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Are we all Jews?
Marty R. writes:
We’re all Keynesians. No! We’re all Jews. We all came from Africa. No! We all came from Israel. We’re all Jews, we’re all Jews, we’re all Jews.
LA replies:
But this discovery is not essentially new, since for at least 30 years the oldest modern Homo sapiens remains have been 200,000 year old fossils found in Israel. This latest find increases the age of the oldest modern Homo sapiens to 400,000 years (and it only does that potentially, of course, since how much credit can be put on teeth by themselves?), but it doesn’t change the fact that the oldest human fossils at present are found in Israel. (I may be wrong about that, as new findings crop up all the time, but that only shows how fluid and indeterminate is everything in this field.)
In any case, I assume you’re joking. If modern Homo came into existence in Israel 400,000 years ago, that would no more make all human beings Jews, than that all human beings would be Negroes if modern Homo had come into existence in Africa, since Negroes, and, even more so, Jews, came into existence more recently than 400,000 years ago.
There have been many articles on this today. Here is one from the Mail:
Did first humans come out of Middle East and not Africa? Israeli discovery forces scientists to re-examine evolution of modern man
Scientists could be forced to re-write the history of the evolution of modern man after the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains.
Until now, researchers believed that homo sapiens, the direct descendants of modern man [LA replies: Uh, no, modern man is Homo sapiens], evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago and gradually migrated north, through the Middle East, to Europe and Asia.
Recently, discoveries of early human remains in China and Spain have cast doubt on the ‘Out of Africa’ theory, but no one was certain.
The new discovery of pre-historic human remains by Israeli university explorers in a cave near Ben-Gurion airport could force scientists to re-think earlier theories.
Archeologists from Tel Aviv University say eight human-like teeth found in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin—10 miles from Israel’s international airport—are 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, making them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered anywhere in the world.
The size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. Until now, the earliest examples found were in Africa, dating back only 200,000 years.
Other scientists have argued that human beings originated in Africa before moving to other regions 150,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens discovered in Middle Awash, Ethiopia, from 160,000 years ago were believed to be the oldest ‘modern’ human beings.
Other remains previously found in Israeli caves are thought to have been more recent and 80,000 to 100,000 years old.
The findings of Professor Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Institute of Archeology at Tel Aviv University, published last week in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, suggest that modern man did not originate in Africa as previously believed, but in the Middle East.
The Qesem cave was discovered in 2000 and has been the focus of intense study ever since.
Along with the teeth—the parts of the human skeleton that survive the longest—the researchers found evidence of a sophisticated early human society that used sharpened flakes of stone to cut meat and other impressive prehistoric tools.
The Israeli scientists said the remains found in the cave suggested the systematic production of flint blades, the habitual use of fire, evidence of hunting, cutting and sharing of animal meat, and mining raw materials to produce flint tools from rocks below ground.
[end of article]
LA writes:
Here’s my view of the matter: Given the current very fragmentary, very fluid, and fantastically speculative state of knowledge in the field of human pre-history, especially concerning the location of the origin of modern man, spending one’s time thinking seriously about these subjects is a waste of time. For example, the idea of basing an entirely new view of the age of modern Homo on nothing but a few teeth is silly.
We already live in a culture of hype. Given how fragmented and incomplete are all the findings and theories in early human evolution, the field is a natural candidate for super hype, divided into hype producers and hype consumers, with the latter salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the latest claim that our entire knowledge of human evolution has been turned on its head. The field is also a candidate for racial, ethnic, and political agendas.
At the same time, given the highly politicized way that the widely accepted origin of modern Homo sapiens in Africa has been used to tell us that “we’re all black,” and therefore that racial differences between blacks and non-blacks are of no importance or are even non-existent, it is entirely understandable and legitimate that people would fight back against that PC line. But then we inevitably end up with racial hype versus racial hype. So I still say that from the point of view of real substance, it is a waste of time for non-specialists to follow this field at this time. Perhaps at some point in the future we will have reasonably solid scenario of human origins. But we are very, very far from that at present. I myself feel this particularly strongly, because a few years ago, based on my reading, I thought that the Out of Africa theory was the solidly established consensus, then I realized that it wasn’t. At the same time, the multitude of alternative theories adds up to a picture that is almost sickening in its lack of stability and of any common ground.
LA continues:
Hmm, the Producers of Hype and the Consumers of Hype—those could be the denizens of another circle of Hell in an updated version of The Inferno.
December 28
James P. writes:
In this connection, you may recall this story from last year, in which anthropologist Alice Roberts was staring in great satisfaction at the clearly negroid features of the “first European.”
December 29
Paul T. writes:
Even if we have ancestors who lived 400,000 years ago in what later became Israel, it’s not certain that they’d be ancestors of Jews, who (so I thought) came from Ur in Mesopotamia around 1960 B.C. [LA replies: Right—isn’t that when Exodus came out?] I suppose the argument would have to be that the owner of those recently-found teeth and his tribe made their way to Mesopotamia and a later generation immigrated back. [LA replies: and I’m sure you realize how ridiculously forced and far fetched it would be to posit some connection between the group that supposedly went from Israel to Mesopotamia 400,000 years ago, and the Hebrews who entered Israel from Mosopotamia 398,000 years later.] Incidentally, I also seem to recollect that the word “Hebrew” is believed to derive from an older word, “Ibiru,” which means something like ‘the folks who came from over the river”—i.e. from Mesopotamia. These observations are based on my dim recollection of Isadore Epstein’s book Judaism (an Pelican/Penguin book from the late 1950’s (A.D.!).
December 29
Paul Nachman writes:
Good remark by you:
Here’s my view of the matter: Given the current very fragmentary, very fluid, and fantastically speculative state of knowledge in the field of human pre-history and especially the location of the origin of modern man, spending one’s time thinking seriously about these subjects is a waste of time. For example, the idea of basing an entirely new view of the age of modern Homo on nothing but a few teeth is silly.
We already live in a culture of hype. Given how fragmented and incomplete are all the findings and theories in early human evolution, the field is a natural candidate for super hype, divided into hype producers and hype consumers, with the latter salivating like Pavlov’s dog at the latest claim that our entire knowledge of human evolution has been turned on its head. The field is also a candidate for racial, ethnic, and political agendas.
I’ve long held the equivalent view, that this kind of stuff, as far as lay people go, is basically entertainment.
Building up an entire creature (it’s not done only for humans) on the basis of a tooth has always struck me as quite droll.
I remember one case where a fragment of some sort was interpreted to be from a small woman but later all the detailed speculation was overturned by the revelation that this item was from a boy. But then, how did they decide that?
I had a similar reaction upon reading the geological history of the Jackson Hole area that was part of a topographical map of the Tetons and surroundings. It was mountains rising, then eroding or subsiding, plus all kinds of other processes in a sequence that was interesting to read but left me thinking that a totally different sequence would sound just as plausible to me. I don’t mean at all to denigrate such work. But with the past piled on top of itself in such a heterogeneous fashion, I’d think you’d might well come to vastly different overall conclusions at investigation sites sited a few miles apart.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 27, 2010 05:22 PM | Send
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