Evidence for Prehistoric Genetics—Were Our Domesticated Foods Deliberately Engineered 10,000 Years Ago?
Product ID: LK6
Report Topics:
- The genetic creation of modern wheat was above and beyond mere chance, and had to have been performed by direct human intervention
- Evidence most other modern foods and domesticated animals also underwent significant genetic alterations
- Hybrid manipulations and cross-breedings occurred world-wide and during the exact same time period ten millennia ago
- Modern scientists are unable to reproduce the same global hybridizations which took place during the Neolithc Age
- Report Update—Bovine Genome Project Reveals Human Genetic Manipulations 10,000 Years Old
- Report Update—Was There an Earlier Genetic Convergence?
Full Report:
The evidence for genetic research in antiquity can be seen in the origins of many of today’s grains. Wheat, for example, mysteriously appeared at precisely the same moment as the sudden explosion of agriculture in Armenia and Anatolia (modern Turkey) circa 8000 B.C.E.. At that time, wheat was only a wild grass, but as a result of not one but three “genetic accidents”— as conservative historians call them—the wild wheat grass was suddenly transformed into a highly nutritional domesticated source of food.
First, the wild wheat was crossed with a natural goat grass, and the fourteen chromosomes of the one were combined with the fourteen of the other to produce a new, plumper plant called emmer, with twenty-eight chromosomes. Then, within a very short time, the emmer hybrid was crossed again with another goat grass to create a still larger strain of forty-two chromosomes.
Next and last, a third change took place. One of the forty-two chromosomes underwent a mutational alteration. Had the mutation of that specific chromosome not occurred, the agricultural wheat that we know today, and which sustained the first Armenian farmers and their successors, would have been non-existent. That these genetic combinations and alterations came about by pure “accident” in a relatively short period of time strains the laws of probability to the very limits.
As if this were not enough, however, still another “propitious” element entered into the picture. Unlike its wild grass predecessors, the individual grain seeds of wheat are too heavy to be borne on the wind, in order to be scattered and regenerate. The scattering of wheat must be done artificially in order for the plant to survive—otherwise it would quickly become extinct.
As science historian Jacob Bronowski put it, “through a happy conjunction of natural and human events,” humankind supposedly just happened upon the scene, discovered the “accidental” hybrid plant of wheat, was somehow convinced that of all the estimated 195,000 plant species to be found in the Middle East this was the one worth domesticating, and aided in its propagation at a critical moment by personally scattering its seeds and cultivating it.
Truly, this is stretching chance to the nth degree. It is far more likely that wheat was instead a product of a targeted prehistoric development, from the very beginning of its genetic creation. This of course presupposes that the first Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers somehow possessed a knowledge of genetics and Mendelian crossbreeding comparable if not superior to ours today.
If wheat had been the only plant to have undergone dramatic chromosomal changes, this would have been miraculous enough. But the very same time frame when wheat appeared also witnessed many other sudden botanical mutations all over the world. The chromosomes of bananas and apples were multiplied by factors of two and three, while peanuts, potatoes and tobacco, among others, were expanded by factors of four. Sugar cane was inexplicably altered from a 10–chromosome ancestor to its 80–chromosome complexity it has today.
Every indication points to major genetic experimentations having taken place globally at a specific point in prehistoric time.
Researchers of the development of modern agriculture admit concerning the sudden advent of corn and other modern nutritional grains, that thousands of generations of genetic selection would have been necessary to achieve even a modest degree of such conspicuous sophistication.
Yet the lengthy time periods in which a very prolonged process was required purely by natural selection are nowhere to be found. There are no explanations for how these miraculous botanical creations came about by themselves, unless the process was not a natural selection but by deliberate artificial manipulations.
Karl F. Kohlenberg, in his study of the history of corn development, remarked concerning its human dependence:
“What distinguishes the maize plant from all other types of grain is its biological helplessness. Left to itself, it would very quickly die out. Its seeds sit so firmly beneath the husk that no wind could scatter them. Should a forgotten maize ear fall to the ground, though the seeds may produce hundreds of seedlings, they nevertheless grow in such thick clumps that none of them is able to develop normally.”
Again, like wheat, the genetic alteration of corn into its present form, and the advent of human farmers to help propagate it at a critical time in its “evolution,” could not have been only a “fortuitous event.”
The tremendous difficulty in actually producing a successful genetic hybrid has been demonstrated by the Botanical Gardens of St. Petersburg, Russia where, since 1837, botanists have tried to cultivate a wild form of rye into a new form for domestication. So far the results have proven very disappointing, and the wild rye’s characteristic stalk fragility, smallness of its grains, and the overall thickness of its glumes and rachises—husks and stems—stubbornly remain. If such obstacles are difficult for modern experts to overcome, how did the Neolithic farmers of ten thousand years ago do it, with the domesticated grains they developed that have come down to us today?
Wheat and other cereals were initially produced in the Middle East, while corn was first grown in the New World. Both these areas were also centers for a remarkable number of other “highly evolved” foods. In the Middle East, the beginnings of farming saw the sudden advent of millet, spelt, flax, grapes, apples, pears, olives, lentils, peas, figs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts and a host of botanical plants.
In exactly the same time period, the New World saw the development of a wide variety of gourds, squash, peppers, beans, potatoes and cotton. In some cases, there appears to have been an active intercourse of genetic materials between the two areas.
As one example, the earliest known variety of cotton in the Americas contained thirteen small chromosomes, while its Old World counterpart—first cultivated in India—has thirteen large chromosomes. Remains of cotton excavated from the earliest levels of Huaca Prieta in Peru, however, dating to about 2500 B.C.E., was found to possess thirteen small and thirteen large chromosomes. In other words, the Peruvian cotton was a hybrid between the Eastern and Western cotton.
Orthodox historians have sought to explain this hybridization in natural, “accidental” terms, but without much success. The cotton plant is too delicate, either in the blossom or seed state, to have been simply carried by sea currents, bird migration or wind from one Hemisphere to the other. And explaining the transportation of the Old World cotton to Peru is only half the problem. The other half involves the propagation of the two forms into a common strain.
Not only plants, but animals too may have been the product of genetic manipulation and selected breeding. It is noteworthy that in the same era as the advent of highly developed grains and fruits in the early Middle East, there also appeared the domesticated dog, horse, sheep, goat, ram, pig and cattle.
About the same time, in the Far East, along with the advent of genetically improved rice plants and soybeans, came domesticated ducks, chickens and water buffalo.
In India, again during the same prehistoric period, the proto-Harappan culture of the Indus river valley were also performing experimentation. The wheat used by the Harappans was very advanced. It is still grown in the Punjab today, even though surrounding areas cultivate an inferior strain. The same can be seen in their animal husbandry. Zoologists examining Harappan seal impressions and other artwork have noted the recurrence of pictures of highly specialized hybrid cattle which no longer exist. The Harappans also carefully bred dogs and sheep, and domesticated the elephant, and perhaps even the rhinoceros—a feat considered nearly impossible today.
With the domestication of animals we face a whole new level of problems beyond that of the domestication of mere plants. To bring a wolf cub into a human community to become a dog, or to corral a wild auroch calf and transform it into a milk-producing animal, not only involves a gradual change in form, but also a change in its very nature, a complete negation of its hard-wired instincts and its transmutation into a docile creature. This would have involved genetic manipulation of a far more sophisticated nature, dealing with the genes controlling basic behavior.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, Russian botanist Nicolai Vavilov established 400 plant research institutes across the Soviet Union and helped launch dozens of expeditions world-wide in an attempt to collect 50,000 wild specimens with flora germoplasm of original seed stock. Through his extensive research work, Vavilov was the first to realize that most of today’s major crops had in fact originated from eight major and several minor very specific global centers, and all of them during a certain specific period in the past. Later, in 1971, another scientist, Jack Harlan, updated Vavilov’s work, and in 1992 further extended his own research by proposing the existence of what he called global biomes, or areas with both flora and fauna forms that had been subjected to specific domestication in the distant past.
Building on all this, the most recent investigations have found the correlated time frames, locations and types of plant and animal manipulations to be very revealing. Here is a summary of the most important of these findings:
*8000 B.C.E.—Turkey, Central Asia—wheat, barley, rye, flax, oats
*8000 B.C.E.—Iran, Syria, Israel—chickpeas, lentils, figs, dates, grapes, lettuce, almonds, olives, carrots
*7500 B.C.E.—South America—beans, squash, cassava
*7000 B.C.E.—Southeast Asia, New Guinea—taro root, peas, mung beans, citrus fruits, bananas, coconuts, sugarcane
*7000 B.C.E.—Syria—sheep, goats
*7000 B.C.E.—China—rice, buckwheat, millet, soybeans, cabbage
*6500 B.C.E.—India—cucumbers, eggplant, pigeon peas, Asian cotton
*6500 B.C.E.—Turkey—pigs, cattle
*6000 B.C.E.—Peru—corn, potatoes, peanuts, New World cotton
*6000 B.C.E.—Central America—maize, squash, beans, lima beans, peppers, tomatoes
*6000 B.C.E.—Africa—sorghum, cowpeas, yams, watermelon, okra
What is truly remarkable is that, even though these prehistoric productive habitats are spread out over wide distances across the world, all their originating plant and animal groups were created by, and became totally dependent upon, the same direct intervening hand of human agriculturalists, and within the same short perod of only two millennia.
Of greatest significance, this virtual explosion of radically different sustainable living forms that appeared everywhere in the early Neolithic period had no known precedent, and since that distant time has never been repeated, even with all of today’s biochemical and genetic engineering.
Such revelations beg the questions, were these prehistoric regions chosen and prepared beforehand on purpose and by design? And were the agricultural manipulations which took place within them in the exact same era deliberately planned and carried out by a single world-wide group of unknown genetic pioneers, whose wisdom ten thousand years ago was far superior to ours today?
Report Update—Bovine Genome Project Reveals Human Genetic Manipulations 10,000 Years Old
[From the Washington Post, Tuesday, April 28, 2009, David Brown, “Cow’s DNA Shows Human Influence”]
“A team of hundreds of scientists working in more than a dozen countries Thursday published the entire DNA message—the genome—of an 8-year-old female Herford living at an experimental farm in Montana
.
“Hidden in her roughly 22,000 genes are hints of how natural selection sculpted the bovine body and personality over the past 60 million years and how man greatly enhanced the job over the past 10,000.
“’Are there signatures of the human hand in the cattle genome? The answer is plainly and clearly yes,’ said Harris Lewin for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of one of three papers on the cow genome appearing in the journal Science.
“The cow genome is the first of a livestock animal to be sequenced.”
[Special note—what other synchronistic prehistoric genetic manipulations will scientists discover once they sequence other livestock species?]
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
Report Update—Was There an Earlier Genetic Convergence?
In November, 2009, geneticists from around the world announced that, after an intensive four-year collaboration, they had finished mapping the complete genome for corn, and released over a dozen scientific papers giving their results.
What these studies revealed is that at various stages in corn’s past there had been many very unusual “gene actions” and “evolutionary mechanics” which some investigators are finding most difficult to explain without presupposing intelligent manipulation.
The genome sequencing has shown that an astounding 85 percent of corn’s 32,000 genes are made up of “transposable elements”—also dubbed “jumping genes”—that point to evidence of having been moved around in corn’s 10 chromosomes during its history, most of these occurring about 10,000 years ago.
The fact that not one of these subtle transmutations resulted in a fatal genetic disruption that would have inevitably led to the extinction of the ancient corn plant—but instead created significant positive reinforcements to its continued thriving and dissemination far above and beyond what natural selective chances would have allowed for—is potent evidence that someone long ago was deliberately manipulating the end-product.
Yet there are also indications found that another part of corn’s developmental process may have seen even earlier intelligent intercessions. About 5 million years ago, for example, there suddenly occurred a key fusion of two related ancestral species that gave the new combinant corn a huge array of new genetic potentialities for increased survival and adaptation.
Significantly, this very same fusion process also took place in roughly the same time period as can be detected in many other plants, certain mammals the descendants of which were eventually domesticated, and even within a number of early hominids.
In other words, just as there had been a convergence of genetic changes circa 10,000 years ago that gave birth to our present-day domesticated food supply, had there likewise been a similar yet much earlier convergence of genetic manipulations 5 million years ago?
Various out-of-place archaeological and paleontological discoveries reveal that there certainly existed some form of intelligent human life at such a remote period.
Had these unknown people also been responsible for their own type of genetic husbandry and alterations among the flora and fauna of that distant age?
Continued genome mapping and further exploration of all unexplained genetic sequencing in a wider variety of species, both living and extinct, will one day give us all the answers we seek.
[Copyright 2010. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
