Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times 1857; Aug 4, 1932; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003)
BONES OF CANNIBALS: A PALESTINE RIDDLE Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times 1857; Aug 4, 1932; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2003) pg. 21 ATE BODIES OF ENEMIES Men, Short of Stature, Burned Bones of Dead After Burial, London Session Hears. TEETH OF WOMEN DRAWN Linking relics to Burnt Skeletons from Ur scientist speculate an old cremation custom. Wireless to NEW YORK TIMES London Aug. 3 Seven or eight thousand years ago in what geologist call modern times a race of negroid cannibals lived In Palestine, burned the bones of their dead after burial, and devoured the bodies of their enemies. Skulls and thighbones of this race were unearthed within the last four years, first at Shukbah near Jerusalem and later in caves at Mount Carmel, and because they puzzled the excavators who found them they received the new name “Natufians.” Today the first authoritative account of them was given by Sir Arthur Keith to the congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences and showed them to be one of the greatest riddles of archaeology. They were clearly a Negroid people, said Sir Arthur, with wide faces flat- noses and long large heads. They were short of stature 5 feet 3 or 4 inches tall-and their thighs and legs were remarkably strong. While their arms and shoulders were weak. Alone Among prehistoric peoples they had a custom of extracting the two upper central incisor teeth of their women. Jagged holes in the fronts of their skulls indicate that they ate human brains.
Off-course the above turned out to be a bit sensational about Flied tooth Cannibals as will be shown later
And while I dislike loaded terms like Negroid/Caucasoid and all other "oids"and all that it implies, they were trying to find a morphological fit for the population of which certain population south of the Sahara possessed,but even more importantly was that material culture can be traced back by a people called the Mushabaeans that came from the Nile.
In 8000 B.C. the Natufians -- a hunting-gathering people -- lived in the region around Jericho and the Dead Sea. They were first to cultivate this new mutation -- this modern wheat. They became the first farmers. By then, the climate had been warming for 2000 years. Once the area had been fairly lush. Now it grew arid. Game moved north. The vegetation changed. But the wild grains did well in the drier climate. The Natufians began eating a lot more grain. And here we come to a great riddle. How did modern wheat replace those wild grains? Isolated mutations died without human help. Was some human clever enough to recognize and pick out that lone stalk of fat wheat in a field of grain? We used to think so. But maybe the drama played out in quite a different way. By 8000 B.C. the Natufians needed much more grain. They probably began doing some planting to create it. Once they did, the fat wheat had its chance. It was easier to harvest. The seeds stayed in place when you cut it. Every time the Natufians harvested seed, they got proportionately more of the mutations. They lost more of the wild grain. It took only a generation or so of that before a single mutation took over. The result was an unexpected wedding. In no time at all, modern wheat dominated the fields. And that was both a blessing and a curse. The Natufians unwittingly replaced the old wild wheat with far richer food. But it was a food that could survive only by their continued intervention. No more lilies of the field. From now on we would live better, but we would also be forever bound to this wonderful new food by the new technology of agriculture.
Larry Angel (1972): "one can identify Negroid traits of nose and prognathism appearing in Natufian latest hunters.(McCown, 1939) and in Anatolian and Macedonian first farmers, probably from Nubia via the predecesors of the Badarians and Tasians..."
C.L. Brace (2005): "If the late Pleistocene Natufian sample from Israel is the source from which that Neolithic spread was derived, there was clearly a sub-Saharan African element present of almost equal importance as the Late Prehistoric Eurasian element."
More to come
