Before The Dawn: Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors

Review: Before The Dawn: Recovering The Lost History Of Our Ancestors
by Nicholas Wade

Sorting out the patterns of human intelligence between the races.
The book Before The Dawn: Recovering The Lost History Of Our
Ancestors by Nicholas Wade, 2006, has some interesting observations
with regards to European evolution that seems to have passed without
much notice. If not, then I apologize for my own failure to catch the
items below.

Wade pints out that “The question of behavioral modernity is of great
significance because it appears to be the last major step in the
emergence of the ancestral human population. The components of modern
behavior appear most prominently around 45,000 years ago in Europe.
At sites throughout Europe, the staid culture of the Neanderthals
begins to yield to a set of new and more inventive techniques. There
is a new set of stone tools, more carefully crafted to attain
specific shapes. There are complex tools made of bone, antler and
ivory. The bringers of the new culture made personal ornaments, of
materials such as punctured teeth, shells and ivory beads. They
played bird-bone flutes. Their missile technology was much improved.
They were avid hunters who could take down large and dangerous game.
They buried their dead with rituals. They could support denser
populations. They developed trade networks through which they
obtained distant materials.”

Europeans at this time were experiencing recurring glaciation events
that kept driving the population south where evolution and genetic
drift would be accelerated do to the few members that survived,
followed by population expansions after the glaciers receded. These
cycles only occurred in the northern hemisphere so evolution was
outpacing those races that laid to the south. At the same time,
intelligence mutations were appearing and spreading:

“Genetic differentiation would certainly have started to act on the
human populations of the Upper Paleolithic era. Bruce Lahn, a
geneticist at the University of Chicago, has made a striking
discovery about the evolution of two genes involved in the
construction of the human brain. Each gene has several alternative
versions, or alleles, but in each case one specific allele has become
much more widespread than the others in certain populations. For an
allele to rise to high frequency very quickly is a signature of
natural selection hard at work. So presumably each allele conferred
some very strong selective advantage.

“One of the alleles is an alternative version of a gene known as
microcephalin. The allele appeared around 37,000 years ago (though
anytime between 60,000 and 14,000 years is possible) and is now
carried by some 70% of many populations of Europe and East Asia. The
allele is much less common in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is
typically carried by from zero to about 25% of the population.

“Just some 6,000 years ago a new allele of another brain gene, known
as ASPM, appeared in the Middle East or Europe and rapidly rose to
prominence, being carried by about 50% of people in these
populations. The allele is less common in East Asia and occurs hardly
at all in sub-Saharan Africans.

“What made the two alleles spread so quickly? It seems likely that
each conferred some cognitive advantage, perhaps a slight one yet
enough for natural selection to work on.

“In Lahn’s view, many genes are likely to be involved in constructing
the human brain. He has found alleles of two of these genes, both of
which happen to be quite common in Europeans and East Asians, but
there almost certainly exist alleles of other genes that may be more
common in other populations. Each population may therefore have used
a different set of alleles to accomplish the same purpose, a well
known biological process known as convergent evolution.”

Harpending et al. reported finding a number of alleles found in
Ashkenazi Jews that led to high intelligence, and it was attributed
to the unique occupational restrictions placed on Jews over the last
several hundred years to work in areas where high mental ability was
required. It is important then to recognize that not only are genes
for general intelligence continually evolving, but also they can
evolve very rapidly under the right ecological pressures. It is often
stated that the high correlation between brain size and intelligence
cannot be true because Albert Einstein had a brain slightly smaller
than average. However, brain size is only one physiological trait
that is correlated with intelligence— he could easily have had all of
the other genetic components for high intelligence while missing
brain size.

Again, “A firm conclusion from Lahn’s finding is that human evolution
continued after the dispersal of the ancestral population 50,000
years ago, and took different forms in different populations. Much of
this evolution may have been convergent, as each population adapted
with different alleles to the same challenges. But convergent
evolution does not necessarily proceed in lockstep in each separate
population. So it could be that the spread of the microcephalin
allele some 37,000 years ago expanded the cognitive powers of
Caucasian populations and underlay such striking cultural advances as
the Aurignacian people’s adeptness at painting caves, while other
populations developed such capabilities later.”

Wade also summarized how races evolved—that is recognizable
differences in terms of behavior and outward appearances: “When the
ancestral human population dispersed across the world 50,000 years
ago, evolution set in motion a grand experiment: each population, in
its fiercely guarded territory, would develop in its own way. This
development would be both cultural, leading to a vast family of
different languages, religions and lifestyles, and also genetic, as
the members of each society responded to different climates,
ecologies and social arrangements of their own making. Isolated on
their separate continents, the far flung branches of the human family
were to follow different trajectories as each adapted to the strange
world that lay beyond the boundaries of their ancestral homeland.”

Wade points out that, “Besides being well adapted or designed for
their environments, chimp and human societies possess another salient
feature in common, that of a strong propensity to kill their own
kind. A willingness to kill members of one’s own species is
apparently correlated with high intelligence. It may be that chimps
and people are the only species able to figure out that the extra
effort required to exterminate an opponent will bring about a more
permanent solution than letting him live to fight another day.” A
lesson that has not been learned well enough from our past wars
outcomes.

The strawman set up to deny race is that there are no absolute
genetic markers to define unique races. Of course that is not the
definition of race. Wade explains, “Sets of these sites, known as
Ancestry Informative Markers, can be used to identify not just an
individual’s race but the racial origin of individual sections of a
person’s genome. A company called DNAPrint Genomics has already
started offering a test to assess people’s continent of origin and,
if of mixed race, the proportions of ancestry due to different
races.” This is one of the most cogent and short explanations of race
I have come across. Wade goes on to explain that human races have
such a wide differentiation in terms of genetic differences that many
population groups would be designated as subspecies if we were not
for humans pushing an egalitarian dogma.

How adapted a society is put together is dependent on more than
intelligence and the ecological niche occupied. Wade notes
that, “Some scholars have remarked on long term cultural differences
between societies of East and West. Richard E. Nisbett, a social
psychologist at the University of Michigan, believes there
are `dramatic differences in the nature of Asian and European thought
processes,’ principally that Westerners view the behavior of physical
objects and organisms as being governed by precise rules, whereas
East Asians seek to understand events in terms of the complex web of
interrelationships in which they are embedded. The social structures
of Europe and China are built to match, in Nisbett’s view, with Asian
societies being interdependent and Western societies
individualistic. ”

This book is a very good explanation on how Europeans evolved. Two
other books complement this one as well: The Journey of Man: A
Genetic Odyssey by Spencer Wells, 2002, and Apes or Angels? Darwin,
Dover, Human Nature, and Race by Cornelius J. Troost, 2007.