North vs South, mountain vs beach - a historical theory

Somehow- we don’t know how - humans separated into coastal and mountain peoples. Smaller, darker and more curly-haired ones took up residence along the coasts of south Asia and into Micronesia and Australia, while others gravitated to mountains around the Caspian Sea and on into Afghanistan and Xinjiang, becoming larger and, apparently, more war-like. The Achaemenids who developed the earliest Persian Empire were originally of these, maybe from the Caucasus Mountains. I submit that eventually they extended their rule over most of coastal South and Southeast Asia, utilizing a set of magical formulations (pageantry mostly, maybe) distinct from older animistic rituals, observations and beliefs. With greater fanfare, spectacular ritual and brutally enforced social hierarchy that wasn’t simply militaristic (in guise of protectionist), that influence wass the basis of the Hindu caste system and much of Asian royalty.
Misdirection and even forms of sleight-of-hand might be part of this, but inexplicable behavior designated only as 'beyond common understanding' (if that) is a greater part. Special, ill-defined terminology also helps (you know, like 'redacted' instead of 'censored, deleted' 'hidden' or 'blocked out'; neither my dictionary nor my thesaurus includes it, but an internet search gave me "edit" and also, and I love this, sanitized). Act superior and many will accept it as so. Which helps explain the specialized terminology of so many specializations - workers in every occupation being superior to the rest of us, as it were).
We all indulge in some magical thinking, if only about sex and death; some are far more pretentious about it than others. Perhaps it is just more necessary for them, for war and dynastic power politics, political cohesion, power-structure delineation, influencing emotional weather when necessary, ego maintenance and perhaps other things I'm not able to know about.
Many are well familiar with the “Out of Africa” hypothesis that modern humans evolved in Africa and dispersed across Asia, reaching Australia in a single wave about 60,000 years ago. However, technological advances in DNA analysis and other fossil identification techniques, as well as an emphasis on multidisciplinary research, are revising this story. Recent discoveries show that humans left Africa multiple times prior to 60,000 years ago, that they interbred with other hominids in many locations across Eurasia, and that humans may well have been in Australia even 75,000 years ago. Recent evidence shows that early humans were already present in Eurasia before the split that gave rise to Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens sapiens, and that humans almost identical to those of living populations had emerged in East Asia long before they appeared in the African fossil record.
Surely well before egress from Africa humanity had experienced much differentiation: some were better flint-knappers, others good trackers or clothing makers. Some excelled at story-telling, a few learned and retained more than others about roots, barks, mushrooms, poisons, plant or insect secretions useful on wounds… Once in a while someone would excel at ritual, singing, imitating animal noises or whistling. Some could run faster than others, some could carry more. Seems likely to me that someone would be delegated responsibility for fire-starting and tending, while others served more as trackers, scouts and/or guards. Some tended to spread joy, others animosity. And as individuals diverged, so also did groups, and not only in adjustments to varied terrain. We know that some became tall, others short, with tribes remaining that way today. We also know that people that vary extensively from one another often don’t much like each other.
Fossils of seemingly modern humans have been announced by archaeologists working at several Chinese digs, mostly in central and southern China, with associated dates ranging from 80,000 to 178,000 years in age. A site with evidence of very early symbolic behavior (prior to 40,000 BCE) is Kara Bom (discovered 1981), is located, like Denisova Cave of the extremely robust Denisovans, in the Russian Altai Mountains (near where Kazakhstan and Mongolia almost meet, and Russia and China do).
A single dispersal of anatomically modern humans out of Africa around 60,000 years ago can’t be the full story. Homo sapiens reached distant parts of the Asian continent, as well as Oceania, earlier than previously thought. Additionally, evidence that modern humans interbred with other hominids already present in Asia, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, complicates the evolutionary picture. Humans, well, hominids anyway, apparently started leaving Africa as early as 200,000 years ago, at about the time of the advent of modern humans. Maybe some hominids left much, much earlier, unless somehow some parallel evolution occurred or scientists just have the wrong end of the stick. Finds show that modern humans reached Southeast Asia and Australia well before 60,000 years ago, quite likely before 70,000 BCE.
However, other recent studies do confirm that all present-day non-African populations branched off from a single ancestral population in Africa approximately 60,000 years ago. This could indicate that there were multiple, smaller dispersals of humans out of Africa beginning perhaps 120,000 years ago, perhaps earlier, but followed by a major exodus about 60,000 years ago. While the recent dispersal contributed the bulk of the genetic make-up of present-day non-Africans, much earlier journeys contributed significantly to our genetic and physical variety. Migrations out of Africa prior to 60,000 years ago surely were of small groups of foragers; some of them eventually left genetic traces that have come down to modern human populations. A later, major 'Out of Africa' event most likely occurred around 60,000 years ago or thereafter.
Recent genetic research has shown that modern humans interbred with other ancient hominids - not only with Neanderthals, but also with recently-discovered relatives the Denisovans (as well as with a currently unidentified population of pre-modern hominids). One estimate is that all present-day non-Africans have 1-4% Neanderthal heritage. Another estimation gives modern Melanesians an average of 5% Denisovan heritage. It’s clear that modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and perhaps other hominid groups overlapped in time and space in Asia, and had many instances of interaction.
The increasing evidence of these interactions suggests that the spread of material culture is also more complicated than previously thought. The spread of modern human behaviors didn’t occur in a simple progress starting from Africa and going east. Ecological variation needs to be considered in concert with behavioral variation between the different hominid populations present in Asia during the Late Pleistocene – with study of the interplay between genetics and environment.
Northward-traveling human foragers carried tool-kits including blades and composite tools, and also symbolic objects (beads and colorants). Their successful establishment in higher latitudes and altitudes was accompanied by straightened hair, lightened skin and increased stature. The southern route includes probable movement pathways through or perhaps around the Indian subcontinent, to mainland Southeast Asia (well, first to the now submerged Sunda Shelf, where towns may have been built over 10,000 years ago, with remains now being discovered), as far north as central China and southward into the Southeast Asian islands and on to Australasia. Questions remain as to why modern human foragers arriving in Southeast Asia left no blade or stone tools – at least few have been found. Rust, weathering, earthquakes, water damage or unwillingness to part with seriously important utensils may well have contributed. Evidence shows ground stone technologies, among other adaptations to new environments. There are also many questions concerning what happened when different foraging groups, originating in areas to the north and south, met in central China. We refer to modern Han Chinese as a single, almost monolithic culture, but it isn’t. Northerners are larger wheat eaters, Southerners eat rice and many left in a huge diaspora that produced many, many powerful business people. Mongol and Japanese influence also varied greatly, but this seems only tangential to the subject here.
Much as the Great Rift Valley of Tanzania was a cradle of humanity, there may have been another – the Caucasus. Not of the sand and beach people certainly, but of those who eventually conquered and controlled them. Not Caucasians, per se, nor even light-eyed, light-skinned people, but hardy people who’s hardiness developed in mountains. As humans moved across the Asian and European continents about 50,000 years ago, moving away from the equator and facing diminished threat from ultraviolet exposure, natural selection would have favored lightening mutations, and it’s entirely possible that light skin evolved unconnectedly in many places.
Wikipedia tells us: “The nation states that comprise the area today are the post-Soviet states Georgia (including Adjara and Abkhazia), Azerbaijan (including Nakhchivan), Armenia, and the Russian Federation, with divisions including Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, North Ossetia–Alania, Kabardino–Balkaria, Karachay–Cherkessia, Adygea, Krasnodar Krai and Stavropol Krai (in clockwise order). Three territories in the region claim independence but are recognized as such by only a handful of entities: Artsakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are recognized by the world community as part of Georgia, and Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan.”
The Caucasus, one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse of regions, has over 50 ethnic groups and at least three indigenous language families. This indicates lengthy habitation – without which so much differentiation is unlikely to have occurred.
Caucasus languages are sometimes mistakenly referred to as a family of languages, but aren’t. Three of the distinct families have no native members outside the Caucasus. In addition, Indo-European languages, such as Armenian and Ossetian, and Turkic languages, such as Azerbaijani, Kumyk language and Karachay–Balkar, are spoken. Kartvelian, formerly known as the South Caucasian or Iberian language family, includes Georgian, the official language of Georgia, Svan, Zan, Mingrelian and Laz. Northeast Caucasian languages (Avar–Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian or Caspian family) include Andic, Akhvakh, Karanta, Botlikh, Godoberi, Chamalal, Bagvalal, Tindis and also the Chechen language (1.5 million speakers).
Also in the region are Tsezic peoples (Tsez, Hinukh, Bezhta, Hunzib and Khwarshi), Lezgic peoples (Aguls, Lezgians, Ingush, Rutuls, Tabasarans, Tsakhurs, Kryts, Buducks, Udins, Archins, Dargins, Laks and the Khinalug), plus Nakh peoples: Bats, Chechens, Kists, and the Ingush. And Circassians: Adyghe, Kabarday, Cherkess, and Ubykh.
Northwest Caucasian, also called the Abkhazo-Adyghean, Circassian, or Pontic family, includes the Kabardian, Abkhaz and Abaza languages.
The predominant Indo-European language in the Caucasus is Armenian, spoken by the Armenians (maybe 7 million speakers). The Ossetians, speaking the Ossetian language, form another group of the Indo-European language family – with about 700,000 speakers. Ossetic has preserved many features inherited from the language of the Alani and Scythians. Other Indo-European languages spoken in the Caucasus include Greek (Pontic Greek), Persian (including Tat Persian), Kurdish, Talysh, Judeo-Tat, and Slavic languages like Russian and Ukrainian, whose speakers number over a third of the total population of the Caucasus.
Two dialects of Neo-Aramaic are spoken in the Caucasus: Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, with around 30,000 speakers, and Bohtan Neo-Aramaic, with around 1,000 speakers. Both of these were brought to the Caucasus by ethnic Assyrians fleeing Assyrian Genocide during WWI.
A dialect of Arabic known as Shirvani Arabic was spoken natively in parts of Azerbaijan and Dagestan throughout medieval times until the early 20th century. In the 19th century, it was considered that the best literary Arabic was spoken in the mountains of Dagestan.
Several Turkic languages are spoken in the Caucasus, with Azerbaijani is predominant. Other Turkic languages spoken include Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Nogai, Turkish, and Turkmen.
And the Kalmyk language, spoken by descendants of Oirat-speakers from East Asia, is a Mongolic language.

The territory of the Caucasus region was inhabited by Homo erectus since the Paleolithic Era. In 1991, early human (that is, hominin) fossils dating back 1.8 million years were found at the Dmanisi archaeological site in Georgia. Scientists now classify the assemblage of fossil skeletons as the subspecies Homo erectus georgicus. The site provided the earliest unequivocal evidence of early human presence outside Africa (the Dmanisi skulls are the five oldest hominins ever found outside Africa).
Chechens are one of the Nakh peoples, who have lived in the highlands of the North Caucasus region since prehistory. There is archeological evidence of historical continuity dating back since 3000 BCE as well as evidence proving their migration from the Fertile Crescent c. 10,000–8,000 BCE. In the Middle Ages, the lowland of Chechnya was dominated by the Khazars and then the Alans. Khazar, Alan and Armenian genetics seem to account for much of non-Semetic Jewry.
Traces of human settlement dating back to 40,000 BCE found near Lake Kezanoi, with cave paintings, artifacts, and other archaeological evidence, indicate continuous habitation for some 8,000 years by people who’d mastered fire, used animal skins for warmth and had a variety of tools. Just to the south, agriculture seems to have arisen in at least two separate, discrete areas, at least 10,000 years BP.

For an area of only about 500x400 kilometers, the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Caucasus is extraordinary. Continental France covers about 1000 km from north to south and from east to west. Texas, at 696,241 km2, is 10% larger than that. Afghanistan is 652,000 square kilometers, Myanmar 678,500, and Thailand at 513,120 is still over twice as large.
Myanmar, with beaches, lowlands and high mountains, is said to be one of the most diverse of places, with about 60 ethnic groups and four major language families (Sino-Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, Austro-Asiatic, and Indo-European). Thailand has less diversity, with Siamese, T’ai (Tai Khoen, Tai Lue, Tai Luang); Thai Lao (Thai Loei, Lao Lom, Lao Khrang, Lao Wiang/Klang, Lao Ngaew, and Lao Ti); the related Khon Muang (Northern Thais); Phu Thai; the much less related 'Khon Pak Tai’ Southern Thais; Khmer and Khmer Leu (Northern Khmer); Malays; Ngaw; Kuy/Kuay (aka Suay); Moken; Karen; various Chinese (Teh Chiew, Hokkian, Hainanese, Hakka, Yunnanese); and the “hill tribes” Lisu, Lahu, Akha, Hmong, Yao/Mien, Palong, Padong, Pa-O, Paluang, Bisu, Khmu, and Htin. France, Afghanistan and Texas hardly compete.
The Caspian Sea, to the east of Caucasia, is the world’s largest inland body of water, with no outflow and salinity of approximately 1.2% - about a third that of most seawater. Surface water in the Black Sea, to the west, has salinity of 17 psu (practical salinity unit) - but reaches the Mediterranean with a salinity of 34 psu, similar to ocean water. It’s said to not mix with lower levels of water, but still, neither sea would have been all that much of a draw for early habitation! Apparently though, the mountains somehow were, at least until lowland civilizations became a draw for some (much as seems to have been the case for peoples from Altai and Tibet - also the Mughals of Babur came down out of the mountains of Afghanistan to northern, and later central, India).
Cattle, goats, sheep, and pigs all have their origins as farmed animals in the Fertile Crescent of eastern Turkey, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. Their domestication began the Neolithic Revolution, between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. Taking root around 12,000 years ago, agriculture triggered changes in society and the way people lived. Gatherer/hunter traditions gave way to permanent settlements with better food storage. Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population rocketed - from some five million people 10,000 years ago to over seven billion today.
In Crete, Greece, there existed one of the oldest and most powerful civilizations on earth: the Minoan civilization, which arose about 3000 BCE (perhaps before Phoenicia or Egypt although that is not clear, and the Sphinx is clearly much older). They received the name from the legendary King Minos, though some suggest that Minos was not his name but his title, like ‘Governor’ in the ancient Cretan language. The Minoan Empire was a Bronze Age civilization that arose in Crete and flourished almost 5000 years ago, until it was destroyed by volcano and tsunami in 1450BCE. The Minoans were educated, with artists, warriors and merchants, and many accomplished sailors. Their maritime empire was vast; the first large civilization of Europe. Perhaps with the arrival of new people with new technology, by 2000 BCE the Minoan Neolithic community had developed a hierarchical society with centralized administration. They were building palaces, conducting extensive trade, and producing wonderful pottery, jewelry, statues, carvings, frescoes and other artifacts. The first in Europe to use a written language, now called Linear A (finally deciphered only just recently), they dominated the Mediterranean Sea, but became something like a prototype for the Atlantis legend, leaving little but tokens of its grandeur. According to Homer, the kingdom had 90 cities, the main city being Knossos, and was governed for 9 years by King Minos, in close relationship with his father, the god Zeus. The legend of Talo—the giant metallic, robot-like being gifted to Minos by Zeus—took place during the period of the Minoan civilization. Daedalus, the man who built a ‘flying machine’ for his son Icarus, lived in Crete at this time, and designed great structures for Minos, including the famous labyrinth where the Minotaur was held captive. Theseus, son of the god Poseidon, killed the Minotaur with the help of Minos’ daughter, Ariadne. The labyrinth was considered mere legend until Sir Arthur Evans discovered the city of Knossos in Crete.
We’ve long heard of ‘barbarians’ from Altai, Mongolia, Tibet and the Caucasus invading more ‘civilized’ (agricultural) areas and dominating them for generations; one thing that we haven’t been able to do is analyze the methods of control that rulers developed and handed down, as they have, quite naturally, been much inclined to keep those matters to themselves. By the 7th century BCE, the Persians had settled in the south-western portion of the Iranian Plateau in the region of Persis, which came to be their heartland. From this region, Cyrus the Great, descendant of barbarians from we know not what mountains, advanced to defeat the Medes, Lydia, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, but Iranian elites of the central plateau reclaimed power by the second century BCE. Cyrus’s Achaemenid Empire c. 550–330 BCE), a.k.a. the First Persian Empire, was larger than any previous empire in history, spanning a million square kilometers. At its greatest extent it stretched from the Balkans in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. Incorporating various peoples of different origins and faiths, it is notable for its successful model of a centralized, bureaucratic administration (through satraps under the King of Kings), for building infrastructure including roads and a postal system, an official language in use across its territories, and the development of civil services and a large professional army. Its successes inspired similar systems in later empires.
In another blog I discuss Persian influence into SE Asia (https://mythorelics.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-historical-theory-about-god-kings.html); but here is a quick synopsis (from a 2013 post included in the just referenced one, a post I deleted):

About 3000 years ago, a mountain people from either the Georgian Caucasus or the Badakshan area of Central Asia (northeastern Afghanistan and southeastern Tajikistan), an important trading center through which the “Silk Road” passed, became tempted by thoughts of wealth in lowlands to their west, which they were becoming strong enough to consider appropriating. These people of Kamboja, or Kambujiya, had strong belief in hierarchy, divine will and the right of might. To them, to be able to take was a mandate to do so, within the natural, moral compass and order of things. How could it be else-wise?
In the 9th century BCE they took Persis (now Fars Province of Iran, where Shiraz is), then Anshan (in the Zagros mountains of southwestern Iran), a quite ancient civilization, and soon the whole Iranian plateau.
The empire at around 500 BCE stretched from the Indus Valley in the east to Thrace and Macedonia; it eventually controlled Egypt and encompassed approximately 8 million square kilometers; in 480 BCE it is estimated to have had 50 million people. At its greatest extent, it had absorbed the modern territories of Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, most of Turkey, parts of Libya, Georgia and Azerbaijan, much of the Black Sea coastal regions and extensive parts of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Oman. They may well have been the root of the Ksyatriya caste, India’s ruling and military elite who were in charge of protecting society by fighting in wartime and governing in peacetime, and Gautama Buddha was most likely one of them (see the work of Ranajit Pal, who faces much disparagement but seems to me spot on).
Some of these Persian Ksyatriyas created the Srivijaya maritime empire, a splinter group from which met other Kambojas who had come overland (eventually following the path of the Mekong) to the Tonle Sap in what was then the kingdom of Chenla (Zhenla) and what is now Cambodia. These two groups, united by racial background and world-view, would have had trouble communicating verbally after a millennium and a half of differing influences on their language, but they saw the locals in quite the same way. Together they enslaved the local aboriginals, built the extensive Angkor Wat complexes, became known as the Khom and eventually formed the core of Siamese royalty and what became Thailand. As less than 1% has great difficulty holding in slavery over 99%, when drought and the Black Plague hit about 1300 CE, the Angkor Empire started to crumble, its edifices, by the time of the rise of Ayudhaya, left as a bad memory to become over-run by jungle, and the Khom were almost forgotten. Jit Phoumisak, called by some the only Thai intellectual, wrote about this, and seems as a result to have been executed. David K. Wyatt of Cornell University, the foremost historian on Thailand, might well have wanted to write on it, too, but wanted even more to be able to return to Thailand for visits, and so did not, although some of his later writings show interest in the surrounding controversies.
Srivijaya, like the Dutch and British East India Companies, merely expropriated ports, with “Factory” warehouses, and did not attempt administration of colonies (Ligor, now Nakorn Sri Thammarat a possible exception), but the Khom rulers of the Khmer (pronounced “kha-may, the first syllable just like the Thai word for slave) raised rule to an art form, beguiling a gullible public with magical incantations and other bewitchery for half a millennium.

What interests me is not a question of genetic superiority or relative mystical power, but how the divergence occurred: many taking an easier route east mostly along coastal areas with fewer large beasts (well, as I imagine it), while others went north, to mountains and greater difficulties. Could it be just that some folk are more ornery than others?

With thinking about all this, I find myself needing to question who, precisely, the Chinese are, or quite how they became that. It’s a quite a lot less clear than one might easily expect. So much presented strikes me as less than suspect: that Chinese are albino San bushmen, that the ‘Mongoloid’ type dominant in the area of China appeared only relatively recently, that DNA research without more recent epigenetic understandings tells as much as has been claimed...

In 1965 fossils were found in Yuanmou County, Yunnan, that show early Homo erectus living within today’s China as early as 1.7 million years ago. Two fossil teeth from the inside upper jaw of a young male were unearthed in the same layer as stone chips and stone tools with traces of the work of early man along a three-meter-thick layer of earth containing carbon, indicating that Yuanmou Man both made simple tools and knew how to use fire. But a site at Xihoudu (西侯渡) in Shanxi Province is said to be the earliest recorded use of fire by Homo erectus - and is dated to 1.27 million years ago. I have no explanation for the discrepancy other than the bitter ego rivalries that regularly occur within the realms of academia (and elsewhere).
Lantian man of the Chenjiawo area lived between 700,000 to 1,150,000 BP. That’s much older than the more famous Peking Man (220,000 - 580,000 years ago) found at Zhoukoudian near Beijing. Lantian Man lived in the early Pleistocene, as did distant cousins in Java and East Africa. The skull fossil of Peking Man, found in 1929 at Zhoukoudian, Fangshan, in suburban Beijing, shows a brain capacity of 1,059 ml., smaller than that of modern man (1,400 ml.). But Peking Man could speak, walk upright and engage in productive labor. Fossils of bones and teeth belonging to over 40 men and women of different ages were later dug up at the same site, as also were over 100,000 pieces of roughly processed stone tools – tools for cutting, smashing, chopping and trimming. A layer of ash six meters thick, with burned animal bones, shows that Peking Man used fire to cook food.
Homo erectus remains from Longtandong, Hexian, Anhui date from 190,000 to 300,000 years ago. Homo sapiens bones have been found and identified as from 180,000 to 280,000 years old, at Jinniushan, Yingkou, Liaoning and Tianshuigou, Dali, Shaanxi. The Liujiang hominid (of Liujiang County) has been controversially dated at 139,000–111,000 old. Dating results of Lunadong (Bubing Basin, Guangxi, southern China) teeth indicate age of 126,000 years. These were pre-modern people; modern Homo sapiens found around Salawusu, Inner Mongolia date to around 28,000 to 65,000 years ago (Laishui, Hebei), and show similar appearance to today’s people. Hetao people of the Paleolithic Salawusu Culture of Inner Mongolia left remains by Dagouwan and Dishaoguwan villages in Wushen Banner, Ordos City of Inner Mongolia; they left 35,000 year old fossilized animals and stoneware that show beginnings of modern existence.

Modern humans not distantly descended from Africans apparently first arrived at southern China about 100,000 years ago (Zhiren Cave, Zhirendong, Chongzuo City). Scientists generally accept that the origin of modern man was an African woman who lived 200,000 years ago, that some of her descendants arrived in the Middle East some 100,000 years ago, that a group of humans arrived in East Asia and Europe about 60,000 years ago, and that wherever they stopped, they wiped out earlier hominids - but often only after first mating with them. Neanderthal Man in Europe and the Peking Man in China were hominid branches that went extinct, but left genetic traces.
Homo-sapien-sapiens may have first left Africa about 60,000 BCE; but clearly other hominids left before. Early modern Africans are thought to have had two great migrations East: the ‘first’ migration, purportedly of Blacks with straight hair, took a route along the coast of Asia, then island hopped from the Sunda Shelf to Oceania and Australia, and somehow on to South America - leaving remains called ‘Luzia’ in Brazil. By reaching Australia, H. sapiens expanded its habitat beyond that of H. erectus; it’s now suggested that this happened before 70,000 BCE.
The 2nd migration event is also claimed to have been of Blacks with straight hair, but with Mongol features like those of the ‘San’ people of the Kalahari Desert. They took an ‘inland route’ through southern Asia then up to China, about 50-45,000BCE. Included within this group, somehow, were straight haired Blacks without Mongol features - called Dravidians - who settled in India and other areas of southern Asia, and also Albinos (Blacks without pigmentation), somehow motivated to seek relief from the heat and burning sunshine of southern Africa - and relief from the torment heaped upon them by more normal, yet superstitious, Africans. To me, though, accepting that high cheek-bones show connection between the San and Mongolians, half a world apart and with not much clear connectivity between, seems more than just a bit of a stretch.

The gap of about 50,000 years between homo sapiens settling Australia and then North America indicates a strong popular preference for serene southern sea-sides over rugged, snowy northern mountains. But it was northern mountaineers who conquered. Maybe mountains are genetically uplifting, making from mere homo-sapiens 'homo-sapiens-sapiens' with pragmatic understanding of the value of those just there to be used (like lowly sand lovers, totally expendable as shown by their tendency to over-populate!). The physically onerous background experience of the mountaineers allows that they hardly even need harden their hearts: natural ethical progress, God’s Plan, survival of the fittest. And how nicely convenient, those Great Teachers that helped make the low-landers so easy to, as necessary, control (and dispose of, or redact, as it were). By which I hardly mean to imply that power-mad killings by locals of hot, low-lying areas have been rare; many forms of adversity &/or misfortune might tend to inspire callous cynicism. Nor do I know of Innuit or Lapp/Sami mass-murderers (although I suspect there to have been at least a case or two). Still, the most avaricious raiders might well have had cold mountain backgrounds or at least ancestry. Tricky to take a survey.

The Tung-tien-yen cave, Liu-chiang County, Kwangsi was discovered in 1958 to contain human remains from the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) geological epoch (about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago). A skull from there was described as ‘Evolving Mongoloid’, but also as Melanesian or Negrito.
Modern Chinese are seen by some as a mix of Mongol-featured Blacks like the San, their Albinos, Albinos of Central Asians (who later became Europeans), and Blacks like the Jomon in Japan. But understanding just when these admixtures took place requires we know exactly what was meant by ‘Primitive Mongoloid’ or ‘Evolving Mongoloid’ and how that differs from Eskimos… When the dark, kinky-haired Asians of southern coastal areas arrived is no more clear than who the ‘Blacks with straight hair’ were, or why differing hair-types separated, either. Ethnocentrism hasn’t helped the investigations.

Tianyuan Man, who lived in China 40,000 years ago, showed substantial Neanderthal admixture. A 2017 study of the ancient DNA of Tianyuan Man found him closely related to modern East Asian populations, but not a direct ancestor. A 2013 study found “Neanderthal introgression of 18 genes within the chromosome 3p21.31 region (HYAL region) of East Asians” (sorry, but that’s beyond the scope of my understanding). Migrations eventually turned northeast to China and finally reached Japan before turning inland, as is said to be evidenced by a pattern of mitochondrial haplogroups descended from haplogroup M, and in Y-chromosome haplogroup C. Findings suggest Neanderthal ‘introgression’ occurred within ancestral populations shared by East Asians and Native Americans. One reason I wanted to put this together was to avoid terminology like ‘introgression’ and ‘dispersed out of Africa’ – which I hardly think help with clarity. I suspect ‘haplogroup’ to be an essential term, but lots of professional people simply admire terms unused outside of their profession!

Until the Neolithic era (10,000 BCE) Homo erectus and Homo sapiens lived in loosely organized packs. Fossils unearthed by scientists were likely covered accidentally. Landslides and volcanic activity are good for preservation! Only when our ancestors settled in cooperative villages and began to bury their dead did lots of remains become preserved.

Southeast Asia (Java) was first reached by hominids about 1.7 million years ago (Meganthropus); Western Europe around 1.2 million years ago (Atapuerca). Denisovan ancestry shared by Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and smaller scattered groups of people in Southeast Asia (like the Mamanwa, a Negrito people in the Philippines) suggests interbreeding took place in Eastern Asia. Denisovans, an ancient humanlike population previously identified via nuclear DNA taken from a finger bone excavated in Siberia’s Denisova Cave, contributed some genes to living New Guineans, Australian aborigines, two aboriginal groups in the Philippines and populations on several nearby islands; they seem to have ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia. Some in China claim them as the first modern people. It’s considered possible that they interbred with an unknown archaic human. Another enigmatic species is Homo floresiensis; exactly how and when did they get to the island of Flores (and did they somehow use boats at this very early point in time)? Who were their ancestors?
Homo erectus reached Flores, but not Australia. The species Homo floresiensis (nicknamed ‘hobbit’), found at Liang Bua in Indonesia, may have descended from a very early (before or not long after Erectus) and still unknown migration from Africa.
Clues to migrations of people predating Homo erectus keep appearing; by now, five or six sites in Eurasia span a suggested timeframe of roughly 2.6-2 million years. Recent finds at Shangchen in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau indicate hominid occupation there from 2.1 million years ago. There may have been not only dispersals from Africa, but also back into Africa, starting much earlier than 2 million years ago. The main current model, of Erectus being the first hominid to spread from Africa across Eurasia, fails to account for many recent finds.
During early hominid days, the sea level was much lower and most of Maritime Southeast Asia formed one land mass known as Sunda. Migrations seem to have gone along the coastal route to the straits between Sunda and Sahul, the continental land mass of present-day Australia and New Guinea. Still, gaps (on the ‘Weber Line’) were of 90 km wide, so the migration to Australia and New Guinea seems to have required seafaring skill. A recent study has shown that early travelers made it to Sumatra in western Indonesia between 73,000 and 63,000 years ago; this ties in well with other evidence that hints at humans reaching inner Southeast Asia some time before 60,000 years ago, (and then following the retreating glaciers north). New evidence, though, suggests humans in north Australia even 75,000 years ago – something I believe, but which remains in dispute.

Internet sources (Wikipedia especially) say: Sequencing of one Aboriginal genome from an old hair sample in Western Australia revealed that the individual was descended from people who migrated into East Asia between 62,000 and 75,000 years ago, which supports a theory of a single migration into Australia and New Guinea before the arrival of Modern Asians (between 25,000 and 38,000 years ago) and their later migration into North America. Mitochondrial haplogroups A, B and G originated about 50,000 years ago, and bearers subsequently colonized Siberia, Korea and Japan, by about 35,000 years ago. Parts of these populations migrated to North America during the Last Glacial Maximum. This migration is believed to have happened around 50,000 years ago, before Australia and New Guinea were separated by rising sea levels (approximately 8,000 years ago). This is supported by a date of 50,000–60,000 years ago for the oldest evidence of settlement in Australia, around 40,000 years ago for the oldest human remains, the earliest humans artifacts which are at least 65,000 years old and the extinction of the Australian mega-fauna by humans between 46,000 and 15,000 years ago (as happened in the Americas). Details of stone age tool use in Australia has been much debated.

Genetics of the Ainu people of northern Japan might be a key to the reconstruction of the early peopling of East Asia, as they show a phenotypical trait associated with northeast Siberians and Mongolians through a single mutation of the EDAR gene, dated to c. 35,000 years ago, but once again I sense a serious stretch of imagination.
Maybe ‘dispersals’ occurred from people fleeing the society of, and control by, others. Maybe that desire for independence was accompanied by related tendencies and idiosyncrasies. Maybe changes didn’t come one by one, but came rather, in packages, as it were, as seems to me strongly implied by epigenetics. And maybe desire to not be controlled hardly precludes desire to control. And maybe magic and/or space aliens were involved. At any rate, it seems clear to me, at least, that desire for increased sense of self-importance has limited our ability to understand ourselves.
Maybe some people are more social and friendly, and others more ornery and inclined to attempt assertion of control over others.

Has agriculture promoted addictive behavior?

It is generally accepted that the history of agriculture began more than 10,000 years ago.
Major forms of agriculture arose independently in at least seven different areas of the world. Each depended on a different mix of plants and non-human animals. Moreover, there are different mixes of horticulture, or small-scale gardening, with other activities, like gathering and hunting.
According to long-standing archaeological theory, there are eight plants that are considered the domesticate “founder crops” in the story of the origins of agriculture on our planet. All eight arose in the Fertile Crescent region (what is today southern Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Turkey and the Zagros foothills in Iran) during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period some 11,000-10,000 years ago. The eight include three cereals (einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, and barley); four legumes (lentil, pea, chickpea and bitter vetch); and one oil and fiber crop (flax or linseed). Figs might be a ninth.
The origins of agriculture weren’t just in the western and northern Fertile Crescent (along the Euphrates), but also in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran (in the eastern Fertile Crescent). At the site of Chogha Golan there, charred plant remains (including wild barley, goat-grass and lentil) dating from 11,700 to 9,800 years ago were excavated. 9.800 years ago, domesticated emmer wheat appeared. Evidence has also been found in North Africa, Israel and Syria, of pea, chick pea, bitter vetch, and flax from 10,000+ BCE.
By 6000 BCE agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, with rice as the primary crop.
The Kebaran culture, the eastern Mediterranean area (c. 16,000 to 10,500 BCE), named after its type site, Kebara Cave south of Haifa, is associated with the use of the bow and arrow and the domestication of the dog. The Kebaran is characterized by the earliest collecting of wild cereals, known due to the uncovering of grain grinding tools. The Natufian culture which followed existed from around 12,500 to 9,500 BCE, with a sedentary or semi-sedentary population (they were the original builders of Jericho, the world’s first city) even before the introduction of agriculture. Some evidence suggests deliberate cultivation of cereals, specifically rye, by the Natufian culture, at Tell Abu Hureyra, the site of earliest evidence of agriculture in the world. Generally, though, Natufians exploited wild cereals. Animals hunted included gazelles.
Before the Natufian roaming hunter gatherers, known as the Kebaran culture, trudged the Mediterranean coast as their ancestors had for thousands upon thousands of years. What the Natufians appear to have done, and were possibly the first to have done, is to say “Enough! I’m stopping here thank you,” and build villages.

These villages are very small by modern standards, no more than forty meters across and with populations of less than a couple of hundred people. There was almost nothing like them before. The houses are crude, more like shacks, but they do show a surprising degree of care in their organization and maintenance. Also, whilst there’s no pottery there are stone bowls and grinding stones.
Perhaps most importantly these seem to have been all year round settlements. The teeth of hunted animals such as gazelle show that both summer and winter kills being brought back to the villages. Also, there’s plenty of evidence for house mice and rats in numbers appropriate to a village occupied all year.

Connections with the Neolithic:
What intrigues archaeologists most about the Natufian is that, just under three thousand years later, the Neolithic, with the first evidence in the world of agriculture, started in pretty much the same place. It’s difficult not to see the two events as connected, with one leading to the other. The question that archaeologists have asked since the discovery of these earliest villages is “Why then? Why there?” A number of factors have been suggested.
The start of the Natufian culture, 12,500 BCE, also marks the end of the last glaciation. The world’s temperatures rapidly increased at this time by several degrees. This seems to have increased rainfall in the Levant, extending woodland further inland, although at the same time a rise in sea level might have countered this effect a bit. The improvement in climate did, however, reverse around 11000 BCE, when the “Younger Dryas” event caused a return to cold weather for the next thousand or so years. It was only after the weather warmed up again that agriculture started.
Agriculture changed society in many ways: primarily through division of labor but also through limiting mobility and the variety it could bring. Exchange become more important, considered and unavoidable. Storage hadn’t been much of an issue before, now it was, as was protection of what was stored. There’s been discussion of resultant social and sexual inequality, despotism, militancy, increased disease incidence and declining health.

Proposed Centers of Origin of Some Crops:
1. Near East (Fertile Crescent)- wheat and barley, flax, lentils, chickpea, figs, dates, grapes, olives, lettuce, onions, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, and melons; fruits and nuts.
2. Africa- Pearl millet, Guinea millet, African rice, sorghum, cowpea, Bambara groundnut, yam, oil palm, watermelon, okra.
3. China- Japanese millet, rice, buckwheat, and soybean (about 7000 BCE).
4. South-east Asia- wet- and dryland rice, pigeon pea, mung bean, citrus fruits, coconut, taro, yams, banana, breadfruit, coconut, sugarcane.
5. Mesoamerica and North America- maize, squash, common bean, lima bean, peppers, amaranth, sweet potato, sunflower.
6. South America- lowlands: cassava; mid-altitudes and uplands (Peru): potato, peanut, cotton, maize.


Adapted from “The origins of agriculture: a biological perspective and a new hypothesis” by Greg Wadley and Angus Martin, published in Australian Biologist 6: 96-105, June 1993

There’s never been agreement on the nature and significance of the rise of civilization, yet the questions posed by the problem are fundamental. How did civilization come about? What animus impelled man to forego the independence, intimacies, and invariability of tribal existence for the much larger and more impersonal political complexity we call the state? What forces fused to initiate the mutation that slowly transformed nomadic societies into populous cities with ethnic mixtures, stratified societies, diversified economies and unique cultural forms? Was the advent of civilization the inevitable result of social evolution and natural laws of progress or was man the designer of his own destiny? Have technological innovations been the motivating force or was it some intangible factor such as religion or intellectual advancement?

To a very good approximation, every civilization that came into being had cereal agriculture as its subsistence base, and wherever cereals were cultivated, civilization appeared. Some hypotheses have linked the two. For example, Wittfogel’s (1957) ‘hydraulic theory’ postulated that irrigation was needed for agriculture, and the state was in turn needed to organize irrigation. But not all civilizations used irrigation, and other possible factors (e.g. river valley placement, warfare, trade, technology, religion, and ecological and population pressure) have not led to a universally accepted model.
Prompted by a possible link between diet and mental illness, several researchers in the late 1970s began investigating the occurrence of drug-like substances in some common foodstuffs. Dohan (1966, 1984) and Dohan et al. (1973, 1983) found that symptoms of schizophrenia were relieved somewhat when patients were fed a diet free of cereals and milk. He also found that people with coeliac disease - those who are unable to eat wheat gluten because of higher than normal permeability of the gut - were statistically likely to suffer also from schizophrenia. Research in some Pacific communities showed that schizophrenia became prevalent in these populations only after they became ‘partially westernized and consumed wheat, barley beer, and rice’ (Dohan 1984).
Groups led by Zioudrou (1979) and Brantl (1979) found opioid activity in wheat, maize and barley (exorphins), and bovine and human milk (casomorphin), as well as stimulatory activity in these proteins, and in oats, rye and soy. Cereal exorphin is much stronger than bovine casomorphin, which in turn is stronger than human casomorphin. Mycroft et al. (1982, 1987) found an analogue of MIF-1, a naturally occurring dopaminergic peptide, in wheat and milk. It occurs in no other exogenous protein. (In subsequent sections we use the term exorphin to cover exorphins, casomorphin, and the MIF-1 analogue. Though opioid and dopaminergic substances work in different ways, they are both ‘rewarding’, and thus more or less equivalent for our purposes.)
Since then, researchers have measured the potency of exorphins, showing them to be comparable to morphine and enkephalin (Heubner et al. 1984), determined their amino acid sequences (Fukudome &Yoshikawa 1992), and shown that they are absorbed from the intestine (Svedburg et al.1985) and can produce effects such as analgesia and reduction of anxiety which are usually associated with poppy-derived opioids (Greksch et al.1981, Panksepp et al.1984). Mycroft et al. estimated that 150 mg of the MIF-1 analogue could be produced by normal daily intake of cereals and milk, noting that such quantities are orally active, and half this amount 'has induced mood alterations in clinically depressed subjects' (Mycroft et al. 1982:895). (For detailed reviews see Gardner 1985 and Paroli 1988.)

Most common drugs of addiction are either opioid (e.g heroin and morphine) or dopaminergic (e.g. cocaine and amphetamine), and work by activating reward centers in the brain. Hence we may ask, do these findings mean that cereals and milk are chemically rewarding? Are humans somehow 'addicted' to these foods?

Problems in interpreting these findings:
Discussion of the possible behavioral effects of exorphins, in normal dietary amounts, has been cautious. Interpretations of their significance have been of two types:
where a pathological effect is proposed (usually by cereal researchers, and related to Dohan’s findings, though see also Ramabadran & Bansinath 1988), and
where a natural function is proposed (by milk researchers, who suggest that casomorphin may help in mother-infant bonding or otherwise regulate infant development).

We believe that there can be no natural function for ingestion of exorphins by adult humans. It may be that a desire to find a natural function has impeded interpretation (as well as causing attention to focus on milk, where a natural function is more plausible). It’s unlikely that humans are adapted to a large intake of cereal exorphin, because the modern dominance of cereals in the diet is simply too new. If exorphin is found in cow’s milk, then it may have a natural function for cows; similarly, exorphins in human milk may have a function for infants. But whether or no, adult humans don’t naturally drink milk of any kind, so any natural function can’t apply.
Our sympathies therefore lie with the pathological interpretation of exorphins, whereby substances found in cereals and milk are seen as modern dietary abnormalities which may cause schizophrenia, coeliac disease or whatever. But these are serious diseases found in a minority. Can exorphins be having an effect on humankind at large?
Other evidence for 'drug-like' effects of these foods”:
Research into food allergy has shown that normal quantities of some foods can have pharmacological, including behavioral, effects. Many people develop intolerances to particular foods. Various foods are implicated, and a variety of symptoms is produced. (The term ‘intolerance’ rather than allergy is often used, as in many cases the immune system may not be involved (Egger 1988:159). Some intolerance symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, epilepsy, hyperactivity, and schizophrenic episodes involve brain function (Egger 1988, Scadding & Brostoff 1988).
Radcliffe (1982, quoted in 1987:808) listed the foods at fault, in descending order of frequency, in a trial involving 50 people: wheat (more than 70% of subjects reacted in some way to it), milk (60%), egg (35%), corn, cheese, potato, coffee, rice, yeast, chocolate, tea, citrus, oats, pork, plaice, cane, and beef (10%). This is virtually a list of foods that have become common in the diet following the adoption of agriculture, in order of prevalence. The symptoms most commonly alleviated by treatment were mood change (>50%) followed by headache, musculoskeletal and respiratory ailments.
One of the most striking phenomena in these studies is that patients often exhibit cravings, addiction and withdrawal symptoms with regard to these foods (Egger 1988:170, citing Randolph 1978; see also Radcliffe 1987:808-10, 814, Kroker 1987:856, 864, Sprague & Milam 1987:949, 953, Wraith 1987:489, 491). Brostoff and Gamlin (1989:103) estimated that 50% of intolerance patients crave the foods that cause them problems, and experience withdrawal symptoms when excluding those foods from their diet. Withdrawal symptoms are similar to those associated with drug addictions (Radcliffe 1987:808). The possibility that exorphins are involved has been noted (Bell 1987:715), and Brostoff and Gamlin conclude (1989:230):
“... the results so far suggest that they might influence our mood. There is certainly no question of anyone getting ‘high’ on a glass of milk or a slice of bread - the amounts involved are too small for that - but these foods might induce a sense of comfort and wellbeing, as food-intolerant patients often say they do. There are also other hormone-like peptides in partial digests of food, which might have other effects on the body.”
There’s no possibility that craving these foods has anything to do with the popular notion of the body telling the brain what it needs for nutritional purposes. These foods weren’t significant in the human diet before agriculture; large quantities of them cannot be necessary for nutrition. In fact, the standard way to treat food intolerance is to remove the offending items from the patient’s diet.

A suggested interpretation of exorphin research:
But what are the effects of these foods on normal people? Though exorphins cannot have a naturally selected physiological function in humans, this does not mean that they have no effect. Food intolerance research suggests that cereals and milk, in normal dietary quantities, are capable of affecting behavior in many people. And if severe behavioral effects in schizophrenics and coeliacs can be caused by higher than normal absorption of peptides, then more subtle effects, which may not even be regarded as abnormal, could be produced in people generally.

The evidence presented so far suggests the following interpretation:
The ingestion of cereals and milk, in normal modern dietary amounts by normal humans, activates reward centers in the brain. Foods that were common in the diet before agriculture (fruits and so on) do not have this pharmacological property. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid and / or dopaminergic drugs, that is, reward, motivation, reduction of anxiety, a sense of wellbeing, and perhaps even addiction. Though the effects of a typical meal are quantitatively less than those of doses of those drugs, most modern humans experience them several times a day, every day of their adult lives.

Hypothesis: exorphins and the origin of agriculture and civilization:
When this scenario of human dietary practices is viewed in light of the problem of the origin of agriculture, it suggests an hypothesis that combines the results of these lines of enquiry. Exorphin researchers, perhaps lacking a long-term historical perspective, have generally not investigated the possibility that these foods really are drug-like, and have instead searched without success for exorphin’s natural function. The adoption of cereal agriculture and the subsequent rise of civilization haven’t been satisfactorily explained, because the behavioral changes underlying them have no obvious adaptive basis.
These unsolved and until-now unrelated problems may in fact solve each other. The answer, we suggest, is this: cereals and dairy foods are not natural human foods, but rather are preferred because they contain exorphins. This chemical reward was the incentive for the adoption of cereal agriculture in the Neolithic. Regular self-administration of these substances facilitated the behavioral changes that led to the subsequent appearance of civilization.

This is the sequence of events that we envisage:
Climatic change at the end of the last glacial period led to an increase in the size and concentration of patches of wild cereals in certain areas (Wright 1977). The large quantities of cereals newly available provided an incentive to try to make a meal of them. People who succeeded in eating sizeable amounts of cereal seeds discovered the rewarding properties of the exorphins contained in them. Processing methods such as grinding and cooking were developed to make cereals more edible. The more palatable they could be made, the more they were consumed, and the more important the exorphin reward became for more people.
At first, patches of wild cereals were protected and harvested. Later, land was cleared and seeds were planted and tended, to increase quantity and reliability of supply. Exorphins attracted people to settle around cereal patches, abandoning their nomadic lifestyle, and allowed them to display tolerance instead of aggression as population densities rose in these new conditions.
Though it was, we suggest, the presence of exorphins that caused cereals (and not an alternative already prevalent in the diet) to be the major early cultigens, this does not mean that cereals are ‘just drugs’ They have been staples for thousands of years, and clearly have nutritional value. However, treating cereals as ‘just food’ leads to difficulties in explaining why anyone bothered to cultivate them. The fact that overall health declined when they were incorporated into the diet suggests that their rapid, almost total replacement of other foods was more due to chemical reward than to nutrition.
It’s noteworthy that the extent to which early groups became civilized correlates with the type of agriculture they practiced. That is, major civilizations (in south-west Asia, Europe, India, and east and parts of South-East Asia; central and parts of north and south America; Egypt, Ethiopia and parts of tropical and west Africa) stemmed from groups which practiced cereal, particularly wheat, agriculture (Bender 1975:12, Adams 1987:201, Thatcher 1987:212). (The rarer nomadic civilizations were based on dairy farming.) Groups which practiced vege-culture (of fruits, tubers etc.), or no agriculture (in tropical and south Africa, north and central Asia, Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific, and much of north and south America) did not become civilized to the same extent.
Thus major civilizations have in common that their populations were frequent ingesters of exorphins. We propose that large, hierarchical states were a natural consequence among such populations. Civilization arose because reliable, on-demand availability of dietary opioids to individuals changed their behavior, reducing aggression, and allowed them to become tolerant of sedentary life in crowded groups, to perform regular work, and to be more easily subjugated by rulers. Two socioeconomic classes emerged where before there had been only one (Johnson & Earle 1987:270), thus establishing a pattern which has been prevalent since that time.

The natural diet and genetic change:
Some nutritionists deny the notion of a pre-agricultural natural human diet on the basis that humans are omnivorous, or have adapted to agricultural foods (e.g. Garn & Leonard 1989; for the contrary view see for example Eaton & Konner 1985). An omnivore, however, is simply an animal that eats both meat and plants: it can still be quite specialized in its preferences (chimpanzees are an appropriate example). A degree of omnivory in early humans might have pre-adapted them to some of the nutrients contained in cereals, but not to exorphins, which are unique to cereals.
The differential rates of lactase deficiency, coeliac disease and favism (the inability to metabolize fava beans) among modern racial groups are usually explained as the result of varying genetic adaptation to post-agricultural diets (Simopoulos 1990:27-9), and this could be thought of as implying some adaptation to exorphins as well. We argue that little or no such adaptation has occurred, for two reasons: first, allergy research indicates that these foods still cause abnormal reactions in many people, and that susceptibility is variable within as well as between populations, indicating that differential adaptation is not the only factor involved. Second, the function of the adaptations mentioned is to enable humans to digest those foods, and if they are adaptations, they arose because they conferred a survival advantage. But would susceptibility to the rewarding effects of exorphins lead to lower, or higher, reproductive success? One would expect in general that an animal with a supply of drugs would behave less adaptively and so lower its chances of survival. But our model shows how the widespread exorphin ingestion in humans has led to increased population. And once civilization was the norm, non-susceptibility to exorphins would have meant not fitting in with society. Thus, though there may be adaptation to the nutritional content of cereals, there will be little or none to exorphins. In any case, while contemporary humans may enjoy the benefits of some adaptation to agricultural diets, those who actually made the change ten thousand years ago did not.

Other 'non-nutritional' origins of agriculture models:
We are not the first to suggest a non-nutritional motive for early agriculture. Hayden (1990) argued that early cultigens and trade items had more prestige value than utility, and suggested that agriculture began because the powerful used its products for competitive feasting and accrual of wealth. Braidwood et al. (1953) and later Katz and Voigt (1986) suggested that the incentive for cereal cultivation was the production of alcoholic beer:
“Under what conditions would the consumption of a wild plant resource be sufficiently important to lead to a change in behavior (experiments with cultivation) in order to ensure an adequate supply of this resource? If wild cereals were in fact a minor part of the diet, any argument based on caloric need is weakened. It is our contention that the desire for alcohol would constitute a perceived psychological and social need that might easily prompt changes in subsistence behavior” (Katz & Voigt 1986:33).
This view is clearly compatible with ours. However there may be problems with an alcohol hypothesis: beer may have appeared after bread and other cereal products, and been consumed less widely or less frequently (Braidwood et al. 1953). Unlike alcohol, exorphins are present in all these products. This makes the case for chemical reward as the motive for agriculture much stronger. Opium poppies, too, were an early cultigen (Zohari 1986). Exorphin, alcohol, and opium are primarily rewarding (as opposed to the typically hallucinogenic drugs used by some hunter-gatherers) and it is the artificial reward which is necessary, we claim, for civilization. Perhaps all three were instrumental in causing civilized behavior to emerge.
Cereals have important qualities that differentiate them from most other drugs. They are a food source as well as a drug, and can be stored and transported easily. They are ingested in frequent small doses (not occasional large ones), and do not impede work performance in most people. A desire for the drug, even cravings or withdrawal, can be confused with hunger. These features make cereals the ideal facilitator of civilization (and may also have contributed to the long delay in recognizing their pharmacological properties).
Our hypothesis is not a refutation of existing accounts of the origins of agriculture, but rather fits alongside them, explaining why cereal agriculture was adopted despite its apparent disadvantages and how it led to civilization.
Gaps in our knowledge of exorphins limit the generality and strength of our claims. We do not know whether rice, millet and sorghum, nor grass species which were harvested by African and Australian hunter-gatherers, contain exorphins. We need to be sure that pre-agricultural staples do not contain exorphins in amounts similar to those in cereals. We do not know whether domestication has affected exorphin content or-potency. A test of our hypothesis by correlation of diet and degree of civilization in different populations will require quantitative knowledge of the behavioral effects of all these foods.
We do not comment on the origin of non-cereal agriculture, nor why some groups used a combination of foraging and farming, reverted from farming to foraging, or did not farm at all. Cereal agriculture and civilization have, during the past ten thousand years, become virtually universal. The question, then, is not why they happened here and not there, but why they took longer to become established in some places than in others. At all times and places, chemical reward and the influence of civilizations already using cereals weighed in favor of adopting this lifestyle, the disadvantages of agriculture weighed against it, and factors such as climate, geography, soil quality, and availability of cultigens influenced the outcome. There is a recent trend to multi-causal models of the origins of agriculture (e.g. Redding 1988, Henry 1989), and exorphins can be thought of as simply another factor in the list. Analysis of the relative importance of all the factors involved, at all times and places, is beyond the scope of this paper.
“An animal is a survival machine for the genes that built it. We too are animals, and we too are survival machines for our genes. That is the theory. In practice it makes a lot of sense when we look at wild animals.... It is very different when we look at ourselves. We appear to be a serious exception to the Darwinian law.... It obviously just isn't true that most of us spend our time working energetically for the preservation of our genes” (Dawkins 1989:138).
Many ethologists have acknowledged difficulties in explaining civilized human behavior on evolutionary grounds, in some cases suggesting that modern humans do not always behave adaptively. Yet since agriculture began, the human population has risen by a factor of 1000: Irons (1990) notes that ‘population growth is not the expected effect of maladaptive behavior’.
We have reviewed evidence from several areas of research which shows that cereals and dairy foods have drug-like properties, and shown how these properties may have been the incentive for the initial adoption of agriculture. We suggested further that constant exorphin intake facilitated the behavioral changes and subsequent population growth of civilization, by increasing people's tolerance of (a) living in crowded sedentary conditions, (b) devoting effort to the benefit of non-kin, and (c) playing a subservient role in a vast hierarchical social structure.
Cereals are still staples, and methods of artificial reward have diversified since that time, including today a wide range of pharmacological and non-pharmacological cultural artifacts whose function, ethologically speaking, is to provide reward without adaptive benefit. It seems reasonable then, to suggest that civilization not only arose out of self-administration of artificial reward, but is maintained in this way among contemporary humans. Hence a step towards resolution of the problem of explaining civilized human behavior may be to incorporate into ethological models this widespread distortion of behavior by artificial reward.


Wanting to further explore this idea, I gathered from internet sources:
One model for the evolution of alcohol consumption suggests that ethanol only entered the human diet after people began to store extra food, potentially after the advent of agriculture, and that humans subsequently developed ways to intentionally direct the fermentation of food about 7000BCE. As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, beer-like beverages developed independently throughout the world when people domesticated cereals. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal beer produced about 5000BCE in today’s Iran. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer we have so far is a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking through reed straws from a communal bowl. In China, residue on pottery dating from between 5400 and 4900 years ago shows beer was brewed using barley and other grains.
Discovery of late Stone Age jugs suggest that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period (c. 10000 BCE). Chemical analysis of jars from the neolithic village Jiahu in the Henan province of northern China revealed traces of alcohol that were absorbed and preserved. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chemical analysis of the residue confirmed that a fermented drink made of grapes, hawthorn berries, honey, and rice was being produced in 7000–6650BCE. The results of this analysis were published in December 2004. This is approximately the time when barley beer and grape wine were beginning to be made in the Middle East. The earliest firm evidence of wine production dates back to 6000BCE in Georgia. Medicinal use of alcohol was mentioned in Sumerian and Egyptian texts dating from about 2100BCE. Evidence of alcoholic beverages has also been found dating from 3150BCE in ancient Egypt, 3000BCE in Babylon, 2000BCE in pre-Hispanic Mexico, and 1500BCE in Sudan.
There may have been a single genetic mutation 10 million years ago that endowed humans with an enhanced ability to break down ethanol. Scientists note that the timing of this mutation coincides with a shift to a terrestrial lifestyle. The ability to consume ethanol may have helped human ancestors dine on rotting, fermenting fruit that fell on the forest floor when other food was scarce.
The Mediterranean region contains the earliest archeological evidence of human opium use; the oldest known seeds date back to more than 5000BCE in the Neolithic age with purposes such as food, anesthetics, and ritual. The earliest recorded use of narcotics dates back to 4,000 BCE. Evidence from ancient Greece indicates that opium was consumed in several ways, including inhalation of vapors, suppositories, medical poultices, and as a combination with hemlock for suicide. Indian scholars maintain that ancient verses and the history shown in them were orally transmitted thousands of years before even 4000BCE.
Tea drinking likely began in Yunnan province during the Shang Dynasty (1500–1046 BCE) - legend has the Yellow Emperor, inventor of agriculture and Chinese medicine, drinking a bowl of just boiled water due to a decree that his subjects must boil water before drinking it, in about 2737 BCE, when some tea leaves fell in and he enjoyed the taste. In 1978, Archeologists found tea relics in the Tianluo mountains and estimated them at 7,000 years old. Another promising find in the same mountains was old roots of the Camellia Sinenses plant with broken pottery. These roots were determined to be about 6,000 years old 9from 4000BCE). It wasn’t until the Tang dynasty (618-907), that consumption become widespread.
This goes a bit beyond my ken, and I expect that of most readers too:
Addiction is a disorder of the brain’s reward system which arises through transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms and occurs over time from chronically high levels of exposure to an addictive stimulus (e.g., eating food, the use of cocaine, engagement in sexual intercourse, participation in high-thrill cultural activities such as gambling, etc.). ΔFosB, a gene transcription factor, is a critical component and common factor in the development of virtually all forms of behavioral and drug addictions. Research into ΔFosB’s role in addiction has demonstrated that addiction arises, and the associated compulsive behavior intensifies or attenuates, along with the over-expression of ΔFosB in the D1-type medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens. Due to the causal relationship between ΔFosB expression and addictions, it is used pre-clinically as an addiction biomarker. ΔFosB expression in these neurons directly and positively regulates drug self-administration and reward sensitization through positive reinforcement, while decreasing sensitivity to aversion. I expect that it mostly means that correlation has been found between brain chemistry and the compulsions we call addiction.

A common belief is that psychotropic plant chemicals evolved recurrently throughout evolutionary history. Archaeological records indicate the presence of psychotropic plants and drug use in ancient civilizations as far back as early hominid species about 200 million years ago. Roughly 13,000 years ago, the inhabitants of Timor commonly used betel nut (Areca catechu), as did those in Thailand around 88,700BCE. At the beginning of European colonialism, and perhaps for 40,000 years before that, Australian aborigines used nicotine from two different indigenous sources: pituri plant (Duboisia hopwoodii) and Nicotiana gossel. North and South Americans also used nicotine from their indigenous plants N. tabacum and N. rustica. Ethiopians and northern Africans were documented as having used an ephedrine-analog, khat (Catha edulis), before European colonization. Cocaine (Erythroxylum coca) was taken by Ecuadorians about 3000BCE and by the indigenous people of the western Andes almost 7,000 years ago (5000BCE). The substances were popularly administered through the buccal cavity within the cheek. Nicotine, cocaine, and ephedrine sources were first mixed with an alkali substance, most often wood or lime ash, creating a free base to facilitate diffusion of the drug into the blood stream. Alkali paraphernalia have been found throughout these regions and documented within the archaeological record. Although the buccal method is believed to be most standard method of drug administration, inhabitants of the Americas may have also administered substances nasally, rectally, and by smoking.
Sex addiction as a term first emerged in the mid-1970s when various members of Alcoholics Anonymous sought to apply the principles of 12-steps toward sexual recovery from serial infidelity and other unmanageable compulsive sex behaviors that were similar to the powerlessness and un-manageability they experienced with alcoholism. Certainly compulsive sexual behavior, as with “Jack the Ripper” (!), existed long before 1970.