Origins of the First Europeans

➡ The Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old human skeleton found in England, is considered one of the first modern Britons. In 2018, scientists claimed that DNA tests showed he had black skin and blue eyes, but this was later disputed. The tests also suggested that he had genes associated with light skin and freckles, common in modern Europeans. The debate over his skin color has sparked controversy and raised questions about the history of human evolution and migration.
➡ This text discusses the idea that there’s a lot of evidence suggesting humans have been around for millions of years, but this evidence has often been ignored or hidden. The authors argue that this is because admitting this evidence would challenge current theories about human evolution and could threaten the reputations and funding of established scientists. They also suggest that some scientists have even cheated to support the accepted theories. The authors believe that humans didn’t evolve from apes on Earth, but instead, our origins might be off this planet, and they’re working on a new book about this idea.
➡ An old Greek leader, Solon, was told a story about ancient empires, natural disasters, and a big war in Atlantis, a huge island in the Atlantic Ocean. This island was bigger than Libya and Asia combined and had a powerful empire that ruled over many other places. However, after a series of earthquakes and floods, Atlantis and all its warriors disappeared into the sea, making it impossible to navigate. The story also discusses the origins of modern Europeans and the spread of Indo-European languages, suggesting that these languages spread with the development and spread of agriculture.
➡ The Yamnaya people, who lived about 5000 years ago, used wheels and horses to spread across vast lands, replacing many isolated groups living in the river valleys north of the Black and Caspian seas. They lived in mobile homes and exploited landscapes that hadn’t been used before. They expanded from Europe to Mongolia, replacing up to 90% of the population in some areas. Modern Europeans are a mix of these Yamnaya, western hunter gatherers, and agriculturalists from the Middle East.
➡ The text talks about how the genetic makeup of Europeans has changed over thousands of years. It explains that early farmers, hunter gatherers, and a group from the east called the North Eurasians all contributed to the genetic mix of modern Europeans. The text also mentions that the DNA of a 17,000-year-old boy from Siberia shows a genetic link between Native Americans and Europeans. Lastly, it discusses how the DNA of early farmers is similar to people in Sardinia today, suggesting that these farmers were the ancestors of modern Sardinians.
➡ Around 4500 years ago, a group of people known as the Yamnaya migrated from the Pontic Steppe, north of the Black Sea, to Central Europe. They were genetically similar to the Corded Ware people, who lived in Central Europe at the time, and they brought with them a genetic component that is still found in people today. This migration replaced the existing population almost completely, and it’s believed that the Yamnaya were more successful due to their advanced tools and skills. This migration also supports two theories about how Indo-European languages spread to Europe, either with the first farmers 7000 years ago or with the Yamnaya 4500 years ago.
➡ The author talks about how it’s now quick and cheap to get your DNA sequenced, and shares his own results. He found out he’s mostly European, with a bit of Asian and Native American, and no African, Jewish, or Oceanian. He also discovered traits like being able to drink milk as an adult, being tall, and having blue eyes and blond hair, even though his parents didn’t. He ends by promoting his books and asking for support on Patreon.

Cheddar man is the name given to 10,000 year old human remains found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. Discovered in 1903, it is Britain’s oldest near complete human skeleton, with a huge hole in his skull suggesting he died of violent death. Other remains found in a cave have been to cannibalistic rituals, trophy display and a secondary burial. Cheddar man is thought to have died in his twenty s and had a relatively good diet, considering he lived in Britain when it was almost completely depopulated, with a total population of about 12,000 individuals.

Although previous populations had settled in Britain long before his arrival, they were wiped out before him. The Cheddar man marked the start of continuous habitation on the island, making him among the very first modern Britons, which is probably why his alleged phenotype is stirring up so much controversy. In 2018, some researchers claimed that they had been able to accurately reconstruct the face of the first Brit based on his dna, proclaiming that he had black skin and blue eyes, with a pair of seemingly politically motivated paleo artists gleefully revealing a new afrocentric model to replace the prior one, which was depicted as a traditional western european hunter gatherer with white skin.

One month later, and after considerable blowback, one of the main scientists who worked on this study says he may not have been black after all. Geneticist Susan Walsh at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis says, we simply don’t know his skin color and that dna testing is not advanced enough to say for certain. Dr. Walsh believes that the test can’t prove cheddar man’s skin color, adding that his dna may have degraded over the past 10,000 years.

That said, the details of the study were behind a paywall, so I couldn’t access it. But the Natural History Museum website cited the study and stated in their fact that the cheddar man’s skin pigmentation was most likely one of the two most highly pigmented of five categories, which I found odd because the Fitzpatrick scale, most commonly used to determine epidermal melanin, has six categories where the fourth and fifth types are certainly not fair but also not black, like a bantu sub saharan African.

The study also did not take into account any other traditional considerations regarding recessive phenotypes. Ignoring other specimen or morphology, 150 genes have now been identified as having a direct or indirect effect on skin color, and many considerations were ignored in the findings. For example, cheddar man also had genes that are associated with extremely light skin pigmentation and freckles in modern day Europeans, namely irf four, which the Irish have in high frequency.

And he was heterozygous for one of the red hair mutations, which in and of itself causes a lot of depigmentation. I think the authors overplayed their hand on the data and either rushed their conclusions or showed extreme bias, leading me to agree with those suspicious of a political agenda in the announcement. My own analysis of the paleolithic, blue eyed western european hunter gatherer, including cheddar man, is that he looks something like this, which is based on a skull found in Latvia of which had predominantly western hunter gatherer ancestry.

This would account for darker hair, blue eyes, and a skin tone that would not be typically found on a red haired, ginger or blonde individual, but certainly within the expected range of modern Europeans, for example, sardinian or even north african. To better understand my assessment, let us look at what we know about the peopling of Europe by the first modern humans roughly 35,000 years ago. The first modern human discovered was chromagnon, which mean big cave, after the location was discovered in the Pyrenees region between France and Spain.

Chromagnon was the only type of hominin that had a prominent chin, no protruding brow ridge, a forehead indicating a large neocortex, and a round skull shape. There are other discoveries that are considered anatomically correct, but that’s a different term, anthropologically speaking, than fully modern, which starts with chromagnon types roughly 40,000 years ago. To determine who the first modern humans to settle Europe were, scientists analyzed the genome of two skull fragments from a site in Crimea dating to 36,030 7000 years ago.

According to Jean Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Quote, it’s a complex story. It’s not a one way peopling of Europe by modern humans coming out of Africa, end quote. My name is Iski Bielasliv. I’m the director for the center for Geogenetics, and we are releasing a paper in science concerning how the genetic diversity in presentday Europeans came about.

We have sequenced the genome of a 37,000 year old individual from Europe, meaning it’s one of the oldest modern humans found in Europe. And this genome basically reveals three different things. First of all, and this is very surprising, we can see that all the major genetic components present in living day Europeans were already present in Europeans 37,000 years ago. And that changes the whole concept of how Europe was populated where we previously thought, well, it was massive movements of people from outside into Europe, providing genes.

Now, the data suggests no. There was like this major population of people stretching all the way from Europe to central Asia, exchanging genes in a very complex network with each other. And it’s not this massive movement of people all the time going back and forth. The other thing we can see is that this individual is 100% european. There’s no east asian, genetically speaking, in this individual. The fact that 37,000 year old chromagnon type remains are nearly identical to modern Europeans, anatomically and genetically.

And as a western european huntergatherer, Cheddar man is essentially a descendant of chromagnon. It should come as no surprise that Mr. Adrian Target, a history teacher in Somerset, UK, has been shown by dna test to be a direct descendant by his mother’s line of cheddar man. This begs the question, why does the mainstream media and woke members of post World War II academia insist on pushing an afrocentric narrative? Between 45,030 5000 years ago, anatomically modern humans spread across Europe, while the neanderthals present since before 300,000 years ago disappeared? How this process occurred has long been debated, but since the sequencing of modern human and archaic hominin genomes, we are now able to answer some of these questions.

Comparisons between the neanderthal genome and the genomes of presentday humans have shown that neanderthals contributed approximately one to 3% of the genomes of all people living today outside of subsaharan Africa, suggesting that human populations ancestral to all nonafricans mixed with Neanderthals. We also know that Neanderthals share more alleles with East Asians and Native Americans than with Europeans, and that people of subsaharan african descent contain up to 20% admixture from a superarchaic hominin species 1.

2 to 1. 3 million years removed from modern human, and that is not found in the dna of Caucasians or East Asians. That said, mainstream anthropologists have a hard time dispensing with their obsolete out of Africa replacement model, theorizing that a black african demographic migrated out and replaced all other hominins and mutated or evolved into the other races, which we now know conclusively to be incorrect. One researcher that addresses this question from a vedic perspective is Michael Kramo, who argues that humanity did not evolve from apes and is in fact descended from much older civilizations that existed in earth’s history, which came and went in a cyclical pattern, giving credence to many ancient myths and legends from antiquity.

And welcome back to 43. Focus. And please welcome Michael Cremo, who is the co author of this book, the hidden History of the Human Race. Nice to see you, Michael. Good to be here, Gary. This, I believe, calls into question Darwinian’s theory of evolution. Is that correct? Yes, Gary. Essentially, that theory says that human beings like us have been around for about 100,000 years, and before that, you would have had only ape manlike creatures.

Before that, apes and monkeys. What we found, however, when we looked into the entire history of archaeology, my co author and I did eight years of research. We looked at every archaeological discovery that’s ever been made. And what we found is that there are hundreds of such discoveries that indicate human beings like ourselves have been around for literally millions of years. What’s been the reception to this book? Oh, there’s been.

From the spokespersons of the scientific establishment, there has been absolute outrage. For example, how dare you come up with any kind, like Richard Leakey, for example. He said, this book is pure humbug. Nobody would take it seriously but a fool. On the other hand, we’ve had many scientists and scholars say this is a wonderful book. It’s really great that finally somebody has brought together all this evidence, because a lot of it’s not available in English.

We had to do eight years of research, translate papers from German, Russian. You referred to in India, the vedic literature. Well, yes, I was saying in the beginning that we do take our inspiration from these ancient sanskrit writings of India. They’re collectively called the Vedas. Among them are the Puranas. Purana is a sanskrit word. It means history. Now, these histories tell of human civilizations on this planet going back millions of years.

How do we know those are accurate? Well, that was our question, too. Richard Thompson and I, we thought, well, if there’s any accuracy to those statements, there must be some factual evidence to back them up. Now, when we looked in the current textbooks, of course, we didn’t find any such evidence, but we thought, well, let’s look a little bit further. And as I said, that led to an eight year research program where we investigated every archaeological discovery ever made.

And what we found is that, practically speaking, archaeologists and anthropologists have buried almost as much evidence as they’ve dug up. In other words, or perhaps overlooked. Cast aside. Well, yes, cast aside. And there have been some outright cases of suppression where people who have reported such things have had their careers ruined. We should never, I don’t think, be afraid to investigate opposing points of view. And the hidden history of the human race is something that is in direct opposition I guess to the darwinian theory, it definitely is evolution.

And a vast amount of evidence showing that human beings like ourselves have been around for millions of years has been systematically suppressed. And I can give you some examples. For example, in 1979, Mary Leaky, who’s one of the most famous archaeologists of this century, discovered in Africa completely modern human footprints, no different from the footprints that you or I would make on a beach today. Now, the thing about these footprints is they were found in rock that was dated 3.

6 million years old. And that throws out completely any idea of human origins that’s current today. Why would anyone want information like that suppressed? What possible advantage would there be in that? Well, power, prestige, money. There’s a lot riding on it. If even one of the hundreds of cases that we document in the hidden history of the human race were found to be true, accepted, that would mean that everything we’ve been told about human origins and antiquity for the past 150 years is simply not true.

And I don’t think that the current establishment is ready to admit that. How long ago do you think that this evidence was suppressed? I mean, is this something that’s been going on for years and years? Yes, this has been going on for about 150 years. I’ll give you another example. I’d like to move along here in some of the additional myths that you have listed here. Michael Cremo, you have talked in terms of the fact that scientists don’t cheat.

That’s a myth. You say there’s actual cheating going on? Oh, that’s very well documented. For example, the Piltdown case is a very famous case that documents that. Now, what that has to do with is early in this century, there was a purported discovery of an ape man in England based on a skull and a jawbone. And this pilt down man. Pilt down ape man was in the science textbooks for about 40 years.

And then suddenly it was revealed that the British Museum had tested these fossils and determined that it was a very elaborate hoax. And many people have speculated about the identity of the person who was the hoaxer. And practically all of them center on different scientists in England, such as Sir Grafton Elliott Smith or Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, all very well established scientists in England, because only somebody who knew the scientific method very well could have prepared these fossils in such a way that they would have fooled the scientific community all around the world for 40 or 50 years.

So some scientist who wanted to perhaps give some evidence in favor of evolution, because there’s not very much of it, invented this ape man. And in a very sophisticated way, cheated literally, and this is admitted by the scientists themselves. And there are more examples I could give, and we document many of them in our book, the hidden history of the human race. Myth number three, Michael, that you have written evidence that goes against human evolution is reported only by crackpots.

Now, this is one of the standard techniques that the scientific community tries to use against anybody that reports something that goes against their ideas. They try to label them in a derogatory way without actually discussing the facts. And I think we’ve all had experience of that. But the real facts are, is that actual scientists have, over the past 150 years, reported many astounding facts that go against the theory of evolution.

And the present scientific community doesn’t want people to know that. They want to promote the idea that anybody that’s against evolution is somehow or other a religious fanatic, a crackpot. But it’s simply not true. And I’ve personally met scientists who have discovered some of these things. And what happens to them is it’s very unfair, the treatment to which they are subjected. Ron in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Ron, how are you? Yeah, good evening.

I’m just going to make a question here and then hang up and listen. Obviously, your two guests do not believe that we evolved from lower primates. And interestingly enough, one of them comes from a judeo christian background and one not right now. My question is, if we did not, then where do you two people feel we did come from? And I’d like some hard evidence of a garden of Eden.

Thank you. Okay. Actually, this is the subject matter of the next book that Richard Thompson and I are working on. We call it human devolution, because from the evidence that we can see, it appears that if our origin is not on this planet, we did not evolve from apes on this planet. Say, if you have civilizations coming and going over vast periods of time, perhaps you might have humans and other apemen like creatures coexisting.

I will mention that the piranhas do talk about intelligent races of apel like creatures that use stone tools. This is not an idea that came in with Darwin. It’s been there for thousands of years. Now, what might one predict from that? If you were to predict what archaeologists might find, you would say, well, they would tend to find a very bewildering mixture of anatomically modern human fossils, ape manlike fossils, crude stone tools, articles indicative of a higher level, higher level of culture, all sort of mixed up and going back hundreds of millions of years.

I think you might also predict that given the biases of investigators towards a linear, progressive idea of time, with things beginning in a very simple state and progressing in a linear fashion to a more advanced state, that they might edit that record to conform to their linear, progressive biases. And indeed, both predictions we found in our investigations do come true. You actually do have that very bewildering mixture of advanced artifacts and bones mixed up with more primitive ones.

And you also do find a very systematic editing of this record to conform to a linear, progressive, you might call it evolutionary, view of things, which is quite amazing. Of course, if we have this sort of cyclical picture, circular picture of things, much of conventional science will need to be readjusted. And naturally, I suppose it’s only fair to say that vedantic thought has many other ideas about the nature of time and space, the nature of spiritual dimensions.

I believe that your view of things would be that rather than say that humanity evolved from simple celled creatures, that in some sense we rather descended from spiritual planes. Yes, and this is a matter that cremo brings up some interesting points. First, if there’s evidence of bipedal hominins prior to 7 million years ago, it throws a monkey wrench into the out of Africa model, which states that bipedalism came about five to 7 million years ago.

He also brings up the idea that certain elements of humanity may have devolved, which is supported anatomically, for example, with chromagnon, which has a substantially greater cranial capacity than the modern average. And finally, he speaks about cyclical patterns of time on Earth, which is supported by the geological record showing that our planet undergoes periodic global cataclysms, which is also spoken about in many religions and mythologies, such as the biblical flood of Noah or the fabled tale of the lost empire of Atlantis, which brings us back to the peopling of Europe, which we have established.

Started with Chromagnon, the first fully modern human to inhabit western Europe, with its oldest settlement starting in the west and moving east, which is counterintuitive if one assumes that chromagnon must have originated in Africa. Please watch my latest video out of Africa theory debunked for why I reject that model. So if Chromagnon did not arise from ancestors of sub saharan Africans and evolve into Asians and Caucasians, then where did he come from? Chromagnon’s direct descendants are the Basque, which occupy an area in the Pyrenees where the first chromagnon was found.

Besides having a high degree of rh negative blood, they share genetic affinities with the Guanchas the native indigenous population of the Canary Islands, which were decimated 500 years ago by the Spanish. But they left mummies and were depicted in art at the time with an uncanny resemblance to how many have portrayed the western european huntergatherer populations which gave rise to cheddar man. In 590 BC, an egyptian priest of very great age told a greek statesman, solon, an incredible tale of ancient empires, natural catastrophes and a great atlantean war.

Quote this power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean. For in those days, the Atlantic was navigable, and there was an island situated in front of the straits, which are bayou called the pillars of Hercules. The island was larger than Libya and Asia put together and was the way to the other islands. And from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent, which surrounded the true ocean.

For this sea, which is within the straits of Hercules, is only a harbor having a narrow entrance. But that other is a real sea. And the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now, in this island of Atlantis, there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over other parts of the continent. And furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjugated the parts of Libya within the columns of Hercules as far as Egypt and of Europe as far as Tyrannia.

This vast power gathered into one, endeavored to subdue at a blow our country and yours, and the whole of the region within the straits. And then, solon, your country, shone forth in the excellence of her virtue and strength among all mankind. She was preeminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Helenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwelt within the pillars.

But afterwards, there occurred violent earthquakes and floods. And in a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth. And the island of Atlantis, in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea, for which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way. And this was caused by the subsidence of the island Plato 360 bc.

You we have this kind of collective memory, if I can call it that, of a worldwide flood. While the Basque have a legend that they originally came from an island archipelago in the west that they call Atlantica. The Berbers living around Mount Atlas, who also share genetic affinities to the Basque and the Guanchas of the Canary Islands, are also thought to have atlantean ancestry, as they are considered descendants of Cromagnon as well.

I have many videos which explore the possibility that chromagnon were the Atlanteans that originally populated Europe during the pleistocene. That said, what about modern Europeans of the holocene, meaning the past 11,500 years, our current age? Where did they come from? And what comprises the various phenotypes that make up the modern european demographic? I think a lot of assumptions we had coming into what I had when I grew up about the relationships amongst human populations and the nature of human population structure today are fundamentally wrong.

So I think a lot of us have an idea that the population structure we intuitively understand in the world today, people grouped into groups, like people like New Guineans, or different groups of Africans, or Caucasians, or East Asians or South Asians, reflects some kind of age old population separation that’s happened for the eons, right, for a very long time after a bifurcation and spreading from some common ancestral population.

But that’s profoundly wrong. In fact, in fact, 10,000 years ago, that structure would have been unrecognizable. And I’m going to tell you why that is, because we now know it’s that. So, from ancient dna. And the example I’m going to give is West Eurasia, which we know best, because ancient dna has been richest from west Eurasia, not because it’s a particularly important place in the world, Europe, but because that’s where the first ancient dna studies have been.

Because scientists who invented this technology were largely in Europe, and that’s where we have our best data. But everything that we look at suggests that the same sorts of patterns will be observed in other parts of the world as well. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about a story we published in 2016, where we put together new data from 44 individuals from the ancient Near east.

This is places like Iran and Levant, the Jordan in Israel, Anatolia and the northern part of the Levant, which is, for example, of the Near East Caucasus, Armenia. So we combine that data with previous data from the step north of the blackened Caspian Sea in present day Russia, and also many samples from Europe that we had data from to try to understand the nature of the human population structure that existed over the last 15,000 years, which was the period over which we were able to interrogate whole genome sequences from this time.

And so this picture shows the different places, the Levant, Iran, Anatolia, present day Turkey, the Caucasus, where Armenia is, and mainland Europe, and the step where each of which we had samples at different points in time. And what you can see from the genetic data is the following. This is what happened 10,000 years ago. We actually have real genetic data, whole ancient genomes of similar quality to modern genome sequence for medical studies from four populations.

Iranian farmers who lived around this time. Levantine farmers who lived in Jordan and Israel. Western hunter gatherers who lived in the far west of Europe. Eastern hunter gatherers who lived in the far east of Europe. Each of these groups was as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians are today. And what happened is that none of them disappeared, but they all mixed each other profoundly. And what you actually see in this region today is mixtures in different proportions of these four source populations with small additional contributions from other groups.

But these are the primary sources of ancestry across this vast region. And it’s this blurring that creates this relative sense of sameness that we see today. So this is a critique of people’s picture of, quote, racial structure today that I think was not really in people’s heads before. There are many good critiques of that, but one of them that was not in people’s heads was the idea that 10,000 years ago, if you had made such a categorization, it would be completely different from what it is today.

So the third thing I wanted to tell you about, before I close and maybe we can have a conversation, is how ancient dna has yielded a great surprise with regard to an age old, more than 200 year old question, which is, how did the languages that we happen to speak in this country come to be? So? In 230 years ago, William Jones, a british colonial justice who was serving in present day Calcutta, in the city of Calcutta, and had been trained in his school days in Latin and Greek, and was a poly linguist, was one of these amazing people who knew many languages.

He was interested also in the local scriptural languages. And when he studied Sanskrit, he said the following. The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident.

So strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists. This was one of the first articulations of the Indo european problem. It was not the first, but it was one of the first. And it’s the observation that almost all the languages of Europe today, with the exception of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Basque and Sami, and as well as iranian and northern indian languages and Armenian, are all stem clearly from the same root.

Since that observation, there have been ancient texts in ancient Hittite, which was a language spoken in present day in Turkey, in ancient Turkey, about 33,000 years ago, which showed that too was an indoeuropean language, is. And there’s an ancient language called Tokarian that used to be spoken in the Tarin basin of China, which was also indoeuropean, but is now also extinct. So one of the leading hypothesis is that indoeuropean languages spread with the spread of agriculture, which, as I mentioned to you, was developed eleven to 12,000 years ago and then exploded out of the Near east after 9000 years ago, almost simultaneously into Europe, from Anatolia and into South Asia, from Iran.

The alternative hypothesis was something known as the step hypothesis. The step hypothesis of indoeuropean origins is motivated by a very different observation, and it’s motivated mostly by language. So there are many arguments for the step hypothesis, but I’ll give you one particularly interesting one. In all of these indoeuropean languages, with the exception of ancient Hittite, which is the ancient earliest branching of them, there is a common shared vocabulary for axles, wheels, and some vocabulary for horses.

And what this suggests is that the common ancestral population knew of these things, knew of wheels, knew of carts. So that’s the step hypothesis. And there’s a particular group of people called the Yamnaya. So the Yamnaya are steppe pastoralists who were the first people of the open step, who used this extraordinary technology of wheels and horses to spread. So prior to the Yamnaya, there were many isolated populations living in the river valleys north of the black and caspian seas.

They made different types of pots and stone tools and each one was different from the other. But after about 5000 years ago, this Yamnaya group spread and displaced almost all of them. The villages of these groups disappeared. There were almost no more villages. And instead, what you see is great tombs only with very few villages or no villages, often buried with horses or carts inside of them. And the archaeological interpretation is that these people had learned how to take their supplies out into the open steppe and they were living in ancient version of mobile homes.

They were taking their water out into the steppe and they were exploiting the vast landscapes that had not been exploited before. These were very rich people, their graves were very rich, and they expanded incredibly. They expanded westward all the way to Europe, to Hungary, eastward all the way to Mongolia, running over lots of groups that had come before. So genetically, we were very interested in trying to understand the population movements that occurred during this critical period.

And one of the things the first ancient dna from Europe was really focused on the transition from hunting, gathering to farming, which occurred between 8000 or 9008 thousand years ago, and the first Europeans all before 5000 years ago. And the first ancient DNA samples were all mixtures of these two types of ancestry. Blue, which is the hunter gatherer type of ancestry, and then after about 8000 years ago, mostly orange farmers.

And there was none of an ancestry that is ubiquitous today, which is green. So if you look in people today, there’s a third ancestry type that wasn’t there in Europe 5000 years ago. So we knew in our laboratory in 2014 that this had to have entered Europe sometime. So in Britain, where we have data, we reported data on 155 individuals from 6000 to 3000 years ago. You can measure the proportion of ancestry from first farmers of Britain who arrived in Britain about 6000 years ago.

It took them a couple of thousand years ago to get from Turkey to Britain a couple of thousand years and step like ancestry. And when you look at the data, you see that until 4500 years ago, all the ancestry of everybody, without exception, is first farmer and then bank. At 4500 years ago, everybody has about 90% ancestry from the continent. And it’s a minimum 90% population replacement. Shortly before 4500 years ago, the last stones of Stonehenge went up and these first farmers had built it.

And within 100 years, they didn’t know that they would be replaced by these people from the continent who very shortly ended the practices that were common at places like Stonehenge. It’s a 70% replacement in Germany, a 90% replacement in Britain. And now it’s up to archaeologists in dialogue with geneticists and anthropologists to figure out what’s going on. So by looking at this linguistics graph, we can identify some of the various terms he used.

For example, Hittite, whose empire was in Anatolia, or modern day Turkey, which is an extinct language now, but probably the first or oldest of the aryan languages to separate from the original mother tongue. Another is Tokyan, which is here and belongs to the people who left ancient blonde mummies in western China along the Silk Road, some of them six foot six inches tall, who populated this region of China before any east asian phenotypes migrated to the area.

And here is the modern Hindi spoken in modern India. And here is vedic Sanskrit, introduced into India by the Aryans several thousand years ago. Here is the germanic branch of languages. And German is also descended from the Aryans. And even English that I’m speaking now is an aryan or indo european language that stems from proto indo european origins or an aryan origin. So these languages, as Dr. Wright stated, either spread with agriculture and metals or with domesticated animals like horses and cattle, or both, by one population, one ethnic group, or one race, if you will.

And this demographic happened to have the genetic marker for blue eyes. Geneticists compared mitochondrial dna from blue eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark, and Turkey, concluding that people with blue eyes have a single common ancestor that lived by the Black Sea around 10,000 years ago, spreading out with agriculture, according to Professor Iberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

Quote, the first blue eyed humans were among the protoindoEuropeans, or Aryans, who subsequently spread agriculture into western Europe and later rode horses into Iran and India. This helps to explain why so many of the statues of ancient sumerian nobility have blue eyes and why this color is revered around the ancient Mediterranean, including the many blue eyed statues of the ancient egyptian pharaohs and nobility. So what we find is that modern Europeans are comprised of a combination of western hunter gatherers who are the blue eyed ancestors of the earliest or indigenous people of Europe, such as the Basque, a wave of dark haired, light skinned agriculturalists from the Middle east, and a later iranic wave of blonde, blue eyed Indo Europeans from the steppes.

To help further illustrate how this happened, here’s a brief presentation by a colleague of Professor Reich, who just spoke, Johann Krauss, professor of archaeology and paleogenetics and director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. I want to talk today about a topic, a research project that we have been working on over the last few years, mostly together with David Reichstein in Harvard, but also with an entire international consortium of researchers, where we address the question about the ancestry of modern Europeans by actually looking at the dna that we can extract from skeletons from the past and see how basically the genetic makeup of Europeans have been changing over time.

And our main finding, as was presented here also in the title, was that modern Europeans are best modeled, or can best be seen as a mixture of three ancestral populations that are present today in all european populations. So the neolithic transition has been a very interesting topic in archaeological research and very fascinating for many years, which is basically the transition from a huntergatherer lifestyle of people to a more sedentary lifestyle where people have aquaculture and domesticated animals.

This process, which is also called the neolithic revolution, this change in basically subsistence strategy happened in central Europe about 7000 years ago. And it has been for a long time argued whether this change was due to new people coming to Europe and bringing domesticated animals and wheat and agricultural products, or whether this was just culture that was just innovation, which was transmitted from village to village. But it wasn’t really people moving, but in fact it was culture moving.

So there were these two models that people had suggested. One is the cultural diffusion model, which would suggest that it was actually culture that was passed on from maybe neighboring populations. And then there’s the other model, which we call the demic diffusion model, which argues that there were early people that were living like hunter gatherers in Europe. And later on there were new people coming to Europe. Those new people actually brought this technology.

They brought basically domesticated animals and agriculture. And the people that we see in Europe today are actually more or less those newcomers that came to Europe about 7000 years ago. And there has been much debate about that in archaeology. It was very difficult to solve this question and only genetics could really help to address and give us almost definite final answer on that. And that was that there seems to have been a large migration into Europe.

And here you have a time beam here starting at 6000 before christ to about basically today. And here we have those different types that you see in Europe, different frequencies. You have a dark year, you have a certain type. Then you have those orange types, yellow types, and those other types here. What you can see that before 7000 years before presence, about 5000 years, 6000 years before christ, you had in Europe only one type of mitochondrial dna, which is so called U type.

That’s a type that we see in all hunter gatherers. So all hunter gatherers that we have sequenced, which is more than hundred by now, they all have this U type, even from the start of the Pleistocene. So the time when the andontals were still in Europe. But then as soon as the first farmers come to Europe with the so called linear band ceramic, the frequency of this type of mitochondria drops basically to zero.

So this type disappears. We don’t see that in the people anymore. So this type of dna disappears and a new type appears, which we then see for the next few thousand years to be very high frequency in Europeans. Whereas this utype is really, really far down however, you see that this is not the only event that happened, because it’s not that this is how we look today, that we don’t have u anymore and we only have this early farmer type.

But you can actually see that over the neolithic, there’s like some other more changes. Actually, some really interesting change happens about here about 4500 years ago, where the frequency of the early farmers goes down and this hunter gatherer types come up and there’s this new yellow types here that are also coming up. So the frequency changes again about 4500 years ago. Keep that in mind. That will become important later again.

But then, of course, people again said, okay, this is mitochondrial DNA. This is the story of the females, which is of course a very important part of our population. But is that really representing the entire story? So people then would argue again, we actually need the nuclear genome and the nuclear DNA for those modern humans. It was more challenging. So it took some time. So the first paper that came out in 2012 from Atius Yakobson’s group and Ponto, Scotland, here as a PhD student working on that, they actually sequenced hunter gatherers and an early farmer coming from Sweden.

So they were found here. So the hunter gatherers were found on Gotland, which is here in the Baltic Sea. And the early farmer was found here on the western coast of Sweden. So what you have then here is modern populations that you have presented here by dots, different parts of Europe, Italy, Russia. This is kind of the Near east here. And here you have those kind of genomic information again over the whole nuclear genomes, basically like people did in Switzerland or London, asking people on the street.

But in this case, using skeletons from the past and extracting that nuclear dna, you can see that the early farmer is actually quite distinct from those hunter gatherers. The early farmer looks basically like us today, looks more a bit like sardinian or like a Basque, not so much like a central european, but for sure not like a modern swedish person. And that was something really interesting here because it told us, okay, they are definitely very different people.

So it’s probably people that migrated into that region, bringing agriculture. However, they’re not to 100% ancestral to the modern swedish people. In fact, those hunter gatherers look more like those modern swedish people than those early farmers do, which tells us that there must have been some more to that story. It’s not only that the people come and then the people stay, and they have the agriculture and they stay there until today.

And this is the Swedish. And that happened in other parts of Europe, but there must have been some more complexity to that story. Then the other big paper that came out in the same year was the genome of this fellow here. Some of you might recognize him. He kind of looks from some sort of 1980s horror movie, but he’s actually the Iceman. Right? So there was this tyrolian iceman that was discovered about 20 years ago in a glacier in the Alps.

And what people found was that genetically, he looked comparing it to different european populations. Here, you see, this is the different populations, different parts of Europe. This is actually southern Europe here. This is northern Europe, eastern Europe. He actually has the highest similarity, and extremely high, actually, to people that live today in Corsica and Sardinia. So if you would just get his dna, like on the street in Switzerland, you would actually think that he is from Sardinia or Corsica, which then, of course, again, is a bit weird, because certainly he didn’t travel from Corsica to the Alps.

It’s pretty unlikely because people were not so mobile during the time. It might have been possible, but it’s, I think, quite unlikely that he actually was born in Sardinia. But in fact, it tells us that those farmers, he belonged to the copper age farmers. So the kind of middle to late neolithic farmers, that those farmers were probably looking different to the people that live in Tirole today. And another very, very important story then appeared, only, I think it was in 2013, so two years ago now.

And that was a story which made the thing even more complex. What people had analyzed in this paper was an ancient fossil, ancient human. So that’s work that was done in Copenhagen by Eskabilloslav’s group, where they sequenced a little boy that was, I think, about twelve years old when he died. And that was 17,000 years ago, very, very long time ago, close to the Lake Baikal, they sequenced his dna and they compared his dna again to different populations that live in different parts of Europe, Siberia, as well as Native Americans in the Americas today.

What you can see on this plot, it might be a bit hard to see it from the back, but this is basically Europe. This is Native Americans, and this is where this kind of Malta child falls in. It doesn’t fall with Siberians, but it falls somewhere in between modern Europeans and native Americans. They also did some more studies and some more complex statistics. What they could basically show is this is kind of populations that would have a high genetic affinity based on the color.

So warmer color, more affinity, kind of colder color, less affinity. You can actually see that populations in the Americas today, as well as here in the beringian region, as well as in Europe have a genetic affiliation or affinity to this 17,000 year old boy from Siberia. So what does that tell us? It’s an interesting story. So what it actually tells us is that there’s a genetic link between Native Americans and Europeans.

Europeans are closer related genetically to native Americans than they are to eastern Asians. So there has been some sort of ancestor in the past that gave us some dna which is also fined in native Americans dna. So there’s some genetic link here. What we have down here are our early farmers. Our early farmers, indeed. Again, look like certain populations in Europe. And no surprise we’ve seen that before with the Iceman.

They look like Sardinians. So people in Sardinia look genetically like the first farmers that has been replicated now many times. So this is basically people here from Sardinia. They’re almost indistinguishable from people that were the early farmers that came maybe about 7000 years ago to Europe. However, the rest of the Europeans, they look somehow different. They kind of fall kind of in between here and there. So hunter gatherers and near eastern populations.

But they’re also kind of moved towards this kind of direction in this plot. Right. They’re kind of like moved towards this upper party of the plot. What do we have at the upper part of the plot? We have the Maltacha. So this child from Lake Baikal. And this made us to actually propose a third component that we have in Europe, which is the early farmers, the hunter gatherers, but then this, what we would call north eurasian, ancient north Eurasians.

So this link between native Americans and Europeans, that is actually kind of responsible for this kind of upward movement of this Europeans and is basically found best represented by this multi child from Siberia. Basically, modern Europeans are best represented by a genetic mixture of those three components, north Eurasians, West Eurasians, basically those hunter gatherers, and then those early farmers. So that basically, then was this model that we developed, that we have this three way mixture of modern Europeans with these three genetic components.

So, in summary, for this model, we would then suggest for the kind of the recent holocene history of european populations, that about 9000 years ago, early farmers come to Europe on their way to Europe. They mix with certain populations, huntergatherer populations, potentially in East Europe. Because we have a little bit of huntergatherer dna in the early farmers, about 7000 years ago, they arrive in central Europe, in Scandinavia.

We have something else going on. I don’t want to go too much into detail, but then, less than 7000 years ago, a new genetic component comes from the east, which is this north eurasian component. Why do I say less than 7000 years ago? Because neither the huntergatherer from Los Bour nor the early farmer had this component. They do not have that. But every european population today has this component.

So therefore we know it was not around 7000 years ago in central Europe and it must have arrived later. And that was basically the end of the story of this paper that we published in October. We said, okay, we have those three genetic components, but it kind of really bothered us to not know when this component actually arrived. What do we have in this plot is one population that we also have studied, which is the so called yamnaya.

Yamnaya is actually a population that archaeologists have been interested in in a very, very long time, because it was a population that was present north of the Black Sea in the so called pontic step, was this large region where those pastoralists were living. And there was hypothesis already in the 19th century that those people at some point came to Europe and brought potentially indoeuropean languages. That was basically the homeland supposed to be of the indoeuropean languages, was some hypothesis that people had been discussing already in the late 19th century and had still be then been around a lot in the 20th century.

However, this is a population that we find in the past north of the Black Sea, so not in central Europe. And this is also something we can again present in some sort of admixture like analysis, where we have, with the three different colors here, those three different genetic components. So with the orange here we have the early neolithic, middle neolithic. So the early farmer component in blue here we have the hunter gatherer, and here you have the late neolithic, as well as the early Bronx Age, as well as those Yamnaya populations.

This is all the Yamnaya here. Those are the populations in the Bronx age, hunter gatherers, early farmers. So what you see is the hunter gatherers, they’re all blue here. They don’t have this green, they don’t have these Yamnaya components. The early neolithic farmers, they also do not have this Yamnaya component. The Yamnaya have this green component, very strong, as well as the corded wear. The corded wear. Those people that were in central Europe about 5000 years ago or 4500 years ago, they basically genetically look almost exactly like the Yamnaya.

Though what we see here in this plot is also represented here. Genetically, Yamnaya and corded wear are basically almost indistinguishable. And that basically led us to the hypothesis. To think that the corded wear probably is very close related to Yamnaya, which some archaeologists have also suggested in the past. They come probably in some large migration from the pontic step north of the plexi to central Europe. And they bring this green component that we find in people today, that we find in the Bronx, Asia, we find in the late neolithic, but we don’t find in the early Neolithic and we don’t find in hunter Gatherer.

So basically, this kind of shift towards the north, this kind of shift towards the north eurasian component happened with a corded wear about 4500 years ago. So that basically lets us to fill this kind of number here. So we can now say that this component, this kind of north eurasian component, came with Yamaya, with the corded wear, about 4500 years ago to Europe. And in fact, we could show that it replaced this middle neolithic people that were living here in actually parts of Germany at the time, or today Germany at that time.

Germany didn’t exist. They replaced this population almost completely, almost 100% replacement. Whatever happened, why ever those people, the corridor culture was kind of more sophisticated, more successful, maybe better in warfare. We know they had wheels and wagons, they had horses, at least in a higher percent than the other early farmers. Somehow there were kind of a mass migration into this region and then over time, actually mixed up with the people that were living in this region.

And this was a major finding because it tells us that there was a migration that we really didn’t know so much about before. We knew, or we had at least a good idea that there was this early neolithic people, the first farmers coming to Europe 7000 years ago. We had a good idea that this happened. But what we didn’t know was that there was another large migration happening in the late neolithic, the new people coming in.

And that had direct implications. And also for some hypotheses which are related to the languages, especially to the indoeuropean languages. There are two main hypotheses that people have been discussing in the past about where and when indo european languages came to Europe. There’s the so called anatolian hypothesis and there’s the pontic step, or Corrigan hypothesis. And one hypothesis states that with the first farmers, 9000 years ago, the indoeuropean languages came from Anatolia, came to Europe and then basically spread in Europe and later on, then also spread towards central and southern Asia.

And the other hypothesis is the Korgan hypothesis, or pontic step hypothesis, which already goes back to some hypothesis about Urhaimad from some old german archaeologists from the 19th century, suggesting that it was rather from kind of the northern, north of the Black Sea here, the so called pontic step. From this pontic step, some time ago, they said, well, 5000 years ago. So 4500 years ago, there was this movement, together with the cord, where those languages might have spread into Europe and then spread into different parts of Europe, and also in the other direction, towards Persia, as well as to Central Asia.

So those two hypotheses are basically both in some ways supported by our data, because we can show that there was a large migration 7000 years ago, but there was also a large migration 4500 years ago. So we can at least say that, based on the genetics, both hypotheses are equally likely. My kind of last point I would like to make is, because we have so many sequences now, 100 ancient humans, we can look again at the phenotypes over time.

And that was actually quite interesting, because now we can look at some more phenotypes, not just the blue eyes and the skin color, but we could actually also see that there were certain genes that were changing in time since huntergatherers towards people today. There were not just the blue eyes where we sat, like the hunter gatherers, they all had blue eyes. Over time, blue eyes go actually down the kind of lowest number of blue eyes we have in the middle Neolithic.

So probably the farmers coming in from the Near east, they had probably not blue eyes, so basically had a lower proportion, therefore. But later on, the kind of research is here, when the people come from the pontic step, they had probably a larger component of blue eyes again. And then it kind of drops down to what we have today in actually more or less constant until today. The one thing which shows the strongest selection, actually, of all the genes almost, we know of which has really changed in frequency tremendously, is actually almost surprisingly, within the last few thousand years.

That is a gene which is basically giving you the ability to drink milk when you’re an adult, so that you’re lactose tolerant. So actually, most people, and basically all mammals, cannot digest milk when they’re adults because usually the lactase gene gets shut down when you get older, which makes a lot of sense because the mother doesn’t want to give milk for the rest of their life. Right. I’m sure there’s some empathy here in the room for that.

But what happened in Europe was that there was a gene which had basically zero frequency in the hunter gatherers. Early farmers also didn’t have it. Even though they had cows, they couldn’t digest milk when they were adults. But then around the time when the pontic step people come in. So this kind of migration from the east, this kind of gene comes potentially in, we’re not really sure if it comes in during the time, but then we see it the first time and it rose in frequency a lot to about 60%.

And Europeans today, it’s like a tremendous shift from here to there within only about 4000 years. This is actually such a strong selection, it’s incredible. It’s like basically you have way more offspring if you can digest milk when you’re an adult than if you don’t. And it has been very strong and has come up in frequency here. And people have also seen that since the 1970s, basically as one of the genes being under selection, coming up again and again.

And we can see that in this data again, that actually comes pretty late. People had suggested before that it was something that evolved about 6000 years ago with farming, but it seems to be something that actually came later on at the early Bronx age and then mostly during the Iron Age. There’s like dozens of genes, sometimes hundreds of genes or hundreds of variants that actually cause a certain phenotype.

One phenotype is actually height. Height is a very complex trait. But what we also see, which is quite interesting, that those Yamnaya actually had an increase in height. They were selected for being tall. So it’s quite an interesting story. Those people had horses, they had wagons, they came from the east, potentially brought languages and were really tall warriors. So it sounds like a story from the 19th century, but unfortunately, somehow it’s also supported by the genetic data and this DNA sequencing.

This is really the key to everything that we do. And this is also the key to what I will be talking today about. And the big boom that some of you might have recognized in this field over the last, let’s say, ten years, when we really see in almost every month a new paper on nature science, which is related to ancient DNA, because these new technologies that came on the market allow you to sequence DNA in very, very short time for very, very little money.

Ten years ago, or twelve years ago, it took the first genome project about ten years to generate the first human genome. It cost about $2 billion to produce the first human genome. Today, this machine is doing it in a couple of hours for less than 500 euro. So things have changed a lot. So this massive throughput, in fact, my parents and also my girlfriend got a genome sequence for Christmas last year.

I also had my DNA sequence through ancestrydNa. com, which allowed me to download the raw sequence DNA as a zip file, which I then uploaded to several other sites offering analysis such as this one, which validated much of the findings in this presentation. Although my mother is german and my father, who passed away last year, was iranian, my results list me as 93% european, which speaks to the genetic overlap between places like Iran and Germany, both receiving admixture from indoeuropean or aryan migrations about 4500 years ago.

My Y chromosome, inherited from my paternal or father side, is r one a, which is sometimes regarded as the aryan haplogroup, including on published scientific papers such as this one from 2012. Quote haplogroup R one A as the ProtoindoEuropeans and the legendary Aryans witnessed by the dna of their current descendants. The rest of my summary includes 4% asian, which speaks to the influx of aryan populations from western Asia as reflected in viking genomes that were sequenced and also show west asian admixture.

And I had 1% native american, presumably from the ancient link between salutrian Europeans and the Americas. And finally, no african DNA, no jewish DNA, and no oceanian DNA. That said, I’m also lactose tolerant, meaning I can drink milk as an adult, which is a trait that shows up in Europeans via the Aryans. During the hollow scene. I’m six foot four inches tall, which was a trait that became prominent in Europe around 4500 years ago.

I have blue eyes and blondish hair, even though neither of my parents had blue eyes. My mothers were green and my father’s were brown, showing that they were carriers of the recessive traits. This episode was much longer than usual and now I’m hungry. So now that the ducks and geese are fed, I’m going to grab a bendejo roll on the way home. If you like my videos, consider checking out my books species with amnesia, our forgotten history, gods with amnesia, subterranean worlds of inner earth, the occult, secrets of Vril and 1666, redemption through sin my name is Robert Sepper.

I’m an anthropologist. My published work is available on Amazon and through all other major book outlets. If you’d like to support my work, you can do that through patreon. com. There should be a link in the description. Please subscribe for future updates. Leave your thoughts below. Have a wonderful weekend and I hope to see you again soon. .