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Archive for the ‘Ethnicity, Genetics & Anthropology’ Category

30 Quotes From Western Elite On Population Control

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 30, 2013

PopulationCThere is a clear consensus among the global elite that overpopulation is the primary cause of the most important problems that the world is facing and that something desperately needs to be done about it.

They truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that we will literally destroy the planet if we are left to our own devices.  To the elite, everything from global warming to our growing economic problems can be directly traced back to the lack of population control. They warn that if nothing is done about the exploding population, we will be facing a future full of poverty, war and suffering on a filthy, desolate planet.

They complain that it “costs too much” to keep elderly patients that are terminally ill alive, and they eagerly promote abortion for babies that are “not wanted” because they would be “too much of a burden” on society.  Anything that reduces the human population in any way is a good thing for those that believe in this philosophy.  This twisted philosophy is being promoted in our movies, in our television shows, in our music, in countless books, on many of the most prominent websites in the world, and it is being taught at nearly all of the most important colleges and universities on the planet.

The people promoting this philosophy have very, very deep pockets, and they are actually convinced that they are helping to “save the world” by trying to reduce the size of the human population.  In fact, many of them are entirely convinced that we are in a “life or death” struggle for the fate of the planet, and that if humanity does not willingly choose to embrace population control soon, then a solution will have to be “forced” upon them.

Yes, I know that all of this may sound like something out of a science fiction novel.  But there are a whole lot of people out there that are absolutely obsessed with this stuff, and many of them are in very prominent positions around the globe.

The following are 30 population control quotes which show that the elite truly believe that humans are a plague upon the earth and that a great culling is necessary…

1. UK Television Presenter Sir David Attenborough: “We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now”

2. Paul Ehrlich, a former science adviser to president George W. Bush and the author of “The Population Bomb”: “To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied”

3. Paul Ehrlich again, this time on the size of families: “Nobody, in my view, has the right to have 12 children or even three unless the second pregnancy is twins”

4. Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First: “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”

5. CNN Founder Ted Turner: “A total world population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

6. Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso about medical patients with serious illnesses: “You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government. This won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die.”

7. David Rockefeller: “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

8. Environmental activist Roger Martin: “On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.”

9. HBO personality Bill Maher: “I’m pro-choice, I’m for assisted suicide, I’m for regular suicide, I’m for whatever gets the freeway moving – that’s what I’m for. It’s too crowded, the planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.”

10. MIT professor Penny Chisholm: ”The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”

11. Julia Whitty, a columnist for Mother Jones: “The only known solution to ecological overshoot is to decelerate our population growth faster than it’s decelerating now and eventually reverse it—at the same time we slow and eventually reverse the rate at which we consume the planet’s resources. Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war. On one front, we’ve already made unprecedented strides, reducing global fertility from an average 4.92 children per woman in 1950 to 2.56 today—an accomplishment of trial and sometimes brutally coercive error, but also a result of one woman at a time making her individual choices. The speed of this childbearing revolution, swimming hard against biological programming, rates as perhaps our greatest collective feat to date.”

12. Colorado State University Professor Philip Cafaro in a paper entitled “Climate Ethics and Population Policy”: “Ending human population growth is almost certainly a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for preventing catastrophic global climate change. Indeed, significantly reducing current human numbers may be necessary in order to do so.

13. Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Pianka: “I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.”

14. Detroit News Columnist Nolan Finley: “Since the national attention is on birth control, here’s my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan’s drinking water.

We’ve got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don’t have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can’t afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences.”

15. John Guillebaud, professor of family planning at University College London: “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights. An extra child is the equivalent of a lot of flights across the planet.”

16. Democrat strategist Steven Rattner: “WE need death panels. Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.”

17. Matthew Yglesias, a business and economics correspondent for Slate, in an article entitled “The Case for Death Panels, in One Chart”: “But not only is this health care spending on the elderly the key issue in the federal budget, our disproportionate allocation of health care dollars to old people surely accounts for the remarkable lack of apparent cost effectiveness of the American health care system. When the patient is already over 80, the simple fact of the matter is that no amount of treatment is going to work miracles in terms of life expectancy or quality of life.”

18. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “All of our problems are the result of overbreeding among the working class”

19. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

20. Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger: “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

21. Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams in an article entitled “So What If Abortion Ends Life?”: “All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides.”

22. Alberto Giubilini of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and Francesca Minerva of the University of Melbourne in a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics: “[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child.  Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”

23. Nina Fedoroff, a key adviser to Hillary Clinton: “We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can’t support many more people.”

24. Barack Obama’s primary science adviser, John P. Holdren: “A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.

The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

25. David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

26. Thomas Ferguson, former official in the U.S. State Department Office of Population Affairs: “There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…”

27. Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

28. Jacques Costeau: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.”

29. Finnish environmentalist Pentti Linkola: “If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die”

30. Prince Phillip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II and co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

Source

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Posted in Ethiopia, Ethnicity, Genetics & Anthropology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

አዲስ አበባ / Addis – ሳሪስ አቦ / Saris Abo

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 13, 2013

ሳሪስ አቦ – የምዕራፈ ቅዱሳን ፈለገ ሕይወት አቡነ ገብረ መንፈስ ቅዱስ እና አቡነ አረጋዊ ቤ/ክርስቲያን

ቀኑ መጋቢት 5 ዕለቱ ቅዳሜ ለእሁድ አጥቢያ ሰዓቱ ከሌሊቱ ስድስት ሰዓት ሆኗል፤ አሁንም ህማሙን እየታገለ እያላበው በድካም ለፍጥረቱ ሁሉ ይለምናል፤ “አቤቱ ህዝብህን አድን ርስትህን ኢትዮጰያንም ባርክ” ይላል። ህመም የጀመረው መጋቢት 3 ዓርብ ቀን ነው፤መታመሙን የሰሙ እንደርሱ ቅዱሳን የሆኑት ዘርአ ቡሩክ፤ ፍሬ ቅዱስ፤ያዕቆብ፤ብንያምና ዮሴፍ እንዲሁም በወቅቱ የኢትዮጰያ ንጉስ የነበረው እንድርያስ ሊጠይቁት ተሰብስበዋል ወደ አጠገቡ መድረስ ግን አልተቻላቸውም አባታችን ገብረመንፈስ ቅዱስ የሚጋርደው እንጨት ዛፍ በሌለበት በርሃ እንደ አንበሳ ተኝቶ አዩት በላዩ ያረፈው የእግዚአብሔር ጸጋ ከፊቱ የሚወጣው ብርሃን ቀይ መልኩ ረዥም የራስ ጠጉሩ እንደ ነጭ ሐር የሚሆን ጽሕሙ አስደነቃቸው።

ከሌሊቱ ሰባት ሰዓት ሲሆን ከሰማይ ታላቅ ነጎድጓድ ድምጽ ተሰማ ጌታችን መላአክትን አስከትሎ ወደ አባታችን ወረደ፤ ከሰማይ ወደ ምድር ህብሩ አምሳያው ልዩ ልዩ የሆነ እንደ ጸሐይና እንደ ጨረቃ የሚያበራ እንደ ወንጪፍ ድንጋይ ይወረወር ነበር ከዚያ የነበሩ ሁሉ ፈሩ ወደ ኃላም ሸሹ ምድር ራደች ተራሮች ኮረብቶች ተናወጡ ብርቱ ጩኸት ንውጽውጽታ ሆነ።

ወዳጄ ገብረመንፈስ ቅዱስ ሰላም ላንተ ይሁን” እነሆ የማይታበል ቃል ኪዳን እገባልኃለው ስምህን የጠራ መታሰቢያህን ያደረገውን፤ እጣን ቋጥሮ ግብር ሰፍሮ መባ ይዞ ቤትህ የመጣውን እምርልኃለው አንተ ከገባህበት ገነት መንግስተ ሰማያት አገባዋለሁ አለው፤ አባታችንም “አቤቱ ጌታ ሆይ የኢትዮጰያን ህዝብ ማርልኝ” አለው፤ እነሆ ምሬልኃለው አስራት በኩራት አድርጌም ሰጥቼሃለው፤ ከመጋቢት አምስት ቀን ጀምሮ ዝክርህን ያድርጉ በአማላጅነትህም ይማጸኑ አለው።

ከዚህ በኃላ ሰባቱ ሊቃነ መላክት የአባታችንን ነፍስ ሊቀበሉ ወረዱ በታላቅ ምስጋናም ወደ ሰማይ አሳረጉት ስጋውንም ይዘውት ሄዱ የት እንደተቀበረ ግን እስካሁን አይታወቅም አንዳንዱ በእየሩሳሌም ነው ይላሉ፤ ሌላው በምድረ ከብድ ነው ይላል ግን እስካሁን ልክ እንደ ሊቀ ነብያት ሙሴ ስጋ የት እንደተቀበረ አይታወቅም።

ገድሉ ትሩፋቱ ከሰማይ ከዋክብት ከምድር አሸዋ ይበዛል ኢትዮጰያን አብዝቶ ይወዳታል፤ ምድራዊ ምግብ አልተመገበም የእናቱን ጡት እንኳን አልጠባም፤ ልብስ፤ መጠለያ አልፈለገም፤ የክረምት ቁር የበጋ ሐሩር እየተፈራረቀበት በተጋድሎ 562 ዓመት ኖረ፤ በዛሬዋ ቀን ሩጫውን ጨረሰ። ለእግዚአብሔር ምስጋና ይሁን እኛንም ከአባታችን በረከት ያሳትፈን።

ቢዲዮው ላይ በሚታየው የአዲስ አበባ ሳሪስ አቦ ቤተክርስቲያን ከዕለታት በአንዱ ቀን ጻደቁ አባታችን አቡነ መንፈስ ቅዱስ ወደ ዝቋላ ሲጓዙ ለጥቂት ቀናት ቦታው ላይ አርፈውበት እንደነበር ይነገራል። ከቤተክርስቲያኗ ወረድ ብሎ ሸለቋማ ቦታ ላይ በጣም የምትማርክ አነስተኛ ቤተክርስቲያን በ አቡነ አረጋዊ ስም እየተጠራች መንፍሳዊ ግልጋሎትን ትሰጣለች።

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From Ethiopia to Chile: a 7-Year Walk to Trace Man’s Global Migration

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 10, 2013

Fascinating!

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winning American writer and Journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is undertaking an ambitious expedition to retrace on foot the path our ancient ancestors traveled as they migrated across the world.

The Ethiopia-to-Chile walk — which took human ancestors some 50,000 years to make — is called Out of Eden and is sponsored by National Geographic, the Knight Foundation and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, the American plans to write one major article a year with periodic updates every 100 miles or so.

Continue reading…

mtDNA Variation in East Africa

HumanMigrationLanguage diversity in East Africa fits well with its complicated genetic history. In Fleming words, ‘‘Ethiopia by itself has more languages than all of Europe, even counting all the so-called dialects of the Romance family’’ (Fleming, 2006).

All African linguistic phyla are found in East Africa:

  • Afro-Asiatic (AA)

  • Nilo-Saharan,

  • Niger-Congo

  • Khoisan

Among them, AA is the most differentiated, being represented by three:

  • Omotic

  • Cushitic

  • Semitic

of its six major clades:

  • Chadic

  • Berber

  • Egyptian

Omotic and Cushitic are considered the deepest clades of AA, and both are found almost exclusively in the Horn of Africa, along with the linguistic relict Ongota that is traditionally assigned to the Cushitic family but whose classification is still widely debated (Fleming, 2006).

These observations are in agreement with a North-Eastern African origin of the AA languages, most probably in pre-Neolithic times

Continue reading…

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Posted in Ethiopia, Ethnicity, Genetics & Anthropology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Unbelievable: African Caged in Monkey House

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 19, 2012

My note: Ignorant Darwinists á la Richard Dawkins (update on this particular fool) suggested that this poor man from Africa was the Missing Link’ between apens and humans. These fools were wrong then and continue to be wrong today — little has change since then. It is a source of disgrace and embarrassment that they always miss opportunities for their personal/human development by refusing to accept their mistakes — as they’re mostly driven by feelings of inferiority. Never learning apes, please grow up!

Ethiopia Saluting the Colors

by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Who are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,’

With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?NearDebreBerihan

Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

(‘Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sands and pines,

Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia comist to me,

As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder’d,

A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,

Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.

No further does she say, but lingering all the day,

Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,

And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?

Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?

Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?

OtaBenga1904In 1906 Ota Benga arrived at the Bronx Zoo one day late in the summer of 1906 wearing a white linen suit. He was lugging a wooden bow, a set of arrows, and a pet chimpanzee. Twenty-three years old and twice widowed, he had already hunted elephants, survived a massacre by the Belgian colonial army, been enslaved and freed, danced at Mardi Gras, and posed alongside Geronimo in the St. Louis World’s Fair. And yet Americans were forever calling him “boy”—in part because, as one of the Congolese tribe of Mbuti pygmies, he stood less than five feet tall and weighed only 103 pounds. He spoke no English. When he smiled, he revealed a set of incisors whittled to sharp points, like a vampire bat’s.

Benga had traveled to the U.S. with the anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner, but upon arriving in New York, Verner had gone dead broke. He contacted the zoo’s director, William Temple Hornaday, who agreed to loan Benga an apartment on the premises. Hornaday was an enlightened zookeeper and among the earliest to endorse displaying animals in naturalistic settings. He also happened to be a Darwinian racist who schemed to exhibit Benga alongside the apes.

For nearly two weeks, Benga roamed the grounds unnoticed; to the zoo’s visitors, he was just a small, somewhat strange black man. But over time, at the urging of Hornaday, the zookeepers convinced Benga to play with the orangutan in its cage. Benga obliged. Crowds gathered to watch the two monkeying around. The keepers gave Benga his bow and arrow; he shot targets, squirrels, the occasional rat. Bones were scattered about the cage to add a whiff of cannibalism. The keepers goaded Benga to occasionally charge the bars of his enclosure, baring his sharp teeth. Children screamed. Adults were at turns horrified and titillated. “Is that a man?” a visitor asked. A circus owner offered to throw a party for Benga, a French spinster offered to purchase him, and a black manicurist offered to paint his nails. Hornaday posted a sign outside of the cage, displaying Benga’s height, weight, and how he was acquired. “Exhibited each afternoon during September,” it concluded.

Alerted to the situation by a story in the New York Times, a group of Baptist clergymen became incensed. They wrote letters to the city papers and traveled to the office of Mayor George B. McClellan, who hid in his office and sent out a note telling them to address their complaints to the New York Zoological Society.

Hornaday took down the sign and banned Benga from entering the monkey cage, but the furor only escalated. The zoo attracted as many as 40,000 visitors a day in mid-September, many of whom hounded Benga throughout the grounds. Unable to articulate his frustration, Benga repeatedly lashed out, shooting one visitor in the calf with an arrow and brandishing a knife at a zookeeper. In public, Hornaday seemed unconcerned by the controversy. In a letter to the mayor, he wrote, “When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.” Meanwhile, he privately wired Verner an SOS. “Boy [has] become unmanageable, also dangerous … Please come for him at once.”

Source: NewYork Magazine

For equally ridiculous experience please go to my Photofile

Ode to Ethiopia

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

O Mother Race! to thee I bringDebreBerihan

This pledge of faith unwavering,

This tribute to thy glory.

I know the pangs which thou didst feel,

When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,

With thy dear blood all gory.

Sad days were those-ah, sad indeed!

But through the land the fruitful seed

Of better times was growing.

The plant of freedom upward sprung,

And spread its leaves so fresh and young-

Its blossoms now are blowing.

On every hand in this fair land,

Proud Ethiope’s swarthy children stand

Beside their fairer neighbor;

The forests flee before their stroke,

Their hammers ring, their forges smoke,-

They stir in honest labour.

They tread the fields where honour calls;

Their voices sound through senate halls

In majesty and power.

To right they cling; the hymns they sing

Up to the skies in beauty ring,

And bolder grow each hour.

Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul;EthioOrthodoxChurch

Thy name is writ on Glory’s scroll

In characters of fire.

High ‘mid the clouds of Fame’s bright sky

Thy banner’s blazoned folds now fly,

And truth shall lift them higher.

Thou hast the right to noble pride,

Whose spotless robes were purified

By blood’s severe baptism.

Upon thy brow the cross was laid,

And labour’s painful sweat-beads made

A consecrating chrism.

No other race, or white or black,

When bound as thou wert, to the rack,

So seldom stooped to grieving;

No other race, when free again,

Forgot the past and proved them men

So noble in forgiving.

Go on and up! Our souls and eyes

Shall follow thy continuous rise;

Our ears shall list thy story

From bards who from thy root shall spring,

And proudly tune their lyres to sing

Of Ethiopia’s glory.

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Did “Lucy” Climb Trees?

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on November 7, 2012

All of us who are human beings are in the image of God. But to be in his likeness belongs only to those who by great love have attached their freedom to God.”  —St. Diadochus of Photike

This question is at the root of a discovery just announced on the cover of Science magazine by Bay Area scientist Zeray Alemseged, Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences and Midwestern University Professor David Green.

Australopithecus afarensis (the species of the well-known “Lucy” skeleton) was an upright walking species, but the question of whether it also spent much of its time in trees has been hotly debated for 30+ years, partly because a complete set of A. afarensis shoulder blades has never before been available for study. In an extensive analysis of two complete shoulder blades from the fossil “Selam”—the only ones from this pivotal species known to science—Alemseged and Green found the bones to be quite apelike, suggesting that our forebears were still climbing trees as bipedalism was emerging.

 

Continue reading…

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Genomics and African Queens: Diversity Within Ethiopian Genomes Reveals Imprints of Historical Events

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on June 21, 2012

Researchers have started to unveil the genetic heritage of Ethiopian populations, who are among the most diverse in the world, and lie at the gateway from Africa. They found that the genomes of some Ethiopian populations bear striking similarities to those of populations in Israel and Syria, a potential genetic legacy of the Queen of Sheba and her companions.

The team detected mixing between some Ethiopians and non-African populations dating to approximately 3,000 years ago. The origin and date of this genomic admixture, along with previous linguistic studies, is consistent with the legend of the Queen of Sheba, who according to the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast book had a child with King Solomon from Israel and is mentioned in both the Bible and the Qur’an.

Ethiopia is situated in the horn of Africa, and has often been regarded as one of the gateways from Africa to the rest of the world. The Ethiopian region itself has the longest fossil record of human history anywhere in the world. Studying population genetics within this diverse region could help us to understand the origin of the first humans.

“From their geographic location, it is logical to think that migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago began in either Ethiopia or Egypt. Little was previously known about the populations inhabiting the North-East African region from a genomic perspective. This is the first genome study on a representative panel of Ethiopian populations,” explains Luca Pagani, first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. “We wanted to compare the genome of Ethiopians with other Africans to provide an essential piece to the African — and world — genetic jigsaw.”

They found that the Ethiopian genome is not as ancient as was previously thought and less ancient than the genomes of some Southern African populations. There were also links with other populations.

“We found that some Ethiopians have 40-50% of their genome closer to the genomes of populations outside of Africa, while the remaining half of their genome is closer to populations within the African continent,” says Dr Toomas Kivisild, co-author from the University of Cambridge. “We calculated genetic distances and found that these non-African regions of the genome are closest to populations in Egypt, Israel and Syria, rather than to the neighbouring Yemeni and Arabs.”

The team found that these two groups of African and non-African people mixed approximately 3,000 years ago, well before the historically-documented Islamic expansions and the colonial period of the last centuries.

An earlier study found that Ethio-Semitic, an Ethiopian language belonging to a linguistic family primarily spoken in the Middle East, split from the main Semitic group 3,000 years ago, around the same time as the non-African genomic component arrived in Ethiopia. All this evidence combined fits the time and locations of the legend of the Queen of Sheba, which describes the encounter of the Ethiopian Queen and King Solomon.

“None of this research would have been possible without the superb fieldwork of our Ethiopian colleagues Professor Endashaw Bekele and Dr Ayele Tarekegn over many years. The outstanding genetic diversity present within the peoples of Ethiopia is a rich resource that will contribute greatly, both to our understanding of human evolution and the development of personalised medicine.” says Dr Neil Bradman, co-lead author from UCL (University College London). “The Ethiopian Government has a practice of encouraging genetic research, a policy that bodes well for the future.”

“Our research gives insights into important evolutionary questions,” says Dr Chris Tyler-Smith, co-lead author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “We see imprints of historical events on top of much more ancient prehistoric ones that together create a region of rich culture and genetic diversity. The next step for our research has to be to sequence the entire genomes, rather than read individual letters, of both Ethiopian people and others to really understand human origins and the out-of-Africa migration.”

Source: ScienceDaily

Images: courtesy of artist Addis Gebru

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Why Do ‘Black’ Pacific Populations of Melanesia Have Blond Hair?

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on May 6, 2012


Blond hair is relatively common in the Solomon Islands, even though the skin pigmentation of Melanesian peoples is relatively dark.

Naturally blond hair is rare in humans and found almost exclusively in Europe and Oceania. Here, we identify an arginine-to-cysteine change at a highly conserved residue in tyrosinase-related protein 1 (TYRP1) as a major determinant of blond hair in Solomon Islanders. This missense mutation is predicted to affect catalytic activity of TYRP1 and causes blond hair through a recessive mode of inheritance. The mutation is at a frequency of 26% in the Solomon Islands, is absent outside of Oceania, represents a strong common genetic effect on a complex human phenotype, and highlights the importance of examining genetic associations worldwide.


Continue reading…

 

Interesting reading..

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Charles Darwin Was an Ethiopian

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on February 5, 2010

I thought I’ve seen Darwin somewhere near Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. Well, “Lucy” could recognize her children very easily, and she won’t be quite amused by Charlie. And Prester John, he could probably give Darwin a lesson or two about the origin of Adam and Eve.

Genographic Project’s DNA Test Reveals Charles Darwin’s Ancestors’ Migratory Journey; Gives Insight into Deep Ancestry of Scientist Who Developed Theory of Natural Selection

It is something that Charles Darwin himself may never have imagined. The man who penned “On the Origin of Species”, the seminal work that hypothesized that all humans evolved from common ancestors, could now discover his own “human deep ancestry.”

Today, 200 years after his birth, DNA technology has helped determine who Darwin’s ancient ancestors were. Darwin’s great-great-grandson, Chris Darwin, 48, who lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, took a Genographic Project public participation cheek swab test analyzing his “Y” chromosome. According to Dr. Spencer Wells, project director of the Genographic Project, a research partnership between National Geographic and IBM with field support from the Waitt Family Foundation, Darwin’s deep ancestry shows his ancestors left Africa around 45,000 years ago.

I couldn’t wait to find out my family’s deep ancestry. I suspect that most people would be fascinated to know their family history over the past 60,000 years. After all, how can you understand who you really are, if you don’t know where you have come from?,” Chris Darwin said.

The test revealed that Chris Darwin, and therefore his paternal great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, are from Haplogroup R1b, one of the most common European male lineages. “Approximately 70 percent of men in southern England belong to Haplogroup R1b, and in parts of Ireland and Spain that number exceeds 90 percent,” Wells said.

The Genographic Project’s test results show that Darwin’s paternal ancestors would have migrated out of northeast Africa to the Middle East or North Africa around 45,000 years ago. Diverging from this Middle Eastern clan, a new lineage emerged in a man around 40,000 years ago in Iran or southern Central Asia. Before heading west towards Europe, the next mutation, which defined a new lineage, appeared in a man around 35,000 years ago. Men belonging to Haplogroup R1b are direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who, beginning 30,000 years ago, dominated the human expansion into Europe and heralded the demise of the Neanderthal species.

Continue reading…

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The Oscar Goes to “ARDI”

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 18, 2009

Science’s breakthrough of the year: Uncovering ‘Ardi’

SCIENCE

Every December, the editors of Science face the challenge of reviewing what Science has accomplished around the world in the past 12 months, so as to select our “breakthroughs of the year.” The task is an invigorating one, providing a powerful reminder of both the enormous scope and the continual advance of science. For this year’s selections, the range is staggering. From the discovery of pulsars created by neutron stars that are many thousands of light-years distant, to the production of a new single-atom–thick material such as graphene, the same natural laws and logic have generated new understandings over a more than 1030-fold difference in scale. And there is usually special excitement when an advance directly concerns humans, as in the discovery of an ancient ancestor or a successful application of gene therapy to cure disease.

This year’s selection for the Breakthrough of the Year is the reconstruction of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton and her environs, published in Science as a major series of 11 articles in October. This choice does not come easily, given the distaste of our editors for self-promotion. But this work changes the way we think about early human evolution, and it represents the culmination of 15 years of highly collaborative research. Remarkably, 47 scientists of diverse expertise from nine nations joined in a painstaking analysis of the 150,000 specimens of fossilized animals and plants.

The 11 Ardipithecus papers, requiring 89 pages of text plus 295 pages of supporting online material, provide an enormous amount of data for scientists around the world to reexamine. As described on p. 1598 in the current issue, some of those scientists are certain to challenge some of the findings, as further advances are built on those already published. With time, we will come to understand much more, and some current conclusions will probably be modified. This is both to be expected and hoped for: Science can only advance as a highly collaborative global endeavor, through which new knowledge improves on old knowledge based on logic and confirmable evidence.

Science’s list of the nine other groundbreaking achievements from 2009 follows.

2. Pulsars Detected by Fermi: NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope helped to identify previously unknown pulsars—highly magnetized and rapidly rotating neutron stars—and shed light onto their unique gamma-ray emissions.

3. Rapamycin: Researchers found that tinkering with a key signaling pathway produces life-extending benefits in mice—the first such result ever achieved in mammals. The discovery was particularly remarkable because the treatment did not start until the mice were middle-aged.

4. Graphene: In a string of rapid-fire advances, materials scientists probed the properties of graphene—highly conductive sheets of carbon atoms—and started fashioning the material into experimental electronic devices.

5. Plant ABA Receptors: Solving the structure of a critical molecule that helps plants survive during droughts may help scientists design new ways to protect crops against prolonged dry periods, potentially improving crop yields worldwide and aiding biofuel production on marginal lands.

6. LCLS at SLAC: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory unveiled the world’s first x-ray laser, a powerful research tool capable of taking snapshots of chemical reactions in progress, altering the electronic structures of materials, and myriad other experiments spanning a wide range of scientific fields.

7. Gene Therapy Comeback: European and U.S. researchers made progress in treating a fatal brain disease, inherited blindness, and a severe immune disorder by developing new strategies involving gene therapy.

8. Monopoles: In an experimental coup, physicists working with strange crystalline materials called spin ices created magnetic ripples that model the predicted behavior of “magnetic monopoles,” or fundamental particles with only one magnetic pole.

9. LCROSS Finds Water on the Moon: In October, sensors aboard a NASA spacecraft detected water vapor and ice in the debris from a spent rocket stage that researchers deliberately crashed near the south pole of the Moon.

10. Hubble Repair: In May, a nearly flawless final repair mission by space-shuttle astronauts gave the Hubble Space Telescope sharper vision and a new lease on life, resulting in its most spectacular images yet.

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Why Can’t We Live Together?

Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on September 11, 2009

Since the creation of the Earth, humans were united and have shared all their possessions in community. Africa, Europe and Asia were the only continents existed at that period. People had good intentions towards each other. The only things which cause us today to be arguing about Africans, Europeans and Asians were brought up by some extremists people from the fields of science, philosophy and literature who didn’t care about the future generation and about others.

HiddingTruth

Due to a systematic indoctrination and manipulation of populations in Europe and Asia, most of this world we live in today have the same mentality of segregation, indifference, ignorance, lies and distortion of facts. How long shall we continue sleep walking? “Racially” motivated competitions between continents will only lead to the downfall of humanity. There is no “survival of the fittest” by fighting against other fellow human beings on a racial basis.

We need to support each other irrespective of our “racial” attachment. If the West thinks it’s more civilized and rich, it should stretch out its hands towards Sub-Saharan Africans, in a similar manner like it did towards Middle Easterners, Afghans, and Iraqis. We are not going to live here on Earth for ages, so let’s treat each other with mercy, love. Let everyone tell the truth but not the same old nonsense which will linger to nothing but will only teach, conduct and corrupt the new generation to come to continue hating each other. Remember we are all going somewhere, no one will inherit this earth forever.

No public policy or legislation, no funding or estate, no trained personnel or teaching device, no infrastructure or bureaucratic establishment, and no power of enforcement are required for an eternal program of showing people the Way to the Truth and Life, now in this materialistic world and finally in the ideal world to come.

Many people are learning now honest spiritual thinking is the only true solution for political, social, and economic crises facing citizens of a nation at any time. So, let’s all face the truth without ridiculing it.

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