BrandonPilcher's Blog

I need to update this blog badly

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:54:00 -0400

I haven't done so in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, lately I've been in a drawing mood. I'm doing lots of ancient Egyptians and fantasy people now, though I may return to dinosaurs in a few weeks.

Are we heading for a fascist America?

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:32:00 -0400

Sara Robinson at Orcinus has written a post asserting that the conservative movement in America has taken on a nearly fascistic form. She cites a prominent scholar's analysis of how historical fascist movements evolve and compares it to today's conservative political developments.

Having read Orcinus for a while now, it has become very apparent to me that the far right has acted very unhinged ever since the possibility arose that Obama would become President. They've thrown many a childish insult at him: Muslim terrorist, black supremacist, socialist, etc. Some have even accused him of not being born in America even though he released a birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii. For me, however, the most damning example of conservatives showing their ugly side was when the government released a report discussing right-wing extremists. The conservatives immediately accused the government of slandering conservatives, even though the report's focus clearly was on far-right extremists, not mainstream conservatives. That conservatives should feel so uncomfortable about a report targeting extremists says to me that they somehow identify with the extremists.

Will the conservative movement eventually evolve into a fascist movement? I cannot say for sure, as I haven't watched conservatives' behavior as closely as the Orcinus bloggers have. Even if they do become fascistic, however, I see room for optimism. My prediction is that the conservative attacks will grow so childish and volatile that they will lose the respect of most right-minded Americans, including a large percentage of their support base. At least, I hope that becomes the case.

Don't always trust housewives about linguistic reconstructions

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:30:00 -0400

Man, I haven't posted for a long time on the subject of anthropology since my big Ancient Egypt essay.

If you've read that essay, you'd probably encountered the term "Afroasiatic", which denotes a language phylum that appears to have originated in Africa during the late Paleolithic. Well, there exist a handful of people who deny the phylum's African origin. One of these is a housewife by the name of Mathilda, who has a post on her blog "Mathilda's Anthropology" arguing for an Asian origin. She claims that proto-Afroasiatic has words for animals native to southwest Asia, not Africa. Unfortunately, she does not cite a source. I therefore decided to ask an actual linguist about whether proto-Afroasiatic does indeed have words for Asian animals. This is what the linguist, Christopher Ehert (who specializes in African languages) had to say in response to my inquiry:

Dear Mr. Pilcher,

There are absolutely no valid reconstructions of terms for specifically Asian animals back to the proto-Afroasiatic language. Note the adjective 'specifically.'

One book on Afroasiatic reconstruction by Orel and Stolbova includes a number of proposed root terms, some of which probably do reconstruct fairly far back in Afroasiatic language history, which in one branch of the family or another refer to a sheep or a goat,but which in other branches (often not noted by Orel and Stolbova) refer to African antelope species.

There are also a very few terms which always denote goats or sheep but which are suspect as or can be demonstrated to be loanwords that spread long after the family diverged into branches. They indicate the diffusion of the animals from Asia but not of people.

There is a valid old root word for 'cow', but cows were a wild animal of the Sahara, probably as far south as Eritrea, as well as the regions from Europe to India. The presence of a name for the cow is thus not diagnostic of an extra-African origin for the family. In any case the term does not go back to the very earliest stage, the proto-Afroasiatic period.

A single domestic animal, the donkey, does have a validly reconstructible Afroasiatic root word, but the donkey's wild area was Africa, not Asia, and the donkey was domesticated by Afroasiatic speakers in Africa.

So if there's no valid reconstruction of proto-Afroasiatic mentioning Asian animals out there, where is Mathilda getting her information? My suspicion is that she (pardon my language) pulled it out of her ass. Either that or she's relying on a discredited reconstruction. Whichever, it's odd that she does not cite the reconstruction she's using.

My latest art series

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:52:00 -0400

Right now, I'm drawing dinosaurs with colors like those of modern day animals. Currently, I have:

A T. rex based on a harpy eagle
A Triceratops based on an okapi
A Deinonychus based on a colobus monkey

Lots of Twilight fans are morons

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 21:24:00 -0400

At least if the transcripts of Twilight fan dialogue recorded in this article are genuine.

The Post-Racial Delusion

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:15:00 -0400

This is an essay I wrote for my English class the past spring. The essay discusses modern-day anti-black racism and discrimination. It got a pretty good grade---in fact I recall my teacher wanted a copy of it so she could use it as a model for future classes.

Ever since Barack Obama was considered a viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America, there has been a lot of babbling about the supposed “post-racial” era we have entered. Supposedly, now that a black man has run for office and won it, racism, that ancient evil that has plagued our country since its founding, is no longer a serious issue in America. Now, say the people who throw “post-racial” around, we can all come together and forget the racial lines that divided us in the past.

It certainly does seem that overt racism is less widespread in the current decade than in preceding ones. No longer do black people have to sit at the back of the bus. No longer do whites use “nigger” as if it were a household term. And rarely if ever do whites threaten blacks with violence if they stay in predominantly white communities after sundown, as was once common throughout the US (Loewen 2005).
While these facts are irrefutably evidence of some degree of progress in race relations over the last forty years, to conclude that we have entered a post-racial era, that we have completely rid ourselves of racism, is incorrect. Just because we don’t express our racism as openly as we once did does not mean we have shed our prejudices. In fact there is empirical evidence showing that racial prejudice is still widespread in America.

Consider, for instance, a survey taken in 2001 which measured how widely espoused certain anti-black stereotypes (e.g. laziness, aggressiveness, or preference for living on welfare as opposed to working) are among white Americans. The survey found that approximately sixty percent of white Americans admitted that they held at least one negative stereotype about blacks (Bobo 2004).

It is important to note, however, that surveys like the one just cited measure not so much how commonly prejudicial views are held as to how often people are willing to admit them when confronted by someone else. It is therefore possible that many of the poll’s respondents were lying about the anti-black stereotypes they held, which would make the poll’s results an underestimation of the degree of prejudice rampant among white Americans.

Fortunately, psychologists in recent years have invented special tests to determine the degree of prejudice held within people’s heads. A detailed explanation of these tests’ methodologies is beyond the scope of this paper, but basically what they do is measure how quickly people will associate certain words with certain images. For instance, test-takers take less time to associate negative words with images of insects than they do positive words, because of an anti-insect bias within our culture.

These very tests find that almost ninety percent of white test-takers more quickly associate negative words with photos of black people than positive words, and more quickly associate positive words with photos of white people than negative words (Vedantam 2005). The implication here is that most white Americans more naturally have negative than positive thoughts about their black compatriots.

Readers at this point may ask why this is relevant. Even if so many white people still hold prejudices and stereotypes in their subconsciousness, they may claim, such whites may not necessarily express those prejudices openly or discriminate against blacks. While it is true that not everyone with bigoted thoughts shows their bigotry, there is still evidence that many whites do let their anti-black bias affect their treatment of blacks. To name only a few pieces of this evidence:

• One study found that, adjusting for qualifications and skills, black job applicants without criminal records were less likely to be called back by an employer than white applicants with a criminal record (Prager 2003).

• Another study, this time on housing discrimination, found that blacks are 60 percent more likely to have a mortgage rejected than whites, even after adjusting for 38 different factors that could affect the likelihood of having a mortgage rejected (Turner and Skidmore 1999).

• Black men with college degrees earn 20-25 percent less than comparable white men of the same age (Carnoy 1994).

• Doctors presented with identical patient histories and symptoms are more likely to refer white patients to advanced medical treatment than black patients (Schwartz et al. 1999).

• Policemen are more than twice as likely to search vehicles driven by black people than white people even though whites are more than twice as likely to be found in possession of illegal contraband. Blacks also constitute thirty-four percent of arrests for violent crimes even though they only commit around twenty-eight percent of violent crimes. An even greater disparity is found with regards to drug-related arrests; although blacks only constitute thirteen percent of users and sixteen percent of dealers, they make up more than a third for all drug-related arrests (Wise 2005).

Some readers, despite being confronted with this evidence, may ask, if racism and discrimination are really so prevalent in America, what can explain the success of certain black individuals, such as Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, or Barack Obama, in American society? My answer to this question is that these blacks achieved their success in spite of our racial discrimination. They had enough gumption, or perhaps luck, to overcome the barriers that stood in their way. That they ultimately got ahead does not mean that those barriers do not exist.

Some may also wonder what can be done to solve the racial disparities that still exist. Obviously, admonishing white people for being racist and discriminating, the tactic favored by the politically correct in the last four decades, has not destroyed the disparities; it has only made the discriminatory less honest about their prejudice.

A better solution would be some sort of affirmative action program. Affirmative action is admittedly not too popular with whites, thanks to its demonization by conservative rhetoricians as “reverse discrimination”, but what else could protect blacks from “traditional” discrimination but a program that guarantees that they would have adequate access to good jobs, good health care, good housing, etc? Without affirmative action working in their favor, blacks will still suffer from prevalent anti-black bias.

Before we can come up with any effective solution to the problem of racism, however, we must acknowledge that we have a problem to begin with. As much as we lie to ourselves about it, we do not live in a post-racial America.

Works Cited

Bobo, Lawrence. "Inequalities That Endure? Racial Ideology, American Politics, and the Peculiar Role of the Social Sciences." The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity. Ed. Maria Krysan and Amanda Lewis. N.p.: Russel Sage Foundation, 2004. 19-20.

Carnoy, Martin. Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Loewen, James W. Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. N.p.: New Press, 2005.

Pager, Devah. "The Mark of a Criminal Record." American Journal of Sociology 108.5 (2003): 937-975.

Schwartz, Lisa M., Steven Woloshin, and H. Gilbert Welch. "Misunderstandings about the Effects of Race and Sex on Physicians' Referrals for Cardiac Catheterization." New England Journal of Medicine 341 (1999): 279-83.

Turner, Margery Austin, and Felicity Skidmore. "Mortgage Lending Discrimination: A Review of Existing Evidence." Urban Institute Press (June 1999).

Vedantam, Shankar. "See No Bias." Washington Post 23 Jan. 2005: W12.

Wise, Tim. "Excuses, Excuses: How the Right Rationalizes Racial Inequality in America (Part Two: Criminal Justice)." The Black Commentator 19 May 2005. .

Muslim fundies for the lose

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:13:00 -0400

They've jailed a woman in Sudan and threatened her with lashes for the crime of wearing pants.

I normally consider myself a liberal, pro-multicultural person, but I have had it with the Muslim fundamentalists. They're a bunch of violent, misogynistic barbarians who get their morality from some millennium-old book. Their kind should have disappeared centuries ago.

I also happen to hate Christian fundies, Jewish fundies, Hindu fundies, Buddhist fundies...all kinds of fundies. They are nothing but obstacles to social progress.

Interesting book

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:22:00 -0400

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

The book's argument is that more egalitarian societies (i.e. societies with a smaller income gap between the rich and the poor) are healthier and suffer fewer social problems (crime, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, etc.) than more unequal societies such as Great Britain and the USA. Judging from the reviews, it seems to have very compelling evidence. I should look for it next time I visit a bookstore.

Twilight comic book coming out

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:59:00 -0400

As if novels and movies weren't enough, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight franchise now has a comic book adaptation coming out.

The Twilight books strike me as unusual material to be adapted into the comic book format. Comic books ("graphic novels" if you want to be pretentious about it) are usually pretty action-packed. Twilight is not exactly saturated with action, it's mostly romance and drama. It's a pretty boring story (which is one reason why I am at a loss to explain why it is so damned popular with young women). What's the point of making Twilight into a comic book if it doesn't have a lot of visually spectacular stuff going on that would warrant pictures?

Beware of elderly Harvard scholars

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:33:00 -0400

http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/07/21/racism-in-cambridge-harvard-prof-gates-arrested/

^ While I will admit that the scholar in question could have saved himself a lot of trouble by not being so difficult with the police, it's a little weird that the cops would think an old professional like him would be suspicious. Aren't young guys usually the ones who commit the kind of crime he was accused of?

I may have stopped failing in life

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:58:00 -0400

I just found the Facebook profile of this really hot black girl named La'Rhonda who goes to my college. Her profile says she's single. I added her as a friend and hope she'll add me. If all goes as planned, I may have acquired my first girlfriend!

Dinosaurs may have weighed less than we thought

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:45:00 -0400

From ScienceDaily

Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized.

Widely cited estimates for the mass of Apatosaurus louisae, one of the largest of the dinosaurs, may be double that of its actual mass (38 tonnes vs. 18 tonnes).

"Paleontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large animals in extinct lineages. By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed and that the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed" says Gary Packard from Colorado State University.

The African Origin of Ancient Egyptian Civilization

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:14:00 -0400

Few bygone civilizations fascinate us as much as that of the ancient Egyptians. The kingdom along the Nile River has been the subject of countless books, magazine articles, movies, and television shows and documentaries. There is even a hotel in Las Vegas with an ancient Egyptian theme! Museums all over the world dedicate entire galleries to excavated Egyptian artifacts, and Egypt itself receives millions of tourists flocking to photograph its ruins each year.

There are many reasons behind our infatuation with ancient Egypt. One is its sheer antiquity. Egypt is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, blossoming at a time when most of the rest of the world (including the ancestors of the Greeks, Chinese, and Maya) had yet to build anything more impressive than stick huts. Another reason is that we are amazed by the Egyptians’ achievements: their colossal temples and tombs, their uncannily well-preserved mummies, their art, and their glittering jewelry. A third reason is that despite more than two centuries of study by Egyptologists, much about ancient Egypt still remains mysterious. Many questions about the Egyptians still have their answers buried by the sands of time. For instance, how were the pyramids built? What was responsible for the early death of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun? And how did the Egyptians influence later civilizations such as Greece and Rome?

However, the most contentious question concerning ancient Egypt, the one that has inspired the most emotionally charged arguments, concerns their ethnic identity. Egypt lies on the African continent, specifically in its northeastern region, yet traditionally historians have classified it as part of the “Near Eastern” (alongside Sumer, Babylon, and Israel) or “Mediterranean” (alongside Greece and Rome) cultural blocs. Whenever anyone makes a movie or television show set in Egypt, white rather than black actors are chosen to play the Egyptians; for instance, Yul Brynner as the pharaoh Rameses in C.B. Demille’s The Ten Commandments, or Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep in The Mummy. The implication here is that despite being in Africa, ancient Egypt was really a white civilization of European or Asian origin rather than being truly African.

This view is wrong. The best evidence we have suggests that the civilization of ancient Egypt was established in the main by indigenous Africans. This is not to say that there was no influence, biological or cultural, from Asia or Europe on Egypt, but any such influence was slight. The ancient Egyptians, biologically and culturally, were fundamentally Africans.

Biologically African

Before we begin, we need to clarify on what it means to be biologically African. Most people think they know what African (or “Negroid”) features look like: for instance, broad noses and thick lips. While many Africans do have those features, there are many who do not. According to the physical anthropologist Jean Hiernaux in his 1975 book The People of Africa (Hiernaux 1975):

In sub-Saharan Africa, many anthropological characters show a wide range of population means or frequencies. In some of them, the whole world range is covered in the sub-continent. Here live the shortest and the tallest human populations, the one with the highest and the one with the lowest nose, the one with the thickest and the one with the thinnest lips in the world. In this area, the range of the average nose widths covers 92 per cent of the world range: only a narrow range of extremely low means are absent from the African record.

Narrower noses and thinner lips, so-called “Caucasian” features, are particularly common in northeastern African countries not far from Egypt, such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and northern Sudan. Why this is so remains unknown, although some anthropologists have noted a correlation between nose width in humans and air moisture, with narrower noses predominating among peoples living in drier climates. The point is that native African facial features are diverse and are not limited to the stereotypical broad-nosed, full-lipped “Negroid” type.

With that in mind, how can we tell whether the Egyptians’ skeletal structure was more African or European/Asian?

One way physical anthropologists can tell how closely related certain populations are is by studying the overall shape of their skulls, because skull shape varies from population to population. Populations with the most similar-looking skulls are considered more closely related.

Analyzed this way, ancient Egyptian skulls in general turn out to be more similar to skulls from northeastern African countries such as Ethiopia or northern Sudan than to European or Asian skulls (Kemp 2005). Sub-Saharan traits are especially strong in skulls from southern Egypt (also known as Upper Egypt) (Keita 1990, 2005), although they are less pronounced in northern Egyptian (or Lower Egyptian) skulls.
However, there is some evidence implying that Egyptians did eventually mix with Asians and Europeans. Comparison of Egyptian skulls across time shows continuity for most of Egyptian history, but there is a degree of change in later periods, when Egypt experienced increased infiltration from foreigners (Zakrzewski 2004). By then, however, Egyptian civilization was in decline. Any foreign admixture during Egypt’s golden years was small in scale.

Ancient Egyptians also appear to be more closely related to Africans than to Europeans or Asians when we take into account the shape of their skeletons beyond their skulls. Particularly important here is the length of the limbs. People from Africa have proportionately longer limbs than people from Europe or Asia, because longer limbs more easily dissipate heat. Ancient Egyptians’ limb proportions are more similar to those of Africans than Europeans or Asians (Zakrzewski 2003). One study found the Egyptians’ limbs to be even longer than those of most Africans, calling them “super-Negroid”!

Another line of evidence concerns hair morphology. One might think that all one has to do to tell what hair texture the ancient Egyptians had is to simply look at their mummies, but this can be misleading. Analysis of hair from Egyptian mummies shows that the proteins in it have been damaged, possibly by chemicals used in the mummification process (Bertrand 2003). Damage to hair’s chemical structure can change texture. Fortunately, there is a more reliable way to tell the original texture of a hair is by measuring the cross-section with a special instrument called a trichometer. Using this, one can get the minimum and maximum diameter of a hair. Then, one divides the minimum measurement by the maximum and multiplies the product by a hundred, producing an index.

Populations vary in the indices of their hairs’ cross-section. Curly-haired populations, such as Africans and Melanesians, have indices between 55 and 70. On the other hand, straight-haired populations, such as Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans, have indices above 70.

When ancient Egyptian hair samples are subjected to trichometer measurements, they typically turn out indices between 35 and 66.5. This indicates that most ancient Egyptians had naturally curly hair, as do most Africans (M’Bantu and Supia 2001). However, it must be noted that Egyptians usually shaved their heads to rid themselves of hair lice and wore wigs most of the time (often the hair used to make the wigs was imported from surrounding nations). Thus ancient Egyptian artwork does not usually depict Egyptians with their natural hair.

Finally, there is the question of the Egyptians’ skin color. You might think that looking at Egyptian paintings would easily answer this, but the problem is that Egyptian art was symbolic rather than realistic. Characters in Egyptian murals may be brown, yellow, gold, green, white, or black depending on the symbolism. The most common convention in earlier Egyptian art is to paint men brown and women yellow, but in later dynasties both sexes are portrayed as brown-skinned. Whatever caused this change in convention remains a mystery, but the point is that Egyptian art is not meant to accurately portray its subjects’ skin tones.

If we wanted to more accurately determine the skin color of the ancient Egyptians, we should look at the skin cells in their mummies and take note of the amount of melanin, the pigment that determines skin tone. One study (Mekota and Vermehren 2005) did just that when analyzing Egyptian mummies’ soft tissue. They described the skin cells as being “pack with melanin, as expected for specimens of Negroid [African] origin.” Unfortunately, they did not go into depth or specify exactly how much melanin was in the skin cells, but by choosing the word “Negroid”, they implied that the ancient Egyptians’ skin tones were within the range we call “black”.

In conclusion, the ancient Egyptians were, by and large, not white people like Yul Brynner or Arnold Vosloo. In fact, if we saw them today, we would probably call them “black”.

Physical anthropology is not the only discipline which provides evidence for the African origin of ancient Egypt. Archaeology also shows us that ancient Egyptian civilization was fundamentally rooted in Africa as well.

Archaeologically African

The oldest evidence of an organized society in Egypt comes from the country’s far south, in a basin called Nabta Playa out in the Sahara Desert. In this barren environment, archaeologists have found the remains of villages with huts built in straight rows, wells, stone-roofed chambers with the bones of dead cattle (most likely sacrificed) buried within, and even a circle of megaliths similar to England’s Stonehenge. These ruins date back to between the 10th and 7th millennia BC. Back then, the Sahara was grassland, and there was a lake within the basin, allowing people to live there (Wendorf and Schild 1998).

The Nabta Playa proto-civilization may represent the earliest stage of Egyptian civilization. One reason to think so is the evidence for cattle sacrifice there. Cattle sacrifice was also practiced by ancient Egyptians; as many as 16,000 cattle were sacrificed in one year to the god Amun during the reign of pharaoh Rameses III (Dollinger 2009). Perhaps this Egyptian tradition had its roots in Nabta Playa.

Around 5,500 years ago, the Sahara dried up, forcing the people living there into Egypt’s Nile Valley, where they adopted farming. Soon, two early civilizations developed, one in northern Egypt and another in southern Egypt. Of these two cultures, it was the southern Egyptians who developed what we think of as ancient Egyptian civilization. It is in southern Egypt that we first find evidence of social and economic differentiation among people, indicating the establishment of a social hierarchy similar to that of later Egyptian culture. The institution of the pharaoh also appears to be southern in origin; the oldest artifact with pharaonic iconography on it is an incense burner found in Qustul, just north of the modern Egypt/Sudan border. In time, the culture of Upper Egypt dominated that of Lower Egypt and even conquered it by 3100 BC, making Egypt a single country for the first time in history (Bard 1994).

The genesis of ancient Egyptian culture in the country’s south is inconsistent with any argument that Egyptian civilization is part of the “Near Eastern” or “Mediterranean” cultural bloc. If civilization in Egypt was indeed an import from Asia, we would expect the north to dominate and conquer the south. Instead, the reverse was the case, which shows that Egyptian culture was essentially an indigenous---and therefore African---development.

Linguistically African

The Ancient Egyptian language is classified by most linguists as one of a phylum of languages called “Afroasiatic” or “Afrasian”. This language phylum is believed to have originated in the Horn of Africa (the region encompassing Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea) between 15,000 and 13,000 BC and spread to Egypt between 12,000 and 10,000 BC (Ehert 1996). Other examples of Afrasian languages include Hausa (spoken in Nigeria), Tuareg (spoken throughout the southern Sahara), and Oromo (spoken in Ethiopia).

Culturally African

Before I begin, I will admit that Africans do not belong to a single culture. In fact African cultures have always been diverse. Among the different types of cultures that have developed in Africa are urban civilizations, rural chiefdoms, pastoralist tribes, and hunter-gatherer bands. Broad generalizations about African cultures are therefore difficult to make.

With that said, the ancient Egyptians did share many customs with several other societies in Africa. Among these customs:

• Divine Kingship: Unlike in Mesopotamia, where the king was an intermediary between the gods and the mortal population, in Egypt the pharaoh was a god who had the power to make the Nile flood and inundate farmers’ fields. In other African societies, the king is also thought to be a god with control over the weather; his duty is to make it rain.
• Circumcision: In both ancient Egypt and some African societies, children would be circumcised as a coming-of-age rite.
• Animal Worship: Egyptians thought that certain animals were living representations of their gods. For instance, cats represented the goddess Bast, cattle the goddess Hathor or the god Apis, and crocodiles the god Sobek. Many African societies also practice this type of animal worship.
• Ancestor Worship/Veneration: The Egyptians believed in honoring their deceased ancestors and would hold feasts in their honor. Ancestor veneration is also widespread in the rest of Africa.
• Voodoo: The Egyptians believed that if you made an image of your enemies and damaged it, the enemies would be hurt as well. A similar belief is found in the “voodoo” religions of Africa.

The above is far from a complete list of shared cultural practices between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa, but it should suffice to show that the Egyptians had at least a little in common with other African peoples.

Why is Egypt not recognized as African?

The ancient Egyptians were Africans. Their biology, language, and culture all evolved within Africa, not in Asia or Europe. Yet most people do not realize this and continue to think of Egypt as part of the “Near East” or “Mediterranean”.

This reason for this should be obvious: it is a legacy of racism. When Westerners began studying the remains of ancient Egypt in the 18th and 19th centuries, they could not admit that native Africans built this civilization. After all, many Western economies depended on the subjugation and exploitation of Africans, whether as slaves or colonial subjects. The justification for this was that Africans were dim-witted savages that needed to be dominated by the white man. If one of the world’s earliest and most influential civilizations was built by Africans, that justification for exploitation would be refuted. Therefore, early Egyptologists argued that the Egyptians were really invaders from Europe or Asia rather than native Africans.

Fortunately, modern science has marched on since those prejudiced beginnings, and has shown us that the ancient Egyptians were indeed of African origin. Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the evidence connecting Egypt to the rest of Africa, so popular culture continues to depict it as non-African.

Why Egypt’s Africanity must be recognized

Acknowledging the African roots of ancient Egypt is important for two reasons. The first reason is that it will make our reconstructions of ancient Egypt more accurate. When recreating the past we must strive to be as accurate as possible. Failure to be accurate would lead to the propagation of misconceptions that distort our view of the past.

The second reason is that denying Egypt its Africanity in spite of the facts does a disservice to people of African descent. It denies them their heritage and sends the message that people of their stock could not have accomplished a civilization as powerful or influential as Egypt. It therefore perpetuates racism against Africans and people with African ancestry.

If we are to challenge racism and come together as one species, we must admit the fact that people of all skin tones have contributed to human development throughout history. We should stop pretending that only the light-skinned peoples of Europe and Asia matter in history. To continue to do so is to perpetuate a harmful lie.

It is time to accept the truth. One of the world’s oldest civilizations, one which help lay the foundations for our own modern civilization, was established by Africans.

Works Cited

Bard, Kathryn A. "The Egyptian Predynastic: A Review of the Evidence." Journal of Field Archaeology 21.3 (1994): 265-288.

Bertrand, L., et al. "Microbeam synchrotron imaging of hairs from Ancient Egyptian mummies." Journal of Synchroton Radiation (2003).

Dollinger, Andre. "Farmed and Domesticated Animals." An introduction to the history and culture of Pharaonic Egypt. 24 June 2009

Ehert, Christopher. "Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture." Egypt in Africa. Comp. Theodore Celenko. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indi¬ana University Press, 1996. 25-27.

Hiernaux, Jean. The People of Africa. N.p.: Encore Editions, 1975.

Keita, S.O.Y. "Early Nile Valley Farmers, From El-Badari, Aboriginals or ‘European’ Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data." Journal of Black Studies 36.2 (2005): 191-208.

Keita, S.O.Y. "Studies of Ancient Crania from Northern Africa." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 83 (1990): 35-48.

Kemp, Barry J. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. 1989. 2nd ed. N.p.: Routledge, 2005. 53.

M'bantu, Anu, and Fari Supia. "Egyptology: Hanging in the Hair." Ancient Africa's Black Kingdoms. Ed. Myra Wysinger. 8 July 2001. 24 June 2009 .

Mekota, A.M., and M. Vermehren. "Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft tissues." Biotechnic & Histochemistry 80.1 (2005): 7-13.
Robins, G., and C.C.D. Shute. "Predynastic Egyptian stature and physical proportions." Human Evolution 1 (1986): 313-324.

Wendorf, Fred, and Romuald Schild. "Late Neolithic megalithic structures at Nabta Playa (Sahara), southwestern Egypt." The Comparative Archaeology Web. Mar. 1998. 24 June 2009 .

Zakrzewski, Sonia R. "Intra-population and temporal variation in ancient Egyptian crania." Program of the Seventy-Third Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The Hyatt Regency Hotel, Tampa, FL. 14 Apr. 2004.

Zakrzewski, Sonia R. "Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (2003): 219-229.

On equal treatment

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:04:00 -0400

“Equality” is among Americans’ favorite buzzwords, along with “freedom” and “liberty”. The Founding Fathers themselves said that all men are created equal. Americans, particularly socioeconomically privileged white Americans, like to think of their country as one of equal opportunity, one where any people regardless of whatever category they fit into can be financially successful (whether or not that is actually the case is debatable). Whenever we perceive inequality, we get riled up and protest it.

This is normally a good thing. Fairness is a virtue. Yet there are times when the word “equal” has been used wrongly. In these circumstances, people argue for treating things as equal when they really are not equal.

Take the question of whether creationism (“intelligent design” in this age of euphemisms) should be taught in science classes as a competing hypothesis to the theory of evolution. Some people say that creationism and the theory of evolution should receive “equal treatment” in the classroom. It’s only fair, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, it isn’t. The theory of evolution is a theory backed up by evidence from multiple scientific disciplines, such as genetics, biology, and paleontology. Creationism is a bunch of old myths told by pre-scientific people to explain natural phenomena they didn’t understand. The scientific evidence does not support, and in fact usually contradicts, the claims of creationism. To claim that that creationism and the theory of evolution (or any other modern theory or law that contradicts creationism) should be treated equally is not fair, because they are not equally valid.

Another example of people wrongfully claiming for equal treatment concerns ethnic preferences in hiring. Suppose, for instance, you have two job applicants. Their qualifications for the job are identical, but one comes from a socially stigmatized ethnic group (e.g. blacks or Native Americans), whereas the other comes from a socially dominant ethnic group (e.g. whites). Some people claim that there should be no preference in choosing which applicant gets hired. This is understandable, but realize that the two applicants are not on equal footing here. Most likely the applicant from the stigmatized group has had a harder time looking for a job than his competitor, because of society’s stigma against him. Therefore, I would give the job to the applicant from the stigmatized group, because he has suffered more than the applicant from the socially dominant group. Race has nothing to do with it; if white people were socially stigmatized and blacks and Native Americans were socially dominant, I would favor a white applicant over an equally qualified black or Native American applicant. Would it be unequal treatment? Yes. But it is fair. It would be unfair to treat the two applicants as if they stood on equal ground when they don’t.

My point is that fairness does not always mean treating two things as if they were the same. It is unfair to assume that a scientifically supported theory is only as valid as obsolete mythology. It is unfair to assume that an oppressed person is only as deserving of compassion as a privileged person. Real fairness is when you treat things as they should be treated, not when you always treat things as if they were equal.

So Michael Jackson is dead

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:30:00 -0400

I'll admit that although I liked his song "Remember the Time" (as well as the music video for it, which you can find on Youtube), I was never crazy about him. In fact he sorta weirded me out. He looked so much like a white woman that it's difficult to believe that he was born a black boy. Plus there's his irresponsible spending habits and possible pedophilia. Still, RIP MJ.

The hot girls at my college are all already taken

Tue, 05 May 2009 17:13:00 -0400

It seems that every time I attempt to ask an attractive woman out, they tell me they already have a boyfriend. I've done this with quite a number of women now, the latest example being today with a woman named Natasha.

I suppose I should have expected this to happen a lot, since hot girls are likely to be the first to be claimed.

I'll keep looking nonetheless.

Nigerian girls are hot

Tue, 05 May 2009 09:17:00 -0400

Everyone looks to Scandinavia or East Asia for hot women, yet as far as I'm concerned, neither can hold a candle to the Nigerians. Here's a small sampling of their best:

If Nigeria wasn't your usual post-colonial, corruption-ridden Third World dunghole, I might actually vacation there.

Two cents on the Wolverine movie

Sat, 02 May 2009 21:28:00 -0400

It was pretty fucking awesome, especially the action scenes. Excellent choreography there. Man, I'd love to have wristblades like Wolverine's.

Limb proportions of various peoples

Sat, 02 May 2009 12:03:00 -0400

Remember my earlier post about how the proportional length of the limbs various across human populations?

Below is a link to a graph showing how populations across the world differ in proportional limb lengths. Populations position closer to the upper right corner of the graph have proportionally longer limbs as an adaptation to life in the tropics, while those in the lower left corner have stockier limbs and are therefore more cold-adapted. I've added some colors onto the graph to indicate the major clusters: green represents tropically adapted populations, blue represents cold-adapted populations, and red represents subtropical populations with intermediate limb lengths.

Link

I find two things from the graph that stand out:

* African-Americans can trace their recent African heritage to tropical western Africa, yet they're slightly distant from the tropically-adapted populations on the graph. Could this result be because of high levels of European admixture?
* The Egyptian sample (which dates back to ancient times) lies closest to tropically-adapted populations such as Melanesians and African pygmies. This may seem a strange result, because Egypt is not tropical. One would expect Egyptians to lie closer to the San and Arizonan Native Americans (the subtropical "red" group), not tropical populations. The only explanation I can think of for this is that the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians migrated to North Africa from a more tropical location to the south (I'm guessing either the Horn of Africa or the Sudan) relatively recently.

SOURCE: Trinkhaus, E. (1981) Neanderthal limb proportions and cold adaptation, in C.B. Stringer (ed) Aspects of Human Evolution

On the nature of regional variation in the human gene pool

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:25:00 -0400

"Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents" by Serre & Paabo, 2004

Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous
among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been
interpreted as genetic support for “races.” A recent study in which >350
microsatellites were studied in a global sample of humans showed that they could
be grouped according to their continental origin, and this was widely
interpreted as evidence for a discrete distribution of human genetic diversity.
Here, we investigate how study design can influence such conclusions. Our
results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the
globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that
extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore,
there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between
different continents or “races.”

In other words, instead of being divided into separate, homogeneous clusters (the popular notion of biological "race"), human genetic variation blends from region to region. People in one region are genetically closest to those immediately next to them, regardless of whatever "race" to which either population is assigned. For instance, although Southeast Asians are popularly classified as "Mongoloid" along with the likes of the Japanese, they would more likely have had gene flow with geographically closer "Australoid" populations like Papua New Guineans than with distant Northeast Asians.

In the biological sense, if not the social sense, "race" is an outdated concept.

Random Prehistoric Organism of the Week: Homo rhodesiensis

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:14:00 -0400

Almost everyone by now should have heard of the Neanderthals, those stocky, brow-ridged people who lived in Europe between 130,000 and 22,000 years ago until they mysteriously vanished some time after anatomically modern humans migrated into the subcontinent. By contrast, very few outside the paleoanthropological community have heard of another archaic human species who was also replaced by our own kind: Homo rhodesiensis.

Initially discovered in 1921 by Sir Arthur Smith Woodward in the British colonial state of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Homo rhodesiensis has since also been found at various sites in southern, eastern, and northern Africa. Its remains have been dated between 300,000 and 125,000 years old.

Honestly, I couldn't find a horrible lot of information about this species far beyond what I typed above. It apparently hasn't intrigued paleoanthropologists as much as the famous Neanderthals. That's unfortunate and ironic, because Homo rhodesiensis is probably a better candidate for an ancestor of our own species, Homo sapiens, than are the Neanderthals (who have long been known to have not been our ancestors). I think this because of the hominims' geographic distribution; Neanderthals lived mostly in Europe and Southwest Asia, whereas H. rhodesiensis lived in Africa, the same place where Homo sapiens originated. It's likely that we are more closely related to a fellow African species like H. rhodesiensis than to Neanderthals who lived far away from our species' origin point.

Why, then, are Neanderthals so popular while H. rhodesiensis remains understudied? Do we have a larger collection of Neanderthal than H. rhodesiensis remains? Or could it be because a European species like the Neanderthals attracts more attention from Eurocentric scientists than the African H. rhodesiensis? Whatever the reason, I think it's horribly unfair.

Black in North Africa

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:50:00 -0400

A Tuareg Berber from North Africa

Although some people use "African" as if it were a synonym with "black", there's also a widespread belief that black people in Africa are not evenly distributed across the continent, but rather are concentrated in the southern two thirds called "sub-Saharan Africa". Africa's arid northern third, on the other hand, supposedly belongs to light-skinned "Caucasians" related to Southwest Asians and southern Europeans (Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, etc.).

This common division of African peoples has a grain in irrefutable fact: people in North Africa have experienced significantly more gene flow and cultural interaction with Southwest Asian and Europeans than have their sub-Saharan neighbors. This should not surprise us, since out of all regions in Africa, North Africa is the closest geographically to Eurasia. Nonetheless, there is evidence from physical anthropology that the conventional division of Africans into "white" North Africans and "black" sub-Saharan Africans is too simplistic.

In 1990, Dr. Shormaka Omar Keita took skulls from pre-Islamic North Africa (including both Northwest Africans, or Maghrebians, and Egyptians) and compared them to skulls from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. His results may surprise a lot of people used to thinking of North Africans as "Caucasians", for North Africans turned out to be a more diverse lot:

* Ancient people from Northwest Africa and northern Egypt generally had skull features in between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Some had more European-type skulls, others more sub-Saharan-esque, but the general trend was an intermediate one.

* Ancient people from southern Egypt generally had skulls more like those of northern Sudanese and sub-Saharan Africans.

These results shouldn't stun too us too much if we think critically about them. North Africa, after all, is geographically between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, so it makes sense for North Africans to lay genetically and physiologically between Europeans and sub-Saharans. Nonetheless, the reader may be curious as to how black people from sub-Saharan Africa would have gotten across the bleak Sahara Desert to mix with North Africans.

Well, first of all, there's a river going through the Sahara, the famous Nile, along which the civilizations of Egypt and Nubia sprang. The Nile originates in sub-Saharan Africa, so it's perfectly plausible that sub-Saharan Africans could have migrated downriver to mingle with North Africans. There is also the fact that the Sahara was not always a desert; from 12,000 BC to 2,500 BC it was a grassland not unlike the Serengeti today. Perhaps the "black" element in North Africa came during that time.

The reader may also be curious as to what a person with a skull "intermediate" between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans would look like. My guess is that such a person would look either like a "biracial" person today or like some peoples in the Horn of Africa today, who in general have thinner lips and narrower noses than other sub-Saharan Africans.

Two boys from Ethiopia, a country in the Horn of Africa

Before I conclude this post, I should point out that most of the skulls Keita analyzed came from ancient times. Since then, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic Vandals, Arabs, and Turks have all settled in North Africa, no doubt mingling with the locals. Therefore, it's possible that an analysis of North African skulls from a later date may show a stronger European/"Caucasian" tendency. I doubt any intermixing would have been significant enough to completely remove the "black" element from North Africa though.

Well, I got to get going to bed soon. It's past 11:00 pm as I type this.

T. Rex, Biting Champion of the Dinosaurs

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:12:00 -0400

Tyrannosaurus rex has always been my favorite animal, dinosaur or not. It was once considered the largest of the meat-eating dinosaurs, but that title now belongs to the fin-backed fish-eater Spinosaurus. Despite that, T. rex is still a pretty spectacular dinosaur in another respect: it had the deadliest, most powerful bite of any land predator.

"Maximum Bite Force and Prey Size of Tyrannosaurus rex and Their Relationships to the Inference of Feeding Behavior " by Mason B. Meers, 2003

The feeding behavior of the theropod dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex is
investigated through analysis of two variables that are critical to successful
predation, bite force and prey body mass, as they scale with the size of the
predator. These size-related variables have important deterministic effects on
the predator's feeding strategy, through their effects on lethal capacity and
choice of prey. Bite force data compiled for extant predators (crocodylians,
carnivorans, chelonians and squamates) are used to establish a relationship
between bite force and body mass among extant predators. These data are
used to estimate the maximum potential bite force of T. rex, which is between about 183,000 and 235,000 N for a bilateral bite. The relationship between maximum prey body mass and predator body mass among the same living vertebrates is used to infer the likely maximum size of prey taken by T. rex in the Late Cretaceous. This makes it possible to arrive at a more rigorous assessment of the role of T. rex as an active predator and/or scavenger than has hitherto been possible. The results of this analysis show that adult Triceratops horridus fall well within the size range of potential prey that are predicted to be available to a solitary, predaceous T. rex. This analysis establishes
boundary conditions for possible predator/prey relationships among other
dinosaurs, as well as between these two taxa.

183,000-235,000 newtons converts to approximately 41,140-52,830 lbs, an almost incredible number by any measure. This dude could kill almost anything with a single bite!

Another paper, ""Fused and vaulted nasals of tyrannosaurid dinosaurs: Implications for cranial strength and feeding mechanics" by Eric Snively et al., compares T. rex's jaw strength to those of other big, meat-eating dinosaurs like Allosaurus or Carcharodontosaurus. According to their results, T. rex's bite would have been much stronger and more lethal than that of similarly-sized or even larger meat-eaters. As far as jaw strength is concerned, T. rex is still the King of Dinosaurs!

Asteroid may not have been responsible for non-avian dinosaur's extinction after all

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:09:00 -0400

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427010803.htm

^ Proposes that really huge volcanic eruptions were responsible instead.

I'll be especially interested in hearing the scientific community's response to this.

Evidence of tropically adapted peoples in Neolithic Europe

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:56:00 -0400

Before I begin, let me point out to you one important physiological difference between people from cold climates (e.g. Europeans) and people from warm climates (e.g. Africans). People from colder climates tend to have shorter limbs than people from warm climates. This tendency, called Allen's rule, is because having shorter limbs helps to conserve heat, whereas having longer limbs helps dissipate it.

The reason I brought this out is because I found an interesting 2009 study I found discussing the limb lengths of Neolithic Europeans, titled "Population continuity, demic diffusion and Neolithic origins in central-southern Germany: The evidence from body proportions" by A. Gallagher et al:

The transition to agro-pastoralism in central Europe has been framed within
a dichotomy of "regional continuity" versus exogenous "demic diffusion".
While substantial genetic support exists for a model of demographic diffusion from an ancestral source in the Near East, archaeological data furnish weak support for
the "wave of advance" model. Nevertheless, archaeological evidence attests the
widespread introduction of an exogenous "package" comprising ceramics, cereals,
pulses and domesticated animals to central Europe at 5600calBCE. Body
proportions are under strong climatic selection and evince remarkable stability
within regional lineages. As such, they offer a viable and robust alternative to
cranio-facial data in assessing hypothesised continuity and replacement with the
transition to agro-pastoralism in central Europe. Humero-clavicular, brachial
and crural indices in a large sample (n=75) of Linienbandkeramik (LBK) [Early
Neolithic], Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age specimens from the middle
Elbe-Saale-Werra valley (MESV) were compared with Eurasian and African terminal Pleistocene, European Mesolithic and geographically disparate recent human specimens. Mesolithic Europeans display considerable variation in
humero-clavicular and brachial indices yet none approach the extreme
"hyper-polar" morphology of LBK humans from the MESV. In contrast, Late
Neolithic and Early Bronze Age peoples display elongated brachial and crural indices reminiscent of terminal Pleistocene and "tropically adapted" recent humans. These marked morphological changes likely reflect exogenous immigration during the terminal Fourth millennium cal BC. Population expansion and diffusion is a function of increased mobility and settlement dispersal
concomitant with significant technological and subsistence changes in later
Neolithic societies during the late fourth millennium cal BCE.

To summarize that big block of text, skeletons have been found in Europe dating back to the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age which have much longer limbs (more like those of tropical peoples) than those from the Early Neolithic ("LBK"), whose limbs by contrast are more cold-adapted ("hyper-polar"). This suggests that between the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, people from some more southerly location were migrating into Europe and mixing with the natives.

This finding sparks a number of questions. Who were these newcomers? Exactly where did they come from? And just what were they doing in Germany?

I wonder if this wave of migrants may have been the source for the African/Southwest genes in Greeks that I discussed earlier today.

Department of Homeland Security Report on Right-Wing Extremists

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:23:00 -0400

http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf

The report linked to above warns that the economic downturn and the election of the first President of color may spark a resurgence in right-wing extremists' activity, but reassures us that they haven't turned to attack planning...yet.

What's especially noteworthy isn't the report itself so much as how apeshit the conservatives have gone over it. Despite the report's clear language that it was dealing with extremists, mainstream conservatives apparently think it's an attack on them.

I can think of only one reason the conservatives would react with so much hostility to a report on extremists: they identify with them.

On the "racially" mixed heritage of the Greeks

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:20:00 -0400

Most people think of ancient Greece as the quintessential "Western civilization", the cradle of the European culture, ideas, and way of thinking. Greece did indeed influence later European civilization, but there is some evidence that suggests that, at least on the genetic level, the Greeks themselves weren't wholly Europeans.

Consider, for instance, Greek male paternal ancestry. According to a 2003 paper published by Mark Jobling, titled "The human Y chromosome: an evolutionary marker comes of age", almost 25% of Greek men carry genetic markers originating from sub-Saharan Africa, and another 25% carry markers from Southwest Asia. Below, an image taken from a map in the study:

The dark blue represents the presence of African markers, and the light green represents Southwest Asian markers; most of the rest is made up of indigenous European markers. What this means is that at some point in Greek history, men of African and Southwest Asian ancestry migrated into Greece and mixed with the native Greeks.

Another line of non-European ancestry in Greeks comes from studying certain genes known as HLA genes, which affect the immune system. A study on these genes conducted in 2006 by A. Hajjeji, titled “HLA genes in Southern Tunisians (Ghannouch area) and their relationship with other Mediterraneans” noted that the HLA genes of their Greek sample were more similar to those of sub-Saharan Africans than were those of other Mediterranean populations. They said in their abstract:

This present study confirms the relatedness of Greeks to Sub-Saharan
populations. This suggests that there was an admixture between the Greeks
and Sub-Saharans probably during Pharaonic period or after natural catastrophes
(dryness) occurred in Sahara.

Another study, "The origin of the sickle mutation in Greece; evidence from beta S globin gene cluster polymorphisms" by M. Boussiou et al in 1991, found that the infamous sickle-cell allele, an allele originating in sub-Saharan Africa, occurs in Greece as well.

There are many more studies finding evidence of non-European ancestry in Greeks; some can be found here.

Honestly, though, I'm not 100% sure when this non-European ancestry would have entered the Greek population. Some people have suggested that sub-Saharan slaves imported into Greece during the Ottoman period were responsible for the non-European element, while others trace the admixture to Neolithic farmers from Southwest Asia moving into Greece. It could be both. However, if it was indeed the Neolithic, then that would suggest that ancient Greece, the cradle of "Western" civilization, was not so "Western" after all.

On the evolution of light skin in Europeans and Southwest Asians

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:39:00 -0400

European skin turned pale only recently, gene suggests

^ Says that pale complexions in people of European descent appeared not much earlier than 12,000 years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age. Apparently, "white people" are a very recent development in human evolutionary history.

Some other evidence suggests that it is from Europeans that Southwest Asians ("Middle Easterners") and some North Africans get their relatively light complexions. From the 2006 paper "Genetic Evidence for the Convergent Evolution of Light Skin in Europeans and East Asians" by geneticist Rick Kittles (analyzed here):

The relatively high frequencies of the derived allele [the genetic allele
coding for light as opposed to dark skin] in Central Asian, Middle Eastern,
and North Africa seem likely to be due to recent gene flow with European
populations.

This answers the question posed in my previous blog post about why Southwest Asians have lighter skin than Africans; they've mixed with white people somewhere in the prehistoric past.

New dinosaur: Xiongguanlong, ancestor of T. Rex

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:23:00 -0400

Ancestor of T rex found in China

How Xiongguanlong may have looked

This finding is especially significant because it represents a transitional form between the earliest tyrannosaur ancestors (which for the most part were very small animals like Guanlong) and later, larger tyrannosaurids like Albertosaurus, Tarbosaurus, or Tyrannosaurus. One characteristic in which it is intermediate between the earlier tyrannosauroids and the big tyrannosaurids is its size; it's about as big as Jurassic Park's raptors.

What skin color were Ancient Egyptians?

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:39:00 -0400

Below, a link to a paper on Egyptian mummies dating between 1550 and 1080 BC:

Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft tissues

This sentence isn't found in the abstract, but comes from deep within the paper:

The basal epithelial cells were packed with melanin as expected for specimens of
Negroid origin.

In layman's words, this means that the amount of melanin (that's the pigment that determines skin color) found in the mummies' skin cells was similar to that of "Negroid" peoples---that is, people from Africa's tropical regions, people traditionally called "black".

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, they don't specify exactly how much melanin these mummies had beyond saying that it is within the tropical African range. "Black" Africans come in several skin tones; some are really dark, as in almost ebony-black, whereas others are of a lighter, more chocolatey color. I'm leaning towards the Egyptians having the latter shade, as it's closer to how they painted themselves, as you can see in the image reproduced above (their southern neighbors in Nubia, on the other hand, were often painted jet black).

That said, it makes sense for Ancient Egyptians to have had dark skin like those of tropical Africans. Egypt, though not in the tropics, still receives a relatively large amount of ultraviolet rays, so the people who would have migrated to Egypt from eastern sub-Saharan Africa (the cradle of humankind, remember) would have still needed a lot of protection from sunburn and therefore would have retained most of their melanin.

There is still the question of why some people living in latitudes not far removed from Egypt's, such as Southwest Asians and some Northwest Africans, have lighter skin, but I'll get to that in a later post.