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Pumpkin Person

Monthly Archives: May 2017

Trump’s visit to Europe

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 53 Comments

Chris Matthews is the best political analyst on TV and last night he was saying that although elites were appalled at Trump’s boorish behavior in Europe, many Americans in the heartland were cheering.

Millions of Americans loved the way Trump just strutted into Europe like he owned the place, frowning the whole time and not socializing with anyone, shoving other NATO leaders aside like they were trash and then lectured them all about pulling their weight.  He reminded me of a pissed off CEO who just found out the company stock price went down, and goes down to the factory floor to warn the workers that if they don’t increase productivity, they’re all out on their ass.

Many Americans see Europeans as hoity-toity elitists who pretentiously look down on the World’s sole superpower when they have no right to feel superior and they appreciated Trump putting them in their place.

Matthews explained that when U.S. movie studios were making commercials for their films, they have often been very careful not to show the Eifel tower because a European looking film is anathema to the U.S. heartland.

But one point Matthews didn’t mention is that sadly there’s also an element of homophobia in all the Euro-hate.  In the eyes of millions on non-European men of all races, the male behavior of even the most heterosexual Europeans seems very gay, especially in countries like France where guys are just a little too in touch with their feminine side and in a very vulgar way..  I cringe when even straight men from France use terms like “bubble but”, “bouncing pecs”, “brown boys” and “cool guy squad”.

One of my favorite movies is Quest for Fire and it was a directed by a French man, but watching it for the first time since early childhood (I’m now in my 30s), I was disgusted by all the sexual innuendo I could now perceive, and then listening to the French director in the commentary talking about how he was strip searched when he was filming in foreign locations was so inappropriate I had to turn off the commentary.  Given how sexual his movie is, and the nature of France culture, I’m wondering if he got himself strip searched on purpose.   I think a lot of men raised in France missed out on the whole socialization process of what it means to be a real man.

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Dark Matter (2007)

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 185 Comments

Pumpkin Person rating: 8/10

Dark Matter (based on a true story) is a fascinating little film about some of the problems high IQ East Asians face when trying to cope with U.S. universities.  The film tells the story of Liu Xing, a large cranium physics PhD student from China with the highest qualifying score in the history of his American university’s physics program.

student
student2

His professor is eager to meet such a brilliant mind, but finds his extreme humility, bad English and worshipful attitude (yes sir, whatever you say, sir) a bit socially awkward.  I remember thinking that if the professor were aware of Rushton’s theory that East Asians are more highly evolved than the rest of us because of their recent divergence from the evolutionary tree, he wouldn’t find this behavior so weird.

polygenetic

The professor makes clear that Xing is allowed to challenge him, which Xing finds refreshing because in his home country, students are so respectful of teachers that they never challenge authority and as a result, they have fallen behind the West culturally despite being genetically more advanced according to Rushton.

Now free to challenge his professors, Xing makes a brilliant discovery that greatly improves his professor’s model for understanding the universe, but because the professor’s ego can’t handle being upstaged by a university kid, and because he cares more about his status than advancing science, he starts giving Xing a hard time.

He tells Xing that his mathematical tests were not rigorous enough to prove Xing’s ideas, even though those tests were previously considered the gold standard.

professor

The professor

Coming from a more evolved race where such psychopathic and aggressive behavior was weeded out in part by 40,000 years of cold winters, Xing simply can’t understand how people can be so evil and shady, and is absolutely devastated.

devestated

The professor’s hatred for Xing grows as he notices the irony that someone as humble and worshipful as Xing is publicly correcting his theory.  Seeing a group of East Asians on campus, the professor makes the bitter observation that their humility is just a façade to hide their deep arrogance.  Rubbing salt in the wound, the professor’s receptionist states that the Chinese achieved civilization 2000 years before whites did.

Furious, the professor forbids Xing from pursuing his “dark matter” theory of the universe, and this leads to Xing dropping out of school to sell lady’s moisturizer, a job he clearly lacks the English and social skills to pursue.

Seeing his fall from grace is absolutely devastating to Joanna Silver (played by Meryl Streep) a wealthy sinophile who so desperately wanted Xing to succeed.

streep

Johanna Silver played by the brilliant Meryl Streep

Adding insult to injury, Xing is rejected by a white girl he has a crush on.

woman

The young woman who rejects Xing’s advances, preferring to find a primitive alpha male

Finally, he just can’t take it anymore, and he returns to the physics department with a gun and goes on a killing spree.  This is a classic example of what Lion of the Blogosphere calls beta-male rage.  Lion writes:

The overwhelmingly vast majority of violent crime is committed by thugs.

Beta-male rage is rare, but is on the rise. It happens when a lesser beta male, with no history of violence, criminal behavior or thuggishness, surprises everyone by committing a violent crime.

By a lesser beta male, we mean a male who has below-average success with women. Beta-male-rage crimes are never committed by men with girlfriends or wives.

Also, to be beta-male rage, the perpetrator cannot be suffering from mental illness such as schizophrenia. A lot of crimes that initially appear to be candidates for beta-male rage turn out to be schizophrenia.

Sadly, it’s not just primitive thuggish people that engage in senseless violence.  More evolved life forms do so too, but their motives for doing so are very different.

You can watch the entire movie for free on Youtube.

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Better race and IQ data

29 Monday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 34 Comments

 

One of the problems with studying the controversial subject of race and IQ is we do not have reliable data on the racial IQ distributions of very many races.  Richard Lynn’s 2006 book made a major contribution to the field, but analyzing hundreds of studies was too ambitious a task for a single 76-year-old man and inevitably the research was criticized for biased selection of data and clerical errors.    Another problem was that different races sometimes took very different tests under wildly different circumstances and living conditions, ranging from modern industrialized society to pre-literate hunter-gathering.

To sidestep these problems, I decided to compare all races on the same type of tests (literacy and numeracy) under similar conditions (as students attending modern schools).  Although achievement tests are not technically IQ tests, they correlate better with IQ tests than some of the actual IQ tests used by Lynn (i.e. Mazes, Draw a Person) and because they are only taken by people with similar schooling, some of the culture bias inherit in all paper and pencil tests is removed.  They also have the advantage of being given to huge and representative samples.

naep

The first major data set is the NAEP mass testing of U.S. 12th graders (above), known as the nation’s report card.  Since an IQ of 100 is by definition whatever score the average U.S. white obtains, a reading, math, and combined score score of 297, 162, and 459 are all equal to IQ 100.  Since I already estimated that U.S. black 12th graders in recent years score an IQ equivalent of 90, 86, and 87 in reading, math, and combined respectively, simple linear extrapolation allows us to infer the IQ equivalents of all the above demographic groups:

reading iq math iq combined iq
white 100 100 100
black 90 86 87
hispanic 93 90 91
asian/pacific islander 100 105 102
american indian/alaska native 93 91 91
two or more races 98 97 97
male 96 97 96
female 99 95 97

The scores of Asian Americans are probably dragged down a bit by the inclusion of Southeast Asians, Pacific Islanders and people with language difficulties.  I suspect if the Asian sample was limited to second generation Northeast Asian Americans, the mean combined IQ would be 105.  Some might argue that Asian scores are inflated by selected migration and a culture of studying.  While the latter might be true, the former is unlikely given the spectacular academic performance of Northeast Asians in their home countries.

The scores of American Indians/Alaskas natives are probably dragged down by fetal alcohol syndrome and extreme cultural deprivation.  Just as African Americans saw their IQs as measured by achievement tests increase from 80 in the 1970s to 87 today, I suspect indigenous Americans are also 7 points below their genetic potential and may have the genetic potential to average 98.

The scores of African Americans are probably slightly inflated by white admixture and I suspect the scores of unmixed descendants of black American slaves would average about 83.  On the other hand if slaves were drawn primarily from the lower end of the African IQ distribution, the scores of African Americans may be deflated relative to the potential of the global black population.

Ashkenazi Jews

Jewish Americans are not included here but previous large scale research suggests a verbal IQ of 109, a math IQ of 113, and thus a combined IQ of 112 on measures of reading and math.  Ashkenazi Jews have an anomalously high IQ for a Caucasoid race, but they are such a tiny percentage of the population that I suspect the highest IQs in the World all belong to peoples of Northeast Asian ancestry.

Australian aboriginals

Data from PISA studies show indigenous Australians score 0.87 SD below non-indigenous Australians on reading tests, suggesting a reading IQ of 87.

pisareading

Meanwhile they score 0.9 SD below on math, suggesting a math IQ of 86.

pisamath

This suggests a combined IQ of 85.  However like indigenous Americans, I suspect that Australian aboriginals are like U.S. blacks in the 1970s (scoring at least 7 IQ points below their potential on achievement tests) so I estimate their potential IQ to be 92.

However I also estimate that indigenous Australians are 43% white at the genetic level, and correcting for this reduces the potential IQ of full-blooded Australoids to 86.

Dark Caucasoids

Data from PISA studies suggest dark caucasoids in Turkey average about 87, but like indigenous peoples, the Arab world is probably about 7 points below their full potential given that less than half of the Turkish population finishes high school, so I suspect they have the genetic potential to be IQ 93.

 

 

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Black billionaires

25 Thursday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 138 Comments

Zack O’Malley Greenburg (a blogger for Forbes magazine) has an article proclaiming Beyoncé and Jay Z a billion dollar couple (hat-tip to commenter Afrosapiens):

Beyoncé, 35, has amassed a personal fortune of $350 million. The total for Jay Z, 47, has soared to $810 million per last week’s ranking of hip-hop’s richest acts (he trails No. 1 Diddy by just $10 million). That brings the couple to a combined net worth of $1.16 billion and counting.

However in order to officially be declared a billionaire by Forbes (and make their international billionaire list), you typically need an individual net worth of at least $1 billion as they’ve explained in the past:

We list individual fortunes, rather than those shared among large multigenerational families such as the Rothschilds or Du Ponts. In some cases, like that of Indian newcomers Sudhir and Samir Mehta, we list siblings together if we don’t know how they split their fortune. In these cases we require the net worth to be an average of $1 billion apiece. When we garner new information on how fortunes are shared, we split up families. Example: Taiwan’s Tsai brothers, who were listed together with a $3.3 billion fortune in 2008. The trio returns to the rankings this year with three individual listings after falling off in 2009. We include wealth held by a spouse and children (marking the entry “& family”) but not wealth of other kin.

With a net worth of $810 million Jay Z could become the first hip hop billionaire but sadly, because of racism, every time blacks cross a milestone, the milestone becomes devalued.  So when a black person moves into a nice neighbourhood, the neighbourhood is no longer considered nice.  When a black family moved into the White House, the status of the Presidency sunk so low that a “pussy grabbing” reality TV star with funny hair could get elected.

Subconsciously the racist attitude is, if a black person achieved it, how impressive can it be?

When I was a kid (I’m now in my 30s) being a billionaire was considered the most exclusive thing in the World, and part of the reason it was so exclusive was because no black had ever achieved that much wealth (with the possible exception of  Mobutu, the Congolese despot and Sani Abacha the Nigerian military leader, whose wealth was so hidden that not even Forbes could confirm it).

After negotiating the most lucrative deal in TV history, in 1995 Oprah overtook Bill Cosby as the only African American wealthy enough to rank among the 400 richest Americans.  At the time her net worth was $340 million and Forbes predicted she would one day become the first black to make their international billionaire list.

Because you only need several hundred million to make the Forbes 400 in the mid 1990s, it was much less exclusive than Forbes international billionaire list, but today being a billionaire is no longer enough to be one of the 400 richest Americans.

Every autumn when Forbes released their annual ranking of the 400 richest Americans, I would bike to the local corner store and buy a copy, hoping that would be the year when Oprah hit ten figures.

1996: $415 million

1997: $550 million

1998:  $675 million

1999: $725 million

2000: $800 million

The reason I wanted so badly for Oprah to become a billionaire was that I had estimated, based on Oprah’s little known hat-size, that she was arguabley the biggest brained black on Earth (excluding pathological cases), so how perfect would it be if the World’s biggest brained black used her smarts to become the World’s first black billionaire.

photo

  Given my fascination with race, intelligence and Darwinism, the stars were lining up so perfectly, and I just had to wait a few more years for it to come to fruition.

Then in 2001, the unthinkable happened.

I had biked to the corner store like I did every autumn to pick up the latest Forbes 400, and suddenly there was this black face staring back at me.

bob.PNG

“Please tell me that’s a really bad picture of Oprah” I remembered thinking

As I got closer, I was forced to confront the truth.  Another black, Bob Johnson, had came out of nowhere and robbed Oprah of her status as “first black billionaire”.  For someone who had just spent the last half decade waiting for Oprah to become the first black billionaire, this was devastating.

And what made it all the more shocking was there was no warning.  Johnson hadn’t even qualified for the Forbes 400 in any previous year, and now suddenly he had leapfrogged over Oprah’s 2001 net worth of $900 million to amass a fortune worth $1.3 billion.

Apparently Viacom had stunned the media industry by paying over $2 billion for Black Entertainment Television and since Johnson owned 63%, he became a billionaire overnight.

So the World’s biggest brained black never did become the World’s first black billionaire as I had so desperately wanted, but a few years later I was able to salvage my theory.

If you can’t be the first, be the ONLY

By 2004, not only was Oprah a billionaire, but Bob Johnson’s wife Sheila divorced him, taking a huge chunk of his fortune with her.  As a result Johnson lost his billionaire status, and for three straight years, Oprah towered as the World’s ONLY black billionaire (excluding Saudi Arabian Blarab billionaire Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al-Amoudi and Canadian Blasian billionaire Michael Lee-Chin who are both arguably mostly non-black at the genetic level)

Since then, the billionaire club has become a lot less exclusive and there are now three black billionaires in America alone, though with a net worth hovering around $3 billion, Oprah remains the richest black in the developed World.

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How autistic are you? Take the quiz

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 381 Comments

Interesting autism quiz here.

The thing that bothered me about it is how arbitrary the questions are.  Unlike IQ tests, where there’s a somewhat objective way of knowing whether an item is good or not (g factor loading) there doesn’t seem to be much of a science behind autism research.

The quiz also seems to assume autism is a continuous variable like height, weight, or IQ, such that everyone in the World can be ranked in order from least autistic to most autistic, but perhaps autism doesn’t work that way.  Maybe it’s a discrete variable, like Down syndrome: you either have an extra chromosome or you don’t.  Ok, Down syndrome’s not that black or white, but close.

Suppose we had no blood test for Down syndrome, but instead it was like autism and we had to rely on questionnaires that had questions like:

Are you short?

Do you have trouble learning?

Do you have slanted eyes?

Do you have a large tongue?

Are you stocky?

If such a test had enough items, the results would form a nice bell curve, and we could easily deceive ourselves into thinking that as many as 20% of humanity had a mild form of Down syndrome.  I fear something like that might be the case when certain commenters on this blog go around labeling anyone who’s a bit nerdy or socially awkward as autistic.

Of course autism might be the extreme end of the normal spectrum as I’ve argued in the past but we must be careful we don’t fall for the  reification fallacy:  Assuming that whatever receives a name or can be scored by a quiz, must have an objective reality.

Of course Stephen Jay Gould famously argued (incorrectly in my opinion) that IQ was an example of the reification error.

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Race, evolution, autism & schizophrenia

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 237 Comments

A few years ago I blogged that schizophrenic traits evolved to cope with tropical environments and autism evolved to cope with cold environments.  My theory was based on research showing schizophrenia and autism to be at opposite extremes of the neurological continuum as well as research claiming tropical folks evolved to have high birth rates at the expense of survival rates while Northerners evolved to have high survival rates at the expense of birth rates.

Since schizophrenia was stereotyped as a black disease and the allegedly super-cold adapted East Asians were stereotyped as socially awkward nerds,  I began to think that up to a point, the overdeveloped social brain of schizophrenia might be useful for having high birth rates because you can attract numerous sex partners,  while the underdeveloped social brain of autism might be useful in the cold where you need to focus on making tools, clothes, fire  and shelter; not picking up women.

Of course an alternative argument is that you need to be more social in the cold because surviving the novel challenges of cold winters requires team work, but the idea of cold climates selecting for autistic type traits and warm climates selecting for schizophrenic type traits, seemed to better explain race differences, at least if you believe the stereotypes.

However a commenter on this blog named “Philosopher” considers this one of the dumbest theories he ever heard and I suspect it’s because he views autistics (or as Philosopher calls them “autists”) as such pathetic creatures that he’s sickened by my claims that they have any kind of survival value,  and is appalled at the idea of them being naturally selected at a “high” stage of evolution when humans finally left the tropics.

Philosopher is also furious that certain heroes of mine like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who Philosopher considers autistic, are two of the richest people in the World, so he’s convinced himself they’re brainwashed suckers who give their money to Africans instead of advancing their own ethnic genetic interests.  Bob Rubin and Steve Schwarzmann are far more powerful, Philospher gushed.

Now if Philosopher really wants to trash autistics, he could just call autism a disease, and not something that was selected for at all, but that’s letting them off too easy.  Philosopher instead compares autistics to breeds of dogs who were deliberately selected by their masters to be obedient little robots who could be easily manipulated.

In a comment so horrifying I am only now revealing a brief excerpt, he wrote:

Pumpkin can’t tell the difference between selected for and selected by.

The reason East asians look similar, have low [testosterone], are more autist and more conservative in persuasion are:

1. The are selected for by Master, much like thoroughbred racehorse owners.
2. They are selected by their environment which is controlled by….1 (see above).

Of course Philosopher has no evidence of this, but he views wanting evidence as an autistic trait, and not something a self-described socially intelligent intuitive schizophrenic like Philosopher needs to bother with.

Philospher’s views remind me of a theory proposed by a Chinese scientist Dr. Bruce Lahn (famous for ground-breaking discoveries about the selection of brain genes).

In a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, scientist Henry Harpending claimed  Lahn wanted to co-author a behavioral genetics article for Scientific American about why “Chinese are boring.”

“I think that Bruce doesn’t understand political correctness,” said Harpending.

Lahn wondered whether China’s imperial times selected against rebellious people.

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Which race is most beautiful?

15 Monday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 267 Comments

Although HBDers deny that they believe some races are superior to others, their critics claim that they do, and in this case, the critics are correct.  J.P. Rushton argued that there was an Oriental > White > Black hierarchy partly caused by the time period when each of the three races branched off the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree: Negroids branched off first and thus were considered genetically primitive, while Mongoloids branched off last and were deemed new and improved.

“One theoretical possibility” said Rushton “is that evolution is progressive, and some populations are more advanced than others.”

The notion of progress seems to imply superiority.

But if the evolution of racial differences was as progressive as Rushton implies, we might not only expect “more advanced” races to be smarter, but more beautiful too.  This might even be true of plants where the highly evolved angiosperms are much more beautiful than the primitive slime molds.

I just had a mental image of all the people who think they understand evolution pulling their hair out at how ridiculous this sounds.

Here’s some 2014 data from OkCupid where people were asked to rate various race/gender combinations by how good looking they are.

raceattraction

The percentages show how attractive different demographics consider each other.  For example Asian women rate Asian men +24% and rate black men -27% meaning they think Asian guys are 24% more attractive than the average guy, but consider black guys 24% less attractive than the average guy.  However black men do much better with black women, who consider them 23% more attractive than average.  Unfortunately black men don’t return the favour, ranking black women only 1% more attractive than the average women, while ranking Asian women 2% more attractive.

Averaging across demographics. Asian women are considered the most attractive by men in general, with a mean rating of +7.5%, followed by Latinas (I LOVE Latinas) who average 4.25%, followed by whites who average +1.75%, and lastly blacks who average -13.75%.  Sadly, these rankings confirm Rushton’s Oriental > white > black hierarchy.

However when it comes to men, whites are on top averaging +10.75, followed by Latinos +0.25%, followed by Asians -3.75% and lastly blacks -7%.

So why do Asians dominate among women but not among men?  If you believe in Rushton’s controversial theory, you might speculate  that women like a guy who is little more primitive than she is because primitive men are more muscular and aggressive and thus better protectors, but if he’s too much more primitive, women get scared and disgusted.

From this controversial perspective, women are willing to date guys who are one step below them on the evolutionary ladder, but not two.

Meanwhile, men don’t need to worry about being protected, so if they date outside their group, they just go for the best women they can find, and if you believe Rushton’s model, the best are East Asians.

Man from the primitive Wogaboo tribe
Man from the primitive Wogaboo tribe
Man from the caveaman tribe
Man from the caveaman tribe
Woman from the most advanced tribe in Quest for Fire
Woman from the most advanced tribe in Quest for Fire

I am reminded of my favorite love story Quest for Fire.  In that film, depicting humanity 80,000 years ago, a member of the advanced modern human tribe of East Africans (bottom right  in the above picture) had a crush on a caveman (top right), because he was just primitive enough to be more masculine than the scrawny guys in her highly evolved tribe, but she would have been terrified by the super manly Wogaboo man (left) from the most primitive tribe.

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The World’s most beautiful people

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 130 Comments

The World’s 72 best looking women as voted on by the internet at worldsmostbeautifuls.com:

women8women16women24women32women40women48women56women64women72

 

The World’s 72 best looking men as voted on by the internet:

men8men16men24men32.PNG

men36men44men52men68men72menreal72

Racial break down

According to the not very accurate pie chart below, whites are only 16% of all humans, and yet they are 46% of the most beautiful women and 50% of the most attractive men. From here we can assign white women a beauty score of 288, meaning they produce 288% as many gorgeous people as expected for their population size, while white men have a beauty score of 313.

worldpop

Below are rough beauty scores for all race and gender groups:

White men 313

White women 288

East Asian men: 112

Southeast Asian women: 100

East Asian women: 72

Dark Caucasoid women: 72

Dark Caucasoid men: 72

Latino women: 13

Black women: 7

Latino men: 0

Southeast Asian men: 0

Black men: 0

 

 

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“160 IQ Jamaican” interviewed by female HBDer

13 Saturday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 79 Comments

Here’s an interesting video by a female HBDer named Tara McCarthy interviewing a self-described 160 IQ Jamaican:

I don’t doubt that the Jamaican is extremely bright, judging from the speed and fluency of his answers, the wisdom and open-mindedness of his opinions, and the nature of his career (computer programming in Japan) but only one in 30,000 Americans by definition have a deviation IQ of 160+ (U.S. norms), which is 159+ (white norms), on any given test.

In theory, only about one in 2.5 million black Americans should have an IQ this high, and the odds are even less in his birth country of Jamaica which has worse nutrition and less white admixture (which is relevant if you’re an HBDer), although the Gaussian curve is a statistical abstraction seldom perfectly observed in nature.  Non-pathological Americans as a whole are forced to perfectly fit the Gaussian curve by IQ test designers, but subgroups like blacks and whites might depart from it at the extremes, depending on the nature of the test.

The host of the show has a kind of quiet intelligence and I bet a lot of the dirty old men in the HBD-o-sphere and alt-right are delighted to see a young attractive blue eyed woman embracing and normalizing their views.  Meanwhile liberals are probably shaking in their boots.

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Homo Erectus in America? by Race Realist

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 201 Comments

[Comment from pumpkin person, May 10, 2017: the following is a guest post from commenter Race Realist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Pumpkin Person.  Out of respect for the author, please try to keep all comments on topic, although I realize discussions naturally evolve over time]

Note: This article is high speculation based on the finding that occurred last week of the modification of mastodon bones in Ice Age California. If it is an actual archaeological site, along with being the age it’s purported to be, there are, in my opinion, only two possibilities for who could be responsible: erectus or the Denisova. Though I will cover evidence that Erectus did make it to America between 40-130,000ya, and rule out that Neanderthals are the hominid responsible.

It was discovered last week that there was human activity at an archeological site in San Diego, California, dated to about 130,000 years ago. Researchers discovered pieces of bone and teeth from a mastodon—that looked to have been modified by early humans. This discovery—if it shows that there was a hominid in the Americas 130,000ya—would have us rethink hominin migrations in the ancient past.

The bones and teeth show signs of having been modified by humans with “manual dexterity and experiential knowledge.” The same pattern was discovered in Nebraska and Kansas, where it was ruled out that carnivorous animals were responsible (Holen et al, 2017).

Now, we only have a few pieces of broken bone and some teeth from a mastodon. It is possible that ‘Natives’ dug up the mastodon skull and modified it, but I like to think outside of the box sometimes. When I first read the ScienceDaily article on the matter, the first hominin that popped into my head that could be responsible for this is erectus. But what is the evidence that he could have made it to the Americas that long ago?

Erectus in America

Evidence for erectus in America is scant. We have discovered no erectus skeletons in the Americas, and we only have a few pieces of bone to go off of to guess which hominid did this (and I doubt it was Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, I will explain my reasoning below).

I’ve been documenting on my blog for the past six months that, contrary to popular belief, erectus was not a ‘dumb ape’ and that, in fact, erectus had a lot of modern behaviors. If it turns out to be true that erectus made it to America, that wouldn’t really surprise me.

rrerectus

Erectus territory

rrneanderthal

Neanderthal territory

Erectus had a wider territory than the other hominid candidates (Neanderthals, Homo sapiens) and the other candidate—the Denisova—were situated more to the middle of the Asian continent. So this, really, leaves us only with erectus as the only possible candidate for the mysterious hominin in Caliofornia—and there is evidence that (albeit, extremely flimsy), erectus may have possibly made it to America, from a paper published back in 1986. Dreier (1986) writes that there is evidence of Man in America before 30kya, and if this is true, then it must be erectus since the estimated dates are between 50-70 kya—right around the time that AMH began migrating out of Africa. Dreier (1986) goes through a few different discoveries that could have been erectus in America, yet they were only modern skeletons. However, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Though I will return to this specific point near the end of the article.)

 

How could erectus have possibly made it to America?

This is one of the most interesting things about this whole scenario. There is evidence that erectus made rafts. If erectus did make it to Flores (Stringer, 2004; Hardaker, 2007: 263-268; Lieberman, 2013)—eventually evolving into floresiensis (or from habilis or a shared common ancestor with habilis)—then he must have had the ability to make rafts. Since we have found erectus skulls at Java, and since certain bodily proportions of floresiensis are ‘scaled-down’ from erectus, along with tools that erectus used, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that erectus had the ability to navigate the seas.

One way that hominins can get to America is through the Bering strait. However, Dreier (1986) assumes that erectus was not cold-adapted, and insists that erectus could have only gone into higher latitudes for only a few months out of the year when it was warmer. As you can see from the above map of erectus’ territory, he lived along the coast of China and into some of the islands around SE Asia. While we don’t have any skeletal evidence, we can infer that it was late Asian erectus who could have possibly, made it to the Americas. So since it was late in erectus’ evolution, we would expect him to have a large brain size in order to 1) survive in Africa and 2) since brain size predicts the success of a species in novel environments (Sol et al, 2008), erectus would have had a larger brain in these locations. So it seems that erectus did have the same adaptability that we do—especially if he actually did make it to the Americas.

Dreier (1986) posits that erectus could have traveled along the Aleutian island chain in Alaska, eating marine life (shells, mollusks, clams, etc), and so he would not have had to “deviate from the 53 north latitude vitamin D barrier drastically since almost the entire Aleutian Island chain falls between the 50 and 55 north latitude lines, and access via this route may have been possible during glaciation when sea levels in the area dropped as much as 100 meters” (Dreier, 1986: 31). Erectus could have gotten vitamin D from shells, mollusks, and other marine life, as they are extremely high in vitamin D (Nair and Maseeh, 2012). I will contend that erectus rafted to America, but the Aleutian island route is also plausible.

Dreier (1986) ends up concluding that our best bet for finding erectus skeletons in America is along with Pacific coast, and there may be some submerged underwater. However, with the new discovery last week, I await more work into the site for some more answers (and of course questions).

However, contra Dreier’s (1986) claim that we should stop looking for sites with human activity earlier than 30,000 years, this new finding is promising.

Why not Neanderthals?

Neanderthals were seafarers, just like erectus, and later, us. However, there is evidence for Neanderthals sailing the seas 100kya, however, earlier dates of seafaring activity “as far back as 200 ka BP can not be excluded.” (Ferentinos et al, 2012). Further—and perhaps most importantly—the range of the Neanderthals was nowhere near the Pacific Ocean—whereas erectus was. So since there is little evidence of seafaring 200kya (which cannot be excluded), then we’re still left with the only possibility being erectus go to the Americas either by walking the Aleutian islands or rafting across the Pacific.

Could erectus have killed animals as large as a mastodon?

Erectus was killing elephants (Elephas antiquus) around 400kya in the Levant (Ben-Dor et al, 2011). Then, when the elephants went extinct, erectus had to hunt smaller, quicker game and thus evolved a smaller body to deal with the new environmental pressure—chasing a new food source. So erectus did have the ability to kill an animal that big, another positive sign that this is erectus we are dealing with in California 130,000 years ago.

An erectus skeleton in America?

An osteologist discovered a brow bone in the Americas, and in an unpublished report in 1990, he says the brow’s thickness and structure is comparable to African erectus, with a reanalysis showing it was closer to Asian erectus—just what we would expect since Asian erectus may have been a seafarer (Hardaker, 2007). However, the author of the book reiterates the Texas A&M osteologists’ findings writing: “these comparisons do not imply that preHomo sapiens were in the Americas” (Steen-McIntyre, 2008).

Humanlike cognition in erectus?

Humanlike thinking evolved 1.8 mya, right around the time erectus came into the picture (Putt et al, 2017). Volunteers created Auchulean tools while wearing a wearing a cap that measured brain activity. Visual attention and motor control were needed to create the “simpler Oldowan tools”, whereas for the “more complex Auchelian tools” a “larger portion of the brain was engaged in the creation of the more complex Acheulian tools, including regions of the brain associated with the integration of visual, auditory and sensorimotor information; the guidance of visual working memory; and higher-order action planning.” This discovery pushes back the advent of humanlike cognition, since the earliest tools of this nature are found around 1.8 mya. There is a possibility that some erectus may have had IQs near ours, as studies of microcephalics show that a large amount have higher than average IQs (Skoyles, 1999).

Conclusion

Evidence is mounting that erectus was more than the ‘dumb ape’ that some people say he is. If erectus did make it to America—and the possibility is there—then human migratory patterns need to be rewritten. I hope there is more evidence pointing to what hominid was in the area at that time—and if there is evidence of humanlike activity there, it most likely is erectus. It is extremely possible that erectus could have gotten to America, as there is evidence that he was at least in northern China. So he could have sailed to the Americas or walked along the Aleutian islands.

The evidence for erectus in America is compelling, and I hope more is discovered about what went on at this site and who was there. Even if it wasn’t erectus, there is still some compelling evidence that he did make it to America.

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