OUT OF AFRICA

Sleeping in a tent with a half million wildebeest nearby on the short grass plains of Africa's Serengeti is like sleeping next to an eight-lane freeway at rush hour – with all the cars honking their horns.

The incessant snorts and grunts of the vast herds vibrate the leaves off the trees which fall like rain on the tent.  They are punctuated by the whistling barks of thousands of zebras, and interrupted by the cackling cry of hyenas on a kill.  One hyena pack's cries are so close they must be less than 100 feet away.

In the short breaks of silence when the hyenas cease and the wildebeest resume, there are lions coughing in the distance.

With the coming of dawn, things quiet down.  The wildebeest and zebras emerge out of the relative safety of the trees where we are camped and onto the plains the Masai call endless – for that is what Serengeti means in their tribal language, "endless plains."

The Serengeti is an area of about 5,000 square miles in northwestern Tanzania, a place once called Tanganyika, in East Africa.  Its southern corner is known as the "short grass plains," and it is here where the greatest wildlife spectacle on earth begins. 

In February and March it is the primary birthing area for the wildebeest, who feast on the grass made plentiful by the seasonal heavy rains.  By the end of May, however, the rains stop, the plains dry up and the herds of wildebeest – over a million and a half in total, accompanied by some 800,000 zebra – begin a momentous trek to the long grass of the northern Serengeti and the Mara grasslands of Kenya.

This trek is known as the Great Migration, and it is an awesome privilege to witness.  It is also such a privilege for me to provide this to people via my adventure business, Wheeler Expeditions.

But in so doing, I have had no contact with the outside world now for going on two weeks.  Not a single phone call or email, not a newspaper or short-wave radio.  I'll be posting this once I reach the town of Arusha, which is the jumping-off spot for safaris to the Serengeti, but as of now I haven't the faintest idea of what's been happening in the world.

The world seems very far away from where I am writing this, on the veranda of my tent with a plain of endless grass spread before me, countless black dots of munching wildebeest covering the dark green all the way to the horizon.

It seems a perfect place to discuss just how we all got out of Africa and into that far away world so long ago – for it is an astounding and fascinating story.

Adam and Eve and Eden
It is a story that can only now be told, through advances in a number of sciences, most especially evolutionary genetics using DNA analysis.  It turns out that every man's genetic lineage can be traced through his particular pattern of mutations on his Y chromosome, while every woman's can be traced by those in her mitochondrial DNA.

This is because every man in the world today has the same Y chromosome, and every woman the same mitochondria (a component of the cell nucleus that generates chemical energy and has its own separate form of DNA, mDNA), inherited essentially unchanged from father-to-son and mother-to-daughter back to one individual for each, an Adam and Eve who lived some 60,000 years ago.

The key word above is "essentially" – for ever so often, a father's Y or a mother's mDNA doesn't get copied exactly.  The son or daughter who gets this Y or mDNA with this (almost always harmless) unique change or "mutation" will give it to his or her descendants and no one else, thus starting a unique genetic lineage.

When one of those descendants acquires another mutation, the lineage will fork again. 

Such Y/mDNA mutations occur at a steady rate through the generations, providing a clock for geneticists to date the forks, and trace them back to the first and original forks of Y Adam and Mitochondrial Eve.

Not only can they date the forks but they can tell where they happened in the world.  Further, they can estimate the population size of the group of folks in which the forks occurred.

This statistical analysis of Y and mDNA data shows that Adam and Eve belonged to an "ancestral human population" of no more than 5,000 members of our species, Homo sapiens, living in what is now Ethiopia, most likely near or in a piece of it carved out by the French called Djibouti.

That's all there were of us back then.  (And eventually, over hundreds of generations their descendants didn't have a son or daughter save for those of Y Adam and M Eve.)  About 50,000 years ago, a tiny band of them – no more than 150 – decided to make a break for it and leave Africa for good.

Believe it or not, every human being on earth today who is not Black African is descended from these 150 ancient pioneers.
 
Exodus from Eden
This satellite photo shows the southern entrance to the Red Sea (on the left) from the Indian Ocean's Gulf of Aden.  You can see where Arabian Peninsula (above) almost touches Africa (below).  This strait is known as the Bab el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears in Arabic.

It's just 12 miles across now, but 50,000 years ago, ocean levels were over 200 feet lower, so the strait was only a handful of miles across and dotted with islands – enabling people with primitive boats or rafts to make it.  This is where man escaped out of Africa.

There are 18 Y lineages for all men in the world, A through R.  Almost all Black Africans are A.  Just before the Exodus out of Eden, a Y mutation occurred labeled M168.  Only a  few Black Africans have it (Lineage B), while all the rest of us guys everywhere out of Africa have it (Lineages C-R).

In other words, A & B are men who never left Africa, C-R are those who did.  (Similarly, there are three basic mDNA lineages for women, L1, L2, and L3.  L3 has two daughter lineages, M and N.  All women in the world outside of Black Africa are either M or N.  No Black African woman is.  They are all L1, L2, or pre-M/N L3.)

Tracing subsequent mutational forks off the M168, the slow path of the original hunter-forager Band of 150 and their descendants can be followed along the southern coast of Arabia and west coast of India (then joined with lower sea levels).  Then they started to radiate – to Southeast Asia and Australia, to China and Central Asia, to the Middle East and Asia Minor (Turkey).

These last folks then became the first modern humans to enter Europe, dated 45,000 years ago through a Y mutation their men had acquired, the M173.  Note the term "modern" – for there were other people in Europe who had gotten there first, archaic humans known as Homo neanderthalensis, Neanderthals.

The evolutionary ancestor of both modern and archaic humans was Homo ergaster who had emerged in East Africa about 1.7 million years ago.  By 1 million years ago, ergaster had spread  throughout Africa and, via the Suez isthmus at the top of the Red Sea, into Asia and Europe.

In Asia, ergaster evolved into Homo erectus.  In Europe, by 300,000 years ago, he had become neanderthalensis.  Built like Arnold Schwarzenegger, with brains larger than ours, well-adapted to the cold and the land for eons, Neanderthals were a formidable adversary.

Remember that it was still the Ice Ages in Europe, and we had just come from Tropical Africa.  Yet within a few thousand years, while they fought fiercely against us, we had removed them from the entire continent save for a few refuges in Spain.  Then even these died off.  What was our advantage?

Language.  We had it, they didn't.

That's because a few thousand years before the Exodus from Eden, the ancestral human population acquired a mutation in a gene called FOXP2.  It's a gene involved in wiring up the mammalian brain while a fetus in the womb.  All mammals, from mice to chimps to us, have the FOXP2.  It's virtually identical in all:  that of chimpanzees has only one of its 715 units different from that of mice.

But ours differs in two, which enables FOXP2 to wire up the fetal human brain for language.  The Band of 150 could speak.  So could the rest that stayed, yes, but that advantage of language gave the Band of 150 the ability to successfully get out of Africa.  Others probably tried too, but they were the ones who made it. Once they did, their new capacity to speak wiped archaic human competitors off the face of the earth.

(Note:  Researchers put to bed the myth that we have Neanderthal blood in us when they extracted mDNA from several Neanderthal female remains, and determined it's different from ours.)

Those M173 folk who defeated the Neanderthals in Europe had another advantage:  culture.  The first culture in human history, called by archaeologists Aurignacian from its distinctive and innovative set of stone tools.  But it wasn't tools that made the Aurignacians the originators of human culture.  It was the painted caves.

The magnificent Aurignacian art of such caves as Chauvet in southern France, of lions and mammoths and much else painted 32,000 years ago, still stuns us with awe and admiration.  But why by them and no one else?  Art and artwork would not appear elsewhere for many thousands of years later.

Because the first Europeans had acquired a mutational advantage.

The First Culture
On the heels of their exterminating the Neanderthals, about 37,000 years ago the Aurignacians acquired an altered version of a gene involved in constructing the frontal lobes of the human brain (the region of distinctively human cognitive abilities), making them larger.

The version of this gene, called microcephalin, is now possessed by over 70% of most Caucasian populations in Europe, and much less elsewhere (0% in many Black African populations, for example) – except for East Asia, where it was acquired much later, after the initial migrations some 14,000 years ago across the Bering Straits, for it is possessed by no native populations of North and South America.

Nonetheless, even with the cognitive advantage of enhanced microcephalin, all mankind in Europe and elsewhere continued its nomadic hunter-forager way of life for millennia after millennia.  Why did it take so long, some 26,000 years after Chauvet, for urban civilization to begin?

It is not until 17,000 years after Chauvet that sedentism – folks quitting nomadic hunter life and starting to live in sedentary villages – was invented, not in Europe but in what is now Israel, Syria, and Jordan.  Archaeologists call the people who created these first settlements 15,000 years ago Natufians, who gathered and stored wild emmer wheat and barley.

They didn't domesticate any cereals.  Agriculture wouldn't come for another 5,000 years.  (As we saw in Asia Minor, agriculture, along with booze and domesticated animals, were invented in the same village of Çayönü in southeastern Turkey around 10,000 years ago or 8,000 BC.)

So sedentism or settled village life came five millennia before agriculture.  Then it took another four millennia before urban civilization finally is launched in Sumeria (southern Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq).

And it was just about this time – 6,000 years ago or 4,000 BC – that another brain gene mutation emerges in the people of the Middle East.

This was an altered version of the gene ASPM, conferring greater brain cell density upon its possessors.  Today, this version of ASPM is carried by 50% of most Caucasian populations, less so in East Asians, and is virtually nonexistent in Black Africans.

So far this has implied that the gene mutations conferring cognitive advantage are the cause of improvements in man's culture.  But it could also be the other way around.

That is, as a culture changes – say, progressively from sedentism to agriculture to civilization – gene mutations can be selected for to better enable people to adapt to the changes.  A cultural environment can select for genetic adaptations just as a natural or biological environment can.

Did Christian Europe Make Jews Smart?
That human cultural environments can cause changes in the human genome – indeed, that human evolution has been ongoing in all sorts of ways right up to the present – has never occurred to most social scientists.  So let's take an outrageous example of how this can be.

The association between Jews and enhanced intelligence needs qualification.  There are in the world three main Jewish communities resulting from the Jews' dispersal or diaspora after the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD:

Oriental Jews, the ones who stayed in the Middle East and Asia.  Sephardic Jews or Sephardim, who ended up living under Moslem rulers in Morocco, Andalusian Spain, and Ottoman Turkey.  Ashkenazic Jews or Askennazim, who ended up living under Christian rulers in Europe.

The genetic lineage of all three can be traced back to common ancestors in the Middle East some 4,000 years ago or 2,000 BC.  Yet is only the Ashkenazi Jews that on average possess superior intelligence. 

The average Ashkenazi has an IQ score of 115, one full standard deviation above the norm of northern Europeans, and is the highest for any ethnic group in the world.  Neither Oriental nor Sephardic Jews come close, scoring on a par with or slightly below that of northern Europeans.

One clear historical difference is that both Oriental and Sephardic Jews lived for centuries under Moslem rule with labor-intensive, rather than intellect-intensive occupations.  It was the other way around for the Ashkenazim.

From around 800 to 1700 AD, Askenazim in Christian Europe were rigorously restricted to a special range of occupations.  They couldn't be farmers and were prohibited from owning land.  They could only have certain managerial or financial jobs such as moneylending ("usury" was forbidden to Christians).  By chance, not design of the Christian rulers, all required superior mental ability.

Since Roman numerals were still used and Indian numerals of 1-9 plus the zero weren't until around 1500, moneylending required real smarts.  As one researcher puts it, "figuring out xvii percent of cccl, (and) without the use of zero, is not a straightforward computation."

Couple this with the terrible persecutions of Jews in Europe during this period, and being constantly uprooted and expelled – from England in 1290, for example, or France in 1394.  Luther's hatred of Jews – stemming from his belief that their refusal to convert to Christianity prevented the Second Coming – was pathological, so Jewish persecution in Protestant German principalities in the 16^th and 17^th centuries became equally so.

All of this has led a team of population geneticists under Dr. Gregory Cochran at the University of Utah to conclude that the 900 years of main Ashkenazi persecution (ending around 1700 when many occupational restrictions were lifted) was easily enough time for genetic mutations fostering greater growth and interconnectedness of neurons in Ashkenazi brains to be selected for.  Such a genetic change, Cochran believes, could be effected in less than five centuries.

And that is why Ashkenazi Jews today comprise less than 3% of the US population, yet have won 27% of US Nobel prizes.

(It's worth noting that Cochran dismisses Jewish folklore regarding the source of Jewish intelligence:  that the smartest kids become rabbis who have the most children.  Rabbis make up some 1% of Ashkenazim, not enough to make "a genetically significant difference.")
 
Americans Are The Ones Who Left
For all people other than Black Africans, they are the ones who left their African home of evolutionary origin.  They are all descendants of that brave Band of 150.  It is thanks to them that we have populated the earth and have today such an extraordinary multiplicity of ethnicities and cultures.

All of us, most certainly including Black Africans, have in common that basic humanity of the ancestral human population in which we all can participate and share.  Yet at the same time, we can appreciate those distinctions which differentiate our cultures from others.

I believe Western Civilization is uniquely valuable to human culture.  It is a great historical tragedy that it is now struggling to keep itself culturally and demographically alive.  One reason is America, or rather Americans.

As Newt Gingrich is fond of pointing out to Europeans, "Americans really are different from you – we're the ones who left."

He is referring to cultural differences between Europe and America – but I believe those differences are also genetic.

There is a phenomenon known as genetic drift, where certain variations within a gene pool are selected for under cultural or environmental pressure and become concentrated among a portion of the pool's population.

The folks who came from Europe to America starting in the early 1600s were the ones who had a higher desire for freedom and capacity for independence than the ones who stayed.  Over the succeeding centuries, they unconsciously self-selected themselves to drift over and concentrate in one side of the European gene pool.

Europeans now – the ones who stayed – really do have less of a desire for individual liberty than Americans.  The process has continued because the ones who have more of a desire keep coming here.  That's why the welfare state and socialism flourish in Europe, and a capacity for self-defense (such as against the Moslem invasions) doesn't.

Now our American capacities for liberty and defense are being gravely weakened – culturally by liberals, and genetically by illegal immigrants attracted not by liberty but liberal welfare programs.

In the face of the hatred of liberals and the envy of the world towards America, it's an increasing challenge for Americans to take pride in their uniqueness.  It helps to do so by understanding that we Americans, in our desire for liberty, have so much in common with that pioneer Band of 150 – that we are more out of Africa­ than just about anybody else.

It's taken me all day to write this and the sun is now setting.  Few sunsets are more spectacular than those in Africa.  This is where we all came from.  There is no place better to more appreciate our primordial origin 50,000 years ago and the distance we have covered since.

With this gorgeous sunset, I feel there's no place better to celebrate being human and being American.  Wherever you are, I'd like to ask that you celebrate with me.