Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

a reply to: Cobaltic1978

I would say starvation and disease would be the direct cause of their downfall. I think that modern humans would be more of an indirect cause.

Also capitalizing dinosaur is not required. Dinosauria and Dinosauriformes yes, dinosaur no.

a reply to: AgarthaSeed
Notwithstanding the fictional nature of Atlantis, there is the further problem with your supposition that the mythological tale claimed no such symptoms of nuclear detonation, but rather was flooded from below by rising water.

Channeled material has no veritable use, outside of cults that is.

originally posted by: chrismarco
a reply to: SLAYER69

That is one rugged looking coconut...reminds me of the terminator skull

And a full set of teeth no less! Unless the whole thing was reconstructed from a minuscule bone fragment.

I like your threads Slayer. Much more enjoyable than the ignorant, political, racist and simply "woo woo" threads I sometimes have to wade through! Keep up the good work sir.

Rat

What caused the Younger Dryas hasn't really been agreed upon. I suspect that it has to do with the way the Solar System randomly (or possibly periodically) passes through areas of interstellar space that have a higher density of gas or debris, causing all kinds of problems with sunlight absorption and increased meteorite impacts.

I also suspect that while many of our hominid cousins in Europe were physically robust and nearly on par with us mentally, they just might not have had the flexibility of imagination necessary for them to adapt to the abrupt swings in temperature. One thing we modern humans are good at is recognizing and ignoring (if necessary) our basic instincts. Neanderthals were smart, but they didn't get much smarter over a million years. So when the climate changed, they had a very difficult time coming up with novel ways to deal with it.

This might also have had something to do with their language ability. We know they probably had some kind of rudimentary language abilities, which went along with their limited ability to understand symbolic representation. They created "art," although they may not have considered it to be the same kind of thing we do. In any event, when the weather gets cold, cooperation and communication becomes extremely vital for figuring out new ways to deal with the cold and find food and so on. Their lack of fluent communication meant that everybody was pretty much on their own, and they couldn't benefit from anybody learning a new way to make a fire or spear, or how to preserve meat and grain through the winter.

Eventually their numbers dwindled to such small numbers that they couldn't find members of their own species to breed with, and they were killed or absorbed by the smarter invaders from the East and South.

In my best Elton John singing voice, "it's the circle of life" migrants came in and replaced Europeans to make new Europeans, and now the processes is repeating its self.

I blames angela merkle great-great-great-great*100 grandfather.

originally posted by: SLAYER69

Why Did Ancient Europeans Just Disappear 14,500 Years Ago?

Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds.

The finds come from an analysis of dozens of ancient fossil remains collected across Europe.

The genetic turnover was likely the result of a rapidly changing climate, which the earlier inhabitants of Europe couldn't adapt to quickly enough, said the study's co-author, Cosimo Posth, an archaeogenetics doctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany. [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans]

Here an interesting little read. After reading it the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond came to mind. Although the replacements didn't have guns and steel they may have had "Germs" from any early form of raising some types of livestock. Run the clock forward to when the Europeans made contact with the New world. Disease wipes out the much larger indigenous Human population. Same thing may have happened several times in our human family tree history, I'm sure this also accounts partially for the disappearance of Neanderthal and Denisovan and possibly others... I feel and have stated this here many times.

If it wasn't the main cause then possibility a large contributing factor.

The reason diseases from Europe wiped out the Native Americans is because Europeans generally lived in closer proximity to domesticated animals and each other. This allowed for the spreading and mutating of various strands of various diseases that spread between humans and animals. Native Americans had a very different lifestyle and were therefore not exposed to similar diseases on anywhere near the same scale.

I haven't read your linked article yet as it is a bit late for me and I just had a root canal and need another for a different tooth ache. Anyhow, it would be interesting if the original Europeans lived like Native Americans and were largely wiped out by people that lived in closer proximity to there animals.... Guess I've gotta read the article first!

Edit: How do all these ancient people seem to have pretty excellent dentition? I went to school for Anthropology + archaeology and it was never explained then! Must be diet! I'm a bit jealous that a skull thousands of years old has better teeth than me and I'm not all that old


Edit 2: OK, after looking they aren't better than mine but my point still stands

Thought provoking post, as usual slayer.

But, I am obligated to point out that the skull shown is Kostenki 14, from Russia, and

he died about 36Kya.
Technicaly he's not even european, he's west eurasian, there is a subtle difference.

The Kostenki site is a veritable treasure trove of antiquities.
A little about people at Kostenki.

The Kostenki - Borshevo, Костенки - Борщево region on the Don River


Kostenki is a very important Paleolithic site on the Don River in the Russia. It was a settlement which contained venus figures, dwellings made of mammoth bones, and many flint tools and bone implements. Kostenki / Kostienki is not actually a single site but really an area on the right bank of the Don River in the regions of the villages of Kostenki and Borshevo, consisting of more than twenty site locations, all dating to the Paleolithic.

They were mammoth hunters and built there houses from mammoth bones, and likley used mammoth bones as fuel.

The floor of the hut-pit was more or less flat and showed outlines of two circles. One of them was larger and had a fireplace in the centre. The smaller circle had two layers of bones. The upper layer consisted mainly of shoulder-blades, hip-bones, and tusks of the mammoth. The lower layer, which was level with the floor of the hut, consisted mainly of tusks which were laid with the points turned inwards towards the centre of the room. They were fairly regularly spaced. This was presumably the supporting framework of the dome shaped roof which collapsed once the hut-pit was empty. The floor of the hut was approximately I metre below the ground and the top of the hut rose 0.8 to 1.0 metres.

These facts led Polykarpovitch to believe that these pit-huts must have been used for sleeping and somehow were kept warm: otherwise they would not have been sufficient protection against the cold. They showed no traces of typical fireplaces; one layer of coal and ash could be found and there was only a little space left around the remains of embers. It could be that the main fire was kept somewhere else and that the inhabitants collected the hot ash and bone 'coal' in rolled up animal skins and took them back to their huts and slept on them. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that no traces of stone nor large bones could be found inside the huts. Rogatchev also assumed that sick people could have been cured there. But an answer to this suggestion can only be given after further research has been carried out.

Some of the handiwork of the people of Kostenki,


A fox tooth necklace


A carved headpiece


A lions head

This all from a very good site on various archeaology sites.

Kostenki at Don's Maps

A very good thread, really enjoyed reading it, and learned a lot, much food for thought, well done all.

I am going to wander from the thread a little but it is still apropos,and I will full fill ATS obligations, by taking the very alternative view that there is evidence that the americas were settled much much earlier than accepted and descendents of thsoe people repeatedly back migrated imto the old world.
Markina Gora's(Kostenki 14) genetics lead a way to the OP.

Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Thorfinn S. Korneliussen, Martin Sikora, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Andrea Manica, Ida Moltke, Anders Albrechtsen, Amy Ko, Ashot Margaryan, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Ted Goebel, Michael Westaway, David Lambert, Valeri Khartanovich, Jeffrey D. Wall, Philip R. Nigst, Robert A. Foley, Marta Mirazon Lahr, Rasmus Nielsen, Ludovic Orlando, and Eske Willerslev.
The origin of contemporary Europeans remains contentious. We obtain a genome sequence from Kostenki 14 in European Russia dating to 38,700 to 36,200 years ago, one of the oldest fossils of Anatomically Modern Humans from Europe. We find that K14 shares a close ancestry with the 24,000-year-old Mal’ta boy from central Siberia, European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, some contemporary western Siberians, and many Europeans, but not eastern Asians. Additionally, the Kostenki 14 genome shows evidence of shared ancestry with a population basal to all Eurasians that also relates to later European Neolithic farmers. We find that Kostenki 14 contains more Neandertal DNA that is contained in longer tracts than present Europeans. Our findings reveal the timing of divergence of western Eurasians and East Asians to be more than 36,200 years ago and that European genomic structure today dates back to the Upper Paleolithic and derives from a meta-population that at times stretched from Europe to central Asia.

and

2. K14’s Y-DNA is thought-provoking. It belongs to hg C and is closely related to the C lineage detected in the Mesolithic La Brana sample from Spain (7,000 YBP). When first discovered, the Y-DNA C lineage in La Brana looked aberrant but now it’s clear that it constitutes an ancient West Eurasian lineage linking such distant geographies as Spain and central Russia and subsequently displaced from the European mtDNA pool by younger lineages. Hg C is much better preserved in contemporary East Asia, island Oceania, the Sahul and the New World. Importantly, hg C in K14 and La Brana is closely related to those C lineages in eastern Eurasia (hgs C1, C2 and C5 all carrying F3393/K29 mutation) that are not found in the Americas (only hg C3 with the defining M217 mutation is found there). Hg C is rare in modern Amerindians but this is likely an effect of relatively recent expansion of hg Q. Considering that hg C3* was discovered in South America and C3b is found at low frequencies across North America (peaking in Na-Dene), it’s likely that hg Q formed a wedge that minimized a once more prevalent Amerindian haplogroup. (At the same time, hg C3 found in northeast Asia could not have been a source of Amerindian C3 because much more common East Asian hgs N and O did not make it to America. This suggests that northeast Asian C3 is likely a product of a spillover from the Americas at the end of the Ice Age caused by an expansion of Y-DNA Q-bearing populations within the Americas. This means that 12,000 years ago East Eurasians only had hgs C1, C2, C4 and C5 forming a single clade opposed to America-specific hg C3.)

Markina Gora

The source blog is pretty heavy with the genetics so thats all I'll post and leave the rest to the readers.
So basically what is being said is that Kostenki 14 represents the earliest european populations that were replaced by later people.
Its this turn over of people that shows up in the OP, but ancient Europeans didnt just dissapear, they were gradually replaced over a very long period of time. La Brana, (spain 7kya) and Motola(sweden 8kya) are both related to Kostenki 14, they became more modern europeans as they bred with the newcomers.
A point of note is that their lineage didnt really die out until about 5kya, after living side by side with the new farmers for several thousand years.
Hunter/Gatherers and early farmers shared central europe for 2000 years.

A team led by Mainz anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger studied bones from the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. "It is commonly assumed that the Central European hunter-gatherers disappeared soon after the arrival of farmers," said Dr. Ruth Bollongino, lead author of the study. "But our study shows that the descendants of Mesolithic Europeans maintained their hunter-gatherer way of life and lived in parallel with the immigrant farmers, for at least 2,000 years. The hunter-gathering lifestyle thus only died out in Central Europe around 5,000 years ago, much later than previously thought."

But it is also shown that those earliest eruos and west eurasians are descended from from a population most closely related to ancient native americans.
Another very interesting coincedence, is that those mammoths that kostenki and his ancestors were hunting are descended from mammoth that migrated from eastern beringia(the new world) approx.60-70kya, its in a very obscure paper from 2014, and ill try to find, but its well documented that humans have followed such gamed migrations many times in the past.
Just some things to think about.

originally posted by: AgarthaSeed


[reply]stormcell[/reply]
A super nova was firestones's intial theory as to how those cherts and other samples, were exposed to a hi energy particle flux.
A super nova or atomic bombs are no longer on the table, since the same traces of high energy particle have been found in trees killed at tunguska.


This is the first time I've heard that info. I've researched the Tunguska incident quite extensively.
The answer is far from clear cut, but IMO the Tunguska incident was actually caused by an ET drone that self detonated due to mechanical failures. ( This scenario is also discussed in The Law of One or Ra Material as well.)

Leads me to believe that both Atlantis' collapse and Tunguska were both forms of nuclear detonation, however using what seems to be a more sophisticated type of nuclear energy that emitted less harmful radiation than our current nukes.

Food for thought

There were witnesses who said they saw something metallic and cylindrical "hovering" in the area. Other said they heard the explosion and then all sorts of metal stones started raining down. These two accounts aren't incompatible. A large object collides with the atmosphere. The heat and pressure causes it to disintegrate. The remains fall down to Earth as a debris cloud that is circular/cylindrical. Some fragments have been retrieved from the ground.

Wouldn't a rapidly expanding Ice age drive these ancient Europeans southwards to escape it bringing their culture and language southward.

Wouldn't the ancestors of these ancient Europeans have legends and mythology of their ancient homeland in the far north.

Wouldn't the receding of the ice age cause the ancestors of these ancient Europeans to want to return to the mythical homeland of their ancestors.

Wouldn't this Southward northward migration cause peoples in the south and north i.e. Indo-Aryans to have similarity's genetically, linguistically, culturally, religiously, socially and mythologically

originally posted by: zinc12
Wouldn't a rapidly expanding Ice age drive these ancient Europeans southwards to escape it bringing their culture and language southward.

Wouldn't the ancestors of these ancient Europeans have legends and mythology of their ancient homeland in the far north.

No because there were no Anatomically Modern Humans in Northern Europe. The last glacial period began prior to their movement out of Africa @ ~110 KA ending ~12 KA When AMH first arrived in Europe from the Caucuses, the Ice sheets were already in place so there was no southern migration for them. France, Germany, Doggerland and Southern England were covered in Tundra-Steppe, everything north of there was glacier or ice sheets. Southern France, Spain, Portugal still had a fairly temperate climate all things considered and even more so ~14.5 KA when these new people arrived.

Wouldn't the receding of the ice age cause the ancestors of these ancient Europeans to want to return to the mythical homeland of their ancestors.

There wasn't a migration North, it was from the East and was in part because of the climate shifting to a more temperate one. And it didn't work out for the people already in Europe as they were replaced by the new invaders.

Wouldn't this Southward northward migration cause peoples in the south and north i.e. Indo-Aryans to have similarity's genetically, linguistically, culturally, religiously, socially and mythologically

It's certainly plausible that the people who swept into Europe 14.5 ka were to forbearers of, or the Indo-Europeans themselves. The time frame is certainly within that window.

a reply to: peter vlar

Is cro magnon man not an anatomically modern human?

It has already been established that during the little Ice age North Europeans travelled southward and hung out on the beaches of Spain until the weather conditions improved then migrated back home...I watched a TV documentary about it so it must be true, plus it sounded Scientific too!

a reply to: zinc12

Cromagnon, or Early Modern Europeans, were AMH yes. But they didn't arrive in Europe until approximately 40 KA, well into the most recent glacial period. But they were constrained by the availability of suitable ecological niches as I mention above. The people you are referring to during the "little ice age" or the Younger Dryas, were the new invading humans who replaced the initial wave from ~40 KA. These people entered Europe about 1600 years prior to the onset of the YD. So the documentary you saw was likely correct, just regarding the new migrants, possibly with admixture with the initial wave, as opposed to being comprised solely of the initial wave of humans in Europe.

a reply to: peter vlar

Well the Guanches who inhabited the canary islands were probably ancient Europeans who migrated there due to necessity. Why are white people white anyway, is it because there is less Sun or is it because they mated with other hominids who were white thus inheriting the white gene among other Caucasoid traits.

a reply to: zinc12 The guanches are non arab north Africans.

Peter,
I would hazatd a guess that the earlier Eurasians/europeans language was more akin yensensie/dene or the uralic family

originally posted by: zinc12
a reply to: peter vlar

Well the Guanches who inhabited the canary islands were probably ancient Europeans who migrated there due to necessity. Why are white people white anyway, is it because there is less Sun or is it because they mated with other hominids who were white thus inheriting the white gene among other Caucasoid traits.

No, the Gaunches were Berbers and trace their history to North Africa approximately 12 KA based on cave paintings found as well as genetic data. These people originated in the lush climate that existed where the Sahara now stands and moved farther to the North of Africa and closer to the Southern coastline of the Mediterranean as the Sahara began its expansion.

As for Caucasian skin tones, it's the result of a very minor mutation on the SLC24A5. And when I say minor, I mean it quite literally as it is an alteration to just one Amino acid in the gene that makes a stark and contrasting difference in skin tone. The mutation is a very recent one for HSS and like the gene for blue eyes, it originated in one person and spread throughout the population quite rapidly within several generations. Prior to 10 KA, all AMH had darker skin. I'm trying to find a paper right now to see if I'm crazy because I seem to recall that there was the possibility of some of the initial wave of humans that inherited a similar trait through admixture with Neanderthal. Even if that is true, it would have died out with the initial inhabitants when they were replaced 14.5 KA As for the benefit of lighter skin, it has to do with less access to Vitamin D and more melanin+ darker skin which protects you from sunlight. Lighter skin allows more sunlight to penetrate the dermis and when this occurs, your body naturally creates Vitamin D.

a reply to: punkinworks10

The first wave out of Africa and into Western Eurasia? If I'm interpreting you correctly, I would agree that this is a likely answer. It's hard to establish the origins of these early language groups and I'm less hopeful now than I was 20 years ago about finding the origins of the Indo-Europeans and the root of this vast group of related languages. I was spit balling regarding the migration 14.5 KA possibly being Indo-Europeans based solely on the time frame as it lines up with what I have read. I should be careful though because it's not something I've been good about keeping up on and most of the books I have would be considered antiquated in this day and age.

originally posted by: peter vlar
a reply to: punkinworks10

The first wave out of Africa and into Western Eurasia? If I'm interpreting you correctly, I would agree that this is a likely answer.

Peter V.,
Have you seen this commentary on a recent paper, from Dienekes Blog?

The picture on the left[actually below] (source) shows quite nicely that according to current understanding, Africans are nested within Eurasian genetic variation. The modern humans have the following structure:

(Early modern human lineage detected as admixture in the Altai Neandertal, ((Asians, Europeans), Africans)),

and then there are two deeper layers of Eurasian hominins (Neandertal/Denisovans) and the "Mystery hominin" that mixed into Denisovans.

Africans are thus just a leaf of the Eurasian family tree, casting serious doubt -if this model is to be believed- to the position that H. sapiens originated in Africa and are descended from people who never left the continent. It seems much simpler to derive them from an early migration (~200kya?) from Asia which would nicely explain why the continent's first sapiens populations appear tentatively in the northeastern corner, and why they do not replace archaic hominins for most of the 200 thousand years until today. In a reversal of perspective it is not Skhul/Qafzeh that are the "migration that failed", but rather the Omo 1 outlier is.

Are living Africans nested within Eurasian genetic variation (?)

It's an interesting view point.

As to the language thing, there are some fascinating aspect about languages that can give us some insight into how ealry people got around.
I get into it a little later, its the first nice day in a week and the dog really wants a walk.