Discovery of the Borean Man
Introduction
Introduction
Protasis: The Eve of an Earlier Dawn
Contributed by
Dr. Richard Garfield Lovecraft, Ph.D.
Archeologist & Physical Anthropologist
Olympic Peninsular University“Anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence all put the origin of modern humans at between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, probably in Africa. There is also much data that show an outburst of cultural behavior occurring around 50,000-40,000 years ago in Europe. That’s when archaeologists date the oldest evidence of burial ceremonies, body ornaments, and cave paintings.” -- William CromieOn the morning of April 3rd, 2003 C.E., marine archeologist Dr. Jenna Pedersen of Lahrs-Yeoman University set off on a cooperative expedition of chiefly British, French, Greek, and Turkish scientists accompanying a diving team consisting of nearly two dozen individuals from the Société de Recherche Nautique et Découverte Archéologique du Méditerranéen (Mediterranean Nautical Research and Archeological Discovery Society) of France, the Éλλενικο Ινsτιτοντο Ωκηανογραφικων Αρχαιολογικη ερευνα (Ellenico Institoýto Oceanograficon Arçaiologice Éreyna -- Hellenic Institue for Oceanographic Archeological Research) of Greece, and the Turkish Deniz Arkeolojik Keşif Toplumu or D.A.K.T. (Marine Archeological Research Society, or M.A.R.S. of Turkey) into the Celician waters off the southern coast of the Mediterranean Basin’s Anatolian Peninsula in search of evidence for suspected Celto-Etruscan overseas trade with the aboriginal Anatolians of around twenty-five hundred years ago, at a site rumored by local fishermen and recreational divers to hide an undersea “City Reef” comprising human structures of immemorial antiquity; undaunted by assurances from previous wreck divers that nothing was to be found in these clear waters but “meadows of seagrass, batteries of spet barracuda, coral reefs, prowling bull sharks, speedy swordfish, roaming great whites, swarms of prawns, ravenous mako sharks, and some very territorial, very hungry morays” (Pedersen 2003). The team embarked upon R.V. Lara II at 0400 (four of clock, antemeridian/AM), loaned and partly crewed by the Oceanographic Surveilance Society of the United Kingdoms, or O.S.S.U.K., and captained by Rowland Cooper of B.I.N.A.R., the British Institute for Nautical Archæological Research, and departed from the port of Alanya, Antalya province[*], Turkey, guided by local Captain Esref Adivar and his commercial midwater trawler, F.V. Ateş Mirza, to a starting destination amid the eastern waters of the Gulf of Antalya.
Upon the eighth day of the planned six-week expedition under U.S. American marine archeologist Dr. Pedersen and British Captain Cooper, after a week of searching the Gulf of Antalya’s eastern seabed and six days after the departure of Ates Mirza, the crew of Lara II were growing discouraged. Despite what local rumor bore on the matter, assurances from previous wreck divers attempting to find the legendary city-reef that no trace of any such ruin awaited discovery began haunting the mind of Dr. Pedersen and had been foremost on Captain Cooper’s thoughts since the first day of this, his second venture to the eastern Gulf of Antalya made in the attempt to discover the ruin.
It wasn’t always a Celto-Etruscan trading post on ancient Anatolian shores; sometimes it was a Proto-Greek colony built along the migratory route from Crete to Morea, or an early sea portal constructed by itinerant Kurgans of ambitious design, or a Proto-Semitic tie between the Afro-Asiatic people of pre-dynastic Egypt and a prehistorically influential Proto-Indo-European population antecedent to the Proto-Greek and Proto-Germanic peoples, or a refuge for ancient Dacian corsairs of the Black Sea whither pursuers would be forced to navigate the islands of the labyrinthine BLANK Sea to reach, or a traders’ hub of import to the ancient Egyptian-Hebrew alliance during the Nubian conquest of Lower Egypt, or even the proposed inspiration for Plato’s alleged Egyptian origin of the story of Atlantis, BLANK being replaced by the BLANK Strait referred to as the “Pillars of Hercules” prior to the Strait of Gibraltar in Plato’s rendition, or the much later Golden Age of Piracy’s original inspiration for the pirate-paradise Libertalia (or Libertania) reputed to lie on the western coast of Madagascar; most of Lara II’s regular crew had heard these and many other stories behind the origin of the city-reef before this most recent expedition, as had many of the divers, having crewed previous expeditions to find the ruin aboard other vessels, while those who’d only recently joined the ship’s regular crew and divers crewing their first mission to find the elusive ruin had grown weary over the course of the five foregone days of hearing stories behind a city they grew increasingly convinced existed only in fable.Upon the sixth day of the six-week expedition headed by the United States marine archeologist Jenna Pedersen, after five days spent scanning the eastern half of the small gulf’s sea floor failed to bear a modicum of data useful for anything but elimination of possible sites in the detection of their quarry, the divers and scientists were plying hope’s exhaustion when finally, as they searched near the Teke Peninsula at the western intersection of the Gulf of Antalya with the outlying Cilician Sea of the east Mediterranean, an awesome serendipity occurred:
The Pedersen Ruin: Initial Discovery
A member of the diving team was finning idly beside a rockface separating an upper and lower tract of posidonia upon a larger cascading formation that looked conspicuously like an artificial structure surrounded by clouds of wrasses, shrimp, and krill, schools of barracuda, and the occasional blue shark, among other reef organisms, thinking she might have found something significant enough to salvage their already seemingly doomed expidition when she accidentally swam abruptly upon an unexpected aperature in the façade of the stone. After her partner had helped her back to the deck of Lara II, as their team’s medic worked to stop or her arterial bleeding and stabilize her condition for medical transport, while crying and panting and rambling about unblinking eyes and snapping jaws sporting rows of serrated teeth, she managed to identify her attacker as a four-meter-long Strophidon sathete, or Gangetic Moray (McCellend 1844)[*], which although unheardof in Mediterranean waters, is known to be a marine, estuarine, and riverine species indigenous not only Indo-Pacific and east African costal waters but also to the nearby Red Sea, which connects to the southern East Mediterranean Sea by a number of streams through the Nile River Delta as well as the man-made Suez Canal in Egypt that separates the African continent from the Sinai Peninsula. With this fact in mind, a team of four more divers shortly donned suits of mail to investigate the possibility of a Gangetic Moray or population thereof thriving in Mediterranean waters, but were unable to verify their wounded colleague’s sighting, locating only a particularly large (estimated at 1.5 meters) example of Muraena helena: the Mediterranean Moray, or Roman Eel (Linnaeus 1758). However, upon their return, the four divers brought with them samples of rusticles collected from the area and were each able to volunteer an independent description of the aperature from which the monstrous eel (whatever its species) had struck: a narrow opening bordered in hewn granite, straight across its inferior with a rounded superior; or, in other words, the shape of a typical Etruscan arch.
Subsequent dives over the next three days of the expedition confirmed several such aperatures in the two uppermost segments of the cascade formation, a series of three peristalithic frustra centered each upon the larger truncated cone below it so as to form a broad ledge or plateau at the foot of each kerb’s plane, resulting in a frustrated conical formation topped by a dome with a ten-foot breach; discovered to be a principally hollow structure, of which the dry stone outer walls were augmented with interior ashlar masonry, and of which the plane separating the upper two frustra was supported by an interior arcade partitioning off a vaulted walkway from the court it encircled. Yet, whereas the upper two kerbs of the frustrated structure shared a hollow interior, the lower frustrum comprised an otherwise solid foundation but for a single aperature in the kerb’s wall, where a megalithic dolmen, covered over by former topsoils and petrified plant roots now encased by millennia of sedimentation and frontispieced by a trilithon, provided access by way of an interior arch to a vaulted corridor leading by stairway up into the broken-domed chamber. Intricately carved orthostats, albeit now eroded and overgrown with pisodonia, extended from either side of the dolmen foyer, encircling the peristalith in place of the dry stone wall construction of the two kerbs above it. The frustrated structure was tentatively identified as a hillfort based upon its architecture, further inforced by the artifacts it contained, although the structure has also been suggested to have been a grange, a temple, an administrative building or meeting hall, while PERSON (year) reminds that ancient cultures did not always make such familiar distinctions, citing the ancient Minoans, whose palaces served the combined functions of governmental and administrative centers, shrines or temples, workshops, and stores or granges all within a single palatial “court building”.
Ethical concerns were raised by the aforementioned discovery of the internal chamber after an itinerent school of blue sharks, Pionace glauca (Linnaeus 1758), began lingering about Lara II, which, due to the threat of frenzy facing divers should the slightest accidental injury occur, combined with the recent eel attack, spurred the addition of mandatory electronic shark repellents to the required equipment roster, the use of which caused a congregation of grey nurse sharks[ ], Carcharias taurus (Rafinesque 1810), an extremely aggressive species[ ] documented elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea[ ] yet unheardof in the Cilician, which had been using the chamber as their daily haunt, to abandon the location.
Increasingly detailed surveys of the site performed during the remainder of the two-week expedition located a number of peripheral structures. Living quarters[ ] were found skirting the whole circumfrance of the conical structure’s inferior peristalith, beneath even the upper forecourt, behind a stairway discovered obscured by layers of rock and silt hosting a cascading patch of seagrass; accessible by a vaulted corridor built into the structure’s walls, beginning as a stair descending from behind the arcade of the inner chamber and terminating at the end of a semicircular hallway. An attatched store opposite the foyer, behind the corridor leading up into the main chamber, was filled with artifacts and had apparently acted primarily as a weapons cache.
Petrified wooden beams and planks, fallen sections of flagstone or ashlar walls and arcades, and BLANK were soon found partly exposed throughout the pisodonia-swallowed trenches between the frustrated conical formation and the BLANK rising up around it, and comprised sporadic portions of the trench walls. Short lengths of flagstone, cobble, and even ashlar pavement could also be discerned, having evidentally evaded sedimentation, in a few isolated locations.
Descending the BLANK from the foot of the hillfort into the deeper waters were the squarish, trilith stone entrances to ruined dwellings of BLANK construction similar to those at the ancient Lycian city of Arikanda in today’s BLANK province, Turkey, imbedded within the steeper rocks along the trenches to which they connected by stone stairways, where the seagrasses gave way to corals, blah, while along ledges and within recesses nearer the roughly curved crests of the pisidonia-covered BLANK these became increasingly interspersed with fourteen to twenty-one inch tall circular foundations of dry stone wall construction, similar to those remaining of the late Bronze Age castros in Spain, many of which containing hearths and postholes still plugged with petrified wood indicating the presence of floors and walls of dwellings similar in their time to those of the Castro de São Lourenço in Esposende, Portugal.
Further down the seafloor, at the drop-off marking the ancient shoreline roughly four hundred feet (metric measurement goes here) below the surface, lay a broad granite slab upheld by four large orthostats at the end of a crudely paved avanue leading up to the hillfort. Petrified reminants of wooden beams and planks betrayed this structure as the centerpiece of an ancient wharf, a stone pier evidently fallen into disuse with the construction of a newer centerpiece roughly thirty meters away, comprising a larger, more masterfully hewn granite pier colonaded on either side and upheld by nine marble columns below, lying athwart a flagstone street from a ruined temple atop a BLANK some fifty meters or so from the BLANK capped by the ancient hillfort.
Other structures in the vacinity were identified to include a broken BLANK stripmall and petrified reminants of an ancient boardwalk adjascent to the wharf, several stores and granges, an arena at the foot of an amphitheater, a palisade, a city wall extending beyond the ancient shoreline to enclose the whilom bay, and a gatehouse built atop the seaside gate’s watchtowers, between which the gate would close to protect the city and its bay while opening would allow it to accept merchant traffic. As at the hillfort and the wharf, these structures displayed an original neolithic artisanship foundational to later sophisticating phases marked by overlying calcolithic or even bronze-age architectural development.
Artifacts documented at the site included bladed weapons made from a range of materials, from flaked obsidian and carved antler horns hilted in leather thongs to bronze swords (Gagnon 2003), jewelry ranging from crude Mousterian-style bracelets, armlets, necklaces, and circlets, to Bronze-age style creations wrought from silver and gold (Argyris 2003), religious relics (Dechapelle 2003), including Venus figurines ranging in sophistication from several similar to the three to five hundred thousand year old Venus of Tan-Tan or the two hundred and eighty-eight to eight hundred thousand year old Venus of B’rekhat Ram to a number showing the detail and craftmanship of the twenty-seven thousand year old Venus of Willendorf or the twenty-five thousand year old Venus of Brassempouy carved from mammoth ivory; sketches and photographs from the site also depicted kilned pottery (Akin 2003), iron cauldrons, kettles, pans, and skillets (Emir & Wright 2003), spits, tripods, and cranes associated with the aformentioned stone or brick hearths (Pedersen 2003), horns, cups, goblets, and similar drinking vessels (Stein 2003), pitchers, ewers, urns, and lamps made from a variety of ceramics, precious metals, and other materials (Ergülen 2003), one object contentiously described as a hookah (Potts 2004), smoking pipes of various woods, metals, antler, horn, and bone (Baker 2003), bronze, brass, and wrought iron cutlery (Plamont 2003), musical instruments ranging from simple bone flutes, ivory xylophones, and horns (Yilmaz & Kemal 2003) to more sophisticated devices separable into winds, percussion, and strings.
The fossilized remains of more than two hundred individual persons were photographed or sketched at the site, along with animals preliminarily identified as domestic dogs, cats, cattle, goats, mouffon, and other animals whose remains would have to be excavated in order to identify. A fossil graveyard containing the butchered remains of thousands of individual animals surrounded the previously terrestrial lengths of the city wall.
Artifacts documented at the site
[...]
And while the Pedersen ruin itself was originally presumed built by H. s. sapiens sometime in the Boreal stage of the Holocene epoch (Pedersen 2003)
Just as interglacial periods began growing shorter (roughly ten to thirty thousand years), albeit warmer, than in the previous half-million years, and glacial periods began growing longer, during the Sicilian Stage of the Middle Pleistocene Epoch, when the Günz-Mindel interglacial period gave way to the Mindel glaciation assuming much more recent an origin than the Middle Pleistocene epoch yet imposing a nonetheless inconveniently early estimate for such advanced technological productions (Tiller & Lath 2003), with the artisans having intruded into the Pleistocene strata of the geologic column in preparation for construction and the site having later been covered over by human-exposed rock of far greater antiquity than the ruin itself (Pedersen 2003), the evidenced lack of said occultation, such as the absence of Holocene minerals in the same stratum as the ruin (BLANK 2003)
or of any Holocene or Late Pleistocene material used in the construction of the artifacts found (Baig 2003)
the fact that all samples of fossilized wood and bone associated with the ruin had been mineralized exclusively by Middle Pleistocene sediments (Baig 2003)
that the hardened Pleistocene mud and silt contained trace fossils matching the artifacts and biofacts in question (BLANK 2003), and that fragile artifacts such as pottery had been almost perfectly preserved within the Middle Pleistocene rocks rather than having been destroyed by them (Pedersen 2003), demonstrated even before radiometric dating had commenced that the anthropological community was faced with a colossal anachronism.
The team gets funding to excavate the site.
III. The Pedersen Ruin: Excavation
Artifacts recovered from the site include weapons and armor (Gagnon 2003) similar in construction and sophistication to those associated with the Classical and Medieval periods of Europe (Tiller & Lath 2003), refined jewelry (Argyris 2003) and religious relics (Dechapelle 2003), kilned pottery (Akin 2003), iron cauldrons, kettles, pans, and skillets (Emir & Wright 2003), brick or stone hearths with spits, tripods, and cranes (Pedersen 2003), horns, cups, goblets, and other such drinking vessels as well as pitchers, ewers, urns, and lamps made from a variety of ceramics, precious metals, and other materials (Ergülen 2003), one object contentiously described as a hookah (Potts 2004), smoking pipes of various woods, metals, antler, horn, and bone (Baker 2003), steel cutlery (Plamont 2003), musical instruments separable into winds, percussion, and strings (Yilmaz & Kemal 2003)
Outside the site: partial fossil skeletons of flayed and butchered animals including aurochsen, buffalo, wisents, muskoxen, mouflon/musmon, argali, antelope, goats, ibexes, aoudads, Pyrenean chamois, gazelles, Cretan deer, red deer (“elk” in North America), elk (“moose” in North America), giant deer (“Irish elk”), reindeer (“caribou”), okapis, wild boar, mammoths, dwarf elephants, narrow-nosed rhinoceroses, giant unicorns, hippopotamuses, dwarf hippopotamuses, European hippopotamuses, macaques, sea cows, walruses, European giant beavers, crocodiles, giant swans, beluga sturgeon, grey mullets, surmullets, codfish, European congers, Mediterranean morays, halibuts, anchovies, mackerels, sardines, herring, carp, wels catfish, and Deninger’s cave bear (Hardy & Fischer 2003) some of which so foreign in nativity as to be thought by their very presence indicative of extensive trade networks (Tiller & Wright 2003)
rusticle
thermoluminescence used to date pottery
forecourt, portal stones, porthole slab, dolmens, orthostats, trilithons, triliths, chamber tombs, gallery graves,
Far older than the city found near Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu,
Alexandria, Egypt
Half-buried ruin
Cenozoic era / Quaternary period
Middle Pleistocene epoch (Ates 2003)
Lower Paleolithic
Calabrian faunal stage (Donau glaciation)
Sicilian faunal stage (Mindel glaciation)Further discoveries in
Izmir/Hatay province
Gulf of Taranto
Homo heidelbergensis footprints in Italy (Roccamonfina volcano). Venus of Tan-Tan (300 to 500 ky ago) and Venus of B'rekhat Ram (233 to 800 ky ago). First appearance of proto-Neanderthal traits.
Tyrrhenian faunal stage (Riss/Riß glaciation)
The ruins include a hand-dug well, a mess hall, barracks, a library, a rock chimney, a store, an administration building, a cistern, a hospital, a powder magazine, the foundation of the officers' quarters, the first sergeant's quarters, a restored bakery , and replicas of enlisted men's huts.
British names: Niles, Nigel, Rupert, Warren, Willoughby, Colin, Neville, Mycroft, Stratford.
IV. Diet of the Borean Man
both trace fossils and petrified hard parts of apparently cultivated plant matter closely resembling modern produce to which it only distantly relates, including what appear domestic varieties of pomes, nuts, seedpods, legumes, roots, berries, tubers, and cereals, most interestingly exampled by ears of a non-maize corn, that exist today only in uncultivated wild populations (Ardiç 2003) though relatives to the more common of modern cultivated plants (apples, pears, grenades, strawberries, grapes, turnips, cabbage, wheat, barley, rye, and many others) are attested as well (Hasim 2003) along with chemo-fossils of what have been controversially identified as loaves and cakes of milled corn baked together with yeast or fried with lard, in some cases baked or fried with bird eggs (BLANK, et al. 2004) chemo-fossils of hemp and opium resin (Stoner, et al. 2003)
as well as fermented honey and plant materials indicating the consumption of ethanol (Daniels 2004) and body fossils of what appeared to be either a newly discovered Homo sapiens ssp. with peculiarly modern European features (Pedersen, et al. 2003) or an early Homo sp. possessing anachronistically derived specializations to the boreal climate of the north Mediterranean basin during the Sicilian faunal stage of Pleistocene epoch (Xylander, et al. 2003).
V. The Xanthopolous Ruin
Following in May of the same year, little more than a fortnight later, excavation by a diving team under Peloponnesian Anthropologic University’s marine archeologist Dr. Leonidas Xanthopoulos of another site below the coastal waters of the Mediterranean’s historical Morean peninsula was independently underway. Produced from this site, stumbled upon during the search for evidence (Xanthopoulos 2003) of a pre-Helladic naval incursion of Morea by Proto-Germanic seamen depicted upon a series of Proto-Germanic rune stones rediscovered in 1997 C.E. (Reynders 1999) were similar hominine fossils (Xylander 2003) and artifacts (Ramos 2003) preserved within the same Middle Pleistocene sediments (Areleous 2003)
this time included preservations of literature scribed upon marble and agate plates or clay tablets employing a script found fragmentarily, in the form of geometric symbols regarded as unidentifiable by those who discovered them, scribed into pottery or arcades and columns, etched in glass and engraved into the metal or carved into the wood or bone of weapons and all manner of artifact at the Pedersen site in brief sequences of words and short phrases (Foster-Kent 2003-2004), mathematics (Kooperhaak 2003), primitive written music (Foster-Kent 2004), accomplishments in various visual arts such as painting (Kokinos 2003), engraving (Kovac 2003), pottery (Loncar 2003), sculpture (Ardelean 2003),
...Created for their own sake rather than merely as decoration upon other artifacts, as at the Pedersen ruin (al-Din 2003-2004).
Excavated alongside many of the hominine remains were remarkably well-preserved body fossils of the European wildcat and an unknown fossil canid (Hardy 2003)
...at first attributed to the canine sub-family to which the Grey Wolf and the Modern Dog belong and conjectured to represent the first known fossil record attestation to the “Proto-Dog” (Xanthopoulos 2003).
Due in part to the presence of these dog-like canids, the Xanthopoulos ruin and its inhabitants were initially misattributed to the Boreal Holocene epoch as well (Xanthopoulos 2003)...
...the language family into which their discernible (though yet to be translated) tongues naturally seemed to group preliminarily assumed to be an early division of the controversial Borean super-family (Foster-Kent 2003),
...and the hominine fossils considered as candidates for the first behaviorally modern Homos sapientes ssp. to migrate out of Anatolia and into the European subcontinent (Xanthopoulos 2003).
Though this overzealous hypothesizing coincidentally managed to presage factual attributions to this ancient people......the already problematically early date of 9000-8000 B.P. shortly succumbed to the seemingly even more wildly improbable yet undeniable reality of a Middle Pleistocene origin for the Xanthopoulos ruin...
...albeit not quite soon enough to prevent the fossil hominines discovered there from having applied to them the epithet, “Borean Man”.
And soon, the uncomfortable truths that Borean Man had to offer would nake him before the skeptical eyes of the scientific community and the structures, artifacts, and fossil remains of the Borean Man would with exceeding brevity prove to have far reaching implications upon traditional views within the disciplines of archeology, paleoanthropology, physical and cultural anthropology, sociology, human evolutionary psychology, glottogony, philology, and evolutionary linguistics, among many other fields of study.
VI. Age of the Borean Man
Later that May, radiometric dating on samples from the Pedersen ruin commenced, with core samples from the stratum in which the ruin, fossils, and artifacts were found, key materials such as mortar and other cements created in the construction of the ruin itself, trace fossils and chemo-fossils from the same stratum, each of the twenty-two partial hominine skeletons so far excavated from the site, and petrified wood such as that found making up the handles of certain knives, polearms, and other weapons, among other materials, as well as samples of pottery from the site each tested independently using potassium-argon (K-Ar), argon-argon (Ar-Ar), and rubidium-strontium (Rb-Sr) dating, each date given by one of the aforesaid methods crosschecked with the others and by uranium-thorium (thorium-230) dating (also known as uranium series disequilibrium dating) of speleothem and fossil corals in combination with fission track dating of apatite occurring in the site’s basin sediments and residually in fossilized bone and tooth samples, titanite (often as the gemstone sphene) found in the surrounding granular Middle Pleistocene limestone silts, zircon present throughout most of the local sediments, and nearby volcanic glasses associated with the stratum, in combination with electron-spin resonance dating, and thus confirmed to be roughly four hundred and fifty thousand years old. The more extensive Xanthopoulos ruin underwent a similarly intensive round of radiometric and paleomagnetic dating beginning the end of May, with the last samples tested in late June, and was independently verified by potassium-argon, argon-argon, and rubidium-strontium tests, with each method having been checked against the others and confirmed by electron-spin resonance, thorium-230 / uranium series, and fission track dating to have been buried in the Lower Paleolithic, around 450,000 B.C.E. Being that it took Homo sapiens sapiens approximately one hundred and fifty thousand to one hundred and ninety-five thousand years to develop a comparable level of technological sophistication from its most primitive origins, with the majority of said development -- the journey from the Stone Age to the Space Age -- taking place within the past ten thousand years, Borean Man was therefore reasonably assumed to have appeared no more recently than 475,000 B.C.E. and very likely as early as 600,000-645,000 B.C.E.
In order to gauge the significance of these dates and the gravity of their implications upon anthropological theory, one must bear in mind that Homo antecessor or “Ancestral Man” (also H. sapiens antecessor, or “Ancestral Wiseman”), the last common ancestor of H. neanderthalensis or “Neanderthal Man” (also H. s. neanderthalensis, or “Wiseman from Neander Valley”) and H. sapiens or “Astute Man” (also H. s. sapiens, or “Astute Wiseman”), did not become distinguishable from H. erectus, “Upright Man” (also H. s. erectus or “Upright Wiseman” according to the multi-regional hypothesis of human origins[*], though the concept of “paleospecies” allows H. erectus to remain a valid taxon even assuming the multi-regional hypothesis is correct[*]), or H. ergaster, “Working Man” (an early African variant of H. erectus believed by some to be a distinct species and suggested to be the progenitor of H. sapiens, leaving the Eurasian, Indonesian, and perhaps later African H. erectus as an evolutionary side-branch, with the Asian H. erectus pekinensis or “Peking Man” possibly descended from H. habilis or “Handy Man” through H. georgicus or “Georgia Man”, also identified as H. erectus georgicus or “Upright Man from Georgia”, instead of through H. ergaster; also H. s. erectus by the multi-regional hypothesis for H. (s.) sapiens’ origin), until approximately 1.2 M.Y.A., and did not become extinct until around 800,000 B.C.E. and that Homo heidelbergensis or “Heidelberg Man” (also H. s. heidelbergensis, “Wiseman from Heidelberg”, or H. s. paleohungaricus, “Wiseman from Ancient Hungary”), the likely progenitor of H. neanderthalensis, was not distinguishable from H. antecessor, if ever, until H. neanderthalensis, likely negating H. antecessor as the common ancestor of H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens should this be true -- yet known only from a single skullcap, did not appear until sometime between eight hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand years ago; that H. rhodesiensis or “Rhodesian Man” (also H. s. arcaicus, “Archaic Wiseman”, or H. s. rhodesiensis, “Wiseman from Rhodesia”; considered by some as belonging to the species H. heidelbergensis) was indistinguishable from H. antecessor until 600,000 B.C.E., and did not succumb to extinction until 125,000 B.C.E.; that H. s. idaltu, “Elder Wiseman” or “Firstborn Wiseman”, doesn’t appear in the fossil record until approximately 154,000-160,000 B.C.E.; that anatomically modern H. s. sapiens doesn’t appear in the fossil record until about 150,000 B.C.E. in Ethiopia (the ancestor of all today’s H. s. sapiens according to the single recent African origin hypothesis); that the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of today’s H. s. sapientes, MT-MRCA (“Mitochondrial Eve”), lived near the end of the Middle Pleistocene approximately 140,000 B.P.; that the most recent common patrilineal ancestor of all known extant humans, Y-MRCA (“Y-chromosome Adam”), didn’t live until the Late Pleistocene roughly 60,000 B.P.; that the so-called “Great Leap Forward” or “Pleistocene Revolution”, often associated with an apparent mutation in the FOXP2 gene in East Africa sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 B.P. and considered by many as responsible for the advent of cultural modernity, albeit seen only as a rapid expansion of modern behavior by supporters of the continuity hypothesis, who view this apparent technological revolution merely as reflective of a trade revolution which allowed the frondescence of developing technologies and behaviors into other human cultures, did not occur until about fifty thousand years ago; and that the SLC24A5 mutation resulting in the light skin adaptation to the cool European climate of modern Caucasian humans did not occur until 12,000-6000 B.P. (a separate mutation of the MCR1 gene gave the Neanderthals pale skin and red hair, likely also in adaptation to the European environment, although the timing of this mutation has not been dated and may have originated as early as in Heidelberg Man, who colonized Europe thousands of years before his Neanderthal descendants). The very existence of such fossils and artifacts as those from the Pedersen and Xanthopoulos ruins four hundred and fifty thousand years ago, therefore, was both revolutionary and devastating. The scientists given the privilege of studying these materials proceeded on proverbial eggshells, lest somehow it all be proven some masterfully concocted hoax that would forever soil their reputations and rob them of their careers.
Upon return of the radiometric dating results, the scientists who studied the remains and artifacts unearthed from the Pedersen and Xanthopolous ruins published preliminary papers throughout June and September detailing their findings, and follow-up papers subsequent to the scientists who studied the materials from each ruin being made aware of the other ruin’s existence between September and the end of December, with further findings published as late as February of 2004 C.E.
The Borean Man was given the binomen Homo borealis, and the trinomen Homo sapiens borealis.
VII. Physical Characteristics
Osteologically determinable features:
Cranio-skeletal:
? Adult highth range (when unaffected by malnutrition or pathology) averaging around 0.00m/00cm (4’11”) ~ 0.00m/00cm (5’7”) for females and about 0.00m/00cm (5’9”) ~ 0.00m/00cm (6’6”) for males.
? Brain to lean body mass (LBM) ratio.
? Encephalization quotient (EQ). Compare to EQ 4.15 for the Jinniushan specimen, EQ 0.00 for the average modern male and EQ 0.00 for the average modern female.Cranial (& mandibular):
? High cranial vault lacking a BLANK.
? Cranial capacity ranging approximately 1350cm3 ~ 1850cm3 with an average of about 1600cm3 for females and around 1650cm3 for males .
? Slight sagittal crest in males
? Dental formula for males:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 0
And for females:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 0
? Blah.
Post-cranial:
? Body mass
? Relative limb length
? Ischiopubic index -- the [length of the superior pubic ramus / highth of the ischial bone] × 100 -- averages 000.0 in males and 000.0 in females .
? Pelvic inlet index
? Iliac brim index
? Platypelloid shapeThrough the art and translated literature of the Borean Man we learn that this people possessed many other features previously thought unique to modern humans, which have historically been presumed to have appeared relatively recently in hominin evolution. These include: noticeable whites in the eyes, iris pigments varying noticeably between persons, smaller “vellus” hairs covering the body and resulting in a “naked” appearance, distinct patches of androgenic hair on males comparable to that of modern Mediterranean men,
Sexually dimorphic characteristics within Homo sapiens borealis included more robust males of larger stature and denser, bulkier musculature than typical of today’s male H. s. sapiens, and often had somewhat more pronounced facial features. Females of the subspecies possessed very often greatly exaggerated feminine characteristics as compared to anatomically modern H. sapiens, were more gracile in postcranial morphology than modern H. sapiens, with thinner, stronger limb bones, leaner bodies with narrower ribcages, and proportionately longer legs, while recoverable artwork from the period displays women with tauter waists, more rounded and muscular haunches, and chests beset with generally much larger, far rounder and more uplifted breasts than naturally found among modern female H. s. sapientes (although some modern females are able to achieve this look via cosmetic surgery), and were more neotonous in craniodental morphology than today’s women.
Both sexes were known, according to recoverable artwork from the period, to have color morphs similar to those of modern Caucasians, and presumably to those of yesteryear’s Neanderthal people, as necessitated by the conditions of their environment: the southernmost populations of the Borean people tended toward dark brown, dark red, and black hair pigmentation, tan to olive skin tones and very rarely freckles, with irises generally brown but occasionally green, violet, burgundy, red, or purple, whilst the more northerly populations tended toward light brown, fiery red, auburn, strawberry blonde, golden blonde, sandy blonde, platinum blonde, or fallow hair, or even white or “blue” (silvery grey) hair in youth, with skin pigmentation fair and far more often freckled than the darker southern morph or rarely even spotted, and with eyes of blue, green, teal, hazel, brown, yellow, grey, violet, or occasionally red or purple. Apparently there also existed an even more southerly and more darkly-skinned morph of H. s. borealis, or perhaps a distinct cline or subspecies (“H. sapiens australis”) that, though remaining to date undiscernible from other color morphs in the fossil record, features in the known Borean literature and was reputed to live south of the “Great Sea” (also referred to nearly as often as the “Thirteen Seas”), which is contextually clearly discernible within the Borean literature as a reference to the Mediterranean Sea, mostly concentrated around an area presumed to be the Nile delta region but remarked to also be more lightly scattered across all of the southern Mediterranean basin as well, aside from a few areas indicated by Borean myth and folklore to have been inhabited by various sorts of carnivorous Lizard-Men and other monstrous, often at least somewhat reptilian, creatures.
The implication of this discovery upon traditional views of recent hominin evolution (from Homo erectus, or “Upright Man”, onward) is a complete re-evaluation not only of how our own subspecies, H. sapiens sapiens, came to be the only surviving hominine and eventually the most technologically advanced of all hominid species, but more specifically, how the adaptation of the pale-skinned European morphs of modern humans to the frigid climes of Europe occurred, and how the still earlier, more widely relevant adaptation of their proto-Semitic relatives to the cradle of civilization took place, as well as a radical re-assessment of the once-presumed exclusive import of the former upon the latter, and the nature, depending upon the extent to which the earlier adaptation was necessary for the latter to in some form occur, of the socio-biological mechanism by which this happened.
Ogre: Large, robust morph of H. neanderthalensis. Sagittal crest anchoring the massive temporalis muscles used in mastication,.
Ensconce, dredge, beseech, tepid, toothsome, foment, trite, refectory, phthisical, spet, sennet, temerity, votive offering, spathe & spadix, beleaguer.
“Ruins are of great importance to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, whether they were once individual fortifications, places of worship, houses and utility buildings, or entire villages, towns and cities. Many ruins have become UNESCO World Heritage Sites in recent years, to identify and preserve them as areas of outstanding value to humanity. [...] Cities have been also been ruined, and some occasionally lost entirely, to natural disasters. The ancient city of Pompeii was completely lost during a volcanic eruption in the 1st century CE, its uncovered ruins now preserved as a World Heritage Site. The city of Lisbon was totally destroyed in 1755 by a massive earthquake and tsunami, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake left the city in almost complete ruin.” (Van Laren)
This variant human subspecies (or species), tentatively dubbed either H. s. borealis (“Astute Man of the North”) or simply H. borealis (“North Man”), referred to less formally though less controversially as the “Borean Man”, was upon initial discovery misidentified on the basis of the apparent level of technological development and the existence of a scribed language as an ancient, atypically advanced civilization of our own subspecies, H. s. sapiens (“Astute Wise Man”), from the Boreal Holocene epoch (hence, considering also the continent of its discovery, the nickname “Borean Man” and later binomen Homo borealis or the trinomen Homo sapiens borealis), which even under this misconception shocked anthropologists of every discipline, however it was shortly observed and authenticated that both objective geological and radio-isotopic evidence and internal evidence glossed from recoverable art and literature from this civilization clearly place it within the Middle Pleistocene epoch, approximately 450,000 B.C.E., with the genesis of the Borean Man no fewer than five-hundred thousand years ago, approximately coincident with the first appearance in the fossil record of traits distinguishing the earliest ancestors of H. s. neanderthalensis or H. neanderthalensis (“Astute Man from Neander Valley” or “Neanderthal Man”, respectively), discernable from H. s. heidelbergensis or H. heidelbergensis (respectively either “Astute Man of Heidelberg” or simply “Heidelberg Man”), about three-hundred thousand years after the earliest proposed date for the existence of H. s. cepranensis or H. cepranensis, roughly one-hundred thousand years after the appearance H. s. heidelbegensis itself along with the earliest appearance of H. s. acraicus, or H. (s.) rhodesiensis from H. s. antecessor or H. three-hundred and forty thousand years before the earliest traits distinguishing H. s. idaltu (“First-born Astute Man”), also known as “Herto Man”, the ancestors of H. s. sapiens, around 160,000 B.C.E., from H. s. rhodesiensis or H. rhodesiensis (“Ancestral Astute Man” or just “Ancestral Man”, respectively), fully three-hundred and fifty years before the first appearance in the fossil record of anatomically modern H. s. sapiens approximately one-hundred and fifty thousand years ago in Ethiopia (according to the “Out of Africa” theory, the ancestor of all anatomically modern H. s. sapientes), three-hundred and sixty thousand years prior the genetically demonstrable time of the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of all known extant humans, MT-MRCA (“Mitochondrial Eve”), near the end of the Middle Pleistocene approximately one-hundred and forty thousand years ago, and four-hundred and forty thousand years before the most recent common patrilineal ancestor of all known extant humans, Y-MRCA (“Y-chromosome Adam”), in the Late Pleistocene roughly sixty thousand years ago.
The previously gradual image the fossil record had given us of Pleistocene hominine evolution, despite geographical, chronological, technological, and morphological overlapping of Homo erectus with Archaic H. sapiens in the Early Pleistocene and gaps in said overlap allowing for the “Out of Africa” theory to conflict with the “Multi-regional” theory of homogenesis, seemed to logistically preclude the possibility of a hominine so significantly more advanced than his contemporaries having so recently existed, and no conjectured explanation for this phenomenon was without far-reaching implications that would forever change mainstream views surrounding our species’ prehistory. Fossil evidence depicting the gradual technological and morphological transition of anatomically modern humans from Archaic H. sapiens such as H. s. idaltu, and of H. s. idaltu from H. s. antecessor, occurred seamlessly enough in fossil record terms that such an early example of so similar a hominid to today’s extant H. s. sapiens could in no way possibly be attributed to an earlier date for the appearance of anatomically modern H. sapiens by either the “Out of Africa” or “Multi-regional” theory of homogenesis, but attributable instead only to the earlier emergence of a superficially nearly identic yet distinct lineage, indicating this subspecies, having appeared too early to be descendant from H. s. idaltu and bearing traits inconsistent with delineation out of the evolution of H. s. neanderthalensis from H. s. antecessor via H. s. heidelbergensis, to be a separately diverged from an ancestor very probably no more recent than the aforementioned H. s. antecessor or, perhaps more likely still, an even earlier subspecies (or species, discussed later), whilst osteological and archeological evidence nevertheless demonstrate a remarkable and startlingly anachronistic similarity to fully modern humans -- though expressing an impressively greater degree of sexual dimorphism and, evidently, a somewhat wider range of color morphs.