Origin of the Mongoloid Peoples
“Mongoloid,” a term from physical anthropology, refers to the skull shape typically found among East Asians and many American Indians. Skull shape figured prominently in racial theories of the nineteenth century, which erroneously linked skull type with behaviors or abilities deemed characteristic of certain races. Modern craniometry, or skull measurement, is almost purely descriptive and has nothing to say about behavior. It depends on examining a large number of detailed anatomical features of the skull and making statistical correlations between them. Though these assessments are not easily translated into simple physical descriptions, contemporary East Asian skulls generally have fine features, broad head shape and flattened faces. Skulls vary from gracile to robust, terms used by physical anthropologists to denote the general thickness of the bone; mongoloid skulls are the most gracile in the human family.
Mongoloid skulls are also associated with a special kind of teeth. Many human groups, such as sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, retain the generic, undifferentiated human teeth of the ancestral population. But people in southeast Asia, Polynesia, Australia, southern China and ancient Japan have developed a different dental complex known as sundadonty, after Sunda, the former continent that included Malaysia and much of Indonesia. A third category of teeth, itself derived from sundadonty, is sinodonty. Sin odonts include the people of northern China, modern Japan, and the native peoples of North and South America.144 Mongoloids in general have both of the two derived types of teeth, with southern mongoloids being sundadont and northern mongoloids sinodont.
The puzzle is that mongoloid skull types, although now owned by the largest of all human racial groups, do not show up indisputably in the archaeological record until about 10,000 years ago. There were of course people in China before then, but those inhabitants possessed generic early modern human skulls. The mongoloid skull type is a very recent evolutionary development.
No one knows for sure what factors prompted the emergence of the mongoloid peoples from their predecessors, but two explanations have been suggested, both invoking the Last Glacial Maximum.
One is that the mongoloids emerged by genetic drift, the random fluctuation in gene frequencies that occurs between generations. Drift can lead to a single version of a gene becoming universal, or fixed, and all other versions being lost. Fixation of a gene depends on the size of the population, being faster in smaller populations, so anything that breaks a population into small, separately breeding communities will spur genetic drift and evolutionary change. The Last Glacial Maximum, by freezing the landscape in a patchy fashion, could well have fractured the habitat of the people living in the northern latitudes of East Asia into small populations subject to rapid drift. In one of these, presumably the most successful, the particular features of the mongoloid skull would have evolved by chance alone (since drift is a random process) and that group went on to dominate East Asia.
Another proposal is that the mongoloid skull type arose from natural selection. Biologists have long speculated that mongoloid features are an adaptation to cold. An extra layer of fat in the eyelid (the epicanthic fold) gives the eye more insulation. Pale skin lets in more sunlight, which the body requires for synthesis of vitamin D. A stockier body reduces heat loss. It’s a plausible guess that genes favoring such features would have grown more frequent during the 5,000 or so years of the Last Glacial Maximum.
Drift and selection can of course act together. “It is possible that with the onset of glacial conditions the widespread population of eastern Asia contracted its range in its northern latitudes, resulting in a number of temporarily isolated groups,” writes the physical anthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr. “Under strong environmental pressure, morphological change could have become rapidly fixed in a population of small size.”145 Or, in less technical language, new versions of genes that favored the mongoloid physical appearance could have become universal in one of these groups through the selective pressure of the cold climate. East Asians seem to have evolved light skin independently of the Europeans.358 They also have a gene that leads to a dry form of earwax and less sweating.359 When the glaciers retreated 15,000 years ago, the mongoloids would have expanded northward, like their counterparts did in Europe.
When the glaciers started to retreat some 15,000 years ago, the mongoloids, still a small population, would have started to expand and recolonize northern territories, just as their counterparts are known to have done in Europe.
The first modern humans who migrated out of Africa almost certainly had dark skin, as do their descendants in Australia and the relict populations who still survive at points in between. Given that early modern human skulls are all much the same, it’s possible that for many thousands of years all modern humans outside Africa, as well as those inside, had black skin. But at some stage, populations in both the western and eastern halves of Eurasia must have evolved into, or been replaced by, people with lighter skin. When that happened is at present a matter of speculation. But one point at which replacement could have occurred is during the Late Glacial Maximum. The populations living in northern latitudes had perhaps developed lighter skin, either for reasons of vitamin D synthesis or through sexual selection, by 20,000 years ago. When the glaciers returned, the cold-adapted northerners would have moved slowly south, along with the frigid climates to which they, but not their southern neighbors, were adapted. The freezing temperatures could have given them an edge in displacing their darker-skinned cousins in southern latitudes. Later, after the glaciers’ retreat, the populations that expanded from their southern refuges, both in Europe and East Asia, would have been the descendants of the light-skinned northerners.
This might explain why the regional variations in skull type that characterize caucasoid peoples (those of western Eurasia: India, Europe and the Near East) and mongoloids (peoples of East Asia) do not become evident until the Holocene, the warm period that succeeded the great Pleistocene ice age 10,000 years ago. “Most early modern skulls do not exhibit unequivocal characteristics of any present-day race,” writes the paleoanthropologist Richard Klein, “and it seems increasingly likely that the modern races formed mainly in the Holocene, after 12-10 ky [thousand years] ago. This is perhaps particularly clear for eastern Asia (the present-day hearth of the ‘Mongoloids’), but it also applies to Europe (the homeland of the ‘Cauca soids’).”146
With the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, the dominance of the hunter-gathering way of life, the only kind of existence humans had ever known, also began at last to wane. It was in the Near East that the first sustained experiments in settled living were about to begin.
7
SETTLEMENT
Man accumulates property and bequeaths it to his children, so that the children of the rich have an advantage over the poor in the race for success, independently of bodily or mental superiority. . . . But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races. Nor does the moderate accumulation of wealth interfere with the process of selection. When a poor man becomes moderately rich, his children enter trades or professions in which there is struggle enough, so that the able in body and mind succeed best.
CHARLES DARWIN, THE DESCENT OF MAN
THE LAST GLACIAL MAXIMUM preceded the emergence not only of people who looked somewhat different from each other but, far more significantly, of people who behaved differently from all their predecessors. In the southern borders of the western half of Eurasia, around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, a new kind of human society evolved, one in which hunters and gatherers at last developed the behaviors necessary for living in settled communities.
The Pleistocene did not depart quietly but in a roller coaster of climatic swings. After the Last Glacial Maximum, of 20,000 to 15,000 years ag
o, came a warming period known as the Bølling-Allerød Interstadial, during which plants, animals and people were able to move northward again. But the Bølling-Allerød warming, which lasted from 15,000 to 12,500 years ago, was a false dawn. A second cold period, particularly challenging because it began so abruptly, established its grip on Eurasia. Within a decade, it had sent temperatures plummeting back to almost glacial levels and soon had converted to tundra the vast forests of northern Europe. This deadly cold snap is known as the Younger Dryas, after a dwarf yellow rose, Dryas oc topetala, that grew amid the tundra.
The Younger Dryas lasted for 1,300 years and ended as suddenly as it began, also in a decade or so, according to the cores drilled from through the Greenland ice cap that serve as an archive of global climate. By 11,500 years ago the world was launched on the Holocene, the inter-ice age period that still prevails.
These wrenching climatic and territorial changes would have posed severe tests to human survival, doubtless forcing people to resort to many new expedients even in the warmer southern latitudes. The precise chain of cause and effect, if any, remains a mystery. All that can be said for now is that in the Near East, as the Last Glacial Maximum ended, a new kind of human society began to emerge, one based not on the narrow ambit of the forager’s life but on settling down in one place.
Settling down, or sedentism, as archaeologists say, may sound so simple and obvious, but for foragers it was not nearly so clear a choice. Sedentism tied people to a single exposed site, increasing vulnerability to raiders. Sedentism attracted noxious vermin and disease. Sedentism required new ways of thought, new social relationships and a new kind of social organization, one in which people had to trade their prized freedom and equality for hierarchy, officials and chiefs and other encumbrances.
Archaeologists have little hesitation in describing the transition to sedentism as a revolution, comparable to the one that defines the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic 50,000 years ago when behaviorally modern humans emerged from their anatomically modern forebears. Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University refers to these transitions as “two major revolutions in the history of humankind.”147
Hunter-gatherers own almost no personal property and, without differences of wealth, everyone is more or less equal. The first settled communities show evidence of a quite different social order. Houses and storage facilities seem to have been privately owned. With personal property allowed, some people quickly acquired more of it than others, along with greater status. The old egalitarianism disappeared and in its place there emerged a hierarchical society, with chiefs and commoners, rich families and poor, specializations of labor, and the beginnings of formal religion in the form of an ancestor cult.
“Daily life in a village that is larger than a forager’s band heralds the restructuring of the social organization, as it imposes more limits on the individual as well as on entire households,” writes Bar-Yosef. “To ensure the long-term predictability of habitable conditions in a village, members accept certain rules of conduct that include, among other things, the role of leaders or headmen (possibly the richest members of the community), active or passive participation in ceremonies (conducted publicly in an open space) and the like.”148
Sedentism must also have included a response to the most pressing of human social needs, defense against other human groups. For hunter-gatherers, the essence of security is mobility. For the first settlers, defense must have rested on some other basis, which was presumably that of population size. Because the settlers had learned to live together in larger groups, they would have outnumbered the attackers. With greater manpower than the usual foraging group, together with fortifications and perhaps the guard dogs that first became available 15,000 years ago, settlers would have been able to even the odds against the raiding parties after their food and women.
This new form of social organization preceded and perhaps prompted such innovations as the cultivation of wild cereals, and the penning and herding of wild animals like sheep and goats. These steps led in turn, perhaps more by accident than design, to the domestication of plants and animals and to the beginnings of agriculture. Settled life and the new hierarchical form of society paved the way for complex societies, cities, civilization and, in rudimentary form, the institutions of today’s urban life. Almost all subsequent human history and development seems in one sense a consequence of the pivotal transition from the foraging lifestyle to a settled, structured society.
The innovations of settled life and agriculture started to spread through Europe 10,000 years ago, a date that marks the beginning of the Neolithic age. Because the two inventions became so visible in the Neolithic, archaeologists long assumed that the improving climate made agriculture possible, which in turn opened the gateway to settled living. But in part because of improved dating techniques, they have come to see that the reverse is true: it was not agriculture that led to settlement, but rather sedentary life came first, well before the Neolithic age began, and agriculture followed in its train.
“Until recently, the beginning of the Neolithic was thought to occur with the inception of village farming,” write the archaeologists Peter Akkermans, of Leiden University in Holland, and Glenn Schwartz of Johns Hop-kins University. “We are now aware, however, that sedentary village life began several millennia before the end of the late glacial period, and the full-scale adoption of agriculture and stock rearing occurred much later, in the late ninth and eighth millennia BC. It is now evident that agriculture was not a necessary prerequisite for sedentary life, nor were sedentary settlers always farmers.”149
Some signs of sedentary life can be seen as early as the Gravettian mammoth bone houses of 18,000 years ago, and it may be that sedentary systems were attempted when people came across an abundant food source, such as hazelnuts or salmon, together with a method of storing it. But these early instances of settlement were sporadic and may not have required any deep behavioral changes. True sedentism did not catch on as a permanent way of life until toward the end of the Upper Paleolithic. The first clear evidence of a successful and long term settled community comes from people called the Natufians, who lived in the Near East from about 15,000 to 11,500 years ago. They occupied lands on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the region that is now Israel, Jordan and Syria. The early Natufians gathered the wild emmer wheat and barley that grew there. They made stone sickles to cut the cereal grasses, and the sickles bear signs of the characteristic polish caused by the silica in cereal stalks.150
Bar-Yosef suggests that the Natufians may have started to cultivate these wild cereals, including einkorn and emmer wheats, rice and barley, during the Younger Dryas when the natural yields of these cereal grasses would have been reduced. There is little evidence on the point, and in any event the Natufians did not develop the domesticated forms of the cereals. But in gathering, preparing and storing these grains, they were laying the technical basis for their successors to do so.
It is of interest that the Natufians, as the earliest known settled people, were no strangers to war or to religion, two characteristic human activities that shaped societies before and since. The Natufians have consistently been portrayed as peaceful but closer examination of remains from one site has recently shown evidence of violent conflict between Natufian groups.151
Natufian society is interesting for its burial practices, which indicate the emergence both of social inequality and of a disconcertingly intimate form of ancestor worship. Some 10% of early Natufian burials include decorations of marine shells and pendants made of animal teeth, suggesting the presence of a richer elite. In the later Natufian period, as the rigors of the Younger Dryas began, the society was forced to become more mobile, and their mortuary practices reflect a shift back toward a more egalitarian society. The early Natufians also began a practice that became common in the ensuing Neolithic period, that of separating the skull from the body before burial. The corpses were buried but the skulls were covered with plaster, given new faces, and ke
pt in the houses to serve as a close bond between living and dead.152
FIGURE 7.1. THE HOMELAND OF THE NATUFIANS,
THE FIRST FORAGERS TO SETTLE.
The Natufians built settlements on the east coast of the Mediterranean some 15,000 years ago. Later, they began to harvest wild stands of wheat and barley, laying the basis for others to develop domesticated forms of those cereals several thousand years after them.
Though it is impossible to reconstruct what was happening in the minds of late Upper Paleolithic people, it seems likely that settled life required developing mental concepts that were largely unfamiliar or alien to foragers. “The slow transformation of the foraging society into a Neolithic world of agriculturalists and herdsmen was associated with the creation of a new set of social and economic values centering around the house, the dead buried in and around the house, and the production and storage of staples,” write Akkermans and Schwartz.
It is hard not to admire the fortitude and intelligence that hunter-gatherers bring to the problems of survival. But the set of intellectual skills required for survival in the wild seem quite different from those needed to prosper in the jungle of urban life. Even if a hunter-gatherer were born with the innate intellectual ability of a Newton, Darwin or Einstein, it is difficult to see how he would profit from his gift or, in evolution’s cold calculus, be able to turn it into the reproductive advantage of raising more children. But in an urban setting, gifts of calculation or abstract thought would translate much more easily into extra children, and the genes underlying such abilities would spread.
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors Page 15