Evidence of Lemuria?

[Muffit]

Hello all,

Long time no see

I know this is a few years old, but perhaps you haven't seen it...
More firm evidence that there /were/ great civilzations 10,000 years ago, maybe even the Atlantis and Lemuria of the BSG narration...

With affection,
Muffit

====

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1768109.stm



"The whole model of the origins of civilization with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch..."

Another Submerged City

21-Jan-2002

The remains of a huge underwater city off the western coast of India may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history. It's believed that the area was submerged when ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age, 9-10,000 years ago.

Marine scientists say archaeological remains disco vered 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology who were conducting a survey of pollution. Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean - they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 feet. Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth - has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum says more work will need to be done before the site can be said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilization, since there can be errors in carbon dating. "Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilizations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements," he says.

Strong tides make investigations in the Cambay difficult. Marine scientists led by the Madras-based National Institute of Ocean Technology are solving this problem by taking acoustic images off the sea-bed and using dredging equipment to extract artifacts.

The Indian Minister for Ocean Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, says the images indicate symmetrical man-made structures and also a paleo-river, with banks containing artifacts, such as pottery. Carbon dating on a block of wood brought up from the depths suggests it dates back to 7,595 BC. "We have to find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation vanished," he says.

The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years and is the oldest on the subcontinent. Although Palaeolithic sites dating back around 20,000 years have been found on the coast of India's western state of Gujarat before, this is the first time that man-made structures as old as 9,500 years have been found deep beneath the ocean surface.

Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub- bottom profiling to show that the buildings were built on enormous foundations. Graham Hancock, author of "Fingerprints of the Gods," says, "The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made structures. Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia. Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt."

Hancock feels this discovery could have a major influence on our view of the ancient world. "There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilization with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he says.

[Taranis]

I will use the term "Fascinating" .. I would believe this easily there's so much we don't know . I even think that I have see something on TV a few weeks ago ... they where looking a constructs in south Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico..
Make you think alright

[Dawg]

Hi, Muffit!

Miss you - good to see you!

I am
Dawg

[Taranis]

Originally Posted by Dawg

Hi, Muffit!

Miss you - good to see you!

I am
Dawg

Me Too hope to see you here more

[Muffit]

Hi Taranis! Hi Dawg!

Thank you for remembering little old me.
I recalled some time ago folks used to post news items like this, and when I saw it I thought of y'all.

Btw, this jibes very well with additional evidence of advanced civilizations having existed then disappeared by some cataclysm, on two other continents.

In South America, there is a huge stone structure whcih could only have been fashioned by a very advanced and large culture, and has been dated numerous times to circa 10,000 years ago. Scientists have not wanted to acknowledge this since all the available info points to 5,000 years of history only. And recent exhaustive tests have shown the Sphynx in Egypt suffered considerable water damage from rainfall in its distant past. Yet no such rainfall has fallen - except 10,000 years ago. Added to that, the mysterious tiny shafts from the King and Queen's chambers in teh Great Pyramid, never pointed to their respective stellar deities any time near 5,000 years ago. However, by computer simulation, they proved they /did/ point /exactly/ to those deities -- (you guessed it) 10,000 years ago.

All of this plus India seems to point to a worldwide fairly advanced set of civilzations, all of which disappeared with nary a trace, and humanity had to start completely over - which took until 5,000 years ago to reach the same stage of science and culture. Researchers point out that the melting of teh polar ice cap may have raised sea levels and inundated all of the coastal cities (where everybody lived, mainly), causing this disaster, and covering the evidence from our eyes under hundreds of feet of ocean.

Anyway, I love this stuff, hope you all do too...

Nice to see ya's!
Muffit

[CBSG4ever]

Hello Muffit,
You might find this site interesting as well.
http://www.atlan.org/
Whether you believe the author or not, it's....rather fascinating.

[Lyra]

Originally Posted by Muffit

Hi Taranis! Hi Dawg!

Thank you for remembering little old me.
I recalled some time ago folks used to post news items like this, and when I saw it I thought of y'all.

Btw, this jibes very well with additional evidence of advanced civilizations having existed then disappeared by some cataclysm, on two other continents.

In South America, there is a huge stone structure whcih could only have been fashioned by a very advanced and large culture, and has been dated numerous times to circa 10,000 years ago. Scientists have not wanted to acknowledge this since all the available info points to 5,000 years of history only. And recent exhaustive tests have shown the Sphynx in Egypt suffered considerable water damage from rainfall in its distant past. Yet no such rainfall has fallen - except 10,000 years ago. Added to that, the mysterious tiny shafts from the King and Queen's chambers in teh Great Pyramid, never pointed to their respective stellar deities any time near 5,000 years ago. However, by computer simulation, they proved they /did/ point /exactly/ to those deities -- (you guessed it) 10,000 years ago.

All of this plus India seems to point to a worldwide fairly advanced set of civilzations, all of which disappeared with nary a trace, and humanity had to start completely over - which took until 5,000 years ago to reach the same stage of science and culture. Researchers point out that the melting of teh polar ice cap may have raised sea levels and inundated all of the coastal cities (where everybody lived, mainly), causing this disaster, and covering the evidence from our eyes under hundreds of feet of ocean.

Anyway, I love this stuff, hope you all do too...

Nice to see ya's!
Muffit

Hi Muffit,
We havent't met before, but you seem to be legendary around the fleets.
I appreciate your topic of discussion here, and totally understand the content of it, as I too, delve greatly into the realms of ancient /pre-history of our world.
Alike to Lemuria, Sri Lanka had a prehistorical lost city called, Lankapura, which was really ruled by an ancient persian people...ahhh fascinating isn't it?
Have you ever read a book called "Dead Man's Secrets" by Jonothan Gray?
And here's another you will be blown away with, is "The 12th Planet-Book 1 of the Earth Chronicles" by Zecharia Sitchin.... The bible tells of our celestial ancestors, called the Nefilim. I 'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions on these.
Best Wishes!

[Muffit]

Hi CBSG4ever!

Wow, that /is/ a good resource - I think I'm gonna order that book, it looks really neat. The author does have a few misquotes and ideas, but all in all it looks really interesting.

Thanks!

And hi Lt. Lyra!

It's so nice to meet you. And thank you so much for the neat resources, I will check them out for sure. The Nephilim I am aware of, if I remember right, they were half-angel, half-human, and God was not too awful happy about their mixing with the human blood-line. (That part of the Bible is kind of bizarre for me, but certainly interesting(!)). I sure appreciate your thoughts and thank you for your kindness.

With much affection to both,
Muffit

Originally Posted by CBSG4ever

Hello Muffit,
You might find this site interesting as well.
http://www.atlan.org/
Whether you believe the author or not, it's....rather fascinating.

[BST]

Originally Posted by Lyra

Hi Muffit,
We havent't met before, but you seem to be legendary around the fleets.

Lyra,

More than 'legendary', Muffit is the very soul of our Fleet. Her kindness and wisdom serve as reminders that there is goodness in all waiting to be discovered.

Now, her musings, ....... those are legendary!!




***


Dear Muffit,

It does my good to see you again!!

...and what's a welcome without a

(for each cheek)

and

one for "yesterday" .. one for "today" .. one for "tomorrow"

[Muffit]

Dear BST,

You know how to make a daggit purr
I miss you too!

Very affectionately,
Muffit

[jewels]

(((((((Muffit))))))
It was great to see you here again. Cool news story. I think archeologists now living are getting to work in the best time for their fields as far as discovering lost cities and ancient remanents.

[Muffit]

Hi Jewels!

So wonderful to see you again
And I agree, the discoveries are just beginning...

With warmest affection,
Muffit

[Gemini1999]

Muffit -

Nice to see your furry face again!

I remember doing some online research on the subject of Lemuria - the opening narration always made me curious about it. I don't remember much about what I found (I might have posted it here....or not). I do remember one particular website saying that it was beleived that Lemuria predated Atlantis - historically speaking.

Thanks for bringing some of the mythos back into discussion!

Bryan

[Lyra]

Muffit,

It is indeed a pleasure to be acquainted, and I love your site..I had a visit a couple of sectons ago, and I 've been maning to tell you, what a lovely and interesting site, Kudos!

Best wishes to you!!!
And may the the Lords of Kobol be with you always!

[amberstar]

((((((((Muffit)))))))))

So good to see you sweetie! Hope all is well with you.
Many thanks for the post, I agree with Taranis........ "Fascinating!"

[cobrastrikelead]

I am usually of the school of thought of, give me some hard evidence.
But if this turns out. Wow!

[Muffit]

Hi Amberstar! Hi Gemini! Hi CSL!

Miss all you guys

And thank you for visiting my site Lyra, it's wonderful to meet you too! Btw, I will be updating it quite a bit in the next month (bunch of new songs and animations, etc). Wth, keeps little old me busy...

Happy Nova Yahren everybody!

Always with much affection,

[Warrior]

MUFFIT!!!!!!!!!

*POUNCE!!!*

Hi there!

[Damocles]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1768109.stm

I've read this article.

It is full of major science errors, the first of which is a climatological error.

I will go into depth about this by item later when I have time.

As always;

[Dawg]

MUFFIT!!!!



I'm so happy to see you!

Happy New Year - and I hope this year brings you more chances to come share with us!



I am
Dawg

[BST]

Originally Posted by Damocles

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1768109.stm

I've read this article.

It is full of major science errors, the first of which is a climatological error.

I will go into depth about this by item later when I have time.

As always;

This should be interesting.

[Muffit]

Hi Warrior!
Hi Dawg!

[WarMachine]

Hi Muffitt!

Heard about that article when it published. My view has always been that is you want to find Atlantis/Lemuria anywhere, you need to look on the Continental Shelfs of the world.....

...Which brings me to my hat-in-ring. Based on Rand Flem-Ath's viewpoint, I generally agree with their Eart Crust Displacement theory.

However, my vote for Atlantis' true locale goes to the bottom of either the Irish or North Seas...I don't have any real proof to base those notions on, just a hunch.

Damocles: I just got home and have yet to have anything to eat, so I will reply to your last post on ZH after lunch.....

[Damocles]

Originally Posted by BST

This should be interesting.

First the crap article;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1768109.stm

Lost city 'could rewrite history'

The city is believed to predate the Harappan civilisation
By BBC News Online's Tom Housden
The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.


The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.
Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft.
Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.
Lost civilisation
The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years.
Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub-bottom profiling to show that the buildings remains stand on enormous foundations.

The whole model of the origins of civilisation will have to be remade from scratch


Graham Hancock
Author and film-maker Graham Hancock - who has written extensively on the uncovering of ancient civilisations - told BBC News Online that the evidence was compelling:
"The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made structures.
"Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.
"Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt," he said.
Chronological problem
This, Mr Hancock told BBC News Online, could have massive repercussions for our view of the ancient world.


Harappan remains have been found in India and Pakistan
"There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which archaeologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch," he said.
However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum said more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation.
"Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village settlements," he told BBC News Online.
Dr Morris added that artefacts from the site would need to be very carefully analysed, and pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins.
It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago
Although the first signs of a significant find came eight months ago, exploring the area has been extremely difficult because the remains lie in highly treacherous waters, with strong currents and rip tides.
The Indian Minister for Human Resources and ocean development said a group had been formed to oversee further studies in the area.
"We have to find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation vanished," he said.

Pure unadulterated unsubstantiated baloney.

First of all let me deal with that gentleman, Mister Graham Hancock. I’ve heard the name before in light of something called the De Vermis Mysteriis.

http://www.disinfo.com/images/catalo...oCatalog06.pdf

http://www.book-of-thoth.com/portals..._Mysteriis.pdf

Graham Hancock may be a producer of extremely dubious hypothesis supported by the scarcest of true evidence. That is the polite version of saying he is a poltroon.

Now about the above article and its science errors.

PART ONE ANALYSIS;

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.
Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft.
Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

Sidescan sonar is a very interesting device. It will pass through silt cleanly and give you a sharp return echo when it strikes an acoustically reflective surface like igneous rock or metal. Sedimentary rock will give you a mushy spongy return.

This thus tells you nothing about the composition of the reflected surface except its reflectivity, nor whether it was Human artifice or natural geologic displacement boundary effect that gives you that straight crack line you think you see.

The second claim is that human artifacts were recovered from the site and carbon dated to 7,500 BCE.or older. Well a fragment of wood is a fragment of wood, and not all shards are human worked clay. It could simply be compressed sediment.as you will see below. Plus the actual dating methods used were not entirely radiocarbon dating for all specimens Electro forced luminescent dating was used in some cases.

Yep, a lot of crap science here as you will see below;

[to be continued]

[Damocles]

We have another big problem.
1. How did the city become buried under 36 meters of water?
Answer; there was a melting of the polar ice caps and the water level rose!

Bullfelgercarb.

The last thermal heating of the Earth was completed approximately 15000 BCE as measured by the 1998 Bering Sea expeditions who took core samples of the Arctic Sea Floor to determine when the Aleutian Island saddleback was present to form a possible Asia to North America land bridge. That happened.15000 years ago as we determine by presence of surface animal or plant life that was extracted from the core samples. This proves that the surface extrusion of the sea floor occured at those dates along the Aleutian Island chain that was helped along by ice sheeting. To accomplish that a change in sealevel of approximately ten meters was necessary . You still needed ice sheeting to oversurface the then fifty meter deep, deep channels.

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen...THAMERICA.html

2. To all of this data we have to add something called bedrock rebound which is occurring in the Arabian Sea. Thanks to our last ice age this rebound occurs. This means that the ancient alleged city instead of sinking is actually RISING.
3. http://www.atm.dal.ca/~glesins/climatechange/Lect25.ppt

[to be continued]

[Damocles]

Finally there is this.


4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruins_i...Gulf_of_Cambay

Ruins in the Gulf of Cambay
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
On May 19, 2001, India's science and technology minister Murli Manohar Joshi announced the finding of ruins in the Gulf of Khambat (formerly known as the Gulf of Cambay and more commonly spelled Khambhat). The ruins, known as the Gulf of Khambat Cultural Complex (GKCC), are located on the seabed of a nine-kilometer stretch off the coast of Gujarat province at a depth of about 40 m. The site was discovered by a team from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) in December 2000 and investigated for six months with acoustic techniques. The team identified city-like structures at the location, said to resemble those of major cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation, with regular geometric patterns representing a granary, a great bath and a citadel.


Gulf of Khambhat on the right. Image NASA Earth Observatory
However, many marine geologists, including those who are experienced with using sonar in studying underwater archaeological sites, are skeptical of the interpretations of the NIOT scientists. Geologists argue that the many of the "geometric patterns" seen on the sonar images which the NIOT team interpreted to be submerged structures, are instead obvious artifacts of the sonar imaging process itself. Where underlain by lithified sediments and bedrocks, the linear patterns interpreted to be the foundations and walls of man-made structures might represent nothing more than naturally-occurring orthogonal / rectilinear fracturing and jointing in the rock formations at the bottom of the Gulf of Khambat. Marine geologists argued that the sonar images are inconclusive and would remain open to various and contradictory interpretations, unless verified by actual underwater excavations. Without such physical investigations, which ought to clearly document the presence of artifacts in intact, stratified archaeological deposits and in situ man-made structures, whatever interpretations may be made based on sonar imagery alone would remain unverifiable.
A follow up investigation was conducted by the same institute in November 2001, which included dredging to recover artifacts. News articles report that a block of wood was recovered that was dated to 9,500 years old, which is 5000 years older than the Indus Valley Civilisation. As noted by Witzel (2006), there is a complete lack of any stratigraphic evidence to show that this piece of wood is associated in any way with the geometric patterns seen in sonar images and the various objects recovered from the floor of the Gulf of Khambat (Cambay). In many major river or estuary systems, it is quite common to find pieces of wood, which are thousands of years old, which have been eroded from older sediments and incorporated into modern sediments [1].
A round of further underwater explorations was made in the Gulf of Khambat (Cambay) site by the NIOT team from 2003 to 2004, and the samples obtained of what was presumed to be pottery were sent to laboratories in Oxford, UK and Hanover, Germany, as well as several institutions within India, to be dated by optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) and thermoluminescence dating techniques. These pieces returned dates ranging from 13000 ± 1950 BP up to the oldest at 31270 ± 2050 BP, leading to NIOT's chief geologist Badrinaryan Badrinaryan making the claim that they had uncovered the earliest-known pottery remains in the world, from about 31000 BP [2]. In his web publication of his findings, Badrinaryan (2006) stated:
“ Since some persons have expressed doubts about the pottery pieces, a thorough scientific study was made involving the pottery pieces to establish their authenticity. To determine the properties of various material including pottery, many samples were subjected to X-Ray diffraction (XRD) analysis. Since the materials that constitute pottery etc are clays and heterogeneous mixures of a variety of materials, these were accordingly analysed. Every area has a special fingerprint pattern in the clay which can be recognized in X-Ray diffraction (XRD). The above analysis was carried out in Deccan College, Pune Maharashtra state, India,by using an advanced instrument which gave excellent results. The conclusions are that the pattern of pottery pieces corresponds very well with the locally available clay of Gulf of Khambat (Cambay). The mineral patterns of habitational floor, wattle and daub and land materials (alluvial deposit) are comparable. The patterns of fired clay, floor birck piece, vitrified clay, compare very well. All these indicate that they are genuine artifacts, made from locally available material and are insitu. It fully confirms the presence of archaeological sites. The findings indicate that the pottery was produced locally with levigated clay, fired uniformly at about 700°C. From the presence of calcite in clays and pottery arid to semi-arid environmental conditions prior to the submergence of the site could be deduced. Calcritised alluvial deposits indicate the existence of ancient rivers which once flowed in the submerged regions of Gulf of Khambat (Cambay). ”
However, the optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of the items identified as "pottery", which had the older OSL dates, produced dates that are virtually identical to OSL dates obtained from associated sediments. That the "pottery" yielded OSL dates identical to associated sediments suggests that the "pottery", which produced the older and oldest OSL dates, were never fired and actually consist of pieces of naturally cemented sediments. This raises the possibility that the extremely old samples, as argued for many other "artifacts" recovered from the Gulf of Khambat (Cambay), are not man-made artifacts or potsherds, but rather concretions, nodules, and related objects of natural origin [3].
The XRD analysis fails to prove that these artifacts are man-made as natural concretions can also form in local alluvial sediments. The XRD data only indicates that the extremely old samples consists of sediments, which came from the alluvial deposits underlying the currently submerged and typically buried floodplain somewhere along the length of the Gulf of Khambat (Cambay). The "calcite" found in the extremely old "pottery" can be also interpreted to be the material cementing local alluvium together to form concretions, which have been misidentifed as pottery. Such concretions are noted to be quite common in naturally-occurring calcritised alluvial deposits.
[edit] References
• Witzel, Micheal, 2006, Rama’s realm: Indocentric rewritings of early South Asian archaeology and history in Fagan, G. G., ed., Archaeological Fantasies. Routledge Taylor, and Francis Group, New York ISBN 0-415-30593-4
• Badrinaryan 2006. "Gulf of Cambay Cradle of Ancient Civilization" 2006
[edit] External links
• National Institute of Ocean Technology -- http://www.niot.res.in/m3/arch/index.htm
• National Institute of Oceanography

This garbage ranks down there with the so called Pyramids of Bosnia.

[to be continued]

[Damocles]

I dislike the harshness of this presentation but it angers me when the purveyors of news are the LIARS of news.

You have to be cautious, people. Be skeptical. Its wonderful to believe that we had a previous lost civilization that predated the Egyptians.

We did. But it is in Mesopotamia and it is in Canaan. That is where the Human cities of Jericho and Ur go back ten thousand years and where we see huge footprints of irrigation agriculture, penned animal husbandry, written language, and textile manufacture.

It also matches what we know about ourselves.

From the New York Times a credible source that in this case gets it right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/science/07evolve.html

Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 7, 2006
Providing the strongest evidence yet that humans are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.

Many of these instances of selection may reflect the pressures that came to bear as people abandoned their hunting and gathering way of life for settlement and agriculture, a transition well under way in Europe and East Asia some 5,000 years ago.

Under natural selection, beneficial genes become more common in a population as their owners have more progeny.

Three populations were studied, Africans, East Asians and Europeans. In each, a mostly different set of genes had been favored by natural selection. The selected genes, which affect skin color, hair texture and bone structure, may underlie the present-day differences in racial appearance.

The study of selected genes may help reconstruct many crucial events in the human past. It may also help physical anthropologists explain why people over the world have such a variety of distinctive appearances, even though their genes are on the whole similar, said Dr. Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society.

The finding adds substantially to the evidence that human evolution did not grind to a halt in the distant past, as is tacitly assumed by many social scientists. Even evolutionary psychologists, who interpret human behavior in terms of what the brain evolved to do, hold that the work of natural selection in shaping the human mind was completed in the pre-agricultural past, more than 10,000 years ago.

"There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped," said Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago who headed the study.

Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues, Benjamin Voight, Sridhar Kudaravalli and Xiaoquan Wen, report their findings in today's issue of PLOS-Biology.

Their data is based on DNA changes in three populations gathered by the HapMap project, which built on the decoding of the human genome in 2003. The data, though collected to help identify variant genes that contribute to disease, also give evidence of evolutionary change.

The fingerprints of natural selection in DNA are hard to recognize. Just a handful of recently selected genes have previously been identified, like those that confer resistance to malaria or the ability to digest lactose in adulthood, an adaptation common in Northern Europeans whose ancestors thrived on cattle milk.

But the authors of the HapMap study released last October found many other regions where selection seemed to have occurred, as did an analysis published in December by Robert K. Moysis of the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Pritchard's scan of the human genome differs from the previous two because he has developed a statistical test to identify just genes that have started to spread through populations in recent millennia and have not yet become universal, as many advantageous genes eventually do.

The selected genes he has detected fall into a handful of functional categories, as might be expected if people were adapting to specific changes in their environment. Some are genes involved in digesting particular foods like the lactose-digesting gene common in Europeans. Some are genes that mediate taste and smell as well as detoxify plant poisons, perhaps signaling a shift in diet from wild foods to domesticated plants and animals.

Dr. Pritchard estimates that the average point at which the selected genes started to become more common under the pressure of natural selection is 10,800 years ago in the African population and 6,600 years ago in the Asian and European populations.

Dr. Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford, said that it was hard to correlate the specific gene changes in the three populations with events in the archaeological record, but that the timing and nature of the changes in the East Asians and Europeans seemed compatible with the shift to agriculture. Rice farming became widespread in China 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, and agriculture reached Europe from the Near East around the same time.

Skeletons similar in form to modern Chinese are hard to find before that period, Dr. Klein said, and there are few European skeletons older than 10,000 years that look like modern Europeans.

That suggests that a change in bone structure occurred in the two populations, perhaps in connection with the shift to agriculture. Dr. Pritchard's team found that several genes associated with embryonic development of the bones had been under selection in East Asians and Europeans, and these could be another sign of the forager-to-farmer transition, Dr. Klein said.

[break]

[Damocles]

[Continuing the NYT article]

Dr. Wells, of the National Geographic Society, said Dr. Pritchard's results were fascinating and would help anthropologists explain the immense diversity of human populations even though their genes are generally similar. The relative handful of selected genes that Dr. Pritchard's study has pinpointed may hold the answer, he said, adding, "Each gene has a story of some pressure we adapted to."

Dr. Wells is gathering DNA from across the globe to map in finer detail the genetic variation brought to light by the HapMap project.

Dr. Pritchard's list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis.

The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said.

The five genes show no sign of selective pressure in East Asians.

Because Chinese and Japanese are also pale, Dr. Pritchard said, evolution must have accomplished the same goal in those populations by working through different genes or by changing the same genes — but many thousands of years before, so that the signal of selection is no longer visible to the new test.

Dr. Pritchard also detected selection at work in brain genes, including a group known as microcephaly genes because, when disrupted, they cause people to be born with unusually small brains.

Dr. Bruce Lahn, also of the University of Chicago, theorizes that successive changes in the microcephaly genes may have enabled the brain to enlarge in primate evolution, a process that may have continued in the recent human past.

Last September, Dr. Lahn reported that one microcephaly gene had recently changed in Europeans and another in Europeans and Asians. He predicted that other brain genes would be found to have changed in other populations.

Dr. Pritchard's test did not detect a signal of selection in Dr. Lahn's two genes, but that may just reflect limitations of the test, he and Dr. Lahn said. Dr. Pritchard found one microcephaly gene that had been selected for in Africans and another in Europeans and East Asians. Another brain gene, SNTG1, was under heavy selection in all three populations.

"It seems like a really interesting gene, given our results, but there doesn't seem to be that much known about exactly what it's doing to the brain," Dr. Pritchard said.

Dr. Wells said that it was not surprising the brain had continued to evolve along with other types of genes, but that nothing could be inferred about the nature of the selective pressure until the function of the selected genes was understood.

The four populations analyzed in the HapMap project are the Yoruba of Nigeria, Han Chinese from Beijing, Japanese from Tokyo and a French collection of Utah families of European descent. The populations are assumed to be typical of sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe, but the representation, though presumably good enough for medical studies, may not be exact.

Dr. Pritchard's test for selection rests on the fact that an advantageous mutation is inherited along with its gene and a large block of DNA in which the gene sits. If the improved gene spreads quickly, the DNA region that includes it will become less diverse across a population because so many people now carry the same sequence of DNA units at that location.

Dr. Pritchard's test measures the difference in DNA diversity between those who carry a new gene and those who do not, and a significantly lesser diversity is taken as a sign of selection. The difference disappears when the improved gene has swept through the entire population, as eventually happens, so the test picks up only new gene variants on their way to becoming universal.

The selected genes turned out to be quite different from one racial group to another. Dr. Pritchard's test identified 206 regions of the genome that are under selection in the Yorubans, 185 regions in East Asians and 188 in Europeans. The few overlaps between races concern genes that could have been spread by migration or else be instances of independent evolution, Dr. Pritchard said.

Hello?

We changed from something that could draw pretty pictures forty thousand years ago, that lived in rude stick and animal skin huts; into someone that could write words and build cities and WORK metal and stone into massive buildings by gang labor and for some reason FELT COMPELLED to do so as we do today.

One last note. When it comes to the BBC and science?

They are worse than the National Enquirer. At least the National Enquirer pretends to check their sources and facts.

Frank

As always;
[to be continued]