Prehistoric Near East

The existence of 'Basal Eurasians' is known only through DNA analysis which, in the twenty-first century, has come along in leaps and bounds.

In fact it has developed so much that by the middle 2010s it became possible to start picking out evidence of intermixing between Palaeolithic human populations.

Stone tools of the Emireh culture in the Levant, ascribed as the first local culture which was wholly created by Homo sapiens as opposed to the preceding Mousterian, which had Neanderthal origins

The early 'Out of Africa' groups which entered the Near East from Africa between about 70,000-50,000 BC are now known to have had a genetic make-up which no longer exists (see 'related links' for 'Out of Africa II' in the sidebar for more on early human types and migrations).

These people likely migrated in small groups over many thousands of years. In time they became isolated from other human groups, whether in the Near East, on the Iranian plateau (where the early Neolithic farming population of about 8000 BC bore a very distinctly-different genetic make-up from similar early farmers in the Levant), or in Central Asia or East Asia.

They provided the origins of later regional groups such as East Asians, Australasians, Ancient North Eurasians, and the first European hunter-gatherers, many of whom later developed their own regional sub-groups.

Millennia of such isolation and sub-division allowed each isolated group to develop small differences in the DNA of its members. At various times those isolated groups came together with other groups and intermixed, a process which was repeated again and again across a span of as much as forty or fifty thousand years.

The original 'Out of Africa' genetic make-up became increasingly diffused and then disappeared entirely in its initial form.

DNA expert and researcher David Reich has named that early, pre-admixture population 'Basal Eurasians' as it provided a genetic basis for all later Eurasians.

Basal Eurasians remain within all modern humans at least in part through their various sub-divisions. One of those involved another ghost population, a group which has not survived in its original genetic form.

This was the aforementioned 'Ancient North Eurasians' of North Asia. One of their own sub-divisions, perhaps a major one, was involved in the early phases of the peopling of the Americas.

Main Sources

David Reich - Who we are and how we got here (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Additional Sources

Benjamin W Roberts & Marc Vander Linden (Eds) - Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission

Chris Scarre (Ed) - The Times Atlas of Past Worlds (Guild Publishing, 1988)

O Bar-Yosef & A Belfer-Cohen - From Africa to Eurasia - Early Dispersals (Quaternary International 75, 2001)

Ian Tattersall - Masters of the Planet: The Search for our Human Origins (2012)

Online Sources

University of Oxford News - Before they left Africa, early modern humans were 'culturally diverse'

Science - Stone Age Toolmakers Surprisingly Sophisticated

Bradshaw Foundation: Origins, and First Human Culture Lasted 20,000 Years Longer Than Thought (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft).

Images and text copyright © P L Kessler. An original feature for the History Files.