Excavation planned along the river after 1200 prehistoric tools found in Scotland
A river in Aberdeenshire has yielded more than 1,200 Mesolithic tools. The flints, which were discovered by researchers and volunteers just three days ago, were used by people who had lived along the Dee 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Finds include a broken piece of a hammer-shaped object called a mace head.
Archaeology group Mesolithic Deeside now hopes to uncover more clues to prehistoric life at the site at Milton of Crathes.
It has organised a week-long excavation from 11-14 November.
Flints, pieces of worked stone, have been found at Milton of Crathes in the past.
A broken piece of a mace head has been among the finds at the site
The tools are thought to have been used as scrapers for turning raw animal hide into clothing, and as blades for cutting.
Mesolithic Deeside co-secretary Sheila Duthie said: “When I started finding flints over 20 years ago, I could never have imagined contributing to such a massive project which is, without doubt, broadening our understanding of prehistoric human activity on Deeside.”
“My ideal pastime is footerin’ in flat fields with fine folk finding flints, fair or foul.”
Flints are worked pieces of stone and are thought to have been used for scraping and cutting
The Egyptian-German mission has uncovered a collection of decorated blocks and fragments from the King Nactanebo I temple at the Matariya archaeological site in Heliopolis.
A collection of decorated blocks and fragments from the western and northern fa ade of king Nactanebo I temple at Matariya was uncovered.
The discovery was made several weeks ago during excavation work at the central area of the temple.
The blocks and fragments are made of basalt and belong to the western and northern façade.
A northern extension probably connected the sanctuary with the main axis of the precinct of the sun god.
Several blocks of the Lower Egyptian geographical procession were found, among them the scene with the Heliopolis Nome while others display the representation of the additional nomes of Lower Egypt.
Aymen Ashmawy, head of the ancient Egyptian antiquities sector and head of the mission from the Egyptian side, explains that the inscriptions mention the regnal years 13 and 14 (366/365 BCE) as well as the dimensions and the materials used in this sanctuary.
“Several blocks were unfinished too and no further decoration work seems to have been commissioned after the death of Nectanebo I in 363 BCE,” he said, adding that other architectural elements attest to the building projects of Ramesses II (1279-1213), Merenptah (1213-1201 BC) and Apries (589-570 BCE).
The activity of the Ramesside Period is also represented by an inlay for relief of the early 19th dynasty (c. 1300 BCE). A statue fragment of Seti II (1204-1198) adds to the evidence for this king of the late 19th Dynasty at Heliopolis.
Dietrich Raue, head of the German mission, pointed out that the main processional axis was investigated further west. Scattered fragments point to separate building units of the Middle Kingdom, the 22nd Dynasty (King Osorkon I, 925-890 BCE) and a sanctuary for Shu and Tefnut of King Psametik II (595-589 BCE).
Raue said that some fragments of the statuary of King Ramesses II, a part of a baboon statue, a statue base and fragments of a quartzite obelisk of King Osorkon I and parts of cult installations such as an offering table of Thutmose III, 1479-1425 BCE were found.
These finds point to the continuous royal support and investment in the temple of the sun and creator god at Heliopolis and the excavation work provided additional evidence for the 30th Dynasty and the Ptolemaic Period in the precinct.
Dietrich Raue pointed out that sculptures and limestone casts for reliefs and moulds used in the production of faience ushebti (a type of funerary figurine) testify to the activity of workshops before all evidence of the temple functioning ceases during the Roman Era.
Over the millennia, people in many places across the globe have reported the existence of giants. Some of these alleged giants were supposedly six or seven feet tall, while others were considerably taller – 10 feet or more. However, many of these accounts are considered mythical or legendary. But even if such giants existed, were they simply the result of disease or genetic abnormalities? And were there just a few of them?
The Cardiff Giant
But these sightings have continued into the modern era. Many people in America, for instance, have reported seeing giants – or at least the bones of giants. Given these accounts, one may think there were many thousands, if not millions, of these giants roaming ancient America – a race of giants, in fact. However, most of the evidence is anecdotal rather than scientific. Mistakes could have been made too, especially by people who know little or nothing about science, particularly archaeology or anthropology. Also, there have been plenty of hoaxes through the ages. Some people love to fool others.
So, have giants ever existed in America? Let’s see if we can answer that question. First, this article will provide a recap of the existence of giants through the ages and then finish the investigation with more recent information.
David and Goliath
King Arthur squares off against a giant
Giants in Mythology and Legend
Over the centuries, the existence of giants has been reported in many parts of the world. The word giant comes from the Greek word Gigantes, and of course, in the old days, the Greeks wrote about the existence of giants in much of Greek mythology. For instance, the Olympian gods fought a war with the Gigantomachy, and they weren’t victorious until Heracles decided to join the Olympians. According to Hindu mythology, the Daityas were a race of giants who fought against the Devas, because they were jealous of their Deva half-brothers. Power-hungry people, the Daityas often allied themselves with other races. Supposedly, female Daityas wore jewels as large as boulders.
The Old Testament of the Bible includes tales of giants too. The Book of Genesis mentions the Nephilim, who existed before and after the biblical deluge. And David battled the Philistine giant Goliath, who reportedly was about ten feet tall. Goliath’s brothers were also considered giants.
European Giants
In Norse mythology, most of their various monsters were giants. In the eventual battle of Ragnarök, a kind of end-of-the-world tale, the giants will lay siege to Asgard, which will bring about the destruction of the world. Moreover, the Norse gods are related to giants. The chief god Odin was the great-grandson of the first giant, Ymir.
In medieval folklore, people believed giants were responsible for many ancient civilizations. Their reasoning was that only giants could have built the immense walls, fortifications, temples and statues now attributed to the Greeks, Romans, Celts or Druids. Giants are also mentioned frequently in fairy tales, particularly Jack the Giant Killer, Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon and Young Ronald. In 1890, bone fragments discovered by an anthropologist in France, and dating from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age, came to be known as the Giant of Castelnau. Judging from the size of these leg and arm bones, it’s been estimated this “giant” was anywhere from 10 to 15 feet tall!
Paul Bunyan
Bigfoot
Skulls found at Lovelock Cave
Artist’s depiction of Cahokia
Monk’s Mound
Creek Mound
Miamisburg Mound
The Case for Giants in America
Most Americans have heard of Paul Bunyan, who, according to American folklore, was a giant lumberjack who was so big and strong he could bat cannonballs with his huge hands. In more recent times, Paul Bunyan has become a cartoon character of note. And then there’s Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, a hominid-like, ape-man that purportedly lurks in the woods of North America.
But these giants are just silliness, right?
Well, many authors have written about the possible existence of giants in America. Certainly, one of the better books in this genre was penned by Richard J. Dewhurst, who wrote The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America, published in 2014. The following text will pertain to the discoveries Dewhurst writes about in this very interesting book.
Red-Haired Giants Found in Nevada
According to Paiute oral history, red-haired giants known as the Si-Te-Cah (the “tule eaters”) cannibalized people in what is now central Nevada. Eventually, the Paiute tribes rebelled against these giants and eradicated them. Then, in 1911, a group of bat guano miners discovered the remains and artefacts of some of these giants in Lovelock Cave. Certainly, the greatest of these discoveries were some mummies of the Si-Te-Cah, which had been wrapped in elaborate textiles. During subsequent excavations by scientists in Lovelock Cave, numerous artefacts and some human remains were collected, but experts dispute the claim that giants once lived in the cave. Interestingly, archaeological samples taken from some duck decoys found in the cave showed that using a dating technique known as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, the decoys were from 2,000 to 2,500 years old.
Unfortunately, the mummies of the Si-Te-Cah have been lost; only the skulls of these alleged giants have been kept at the Humboldt Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Mound Builders of America
Throughout Dewhurst’s book, he writes about the discovery of giants interred in burial mounds in parts of the United States. These accounts, dozens of them, in fact, cover a time period from the late 1700s until well into the twentieth century. According to Dewhurst, thousands of these burial mounds were discovered over this time period and many still exist, particularly the larger ones. But the remains of the supposed giants discovered in the burial mounds disintegrated shortly after discovery, were lost, or stored away – without scientific investigation – and then forgotten. A typical account from the book goes like this:
GIANT EIGHT FEET, SEVEN INCHES TALL UNEARTHED
Ohio Science Annual, 1898
A rare archaeological discovery has been made near Reinersville in Morgan County, Ohio. A small knoll, which had always been supposed to be the result of an uprooted tree, was opened recently and discovered to be the work of the mound builders. Just below the surrounding surface, a layer of boulders and pebbles was found. Directly underneath this was found the skeleton of a giant 8 feet, 7 inches in height. Surrounding the skeleton were bones and stone implements, stone hatchets, and other characteristics of the mound builders. The discovery is considered by the scientists as one of the most important ever made in Ohio. The skeleton is now in the possession of a Reinersville collector.
Cahokia, One of America’s Greatest Mound Builder Sites
The Cahokia mound builder site is one of the largest in North America. Located in southwestern Illinois, near Collinsville (across the Mississippi River from St. Louis), the site is near the confluence of three rivers, so the ancient people of the area must have loved this place. About a thousand years ago, Cahokia was a city larger than London, and there were 120 earthen mounds, though only 40 remain today. But the largest still exists, and it’s called Monks Mound, which is comparable in height and surface area to the largest pyramids built by the Egyptians, Maya, Aztecs and Toltecs.
Interestingly, also located near the Cahokia site, is what’s called Woodhenge, a structure that includes 48 wooden posts arranged in a 410-foot diameter circle. Woodhenge has many geological and celestial alignments. At the Cahokia site, built by the Mississippian culture, hundreds of human skeletons have been found, including the bones of many sacrificial victims and, of course, the remains of giants.
Blond-haired Giants of Santa Catalina Island
During the 1920s on Santa Catalina Island, which is off the coast of Southern California (considered one of the Channel Islands), scientists dug up the skeletal remains of more than 3,700 people. Alleged to be from a race of blond-haired giants, one of the skeletons was over nine feet in length, though the average length of the skeletons was about seven feet. In those days, this discovery generated lots of excitement. The ruins of a temple were also found at the Catalina Island site, where the remains of many sacrificial victims were unearthed. Investigated by the Spanish as long ago as the middle 1500s, the people of this civilization worshipped the Sun God. Subsequent radiocarbon dating indicated that at least some of the skeletal remains found on the island were as old as 7,000 years.
Dewhurst claims that most of these skeletons were taken by the University of California and the Smithsonian Institute, though the Smithsonian denied it had the remains for 50 years. However, in 2011, the Smithsonian admitted they had the skeletons in a restricted-access room. Be that as it may, 200 skeletons from the site can be found at UCLA’s Fowler Museum.
Evidence for a Smithsonian Cover-up?
Throughout the book, Dewhurst asserts that the Smithsonian Institute has engaged in a cover-up regarding the existence of a race of giants in America, but he provides no proof in his aforementioned book and, of course, the Smithsonian hasn’t admitted there ever was – or is – such a cover-up. According to the online article, “Big Buried Secrets: Giant Skeletons and the Smithsonian” written by Micah Hanks, if the Smithsonian can be blamed for anything regarding the lost bones of giants, it’s that the Institute’s recordkeeping is not perfect. A quote from the article could summarize this issue:
Of course, the knowledge that such skeletons may indeed have been found at times, paired with the Smithsonian’s apparent inability to keep very good records about their discovery, no doubt helps to fuel the conspiratorial speculation. With all the unknown quantities present here (and whether they are largely fact, or merely fiction), at times it does become difficult to know whether the entire truth is really being told.
Was a Cover-up Ever Needed?
Adrienne Mayor, in her book, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, published in 2007, writes that the existence of giants in America is little more than the subject of persistent rumours. She claims that the presence of bones of large extinct mammals such as mammoths, mastodons, cave bears, sabre-toothed cats and other Ice Age megafauna could have been mistaken as human bones. Moreover, she writes that hair pigment is not stable after death and that atmospheric conditions and different soil types can turn dark hair rusty red or orange.
Robert Wadlow and his father
Conclusion
There’s no incontrovertible evidence that any man or woman has ever been taller than eight feet 11 inches – the height of the world’s tallest human, Robert Wadlow. Other men and women have reached heights of above eight feet. Most, if not all of these people suffered from gigantism or acromegaly, that is, abnormal medical conditions. Moreover, some people, having no recognizable medical abnormality, have become taller than seven feet. (Many of these people play on basketball teams, in fact). Acromegaly affects about 60 out of every one million people, so over the ages there may have been thousands of so-called giants.
This begs the question: How tall is a giant? Is it anybody who suffers from gigantism – or anybody who’s taller than seven or eight feet? Who’s the authority to answer such a query?
Would he or she please step forward!
Anyway, in times past, there may have been quite a few giants, but what evidence is there that an entire race of giants – red-haired, blond-haired or otherwise – existed at some time and place on earth? Perhaps the Smithsonian Institute really has such evidence, but the organization insists that it does not. Without the bones of many such giants, people must assume that a race of giants has never existed on earth. But, in the coming months or years, that conclusion could change – by the author and many other people – so keep your mind open to all possibilities.
2,000-Year-Old Roman Face Cream With Visible, Ancient Fingermarks
The world’s oldest cosmetic face cream, complete with the finger marks of its last user 2,000 years ago, has been found by archaeologists excavating a Roman temple on the banks of London’s River Thames.
Measuring 6 cm by 5 cm, the tightly sealed, cylindrical tin can was opened yesterday at the Museum of London to reveal a pungent-smelling white cream.
“It seems to be very much like an ointment, and it’s got finger marks in the lid … whoever used it last has applied it to something with their fingers and used the lid as a dish to take the ointment out,” museum curator Liz Barham said as she opened the box.
The superbly made canister, now on display at the museum, was made almost entirely of tin, a precious metal at that time. Perhaps a beauty treatment for a fashionable Roman lady or even a face paint used in temple ritual, the cream is currently undergoing scientific analysis.
“We don’t yet know whether the cream was medicinal, cosmetic or entirely ritualistic.
The jar of Roman cosmetics uncovered beneath London’s streets (Museum of London)
We’re lucky in London to have a marshy site where the contents of this completely sealed box must have been preserved very quickly – the metal is hardly corroded at all,” said Nansi Rosenberg, a senior archaeological consultant on the project.
“This is an extraordinary discovery,” Federico Nappo, an expert on ancient Roman cosmetics of Pompeii. “It is likely that the cream contains animal fats. We know that the Romans used donkey’s milk as a treatment for the skin. However, it should not be very difficult to find out the cream’s composition.”
The pot, which appears to have been deliberately hidden, was found at the bottom of a sealed ditch in Southwark, about two miles south of central London.
Placed at the point where three roads meet near the river crossing – Watling St from Dover, Stane St from Chichester and the bridgehead road over the Thames – the site contains the foundations of two Roman-Celtic temples, a guest house, an outdoor area suitable for mass worship, plinths for statues and a stone pillar.
The complex, which last year revealed a stone tablet with the earliest known inscription bearing the Roman name of London, dates to around the mid-2nd century.
It is the first religious complex to be found in the capital, with rare evidence of organized religion in London 2,000 years ago.
“The analysis and interpretation of the finds have only just begun, and I’ve no doubt there are further discoveries to be made as we piece together the jigsaw puzzle we’ve excavated,” Rosenberg said. “But it already alters our whole perception – Southwark was a major religious focus of the Roman capital.”
Since excavation work was completed, the site will now become a residential development housing 521 apartments.
UK: Nurse discovers ‘medieval’ gold Bible worth $1.3mn near the property of King Richard III
A metal detectorist discovered a little gold bible that had formerly belonged to a mediaeval aristocracy or royal. Buffy Bailey, an NHS nurse from Lancaster, came upon the book while searching for farmland near York with her husband Ian.
The 600-year-old object, which is just 0.5in (1.5cm) long, could be worth more than £100,000, Mrs Bailey said. An expert described it as an “exceptionally unique” artefact that would have originally been owned by someone “incredibly wealthy”.
Mrs Bailey, 48, said she and her husband chose York for detecting because they “knew it had a lot of history”.
Buffy Bailey initially thought the find was a charm from a gift shop
With permission from the landowner, Mrs Bailey said she got a signal straight away.
“I dug down five inches and it was just there – I still didn’t believe it was anything special.”
It was only when she cleaned the item she realised she had found something special and not a charm from a gift shop.
“It was so heavy and shiny – just absolutely beautiful,” she said.
The object weighs just 0.2oz (5g) and is either 22 or 24ct gold, and is thought to date back to the 15th Century.
It is engraved with images of St Leonard and St Margaret, patron saints of childbirth, and could have been an object used for protection during pregnancy and childbirth.
The miniature book was found near property once owned by King Richard III
It was found on land near property once owned by Richard III (1483 to 1485) and it is speculated that it could have been owned by a female relative of his or of his wife Anne Neville.
It has been compared to the Middleham Jewel, a gold pendant set with a blue sapphire, found at Middleham Castle, about 40 miles (64km) away, also once owned by Richard III and the Neville family.
Julian Evan-Hart, the editor of Treasure Hunting magazine, said the book was an “exceptionally unique” historical artefact.
“The artwork is clearly iconographic and bears a close resemblance to the Middleham Jewel – there is every possibility that it was made by the same artist.”
“Whoever had it commissioned must have been incredibly wealthy,” Mrs Bailey said.
“There’s nothing else like it in the world. It could be worth £100,000 or more.”
The Yorkshire Museum, in York, is assessing the item before an auctioneer sets a valuation. At that point, the museum may decide to buy the item.
The museum paid £2.5m to acquire the Middleham Jewel in 1992.
Workers digging gas pipes in Peru find the 2,000-year-old gravesite
The AFP reports that workers laying a new gas pipe in the La Victoria district of the city of Lima discovered a 2,000-year-old grave containing some 40 ceramic vessels.
A work crew laying a natural gas pipe under a street in Lima, Peru stumbled across a 2,000-year-old burial site, including the remains of six people and ceramic vessels.
Workers laying gas pipes on a street in the Peruvian capital Lima stumbled on the remains of a pre-Hispanic gravesite that included 2,000-year-old ceramic burial vessels, an archaeologist said Thursday.
“This find that we see today is 2,000 years old,” archaeologist Cecilia Camargo told AFP at the site.
“So far, there are six human bodies that we have recovered, including children and adults, accompanied by a set of ceramic vessels that were expressly made to bury them.”
Experts believe the site in the Lima district of La Victoria may be linked to the culture known as “Blanco sobre Rojo,” or “White on Red,” which settled on the central coast of Peru in the valleys of Chillon, Rimac and Lurin, the three rivers that cross Lima.
“So far, we have recovered about 40 vessels of different shapes related to the White on Red style,” said Camargo, head of the cultural heritage department at the natural gas company Calidda.
“Some bottles are very distinctive of this period and style, which have a double spout and a bridge handle,” Camargo said.
As finds of ancient artefacts and remains occur frequently in Peru, all public service companies that do excavations have in house archaeologists, including Calidda, a Colombian-funded company that distributes natural gas in Lima and in the neighboring port of Callao.
Specialists work around the ancient burial site found by a crew laying a natural gas pipe under a street in Lima, Peru on November 04, 2021.
Archaeologists stunned by 5,000-year-old ‘Scottish Pompeii’ settlement
Duncansby Head lighthouse marks the most northeasterly point of the British mainland. It’s almost 880 miles from Land’s End in the southwest of England. Just beyond here are the Orkney islands, over 70 of them, many of which hold ancient secrets.
While 20 of the islands are inhabited, most of the population of about 22,000, live on the largest one known as the Mainland.
Orkney’s history goes back thousands of years ago — around 6,000, it is believed.
It was here that the people of the Neolithic era — the New Stone Age — settled on Orkney.
The remnants of their vibrant culture remain scattered across the archipelago and were explored during the Smithsonian Channel’s documentary, ‘Aerial Britain: Scotland‘.
Archaeology: Skara Brae has stunned researchers, it is described as the ‘Scottish Pompeii’
Skara Brae on the Mainland’s west coast has attracted particular attraction, as the documentary’s narrator noted: “It’s a 5,000-year-old settlement that has been called the Scottish Pompeii.”
An incredible window into the lives of the ancient people who once lived there, it was only discovered in 1850 when a severe storm stripped the earth from the site.
Europe’s most complete Neolithic village, each house shares the same basic design — a single large room fitted with stone-built cupboards, dressers and beds, all laid out around a square hearth.
Here, the inhabitants would gather around the fire during Orkney’s long and dark winters.
The Broch of Gurness, also on the Mainland, is a later settlement dating from around 500 BC.
At its centre is a brooch or stone tower.
It would probably only originally have reached a height of around 30 feet and was most likely inhabited by the principal family or clan of the area.
The narrator said: “The entire settlement may have been home to as many as 40 families.”
Humans Didn’t Descend From A Pair Of Adults 200,000 Years Ago
Those headlines give the impression that science has produced evidence to support the story of Adam and Eve. But the study they rest on does not demonstrate anything of the kind, and other lines of evidence strongly suggest that past human populations were always much larger than two.
The idea that humanity started with a single couple has been around for a while.
The study in question was actually published in May and received coverage at the time but has been picked up again. Its authors were Mark Stoeckle of Rockefeller University in New York and David Thaler of the University of Basel in Switzerland. It appeared in the journal Human Evolution, and it is “open access” so anyone can read it.
The study is about DNA barcoding: the technique of reading a small chunk of an organism’s DNA and using that to identify its species. To identify an animal, geneticists usually look at a gene called cytochrome oxidase 1 (CO1). This gene is not part of the “main” genome held in the nucleus of animal cells but instead is carried in the mitochondria: tiny sausage-shaped organelles that swarm inside animal cells and provide them with energy.
DNA barcoding is not a perfect method of identifying species, but it works pretty well. That’s because, as the study observes, animals belonging to one species tend to have near-identical CO1 genes, which reliably differ from animals of other species.
Because CO1 genes are so similar within species, regardless of how many individuals there are, Stoeckle and Thaler argue that something must have made them that way. Either evolution is somehow pushing each species to have its own version, which seems unlikely, or each species has had almost all its genetic diversity purged – which implies that its population was once very small.
What’s more, these population bottlenecks seemingly all occurred between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Much of the coverage has interpreted this as implying some sort of global event, an unspecified catastrophe that slashed the population of pretty much every animal species. However, Stoeckle and Thaler do not argue that, saying instead that species experience bottlenecks every few hundred thousand years due to the rough and tumble of life.
Thaler was quoted by Fox News saying that “all of animal life experiences pulses of growth and stasis or near extinction on similar time scales”. He listed possible explanations: “ice ages and other forms of environmental change, infections, predation, competition from other species and for limited resources, and interactions among these forces”.
The finding of a population bottleneck also applies to humans. The human genetic data, according to the study, is “consistent with the extreme bottleneck of a founding pair”.
The idea of humans being reduced to a population of two, who then had to repopulate the planet, has understandably drawn people’s attention. But this idea is almost certainly wrong, for a host of reasons.
First, we should always be hesitant about drawing big conclusions from mitochondrial DNA, and especially from a single gene – even if that gene has been examined in hundreds of species. Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from one’s mother, so it necessarily only tells us about the female line. More importantly, because there is so little of it, it often misleads us. When the mitochondrial genome of Neanderthals was sequenced, it showed no sign that humans and Neanderthals had interbred. The interbreeding was only revealed when the Neanderthal nuclear genome was read.
Second, there is no trace in the geological record of any global event in the last 200,000 years. Any event that slashed populations that significantly would surely have led to a noticeable spike in the extinction rate, and there isn’t one. There are of course the extinctions linked to humans, but those occurred at separate times and locations, not simultaneously across the planet.
Indeed, the study’s finding that the event occurred between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago is too vague to imply a single event. It’s a bit like saying that the Napoleonic Wars happened after the fall of Mycenaean Greece but before 9/11. The suggested timespan is so vast, there is no reason to invoke a single event at all.
The whole pattern can be explained much more easily by saying that a lot of new species evolved over the last few hundred thousand years. That would not be surprising, because most species are indeed fairly young.
Stoeckle and Thaler’s findings would have us believe that 90 per cent of species are less than 200,000 years old. I don’t think their mitochondrial DNA data is enough to show that, and studies of whole genomes and fossils will give us more reliable dates that I would expect to be older. But they won’t be that much older. Given that the planet has been in and out of glacial periods over the last 2.5 million years, plus all the upheavals caused by humans and our extinct relatives, the finding that most species alive today are fairly young shouldn’t surprise us.
What about our own species? First, Stoeckle and Thaler only ever said that their data was “consistent” with the existence of a founding pair. That doesn’t mean much, and they immediately conceded that the same pattern could have arisen “within a founding population of thousands that was stable for tens of thousands of years”. The fact is, genomic data doesn’t do a great job of revealing the sizes of past populations except in broad-brush terms. The human population was probably pretty small for a long time, but there is no reason to think it was two.
Finally, the archaeological record tells a different story. It used to be thought that our species was about 200,000 years old, which would fit Stoeckle and Thaler’s data. However, in 2017 fossils uncovered at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco turned out to belong to our species, and they were around 300,000 years old. What’s more, our lineage split from that of the Neanderthals (our closest extinct relatives) roughly 500,000 years ago, so arguably our species is 500,000 years old. 200,000 years ago does not appear to have been a particularly special time in the history of our species.
