The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European (...)

[Euclides]

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Jan 3;103(1):242-7. Epub 2005 Dec 21


The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form.

Brace CL, Seguchi N, Quintyn CB, Fox SC, Nelson AR, Manolis SK, Qifeng P.

Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.

Many human craniofacial dimensions are largely of neutral adaptive significance, and an analysis of their variation can serve as an indication of the extent to which any given population is genetically related to or differs from any other. When 24 craniofacial measurements of a series of human populations are used to generate neighbor-joining dendrograms, it is no surprise that all modern European groups, ranging all of the way from Scandinavia to eastern Europe and throughout the Mediterranean to the Middle East, show that they are closely related to each other. The surprise is that the Neolithic peoples of Europe and their Bronze Age successors are not closely related to the modern inhabitants, although the prehistoric/modern ties are somewhat more apparent in southern Europe. It is a further surprise that the Epipalaeolithic Natufian of Israel from whom the Neolithic realm was assumed to arise has a clear link to Sub-Saharan Africa. Basques and Canary Islanders are clearly associated with modern Europeans. When canonical variates are plotted, neither sample ties in with Cro-Magnon as was once suggested. The data treated here support the idea that the Neolithic moved out of the Near East into the circum-Mediterranean areas and Europe by a process of demic diffusion but that subsequently the in situ residents of those areas, derived from the Late Pleistocene inhabitants, absorbed both the agricultural life way and the people who had brought it.

[Agrippa]

The Natufians seem to show generally rather primitive traits more than clear Negroid influence, though that was suggested by some earlier authors too already.

Natufian sample from Israel is also problematic because it is so small, being constituted of three males and one female from the Late Pleistocene Epipalaeolithic (34) of Israel, and there was no usable Neolithic sample for the Near East.

The small sample size is a serious problem, sometimes results might base on just one family even! And even in moderns the samples are small and not distinguished after type (!). I think it would make a great difference to compare both populations and correlated feature combinations of populations.

I think that especially the nasal shape was under constant selective pressure in prehistoric times and that there was a lot of change going on. Most measurements are about nasal shape and there is a huge variation inside of modern Europeans too on that. So taking small samples might always distort the real picture.

Thats interesting, especially the connection to other populations:

has previously been shown that the Mongolian Bronze Age sample is unrelated to modern Mongols and has more in common with prehistoric Europeans and the Native Americans of the United States–Canada border

He is right about the decrease of robustness, but his ideas about evolution should be questioned.