330,000-50,000 years ago. Our earliest human ancestors emerged for the first time in Africa. The oldest fossils with features shared with anatomically modern humans have been found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dating to around 330,000-300,000 years ago. Since other hominid fossils are scattered across most of Africa except for the Sahara Desert region, that suggests that the first human beings migrated long distances within Africa as they adapted to diverse ecological and climatic conditions. As I have indicated previously, there is also evidence for extensive long-distance trade in Africa as early as 300,000 years ago. So human evolution in Africa was shaped by both migration and trade.
Many Biblical believers--Jews, Christians, and Muslims--doubt this Darwinian account of the evolutionary origin of human beings because they believe it contradicts the Biblical teaching that God created Adam and Eve as the first human beings. But the theistic evolutionists argue that there is no contradiction if one sees that God could have employed the natural evolutionary process to carry out His plan for the creation of human beings.
After all, even Darwin himself recognized that the religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason. All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God. Darwin recognized this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology. He spoke of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which left open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself. Darwin thus allowed for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga.
After the Genesis Flood, Noah and his family were the only human survivors left to populate the Earth. Noah had three sons--Shem, Ham, and Japheth--"and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth" (Genesis 9:19). The Bible then gives an elaborate genealogical history of how the nations arose from the migration of the descendants of Noah's sons over the earth. For two thousand years, Christian writers have tried to trace the origins of all nations back to Noah's sons. The dominant tendency was to attribute the paternity of Europeans to the children of Japheth, that of Asians to Shem, and that of the Africans to Ham. Since the descendants of Ham were mysteriously cursed to serve their cousins as slaves (Genesis 9:27), this was interpreted as God's justifying the enslavement of Africans and condemning interracial marriage (Goldenberg, 2003). Thus, this divinely ordained story of origins explained both the genealogical unity of all human beings through ancestry traced back to Noah and their genealogical diversity through ancestry traced back to one of Noah's sons.
130,000-95,000 years ago. During this period, some anatomically modern humans began to migrate out of Africa into the Near East, where they could have met Neanderthals who were migrating out of Europe. Genetic analysis indicates that Neanderthals had separated from the human lineage 770,000-550,000 years ago. Neanderthal skeletons and DNA show that the Neanderthal lineage was evolving in Europe around 430,000 years ago.
80,000-35,000 years ago. There was another wave of human migration out of Africa, and humans reached Europe, Asia, and Australasia. During this time, humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. The best evidence for this comes from studies of "ancient DNA." In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists discovered that it was possible to recover DNA from mummified human specimens and ancient bones. In 1997, Svante Paabo and his colleagues reported that they had sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA. In 2010, Paabo and his colleagues published a draft of the entire Neanderthal genome; and they suggested that there was interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. They also published a genetic analysis of another archaic human population--the Denisovans. Later, it was shown that humans had interbred with Denisovans.
Since it was humans who had migrated out of Africa who interbred with Neanderthals, scientists have long assumed that while all present day non-African individuals carry some Neanderthal ancestry in their DNA, there would be no Neanderthal ancestry in African populations. But in 2020, a new genetic study showed that African individuals do indeed show some Neanderthal ancestry (Chen et al., 2020). This can be explained by ancient Europeans with Neanderthal genes migrating back to Africa. So we now know that remnants of Neanderthal genomes are found in every human population.
Proportions of Neanderthal DNA in human populations today range as high as 2 percent. Proportions of Denisovan DNA range as high as 5 percent--mostly in Asian and Australasian populations (Reich, 2018, 58-59). This evolution by hybridization has benefitted human beings. For example, modern humans in parts of Europe and East Asia have Neanderthal keratin protein genes that help them grow skin and hair suitable for the colder regions originally occupied by Neanderthals. And many Tibetans today have a Denisovan gene active in red blood cells that help them breath the thin air of the Tibetan high altitudes (Reich, 2018, 65).
Thus, the scientific study of ancient DNA allows us to trace the entire history of human migration and interbreeding across time and space. This research supports two general conclusions. First, the evolution of human nature is about the mixture of populations, so that there is no such thing as a pure population or race. Second, the people who live in a particular place today almost never descend exclusively from the people who lived in the same place in the distant past. These two conclusions refute racism (by denying the "purity" of racial differences) and ethnic nationalism (by denying that national identity can be based on ancestral descent from a single founding population).
65,000-50,000 years ago. The ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians arrived from Southeast Asia. They remained foragers (living by hunting, gathering, and fishing), with little or no farming, until the British arrived in 1888.
20,000-13,00 years ago. There is genetic evidence for at least four prehistoric migrations of Eurasians migrating to the Americas (Reich, 2018, 155-60). By about 14,000 years ago, these human migrants had reached the southern tip of South America. When sea levels were low enough for a land bridge to emerge in what is now the Bering Strait region, these people could walk across to Alaska. In 1590, the Jesuit naturalist Jose de Acosta was the first person to speculate that human hunter-gatherers first crossed from Asia to an America without humans. John Locke learned this from his reading of Acosta, which supported his conclusion that the American Indian hunter-gatherers were "still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 108).
13,000-9,000 years ago. Agriculture developed for the first time in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East. The first European farmers were genetic mixtures of local hunter-gatherers and Anatolian farmers. Farming was then spread by migrants throughout Eurasia over the next few thousand years.
6,000-4,000 years ago. Early wheel technologies and writing systems emerged and were spread by migrants.
9,000-4,500 years ago. During this period--the Early Bronze Age--the Yamnaya culture emerged in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas. The Yamnaya population arose from a genetic mixture of Iranian farmers and local hunter-gatherers. They were pastoralists whose economy was based on sheep and cattle herding. They were innovative in their use of the newly domesticated horse and the hitching of animals to wagons and chariots with wheels. They eventually spread over a vast expanse of the steppe--5,000 miles from Hungary in Europe to the Altai Mountains in central Asia and south into India where they conquered the Indus Valley Civilization. They developed the first form of Indo-European Language, and their expansion created the family of Indo-European languages that stretches across Europe, India, and parts of East Asia. By sometime after 4,500 years ago, the Yamnaya had migrated all the way to the British Isles. 90 percent of the people who built Stonehenge--people with no Yamnaya ancestry--were replaced by Yamnaya people (Reich, 2018, 99-121).
The Yamnaya were a stratified male-dominated society in which a few elite males ruled. The ancient DNA data show that. The Y chromosomes of the Yamnaya were mostly of only a few types, which shows that a few males succeeded in spreading their genes. Moreover, these few Y-chromosome types of the Yamnaya are predominant today in Europe and India, which shows that the Yamnaya expansion allowed the most powerful Yamnaya male descendants to be more successful in mating than men from the local groups (Reich, 2018, 237-41).
This reminds us that because of the biological differences between the sexes, a single male can have far more children than a single female, and consequently powerful men can potentially have a far greater imprint on the human genome than powerful women.
As we will see, this ancient history of an Indo-European culture was transformed--beginning in the 19th century--into the myth of the "Aryan race" that has supported the ideologies of Nazism, Hindutva (Hinduism), and the Alt-Right Nietzscheanism of Trumpists like "Bronze Age Pervert."
117 AD. The Roman Empire reaches its greatest extent under Trajan.
500. Silk Roads link the Mediterranean region and China.
700s-1000s. Viking ships cross the Atlantic.
1206-1368. The Mongols formed the largest contiguous empire in history. Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was the founder and the first khan of the Mongol Empire. Genetic evidence indicates that 8 percent of the males living in East Eurasia today share a characteristic Y-chromosome sequence that was probably Genghis Khan's Y chromosome, which shows his millions of direct male-line descendants across the territory occupied by the Mongols (Zerjal et al., 2003).
1320-1350. New Zealand was discovered and settled by Polynesians, who developed the distinctive Maori ethnic cultural group, which is today the second largest ethnic group in New Zealand, behind the European New Zealanders.
1492. Columbus landed in the Bahamas, although he thought it was India. He encountered the Taino people--the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands. Thus began the first global network of immigration, interbreeding, and trade encompassing most of the Earth.
1519. Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec capital--Tenochtitlan--present-day Mexico City. Within four years of the 1519 campaign, Martin Cortes, "el Mestizo," was born: his father was Hernan Cortes, his mother was Cortes's Aztec mistress. Thus began the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization. Today, in Mexico (with a population of 127 million), 70% of the people are mestizos, 14% Amerindians, and 15% whites. As I have argued previously, this refutes the idea of "American genocide": there are more people in the Americas today with Indigenous American genes than there were when Columbus landed in 1492.
1526. This was the year of the first transatlantic slave voyage from West Africa to Brazil. Thus began one of the most massive, forced migrations in human history. By the 1780s, over 75,000 African slaves were arriving every year in the Americas.
1693. John Locke wrote an essay "For a General Naturalization" that was probably written in support of the General Naturalization Bill of 1693. "Naturalization is the shortest and easiest way of increasing your people," Locke declared at the beginning of the essay. Increasing population is important, he explained, because "people are the strength of any country or government," and it's "the number of people that make the riches of any country." What we see here is what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free. John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies. The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies. We see that today because the people in the less free countries want to migrate to the freer countries (as measured by the Human Freedom Index).
1718. Great Britain's Transportation Act formalized the forced migration of convicts. From 1718 to 1775, as many as 50,000 convicts were sent to the British colonies in America. After the British lost the Revolutionary War in 1783, they decided to look elsewhere for penal colonies. In 1788, they established their penal colony at Botany Bay (Sydney) in Australia.
1776. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained two grievances against King George III concerning immigration. On the one hand, the King was accused of obstructing the passage of laws that would encourage the free migration of foreigners to America and then facilitate their naturalization. On the other hand, the King was denounced for promoting the forced migration of African slaves through the slave trade, which was said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself." The passage condemning the slave trade was excised from the final draft, however, because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.
I have written about Jefferson's disturbing behavior in adopting his slave Sally Hemmings as his concubine, who bore at least six of his children. That the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, who affirmed natural human equality and who denounced slavery as a violation of human nature, could not only own black slaves but also exploit them for his sexual gratification forces us to think about the human nature of slavery, its corrupting effect on slaveowners, and the evolution of racial mixing. Moreover, interracial sexual mating undermines the claims of the racist that the races can and should remain "pure" in their separation.
1850. The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to make it easier for Southern slaveowners to recapture slaves who had run away to the Northern free states. The law made it a federal crime for anyone to help fugitive slaves avoid capture. This denied the freedom of internal migration within the nation--the freedom to vote with one's feet by running away from enslavement in the American South. Many Americans resisted this law as an unjust law that violated natural human rights. A black abolitionist like Frederick Douglass, who had himself run away from his slave master, were especially eloquent in defending the natural human right to run away--to migrate--to some place where one could be free.
Some years later, Douglass defended a general "right of migration" for all human beings. And he argued for the greatness of America as a "composite nation" open to all races, creeds, and religions and to all foreigners who would come to America searching for freedom. He compared the "repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners" to the "prejudice of race and color" that had supported chattel slavery: both express the natural human propensity to tribalism or xenophobia that favors us against them. Even if all other nations manifest this natural tribalism in limiting migratory rights and other human rights to themselves, America is unique in being the nation dedicated to human rights for all--"the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds." And therefore, America must recognize the right of locomotion or migration as a right for all of humanity, so that America must have open borders.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .
REFERENCES
Garcia-Bertrand, Ralph, and Rene J. Herrera. 2018. Ancestral DNA, Human Origins, and Migrations. Elsevier.
Goldenberg, David M. 2003. The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration. New York: The Experiment.
Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.
Zerjal, T., et al. 2003. "The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols." American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 717-21.
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