” ref 

“Afontova Gora III is a site that consists of 3 layers. Afontova Gora 3 (AG3) was discovered within the complex. Direct AMS dating revealed that Afontova Gora 3 is dated to around 16,090 cal BCE or around 18,090 years ago). Researchers analyzing the dental morphology of Afontova Gora 3 concluded that the teeth showed distinct characteristics with most similarities to another fossil (the Listvenka child) from the Altai-Sayan region and were neither western nor eastern. Afontova Gora 3 and Listvenka showed distinct dental characteristics that were also different from other Siberian fossils, including those from Mal’ta.” ref

“DNA was extracted from one of the teeth of Afontova Gora 3 and analyzed. Compared to Afontova Gora 2, researchers were able to obtain higher coverage genomes from Afontova Gora 3. DNA analysis confirmed that the individual was female. mtDNA analysis revealed that Afontova Gora 3 belonged to the mitochondrial Haplogroup R1b. Around 2.9-3.7% of the genome was Neanderthal in origin. Researchers determined that Afontova Gora 2, Afontova Gora 3, and Mal’ta 1 (Mal’ta boy) shared common descent and were clustered together in a Mal’ta cluster. Genetically, Afontova Gora 3 is not closer to Afontova Gora 2 when compared to Mal’ta 1. When compared to Mal’ta 1, the Afontova Gora 3 lineage apparently contributed more to modern humans and is genetically closer to Native Americans.” ref

“Phenotypic analysis shows that Afontova Gora 3 carries the derived rs12821256 allele associated with, and likely causal for, blond hair color, making Afontova Gora 3 the earliest individual known to carry this derived allele. The allele was found in three later members of the largely ANE-derived Eastern Hunter-Gatherers populations from Samara, Motala and Ukraine c. 10,000 years ago, suggesting that it originated in the Ancient North Eurasian population before spreading to western Eurasia. The hundreds of millions of copies of this mutated alelle (a single-nucleotide polymorphism) are at the root of the classic European blond hair mutation, as massive population migrations from the Eurasian steppe, by a people who had substantial Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, entered continental Europe.” ref

“A genetic study on the Tarim mummies found that they were primarily descended from a population represented by the Afontova Gora 3 specimen (AG3), genetically displaying “high affinity” with it. The genetic profile of the Afontova Gora 3 individual represented about 72% of the ancestry of the Tarim mummies, while the remaining 28% of their ancestry was derived from Baikal EBA (Early Bronze Age Baikal populations). The Tarim mummies are thus one of the rare Holocene populations who derive most of their ancestry from the Ancient North Eurasians (ANE, specifically the Mal’ta and Afontova Gora populations), despite their distance in time (around 14,000 years). More than any other ancient populations, they can be considered as “the best representatives” of the Ancient North Eurasians.” ref

“Afontova Gora V is the site where remains of hare, pika, cave lion, horse, reindeer, bison, and partridge were discovered at the site.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Here are my thoughts/speculations on where I believe is the possible origin of shamanism, which may have begun sometime around 35,000 to 30,000 years ago seen in the emergence of the Gravettian culture, just to outline his thinking, on what thousands of years later led to evolved Asian shamanism, in general, and thus WU shamanism as well. In both Europe-related “shamanism-possible burials” and in Gravettian mitochondrial DNA is a seeming connection to Haplogroup U. And the first believed Shaman proposed burial belonged to Eastern Gravettians/Pavlovian culture at Dolní Věstonice in southern Moravia in the Czech Republic, which is the oldest permanent human settlement that has ever been found. It is at Dolní Věstonice where approximately 27,000-25,000 years ago a seeming female shaman was buried and also there was an ivory totem portrait figure, seemingly of her.

And my thoughts on how cultural/ritual aspects were influenced in the area of Göbekli Tepe. I think it relates to a few different cultures starting in the area before the Neolithic. Two different groups of Siberians first from northwest Siberia with U6 haplogroup 40,000 to 30,000 or so. Then R Haplogroup (mainly haplogroup R1b but also some possible R1a both related to the Ancient North Eurasians). This second group added its “R1b” DNA of around 50% to the two cultures Natufian and Trialetian. To me, it is likely both of these cultures helped create Göbekli Tepe. Then I think the female art or graffiti seen at Göbekli Tepe to me possibly relates to the Epigravettians that made it into Turkey and have similar art in North Italy. I speculate that possibly the Totem pole figurines seen first at Kostenki, next went to Mal’ta in Siberia as seen in their figurines that also seem “Totem-pole-like”, and then with the migrations of R1a it may have inspired the Shigir idol in Russia and the migrations of R1b may have inspired Göbekli Tepe.

Seeming Connections: Totem poles, Ceremonial poles, Spirit poles, Sacred poles, Deity poles, Deities with poles, Pole star, Axis Mundi, Sacred trees, World tree, Maypole, Sun Dance with poles, etc.

“Migration from Siberia behind the formation of Göbeklitepe: Expert states. People who migrated from Siberia formed the Göbeklitepe, and those in Göbeklitepe migrated in five other ways to spread to the world, said experts about the 12,000-year-old Neolithic archaeological site in the southwestern province of Şanlıurfa.“ The upper paleolithic migrations between Siberia and the Near East is a process that has been confirmed by material culture documents,” he said.” ref

“Semih Güneri, a retired professor from Caucasia and Central Asia Archaeology Research Center of Dokuz Eylül University, and his colleague, Professor Ekaterine Lipnina, presented the Siberia-Göbeklitepe hypothesis they have developed in recent years at the congress held in Istanbul between June 11 and 13. There was a migration that started from Siberia 30,000 years ago and spread to all of Asia and then to Eastern and Northern Europe, Güneri said at the international congress.” ref

“The relationship of Göbeklitepe high culture with the carriers of Siberian microblade stone tool technology is no longer a secret,” he said while emphasizing that the most important branch of the migrations extended to the Near East. “The results of the genetic analyzes of Iraq’s Zagros region confirm the traces of the Siberian/North Asian indigenous people, who arrived at Zagros via the Central Asian mountainous corridor and met with the Göbeklitepe culture via Northern Iraq,” he added.” ref

“Emphasizing that the stone tool technology was transported approximately 7,000 kilometers from east to west, he said, “It is not clear whether this technology is transmitted directly to long distances by people speaking the Turkish language at the earliest, or it travels this long-distance through using way stations.” According to the archaeological documents, it is known that the Siberian people had reached the Zagros region, he said. “There seems to be a relationship between Siberian hunter-gatherers and native Zagros hunter-gatherers,” Güneri said, adding that the results of genetic studies show that Siberian people reached as far as the Zagros.” ref

“There were three waves of migration of Turkish tribes from the Southern Siberia to Europe,” said Osman Karatay, a professor from Ege University. He added that most of the groups in the third wave, which took place between 2600-2400 BCE, assimilated and entered the Germanic tribes and that there was a genetic kinship between their tribes and the Turks. The professor also pointed out that there are indications that there is a technology and tool transfer from Siberia to the Göbeklitepe region and that it is not known whether people came, and if any, whether they were Turkish.” ref

“Around 12,000 years ago, there would be no ‘Turks’ as we know it today. However, there may have been tribes that we could call our ‘common ancestors,’” he added. “Talking about 30,000 years ago, it is impossible to identify and classify nations in today’s terms,” said Murat Öztürk, associate professor from İnönü University. He also said that it is not possible to determine who came to where during the migrations that were accepted to have been made thousands of years ago from Siberia. On the other hand, Mehmet Özdoğan, an academic from Istanbul University, has an idea of where “the people of Göbeklitepe migrated to.” ref

“According to Özdoğan, “the people of Göbeklitepe turned into farmers, and they could not stand the pressure of the overwhelming clergy and started to migrate to five ways.” “Migrations take place primarily in groups. One of the five routes extends to the Caucasus, another from Iran to Central Asia, the Mediterranean coast to Spain, Thrace and [the northwestern province of] Kırklareli to Europe and England, and one route is to Istanbul via [Istanbul’s neighboring province of] Sakarya and stops,” Özdoğan said. In a very short time after the migration of farmers in Göbeklitepe, 300 settlements were established only around northern Greece, Bulgaria, and Thrace. “Those who remained in Göbeklitepe pulled the trigger of Mesopotamian civilization in the following periods, and those who migrated to Mesopotamia started irrigated agriculture before the Sumerians,” he said.” ref

“Many of the Venus statues in East Asia are male, and few are female. Similar statues in China, the Inca, and the Maya are basically male. Western European women succumbed to the dominance of Siberian mammoth hunters. When some women became grandmothers, their statues may also be worshiped. But apparently, they also carved many men, including their minor children. It’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome. The women of Xiaohe Cemetery were clearly a feminist fleeing from their male rulers. Paternal inheritance is similar, but maternal inheritance comes from all directions. It can be seen from the funeral methods that this is a matriarchal society.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

“The Xiaohe Cemetery (Chinese: 小河墓地; pinyin: Xiǎohé mùdì, lit. ‘little river cemetery’), also known as Ördek’s Necropolis, is a Bronze Age site located in the west of Lop Nur, in Xinjiang, Western China. It contains about 330 tombs, about 160 of which were looted by grave robbers before archaeological research could be carried out. The Gumugou cemetery slightly to the north is also considered as part of the Xiaohe culture.” ref 

“The cemetery resembles an oblong sand dune. From it the remains of more than 30 people, the earliest of whom lived around 4,000 years ago, have been excavated. The bodies, which have been buried in air-tight ox-hide bags, are so well-preserved that they have often been referred to as the “Tarim mummies“. The Xiaohe remains have attracted considerable attention, particularly because of their “Caucasoid” appearance.” ref  

“Analysis of the Xiaohe population’s genetic makeup has revealed that they represented a genetic bottleneck, essentially derived from Ancient North Eurasians. The Xiaohe cemetery complex contains the largest number of mummies found at any single site in the world to date. The bodies are likely to have been transported significant distances for burial at Xiaohe, as no contemporaneous settlement is known to have existed near the tomb complex.” ref 

My response, I am more confident in some ideas and less in others, I try to let the evidence decide for me, and be open to update my ideas to new facts as it is facts that offer a better footing for ideas to feel assurance. I don’t believe in Alt History beliefs and fully support mainstream Archaeologists, but I am not an Archaeologist nor even a scholar, just someone who has done self-study of the facts available and reached my own ideas about what the facts seem to support. I am on the science side. I would say class war could be sometime between 12,000 years ago, with slavery origins to around 7,000 years ago, when male clans took over, or at least 5,000 years ago, and the birth of the State. Lots of history has been oppression by masters or elites in positions/possessions of power and authority. To me, sexism may also start to some extent 12,000 years ago, it was not really obvious until 7,000 years ago when male clans starting tacking over.

“Starting with the advent of agriculture and then waring patriarchal (male) clan led to a genetic bottleneck 8,000 years ago, where evidence shows, only one man passed on his DNA for every 17 women.” ref, ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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“Israeli Archaeologists Find Earliest Evidence of War in Southern Levant. Industrial production of aerodynamically efficient slingstones almost 8,000 years ago in what is today’s Israel wasn’t done to hunt animals. Almost 8,000 years ago, people in the Galilee and Sharon plain were preparing for war. This postulation is based on the mass production of shaped slingstones at four sites in Israel, starting in the Late Pottery Neolithic – though who they were attacking, or defending against, and why the production of these stone bullets ceased after about a thousand years is anybody’s guess. The current thinking is they were fighting against other local peoples, not invading hordes. That would come later.” ref

“The collections, most recently found at ‘En Esur and ‘En Tzippori but also at two other sites, are the earliest evidence of “formal” slingstones in the southern Levant, say Gil Haklay, Enno Bron, Dr. Dina Shalem, Dr. Ianir Milevski and Nimrod Getzov, archaeologists associated with the Israel Antiquities Authority, reporting in the journal ‘Atiqot. The slingstones were shaped to be biconical, meaning they were bullet-shaped if bullets had two tipped ends. Put otherwise, they look like very big olives, or eggs if there is something wrong with your bird. That double-cone shape is more aerodynamically efficient than just round stones, the archaeologists explain.” ref

“These weren’t the first slingstones in the world, just the earliest found in the southern Levant. Based on the archaeological evidence, the technique of shaping such projectiles emerged in Mesopotamia, spread to western Anatolia in today’s Turkey, from there to the Northern Levant and then to the southern Levant, Haklay explains to Haaretz by phone. Prehistoric contact between these regions has long been established, including through the discovery of obsidian from Turkey in Israel – including in a settlement by Jerusalem from 9,000 years ago.” ref

“In the southern Levant we find it with the Wadi Rabah culture from about 7,800 to 7,600 years ago, and it peaks 7,200 years ago. In the northern Levant we see the slingstones centuries before that – they look the same but they were made of clay,” Haklay says. Not burned ceramic clay but sun-dried clay, he adds. It was in the southern Levant that the stone slingstones appear. “Slingstones used pretty much everywhere in different periods were found throughout prehistory,” Haklay says. “People apparently reached the same solution independently because it’s the optimal way.” ref

“The Levantine biconical projectiles were quite uniform, averaging just over 5 centimeters (2 inches) in length and 60 grams (2 ounces) in weight. Made of local dolomite or limestone rock, or basalt, they are similar in shape to recognized slingstones from later times around the world. “Similar slingstones have been found at other sites in the country, mainly from the Hula Valley and the Galilee in the north to the northern Sharon, but this is the first time they have been found in excavations in such large concentrations,” the team said in a statement. This postulated evidence of warfare at ‘En Esur in the plain and ‘En Tzippori in the Lower Galilee is the earliest known in the whole of the southern Levant and certainly modern Israel, though not the world. The earliest known war zone is in Sudan and dates to about 13,000 years ago.” ref

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• Murder: A Modern Artifact

“The biconical slingstones produced in the southern Levant starting about 7,800 years ago would remain in use for about a thousand years. Then such items abruptly disappeared from the archaeological record, the team says. The legend of David and Goliath from the Iron Age, and giant “flint spheroids” weighing a quarter-kilo apiece found in biblical Lachish, are all well and good. However, respectable “formalized” slingstones would only reappear in the local archaeological record in the Hellenistic period, the authors explain. Come the Late Roman period, the technique would be perfected by the manufacture of “whistling” slingstones, carved to shriek as they traveled, the better to unnerve the enemy. But we digress. Does that mean the locals stopped lobbing stones at one another? It does not.” ref

“The legend of David and Goliath from the Iron Age, and giant “flint spheroids” weighing a quarter-kilo apiece found in biblical Lachish, are all well and good. However, respectable “formalized” slingstones would only reappear in the local archaeological record in the Hellenistic period, the authors explain. Come the Late Roman period, the technique would be perfected by the manufacture of “whistling” slingstones, carved to shriek as they traveled, the better to unnerve the enemy. But we digress. The study discusses 424 slingstones found at ‘En Esur and ‘En Tzippori from the Late Neolithic-Early Chalcolithic. The logical inference of the amounts and circumstances support the thesis that these were weaponry, and the uniformity of the product suggests systematic production: formalization, standardization, and investment in the manufacture, the team explains.” ref

“Of the 424 slingstones, most were complete, some were chinked. The sheer effort invested in the industrial production of slingstones with smoothed surfaces suggests a communal effort to produce ammunition, the archaeologists posit – a transition from individual to large-scale production. Note they are not saying these two sites were the only places where such bullets were discovered from the period. Two other major collections of slingstones from the same period have also been found in the region, and smaller numbers of the shaped stones have been found throughout central and northern Israel. ‘En Esur seems to be the southern “border” of the region in which slingshots were systematically used. But for what?” ref

7,000 to 5,000 years ago because of violence genetics dropped to 1 man for every 17 women

“An abrupt population bottleneck specific to human males has been inferred across several Old World (Africa, Europe, Asia) populations 5000–7000 years ago. Previous studies also show trauma marks present on skulls clearly indicate the fighters used axes, clubs, and arrows to kill each other. Scientists from Stanford used mathematical models and computer simulations, in which men fought and died – allowing them to test their theory on the ‘Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck’. According to genetic patterns, researchers found the decline was only noticed in men – particularly on the Y chromosome, which is passed on from father to son. The war was so severe that it caused the male population to plummet to extremely low levels, reaching an astonishing one-twentieth of its original level. This results in the loss of Y chromosomes as they slowly deteriorate over time and eventually may get wiped out from the genome.” ref

“Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same. Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then, as more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man.” ref

“Violence in the ancient Middle East spiked with the formation of states and empires, battered skulls reveal.” ref

“The Mandate of Heaven (Chinese: 天命; pinyin: Tiānmìng; Wade–Giles: T’ien-ming; lit. ‘Heaven’s command’) is a Chinese political ideology that was used in ancient and imperial China to legitimize the rule of the King or Emperor of China. According to this doctrine, heaven (天, Tian) bestows its mandate on a virtuous ruler. This ruler, the Son of Heaven, was the supreme universal monarch, who ruled Tianxia (天下; “all under heaven”, the world). If a ruler was overthrown, this was interpreted as an indication that the ruler was unworthy and had lost the mandate. The Chinese concept of the legitimacy of rulers is similar to Western culture’s Divine right of kings.” ref

“In European Christianity, the divine right of kings, divine right, or God’s mandation, is a political and religious doctrine of political legitimacy of a monarchy. It is also known as the divine-right theory of kingship. Divine right has been a key element of the self-legitimisation of many absolute monarchies, connected with their authority and right to rule. Historically, many notions of rights have been authoritarian and hierarchical, with different people granted different rights and some having more rights than others. For instance, the right of a father to receive respect from his son did not indicate a right for the son to receive a return from that respect. Analogously, the divine right of kings, which permitted absolute power over subjects, provided few rights for the subjects themselves. The Imperial cult of ancient Rome identified Roman emperors and some members of their families with the “divinely sanctioned” authority (auctoritas) of the Roman State. The official offer of cultus to a living emperor acknowledged his office and rule as divinely approved and constitutional: his Principate should therefore demonstrate pious respect for traditional Republican deities and mores. Many of the rites, practices, and status distinctions that characterized the cult to emperors were perpetuated in the theology and politics of the Christianised Empire. The earliest references to kingship in Israel proclaim that “14 “When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,’ 15 you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother.” ref

Related concepts in other religions to the divine-right theory of kingship:

• Mandate of Heaven and monarch as the Son of Heaven – Sinosphere
• Madkhalism – Islam
• Monarchs who are also deities:
• God emperors
• God kings
• Sacred kings – the occupant of the monarchy gains religious significance or has support from a deity
• Cakravartin – South Asia ref

ref

8,000 years ago in Siberia, the World’s oldest known fortress (fortified structure) was constructed by hunter-gatherers.

“Archaeologists have long associated fortresses with permanent agricultural settlements. However, this cluster of fortified structures reveals that prehistoric groups were constructing protective edifices much earlier than originally thought. Located along the Amnya River in western Siberia, remains of the Amnya fort include roughly 20 pit-house depressions scattered across the site, which is divided into two sections: Amnya I and Amnya II. “One of the Amnya fort’s most astonishing aspects is the discovery that approximately 8,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers in the Siberian Taiga built intricate defense structures,” Schreiber said. “This challenges traditional assumptions that monumental constructions were solely the work of agricultural communities.” It’s unknown what triggered the need for these fortified structures in the first place, but the strategic location overlooking the river would have not only been an ideal lookout point for potential threats but also allowed hunter-gatherers to keep tabs on their fishing and hunting grounds, the researchers noted.” ref

“Hunter-gatherers built the oldest known fort in the world about 8,000 years ago in Siberia, a new study finds. “It remains uncertain whether these constructions were commissioned by those in authority or if the entire community collaborated in constructing them for the purpose of protecting people or valuables,” Schreiber said. “Ethnohistorical records offer a nuanced comprehension of these forts, disclosing various potential reasons for fortifying residences.” Ancient forts were built for a number of reasons, according to these records, “such as securing possessions or individuals, handling armed conflicts, addressing imbalances in attacker-defender ratios, thwarting raids and functioning as elaborate signals by influential chiefs,” Schreiber said.” ref

So, this almost 8,000-year-old war evidence is just a little bit before the 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, time of clan violence and World War 0. When it went down to 14 women to 1 man in genetics due to wars.

• “6200 – 6000 BCE or 8,200 to 8,000 years ago: The 8.2-kiloyear event, involved a rapid cooling, it was a sudden decrease of global temperatures, probably caused by the final collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which led to drier conditions in East Africa and Mesopotamia. In West Asia, especially Mesopotamia, the 8.2-kiloyear event was a 300-year aridification and cooling episode, which may have provided the natural force for Mesopotamian irrigation agriculture and surplus production, which were essential for the earliest formation of classes and urban life. Lacustrine sediment records show that Western Siberia underwent humidification and the Tarim Basin shows a major dry spell during the 8.2 ka event.” ref, ref

• “6200 – 5600 BCE or 8,200 to 7,600 years ago: Sudden rise in sea level (Meltwater pulse 1C) by 6.5 m (21 ft) in less than 140 years; this concludes the early Holocene sea level rise and sea level remains largely stable throughout the Neolithic.” ref
• “6100 BCE or 8,100 years ago: Great Britain had become an island.” ref
• “6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago: Approximately 8,000 years ago (c. 6000 BCE), a massive volcanic landslide off Mount Etna, Sicily, caused a megatsunami that devastated the eastern Mediterranean coastline on the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe.” ref
• “6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago: Neolithic culture and technology had spread from the Near East and into Eastern Europe by 6000 BC. Its development in the Far East grew apace and there is increasing evidence through the millennium of its presence in prehistoric Egypt and the Far East. In much of the world, however, including Northern and Western Europe, people still lived in scattered Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer communities.” ref
• “6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago: The oldest fort is in Siberia around 6000 BCE.” ref
• “5500 BCE or 7,500 years ago: Copper smelting in evidence in Pločnik and Belovode, Serbia.” ref

“Four identified cultures starting around 5300 BCE or 7,300 years ago, were the Dnieper-Donets, the Narva (eastern Baltic), the Ertebølle (Denmark and northern Germany), and the Swifterbant (Low Countries). They were linked by a common pottery style that had spread westward from Asia: starting in south China, then the Lake Baikal area of Siberia, then west to Europe and is sometimes called “ceramic Mesolithic“, distinguishable by a point or knob base and flared rims.” ref, ref, ref, ref

“The Baikal area, has a long history of human habitation. Some 160 km northwest of the lake, remains of a young human male known as MA-1 or “Mal’ta Boy” are indications of local habitation by the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture ca. 24,000 years old (who I think were involved in Shamanism and may have by their descendants or those with related DNA spread shamanism all over).” ref

“Siberian cultural identity is closely connected with the mythology and ancient religion of the indigenous peoples of Siberia – shamanism, whose rituals, images, symbols, and motifs are often manifested in the clients’ dreams.” ref

“The earliest Indigenous peoples of Siberia were hunter-gatherers distantly related to modern Europeans, and diverged from a shared ancestral population around 38kya before populating Siberia. In Siberia, they received geneflow from an East-Eurasian population, most closely related to the 40kya old Tianyuan man (c. 22-50%), representing a deep sister lineage of contemporary East Asian people, giving rise to a distinct Siberian lineage known as Ancient North Eurasian (such as the Mal’ta–Buret’ culture), populations carrying Ancient North Eurasian-related ancestry were probably widely distributed across northeast Eurasia.” ref

“The earliest known archaeological finds from Siberia date to the Lower Palaeolithic. In various places in West Siberia, the Baikal region and Yakutia, storage places from early Neolithic times have been found, which often remained in use for centuries. Alongside tent settlements which leave no traces in the ground, there were also huts, often dug slightly into the ground, whose walls and roofs were made of animal bone and reindeer antlers. Tools and weapons were mostly made from flint, slate, and bone, with few discernable differences between them despite their immense chronological and geographical scope. In some settlements, early artworks have been found, which consist of human, animal, and abstract sculptures and carvings. The Palaeolithic and Mesolithic inhabitants of Siberia were hunter-gatherers, whose prey consisted of mammoths and reindeer, and occasionally fish as well. In the 6th millennium BCE, pottery spread across the whole of Siberia, which scholars treat as the beginning of the Siberian Neolithic. Unlike Europe and the Near East, this event did not mark a major change in lifestyle, economy, or culture.” ref

“The last historical population movement can be associated with the Neo-Siberian expansion outgoing from Northeast Asia (15,000 years ago), and contributed ancestry to Indigenous groups throughout Siberia as well as to Native Americans, associated with the expansion of Paleo-Eskimo, and Eskimo-Aleut groups. Modern Indigenous peoples of Siberia derive varying degrees of ancestry from these three layers, although the  Ancient North Eurasian-like ancestry has been largely replaced.” ref

“The increase in cases of interpersonal violence from the Mesolithic period is most likely related to better preservation and the much higher number of burials and more complete skeletons. Violence is present not only in recent hunter-gatherers and nomadic groups but also among Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.” ref 

“From the Neolithic or early in the Chalcolithic, sedentary groups in which pastoralism played an important economic role developed in southwestern Siberia. The transition to the new economic system and to sedentarism was very smooth. Subsequently, it spread to the Baikal region, where the influence of northern China may also have played a role. All horse nomad cultures shared the burial of the dead in barrow graves which are known as kurgans.” ref

Bridging the Boreal Forest: Siberian Archaeology and the Emergence of Pottery among Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers of Northern Eurasia 

• Globalization and the Emergence of Ceramic-using Hunter-gatherers in Northern Eurasia
• A comparative perspective on the ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Neolithics of Eurasia: Ceramics; agriculture and sedentism
• The transmission of pottery technology among prehistoric European hunter-gatherers

“The Dnieper–Donets culture complex (DDCC) (ca. 5th—4th millennium BCE) was a Mesolithic and later Neolithic culture which flourished north of the Black Sea ca. 5000-4200 BCE or 7,000 to 6,200 years ago. It has many parallels with the Samara culture, and was succeeded by the Sredny Stog culture. Striking similarities with the Khvalynsk culture have also been detected. The Dnieper–Donets culture was originally a hunter-gatherer culture. David Anthony (2007: 155) dated the beginning of the Dnieper–Donets culture as roughly between 5800/5200 BCE or 7,800/7,200 to 6,200 years ago. It quickly expanded in all directions, eventually absorbing all other local Neolithic groups. According to David W. Anthony, the Indo-European languages were initially spoken by EHGs living in Eastern Europe, such as the Dnieper-Donets people. The precise role of the culture and its language to the derivation of the Pontic-Caspian cultures, such as Sredny Stog and Yamnaya culture, is open to debate, but the display of recurrent traits points to longstanding mutual contacts or to underlying genetic relations.” ref

“The physical remains recovered from graves of the Dnieper–Donets culture have been classified as “Proto-Europoid“. The Dnieper–Donets culture produced no female figurines. By 5200 BCE or 7,200 years ago the Dnieper–Donets culture II followed, which ended between 4400/4200 BCE. From around 5200 BCE, the Dnieper-Donets people began keeping cattle, sheep, and goats. Other domestic animals kept included pigs, horses, and dogs. During the following centuries, domestic animals from the Dnieper further and further east towards the Volga–Ural steppes, where they appeared ca. 4700-4600 BCE. Some scholars suggest that from about 4200 BCE, the Dnieper–Donets culture adopted agriculture.” ref

“Certain Dnieper-Donets burials are accompanied with copper, crystal or porphyry ornaments, shell beads, bird-stone tubes, polished stone maces or ornamental plaques made of boar’s tusk. The items, along with the presence of animal bones and sophisticated burial methods, appear to have been a symbol of power. Certain deceased children were buried with such items, which indicates that wealth was inherited in Dnieper-Donets society. Very similar boar-tusk plaques and copper ornaments have been found at contemporary graves of the Samara culture in the middle Volga area. Maces of a different type than those of Dnieper-Donets have also been found. The wide adoption of such a status symbol attests to the existence of the institute of power in the Dnieper–Donets culture complex.” ref 

“The first archaeogenetic analysis involving the Dnieper–Donets culture complex individuals from the Mykilske (Nikols’skoye in Russian) and Yasynuvatka (Yasinovatka) cemeteries held the haplogroups of west Eurasian (H, U3, U5a1a) and east Eurasian (C, C4a) descent have been identified. The authors linked the appearance of east Eurasian haplogroups with potential influence from the northern Lake Baikal area.” ref

“C4a – China (Guangdong, Han from Beijing)

• C4a1 – Mongol from Chifeng and Hulunbuir, Tashkurgan (Kyrgyz, Sarikoli, Wakhi), Czech Republic, Denmark
• C4a1a – Korea, China, Uyghur, Buryat (South Siberia), Denmark, Sweden, France, Scotland, Canada.” ref

“Mathieson et al. (2018) analyzed 32 individuals from three Eneolithic cemeteries at Deriivka, Vilnyanka, and Vovnigi, which Anthony (2019a) ascribed to the Dnieper–Donets culture. These individuals belonged exclusively to the paternal haplogroups R and I (mostly R1b and I2), and almost exclusively to the maternal haplogroup U (mostly U5, U4, and U2). This suggests that the Dnieper-Donets people were “distinct, locally derived population” of mostly of Eastern Hunter-Gatherer (EHG) descent, with Western Hunter-Gatherer (WHG) admixture. The WHG admixture appears to have increased in the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic. Unlike the Yamnaya culture, whose genetic cluster is known as Western Steppe Herder (WSH), in the Dnieper–Donets culture no Caucasian Hunter-Gatherer (CHG) or Early European Farmer (EEF) ancestry has been detected. At the same time, several Eneolithic individuals from the Deriivka I cemetery carried Anatolian Neolithic Farmer (ANF) – derived, as well as WSH ancestry. At the Vilnyanka cemetery, all the males belong to the paternal haplogroup I, which is common among WHGs. David W. Anthony suggests that this influx of WHG ancestry might be the result of EEFs pushing WHGs out of their territories to the east, where WHG males might have mated with EHG females.” ref

“Dnieper-Donets males and Yamnaya males carry the same paternal haplogroups (R1b and I2a), suggesting that the CHG and EEF admixture among the Yamnaya came through EHG and WHG males mixing with EEF and CHG females. According to Anthony, this suggests that the Indo-European languages were initially spoken by EHGs living in Eastern Europe.” ref

“The original homeland of the Indo Europeans’ ancestors in the Palaeolithic, the Northern and Eastern Siberian cultures did not have any agricultural introduction or even pastoralism in Siberia during the central European Neolithic. Its cultures are characterized by characteristic stone production techniques and the presence of pottery of Eastern origin via trade despite West Eurasian genetics. However, the Neolithic cultures of North Asia are distinguished from the preceding Mesolithic cultures and far more visible as a result of the introduction of pottery from Southwards. The Afanasevan population was a mix of people descended from a mother culture of Indo-Europeans in central Russia, and from people who migrated back c. 3700–3300 BCE across the Eurasian Steppe from the pre-Yamnaya Repin culture of the Don–Volga region. Such migrations including early Uralic Eastern migrations, into North Asia from Eurasia started and occurred during the mid-5th millennium.” ref

ref, ref, ref, ref

Kurgan Hypothesis

“The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) or Steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and parts of Asia. It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курга́н), meaning tumulus or burial mound. The Steppe theory was first formulated by Otto Schrader (1883) and V. Gordon Childe (1926), then systematized in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various prehistoric cultures, including the Yamnaya (or Pit Grave) culture and its predecessors. In the 2000s, David Anthony instead used the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.” ref

“Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper–Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BCE). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium BCE had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe. Recent genetics studies have demonstrated that populations bearing specific Y-DNA haplogroups and a distinct genetic signature expanded into Europe and South Asia from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the third and second millennia BCE. These migrations provide a plausible explanation for the spread of at least some of the Indo-European languages, and suggest that the alternative Anatolian hypothesis, which places the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Neolithic Anatolia, is less likely to be correct.” ref

“Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of the “Kurgan culture”:

• Bug–Dniester (6th millennium)
• Samara (5th millennium)
• Khvalynsk (5th millennium)
• Dnieper–Donets (5th to 4th millennia)
• Sredny Stog (mid-5th to mid-4th millennia)
• Maikop–Dereivka (mid-4th to mid-3rd millennia)
• Yamnaya (Pit Grave): This is itself a varied cultural horizon, spanning the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe from the mid-4th to the 3rd millennium.
• Usatovo culture (late 4th millennium)” ref 

Swing of the Mace: the rise of Elite, Forced Authority, and Inequality begin to Emerge 8,500 years ago? 

“I think they took the Southern Dispersal route. The ancestors of the Indo-Europeans were in Sundaland more than 40,000 years ago and had not yet migrated to Central Asia. This article discusses issues related to human expansion from Sundaland: Major East-West Division Underlies Y Chromosome Stratification Across Indonesia” But leaving Sundaland happened 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, which is tens of thousands of years earlier than the formation of Austronesian language. The similarity between Austronesian people and Native Americans may come from mtDNA-B produced in Sundaland. Related papers on Indo-European paternal ancestors (Y-DNA-P, Q, R) from Sundaland:

“The highly structured distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups suggests that current patterns of variation may be informative of past population processes. However, limited phylogenetic resolution, particularly of subclades within haplogroup K, has obscured the relationships of lineages that are common across Eurasia. Here we genotype 13 new highly informative single-nucleotide polymorphisms in a worldwide sample of 4413 males that carry the derived allele at M526, and reconstruct an NRY haplogroup tree with significantly higher resolution for the major clade within haplogroup K, K-M526. Although K-M526 was previously characterized by a single polytomy of eight major branches, the phylogenetic structure of haplogroup K-M526 is now resolved into four major subclades (K2a–d). The largest of these subclades, K2b, is divided into two clusters: K2b1 and K2b2. K2b1 combines the previously known haplogroups M, S, K-P60 and K-P79, whereas K2b2 comprises haplogroups P and its subhaplogroups Q and R. Interestingly, the monophyletic group formed by haplogroups R and Q, which make up the majority of paternal lineages in Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, represents the only subclade with K2b that is not geographically restricted to Southeast Asia and Oceania. Estimates of the interval times for the branching events between M9 and P295 point to an initial rapid diversification process of K-M526 that likely occurred in Southeast Asia, with subsequent westward expansions of the ancestors of haplogroups R and Q.” ref” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“Sundaland (also called Sundaica or the Sundaic region) is a biogeographical region of South-eastern Asia corresponding to a larger landmass that was exposed throughout the last 2.6 million years during periods when sea levels were lower. It includes Bali, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra in Indonesia, and their surrounding small islands, as well as the Malay Peninsula on the Asian mainland. According to the most widely accepted theory, the ancestors of the modern-day Austronesian populations of the Maritime Southeast Asia and adjacent regions are believed to have migrated southward, from the East Asia mainland to Taiwan, and then to the rest of Maritime Southeast Asia.” ref 

“An alternative theory points to the now-submerged Sundaland as the possible cradle of Austronesian languages: thus the “Out of Sundaland” theory. However, this view is an extreme minority view among professional archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists. The Out of Taiwan model (though not necessarily the Express Train Out of Taiwan model) is accepted by the vast majority of professional researchers. A study from Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, examining mitochondrial DNA lineages, suggested that shared ancestry between Taiwan and Southeast Asian resulted from earlier migrations. Population dispersals seem to have occurred at the same time as sea levels rose, which may have resulted in migrations from the Philippine Islands to as far north as Taiwan within the last 10,000 years.” ref 

“The population migrations were most likely to have been driven by climate change — the effects of the drowning of an ancient continent. Rising sea levels in three massive pulses may have caused flooding and the submerging of the Sunda continent, creating the Java and South China Seas and the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia and the Philippines today. The changing sea levels would have caused these humans to move away from their coastal homes and culture, and farther inland throughout southeast Asia. This forced migration would have caused these humans to adapt to the new forest and mountainous environments, developing farms and domestication, and becoming the predecessors to future human populations in these regions.” ref 

“Genetic similarities were found between populations throughout Asia and an increase in genetic diversity from northern to southern latitudes. Although the Chinese population is very large, it has less variation than the smaller number of individuals living in Southeast Asia, because the Chinese expansion occurred fairly recently, from the mid to late-Holocene. Oppenheimer locates the origin of the Austronesians in Sundaland and its upper regions. From the standpoint of historical linguistics, the home of the Austronesian languages is the main island of Taiwan, also known by its unofficial Portuguese name of Formosa; on this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages.” ref 

“In the context of the recent African origin of modern humans, the Southern Dispersal scenario (also the coastal migration or great coastal migration) refers to the early migration along the southern coast of Asia, from the Arabian Peninsula via Persia and India to Southeast Asia and Oceania. Alternative names include the “southern coastal route” or “rapid coastal settlement“, with later descendants of those migrations eventually colonizing the rest of Eastern Eurasia, the remainder of Oceania, and the Americas.” ref 

By the way, I reject the alternative theory “Out of Sundaland” and believe the most supported and widely accepted theory, “Out of Taiwan” model, where ancestors of the Austronesian populations migrated southward, from the East Asia mainland to Taiwan and then Southeast Asia. ref 

“Austronesian language should have been formed in Fujian and Taiwan. They are descendants of the Liangzhu culture people who lived along the Yangtze River into the sea. I agree with the hypothesis of the spread of Austronesian languages ​​from Taiwan. After the Ice Age, sea levels rose. Wind direction did not help the Austronesians reach Australia. Sea levels were lower during the ice ages. From more than 40,000-4,000 years ago, humans traveled through Southeast Asia and arrived in Australia.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, parts of Mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands. The nations and territories predominantly populated by Austronesian-speaking peoples are sometimes known collectively as Austronesia.” ref 

“They originated from a prehistoric seaborne migration, known as the Austronesian expansion, from pre-Han Taiwan, circa 1500 to 1000 BCE. Austronesians reached the northernmost Philippines, specifically the Batanes Islands, by around 2200 BCE. They used sails some time before 2000 BCE.  In conjunction with their use of other maritime technologies (notably catamarans, outrigger boats, lashed-lug boats, and the crab claw sail), this enabled their rapid dispersal into the islands of the Indo-Pacific, culminating in the settlement of New Zealand c. 1250 CE. From 2000 BCE, they assimilated (or were assimilated by) the earlier Paleolithic pre-Austronesian and Australo-Melanesian Papuan populations.” ref 

“They reached as far as Easter Island to the east, Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand to the south. At the furthest extent, they might have also reached the Americas. Aside from language, Austronesian peoples widely share cultural characteristics, including such traditions and technologies as tattooing, stilt houses, jade carving, wetland agriculture, and various rock art motifs. They also share domesticated plants and animals that were carried along with the migrations, including rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, Dioscorea yams, taro, paper mulberry, chickens, pigs, and dogs.” ref 

“The general consensus is that the archeological, cultural, genetic, and especially linguistic evidence all separately indicate varying degrees of shared ancestry among Austronesian-speaking peoples that justifies their treatment as a “phylogenetic unit”. This has led to the use of the term “Austronesian” in academic literature to refer not only to the Austronesian languages but also the Austronesian-speaking peoples, their societies, and the geographic area of Austronesia. Austronesians were the first humans with seafaring vessels that could cross large distances on the open ocean, which allowed them to colonize a large part of the Indo-Pacific region.” ref 

“Prior to the 16th-century Colonial Era, the Austronesian language family was the most widespread in the world, spanning half the planet from Easter Island in the eastern Pacific Ocean to Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean. The broad consensus on Austronesian origins is the “two-layer model”, where an original Paleolithic indigenous population in Island Southeast Asia were assimilated to varying degrees by incoming migrations of Neolithic Austronesian-speaking peoples from Taiwan and Fujian, in southern China, from around 4,000 years ago. Austronesians also mixed with other preexisting populations as well as later migrant populations among the islands they settled, resulting in further genetic input. The most notable are the Austroasiatic-speaking peoples in western Island Southeast Asia (peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Borneo, and Java); the Bantu peoples in Madagascar and the Comoros; as well as Japanese, Persian, Indian, Arab, and Han Chinese traders and migrants in more recent centuries.” ref 

“Island Southeast Asia was settled by modern humans in the Paleolithic following coastal migration routes, presumably starting before 70,000 years ago from Africa, long before the development of Austronesian cultures. These populations are typified by having dark skin, curly hair, and short statures, leading Europeans to believe, in the 19th century, that they were related to African Pygmies. However, despite these physical similarities, genetic studies have shown that they are more closely related to other Eurasian populations than to Africans. Remains of stone tools and marine shells in Liang Sarru, Salibabu Island, North Sulawesi, dated to 32,000–35,000 years ago, is possible evidence for the longest sea voyage by Paleolithic humans ever recorded.” ref 

“The island was previously uninhabited by humans or hominins and can only be reached from either Mindanao or the Sangihe Islands by crossing an expanse of water at least 100 km (62 mi) wide, even during the low sea levels of the Pleistocene. Other evidence of early maritime transport are the appearance of obsidian tools with the same source on neighboring islands. These include the Philippine obsidian network (Mindoro and Palawan, ca.33,000-28,000 years ago), and the Wallacea obsidian network (Timor, Atauro, Kisar, Alor, ca.22,000 years ago). However, the method of crossing remains unknown and could have ranged from simple rafts to dugout canoes by the terminal Pleistocene.” ref 

“These early settlers are generally historically referred to as “Australo-Melanesians“, though the terminology is problematic, as they are genetically diverse, and most groups within Austronesia have significant Austronesian admixture and culture. The unmixed descendants of these groups today include the interior Papuans and Indigenous Australians. The high degree of assimilation among Austronesian, Negrito, and Papuan groups indicates that the Austronesian expansion was largely peaceful. Rather than violent displacement, the settlers and the indigenous groups absorbed each other. It is believed that in some cases, like in the Toalean culture of Sulawesi (c. 8,000–1,500 BP), it is even more accurate to say that the densely populated indigenous hunter-gatherer groups absorbed the incoming Austronesian farmers, rather than the other way around. Mahdi (2016) further asserts that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *tau-mata (“person”) is derived from a composite protoform *Cau ma-qata, combining “Tau” and “Qata” and indicative of the mixing of the two ancestral population types in these regions.” ref

“The broad consensus on the Urheimat (homeland) of Austronesian languages as well as the Neolithic early Austronesian peoples is accepted to be Taiwan, as well as the Penghu Islands. They are believed to have descended from ancestral populations in coastal mainland southern China, which are generally referred to as the “pre‑Austronesians”. Through these pre-Austronesians, Austronesians may also share a common ancestry with neighboring groups in Neolithic southern China. These Neolithic pre-Austronesians from the coast of southeastern China are believed to have migrated to Taiwan between approximately 10,000 and 6000 BCE. Other research has suggested that, according to radiocarbon dates, Austronesians may have migrated from mainland China to Taiwan as late as 4000 BCE (Dapenkeng culture). They continued to maintain regular contact with the mainland until 1500 BCE.” ref 

“The identity of the Neolithic pre-Austronesian cultures in China is contentious. Tracing Austronesian prehistory in Fujian and Taiwan has been difficult due to the southward expansion of the Han dynasty (2nd century BCE) and the recent Qing dynasty annexation of Taiwan (1683 CE). Today, the only Austronesian language in southern China is Tsat, spoken in Hainan. The politicization of archaeology is also problematic, particularly erroneous reconstructions among some Chinese archaeologists of non-Sinitic sites as Han.  Some authors, favoring the “Out of Sundaland” model, like William Meacham, reject the southern Chinese mainland origin of pre-Austronesians entirely.” ref 

“Nevertheless, based on linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence, Austronesians are most strongly associated with the early farming cultures of the Yangtze River basin that domesticated rice from around 13,500 to 8,200 years ago. They display typical Austronesian technological hallmarks, including tooth removal, teeth blackening, jade carving, tattooing, stilt houses, advanced boatbuilding, aquaculture, wetland agriculture, and the domestication of dogs, pigs, and chickens. These include the Kuahuqiao, Hemudu, Majiabang, Songze, Liangzhu, and Dapenkeng cultures that occupied the coastal regions between the Yangtze River delta and the Min River delta.” ref 

“Based on linguistic evidence, there have been proposals linking Austronesians with other linguistic families into linguistic macrofamilies that are relevant to the identity of the pre-Austronesian populations. The most notable are the connections of Austronesians to the neighboring Austroasiatic, Kra-Dai, and Sinitic peoples (as Austric, Austro-Tai, and Sino-Austronesian, respectively). These are still not widely accepted, as evidence of these relationships are still tenuous, and the methods used are highly contentious.” ref 

“In support of both the Austric and Austro-Tai hypothesis, Robert Blust connects the lower Yangtze Neolithic Austro-Tai entity with the rice-cultivating Austroasiatic cultures, assuming the center of East Asian rice domestication, and putative Austric homeland, to be located in the Yunnan/Burma border area,  instead of the Yangtze River basin, as is currently accepted. Under that view, there was an east–west genetic alignment, resulting from a rice-based population expansion, in the southern part of East Asia: Austroasiatic-Kra-Dai-Austronesian, with unrelated Sino-Tibetan occupying a more northerly tier.  Depending on the author, other hypotheses have also included other language families like Hmong-Mien and even Japanese-Ryukyuan into the larger Austric hypothesis.” ref 

“While the Austric hypothesis remains contentious, there is genetic evidence that at least in western Island Southeast Asia, there had been earlier Neolithic overland migrations (pre-4,000 years ago) by Austroasiatic-speaking peoples into what is now the Greater Sunda Islands when the sea levels were lower, in the early Holocene. These peoples were assimilated linguistically and culturally by incoming Austronesian peoples in what is now modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia. Several authors have also proposed that Kra-Dai speakers may actually be an ancient daughter subgroup of Austronesians that migrated back to the Pearl River Delta from Taiwan and/or Luzon, shortly after the Austronesian expansion, later migrating further westwards to Hainan, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Northeast India.” ref 

“They propose that the distinctiveness of Kra-Dai (it is tonal and monosyllabic) was the result of linguistic restructuring due to contact with Hmong-Mien and Sinitic cultures. Aside from linguistic evidence, Roger Blench has also noted cultural similarities between the two groups, like facial tattooing, tooth removal or ablation, teeth blackening, snake (or dragon) cults, and the multiple-tongued jaw harps shared by the indigenous Taiwanese and Kra-Dai-speakers. However, archaeological evidence for this is still sparse. This is believed to be similar to what happened to the Cham people, who were originally Austronesian settlers (likely from Borneo) to southern Vietnam around 2100–1900 years ago and had languages similar to Malay. Their languages underwent several restructuring events to syntax and phonology due to contact with the nearby tonal languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and Hainan. Although the populations of the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Java, and neighboring islands are Austronesian-speaking, they have significantly high admixture from Mainland Southeast Asian populations. These areas were already populated (most probably by speakers of Austroasiatic languages) before they were reached by the Austronesian expansion, roughly 3,000 years ago.” ref 

“The Sino-Austronesian hypothesis, on the other hand, is a relatively new hypothesis by Laurent Sagart, first proposed in 1990. It argues for a north–south linguistic genetic relationship between Chinese and Austronesian. This is based on sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and morphological parallels. Sagart places special significance in shared vocabulary on cereal crops, citing them as evidence of shared linguistic origin. However, this has largely been rejected by other linguists. The sound correspondences between Old Chinese and Proto-Austronesian can also be explained as a result of the Longshan interaction sphere, when pre-Austronesians from the Yangtze region came into regular contact with Proto-Sinitic speakers in the Shandong Peninsula, around the 4th to 3rd millennia BCE. This corresponded with the widespread introduction of rice cultivation to Proto-Sinitic speakers and conversely, millet cultivation to Pre-Austronesians. An Austronesian substratum in formerly Austronesian territories that have been Sinicized after the Iron Age Han expansion is also another explanation for the correspondences that do not require a genetic relationship.” ref 

“In relation to Sino-Austronesian models and the Longshan interaction sphere, Roger Blench (2014) suggests that the single migration model for the spread of the Neolithic into Taiwan is problematic, pointing out the genetic and linguistic inconsistencies between different Taiwanese Austronesian groups.  The surviving Austronesian populations in Taiwan should rather be considered as the result of various Neolithic migration waves from the mainland and back-migration from the Philippines. These incoming migrants almost certainly spoke languages related to Austronesian or pre-Austronesian, although their phonology and grammar would have been quite diverse.” ref 

“Blench considers the Austronesians in Taiwan to have been a melting pot of immigrants from various parts of the coast of East China that had been migrating to Taiwan by 4000 years ago. These immigrants included people from the foxtail millet-cultivating Longshan culture of Shandong (with Longshan-type cultures found in southern Taiwan), the fishing-based Dapenkeng culture of coastal Fujian, and the Yuanshan culture of northernmost Taiwan, which Blench suggests may have originated from the coast of Guangdong. Based on geography and cultural vocabulary, Blench believes that the Yuanshan people may have spoken Northeast Formosan languages.” ref 

“Thus, Blench believes that there is in fact no “apical” ancestor of Austronesian in the sense that there was no true single Proto-Austronesian language that gave rise to present-day Austronesian languages. Instead, multiple migrations of various pre-Austronesian peoples and languages from the Chinese mainland that were related but distinct came together to form what we now know as Austronesian in Taiwan. Hence, Blench considers the single-migration model into Taiwan by pre-Austronesians to be inconsistent with both the archaeological and linguistic (lexical) evidence.” ref 

“The Austronesian expansion (also called the “Out of Taiwan” model) is a large-scale migration of Austronesians from Taiwan, occurring around 1500–1000 BCE. Population growth primarily fueled this migration. These first settlers settled in northern Luzon, in the archipelago of the Philippines, intermingling with the earlier Australo-Melanesian population who had inhabited the islands since about 23,000 years earlier. Over the next thousand years, Austronesian peoples migrated southeast to the rest of the Philippines, and into the islands of the Celebes Sea and Borneo. From southwestern Borneo, Austronesians spread further west in a single migration event to both Sumatra and the coastal regions of southern Vietnam, becoming the ancestors of the speakers of the Malayic and Chamic branches of the Austronesian language family.” ref 

“Soon after reaching the Philippines, Austronesians colonized the Northern Mariana Islands by 1500 BCE or even earlier, becoming the first humans to reach Remote Oceania. The Chamorro migration was also unique in that it was the only Austronesian migration to the Pacific Islands to successfully retain rice cultivation. Palau and Yap were settled by separate voyages by 1000 BCE. Another important migration branch was by the Lapita culture, which rapidly spread into the islands off the coast of northern New Guinea and into the Solomon Islands and other parts of Island Melanesia by 1200 BCE. They reached the islands of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga by around 900 to 800 BCE.” ref 

“This remained the furthest extent of the Austronesian expansion into Polynesia until around 700 CE, when there was another surge of island colonization. It reached the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas by 700 CE; Hawaii by 900 CE; Rapa Nui by 1000 CE; and New Zealand by 1200 CE. For a few centuries, the Polynesian islands were connected by bidirectional long-distance sailing, with the exception of Rapa Nui, which had limited further contact due to its isolated geographical location. There is also putative evidence, based in the spread of the sweet potato, that Austronesians may have reached South America from Polynesia, where they might have traded with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.” ref 

“In the Indian Ocean, Austronesians in Maritime Southeast Asia established trade links with South Asia. They also established early long-distance contacts with Africa, possibly as early as before 500 BCE, based on archaeological evidence like banana phytoliths in Cameroon and Uganda and remains of Neolithic chicken bones in Zanzibar. An Austronesian group, originally from the Makassar Strait region around Kalimantan and Sulawesi, eventually settled Madagascar, either directly from Southeast Asia or from preexisting mixed Austronesian-Bantu populations from East Africa. Estimates for when this occurred vary from the 1st century CE, to as late as the 6th to 7th centuries CE. It is likely that the Austronesians that settled Madagascar followed a coastal route through South Asia and East Africa, rather than directly across the Indian Ocean.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Who were the Groups migrating and merging with the previous Groups of Europe 9,000 to 7,000 years ago?

My “Steppe-Anatolian-Kurgan hypothesis” 8,000/7,000 years ago

Between 7,000-5,000 Years ago, rise of unequal hierarchy elite, leading to a “birth of the State” or worship of power, strong new sexism, oppression of non-elites, and the fall of Women’s equal status

Around 7,000-year-old Shared Idea of the Divine Bird (Tutelary and/or Trickster spirit/deity), “Ritual” Motif

White (light complexion skin) Bigotry and Sexism started 7,000 years ago?

Paganism 7,000-5,000 years old: related to “Anarchism and Socialism” (Capitalism) (World War 0) Elite and their slaves!

The First Expression of the Male God around 7,000 years ago?

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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Religious/Ritual Ideas, including goddesses and gods as well as ritual mounds or pyramids from Northeastern Asia at least 6,000 years old, seemingly filtering to Iran, Iraq, the Mediterranean, Europe, Egypt, and the Americas?

Presuppositions in reasoned philosophy should be limited to a starting point of a chain of logical facts. There is no god evidence, nor one fact as something proven as “god” anything. It is all made-up stories all the way down. Or simply claiming non-supernatural as supernatural. My goal is to help kill faith in religion and its god myths, while championing reason, and science. 

Examples of logical presuppositions include:

Damien no longer believes in gods.

Presupposition: Damien once had beliefs relating to theism.

Have you stopped god beliefs?

Presupposition: you once had some god beliefs.

Have you met Damien?

Presupposition: Damien exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupposition

This second person I was talking to kept using the negative term primitive.

My response, I don’t use the term primitive regarding religions: Some people say animism is the most primitive and look down on its followers as primitive “bad” compared to big world religions like Christianity, not me but I am an atheist. If I were forced to pick a religion or spirituality, it would be animism, I would choose it as the least religious type of thing. 

“Animism (‘breath, spirit, life’) can involve a belief that objects, places, and/or creatures possess a spiritual essence.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism 

“I use the word “primitive” to indicate that shamanism is very ancient, perhaps tens of thousands of years old. In a sense, atheism is also a belief. Faith is not necessarily religion, but religion must be faith. Faith is a necessary element for cooperation between people. Cooperation between animals is communicated through smell habits and abilities. Ant groups, elephant groups, and wolf groups all have different ways of cooperation. But the way ants and bees cooperate is more primitive.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

My response, Atheism generally is one of two types: a lack of belief in gods or a disbelief in the claims of theism. 

“Belief is the abstract expression of habits, and religion is the institutional expression of belief. Right and wrong are relative, but there is right and wrong under certain habits and beliefs. In order to defend the so-called correctness, politics emerged.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art 

My response, An axiological atheist, which I am, involves axiological judgments related to the god belief question. Axiological atheist “Value Theorizing/Assessments/Judgments” are a type of thinking: involving ignostic thinking, then atheist thinking, then antitheist thinking, then antireligionist thinking, then secularist thinking, and finally humanist thinking. Axiological atheism, thus, is not just regular atheism. Axiology can at first seem hard, but it is actually easy, in that it is based of value or disvalue judgments. To Axiology (as I use it is similar to Value Theory philosophy) thinking the term “value” is vast in what it covers, basically anything involving evaluation thinking axiology can be or is involved. Thus, the term “value” is understood as what is or relates to what may be worthy, good, beneficial, helpful, positive, true, accurate, etc. As an axiological thinker, I believe science is a methodological search to understand what the evidence explains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_theory 

“The world should be secular. Religion was created by ancient elite as psychological warfare. Of the hundreds of research papers & articles I’ve written, this is one that gives perhaps the best overall summary of 3 major religions & how they came to be.  When The Real Popes Came To Power (Roman Piso, 06-20-2018)” – Roman Piso @romanpiso 

“Under political coercion, faith makes people crazy, goes against normal animal nature, and creates sociality between people, which leads to homomorphic revenge, genocide, and other mutual killings between people. People need to use various external symbols to express their political attributes and beliefs so that they appear to be gregarious and do not dare to live in isolation. Various cultural phenomena emerged under this background. People have been carried away by the so-called correctness and have forgotten their original selves. They have been living in the expectations of others and cannot extricate themselves. So, totalitarianism made people obey through the herd effect, and the evil rule was born. This seems idealistic, but humans are social animals after all. Many people have to live within the expectations of others and cannot do whatever they want. Looking at it from another angle, it is also about labeling and trying to establish a new identity, similar to LGBTQ. People often suffer from identity anxiety and always deliberately show themselves to be different.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“In fact, they hope to get the attention of others. Deliberately avoiding people is also to blend in with the crowd. This is actually a mirror effect. Sometimes the more you want others to agree with you, the more you will do different things, but often things go counterproductive. This is because you don’t understand the mystery of social relationships between people in the real world. Sometimes the more you want others to agree with you, the more you will do different things, but often things go counterproductive. This is because you don’t understand the mystery of social relationships between people in the real world. Most people prefer others to listen to what they have to say rather than argue with each other, so people who like to listen are always popular. There is no absolute correctness in the real world. People just want feedback that makes them happy. Such exchanges are delightful. Many religious figures and politicians take advantage of this rule and make people walk like a herd of sheep being led by a sheepdog.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

“I think it was the migration of mammoth hunters that led to the similarity between the Inca stone walls and the Mycenaean Cyclops stone walls in Greece, which inspired the architecture of the mammoth huts. But as humans no longer hunt large animals and the division of labor in society becomes more refined, humans no longer build megalithic structures. Similar to the Amarna period in ancient Egypt, Talatat was used to build temples more economically and conveniently. Pre-Columbian Peruvian stone walls are reminiscent of Europe’s Cyclopean masonry, similar to the old city walls of Mycenae. The technical inspiration for this kind of building may come from the “mammoth huts” built by “mammoth hunters” in the Ice Age. The Shicheng of the Shimao ruins in East Asia also has a similar structure. After the Ice Age, sea levels rose. Wind direction did not help the Austronesians reach Australia. Sea levels were lower during ice ages. From more than 40,000 -4,000 years ago, humans traveled through Southeast Asia and arrived in Australia.” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

My response, I enjoyed this conversation, and I am putting this entire conversation in a blog post so others can read it. 

“Thank you very much! It’s my pleasure!” – 辛立雪 Shirley Simpsons @ShirleySimpsons 

My response, We rise by helping each other. 

I am against oppression, rape, and other abuse! 

I don’t like when people say mental or physical abuse as if it is never related or like they do not happen together. As if one can survive physical abuse and not also deal with the mental abuse of what has been done physically. What kind of person does your behaviors, explain you to be? May I be found among those brave enough to be kind in an unkind world. Bigotry is the shame that people smear all over themselves trying to look better than others. I hate abuse, the scars others make in a moment can last our lifetime. But I am not the thing abuse made, I am a blazing star, shining far past my dark past.

Self-work can be hard but rewarding. Also try writing your goal of a better life, it helped me. Like, where would I like to be in 5 years. Or in a month. I like backing up my goals, so I feel more successful as I finish each one. Our journey in love is both from outside and within. I understand that the pain of the mind, can be some of the most lasting pain. But I also know that freedom of the mind, can be some of most lasting freedom. Do good, make no excuses, just do good, the world desperately needs more of this, and if we all do more, we all win. We rise by helping each other.  

• Navigating Sexual Consent: Body-Sovereignty/Self-Ownership
• Self-Sovereignty, Self-Efficiency, Self-Mastery, and Solidarity: Relationship Anarchism & Anarchist Naturalism
• Navigating Dignity: of significance in Well-being, Motivation, Morality, Ethics, Rights, Law, and Politics
• Activism Labels Matter, thus Feminism is Needed.
• Atheism, Feminism, and Equality?
• Feminist atheists as far back as the 1800s?
• Alice Beck Kehoe: Feminist Anthropologist and Archaeologist, Addressing Sexism, Racism, Ethnocentrism, and Shamanism
• Supporting Atheist Feminism: with Karen Garst and Valerie Tarico and their book
• The History of Abortion as well as Religion and Abortion
• Lake Baikal and Myths of Creation: Primordial waters, Supernatural Creatures of water, and the Mounds of creation
• Shaman Rock, on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal, Siberia, with a natural rock image that resembles a dragon. And is one of the “Nine Holy Sites of Asia.”
• Shapeshifters: found among Totemists, Shamanists, and Paganists?
• My thoughts on the Evolution of Religion: from Animism to Paganism
• Bigotry Related to and with Religious or Nonreligious Terms?
• (Decolonize Russia/Siberian Land Back) Russian Conquest of Siberia and the spread of Russian Imperialism/Colonialism
• Anarchists Cory Johnston (in Saskatchewan) and Damien Marie AtHope (in Florida) seek to learn more about the indigenous peoples of the Americas (First Nations/Native Americans) where they both live.
• The Intersex Rights Movement: 60% used the term Intersex and the label DSD “disorders of sex development” had only 3% support in defining their sex characteristics
• Culture Wars: What is this Stupidity you call Masculinity?
• Left Unity: A Marxist Leninist AND A Socialist Anarchist discuss
• Arcane Capitalism: Primitive socialism, Primitive capital, Private ownership, Means of production, Market capitalism, Class discrimination, and Petite bourgeoisie (smaller capitalists)
• Capitalism is an unethical economic system based on profit over people.
• I am an Axiologist (anti-nihilism / value theorist)
• Anarchist Teaching as Free Public Education or Free Education in the Public
• Addressing Pseudoarchaeology, Pseudohistory, Pseudojournalism, Pseudoscholarship, and Pseudoscience
•  Addressing Religious violence, belief in Gods as a motivation for harm?

Feminist theory 

“Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women’s and men’s social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy. Feminist theory often focuses on analyzing gender inequality. Themes frequently explored in feminist theory include discrimination, objectification (especially sexual objectification), oppression, patriarchy, stereotyping, art history or contemporary art, and aesthetics.” ref

“Feminist theories first emerged as early as 1794 in publications such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, “The Changing Woman”, “Ain’t I a Woman“, “Speech after Arrest for Illegal Voting”, and so on. “The Changing Woman” is a Navajo Myth that gave credit to a woman who, in the end, populated the world. In 1851, Sojourner Truth addressed women’s rights issues through her publication, “Ain’t I a Woman”. Sojourner Truth addressed the issue of women having limited rights due to men’s flawed perception of women. Truth argued that if a woman of color can perform tasks that were supposedly limited to men, then any woman of any color could perform those same tasks. After her arrest for illegally voting, Susan B. Anthony gave a speech within court in which she addressed the issues of language within the constitution documented in her publication, “Speech after Arrest for Illegal voting” in 1872. Anthony questioned the authoritative principles of the constitution and its male-gendered language. She raised the question of why women are accountable to be punished under law but they cannot use the law for their own protection (women could not vote, own property, nor maintain custody of themselves in marriage).” ref

“She also critiqued the constitution for its male-gendered language and questioned why women should have to abide by laws that do not specify women. Nancy Cott makes a distinction between modern feminism and its antecedents, particularly the struggle for suffrage. In the United States she places the turning point in the decades before and after women obtained the vote in 1920 (1910–1930). She argues that the prior woman movement was primarily about woman as a universal entity, whereas over this 20-year period it transformed itself into one primarily concerned with social differentiation, attentive to individuality and diversity. New issues dealt more with woman’s condition as a social construct, gender identity, and relationships within and between genders. Politically, this represented a shift from an ideological alignment comfortable with the right, to one more radically associated with the left.” ref

“Susan Kingsley Kent says that Freudian patriarchy was responsible for the diminished profile of feminism in the inter-war years, others such as Juliet Mitchell consider this to be overly simplistic since Freudian theory is not wholly incompatible with feminism. Some feminist scholarship shifted away from the need to establish the origins of family, and towards analyzing the process of patriarchy. In the immediate postwar period, Simone de Beauvoir stood in opposition to an image of “the woman in the home”. De Beauvoir provided an existentialist dimension to feminism with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) in 1949. As the title implies, the starting point is the implicit inferiority of women, and the first question de Beauvoir asks is “what is a woman”? A woman she realizes is always perceived of as the “other”, “she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her.” ref

“In this book and her essay, “Woman: Myth & Reality”, de Beauvoir anticipates Betty Friedan in seeking to demythologize the male concept of woman. “A myth invented by men to confine women to their oppressed state. For women, it is not a question of asserting themselves as women, but of becoming full-scale human beings.” “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, or as Toril Moi puts it “a woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied situation in the world, or in other words, through the way in which she makes something of what the world makes of her”. Therefore, the woman must regain subject, to escape her defined role as “other”, as a Cartesian point of departure. In her examination of myth, she appears as one who does not accept any special privileges for women. Ironically, feminist philosophers have had to extract de Beauvoir herself from out of the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre to fully appreciate her.” ref 

“While more philosopher and novelist than activist, she did sign one of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes manifestos. The resurgence of feminist activism in the late 1960s was accompanied by an emerging literature of concerns for the earth and spirituality, and environmentalism. This, in turn, created an atmosphere conducive to reigniting the study of and debate on matricentricity, as a rejection of determinism, such as Adrienne Rich and Marilyn French while for socialist feminists like Evelyn Reed, patriarchy held the properties of capitalism. Feminist psychologists, such as Jean Baker Miller, sought to bring a feminist analysis to previous psychological theories, proving that “there was nothing wrong with women, but rather with the way modern culture viewed them.” Elaine Showalter describes the development of feminist theory as having a number of phases.” ref

“The first she calls “feminist critique” – where the feminist reader examines the ideologies behind literary phenomena. The second Showalter calls “Gynocritics” – where the “woman is a producer of textual meaning” including “the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career and literary history.” The last phase she calls “gender theory” – where the “ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system” are explored.” This model has been criticized by Toril Moi who sees it as an essentialist and deterministic model for female subjectivity. She also criticized it for not taking account of the situation for women outside the west. From the 1970s onwards, psychoanalytical ideas that have been arising in the field of French feminism have gained a decisive influence on feminist theory.” ref

“Feminist psychoanalysis deconstructed the phallic hypotheses regarding the Unconscious. Julia Kristeva, Bracha Ettinger, and Luce Irigaray developed specific notions concerning unconscious sexual difference, the feminine, and motherhood, with wide implications for film and literature analysis. In the 1990s and the first decades of the 21st century, intersectionality played a major role in feminist theory, leading to the development of transfeminism and queer feminism and the consolidation of Black, anti-racist, and postcolonial feminisms, among others. The rise of the fourth wave in the 2010s led to new discussions on sexual violence, consent, and body positivity, as well as a deepening of intersectional perspectives. Simultaneously, feminist philosophy and anthropology saw a rise in new materialist, affect-oriented, posthumanist, and ecofeminist perspectives.” ref

“In western thought, the body has been historically associated solely with women, whereas men have been associated with the mind. Susan Bordo, a modern feminist philosopher, in her writings elaborates the dualistic nature of the mind/body connection by examining the early philosophies of Aristotle, Hegel, and Descartes, revealing how such distinguishing binaries such as spirit/matter and male activity/female passivity have worked to solidify gender characteristics and categorization. Bordo goes on to point out that while men have historically been associated with the intellect and the mind or spirit, women have long been associated with the body, the subordinated, negatively imbued term in the mind/body dichotomy.” ref

“The notion of the body (but not the mind) being associated with women has served as a justification to deem women as property, objects, and exchangeable commodities (among men). For example, women’s bodies have been objectified throughout history through the changing ideologies of fashion, diet, exercise programs, cosmetic surgery, childbearing, etc. This contrasts to men’s role as a moral agent, responsible for working or fighting in bloody wars. The race and class of a woman can determine whether her body will be treated as decoration and protected, which is associated with middle or upper-class women’s bodies. On the other hand, the other body is recognized for its use in labor and exploitation which is generally associated with women’s bodies in the working-class or with women of color. Second-wave feminist activism has argued for reproductive rights and choice. The women’s health movement and lesbian feminism are also associated with this Bodies debate.” ref

“The standard sex determination and gender model consists of evidence based on the determined sex and gender of every individual and serve as norms for societal life. The model that the sex-determination of a person exists within a male/female dichotomy, giving importance to genitals and how they are formed via chromosomes and DNA-binding proteins (such as the sex-determining region Y genes), which are responsible for sending sex-determined initialization and completion signals to and from the biological sex-determination system in fetuses. Occasionally, variations occur during the sex-determining process, resulting in intersex conditions. The standard model defines gender as a social understanding/ideology that defines what behaviors, actions, and appearances are normal for males and females. Studies into biological sex-determining systems also have begun working towards connecting certain gender conducts such as behaviors, actions, and desires with sex-determinism.” ref

“The socially biasing children’s sex and gender model broadens the horizons of the sex and gender ideologies. It revises the ideology of sex to be a social construct that is not limited to either male or female. The Intersex Society of North America which explains that “nature doesn’t decide where the category of ‘male’ ends and the category of ‘intersex‘ begins, or where the category of ‘intersex’ ends and the category of ‘female’ begins. Humans decide. Humans (today, typically doctors) decide how small a penis has to be, or how unusual a combination of parts has to be before it counts as intersex”. Therefore, sex is not a biological/natural construct but a social one instead since, society and doctors decide on what it means to be male, female, or intersex in terms of sex chromosomes and genitals, in addition to their personal judgment on who or how one passes as specific sex. The ideology of gender remains a social construct but is not as strict and fixed. Instead, gender is easily malleable and is forever changing.” ref

“One example of where the standard definition of gender alters with time happens to be depicted in Sally Shuttleworth‘s Female Circulation in which the “abasement of the woman, reducing her from an active participant in the labor market to the passive bodily existence to be controlled by male expertise is indicative of the ways in which the ideological deployment of gender roles operated to facilitate and sustain the changing structure of familial and market relations in Victorian England”. In other words, this quote shows what it meant growing up into the roles of a female (gender/roles) changed from being a homemaker to being a working woman and then back to being passive and inferior to males. In conclusion, the contemporary sex-gender model is accurate because both sex and gender are rightly seen as social constructs inclusive of the wide spectrum of sexes and genders and in which nature and nurture are interconnected.” ref

“Intersectionality is the examination of various ways in which people are oppressed, based on the relational web of dominating factors of race, sex, class, nation, and sexual orientation. Intersectionality “describes the simultaneous, multiple, overlapping, and contradictory systems of power that shape our lives and political options”. While this theory can be applied to all people, and more particularly all women, it is specifically mentioned and studied within the realms of black feminism. Patricia Hill Collins argues that black women in particular, have a unique perspective on the oppression of the world as unlike white women, they face both racial and gender oppression simultaneously, among other factors. This debate raises the issue of understanding the oppressive lives of women that are not only shaped by gender alone but by other elements such as racism, classism, ageism, heterosexism, ableism etc.” ref

“In this debate, women writers have addressed the issues of masculinized writing through male gendered language that may not serve to accommodate the literary understanding of women’s lives. Such masculinized language that feminist theorists address is the use of, for example, “God the Father”, which is looked upon as a way of designating the sacred as solely men (or, in other words, biblical language glorifies men through all of the masculine pronouns like “he” and “him” and addressing God as a “He”). Feminist theorists attempt to reclaim and redefine women through a deeper thinking of language. For example, feminist theorists have used the term “womyn” instead of “women”. Some feminist theorists have suggested using neutral terminology when naming jobs (for example, police officer versus policeman or mail carrier versus mailman). Some feminist theorists have reclaimed and redefined such words as “dyke” and “bitch“. It is central to feminism that women are systematically subordinated, and bad faith exists when women surrender their agency to this subordination (for example, acceptance of religious beliefs that a man is the dominant party in a marriage by the will of God). Simone de Beauvoir labels such women “mutilated” and “imminent.” ref

“Feminist psychology is a form of psychology centered on societal structures and gender. Feminist psychology critiques the fact that historically psychological research has been done from a male perspective with the view that males are the norm. Feminist psychology is oriented on the values and principles of feminism. It incorporates gender and the ways women are affected by issues resulting from it. Ethel Dench Puffer Howes was one of the first women to enter the field of psychology. She was the executive secretary of the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1914. One major psychological theory, relational-cultural theory, is based on the work of Jean Baker Miller, whose book Toward a New Psychology of Women proposes that “growth-fostering relationships are a central human necessity and that disconnections are the source of psychological problems.” ref

“Inspired by Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, and other feminist classics from the 1960s, relational-cultural theory proposes that “isolation is one of the most damaging human experiences and is best treated by reconnecting with other people,” and that a therapist should “foster an atmosphere of empathy and acceptance for the patient, even at the cost of the therapist’s neutrality”. The theory is based on clinical observations and sought to prove that “there was nothing wrong with women, but rather with the way modern culture viewed them”. Feminist history refers to the re-reading and re-interpretation of history from a feminist perspective. It is not the same as the history of feminism, which outlines the origins and evolution of the feminist movement. It also differs from women’s history, which focuses on the role of women in historical events. The goal of feminist history is to explore and illuminate the female viewpoint of history through rediscovery of female writers, artists, philosophers, etc., in order to recover and demonstrate the significance of women’s voices and choices in the past.” ref

“Feminist geography is often considered part of a broader postmodern approach to the subject which is not primarily concerned with the development of conceptual theory in itself but rather focuses on the real experiences of individuals and groups in their own localities, upon the geographies that they live in within their own communities. In addition to its analysis of the real world, it also critiques existing geographical and social studies, arguing that academic traditions are delineated by patriarchy, and that contemporary studies which do not confront the nature of previous work reinforce the male bias of academic study. The Feminist philosophy refers to a philosophy approached from a feminist perspective. Feminist philosophy involves attempts to use methods of philosophy to further the cause of the feminist movements, it also tries to criticize and/or reevaluate the ideas of traditional philosophy from within a feminist view.” ref

This critique stems from the dichotomy Western philosophy has conjectured with the mind and body phenomena. There is no specific school for feminist philosophy like there has been in regard to other theories. This means that Feminist philosophers can be found in the analytic and continental traditions, and the different viewpoints taken on philosophical issues with those traditions. Feminist philosophers also have many different viewpoints taken on philosophical issues within those traditions. Feminist philosophers who are feminists can belong to many different varieties of feminism. The writings of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bracha Ettinger, and Avital Ronell are the most significant psychoanalytically informed influences on contemporary feminist philosophy. Feminist theory can be applied to the field of public relations. The feminist scholar Linda Hon examined the major obstacles that women in the field experienced. Some common barriers included male dominance and gender stereotypes. Hon shifted the feminist theory of PR from “women’s assimilation into patriarchal systems ” to “genuine commitment to social restructuring”. Similarly to the studies Hon conducted, Elizabeth Lance Toth studied Feminist Values in Public Relations. Toth concluded that there is a clear link between feminist gender and feminist value. These values include honesty, sensitivity, perceptiveness, fairness, and commitment.” ref

“Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the wider field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or “normality” for women’s sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. Looking at sexuality from a feminist point of view creates connections between the different aspects of a person’s sexual life. From feminists’ perspectives, sexology, which is the study of human sexuality and sexual relationship, relates to the intersectionality of gender, race and sexuality.” ref

“Men have dominant power and control over women in the relationship, and women are expected to hide their true feeling about sexual behaviors. Women of color face even more sexual violence in the society. Some countries in Africa and Asia even practice female genital cutting, controlling women’s sexual desire and limiting their sexual behavior. Moreover, Bunch, the women’s and human rights activist, states that society used to see lesbianism as a threat to male supremacy and to the political relationships between men and women. Therefore, in the past, people viewed being a lesbian as a sin and made it death penalty. Even today, many people still discriminate homosexuals. Many lesbians hide their sexuality and face even more sexual oppression.” ref

“Monosexual Paradigm is a term coined by Blasingame, a self-identified African American, bisexual female. Blasingame used this term to address the lesbian and gay communities who turned a blind eye to the dichotomy that oppressed bisexuals from both heterosexual and homosexual communities. This oppression negatively affects the gay and lesbian communities more so than the heterosexual community due to its contradictory exclusiveness of bisexuals. Blasingame argued that in reality dichotomies are inaccurate to the representation of individuals because nothing is truly black or white, straight or gay. Her main argument is that biphobia is the central message of two roots; internalized heterosexism and racism. Internalized heterosexism is described in the monosexual paradigm in which the binary states that you are either straight or gay and nothing in between.” ref

“Gays and lesbians accept this internalized heterosexism by morphing into the monosexial paradigm and favoring single attraction and opposing attraction for both sexes. Blasingame described this favoritism as an act of horizontal hostility, where oppressed groups fight amongst themselves. Racism is described in the monosexual paradigm as a dichotomy where individuals are either black or white, again nothing in between. The issue of racism comes into fruition in regards to the bisexuals coming out process, where risks of coming out vary on a basis of anticipated community reaction and also in regards to the norms among bisexual leadership, where class status and race factor predominately over sexual orientation.” ref

“Feminist political theory is a recently emerging field in political science focusing on gender and feminist themes within the state, institutions, and policies. It questions the “modern political theory, dominated by universalistic liberalist thought, which claims indifference to gender or other identity differences and has therefore taken its time to open up to such concerns.” Feminist perspectives entered international relations in the late 1980s, at about the same time as the end of the Cold War. This time was not a coincidence because the last forty years the conflict between US and USSR had been the dominant agenda of international politics. After the Cold War, there was continuing relative peace between the main powers. Soon, many new issues appeared on international relation’s agenda. More attention was also paid to social movements.” ref

“Indeed, in those times feminist approaches also used to depict the world politics. Feminists started to emphasize that while women have always been players in international system, their participation has frequently been associated with non-governmental settings such as social movements. However, they could also participate in inter-state decision making process as men did. Until more recently, the role of women in international politics has been confined to being the wives of diplomats, nannies who go abroad to find work and support their family, or sex workers trafficked across international boundaries. Women’s contributions has not been seen in the areas where hard power plays significant role such as military. Nowadays, women are gaining momentum in the sphere of international relations in areas of government, diplomacy, academia, etc.. Despite barriers to more senior roles, women currently hold 11.1 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and 10.8 percent in the House. In the U.S. Department of State, women make up 29 percent of the chiefs of mission, and 29 percent of senior foreign positions at USAID. In contrast, women are profoundly impacted by decisions the statepersons make.” ref

“Feminist economics broadly refers to a developing branch of economics that applies feminist insights and critiques to economics. However, in recent decades, feminists like for example Katrine Marçal, author of Who cooked Adam Smith’s dinner has also taken up a critique of economics. Research in feminist economics is often interdisciplinary, critical, or heterodox. It encompasses debates about the relationship between feminism and economics on many levels: from applying mainstream economic methods to under-researched “women’s” areas, to questioning how mainstream economics values the reproductive sector, to deeply philosophical critiques of economic epistemology and methodology. One prominent issue that feminist economists investigate is how the gross domestic product (GDP) does not adequately measure unpaid labor predominantly performed by women, such as housework, childcare, and eldercare. Feminist economists have also challenged and exposed the rhetorical approach of mainstream economics. They have made critiques of many basic assumptions of mainstream economics, including the Homo economicus model.” ref 

“In the Houseworker’s Handbook Betsy Warrior presents a cogent argument that the reproduction and domestic labor of women form the foundation of economic survival; although, unremunerated and not included in the GDP. According to Warrior:

Economics, as it’s presented today, lacks any basis in reality as it leaves out the very foundation of economic life. That foundation is built on women’s labor; first her reproductive labor which produces every new laborer (and the first commodity, which is mother’s milk and which nurtures every new “consumer/laborer”); secondly, women’s labor composed of cleaning, cooking, negotiating social stability and nurturing, which prepares for market and maintains each laborer. This constitutes women’s continuing industry enabling laborers to occupy every position in the work force. Without this fundamental labor and commodity there would be no economic activity.” ref

“Warrior also notes that the unacknowledged income of men from illegal activities like arms, drugs and human trafficking, political graft, religious emoluments, and various other undisclosed activities provide a rich revenue stream to men, which further invalidates GDP figures. Even in underground economies where women predominate numerically, like trafficking in humans, prostitution, and domestic servitude, only a tiny fraction of the pimp’s revenue filters down to the women and children he deploys. Usually the amount spent on them is merely for the maintenance of their lives and, in the case of those prostituted, some money may be spent on clothing and such accouterments as will make them more salable to the pimp’s clients.” ref

“For instance, focusing on just the U.S., according to a government-sponsored report by the Urban Institute in 2014, “A street prostitute in Dallas may make as little as $5 per sex act. But pimps can take in $33,000 a week in Atlanta, where the sex business brings in an estimated $290 million per year.” Proponents of this theory have been instrumental in creating alternative models, such as the capability approach and incorporating gender into the analysis of economic data to affect policy. Marilyn Power suggests that feminist economic methodology can be broken down into five categories.” ref 

“Feminist legal theory is based on the feminist view that law’s treatment of women in relation to men has not been equal or fair. The goals of feminist legal theory, as defined by leading theorist Clare Dalton, consist of understanding and exploring the female experience, figuring out if law and institutions oppose females, and figuring out what changes can be committed to. This is to be accomplished through studying the connections between the law and gender as well as applying feminist analysis to concrete areas of law. Feminist legal theory stems from the inadequacy of the current structure to account for discrimination women face, especially discrimination based on multiple, intersecting identities. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work is central to feminist legal theory, particularly her article Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. DeGraffenreid v General Motors is an example of such a case.” ref

“In this instance, the court ruled the plaintiffs, five Black women including Emma DeGraffenreid, who were employees of General Motors, were not eligible to file a complaint on the grounds they, as black women, were not “a special class to be protected from discrimination.” The ruling in DeGraffenreid against the plaintiff revealed the court’s inability to understand intersectionality’s role in discrimination. Moore v Hughes Helicopters, Inc. is another ruling, which serves to reify the persistent discrediting of intersectionality as a factor in discrimination. In the case of Moore, the plaintiff brought forth statistical evidence revealing a disparity in promotions to upper-level and supervisory jobs between men and women and, to a lesser extent, between Black and white men. Ultimately, the court denied the plaintiff the ability to represent all Blacks and all females. The decision dwindled the pool of statistical information the plaintiff could pull from and limited the evidence only to that of Black women, which is a ruling in direct contradiction to DeGraffenreid.” ref 

“Further, because the plaintiff originally claimed discrimination as a Black female rather than, more generally, as a female, the court stated it had concerns whether the plaintiff could “adequately represent white female employees”. Payne v Travenol serves as yet another example of the court’s inconsistency when dealing with issues revolving around intersections of race and sex. The plaintiffs in Payne, two Black females, filed suit against Travenol on behalf of both Black men and women on the grounds the pharmaceutical plant practiced racial discrimination. The court ruled the plaintiffs could not adequately represent Black males; however, they did allow the admittance of statistical evidence, which was inclusive of all Black employees.” ref 

“Despite the more favorable outcome after it was found there was extensive racial discrimination, the courts decided the benefits of the ruling – back pay and constructive seniority – would not be extended to Black males employed by the company. Moore contends Black women cannot adequately represent white women on issues of sex discrimination, Payne suggests Black women cannot adequately represent Black men on issues of race discrimination, and DeGraffenreid argues Black women are not a special class to be protected. The rulings, when connected, display a deep-rooted problem in regards to addressing discrimination within the legal system. These cases, although they are outdated are used by feminists as evidence of their ideas and principles.” ref

“Feminist communication theory has evolved over time and branches out in many directions. Early theories focused on the way that gender influenced communication, and many argued that language was “man-made”. This view of communication promoted a “deficiency model” asserting that characteristics of speech associated with women were negative and that men “set the standard for competent interpersonal communication”, which influences the type of language used by men and women. These early theories also suggested that ethnicity, cultural, and economic backgrounds also needed to be addressed. They looked at how gender intersects with other identity constructs, such as class, race, and sexuality. Feminist theorists, especially those considered to be liberal feminists, began looking at issues of equality in education and employment. Other theorists addressed political oratory and public discourse. The recovery project brought to light many women orators who had been “erased or ignored as significant contributors.” Feminist communication theorists also addressed how women were represented in the media and how the media “communicated ideology about women, gender, and feminism.” ref

Feminist communication theory also encompasses access to the public sphere, whose voices are heard in that sphere, and the ways in which the field of communication studies has limited what is regarded as essential to public discourse. The recognition of a full history of women orators overlooked and disregarded by the field has effectively become an undertaking of recovery, as it establishes and honors the existence of women in history and lauds the communication by these historically significant contributors. This recovery effort, begun by Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University and followed by other feminist communication theorists also names women such as Aspasia, Diotima, and Christine de Pisan, who were likely influential in rhetorical and communication traditions in classical and medieval times, but who have been negated as serious contributors to the traditions.” ref

“Feminist communication theorists are also concerned with a recovery effort in attempting to explain the methods used by those with power to prohibit women like Maria W. Stewart, Sarah Moore Grimké, and Angelina Grimké, and more recently, Ella Baker and Anita Hill, from achieving a voice in political discourse and consequently being driven from the public sphere. Theorists in this vein are also interested in the unique and significant techniques of communication employed by these women and others like them to surmount some of the oppression they experienced.” ref

“Feminist theorists also evaluate communication expectations for students and women in the work place, in particular how the performance of feminine versus masculine styles of communicating are constructed. Judith Butler, who coined the term “gender performativity” further suggests that, “theories of communication must explain the ways individuals negotiate, resist, and transcend their identities in a highly gendered society”. This focus also includes the ways women are constrained or “disciplined” in the discipline of communication in itself, in terms of biases in research styles and the “silencing” of feminist scholarship and theory.” ref

“Who is responsible for deciding what is considered important public discourse is also put into question by feminist theorists in communication scholarship. This lens of feminist communication theory is labeled as revalorist theory which honors the historical perspective of women in communication in an attempt to recover voices that have been historically neglected. There have been many attempts to explain the lack of representative voices in the public sphere for women including, the notion that, “the public sphere is built on essentialist principles that prevent women from being seen as legitimate communicators in that sphere”, and theories of subalternity“, which, “under extreme conditions of oppression…prevent those in positions of power from even hearing their communicative attempts.” ref

Anarcha-Feminism

“Anarcha-feminism, also known as anarchist feminism or anarcho-feminism, is a system of analysis which combines the principles and power analysis of anarchist theory with feminism. It closely resembles intersectional feminism. Anarcha-feminism generally posits that patriarchy and traditional gender roles as manifestations of involuntary coercive hierarchy should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that “as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist.” ref

“Anarcha-feminism has a diverse range of thought, but is generally characterised by the principles of women’s autonomy, free love, and intersectionality. Anarcha-feminists are committed to women’s empowerment in social and political life, opposing capitalism and the state as key instruments of institutional discrimination against women. Anarcha-feminism expanded on the traditional anarchist principles of anti-statism, anti-clericalism, and anti-capitalism, demonstrating their role in institutional discrimination such as sexism, racism, and homophobia. In her 1895 essay entitled Sex Slavery, Voltairine de Cleyre claimed that sexism was caused by the institutional authoritarianism upheld by the clergy and the state.” ref

“Anarcha-feminists see the patriarchy and the state as two expressions of the same system of oppression, and concluded that the destruction of all forms of patriarchy would necessarily include the abolition of the state. Emma Goldman herself took an intersectional analysis of the state which saw it as an instrument of sexual repression, and thus rejected the strategy of reformism. As such, the first-wave of anarchist feminists criticized calls for women’s suffrage, considering them to be insufficient for achieving gender equality. He Zhen was skeptical of the limited gender equality achieved in western liberal democracies, which she described as “false freedom and sham equality”, even criticising the women’s suffrage movement and male feminists for espousing an “empty rhetoric of emancipation.” ref

“Anarchism first emerged as a political current at a time when gender inequality was systematically enforced, and women were excluded from public life. Their existence was confined to the traditional gender roles of mothers and wives, within the construct of the nuclear family. In particular, working class women were both politically and economically disenfranchised, which drove them closer to socialism and political militancy. They began to agitate for reproductive rights and free love, which formed the basis for an anarchist feminism.” ref

“The earliest proponents of anarchism were initially reluctant to approach the subject of feminism: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was openly hostile to feminist demands of gender equality and upheld traditional family values; Peter Kropotkin thought that feminist goals should be subordinated to the class struggle; and Benjamin Tucker opposed the demand of “equal pay for equal work“. It was only after Mikhail Bakunin made the abolition of gender inequality one of the aims of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy that women’s rights became a primary concern for the anarchist movement. Anarcho-communists adopted Friedrich Engels‘ critique of the family, which held it to be the origin of both gender inequality and economic inequality. This anti-authoritarian critique of power within the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family began to attract many feminists towards anarchism. The subsequent synthesis of anarchism and feminism, although not explicitly labeled as such at the time, later came to be known as anarcha-feminism.” ref

“During the 1880s, a current of anarchist feminism was first developed by the Catalan activists Teresa Mañé and Teresa Claramunt. By the 1890s, anarchist feminism had spread across the globe, brought by immigrants to and from Europe. The anarchist press started to publish feminist analyses on gender equality and critiques of marriage, the nuclear family, and prostitution. Through Errico Malatesta‘s La Questione Sociale, Teresa Mañé’s pamphlets on female education and gender inequality received widespread publication. Anarchist feminism was further taken up by the American anarchists Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, the latter of whom came to be considered a “founding mother” of anarcha-feminism. Lucy Parsons also established the Working Women’s Union in Chicago and ensured women’s participation in the Industrial Workers of the World as one of its founding members. In England, the anarchist Charlotte Wilson became an advocate for “equal pay for equal work” and promoted women’s education.” ref

“Anarchist women took prominent positions within the editorial boards of magazines (such as Mother Earth), in the publication of books, and as public speakers. Specifically, feminist publications were also circulated, including Germinal, El Oprimido, and La Voz de la Mujer, in which anarchist women defended a revolutionary form of feminism. As a way to counter the Culture of Domesticity, which upheld the private property of the nuclear family, anarchist women like Charlotte Wilson opened their homes into “quasi-public spaces” for political meetings and communal meals. Anarchist women even took part in violent direct actions, including Vera Zasulich‘s attempted assassination of the Russian police chief Fyodor Trepov; Germaine Berton‘s murder of the French far-right politician Marius Plateau; and Kanno Sugako‘s plot to assassinate the Japanese Emperor Meiji.” ref

“The rise of anarchist feminism provoked an anti-feminist reaction among many of the men of the anarchist movement, who deemphasized the struggle for women’s rights as secondary to the class struggle. In turn, La Voz de la Mujer denounced these men as “false anarchists” who prioritized their own liberation over that of women. In the Chinese anarcha-feminist journal Natural Justice, He Zhen also criticised what she saw as “men’s pursuit of self distinction in the name of women’s liberation”. Anarcha-feminists generally concluded that male hostility to feminism proved them unreliable to the cause for women’s rights, and began to organise their own movement to address their own needs.” ref

“First-wave feminists established women’s groups as flat organizations that used consensus decision-making, reflecting an “unconscious libertarian consciousness.” Anarchist women’s groups were established throughout the United States, largely by Italian immigrant women, with the goal of pursuing “women’s emancipation” through mutual aid and self-organization. In Paterson, New Jersey, the Gruppo Emancipazione della Donna formed women’s theater and music clubs, and publicized works of anarchist feminism that linked the struggle against the patriarchy with the struggle against the patria. In contrast to the Italian anarchists, Jewish anarchists rarely formed specific women’s groups, with anarchists of the journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime declaring themselves to all be feminists.” ref

“One of the most notable libertarian women’s groups was the Mujeres Libres, an anarchist feminist organisation that aimed for women’s liberation from their “triple enslavement” by ignorance, exploitation, and discrimination. Founded during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Mercè Comaposada, and Amparo Poch y Gascón, the Mujeres Libres implemented programmes of women’s education that taught women technical skills and increased female literacy. Sánchez Saornil herself wrote poetry that called for women to take action against their oppression, which attracted Emma Goldman to visit Spain and participate in the work of the Mujeres Libres as an advocate.” ref

^{“However, the anarchist feminism of the time, which focused more on developing small activist groups than creating a mass movement, lacked a precise strategy for achieving women’s rights, so little action in that way was taken.} During the early 20th century, anarchist feminism was progressively supplanted by socialist feminism, which took a reformist approach towards achieving women’s suffrage. By this time Charlotte Wilson had herself abandoned anarchist activism, becoming involved in women’s suffrage advocacy and later joining the Independent Labour Party. Anarchist feminist critiques of the family and authoritarianism went into remission, only to be reformulated when a new wave of feminism emerged.” ref

“By the late 1960s, second-wave feminism had emerged from the New Left, as part of a broad wave of anti-oppression activism that included the civil rights movement and culminated with the protests of 1968. Drawing from socialist feminism, this second-wave sought to encourage solidarity between women, bringing them together into a “sisterhood” based on their shared experiences. During this period, feminists rediscovered the work of first-wave anarchist feminists like Emma Goldman, and before long the women’s liberation movement began to reshape the anarchist movement. Many second-wave feminists came to consider anarchism to be the “logically consistent expression of feminism” due to its synthesis of the struggle for individual liberty with that for social equality. Peggy Kornegger claimed that feminists had already been “unconscious anarchists in both theory and practice” and were the only activist tendency to be “practic[ing] what anarchism preaches.” ref

“The pervasive environment of sexism within many sections of the New Left gave an impulse to the establishment of women’s groups as part of a strategy of feminist separatism, which led to the coining and adoption of the term “anarcha-feminist” by anarchist women. Second-wave anarchist feminists developed their own affinity groups according to cooperative, decentralist, and federalist principles, as an alternative to both patriarchal and structureless organisations. The anarcha-feminist drive to reckon with these hierarchical forms of organization was particularly influenced by Jo Freeman‘s 1972 essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness, which encouraged an organized egalitarian tendency within the movement.” ref

“The second wave of anarchist feminism was also characterized by an often violent militancy, as displayed in the SCUM Manifesto. Anarcha-feminists such as Ann Hansen participated in the bombing attacks by the urban guerrilla group Direct Action, which targeted companies that produced parts for weapons of war and a chain video store that was distributing snuff films and paedophilic pornography. By the 1980s, the feminist sex wars had caused a divide within second-wave feminism, which fragmented into multiple different tendencies, while many former feminists moved into academic careerism.” ref

“The beginnings of the anti-globalization movement spurred the development of a new wave, with reflections on the earlier second-wave and the influence of postcolonial feminism leading to an integration of identity politics into the framework of anarchist feminism. The emergence of a third-wave of anarcha-feminism brought with it a new focus on intersectionality, as anarcha-feminists came together to address the intersecting issues of poverty, racism, and reproductive rights, among many others. The early feminist conception of a “New Woman” also formed part of the foundation for third-wave anarcha-feminism, which encouraged women to practice equality rather than to demand it. In Bolivia, the Mujeres Creando carried out direct actions that challenged poverty and traditional gender roles. In the United States, anarcha-feminists within the anarcho-punk scene spurred the development of the Riot grrrl subculture.” ref

“With the turn of the 21st century, there was a concerted effort to rethink approaches to anarcha-feminist histories, placing value in collective, open, and non-hierarchical methods of gathering and exchanging knowledge. Collective research projects were carried out by groups such as the Dark Star Collective, which in 2002 published an anthology of anarcha-feminist works titled Quiet Rumours. Greenway concluded that a complete anarcha-feminist historiography needed to actively challenge hierarchical biases within dominant historiographies, rather than merely reincorporating erased aspects of history or focusing excessively on one or two individuals.” ref

“In 2010, the feminist historian Judy Greenway elaborated five different methodologies of anarcha-feminist historiography:

1. The “additive approach,” which incorporates elements otherwise overlooked in existing historiography;
2. The “Emma Goldman Short-Circuit”, which centers the contributions of Emma Goldman above all others;
3. The “women’s issues approach,” which is chiefly concerned with issues of sexuality and reproductive rights;
4. The “inclusive approach,” which focuses on the role of women in famous historical events;
5. The “transformative approach”, which takes a critical look at the erasure of women and privileged position of men in gendered histories.” ref

“The fourth wave of feminism emerged through the development of postfeminism, taking concern with the objectification of women by market forces and characterized by its use of social networking. The fourth wave of anarchist feminism was particularly influenced by postmodern feminism. In a 2017 article, Chiara Bottici argued that anarcha-feminism has been the subject of insufficient discussion in public debate and in academia, due in part to a broader hostility to anarchism but also due to difficulties in distinguishing between the tendency of anarcha-feminism and the broader philosophy of anarchism. Bottici argued that the risk of economic reductionism that appears in Marxist feminism, in which women’s oppression is understood solely in economic terms, “has … always been alien to anarcha-feminism”; as such, she argues, anarchism is better suited than Marxism for an alliance with feminism.” ref

“From the inception of anarcha-feminism as a current, anarchist feminists have engaged with other struggles that intersect with women’s issues, participating in a number of different anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. A specifically anti-racist anarcha-feminism was pioneered during the 1970s by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and her organization Cell 16. In 1976, a statement produced by the Combahee River Collective lay the groundwork for the development of intersectionality. Since the third-wave, intersectionality has formed one of the core concepts of anarchist feminism, which has used it as a method to develop a feminist ethics of self-organization against all forms of oppression. Groups within the activist network No one is illegal (NOII) have since engaged in an anti-racist anarcha-feminism as part of their anti-border advocacy, which was itself rooted in an anti-statist critique of institutional sexism and racism within state immigration regimes. Drawing from post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and critical theory, Deric Shannon has proposed a contemporary construction of anarcha-feminism that engages with each of these theories, combining anti-capitalism with a comprehensive intersectional stance against all forms of oppression.” ref

“Anarcha-feminism holds the principle that “the personal is political,” developing a critique of everyday life that aims to erode social and political power, in pursuit of a society where each individual had control over “[they’re] own life, and no others.” Anarcha-feminists considered the nuclear family to be the root of all gender inequality, and thus that equality could only be achieved through the extension of personal autonomy and economic independence to women. Although the institution of private property was roundly critiqued by anarcho-communists such as Emma Goldman, it was upheld as a means of women’s economic emancipation by Voltairine de Cleyre.” ref

“Anarchist feminists such as Itō Noe have upheld the ideal of a “New Woman“, encouraging women to assert their own individuality and develop independent thought. Emma Goldman conceived of a revolution that takes place within individual minds, as well as in society.Goldman advocated for women to exercise their autonomy by overcoming their own “internal tyrants”, whether that be the opinions of their family members or traditional Social norms. According to Martha Hewitt, the anarcha-feminist conception of revolution is “as process, transformative praxis of thought, feeling, and collective social activity.” In the 1993 book The Politics of Individualism, the anarcha-feminist L. Susan Brown developed what she called an “existential individualism”, which upheld individual autonomy and voluntary cooperation.” ref

“During the late 19th century, anarchist women were among the earliest to take up the call for reproductive rights, as part of the anarchist feminist opposition to the nuclear family. Anarchist feminists have distributed information about and resources for birth control, for which many were put in jail. While working as a midwife during the 1890s, Emma Goldman became a prominent advocate of women’s reproductive rights, calling for women’s rights to practice family planning and publicly rallying support for Margaret Sanger. In contrast, other anarchist feminists such as Itō Noe opposed abortion from a humanist perspective, as she believed that life began at conception.” ref

“Anarchist advocacy for birth control increased following World War I, as the practice was banned in countries like France and the United States, which anarchist feminists criticised a means to continue increasing the population in order to wage war. Anarchist feminist direct action for birth control continued even after the partial legalization of abortion, as “feminist outlaw” groups like the Jane Collective provided food and medical care for women without access to safe methods of birth control. Anarchist feminists have also participated in the movement for reproductive justice, which has prioritized bodily autonomy and the reproductive self-determination of women of color.” ref

“Anarchist feminists have developed a non-coercive approach to interpersonal relationships, which particularly upholds the value of consent. Anarchist feminists such as Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman fiercely criticized the institution of marriage, as they considered it to be inherently oppressive towards women due to its lack of consent. Their critiques of marriage led them to advocate for and practice free love, which they held to be a remedy to women’s social alienation. With its basis in freely-given consent, free love provided room for women to reconstruct their sexuality in a way that centered their own agency and autonomy. Emma Goldman herself saw sexuality as a “critical social force” of free expression, She extended this to a public defense of gay rights, with some scholars even speculating about her own sexuality. On the other hand, free love was opposed by Lucy Parsons, who criticized it as being inconsistent with anarchism and for its increased risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, instead arguing for a form of “monogamy without marriage.” ref

“Anarcha-feminists have been at the forefront of advocacy for sex workers’ rights since the late-19th century, when anarchist women in Germany and France campaigned for the decriminalisation of sex work. Louise Michel blamed capitalism for creating the economic conditions that drove women towards sex work, which she claimed could only be brought to an end by means of a social revolution. Itō Noe likewise argued that the root cause of women taking up sex work was poverty, and that instead of campaigning to abolish sex work, people should address the root causes of poverty. Emma Goldman also publicly criticised sex work abolitionists for using male legal systems to criminalise women, which she held to be a form of class discrimination.” ref

“Following the second-wave of feminism, sex worker advocacy was taken up by anarchist feminists that themselves engaged in sex work. Grisélidis Réal organized sex workers and carried out a series of direct actions for sex workers’ rights, going on to establish an archive for the history of sex work. Canadian anarchist sex workers were also involved in an advocacy campaign, culminating with the declaration of an “International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.” Relationship anarchy (sometimes abbreviated RA) is the application of anarchist principles to intimate relationships. Its values include autonomy, anti-hierarchical practices, anti-normativity, and community interdependence. RA is explicitly anti-amatonormative and anti-mononormative and is commonly, but not always, non-monogamous. This is distinct from polyamory, solo poly, swinging, and other forms of “dating,” which may include structures such as amatonormativity, hierarchy of intimate relationships, and autonomy-limiting rules. It has also been interpreted as a new paradigm in which closeness and autonomy are no longer considered to create dilemmas within a relationship.” ref, ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

People don’t commonly teach religious history, even that of their own claimed religion. No, rather they teach a limited “pro their religion” history of their religion from a religious perspective favorable to the religion of choice. 

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Do you truly think “Religious Belief” is only a matter of some personal choice?

Do you not see how coercive one’s world of choice is limited to the obvious hereditary belief, in most religious choices available to the child of religious parents or caregivers? Religion is more commonly like a family, culture, society, etc. available belief that limits the belief choices of the child and that is when “Religious Belief” is not only a matter of some personal choice and when it becomes hereditary faith, not because of the quality of its alleged facts or proposed truths but because everyone else important to the child believes similarly so they do as well simply mimicking authority beliefs handed to them. Because children are raised in religion rather than being presented all possible choices but rather one limited dogmatic brand of “Religious Belief” where children only have a choice of following the belief as instructed, and then personally claim the faith hereditary belief seen in the confirming to the belief they have held themselves all their lives. This is obvious in statements asked and answered by children claiming a faith they barely understand but they do understand that their family believes “this or that” faith, so they feel obligated to believe it too. While I do agree that “Religious Belief” should only be a matter of some personal choice, it rarely is… End Hereditary Religion!

Opposition to Imposed Hereditary Religion

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

ref, ref, ref, ref 

Animism: Respecting the Living World by Graham Harvey 

“How have human cultures engaged with and thought about animals, plants, rocks, clouds, and other elements in their natural surroundings? Do animals and other natural objects have a spirit or soul? What is their relationship to humans? In this new study, Graham Harvey explores current and past animistic beliefs and practices of Native Americans, Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and eco-pagans. He considers the varieties of animism found in these cultures as well as their shared desire to live respectfully within larger natural communities. Drawing on his extensive casework, Harvey also considers the linguistic, performative, ecological, and activist implications of these different animisms.” ref

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

We are like believing machines we vacuum up ideas, like Velcro sticks to almost everything. We accumulate beliefs that we allow to negatively influence our lives, often without realizing it. Our willingness must be to alter skewed beliefs that impend our balance or reason, which allows us to achieve new positive thinking and accurate outcomes.

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art