The Role of Chin

Image caption: Homo Erectus, Homo Floresiensis and Homo Sapiens skulls on display. Note the chin structures of the two most visible and complete skulls of the three.

The well-known ideas circling out there about the human chin are pretty much in general agreement about its potential adaptive nature, they are just not in unison about what that adaptive nature is. To get a glimpse of what these ideas entail, we'll take a preliminary look at a recently published journal by Zaneta M. Thayer and Seth D. Dobson, titled Sexual dimorphism in chin shape: Implications for adaptive hypotheses.

Knowledge-base Tool Kit: More on Social Positioning

Just another motoring report of an exclusive car, or is there more to it than meets the eye? As an illustrative example of how the aforementioned manipulation of the wage workforce by corporations and the plutocrats is at work, i.e. mass lay-offs so as to bring down wages and raise productivity with slimmer workforces [see the topic: Knowledge-base Tool Kit: Social Bargaining positions], the following came to attention...

High (volume) Roller — Rolls-Royce is on something of a...roll, with remarkable growth in many markets and all its designated models sold out until September.

Knowledge-base Tool Kit: Social Bargaining positions

Image caption: Cartoon inspired by artwork of Scott Adams, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

In the existing interconnected global social complex, there are two main types of business entities: 1) Owners and/or overseers of profit-driven concerns that supply commodities of various forms, and 2) suppliers of labor. The former group ranges from financiers to the management of manufacturing, service and retail concerns, while the latter essentially comprises of the wage-worker. The global social setup is of course complex enough to obscure the obviousness of its interconnected business relations in all its facets to an ordinary observer, beyond that observer's own immediate role in society and relations directly linked to that, e.g. employer-employee social relations....so, where does that leave an ordinary wage-worker?

KhoiSan: As the "Oldest" Surviving "Tribes"

The reader may recall having heard the claim that the KhoiSan are the "oldest living human populations" at some point or another. The saying may well have taken the character of something of a religious faith within some circles. When the whereabouts of the source for this "understanding" is inquired, common references have been to the National Geographic human genome project web-page and Semino et al.'s (2001) study regarding the "deepest clades" for instance. The former bases this on rather flimsy material that KhoiSan male gene pools comprises of deep root clades like hg A, while the latter has every now and then fallen victim to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what is being related in the authors' findings within the contexts that they were made. Fact is the KhoiSan are no more representative of the oldest anatomical modern human beings any more than other living populations.

ATI one-stop referential page for notes on DNA studies

Reviews on mtDNA studies:

Haplogroups L0, L1, L2 & L3

Mitochondrial DNA M1 haplogroup: A Response To Ana M. Gonzalez et al. 2007

L1, L2 & L3 haplogroups: mtDNA Analysis of Nile River Valley Populations

"Ethno-specific" markers?

Side-lock of Youth

While the ancient Egyptian side-lock is a familiar sight, it is also a somewhat understudied feature—that appears on mainly adolescent figures of wall murals. Perhaps the curious feature about this cultural expression, is that the youth side-lock is strictly an African custom, and the fact that the ancient Egyptians shared [with Africans south of the Sahara] this custom, is significant to this end. Like the practice of circumcision was at one point in antiquity, the youth side-lock was foreign to Europeans, as well as to populations in the Levant. Interestingly enough, with regards to the latter, a question has in fact come up about a possible remote link between the "Jewish side-locks" and the subject of this topic—the Kemetic side-lock.

An Investigation into the "Mysterious" Mesolithic Maghrebi populations

The present discussion takes off from the trail of a previous one posted here on the examination of the "Mechta-Afalou" and the European "Cro-Magnons" as elements of a monophyletic unit constituting a taxonomic "type". That previous discussion had put a spotlight on the futility of such a thesis, which varied quite widely in its specifics as one went from the subjective taxonomic regime of one researcher to the next. In that same discussion, the following was noted:  "the Mechtoid concept and its supposed relationship with Cro-Magnon, is nothing more than another Eurocentric way of trying to relate North Africa to Europe...essentially a *wishful* desire to see north Africa as more an extension of Europe than the actual continent [Africa] its attached to".

Indeed, there has been a long indirectly-stated desire to make the coastal northern piece of the African continent an extension of Europe, and territory which has traditionally been THE domain of European-descended peoples than of autochthonous Africans, which are generally treated as "newcomers" to the region. In other words, some sort of a "natural" apartheid was put in place in the late Upper Paleolithic until some time in the early Holocene, preventing autochthonous Africans from inhabiting the place, while the same region was supposedly hospitable to "European immigrants". This theme blatantly makes its reappearance in another study that has fairly recently enjoyed elevated circulation and has become a citation-favorite within online 'white' supremacist cult gatherings, undoubtedly attributable to the French-published study becoming more accessible as English-translated versions became more available on the net. The study in question comes from Kefi et al., under the heading: Mitochondrial Diversity of the Population of Taforalt (12,000 years b.p. - Morocco): A Genetic Study Approach to the Peopling of North Africa, 2005.