Loring Brace and his craniofacial measurements

I recently referred to this paper in which C. Loring Brace used craniofacial measurements to argue that modern Europeans are descended from ancient Europeans rather than from invaders. Yet his data seemed to contradict that: “the Neolithic peoples of Europe and their Bronze Age successors are not closely related to the modern inhabitants”. How come?

It seems that Brace is one of those Leftist nutters who believe that race does not exist and as part of that he seems to need to believe that modern Europeans gradually evolved from Neanderthals rather than from incoming Cromagnons. So even Neanderthals are not really different!

So I think Brace had arrived at his conclusions long before he did his study and would have presented those conclusions regardless of what he found. His sample of 24 skeletons is in any case ludicrously small for examining generalizations as large as those he wants to make. There is an attempt to put Brace’s findings into plain English here but that attempt also founders on Brace’s contradictions. We read “Ancient peoples had heavier brow ridges than modern Europeans. “The faces were also broader and the jaws were heavier,” Brace added”. But we also read as the summary of the findings: “Europeans inherit their looks from Stone Age hunters, new research suggests.” Black is white, I guess. Oh well! Leftists never have been much influenced by reality.

Addendum by J Richards:

Whoops, John! Sorry for adding this information to your post, but your post is based on a serious misunderstanding of the paper (in addition to your not reading it), and I would rather add this here than in the comments section, which some people may not bother reading. There were 24 skull measurements, not 24 skulls analyzed. The authors analyzed a total of 1,282 skulls. This study is consistent with a recent DNA analysis showing the same thing. Recently, a 700,000-year-old human presence was reported in England (download pdf). What all these things mean is that whites, especially Northern and Central European populations, have been evolving separately from non-whites for much longer than what would have been the case if Middle Eastern populations would have had a major impact on the European gene pool when farming spread up North, i.e., the findings do not undermine the concept of race. The stone-age hunters—just before farming spread to Northern and Central Europe—from which most Northern and Central European individuals descend apparently had a high prevalence of fine facial features similar to that seen in these European populations today rather than the more robust features of the Neolithic samples, some impact of which is seen in Southern Europeans. Those who wish to read this paper can download it here (pdf).

Update

I am indebted to J. Richards for adding a modicum of enlightenment to our understanding of the Brace paper—though I am a little surprised that he did not speak up in response to my initial post about the matter. As I see it, however, both methodological and theoretical problems remain. Brace seems to assume that all his neolithic skeletons were from incomers. Are we to assume that ALL the simultaneous original Europeans had no neolithic skills? That seems improbable even in Brace’s own “cultural diffusion” terms. I would have thought that a more cautious assumption would be that at least some, if not all of the neolithic skeletons were of original Europeans. And Brace’s view that we are all descended from Neanderthals—who were physically very different from modern Europeans—is also surely called into question by finding fine features way back in the European past.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, December 28, 2005 at 09:59 AM in Origin of Man
Comments (3) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Calvin on December 28, 2005, 06:37 PM | #

John, we seem to all be founding our arguments on assumed premises. There is no evidence that farming spread from Mesopotamia to Europe. There is evidence that farmers spread from Mesopotamia to Europe, but that’s not at all the same thing.

The growth of agriculture in Europe was prompted by climate change and a subsequent scarcity of game. For many people (American Indians, Aboriginals, San) the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was the preferred mode of existence. The British anthropological historian Lionel Sims makes this preference the basis for his interpretation of the function of Stonehenge. This doesn’t mean that the ancient Europeans were ignorant of agriculture. It is likely that our ancestors graduated from foraging to managing natural flora and from this to small-scale agriculture, in the manner of some American Indian tribes. The indigenes are far more likely to have progressed to mastery of agriculture as necessity required than to have “learned” it from invaders with little knowledge of the local ecology and climate. The available DNA evidence indicates that these incomers were not our ancestors. I also doubt very much that they were our teachers. The “learned it from Mesopotamians” theory is just another myth promulgated by anti-Western academics, who refuse to acknowledge that Europeans created anything, but insist that they “stole” or “borrowed” everything from Semites, Blacks and Asians.

I expect the agricultural incomers were masacred by angry Europeans at some point.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 28, 2005, 07:26 PM | #

“I expect the agricultural incomers were masacred by angry Europeans at some point.” (—Calvin)

Maybe they got sick and tired of them gang-raping their women.

Posted by J Richards on December 28, 2005, 11:02 PM | #

John,

Sometimes I don’t look at MR for a couple of days in a row and hence I didn’t respond to your earlier post. Anyway, Brace et al. studied largely neutral markers for good reason, namely to rule out the possibility that the Neolithic skulls in their sample were those of indigenous Europeans that eventually became the gracile modern Europeans. Therefore, they can say with some confidence that the Middle Eastern populations that moved up North didn’t leave much of an impact on the indigenous populations there. Possible Neanderthal contribution to the European gene pool or skills transfer between populations is not something that this paper is concerned with. Also, you have mentioned Homo sapiens neanderthalensis in your previous post, but this animal was not a human species and is termed Homo neanderthalensis, instead (This is not to say that it surely wasn’t cross-fertile with humans).

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