Most of the outside world attributes the success of the UAE to the murky fluid beneath its soil, but thousands of years ago, long before oil was of any use, a culture existed here that built a foundation for the UAE’s civilisation…
…During the last two years archaeologists have discovered solid evidence of very ancient communities that were living in different places in the UAE. The most ancient community known so far is the one that lived around Jebel Baraka in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, at least 150,000 years ago. The Arabian Gulf by then was still a dry land ripped by the Tigris and the Euphrates which debouched at the strait of Hormuz.
Hmmm, 150,000 years ago is given as the time homo sapiens left Africa and started to settle other areas, including the Middle East. If I read the article right, these early communities were already established 150,000 years ago.
Maybe Michael Cremo has a point?
But not so fast now…
MITOCHONDRIAL DNA is a remarkable thing. Itself the remnant of a strange evolutionary event (the merger of an ancient bacterium with the cell ancestral to all plant and animal life), it also carries the imprint of more recent evolution. In many species, humans included, it passes only from mother to child. No paternal genes get mixed into it. That makes it easy to see when particular genetic mutations happened, and thus to construct a human family tree.
The branches of that tree are now well studied. Humans started in Africa, spread to Asia around 60,000 years ago, thence to Australia 50,000 years ago, Europe 35,000 years ago and America 15,000 years ago. What have not been so well examined, though, are the tree’s African roots. The genetic diversity of Africans probably exceeds that of the rest of the world put together. But the way that diversity evolved is unclear.
The time frames don’t jibe here at all, communities in the United Arab Emirates that date back 150,000 years, or a branch of humanity just hiking out of Africa 70,000 years ago?
DNA research can be a powerful tool indeed to find the truth. But like all tools, it can be subverted for political, societal and religious gain.
Uh-oh, speaking of DNA, this doesn’t bode well for the male gender:
Imagine a world without men: Lauren Bacall but no Bogie, Hillary Clinton but no Bill, no Starsky or Hutch.
This isn’t just an unlikely sci-fi scenario. This could be reality, according to Bryan Sykes, an eminent professor of genetics at Oxford University and author of “Adam’s Curse: A Future Without Men.”
“The Y chromosome is deteriorating and will, in my belief, disappear,” Sykes told me. A world-renowned authority on genetic material, Sykes is called upon to investigate DNA evidence from crime scenes. His team of researchers is currently compiling a DNA family tree for our species.
In 125,000 years there won’t be anymore men. Good news for radical feminists and women of the same sex proclivity.
But c’mon now, who will women blame for wars, drunken barroom brawls and failing to take out the trash?