Body mass in the Nile Valley - increses due to agricuture not mass migrant influx

[b]In earlier studies (one of which Raxter herself did)
US Blacks as a tropial people were used as a stand-in
to estimate height of Ancient Egyptians. In those studies
Black AMericans were found to cluster closer to Ancient Egyptians
than EUropeans. That finding is not changed at all by Raxter's 2011 study.
In fact, the new study AGAIN confirms that tropical peoples have
similar limb proportions- hence Egyptians and Nubians cluster thereby.
And the clustering of Black Americans has not changed one bit.[/b]
Sorry.

Bi-iliac ranges are correlated with many things
including thermoregulation and locomotion. They are also
correlated with stature, and with a shift to agriculture.
Hence an "intermediate" bi-iliac range could be easily
due to any of the above, including a shift from the
mixed economy pre-dynastics, to the more agricultural
early dynastic/dynastic types. Such ranges change
slowly hence there would not be dramatic jumps in the data
over time. Thus "incoming Caucasoids" are not
needed to explain "intermediate" bi-iliac ranges
lest anyone be tempted to make that interpretation.






[b]QUOTES:[/b]
[i]
"Furthermore bi-iliac breadth appears to change slowly over time,
likely due to multiple factors (thermoregulation, obstetrics,
locomotion) influencing its shape (Ruff 1994; Auerback 2007).."

"Generally narrower body breaths of the foragers contrast markedy
with the wider-bodied agriculturalists. Although bi-iliac breadth
has been argued to be stable over long periods of time (Auerbach,
2007), this shift in mean body breath may be indicative of changes
correlated with subsistence economy."

"Any use of the bi-iliac breath/stature body mass estimations
would inherently reflect changes in stature.." [/i]

"In this study, skeletal measures of body size were analysed to
evaluate the long-term impact of the transition to agriculture in the Nile
Valley..  Here we demonstrate that this transition is also  associated
with a modest reduction and subsequent improvement in stature and
body mass. This trend could be broadly interpreted in the context
of  models of relationship between body size and nutrition."
-- Pinhasi & Stock. 2011. Human Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture

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[b]Here are 7 reasons to NOT break out the champagne:
mission NOT acomplished... [/b]

 [IMG]http://blogs.e-rockford.com/applesauce/files/2011/05/bush_flightsuit.jpg[/IMG]


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1--[b]"Ancient Egyptians as a whole generally exhibit intermediate body breadths relative to higher and lower latitude populations, with Lower Egyptians possessing wider body breadths, as well as lower brachial and crural indices, compared to Upper Egyptians and Upper Nubians. This may suggest that Egyptians are closely related to circum-Mediterranean and/or Near Eastern groups, but quickly developed limb length proportions more suited to their present very hot environments. These results may also reflect the greater plasticity of limb length compared to body breadth.[/b]

^1-- Actually it doesn't automatically "suggest" AEs are
"closely related to circum-Mediterranean and/or
Near Eastern groups." [/b]All the data shows is that
the peoples of the Nile Valley had built-in native
variation as expected for the many different micro
climes of tropical Africa. Almost 20% of Egypt falls
within the tropic zone by the way.

And as noted above, bi-ilac ranges/breadth are also
correlated with several other things such as changes
in diet and lifestyle as other scholars show. For example
agriculturalists tend to have greater body breath
than exclusively foraging/hunting peoples. It does
not automatically follow that greather breadth ranges
mean "circum-Mediterranean" relations. Rather the shift
 to more dynastic agriculture, from a more mixed pre-
dynastic economy can well accommodate changes in body breath
without the need for any mass influx of "Near Easterners."

See quotes above to this effect.
And it should be noted that the pre-Dynastic
Badari, who cluster with tropical Africans were
ALREADY farming and stock-raising with some hunting/
foraging on the side. In other words, tropical
African variants were ALREADY engaging in the
agricultural practices that are correlated with greater
bi-iliac ranges. "Diffusion" from the Middle East
of plants such as wheat, is just that, diffusuion
that was adopted by the indigenous tropical variants
on their own terms. They could grow wheat or peas,
on their own ground, without needing any "wandering Caucasoids"
to be present. This is the precise point stated by Keita 2005, 1992.

QUOTE: [i]
Furthermore, the archaeology of northern Africa does not
support demic diffusion of farming from the Near East.
The evidence presented by Wetterstrom indicates that early
African farmers in the Fayum initially incorporated Near
Eastern domesticates into an INDIGENOUS foraging strategy,
and only over time developed a dependence on horticulture.
This is inconsistent with in-migrating farming settlers,
who would have brought a more abrupt  change in subsistence
strategy. "The same archaeological pattern occurs west of
Egypt, where domestic animals and, later, grains were
gradually adopted after 8000 yr B.P. into the established
pre-agricultural Capsian culture, present across the northern
Sahara since 10,000 yr B.P. From this continuity, it has been
argued that the pre-food-production Capsian peoples spoke
languages ancestral to the Berber and/or Chadic branches of
Afroasiatic, placing the proto-Afroasiatic period distinctly
before 10,000 yr B.P." [/i]
--Source: The Origins of Afroasiatic
Christopher Ehret, S. O. Y. Keita, Paul Newman;, and Peter Bellwood
Science 3 December 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1680
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2--[b]Stature regression equations derived from American Black populations may therefore not be appropriate to estimate the statures of ancient Egyptians.[/b]

^^In earlier studies (one of which Raxter herself did)
US Blacks as a tropial people were used as a stand-in
to estimate height of Ancient Egyptians. In those studies
Black AMericans were found to cluster closer to Ancient Egyotians
than EUropeans. That finding is not changed at all by Raxter's 2011 study.
In fact, the new study AGAIN confirms that tropical peoples have
similar limb proportions- hence Egyptians and Nubians cluster thereby.

Even if stature was over-estimated in earlier
studies as Raxter claims, the data STILL showed US
Blacks closer to AE proportions. Whether the use
of US blacks is "appropriate" to estimate the
statures of AEs makes little difference because
in limb to limb comparison, the AE's are closer
to the US blacks. Throw out the stature estimation
task and this central result STILL stands.

 [IMG]http://www.profilethai.com/download/original/raxterrufftrinkhauscombo.jpg[/IMG]
[i]Even if stature estimation is excluded the
bottom line results are STILL the same- the AE's
cluster more closely with US Blacks.[/i]
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3-- [b]but quickly developed limb length proportions more suited to their present very hot environments. [/b]

^^A misleading claim by Raxter. Actually limb
length proportions do not "quickly" change, but
are heavily genetically embedded.

 [IMG]http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/5873/limbproportionsgeneticc.jpg[/IMG]
[i]Limb proportions DON'T "quickly" change. They are
rather slow in fact. Hence tropical proportions
found in the Nile Valley are not the product of
"Mediterranean" or "Middle Eastern" migrants who
"quickly" changed to "tropical Africans." Limb
proportions don't work that way.[/i]
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4-- [b]The present results for bi-iliac breadth are also consistent with various genetic studies that have found modern Egyptians to have close affinities to Middle and Near Easterners (Manni et al., 2002; Arredi et al., 2004; Shepard and Herrera, 2006; Rowold et al., 2007) and Southern Europeans/Mediterranean groups (Capelli et al., 2006). [/b]
^^No surprise there. We all know MODERN Egyptians
are not identical to the ancients and are more
varied, a result that shows up in ancient samples as well.
Note below that Zakrewski found one widely used sampling
set was not at all typically Egyptian. And whether samples
were pooled or not pooled in other studies MADE LITTLE
DIFFERENCE. The AEs STILL cluster more with tropical
Africans than Europeans or "Middle Easterners."

 [IMG]http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/3571/kemp2005combodendro.jpg[/IMG]
Some tail end sampling sets are not typical of Ancient Egypt.

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5--[b]Some of these authors suggested their results may have been associated with a diffusion from the Near East during the expansion of early food-producing societies[/b]
^^Sure some plant and animal domesticates filtered
into AE from the "Middle East." That was never at
issue. But most of the archaelogical evidence shows
no mass influx of "Caucasoids" or "circum-Mediterranean"
types to instruct the natives. QUOTE:

[i]Ovacaprines appear in the western desert before the Nile valley proper (Wendorf and Schild 2001). However, it is significant that ancient Egyptian words for the major Near Eastern domesticates - Sheep, goat, barley, and wheat - are not loans from either Semitic, Sumerian, or Indo-European. This argues against a mass settler colonization (at replacement levels) of the Nile valley from the Near East at this time. This is in contrast with some words for domesticates in some early Semitic languages, which are likely Sumerian loan words (Diakonoff 1981).. This evidence indicates that northern Nile valley peoples apparently incorporated the Near Eastern domesticates into a Nilotic foraging subsistence tradition on their own terms (Wetterstrom 1993). There was apparently no “Neolithic revolution” brought by settler colonization, but a gradual process of neolithicization (Midant-Reynes 2000).[/i]
-- Keita and Boyce, Genetics, Egypt, And History:  Interpreting Geographical Patterns Of Y Chromosome Variation,
History in Africa 32 (2005) 221-246
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6--[b]Ancient Egyptians "as a whole" [/b]
Sure. If you lump in the more varied New Kingdom types
and Hyskos/Roman era/Greek era types you will get more variation.
Everyone knows the tail end period of AE had more variation.
Even Zakrewski says that one tail-end series is not
"typically" Egyptian. That was never at issue. What is at issue
is the genesis and maintenance of the pre-Dynastic
and early Dynastic period. Later periods were to
have a more mixed pattern, The 12th Dynasty for example
had several pharaohs of Nubian origin (Yurco 1989), as
did the 18th, as did the 25th. Raxter is eager to highlight
the "close links" with "circum-Mediterranean" types it seems, but not the other way.

 [IMG]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y962OyaKpYA/TuwpoZWg92I/AAAAAAAAAjc/FoUvu685n54/s1600/ancient_egyptians_were_not_black_tropicalmelak.jpg[/IMG]
Whether stature estimation is involved makes little difference.
AEs STILL cluster more with Black Americans. ANd limb proportions
do not "quickly" change.
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[b]7-- FInally Raster's  presentation doesnt make a dime's worth of difference
on the fact that based on limb proportions, AEs cluster more towards
Nubians and other tropical Africans than EUropeans or Middle Easterners.
Body breath indexes are accounted for via dietary/economic shifts and do
not necessarily point to any influx of "Middle Esterners" or "Mediterraneans" [/b]

Note how Raxter presents the data:

 [IMG]http://picturestack.com/368/335/KKKPicture22Q8.png[/IMG]

A-- It is admitted that the AEs have more tropical proportions.
B-- It is admitted that the Nubians have even more tropical proportions.
C-- But then the author quickly leaps to highlight body breath and talk about close links with
Europe and the Mid East.

--In fact though, there are EVEN CLOSER links in A and B above
than C,
between Egytians and other Africans via limb
proportions. Highlighting body breadth cannot obscure this reality.

[b]Why not the flip side of the "intermediate" body breadth picture? If half is Euro/Mideast,
then the other half is African. But why is the highlight only one way towards the
EUro/Mideast side where body breadth is concerned?[/n]

And if body breadth is "intermediate"- half of the "close links" - then the second half
of the body breath equation is with tropical Africans. If intermediate body
breadths tell about Euro/Mid East Links, then THE OTHER HALF LIKEWISE SPEAKS
OF AFRICAN LINKS. But how come Raxter never uses a consistent approach on
this count - on the flip side?

 Raxter's blanket claim of Egyotians as a whole
is flawed. Her main data point is Lower Egypt. But
even this varied over time. In the early period,
the limb length proportions of northern samples,
per Kemp cited above show more affinities with
the Africans rather than the Europeans. Also
flawed is Raxter's blanket notion of "quickly developing"
tropical limb lengths, for which she offers little
clear evidence. To the contrary, as other scholars show,
limb proportions are relatively stable, genetically
embedded, and do not quickly change.

If anything the weight of the overall Nile Valley
picture also points to another alternative- that
of tropical Africans with extreme proportions-
having  such proportions modified over the millennia by
(a) cooler Mediterranean temperatures of Egypt,
and (b) a shift to a more agricultural lifestyle.

The Egyptians are more similar to the Nubians via limb proportions.
Both peoples are from warm climes as Raxter notes.
Hence the link with US blacks on limb proportions,
 another tropical people from warm climes, and
who have the same typical linear body build, IS
NOT IN THE SLIGHTEST BIT AFFECTED. The limb proportion
data still stands. Body mass variation is accounted
for by (a) adaptation to cooler climates, and (b)
a shift to more agriculture. This does not at all
rule out small scale migration from the Levant/Maghreb.
We all know it occurred, as well as trade links,
prisoners taken in warfare from Palestine etc.
But mass influxes of "Mediterraneans" or "Middle Easterners"
are not at all needed to give the peoples of the
Nile Valley diversity or variation in body mass.


FINAL QUOTE:

[i]"Generally narrower body breaths of the foragers contrast markedy
with the wider-bodied agriculturalists. Although bi-iliac breadth has
been argued to be stable over long periods of time (Auerbach, 2007),
this shift in mean body breath may be indicative of changes correlated
with subsistence economy."[/i]

[i]"In this study, skeletal measures of body size were analysed to
evaluate the long-term impact of the transition to agriculture in the
Nile Valley..  Here we demonstrate that this transition is also 
associated with a modest reduction and subsequent improvement
 in stature and body mass. This trend could be broadly interpreted
in the context of  models of relationship between body size and nutrition." [/i]

-- Pinhasi & Stock. 2011  The Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture

Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell

Opening comments:

There are a number of points where I disagree with Sowell on the details. In his 1983 Economics and Politics of Race (pg 226) for example, he looks at the record of imperialism, noting that it is a mixed one, but that the imperialists introduced new technology as one positive benefit. This is reasonable, but he fails to qualify his argument when he references one book to say that "almost no community" in "sub-Saharan" Africa harnessed animals to pull the plough, until the coming of Europeans in the 19th and 20th century. His reference on the facts (Gann and Guignan 1981- Africa South of the Sahara) is uncertain, and Sowell does not really qualify the technology examples. Ethiopia for example, is in "sub Saharan" Africa and used the plough, as did farmers in parts of the Nilotic basin of the Sudan. Both of these areas are in the tropical climatic zone, as is part of southern Egypt, which of course was using the plough for millennia.

Furthermore, tropical Africans have long resided above the the line of the current Sahara which is a moving target historically. The earliest example of mummification in Africa for example is that of a so-called "negroid" child in Muhuggiag, Libya (Wendorf 2001, Lovell 1999). The rock art of the Sahara during the so-called "chariot period" show the same "negroid" peoples using such vehicles with skeletal remains resembling Upper Egyptians (themselves resembling so called "sub-Saharan" types Keita 2005, Lovell 1999, and M. Fentress, The Berbers, 1997). Ancient Egypt was populated fundamentally in the pre-dynastic and earlier dynastic eras by tropical Africans, and the closest people ethnically to the ancient Egyptians are Nubians (Yurco 1989, Lovell 1999, Redford 2001, Morkot 2005, Godde 2009, Kemp 2006, Raxter and Ruff 2008). Claims about so-called "sub-Saharan Africans" and technology too often overlook these facts. 

The Sahara is a fluctuating natural element, indeed once a lush greenbelt that alternated between greenery and desert, and is not a convenient "racial" dividing line. In addition "North Africa" is more than the coastal strip of Algeria, Morocco, etc, but in several physical geographic books includes the Sudan, Mali, Niger, Chad etc. (See graphic bottom) Claims about "North Africa" all too conveniently overlook this, as do claims about "sub Saharan" Africa that all too often overlook the fact that so-called "Sub-Saharan Africans" range widely throughout Africa, and are not, and never were sitting conveniently behind the Sahara. 

Many parts of Africa have suffered comparative isolation due to natural barriers of soil, geography, disease and climate, (compare to the broad highway enjoyed by Mediterranean peoples, or the favorable East-West climatic axis between Asia and Europe facilitating land movement of ideas, animals, crops and technology for example), but just as the Sahara was not static over the span of history, neither have the peoples of tropical Africa been static entities, huddled behind some sort of natural "apartheid" line. Where able to mobilize or have access to wider venues and opportunities for trade and/or communication networks and exchange internal to Africa and without, (the Nile Valley, the Saharan kingdoms such as Mali or other various areas for example), tropical Africans have done well, relative to their environment, over the span of human history. Where isolated in small tribes they have shown a pattern typical of other non-Africans worldwide- see Europeans in Ireland or parts of the Balkans for example. Where able to access wider networks and better resources, tropical Africans have likewise shown more elaborate and sophisticated cultures, just as the once obscure English for example, were able to expand their culture via initial association with the wider networks of the Roman Empire (see: Sowell 1999, Conquests and Cultures).

As to the plough in more southerly Africa beyond the Sudan, the implement made limited sense because the tse-tse fly destroyed draft animals, or was of limited use in heavy forested jungle. In other words there is a practical reason people were not rushing to use ploughs. Gann and Guignan do note animal diseases limiting use of the plough. Questions of practicality are nothing unusual in other regions. In Europe, the Irish masses overall, as an indigenous pattern, made little use of animal drawn ploughs, and relied instead on the loy, a type of spade that made sense in rocky, hilly areas, or on small farms where expensive horses, trappings and equipment could not be afforded. The loy was used up until the 1960s in poorer land, and trenches formed by turning in the sods provided drainage. It also allowed the growing of potatoes in bogs as well as on mountain slopes where no other cultivation could take place. The small spade-like loy was thus fine for tending the potato crop, giving sustenance to millions of Irish. Significant deployment of the plough was a product of English and Scottish origin (Hawkes and Dalaman 1985, The history and social influence of the potato). Thus the deployment of technology, in Europe as well as Africa, depends on a trade-off of costs and benefits in the environment at hand. Such trade-offs are a fundamental consideration in Sowell's writings, as we shall see.

Sowell also claims that literacy was unknown in Africa outside Ethiopia, again referencing Gann and Guignan. This too is in error. In fact, numerous "sub Saharan" African societies possessed literacy, as the learning centers of Mali testify. And the indigenous tropical Africans of Egypt, a nation that happens to be in Africa, had writing for millennia before Europe, and played a part in development of the modern alphabet (See: David Sacks 2003. Language Visible). Indeed Europe did not invent writing or the plough either, but had to wait for it to be introduced from someplace else. It should also be noted that numerous "European" introductions to Africa, are themselves derived not from Europe but from Asia and the sub-tropical "Middle East" - things like the compass, printing, gunpowder, the key plant and animal domesticates of the Neolithic, advanced metallurgy, powered machinery via windmills, and the alphabet. None of these critical technologies and advances were invented or developed initially in Europe.

Indeed as Joseph Needham's monumental series Science and Civilisation in China (1986) shows, China was technologically well ahead of Europe until around the 1400s. Indeed some West African kingdoms and cities, such as the Mali of the famous Mansa Musa, or Timbuktu, surpassed several contemporary Northern European kingdoms in wealth during medieval times - the 1300s (Africa south of the Sahara: a geographical interpretation. Robert F. Stock, 2004).

Despite these errors, Sowell's overall point holds. Europeans themselves are beneficiaries of technologies brought by conquerors of European territories. He does qualify overall by saying: "Not all parts of the colonized world were primitive, nor did the coming of Western Civilization always represent progress in all aspects of life." (Sowell, 1983:226) It should also be noted that anthropology, archaeology and African history research since the 1980s has furnished more detailed information that makes old assumptions re "sub-Saharan" Africans or Africa obsolete. In general, Sowell is correct in noting how the movement of peoples, idea and technologies have played in part in human cultures and civilizations, including Europe, beneficiary of much developed elsewhere.

See Egypt post for more details and references.

Now let's get down to bidniss...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------


Social philosophy of Thomas Sowell
copyright Enrique Cardova, 2010

The major themes and philosophies of Sowell’s writing range from social policy on race, ethnic groups, education and decision-making, to classical and Marxist economics, to the problems of children perceived as having disabilities. Sowell has also extended his research from the United States to the international sphere, finding supporting data and patterns from several cultures and nations. He has demonstrated that similar incentives and constraints often result in similar outcomes among very different peoples and cultures.
Five themes in his work cut across specific topics:

1. The importance of empirical evidence, not only in a narrow technical sense but as reflected in the broad record of history.
2. The competing basic visions of policy makers, and their role in the interactions of elites versus the ordinary masses.
3. An importance of trade-offs, constraints and incentives in human decision making.
4. The significance of human capital—attitudes, skills, and work.
5. The importance of systemic (orderly, structured) processes for decision-making—from free markets to the rule of law.

These five keys place the economist’s writings in the greater context of historical synthesis and human decision-making, rather than being simply those of a conservative pundit or “race” writer on particular contemporary social issues. Sowell’s work is also a significant answer to critiques of economics arguing that the discipline has failed to come to grips with real world problems and is occupied too much with technical models and details, while paying little attention to historical processes.^[19]

Importance of empirical evidence

Empirical evidence and objective analysis of relevant factors is sorely lacking in claims surrounding race, culture and society

In his writings Sowell has repeatedly emphasized the need for empirical evidence and objective assessments of data, as opposed to the sweeping generalizations, wishful thinking, and distorted or false evidence provided by numerous writers in the field of social policy and economics. Sowell contends that in no field are these distortions greater than when the topic of race is discussed. Sowell maintains that common assumptions and stirring rhetoric about poverty, slavery, discrimination, economic progress or education do not hold up when measured against hard data.^[20]

What counts in assessing a social or economic policy is not the stated intentions of promoters, but the incentives created and the actual end results produced

In his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics Sowell shows that this was the outlook of Marx. He applies this bottom-line approach to other social policies, ranging from IQ Tests to affirmative action. In numerous cases, he demonstrates that the stated aims of promoters had little relation to the actual results produced. Regarding affirmative action, for example, the goals of proponents—that it was a temporary measure, that it helped those categories of minorities less fortunate, that it would promote social harmony, et cetera—have not been satisfied when the empirical evidence is analyzed. Sowell contends that too often, social policy is made on the basis of sweeping assumptions, arbitrarily selected statistical data, and ideological dogma, without sufficient evidence.^[21]

Numerous factors determine income and education levels among American ethnic groups, and between genders, not the overgeneralized, “all-purpose” explanations of racism, or sexism

In books such as Markets and Minorities, Ethnic America, and Race and Culture, Sowell demonstrates the importance of geography, degree of urbanization, cultural structures, field of work, and other factors more relevant than racism. He believes that those who make charges of racism seldom present credible empirical evidence. As for the pay gap between men and women, for example, Sowell’s book Civil Rights argues that most of this gap is based on marital status, not glass-ceiling discrimination: Earnings for men and women of the same basic description (education, jobs, hours worked, marital status) were essentially equal. That result would not be predicted under explanatory theories of sexism.^[22]

Internationally, empirical evidence shows that colonialism, imperialism, and claims of genetic superiority are all theories failing to explain technological or economic differences among nations

Sowell’s trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture, and Conquests and Cultures exemplifies his broad analytical approach to historical processes, cutting across centuries of history, and many different peoples. He compares nations and minority groups within nations, particularly migrants. On an international scale, cultural factors are very important. Some countries heavily subjected to imperialism and colonialism are themselves among the most prosperous. For example, he notes that once backward Britain survived centuries of Roman colonialism and imperialism, it emerged centuries later as the most powerful empire on earth.
Sowell maintains that trendy explanations of racism and imperialism, or their reverse—simplistic claims of genetic superiority—are often used to explain significant historical patterns, when mundane factors such as geography can be much more relevant and useful in understanding an issue. The presence of navigable rivers, good harbors favorable for transportation and trade, mountain ranges that capture water for later irrigation, fertile land, climate patterns that facilitate the movement of productive plants and animals, and other like factors all heavily influenced nations’ or people’s successes over the span of history. Western tropical Africa for example, suffers a number of such geographic disadvantages. Sowell shows that for centuries, non-white nations like China were more advanced than those of Europe until comparatively recently. He also argues that the European West borrowed and adapted freely from other nations and regions—from the writing systems and domesticates of Southwest Asia to the numerous inventions and innovations of China (gunpowder, compass, etc.) and various other strands in-between. Within national settings, students of East Asian origin in the West frequently outperform their white counterparts and score higher on IQ tests. These patterns undercut simplistic white supremacist theories of inherent genetic superiority. In 1983’s Economics and Politics of Race Sowell predicts that the long cycles of history may yet again reshuffle the success of nations and peoples.

On race and intelligence (as measured by IQ), whole groups and nations have raised their IQ scores over time, undermining various theories of intelligence related to minorities such as Jews and blacks

In Intelligence and Ethnicity, Sowell demonstrates how IQ scores have risen among many groups (see: Flynn effect). He notes that a number of white ethnic groups tallied poor scores as they began entry into the American urban economy. Jews, for example, scored dismally on Army intelligence tests during WWI, leading to assumptions that they were second-rate citizens. Jewish IQ scores have risen steadily, and now they rank near the top. Similarly, IQ scores of East Asians were unimpressive in early measurements, but they rank high today. Sowell shows that black IQ progress has been concealed by the practice of statistical redefinitions, or norming, of beginning measurement baselines. Thus an IQ score that might have been considered normal or average in 1960, is today considered below par. By recalculating from the original baselines, he demonstrates that not only blacks but entire nations have shown significant rises in IQ over time. He notes that the roughly 15-point gap in contemporary black–white IQ scores is similar to that between the national average and the scores of particular ethnic white groups in years past. Indeed similar gaps have been reported within white populations, such as Northern Europeans versus Southern Europeans. Sowell references some of these points in his criticism of the book The Bell Curve.^[23]
In short, Sowell argues, IQ gaps are hardly startling or unusual between, or within, ethnic groups. What is distressing, he claims, is the sometimes hysterical response to the very fact that IQ research is being done, and movements to ban testing in the name of self-esteem or fighting racism. He argues that few would have known of black IQ progress if scholars like James Flynn had not undertaken allegedly racist research.^[24]

What some portray as authentic black culture is actually a carryover from a highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture

According to Sowell, in his 2005 Black Rednecks and White Liberals, what many see as pathologies of contemporary black culture actually derive from a dysfunctional historical white-southern “cracker” culture.

What the [white] rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going — and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, a lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain where the civilization was the least developed.^[25]

Several scholars support Sowell’s observations. Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture (1988) is a thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, and is backed by many other scholarly studies which have turned up very similar patterns even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Scholar Hackett Fischer’s Albions Seed,(1989) for example, eschews the Celtic theory advanced by McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns for the whites, both in Britain and the American South.^[26]
What is different about the current era, Sowell claims, is that better educated, more productive whites are no longer as willing to challenge or condemn the counterproductive behaviors deriving from the holdovers of white cracker culture among blacks. This stands in sharp contrast to the white northern educators that went to educate ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, who insisted on strong discipline and work, and helped lay the foundations for black education.^[27] Instead, Sowell contends, today’s white liberals too often justify, glorify, and subsidize these negatives as the “authentic expression” and behavior of the black masses. Sowell holds that the backward behavior pattern of southern whites has carried over to a generation of negative “blacknecks” who are in no way representative of the authenticity of the black community over its long, difficult climb from slavery and discrimination to freedom and equality in the United States.^[28]

Competing visions and intellectuals

Many modern ideological struggles can be traced to two visions: the vision of the anointed and the vision of the constrained realist

Sowell lays out these concepts in his A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. These two visions encompass a range of ideas and theories. The vision of the anointed relies heavily on sweepingly optimistic assumptions about human nature, distrust of decentralized processes like the free market, impatience with systemic processes that constrain human action, and absent or distorted empirical evidence. The constrained or tragic vision relies heavily on a reduced view of the goodness of human nature, and prefers the systematic processes of the free market, and the systematic processes of the rule of law and constitutional government. It distrusts sweeping theories and grand assumptions in favor of heavy reliance on solid empirical evidence and on time-tested structures and processes.^[29]

Intellectuals are “idea” workers, who often presume special wisdom and insight outside their area of expertise to guide others, while being unaccountable for results

In his 2009 book Intellectuals and Society, (Basic Books: 2009) Sowell argues that intellectuals, defined as people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas (writers, historians, academics, etc.) usually consider themselves as anointed, endowed by superior intellect or insight to guide power-brokers and the masses. This makes them different from other highly educated, cerebral workers in applied occupations such as engineering, medicine, or military service. Sowell claims that modern society needs a healthy skepticism of intellectuals, because not only are many of their theories wrong if judged empirically, but also intellectuals are often unaccountable for results, and thus are more reckless in their claims and more dangerous in their influence. They pay little penalty if they are wrong, unlike for example applied knowledge workers like surgeons or military officers. Thus peace intellectuals helped create a climate that dangerously weakened the resolve and armed strength of many major democracies prior to WWII. On balance, Sowell argues, these unaccountable idea workers have made the world a worse place in the 20th century. Several features mark such intellectuals, Sowell maintains, sometimes cutting across stereotypical categories like left or right.^[30]

• Preference for control of third parties and imposition of their preferences over the decision-making and preferences of the broad masses
• Claimed or assumed leadership or special insight by themselves- a sense of their own specialness.
• Lack of real world accountability for the actual outcomes and results of their theories and notions.
• Special knowledge within narrow areas but ignorance without
• Creation of political and social climates that can cause disaster or hinder beneficial action
• Verbal virtuosity and clever phrasing substituting for evidence or logic.
• Ego-involvement and personalization of issues, leading to demonization of opponents, self-congratulation and self-flattery as a basis for social policy.

Trade-offs, constraints and incentives

Ordinary citizens might benefit from analyzing issues and public policies in terms of costs, benefits and trade-offs, where scarce resources have alternative uses, rather than rely on lofty rhetoric from political leaders, activists and special interests

In Basic Economics^[31] and Applied Economics,^[32] Sowell lays out the fundamentals of the discipline so that the layman can understand them, as well as his essential way or model for approaching problems. There are no free lunches, Sowell emphasizes, only trade-offs at various levels. This transactional approach to social and economic policy is one of the hallmarks of Sowell’s writings:

Lofty talk about “non-economic values” too often amounts to very selfish attempts to impose one’s own values, without having to weigh them against other people’s values. Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one’s own fantasy ventures, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so they can make their own choices with their own earnings, is considered to be pandering to “greed.” Greed for power is more dangerous than greed for money and has shed far more blood in the process. Political authorities have often had “revolutionary values” that were devastating to the general population.^[33]

Government action is too often perceived as beneficial, just and noble, when in fact it often hurts those it is purportedly trying to help

As far back as 1975’s Race and Economics^[34] and continuing through his Affirmative Action Around The World and Basic and Applied Economics series, Sowell repeatedly shows that much government action in the social and economic domains has not only failed to achieve desired or claimed results but in many cases has created worse conditions than those previously existing.^[35] Examples given to bolster Sowell’s arguments range from rent control (which decreases the supply of housing) to busing for racial balance (schools in some areas under busing are just as segregated or worse than before) and crime control, zoning laws, and education.
Sowell also takes strong issue with the notion of government as a helper or savior of minorities, arguing that the historical record shows quite the opposite—from the lower level Jim Crow laws created and enforced by state and local regimes, to welfare subsidies at the federal level that have promoted family dependency and breakdown. The Montgomery Bus Company of the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s, for example, had originally pleaded with local segregationist officials not to impose Jim Crow on the bus lines. Before, such lines served both black and white customers with little problem. This plea was rejected, and the hand of government once again interfered with and hindered free markets that mutually benefited customers of all races.^[36] Unlike the free market, where the dollars held by blacks and whites have equal value, the governmental sphere in a massive number of historical instances imposed unequal values—with black votes having less value than white ones—and so Jim Crow expanded. Sowell maintains that, time and time again, the hand of government has negatively intervened to snuff out mutually desirable free market transactions between blacks and whites, raising business costs, dampening profits, and creating huge inefficiencies to local economies. The wasteful duplication of facilities and customer-service areas in the name of segregation are but one example of the waste and inefficiency imposed by government, reputed benefactor of minorities.^[37] Sowell draws upon a mass of historical data to question both the priorities and logic of those who call for even more government intervention and spending to “solve” the problems of minorities.^[38]

On several measures, black progress was much more positive prior to the significant rise of the welfare state, and prior to the era of affirmative action

Another of Sowell’s themes is to show the painful but steady rise of blacks in the US against heavy odds before massive intervention by government programs, a rise that contradicts some popular assumptions.

Social problems

In Affirmative Action Around the World (2004)^[39] and Civil Rights^[40] Sowell demonstrates that on several measures, black progress was actually better before the era of the expanding welfare state and affirmative action era of the 1970s, and even the Civil Rights Act of 1964, than in the contemporary era. In the decades immediately after the Civil War for example, blacks posted higher employment rates and lower divorce rates than whites. As regards family stability and out-of-wedlock births, black rates prior to WWII were hardly perfect, (19% in 1940 and 22% in 1960) but were still far lower than the 70% out-of-wedlock births afflicting the black community at the beginning of the 21st century. In every census between 1890 and 1940, blacks posted higher marriage rates than whites.^[41] Sowell also shows that numerous other European groups showed patterns of high dysfunction as they migrated to urban areas. He argues that this historical record undermines claims about hopelessly deficient black family patterns due to an alleged legacy of slavery or genetic handicaps, and maintains that the dependency induced by the welfare state undermined much that was stable and commendable about black family and community life, above and beyond the difficulties of rural to urban migration.^[42] The weakening of crime controls by judges and political elites during the 1960s fostered an atmosphere of lawlessness in the black community that also contributed to a negative harvest of social problems. As regards murder, for example, a crime that is not much influenced by fluctuations in victim reporting, rates doubled in the 1960s as plea bargaining, lighter sentences, “revolving door” early releases, restrictions on police procedures and probations increased. Although the weakening of controls was sometimes undertaken in the name of fairness for minorities, no community was harder hit by such rising rates than the black community.^[43]

Education

Black education was badly hurt by Jim Crow laws and practices; nevertheless Sowell demonstrates in Inside American Education (1993) and Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972) that even on this measure, blacks often showed progress that would be almost inconceivable in many of today’s inner city schools. While black education lagged heavily behind that of whites in the segregation era, several black schools were to emerge that produced excellent performances. All-black Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. prior to the 1960s, for example, achieved performance levels equal to or exceeding that of surrounding white schools. The average IQ at Dunbar was 111 in 1939, and again in 1950, and attendance records in some years showed lower levels of absenteeism than that of surrounding white schools in the District of Columbia. Dunbar also produced a impressive number of black firsts in many fields from naval officers, to the first black federal judge, military general, and cabinet member, and with alumni ranging from jazzman Duke Ellington to the black pioneer in the use of blood plasma.^[44] Nor could this be due to creaming of the crop to create a tiny elite of black students, Sowell contends. Attendance records suggest Dunbar’s student body was quite representative of the black community it served, and fully one-third of all black students in D.C. passed through its doors in some decades.^[44]
Dunbar is not the only example. A record of achievement is documented in several schools across the country. In several New York schools (Harlem) before WWII, black student test scores achieved basic parity with comparable working class white schools on the lower East side—sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but never miles behind as is the case in numerous ghetto schools of the contemporary era. Nor are such patterns necessarily a recent phenomenon. As far back as WWI, black soldiers from various Northern States like New York, Pennsylvania, etc. scored higher on Army intelligence tests than southern whites from various southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and others.^[45]
In his 1986 Education: Assumptions versus History, Sowell discusses several all-black public and private schools that achieved high performance standards like Dunbar. Ironically, some of these high-performing black schools declined after the Brown desegregation. Dunbar for example was torn down and rebuilt as a neighborhood school in a neighborhood that had descended into crime, poverty and decay. Similar patterns occurred with many other once thriving black institutions. Schools that once boasted high test scores, numerous academic awards, service to the community, and the development of black professionals became marked by low test scores, locations in decaying neighborhoods, lack of parental support and discipline problems. Policies such as busing for racial balance did little to stem this decline.^[46] There is little interest in such past achievements, Sowell argues, because the historical record would call into question prevailing policies and dogmas focused on racial headcounts, trendy black English, diversity, bigger budgets and more spending. The record also highlights counterproductive cultural attitudes towards education among some of today’s blacks as demonstrated by various research on the anti-intellectual “acting white” phenomenon,^[47] Sowell claims. Today’s Dunbar, he notes, has much finer physical facilities than the old school before its decline in the 1960s, but produces much more dismal academic results. More students went on to college from Dunbar during the Great Depression than they do in the contemporary ghetto school of today.^[44]

Long-standing trend of black progress

Sowell also challenges the notion that black progress is due to progressive government programs or policies. In The Economics and Politics of Race, (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action (2004), and other books, Sowell shows that in the five years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act black gains in employment and education were actually higher than in the five years after. Black progress in employment and education was a long-standing trend from the WWII era, almost two decades before the 1964 law, and before the era of affirmative action in the mid 1970s. Black gains in education and employment after 1964, Sowell maintains, continued this upward movement in the booming postwar economy. The passage of the race-neutral Civil Rights Act of 1964 complemented this upward swing and, by removing unjust legal barriers, provided significant equal opportunity. Sowell sharply contrasts equal opportunity (fair treatment across the board regardless of race) with the disguised or open race quotas and headcounts of affirmative action.
Long-standing advance in reducing poverty is also a hallmark of black effort, Sowell maintains, contradicting assorted claims of black inability. Prior to the 1964 Act, when few welfare or transfer payment programs as such were in place, a majority of blacks had actually pulled themselves above the poverty line despite open hostility from many whites and open segregation and discrimination in job and housing markets. On several other measures, from youth employment to crime, blacks posted a much better showing prior to the expansion of the welfare state, or the affirmative action era, than after.

White ethnic groups show many of the same problems historically

Sowell also argues that many problems identified with blacks in modern society are hardly unique in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat swept by disruption as it became urbanized. Heavy patterns of pathology are for example seen in the white peasant migrants to the dismal urban slums that sprung up during the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere.^[48] He maintains that US blacks only became a largely urban people after WWII, when the booming war economy produced a third great migration north, allowing millions of blacks to escape the harsh, oppressive conditions of the South. While southern cities also saw some migration, it was this massive wartime move north that was much more significant, and the arrival of the rural black proletariat into difficult urban conditions broke down many of the social mores and community controls that had maintained its stability in the past.
Sowell notes that social problems occurring after such migrations are nothing new with other white ethnic groups, who had the advantage of entering, acculturating and adjusting to the urban economy in toto several decades earlier than blacks.^[49] The black migrants faced race discrimination above and beyond other ethnic groups but fundamentally experienced the same social pathologies others did in becoming urbanized. Difficulties with crime, schooling, substance abuse etc. are thus not uniquely "black" problems but are well represented in other urbanizing groups from peasant background. In Ethnic America, (1981) for example, Sowell shows that white ethnic groups like the Irish were marked by many of the same patterns as blacks who migrated from rural backgrounds to the big urban centers, including high levels of violence and substance abuse. As regards out-of-wedlock births, the rate in some New York areas with heavy white Irish settlement was over 50%, comparable to what would develop in later black ghettos in the same city.^[50]
Sowell sums of some of these claims in his Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (1981), warning against what he calls the fallacy of presentism:^[51]

"Those who cannot swallow pseudo-biology can turn to pseudo-history as the basis for classification. Unique cultural characteristics are now supposed to neatly divide the population. In this more modern version, the ghetto today is a unique social phenomenon.. American ghettos have always had crime, violence, overcrowding, filth, drunkenness, bad school teaching, and worse learning. Nor are blacks historically unique even in the degree of these things. Crime and violence were much worse in the nineteenth-century slums, which were almost all white. The murder rate in Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century was about three times what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. All the black riots of the 1960s put together did not kill half as many people as were killed in one white riot in 1863.. Squalor, dirt, disease? Historically, blacks are neither the first nor last in any of these categories. There were far more immigrants packed into the slums (per room or per square mile) than is the case with blacks today - not to mention the ten thousand to thirty thousand children with no home at all in the nineteenth-century New York...

Even in the area where many people get most emotional- educational and IQ test results- blacks are doing nothing that various European minorities did not do before them. As of about 1920, any number of European ethnic groups had I.Q.'s the same or lower than the I.Q.'s of blacks today. As recently as 1940, there were schools on the Lower East Side of New York with academic performances lower than those of schools in Harlem. Much of the paranoia that we talk ourselves into about race is a result of provincialism about our own time as compared to other periods in history."

The true beneficiaries of affirmative action are not the less fortunate but those already advantaged

In his 2004 Affirmative Action Around the World Sowell holds that affirmative action covers most of the American population, particularly women, and has long since ceased to be directed towards blacks, although blacks are often invoked as primary beneficiaries, and that the main beneficiaries are not the less fortunate but those already able to well help themselves:

As in other countries, however, these policies spread far beyond the initial beneficiaries. Blacks are just 12 percent of the American population, but affirmative action programs have expanded over the years to include not only other racial or ethnic groups, but also women, so that such such policies now apply to a substantial majority of the American population...

...the top 20 percent of black income earners had their income share rising at about the same rate as that of their white counterparts, while the bottom 20 percent of black income earners had their income share fall at more than double the rate of the bottom 20 percent of white income earners. In short, the affirmative action era in the United States saw the more fortunate blacks benefit while the least fortunate lost ground in terms of their share of incomes. Neither the gains nor the losses can be arbitrarily attributed to affirmative action but neither can affirmative action claim to have advanced lower-income blacks when in fact those fell behind."^[52]

Sowell shows that immigrants suffering no past discrimination in the United States have also sometimes been classified as “approved minorities” and have also benefited from Affirmative Action. The affluent Fanjul family from Cuba for example, with a fortune exceeding $500 million, received contracts set aside for minority businesses. European businessmen from Portugal received the bulk of the money paid to minority owned construction firms between 1986 and 1990 in Washington D.C. Asian businessmen immigrating to the United States have also received preferential access to government contracts. Sowell also argues that while affirmative action began as a program primarily intended to benefit blacks, a huge majority of minority- and female-owned businesses are in fact owned by groups other than blacks, including Asians, Hispanics, and women.^[53]
In addition, the vast majority of minority firms appear to gain little from government set-asides. In Cincinnati, for example, 682 minority forms appeared on the city’s approved list but 13% of these companies received 62% of preferential access and 83% of the money. Nationally, one-fourth of one percent of minority-owned enterprises are certified to receive preferences under the Small Business Administration, but even within this tiny number, 2% of the firms received 40% of the money.^[53]
The history of black achievement prior to the affirmative action era is too often lost and overlooked, Sowell holds, and contradicts some right-wing claims that blacks have not pulled themselves up, or that seek to tar black progress as a function of affirmative action. The same history also contradicts some liberal claims that government programs like race quotas are responsible for black progress, when the facts show that the main beneficiaries of such programs are often non-blacks, and that there has been a long-standing trend of black advance before such programs.

Human capital

Human capital is the most durable, most precious of all, trumping both physical and financial capital, and overcoming the most adverse circumstances

Over and over again in Sowell’s works the theme of human capital appears. Human capital is the sum total of values, attitudes, skills, work effort and cultural inheritance and patterns, often extending back for centuries. Human capital can be individual—education, self-discipline, savings, hard work—but more important to Sowell’s work, it is also mass capital, the combined product of millions, not the select preserve of a few.

Human capital and oppressed minorities

Human capital has permitted ethnic minorities to bounce back and triumph over the harshest, most brutal treatment by majorities. Sowell’s works (Economics and Politics of Race (1993), Ethnic America(1981), Affirmative Action around the World (2004), and Race and Culture (1994). etc.) are laced with such illustrations, across several nations of the world, and across several centuries. Jews in Europe or the Middle East, for example, often harshly persecuted for centuries and denied a basis in agriculture, used their skills in urban economies to not only survive, but to ultimately end-run their enemies. Overseas Chinese are another such group, enduring harsh treatment from the colonial and modern era of Southeast Asia to the mining towns of 19th Century California, where rampaging white mobs did not give them “a Chinaman’s chance.”^[54] Today their native born descendants as a group surpass the US white average on a number of counts, from income and education to IQ and academic test results. Japanese-Americans show a similar pattern despite such obstacles as racist land laws designed to freeze them out of farming occupations or the internment camps of WWII.

Human capital in patterns reaching back centuries

In several works, Sowell traces the triumph of human capital and the human spirit across nations and historical periods. Industrious German farmers who took over wasteland scorned by others and turned it into productive farms did so not only in the United States, but in places as far afield as Russia and Argentina. Japanese farming skill and discipline repeated itself from the produce fields of California to Brazil. Italian stone and vineyard workers dominated certain related trades from the streets of New York to the fields of distant Argentina. None of this is by accident, but reflects human capital earned the hard way across the span of centuries, in multiple nations, across multiple generations. The importance of human capital—mass capital attained by ordinary men and women through generations of experience and sacrifice—is, for Sowell, much more important to human well-being than the theories of racial supremacists or utopian activists. Such capital is the foundation of human liberty and civilization. Some critics claim that the sharp, sometimes sarcastic tone found in some of Sowell’s works such as Inside American Education reflects his exasperation and frustration at the waste of human capital occurring in many minority, particularly black communities.^[55]

Systemic processes

Systemic processes mated to the common wisdom and practical action of the ordinary people are superior to the grandiose presumptions of intellectual, political and bureaucratic elites

In several works—his Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions, and The Economics and Politics of Race among them—Sowell stresses the importance of systemic processes like free markets, the rule of law, and constitutional government. Such systemic processes are orderly, structured, and sequential. They are not perfect, nor can they be, since humans themselves are flawed. Instead, on the balance, they provide the best framework whereby imperfect humans can achieve large measures of freedom in not only the political sphere but the economic one as well. Such processes are continually refined and improved incrementally over time. Improvements over time to common law judicial systems like that of the United States, for example, did not quickly come about by sweeping decrees from those with allegedly superior wisdom, but rather by a long, painful process extending back to the Magna Carta and beyond. Likewise US blacks pulled themselves from poverty not because of government programs or policies, but often in spite of government, largely using the processes of free markets. Blacks broke segregation in many white neighborhoods, for example, not because of the goodness of the government or the goodwill of whites, but because their combined dollars outbid or induced even racist whites to sell them property in reserved areas.
On balance, Sowell maintains, systemic processes are superior to the dictates or condescension of those on high who presume to know better than ordinary people. A product of the hard-scrabble streets himself, Sowell also stresses the practical action and wisdom of the broad masses within those methodical frameworks, versus the presumptions, confiscations and social engineering of elites. The ordinary masses deserve freedom as much as “their betters.” Such elites, he argues, are only too ready to claim freedom for their own trendy notions and self-aggrandizing profit, while denying similar freedom to the small man on the street to manage his own resources and make his own decisions. A deep skepticism towards intellectual and bureaucratic elites runs through much of Sowell’s work. This is perhaps summed up best at the end of Knowledge and Decisions (1983):

Historically, freedom is a rare and tragic thing. It has emerged out of the stalemates of would-be oppressors. Freedom has cost the blood of millions in obscure places and historic sites ranging from Gettysburg to the Gulag Archipelago. That something that cost so much in human lives should be surrendered piecemeal in exchange for [trendy] visions or rhetoric seems grotesque. Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”^[56]

==========================

References

19	.	^ Graeme Donald Snooks, Historical Analysis in Economics (Routledge 1993)
20	.	^ Sowell, Thomas (1981). Knowledge and Decisions
21	.	^ Sowell, Thomas (2004). Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10199-6
22	.	^ Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, Thomas Sowell, 1984. Markets and Minorities, Thomas Sowell, 1981
23	.	^ Sowell, Thomas. “The Bell Curve Wars,” Chapter 6 in Ethnicity and IQ, pg 70-80
24	.	^ Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action: An International Perspective, op. cit.; Web: “Race and IQ” column for townhall.com
25	.	^ Thomas Sowell (2005). Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Encounter Books, p. 6).
26	.	^ Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. p. 6
27	.	^ Sowell, Ethnic America, p. 202-204
28	.	^ Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. p. 4-60
29	.	^ For helpful discussion of Sowell’s dualistic ideological model, see Joseph G. Conti and Brad Stetson, Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment: Profiles of a New Black Vanguard, (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993, pp. 85--122).
30	.	^ Sowell, T. (2009). Intellectuals and Society. Basic Books. pp. 4-116; 281-319
31	.	^ Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, (Basic Books: 2003)
32	.	^ Thomas Sowell, Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One, (Basic Books, 2003)
33	.	^ Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell, p. 308
34	.	^ Race and Economics, 1975
35	.	^ Basic Economics, op. cit
36	.	^ Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
37	.	^ Sowell, The Economics and Politics of Race, p. 145–206;
38	.	^ Race and Economics, 1975, op. cit.
39	.	^ Affirmative action. op. cit
40	.	^ Civil Rights, op. cit
41	.	^ Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. pg. 161
42	.	^ Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. pp. 160-165
43	.	^ Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, pp. 268-288
44	.	^ a b c Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. pp. 203-245
45	.	^ Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education (Basic Books: 1993)
46	.	^ Sowell, T. Education: Assumptions versus History, (Hoover Institution: 1986)
47	.	^ John U. Ogbu, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003)
48	.	^ Sowell, Ethnic America, 120-207.
49	.	^ Sowell, Ethnic America, p. 120-207
50	.	^ Sowell, Ethnic America, Basic Books: 1981, p. 120-207)
51	.	^ Sowell, Thomas, Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays. 1981. Hoover Institution Press. Quoted in William Vesterman, 1994. Reading and Writing Short Arguments. pp. 167-169
52	.	^ Sowell, 2004. Affirmative Action Around the World, pp 115-147
53	.	^ a b Sowell, 2004. Affirmative Action Around the World, pp 115-147
54	.	^ Sowell, Ethnic America, op. cit.
55	.	^ Robert J. Nash “A Neo-essentialist Diatribe Against American Education,” Journal of Teacher Education, March–April 1995, Vol 46, no 2, pp. 150-155
56	.	^ Knowledge and Decisions, p. 383

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Ancient Egypt: an advanced civilization created by tropical peoples

1) Southern Egypt, from which the genesis of Ancient Egypt civilization sprang, lies in the tropical zone, from the Tropics of Cancer to Capricorn with the Tropic of cancer bisecting Southern Egypt at 23°26'N 25°0'E. The rest of Egypt is very similar, and is placed by scholars in the immediately adjacent subtropical or arid tropic zone, NOT the cold-climate zones of Europe or Asia.(Thompson and Perry, 1997; Griffiths, 1976, Troll and Pfaffen 1964, Koppen-Geiger classification 2006)



2) The peoples of ancient Egypt, in the aforementioned tropical and semi-tropical/arid tropic zones, show the clear limb proportion characteristics of tropically adapted people, and MORE closely resemble other tropically adapted Africans on the continent, than Europeans or Middle Easterners.(Raxter and Ruff 2008, Zakrewski 2003, 2007; Holliday et al, 2003, Kemp, 2005)

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3) Undermining claims of cold-climate or skin color primacy for civilization, the great ancient Nile Valley civilization arose from the 'darker' more tropical south, NOT the cold climate or cool climate Mediterranean, Europe or Asia.(Clark, 1982; Shaw 1976, 2003; Bard, 2004; Vogel, 1997; Kemp 2005)




4) The ancient Egyptians in their tropical and sub-tropical/arid tropic environment, did not need cold climate people to develop their distinct culture. Several strands of culture from religion to material living put the Egyptians closer to nearby Africans than to cold-climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Asiatics.(Keita, 1996, 2004; Yurco 1989, 1996; Williams, 1980; Britannia 1984; Wilkinson 1999; Wendorf, 2001)
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5) European/Asiatic cold climate or light skin inspiration was unneeded by the tropically adapted Africans of ancient Egypt. They peopled the Nile Valley from the Sahara and the Sudan, and ancient Egypt is part of a tropical African lineage. Indigenous development sprang from a long tradition going back deep into the Sahara and the Sudan.(Lovell, 1999; Lefkowitz, 1993, 1996; Keita 1993, Irish 2006)

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6) European/Asiatic cold climate or light skin inspiration was unneeded by the tropically adapted Africans of ancient Egypt. DNA studies show the Egyptians link with other Africans via Haplogroup "E" to a much greater extent than cold climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Middle easterners.(Keita 2004, 2008; Richards 2003; Battaglia, 2008; Cruciani 2007; Lucotte 2003; Stevanovitch et al 2004)





7) African people have a range of physical variation and don't need any inspiration or mixes from cold-climate/light skinned Europeans or Asiatics to explain why. Features like narrow noses, thin lips, height etc are all indigenous to Africa. Africa has both the highest phenotypic diversity and the highest genetic diversity in the world and don’t need cold-climate/light skin inspiration for that established fact. All cold-climate/light skinned Europeans and Asiatics are SUBSETS of original African diversity. Modern DNA studies find even though some African peoples look different, they are genetically related through the PN2 transition clade of the Y-chromosome. Thus light-skinned African Libyans and dark-skinned Zulus are all genetically related Africans, even though they don't look exactly the same.(Keita 2004; Tishkoff 2002, Ely et al, 2006, Stevanovitch 2004)



8) African peoples are the most diverse in the world whether analyzed by DNA or skeletal or cranial methods. The peoples of the Nile Valley vary but they are still related. The people most related ethnically to the ancient Egyptians are other Africans like Nubians not cold-climate/light skinned Europeans or Asiatics.(Keita 1996; Rethelford, 2001; Bianchi 2004, Yurco 1989; Godde 2009)





9) Not needing cold-climate/slight-skinned inspiration, the peoples of ancient Egypt are more closely linked with fellow tropical Africans in terms of cranial studies than with Europeans or Asiatics. Analysis of skeletal and cranial remains reveals that the ancient Egyptians of the early Dynastic and pre-Dynastic phases, link closer to nearby Saharan, Sudanic and East African populations than Mediterranean and Middle Eastern peoples. Greeks, Romans, Hyskos, Arabs and others were to appear later in Egyptian history. Craniometric studies generally place ancient Upper Egyptian populations closer to the range of tropical Africans in the Nile Valley and East Africa than to Mediterraneans, or Middle Easterners.(Keita 1990, 1993, 1996, 2004; Hiernaux 1975; Froment 2002; Kemp 2005)




10) Comparatively recent (in evolutionary terms) Europeans and Asiatics LOOKED LIKE tropical Africans with dark skin and other features, before cold-climate adaptation changed them. Light skin color is a RECENT development for Europeans and Asiatics. The foundations of civilization in terms of key animal and plant domesticates, and associated technology in Europe and Asia were thus laid by these dark-skinned migrants from Africa, who resembled today's Africans, undermining claims of the efficacy of white skin in laying the basic foundations or in building advanced civilizations such as that built by the tropically adapted peoples of the Nile Valley.(Jablonski 2000; Brace 2005; Hanihara 1996; Rethelford 2000)


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DETAILS
1) Fact#1: Southern Egypt, from which the genesis of Ancient Egypt civilization sprang, lies in the tropical zone, from the Tropics of Cancer to Capricorn. The rest of Egypt lies in the subtropical or arid tropic zone, NOT the cold-climate zones of Europe or Asia.
The subtropics are the geographical and climatic zone of the Earth immediately north and south of the tropical zone, which is bounded by the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, at latitudes 23.5°N and 23.5°S. The term "subtropical" describes the climatic region found adjacent to the tropics, usually between 20 and 40 degrees of latitude in both hemispheres. Egypt is also assigned to the subtropics or the arid tropics by modern climatologists. (See: Russell D. Thompson, Allen Howard Perry (1997) Applied climatology: principles and practice. Routhledge: pg 179.; See also Applied Climatology: An Introduction by John F. Griffiths. Oxford University Press. 1976 pg 22)

2) Fact#2: The peoples of ancient Egypt, in the aforementioned tropical and semi-tropical/arid tropic zones show clear limb proportion characteristics of tropically adapted people, and MORE closely resemble other tropically adapted Africans on the continent, than Europeans or Middle Easterners.

In short, the ancient Egyptians have tropically adapted body plans not the body plans of cold adapted Europeans or Asiatics. Quotes by credible mainstream scholars:

----- The very distinctive tropical adaptation of the Egyptians - termed 'super negroid' because of its clarity:
[quote]
"The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the “super-Negroid” body plan described by Robins (1983).. This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans. Of the Egyptian samples, only the Badarian and Early Dynastic period populations have shorter tibiae than predicted from femoral length. Despite these differences, all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations."
--(Zakrzewski, S.R. (2003). "Variation in ancient Egyptian stature and body proportions". American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (3): 219-229.
------- Northern Egypt near the Mediterranean shows the same pattern- limb length data puts its peoples closer to tropically adapted Africans that cold climate Europeans
"..sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline variation along the Nile valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into southern Palestine. The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans rather than with Europeans." (Barry Kemp, "Ancient Egypt Anatomy of a Civilisation. (2005) Routledge. p. 52-60)
------- Comparisons of ancient Egyptians, US blacks and us whites put the Egyptians closer to blacks because of the tropical adaptations
[quote]
"Intralimb (crural and brachial) indices are significantly higher in ancient Egyptians than in American Whites (except crural index among females), i.e., Egyptians have relatively longer distal segments (Table 4). Intralimb indices are not significantly different between Egyptians and American Blacks... Many of those who have studied ancient Egyptians have commented on their characteristically ‘‘tropical’’ or ‘‘African’’ body plan (Warren, 1897; Masali, 1972; Robins, 1983; Robins and Shute, 1983, 1984, 1986; Zakrzewski, 2003). Egyptians also fall within the range of modern African populations (Ruff and Walker, 1993).. brachial indices are definitely more ‘‘African’’).. In terms of femoral and tibial length to total skeletal height proportions, we found that ancient Egyptians are significantly different from US Blacks, although still closer to Blacks than to Whites.
Comparisons of linear body proportions of Old Kingdom and non-Old Kingdom period individuals, and workers and high officials in our sample found no statistically significant differences among them. Zakrzewski (2003) also found little evidence for differences in linear body proportions of Egyptians over a wider temporal range. In general, recent studies of skeletal variation among ancient Egyptians support scenarios of biological continuity through time. Irish (2006) analyzed quantitative and qualitative dental traits of 996 Egyptians from Neolithic through Roman periods, reporting the presence of a few outliers but concluding that the dental samples appear to be largely homogeneous and that the affinities observed indicate overall biological uniformity and continuity from Predynastic through Dynastic and Post dynastic periods.
Zakrzewski (2007) provided a comprehensive summary of previous Egyptian craniometric studies and examined Egyptian crania from six time periods. She found that the earlier samples were relatively more homogeneous in comparison to the later groups. However, overall results indicated genetic continuity over the Egyptian Predynastic and Early Dynastic periods, albeit with a high level of genetic diversity within the population, suggesting an indigenous process of state formation. "
("Stature estimation in ancient Egyptians: A new technique based on anatomical reconstruction of stature." Michelle H. Raxter, Christopher B. Ruff, Ayman Azab, Moushira Erfan, Muhammad Soliman, Aly El-Sawaf, (Am J Phys Anthropol. 2008, Jun;136(2):147-55
------- Older limb studies find the same- tropically adapted Blacks are closer to ancient Egyptians than whites:
[quote]
"An attempt has been made to estimate male and female Egyptian stature from long bone length using Trotter & Gleser negro stature formulae, previous work by the authors having shown that these rather than white formulae give more consistent results with male dynastic material... When consistency has been achieved in this way, Predynastic proportions are founded to be such that distal segments of the limbs are even longer in relation to the proximal segments than they are in modern negroes. Such proportions are termed "super-negroid"...
Robins (1983) and Robins & Shute (1983) have shown that more consistent results are obtained from ancient Egyptian male skeletons if Trotter & Gleser formulae for negro are used, rather than those for whites which have always been applied in the past. .. their physical proportions were more like modern negroes than those of modern whites, with limbs that were relatively long compared with the trunk, and distal segments that were long compared with the proximal segments. If ancient Egyptian males had what may be termed negroid proportions, it seems reasonable that females did likewise."
(Robins G, Shute CCD. 1986. Predynastic Egyptian stature and physical proportions. Hum Evol 1:313–324. Ruff CB. 1994.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/raxterrufftrinkhauscombo.jpg[/img]
Egyptians have tropical body plans as expected for groups evolving/living in tropical environments. these tropical body plans put them closer to fellow Africans than cold-climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Asiatics.

3) Fact#3: Undermining claims of cold-climate or skin color primacy for civilization, the great ancient Nile Valley civilization arose from the 'darker' more tropical south, NOT the cold climate or cool climate Mediterranean, Europe or Asia.

Quotes by credible mainstream scholars:
~~~~~
"While communities such as Ma'adi appear to have played an important role in entrepots through which goods and ideas form south-west Asia filtered into the Nile Valley in later prehistoric times, the main cultural and political tradition that gave rise to the cultural pattern of Early Dynastic Egypt is to be found not in the north but in the south.":
The Cambridge History of Africa: Volume 1, From the Earliest Times to c. 500 BC, (Cambridge University Press: 1982), Edited by J. Desmond Clark pp. 500-509
~~~~~
"..the early cultures of Merimde, the Fayum, Badari Naqada I and II are essentially African and early African social customs and religious beliefs were the root and foundation of the ancient Egyptian way of life."
(Source: Shaw, Thurston (1976) Changes in African Archaeology in the Last Forty Years in African Studies since 1945. p. 156-68. London.)
"What is truly unique about this state is the integration of rule over an extensive geographic region, in contrast to other contemporaneous Near Easter polities in Nubia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and the Levant. Present evidence suggests that the state which emerged by the First Dynasty had its roots in the Nagada culture of Upper Egypt, where grave types, pottery and artifacts demonstrate an evolution of form from the Predynastic to the First Dynasty, This cannot be demonstrated for the material culture of Lower Egypt, which was eventually displaced by that which originated in Upper Egypt. Hierarchical society with much social and economic differentiation, as symbolized in the Nagada II cemeteries of Upper Egypt, does not seem to have been present, then, in Lower Egypt, a fact which supports an Upper Egyptian origin for the unified state. Thus archaeological evidence cannot support earlier theories that the founders of Egyptian civilization were an invading Dynastic race from the east.."
"Egyptian contact in the 4th millennium B.C. with SW Asia is undeniable, but the effect of this contact on state formation is Egypt is less clear... The unified state which emerged in Egypt in the 3rd millennium B.C. however, was unlike the polities in Mesopotamia, the Levant, northern Syria, or Early Bronze Age Palestine- in sociopolitical organization, material culture, and belief system. There was undoubtedly heightened commercial contact with SW Asia in the 4th millennium B.C., but the Early Dynastic state which emerged in Egypt is unique and religious in character."
(Bard, Kathryn A. 1994 The Egyptian Predynastic: A Review of the Evidence. Journal of Field Archaeology 21(3):265-288.)
~~~~
"From Petrie onwards, it was regularly suggested that despite the evidence of Predynastic cultures, Egyptian civilization of the 1st Dynasty appeared suddenly and must therefore have been introduced by an invading foreign 'race'. Since the 1970s however, excavations at Abydos and Hierakonpolis have clearly demonstrated the indigenous, Upper Egyptian roots of early civilization in Egypt."
(Ian Shaw ed. (2003) The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt By Ian Shaw. Oxford University Press, page 40-63)
~~~~~~~
"..sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time. If there was a south-north cline variation along the Nile valley it did not, from this limited evidence, continue smoothly on into southern Palestine. The limb-length proportions of males from the Egyptian sites group them with Africans rather than with Europeans."
(Barry Kemp, "Ancient Egypt Anatomy of a Civilisation. (2005) Routledge. p. 52-60)
~~~~~
"Populations and cultures now found south of the desert roamed far to the north. The culture of Upper Egypt, which became dynastic Egyptian civilization, could fairly be called a Sudanese transplant."(Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa: Their Interaction. Encyclopedia of Pre-colonial Africa, by Joseph O. Vogel, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California (1997), pp. 465-472 )

http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/forgottenoriginals1.jpg
Genesis of ancient Egyptian civilization in the 'darker' tropical south.

[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/nilevalleytimeline2.jpg[/img]
The genesis of Egyptian civilization was in the 'darker' topical south not the north, the Mediterranean, Europe or Asia
4) Fact#4: The ancient Egyptians in their tropical and sub-tropical/arid tropic environment, did not need cold climate people to develop their distinct culture. Several strands of culture from religion to material living put the ancient Egyptians closer to nearby Africans than to cold-climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Asiatics.
A 1996 collection of art and material culture for example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, also highlights several cultural links between the Nile Valley peoples, and demonstrates that they were part of a larger indigenous African context, with local variation. The exhibit suggests 8 common areas of interchange, similarity and linkage, grouping artifacts according to such themes as: Mother and child figures, Headrests, Depictions of humans, Ancestor worship and divine kingship, Animal Deities and symbols, Masking, Body art and Circumcision and male initiation (Egypt in Africa, 1996, Theodore Celenko (ed), Curator, Indianapolis Museum of Art). Other detailed studies confirm the same pattern of indigenous African development, as shown below.
[quotes from credible scholars]
------- Ancient Egyptian religion closer to the religion of African regions than to Mesopotamia, Europe or the Middle East
QUOTE(s):
Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 ed. Macropedia Article, Vol 6: "Egyptian Religion" , pg 506-508
"A large number of gods go back to prehistoric times. The images of a cow and star goddess (Hathor), the falcon (Horus), and the human-shaped figures of the fertility god (Min) can be traced back to that period. Some rites, such as the "running of the Apis-bull," the "hoeing of the ground," and other fertility and hunting rites (e.g., the hippopotamus hunt) presumably date from early times.. Connections with the religions in southwest Asia cannot be traced with certainty."
"It is doubtful whether Osiris can be regarded as equal to Tammuz or Adonis, or whether Hathor is related to the "Great Mother." There are closer relations with northeast African religions. The numerous animal cults (especially bovine cults and panther gods) and details of ritual dresses (animal tails, masks, grass aprons, etc) probably are of African origin. The kinship in particular shows some African elements, such as the king as the head ritualist (i.e., medicine man), the limitations and renewal of the reign (jubilees, regicide), and the position of the king's mother (a matriarchal element). Some of them can be found among the Ethiopians in Napata and Meroe, others among the Prenilotic tribes (Shilluk)."
(Encyclopedia Britannica 1984 ed. Macropedia Article, Vol 6: "Egyptian Religion" , pg 506-508)
------- Credible scholarship shows cultural similarities between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa, contradicting claims of Middle Eastern inspiration.
* Specific central African tool designs found at the well known Naqada, Badari and Fayum archaeological sites in Egypt (de Heinzelin 1962, Arkell and Ucko, 1956 et al). Shaw (1976) states that "the early cultures of Merimde, the Fayum, Badari Naqada I and II are essentially African and early African social customs and religious beliefs were the root and foundation of the ancient Egyptian way of life."
* Pottery evidence first seen in the Saharan Highlands then spreading to the Nile Valley (Flight 1973).
Art motifs of Saharan rock paintings showing similarities to those in pharaonic art. A number of scholars suggest that these earlier artistic styles influenced later pharaonic art via Saharans leaving drier areas and moving into the Nile Valley taking their art styles with them (Mori 1964, Blanc 1964, et al)
* Earlier pioneering mummification outside Egypt. The oldest mummy in Africa is of a black Saharan child (Donadoni 1964, Blanc 1964) Frankfort (1956) suggests that it is thus possible to understand the pharaonic worldview by reference to the religious beliefs of these earlier African precursors. Attempts to suggest the root of such practices are due to Caucasoid civilizers from elsewhere are thus contradicted by the data on the ground.
* Several cultural practices of Egypt show strong similarities to an African totemic clan base. Childe (1969, 1978), Aldred (1978) and Strouhal (1971) demonstrate linkages with several African practices such as divine kingship and the king as divine rainmaker.
* Physical similarities of the early Nile valley populations with that of tropical Africans. Such connections are demonstrated in the work of numerous scholars such as Thompson and Randall Mclver 1905, Falkenburger 1947, and Strouhal 1971. The distance diagrams of Mukherjee, Rao and Trevor (1955) place the ancient Badarians genetically near 'black' tribes such as the Ashanti and the Taita. See also the "Issues of lumping under Mediterranean clusters" section above for similar older analyses.
* Serological (blood) evidence of genetic linkages. Paoli 1972 for example found a significant resemblance between ABO frequencies of dynastic Egyptians and the black northern Haratin who are held to be the probable descendants of the original Saharans (Hiernaux, 1975).
* Language similarities which include several hundred roots ascribable to African elements (UNESCO 1974)
* Ancient Egyptian origin stories ascribing origins of the gods and their ancestors to African locations to the south and west of Egypt (Davidson 1959, White 1970).
quote: "It may be noted that the ancient Egyptians themselves appear to have been convinced that their place of origin was African rather than Asian. They made continued reference to the land of Punt as their homeland." --(White, Jon Manchip., Ancient Egypt: Its Culture and History (Dover Publications; New Ed edition, June 1, 1970), p. 141.
* Advanced state building and political unity in Nubia, including writing, administrative apparatus and insignia some 300 years before dynastic Egypt, and the long demonstrated interchange between Nubia and Egypt (Williams 1980)
* Newer studies (Wendorf 2001, Wilkinson 1999, et al.) confirm these older analyses. Excavations from Nabta Playa, located about 100km west of Abu Simbel for example, suggest that the Neolithic inhabitants of the region were migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, based on cultural similarities and social complexity which is thought to be reflective of Egypt's Old Kingdom
* Other scholars (Wilkinson 1999) present similar material and cultural evidence- including similarities between Predynastic Egypt and traditional African cattle-culture, typical of Southern Sudanese and East African pastoralists of today, and various cultural and artistic data such as iconography on rock art found in both Egypt and in the Sudan.

[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/egyotinafrica1.jpg[/img]
Several strands of culture from religion to material living put the ancient Egyptians closer to nearby Africans than to cold-climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Asiatics.

5) Fact#5. European/Asiatic cold climate or light skin inspiration was unneeded by the tropically adapted Africans of ancient Egypt. They peopled the Nile Valley from the Sahara, and ancient Egypt is part of a tropical African lineage. Indigenous development sprang from a long tradition going back deep into the Sahara and the Sudan.
[quotes by credible mainstream scholars, including Mary Lefkowitz:]
------- The tropical African lineage of ancient Egyptians
"There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas."
and
"[research] must be placed in the context of hypotheses informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early Nile Valley populations can be identified as part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation.
--("Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999). pp 328-332)
----- Afrocentric critic Mary Lefkowitz says the Egypt was peopled by people from sub-Saharan Africa, not cold-climate Europeans or Middle Easterners.
"Recent work on skeletons and DNA suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North. See Bruce G. Trigger, "The Rise of Civilization in Egypt," Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol I, pp 489-90; S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54."
(Mary Lefkowitz (1997). Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. Basic Books. pg 242)
------- In Black Athena Revisited, Lefkowitz finds similarity between Egyptians and Sudanics and recommends the work of conservative anthropologist Nancy Lovell for more research on the subject.
Quote:
"not surprisingly, the Egyptian skulls were not very distance from the Jebel Moya [a Neolithic site in the southern Sudan] skulls, but were much more distance from all others, including those from West Africa. Such a study suggests a closer genetic affinity between peoples in Egypt and the northern Sudan, which were close geographically and are known to have had considerable cultural contact throughout prehistory and pharaonic history... Clearly more analyses of the physical remains of ancient Egyptians need to be done using current techniques, such as those of Nancy Lovell at the University of Alberta is using in her work.."
(- Mary Lefkowitz, "Black Athena Revisited. pp. 105-106)
------- Lefkowitz cites Keita 1993 in Not Out of Africa. Here is Keita on the Jebel Moya studies:
"Overall, when the Egyptian crania are evaluated in a Near Eastern (Lachish) versus African (Kerma, Jebel Moya, Ashanti) context) the affinity is with the Africans. The Sudan and Palestine are the most appropriate comparative regions which would have 'donated' people, along with the Sahara and Maghreb. Archaeology validates looking to these regions for population flow (see Hassan 1988)... Egyptian groups showed less overall affinity to Palestinian and Byzantine remains than to other African series, especially Sudanese."
S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54
------- Here is the work of the anthropologist so strongly recommended by Lefkowitz, Nancy Lovell:
"There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa.. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas."
and
"[research] must be placed in the context of hypotheses informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early Nile Valley populations can be identified as part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation.
-- ("Nancy C. Lovell, " Egyptians, physical anthropology of," in Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999). pp 328-332)
The same Nancy Lovell recommended by Lefkowitz studied dental traits among some high status persons of the key Egyptian Naqada group and found that they resembled the peoples of Nubia.
"A biological affinities study based on frequencies of cranial nonmetric traits in skeletal samples from three cemeteries at Predynastic Naqada, Egypt, confirms the results of a recent nonmetric dental morphological analysis. Both cranial and dental traits analyses indicate that the individuals buried in a cemetery characterized archaeologically as high status are significantly different from individuals buried in two other, apparently non-elite cemeteries and that the non-elite samples are not significantly different from each other. A comparison with neighboring Nile Valley skeletal samples suggests that the high status cemetery represents an endogamous ruling or elite segment of the local population at Naqada, which is more closely related to populations in northern Nubia than to neighboring populations in southern Egypt."
(T. Prowse, and N. Lovell "Concordance of cranial and dental morphological traits and evidence for endogamy in ancient Egypt". American journal of physical anthropology. 1996, vol. 101, no2, pp. 237-246 (2 p.1/4)
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/lefkowitzdebunk.jpg[/img]
6) Fact#6: European/Asiatic cold climate or light skin inspiration was unneeded by the tropically adapted Africans of ancient Egypt. DNA studies show the Egyptians link with other Africans via Haplogroup "E" to a much greater extent than cold climate Mediterraneans, Europeans or Middle easterners.
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/keita2008m35[/img]
Most studies of Egyptian Y-DNA find lineages closer to African populations than Europe or the Middle East.
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/hapelight[/img]
Haplogroup E- uniting numerous African peoples
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/richards2003hape[/img]
Other studies show that DNA Haplogroup 'E' links overwhelmingly links Ethiopians, West Africans and South Africans together
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/em78distrib2[/img]
The predominant Haplogroup in Egypt is 'E" - which has the highest frequency in Africa
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/ychromoegypt1[/img]
Y-chromosome data in Egypt, linking more with African groups than Europeans or Middle Easterners
7) Fact #7: African people have a range of physical variation and don't need any inspiration or mixes from cold-climate/light skinned Europeans or Asiatics to explain why. Features like narrow noses, thin lips, height etc are all indigenous to Africa. Africa has both the highest phenotypic diversity and the highest genetic diversity in the world and don’t need cold-climate/light skin inspiration for that established fact. All cold-climate/light skinned Europeans and Asiatics are SUBSETS of original African diversity. Modern DNA studies find even though some African peoples look different, they are genetically related through the PN2 transition clade of the Y-chromosome. Thus light-skinned African Libyans and dark-skinned Zulus are all genetically related Africans, even though they don't look exactly the same.
"But the Y-chromosome clade defined by the PN2 transition (PN2/M35, PN2/M2) shatters the boundaries of phenotypically defined races and true breeding populations across a great geographical expanse. African peoples with a range of skin colors, hair forms and physiognomies have substantial percentages of males whose Y chromosomes form closely related clades with each other, but not with others who are phenotypically similar. The individuals in the morphologically or geographically defined 'races' are not characterized by 'private' distinct lineages restricted to each of them." (S O Y Keita, R A Kittles, et al. "Conceptualizing human variation," Nature Genetics 36, S17 - S20 (2004)
"Recall that the Horn–Nile Valley crania show, as a group, the largest overlap with other regions. A review of the recent literature indicates that there are male lineage ties between African peoples who have been traditionally labeled as being ‘‘racially’’ different, with ‘‘racially’’ implying an ontologically deep divide. The PN2 transition, a Y chromosome marker, defines a lineage (within the YAPþ derived haplogroup E or III) that emerged in Africa probably before the last glacial maximum, but after the migration of modern humans from Africa (see Semino et al., 2004). This mutation forms a clade that has two daughter subclades (defined by the biallelic markers M35/215 (or 215/M35) and M2) that unites numerous phenotypically variant African populations from the supra-Saharan, Saharan, and sub-Saharan regions.."
(S.O.Y Keita. Exploring northeast African metric craniofacial variation at the individual level: A comparative study using principal component analysis. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 16:679–689, 2004.)
"Africa contains tremendous cultural, linguistic and genetic diversity, and has more than 2,000 distinct ethnic groups and languages.. Studies using mitochondrial (mt)DNA and nuclear DNA markers consistently indicate that Africa is the most genetically diverse region of the world." (Tishkoff SA, Williams SM., Genetic analysis of African populations: human evolution and complex disease. Nature Reviews Genetics. 2002 Aug (8):611-21.)
------- DNA of some modern Egyptians found a genetic ancestral heritage to East Africa:
"The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity of 58 individuals from Upper Egypt, more than half (34 individuals) from Gurna, whose population has an ancient cultural history, were studied by sequencing the control-region and screening diagnostic RFLP markers. This sedentary population presented similarities to the Ethiopian population by the L1 and L2 macrohaplogroup frequency (20.6%), by the West Eurasian component (defined by haplogroups H to K and T to X) and particularly by a high frequency (17.6%) of haplogroup M1. We statistically and phylogenetically analysed and compared the Gurna population with other Egyptian, Near East and sub-Saharan Africa populations; AMOVA and Minimum Spanning Network analysis showed that the Gurna population was not isolated from neighbouring populations. Our results suggest that the Gurna population has conserved the trace of an ancestral genetic structure from an ancestral East African population, characterized by a high M1 haplogroup frequency. The current structure of the Egyptian population may be the result of further influence of neighbouring populations on this ancestral population."
(Stevanovitch A, Gilles A, Bouzaid E, et al. (2004) Mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in a sedentary population from Egypt.Ann Hum Genet. 68(Pt 1):23-39.)
------- Tishkoff et al- Africa has highest genetic diversity
"Africa contains tremendous cultural, linguistic and genetic diversity, and has more than 2,000 distinct ethnic groups and languages (see online link to Ethnologue). Studies using mitochondrial (mt)DNA and nuclear DNA markers consistently indicate that Africa is the most genetically diverse region of the world(TABLE 1).However, most studies report only a few markers in divergent African populations, which makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about the levels and patterns of genetic diversity in these populations (FIG. 1). Because genetic studies have been biased towards more economically developed African countries that have key research or medical centres, populations from more underdeveloped or politically unstable regions of Africa remain under sampled (FIG. 1). Historically, human population genetic studies have relied on one or two African populations as being representative of African diversity, but recent studies show extensive genetic variation among even geographically close African populations, which indicates that there is not a single ‘representative’ African population."
-- Tishkoff NATURE REVIEWS | GENETICS VOLUME 3 | AUGUST 2002
------- Bogus "racial split" theories debunked
"Genetic studies that attempt to recover the biological history of the species have generally found that there is a split between their restricted African samples and "the rest of the world." These approaches conceptualize human population history as a series of bifurcations with each node being relatively uniform. The "Africans" usually used are either the short statured Aka or Mbuti, Khoisan speakers, or West African stereotype s, in keeping with a socially, not scientifically constructed concept of African. Studies using individuals as the unit of analysis evince a different pattern. A select subset of Africans called the "group of 49" forms a unit versus the rest of humankind. However the latter individuals ("rest of humankind") also includes non-East African sub-Saharans. Hence there is no "racial" split. As has been stated, the idea that human variation can be described as being structured by subspecies(races) that are treated as lineages is fundamentally false. In actuality, also, although averages are used, the gene studies usually give us histories that are not necessarily the same as population histories."
Writing African History Chapter 4, Physical Anthropology and African History, Shomarka Keita University of Rochester Press p.134
------- Continent wide African DNA linkages
"The most extensive pan-African haplotype (16189 16192 16223 16278 16294 16309 16390) is in the L2a1 haplogroup. This sequence is observed in West Africa among the Malinke, Wolof, and others; in North Africa among the Maure, Hausa, Fulbe, and others; in Central Africa among the Bamileke, Fali, and others; in South Africa among the Khoisan family including the Khwe and Bantu speakers; and in East Africa among the Kikuyu. Closely related variants are observed among the Tuareg in North and West Africa and among the East African Dinka and Somali."
(-- Bert Ely , Jamie Lee Wilson , Fatimah Jackson and Bruce A Jackson. (2006). African-American mitochondrial DNAs often match mtDNAs found in multiple African ethnic groups. BMC Biology 2006, 4:34)
-------- The PN2 transition:
"It is of interest that the M35 and M2 lineages are united by a mutation – the PN2 transition. This PN2 defined clade originated in East Africa, where various populations have a notable frequency of its underived state. This would suggest that an ancient population in East Africa, or more correctly its males, form the basis of the ancestors of all African upper Paleolithic populations – and their subsequent descendants in the present day."
(--Bengtson, John D. (ed.), In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory: Essays in the four fields of anthropology. 2008. John Benjamins Publishing: pp. 3–16)

8) Fact #8: African peoples are the most diverse in the world whether analyzed by DNA or skeletal or cranial methods. The peoples of the Nile Valley vary but they are still related. The people most related ethnically to the ancient Egyptians are other Africans like Nubians not cold-climate/light skinned Europeans or Asiatics.

------- African people, particularly SUB-SAHARAN Africans, vary the most in how they look, more so than any other population in the world.
"Estimates of genetic diversity in major geographic regions are frequently made by pooling all individuals into regional aggregates. This method can potentially bias results if there are differences in population substructure within regions, since increased variation among local populations could inflate regional diversity. A preferred method of estimating regional diversity is to compute the mean diversity within local populations. Both methods are applied to a global sample of craniometric data consisting of 57 measurements taken on 1734 crania from 18 local populations in six geographic regions: sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, East Asia, Australasia, Polynesia, and the Americas. Each region is represented by three local populations. Both methods for estimating regional diversity show sub-Saharan Africa to have the highest levels of phenotypic variation, consistent with many genetic studies."
(Relethford, John "Global Analysis of Regional Differences in Craniometric Diversity and Population Substructure". Human Biology - Volume 73, Number 5, October 2001, pp. 629-636)
"The living peoples of the African continent are diverse in facial characteristics, stature, skin color, hair form, genetics, and other characteristics. No one set of characteristics is more African than another. Variability is also found in "sub-Saharan" Africa, to which the word "Africa" is sometimes erroneously restricted. There is a problem with definitions. Sometimes Africa is defined using cultural factors, like language, that exclude developments that clearly arose in Africa. For example, sometimes even the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea) is excluded because of geography and language and the fact that some of its peoples have narrow noses and faces.
However, the Horn is at the same latitude as Nigeria, and its languages are African. The latitude of 15 degree passes through Timbuktu, surely in "sub-Saharan Africa," as well as Khartoum in Sudan; both are north of the Horn. Another false idea is that supra-Saharan and Saharan Africa were peopled after the emergence of "Europeans" or Near Easterners by populations coming from outside Africa. Hence, the ancient Egyptians in some writings have been de-Africanized. These ideas, which limit the definition of Africa and Africans, are rooted in racism and earlier, erroneous "scientific" approaches." (S. Keita, "The Diversity of Indigenous Africans," in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Clenko, Editor (1996), pp. 104-105. [10])

[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/nubianegyptianlinks.jpg[/img]
Nubian - Egyptian links. Debunking "racial conflict" claims about the 2 peoples. Nubians were the closest people ethnically to the ancient Egyptians, sharing a common culture, intermarrying and having the same pharaonic structure. All this was millennia BEFORE the 25th Dynasty.
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/godde2009nubianstudy.jpg[/img]
New study finds Nubians the closest people ethnically to the Egyptians

9) Fact #9: Not needing cold-climate/slight-skinned inspiration, the peoples of ancient Egypt are more closely linked with fellow tropical Africans in terms of cranial studies than with Europeans or Asiatics. Analysis of skeletal and cranial remains reveals that the ancient Egyptians of the early Dynastic and pre-Dynastic phases, link closer to nearby Saharan, Sudanic and East African populations than Mediterranean and Middle Eastern peoples. Greeks, Romans, Hyskos, Arabs and others were to appear later in Egyptian history. Craniometric studies generally place ancient Upper Egyptian populations closer to the range of tropical Africans in the Nile Valley and East Africa than to Mediterraneans, or Middle Easterners.

QUOTE(s):
S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54
"Overall, when the Egyptian crania are evaluated in a Near Eastern (Lachish) versus African (Kerma, Kebel Moya, Ashanti) context) the affinity is with the Africans. The Sudan and Palestine are the most appropriate comparative regions which would have 'donated' people, along with the Sahara and Maghreb. Archaeology validates looking to these regions for population flow (see Hassan 1988)... Egyptian groups showed less overall affinity to Palestinian and Byzantine remains than to other African series, especially Sudanese." (Keita 1993)
"When the unlikely relationships [Indian matches] and eliminated, the Egyptian series are more similar overall to other African series than to European or Near Eastern (Byzantine or Palestinian) series." (Keita 1993)
"Populations and cultures now found south of the desert roamed far to the north. The culture of Upper Egypt, which became dynastic Egyptian civilization, could fairly be called a Sudanese transplant."(Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa: Their Interaction. Encyclopedia of Pre-colonial Africa, by Joseph O. Vogel, AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, California (1997), pp. 465-472 )
"Analysis of crania is the traditional approach to assessing ancient population origins, relationships, and diversity. In studies based on anatomical traits and measurements of crania, similarities have been found between Nile Valley crania from 30,000, 20,000 and 12,000 years ago and various African remains from more recent times (see Thoma 1984; Brauer and Rimbach 1990; Angel and Kelley 1986; Keita 1993). Studies of crania from southern Predynastic Egypt, from the formative period (4000-3100 B.C.), show them usually to be more similar to the crania of ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, or modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to those of dynastic northern Egyptians or ancient or modern southern Europeans."
(S. O. Y and A.J. Boyce, "The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians", in Egypt in Africa, Theodore Celenko (ed), Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 20-33)
"There is no archaeological, linguistic, or historical data which indicate a European or Asiatic invasion of, or migration to, the Nile Valley during First Dynasty times. Previous concepts about the origin of the First Dynasty Egyptians as being somehow external to the Nile Valley or less native are not supported by archaeology... In summary, the Abydos First Dynasty royal tomb contents reveal a notable craniometric heterogeneity. Southerners predominate. (Kieta, S. (1992) Further Studies of Crania From Ancient Northern Africa: An Analysis of Crania From First Dynasty Egyptian Tombs, Using Multiple Discriminant Functions. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87:245-254)"
"The predominant craniometric pattern in the Abydos royal tombs is 'southern' (tropical African variant), and this is consistent with what would be expected based on the literature and other results (Keita, 1990). This pattern is seen in both group and unknown analyses... Archaeology and history seem to provide the most parsimonious explanation for the variation in the royal tombs at Abydos.. Tomb design suggests the presence of northerners in the south in late Nakada times (Hoffman, 1988) when the unification probably took place. Delta names are attached to some of the tombs at Abydos (Gardiner, 1961; Yurco, 1990, personal communication), thus perhaps supporting Petrie's (1939) and Gardiner's contention that north-south marriages were undertaken to legitimize the hegemony of the south. The courtiers of northern elites would have accompanied them.
Given all of the above, it is probably not possible to view the Abydos royal tomb sample as representative of the general southern Upper Egyptian population of the time. Southern elites and/or their descendants eventually came to be buried in the north (Hoffman, 1988). Hence early Second Dynasty kings and Djoser (Dynasty 111) (Hayes, 1953) and his descendants are not buried in Abydos. Petrie (1939) states that the Third Dynasty, buried in the north, was of Sudanese origin, but southern Egypt is equally likely. This perhaps explains Harris and Weeks' (1973) suggested findings of southern morphologies in some Old Kingdom Giza remains, also verified in portraiture (Drake, 1987). Further study would be required to ascertain trends in the general population of both regions. The strong Sudanese affinity noted in the unknown analyses may reflect the Nubian interactions with upper Egypt in Predynastic times prior to Egyptian unification (Williams, 1980,1986)..."
(S. Keita (1992) Further Studies of Crania From Ancient Northern Africa: An Analysis of Crania From First Dynasty Egyptian Tombs, Using Multiple Discriminant Functions. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87:245-254)
------- Early Dynastic Periods.
"When the Elephantine results were added to a broader pooling of the physical characteristics drawn from a wide geographic region which includes Africa, the Mediterranean and the Near East quite strong affinities emerge between Elephantine and populations from Nubia, supporting a strong south-north cline."
(Barry Kemp. (2006) Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. p. 54)
Gene flow into the Nubian area during the Neolithic was not from reputed "wandering Caucasoids" but from tropical, Sub-Saharan types.
"Prior to the Neolithic, populations of the Nile Valley in Nubia are very robust, and, because of a gap in the fossil record, it is difficult to connect them to later populations. Some have postulated a local evolution, due to diet change, while others postulated migrations, especially from the Sahara area. But between 5000 and 1000 BC, many cemeteries have supplied a large amount of skeletons, and the anatomical characters of Nubian populations are easier to follow-up. Twenty-seven archaeological samples (4 at 5000 BC, 5 at 4000 BC, 10 at 3000 BC, 3 at 2000 BC, 5 at 1000 BC), and 10 craniofacial measurements, have been considered. While cerebral skull is fairly stable, facial skull displays several regular modifications, and specially a reduction of facial and nasal heights, a broadening of the nose, and an increase of prognathism, while bizygomatic breadth is unchanged. These features illustrate a trend towards a growing resemblance with populations of Sub-Saharan Africa living in wet environments. However, paleoclimatological studies show that Nubia experienced an increasing aridification during that period. It is then unlikely that such a morphological change could be related to any local adaptive evolution to environment. Random drift is also unlikely, because the anatomical trend is relatively uniform during these millennia. It then seems more plausible that these changes correspond to the increasing presence of Southern populations migrating northward."
-- Froment, A. (2002) Morphological micro-evolution of Nubian Populations from, A-Group to Christian Epochs: gene flow, not local adaptation. Am J Phys Anthropol [Suppl] 34:72.
[img]http://africanamericanculturalcenterpalmcoast.org/historyafrican/cranialcoldclimatedebunk.jpg[/img]
Numerous cranial studies put ancient Egyptians closer to other Africans like Nubians than cold-climate/light-skinned Europeans or Asiatics.

10) Fact#10: Comparatively recent (in evolutionary terms) Europeans and Asiatics LOOKED LIKE tropical Africans with dark skin and other features before cold-climate adaptation changed them. Light skin color is a recent development for Europeans and Asiatics. The key foundations of civilization in terms of key animal and plant domesticates and associated technoloigy in Europe and Asia were thus laid by these dark-skinned migrants from Africa, undermining claims of the efficiacy of white skin in laying the basic foundations or in building advanced civilizations such as that built by the tropically adapted peoples of the Nile Valley.

Early West Asians for example, as recently as the Iranian Bronze Age looked like Africans (Hanihara 1996). Civilizations built around this period was by these dark-skinned tropically adapted types who looked like Africans not the much touted white Nordics or high yellow East Asians. Early European Neolithics migrated from Africa via the Mideast and also looked like tropical Africans, again undermining claims of the "need" for the much touted white Nordics or high yellow East Asians. Brace 2005 shows ancient Egyptians link with Africans such as Nubians and Somalians first. Older Europeans look like Africans hence they tend to resemble various Africans studied in Africa. Nevertheless Europe owes a debt to these African migrants via the Middle East that brought key technologies, animal and plant domesticates. The Natufians of the Mideast, the Israel area in particular show some sub-Saharan African elements and are key transmitters of Neolithic technology.

Human skin color also varies in Africa as part of the INDIGENOUS makeup without the "need" for the touted white Nordics or high-yeller Asiatics. [quote]
Human skin color diversity is highest in sub-Saharan African populations.
[quote:]
"Previous studies of genetic and craniometric traits have found higher levels of within-population diversity in sub-Saharan Africa compared to other geographic regions. This study examines regional differences in within-population diversity of human skin color. Published data on skin reflectance were collected for 98 male samples from eight geographic regions: sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, Europe, West Asia, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Australasia, and the New World. Regional differences in local within-population diversity were examined using two measures of variability: the sample variance and the sample coefficient of variation. For both measures, the average level of within-population diversity is higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in other geographic regions. This difference persists even after adjusting for a correlation between within-population diversity and distance from the equator. Though affected by natural selection, skin color variation shows the same pattern of higher African diversity as found with other traits."
-- Relethford JH.(2000). Human skin color diversity is highest in sub-Saharan African populations. Hum Biol. 2000 Oct;72(5):773-80.)
---Afrocentric critic Brace debunks "Caucasoid race mix" claims for Horn of Africa peoples and notes tropically adapted peoples are usually dark-skinned and with limb elongation.
"In this regard it is interesting to note that limb proportions of Predynastic Naqada people in Upper Egypt are reported to be "Super-Negroid," meaning that the distal segments are elongated in the fashion of tropical Africans.....skin color intensification and distal limb elongation are apparent wherever people have been long-term residents of the tropics."
"An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain face form in the Horn of Africa as the result of admixture from hypothetical “wandering Caucasoids,” (Adams, 1967, 1979; MacGaffey, 1966; Seligman, 1913, 1915, 1934), but that explanation founders on the paradox of why that supposedly potent “Caucasoid” people contributed a dominant quantity of genes for nose and face form but none for skin color or limb proportions. It makes far better sense to regard the adaptively significant features seen in the Horn of Africa as solely an in situ response on the part of separate adaptive traits to the selective forces present in the hot dry tropics of eastern Africa. From the observation that 12,000 years was not a long enough period of time to produce any noticeable variation in pigment by latitude in the New World and that 50,000 years has been barely long enough to produce the beginnings of a gradation in Australia (Brace, 1993a), one would have to argue that the inhabitants of the Upper Nile and the East Horn of Africa have been equatorial for many tens of thousands of years."
(-- C.L. Brace, 1993. Clines and clusters..")
------- Modern studies show diversity in how people look is heavily based on distance from sub-Saharan Africa, not merely climate. In genetically diverse Africa, broad-nosed people live on the cool or cold mountain slopes of East Africa or the hot, dry Sahara, and narrow-nosed peoples like many Fulani like in the wet tropics of West Africa. Yellowish-skinned San tribes live in the hot zones of Southern Africa.
"The relative importance of ancient demography and climate in determining worldwide patterns of human within-population phenotypic diversity is still open to debate. Several morphometric traits have been argued to be under selection by climatic factors, but it is unclear whether climate affects the global decline in morphological diversity with increasing geographical distance from sub-Saharan Africa. Using a large database of male and female skull measurements, we apply an explicit framework to quantify the relative role of climate and distance from Africa. We show that distance from sub-Saharan Africa is the sole determinant of human within-population phenotypic diversity, while climate plays no role. By selecting the most informative set of traits, it was possible to explain over half of the worldwide variation in phenotypic diversity. These results mirror those previously obtained for genetic markers and show that ‘bones and molecules’ are in perfect agreement for humans." (Distance from Africa, not climate, explains within-population phenotypic diversity in humans. (2008) by: Lia Betti, François Balloux, William Amos, Tsunehiko Hanihara, Andrea Manica, Proceedings B: Biological Sciences, 2008/12/02)
-------Early West Asians looked like Africans. Thus any migrants from West Asia to Africa in thos period would be by people who look like Africans to begin with. Brace 2005 shows this as to Europeans. Hanihara 1996, demonstrates this below as to West Asians (i.e. 'Middle easterners'). quote:
"Distance analysis and factor analysis, based on Q-mode correlation coefficients, were applied to 23 craniofacial measurements in 1,802 recent and prehistoric crania from major geographical areas of the Old World. The major findings are as follows: 1) Australians show closer similarities to African populations than to Melanesians. 2) Recent Europeans align with East Asians, and early West Asians resemble Africans. 3) The Asian population complex with regional difference between northern and southern members is manifest. 4) Clinal variations of craniofacial features can be detected in the Afro-European region on the one hand, and Australasian and East Asian region on the other hand. 5) The craniofacial variations of major geographical groups are not necessarily consistent with their geographical distribution pattern. This may be a sign that the evolutionary divergence in craniofacial shape among recent populations of different geographical areas is of a highly limited degree. Taking all of these into account, a single origin for anatomically modern humans is the most parsimonious interpretation of the craniofacial variations presented in this study."
(Hanihara T. Comparison of craniofacial features of major human groups. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1996 Mar;99(3):389-412.)



LINKS

http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/dna-shows-egyptians-group-with-african.html

http://nilevalleypeoples.blogspot.com/2009/11/2009-study-finds-nubians-were.html

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Link to research papers and articles: (http://wysinger.homestead.com/keita.html)

Link to current African DNA research: (http://exploring-africa.blogspot.com/)

Google Search- other data http://knol.google.com/k/mainstream-academic-research/peopling-of-the-nile-valley/3q8x30897t2cs/2#

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