posted 04 September 2004 09:15 PM            

Anyway, I'm seeking any information about Shomarka Keita's research concerning the presence of tropical Africans in Upper Egypt.

I also want legitimate reasons why Loring C. Brace's methodologies were flawed, aswell as Cavali Sforza's.

I used to know this **** , but it's been such a long time that I forgot

So, can you help me out?

**Edit** Nevermind. Actually, I found what I was looking for.. Now I need some pictures of dark skinned modern Egyptians

posted 06 September 2004 11:25 AM            

quote:

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Originally posted by supercar:
Carfax, Keita findings have exposed the flaws of Brace's methodologies a long time ago. But here is some good writing on physical anthropology from an Asian Website, which does a good job of comparing Keita's methods to that of Brace and others:
http://asiapacificuniverse.com/pkm/anthro.htm

It also provides references for further reading on Keita's, C.A. Diop, Brace, F. Hassan, and others.

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Actually, the best way to dispose of people who cite Brace, especially Eurocentrists, is to ask them if Europeans are part Neanderthal. If they actually have read any of Brace's works and not just cite his flawed AE cranial study, they would know what this means. Check out what I'm saying, this was posted in another forum and I paid no attention to it until I recognized the underlying theory behind it:

To the Editor:

"The Beginning of Modern Humans" (editorial, June 15) states that a newly discovered Ethiopian skull more than 150,000 years old is "recognizably modern to paleoanthropologists but not to most of the rest of us." It does not look recognizably modern to _this_ paleoanthropologist, and it is a much less probable candidate for being the ancestor of the modern European human than the European Neanderthal is.

I have superimposed the outlines of the crania being compared. Statistical analysis of a battery of measurements shows that the European Neanderthal is more closely related to modern Europeans than to anyone else in the world. [u]This can only be because there is an actual genetic relationship[/u].

That splendid Ethiopian specimen is a good candidate for being an ancestor of Ethiopians, but not Europeans.

C. Loring Brace

You see what I mean? Brace is making the interpretation that two things that look similar can only be due to an actual genetic relationship, however, modern day Europeans and even Cro-Magnon Man, the ancestor of modern Europeans have ZERO Neanderthal genes, or not enough to significantly affect the phenotype. How does this apply to this thread? Simple, Brace explicitly stated that since there was NO similarity craniometrically between groups so-called Negroes" and ancient Egyptians/Northeast Africans because they allegedy look so disimilar, yet there is substantial geneflow between so-called Negroes and Northeast Africans. Brace even said Nubians wasn't black, go figure. Anyway, i hope you understand the point I'm making and how it relates.

posted 06 September 2004 12:35 PM            

I have made this very same point regarding Brace and other advocates of Neo-Aryanist (caucasian) anthropology.

It's difficult to effectively communicate though.

The present state of Out of Africa theory of human evolution requires that you either except that Homo Sapiens/Sapiens is essentially an African species, with Eurasian people constituting recent and genetically trivial (not very different) descendants of a sub group of tropically adapted (ie -Black) Africans, modified in some cases to a cooler climate.

Or you postulate that Europeans and Asians are hybred with Neanderthal, Nanjing man, Java man and other primative hominids.

This is a necessary evil now for Brace et. al, because it is their only remaining means of asserting the significant distinctiveness, uniqueness or relevance of that which is supposedly: caucasian

Many of the phenotypical features that supposidly characterize European and East Asian peples (narrow nasal indices, high cheekbones and slanted eyes) are first found in Africa, prior to the existence of modern humans in Asia or Europe. What, it is fair to ask, is a European or Asian racial feature other than predominent recessive gene albinism/fair skin, as result of extreme dearth of sunlight, and vitamin poor diet?
This fact is quite devastating to the whole Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid classification system, which is perilously close to being revealed as polemical, and non biological,
but too few laypeople can follow the logic of why this is so.

posted 06 September 2004 01:03 PM            

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Originally posted by rasol:
S. Mohammad: Excellent observation.

I have made this very same point regarding Brace and other advocates of Neo-Aryanist (caucasian) anthropology.

It's difficult to effectively communicate though.

The present state of Out of Africa theory of human evolution requires that you either except that Homo Sapiens/Sapiens is essentially an African species, with Eurasian people constituting recent and genetically trivial (not very different) descendants of a sub group of tropically adapted (ie -Black) Africans, modified in some cases to a cooler climate.

Or you postulate that Europeans and Asians are hybred with Neanderthal, Nanjing man, Java man and other primative hominids.

This is a necessary evil now for Brace et. al, because it is their only remaining means of asserting the significant distinctiveness, uniqueness or relevance of that which is supposedly: caucasian

Many of the phenotypical features that supposidly characterize European and East Asian peples (narrow nasal indices, high cheekbones and slanted eyes) are first found in Africa, [b]prior to the existence of modern humans in Asia or Europe. What, it is fair to ask, is a European or Asian racial feature other than predominent recessive gene albinism/fair skin, as result of extreme dearth of sunlight, and vitamin poor diet?
This fact is quite devastating to the whole Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid classification system, which is perilously close to being revealed as polemical, and non biological,
but too few laypeople can follow the logic of why this is so.

[This message has been edited by rasol (edited 06 September 2004).][/B]

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Precisely, this why Keita goes by the "no race" philosophy, because so-called features typical in one race found in others races does not mean that there was mixture. In Africa, especially in East Africa, you find the baseline of all phenotypes found in the wole and well as the highest genetic diversity in Africa. This is why Eurocentrists like to separate East Africa from sub-Saharan Africa.

posted 06 September 2004 01:24 PM            

quote:

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This is why Eurocentrists like to separate East Africa from sub-Saharan Africa.
[/B]

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posted 06 September 2004 01:57 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
I've seen this quite literally in a few studies. They talk about the horn of Africa &/or Somalia as compared to "sub saharan" Africa. Say what? Somalia, which sits between Kenya and Ethiopia and extends into the southern hemisphere, is no longer sub sahara. Fantasy geography in the service of fantasy anthropology.

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posted 06 September 2004 04:17 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by S.Mohammad:

I've seen that too. They act as if east Africa is some separate entity distinct from the rest of Africa. They overexagerrate the amount of admixture in Somalia and Ethiopia. Cavalli-Sforza played a big role in this too with his clustering and labelling of "East Africa." East Africans to him are Amhara, Tigre, Beja, and Somalis, hello, where is the rest of east Africa? Look at the labelling of his cvlusters and you'll see what I'm talking about.

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posted 06 September 2004 04:29 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by S.Mohammad:
They overexagerrate the amount of admixture in Somalia and Ethiopia.

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This is precisely the diffusionist tool used to claim why those East Africans may exhibit the so-called Caucasian facial features, not withstanding that such features are also found elsewhere in Africa.

posted 06 September 2004 04:37 PM            

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Originally posted by supercar:
These tactics of categorizing East Africa may be so, but the act of separating North Africa from the rest of the continent seems to be far more common.

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But that hasn't worked Supercar, because of the fossil, lingusitic and genetic evidence that leads back to East Africa. Even some Berber and West African haplotypes lead back to East Africa. So now they must try and sever East Africa from Africa as well.

But the falseness of this approach is too obvious. It's an example of taking a scam to the nth degree, and so exposing it to everyone.

Somalia is further away from the Sahara than any part of West Africa. While it's border with Kenya consists largely of tall blades of grass...not exactly an impenetrable barrier. Esp. to Cattle. So it cannot by fake geography, be connected to North Africa, and separated from the rest of tropical Africa, in order to obscure the reality of the African origins of Nile Valley civilization.

posted 06 September 2004 05:12 PM            

quote:

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Originally posted by rasol:
But that hasn't worked Supercar, because of the fossil, lingusitic and genetic evidence that leads back to East Africa. Even some Berber and West African haplotypes lead back to East Africa. So now they must try and sever East Africa from Africa as well.

But the falseness of this approach is too obvious. It's an example of taking a scam to the nth degree, and so exposing it to everyone.

Somalia is further away from the Sahara than any part of West Africa. While it's border with Kenya consists largely of tall blades of grass...not exactly an impenetrable barrier. Esp. to Cattle. So it cannot by fake geography, be connected to North Africa, and separated from the rest of tropical Africa, in order to obscure the reality of the African origins of Nile Valley civilization.

[This message has been edited by rasol (edited 06 September 2004).]

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No need to convince me of the fragility of the fallacies promoted by methods used by Euro-bioanthropologists like Brace and Sforza. Simply stating the fact that Eurocentric-minded folks disregard reality, and still resort to debunked works of Euro-Egyptologist, bio-anthropologists and the like, as the lifeline of arguments. They usually label those works as the "mainstream" view. You've experienced it yourself, with Horemheb's reponse to questions raised in our discussions. No need to convince such folks either; they have already closed their minds to only accept what is mentally pleasing to them, not reality. The people to be concerned about, are those who have not only been "innocent" victims of lack of properly updated curricula and the fantasy world of Hollywood, but are also reality or truth-seeking individuals!

posted 07 September 2004 03:28 PM            

The problem is that many of these theories of Sfoza and Brace predate modern scientific analysis or mTdna resserch which has invalidated many old theories that early cephallic index centric anthropologist like Coon,Grafton Smith, Hootan,Seligman,and Sergi. Infact it was the infamous Grafton Smith who insisted that AE people were ''brown cuacasians'' untill they mixed with mythical negriod slaves forming the modern population of Egypt. The problem with this was that early anatomist and anthropologist like Smith believed that the early pre-dyanstic Egyptians looked much like the modern Beja poeple of Sudan. Most early anthropologist,since they were distinct in phenotype from Western/Central Africans places them into pusedo caucasoid labels. Gullselpi Sergi,the inventor of the Mediterranean race concept,labeled all people from the Horn of Africa meaning modern Somali,Ethiopia etc as part of the Mediterranean race. If you read Coon he just parrots Sergi's earlier views.

Dr. S.O.Y. Keita has recently responded to C.L. Brace earlier study in 1993 in complete detail. Here is the following responce:

S. Keita, "A response to Brace et al.'s 'Clines and clusters versus race' (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 1993)" - The clusters made in this kind of research are suspect because although australian-melanesian data cluster with Africa, their DNA differs and places the former clearly in Asia. He listed a number of errors in the above mentioned publication, among them misrepresentations of statements made in certain publications by B. Trigger and the present writer, although he did not give more details, I forgot to ask him in what way my views had been distorted and which of my publications he was talking about. He showed many examples of African facial profiles indicating a great variability and denying the claims of some Africans (ie. Nigerians) to represent the true African prototype. He criticized as well the biased use of the language in definitions like for instance writing about "sub-Saharan" populations which has also other cultural implications, so to be consistent they should also use "supra-Saharan" instead of "north African" or other such nomenclature.

http://www.geocities.com/juanjosecastillos/english.html

For a crtique of Sfoza data see the following:

(S.O.Y Keita and Rick A. Kittles, "The Persistence of Racial Thiking and the Myth of
Racial Divergence," _American Anthropologist_ 99 (3): 523-544, 1997)

[...]
An example of ambiguity is to be foud in the work of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and
his colleagues (1988), who studied select world populations, using cluster
analysis in an effort to explore the issue of possible congruence between
dendograms based on genetics and those based on language. (p.548]
[...]

After explaining inconsistency in the clustering of Berber and Dravidian populations,
the authors write:

[...]
The Berber and Dravidian examples show shifts between the major *racial*
groups as traditionally and currently defined by some scholars...Cavalli-
Sfroza and his colleagues(1988) do not accurately represent the Afro-Asiatic
family because they exclude Chadic, Omotic, and Cushitic speakers, thereby
giving the illusion that Ethiopians are an anomaly, being genetically Africans
(but mixed) who also speak the languages of Caucasians (Afro-Asiatic!?)
(Armstrong 1990). An evolutionary model explains the geographical range
of Afro-Asiatic speakers as one of overlaying gradients of genetic differentiation,
which a racial model breaks into discrete units that cannot be shown to have ever
existed. (pp. 548-9)
[...]

Keita and Kittles criticize the use, by Cavalli-Sfroza et al., and Horai et
al., of "core" populations (supposedly less-admixed) to reconstruct
"racial" history:

[...]
Their study consisted of mtDNA derived from an African individual from Uganda
(who was used to represent all Africans), ten Japanese individuals whose
sequences where amalgamated into one consensus sequence (to represent Asians),
and the Cambridge sequence (used to represent Europeans). Here a single mtDNA
sequence in two of three cases were deemed by the investigators to be
representative of entire geographical regions conceptualized as being authentic.
(p.542)
[...]

The authors comment on the differences in dates of racial divergence given
by a number of modern studies:

[...]
The inconsistencies are difficult to reconcile, although blood substances are
stated to be nonneutral and therefore not as reliable for this kind of enterprise;
this means that results based on certain kinds of data could be theorectically
eliminated...The use of genetic systems not responsible for morphology in order to
study groups that are defined by morphophenotype is theoretically unsound,
especially when divergence times are subject. (p.537)

posted 07 September 2004 10:33 PM            

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Originally posted by Thought2:
Thought Writes:

I had a long and extended discussion with Dr. Brace. One of the problems with his theory, that I pointed out to him was that he utilized few West African Sahelian samples. The AE's were essentially Sahelian Africans in a biologically adaptive sense. Brace did not use Sahelian samples from populations like the Wolof, Tuareg, Fulani or even the Songhay. Instead, he focused on a FEW West African populations from the rain forrest belt regions and related East African groups.

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posted 17 September 2004 12:55 PM            

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Originally posted by supercar:
Interesting. Did he express any sign of a change of heart about his method in his response to you?

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