Goldfoot Genealogy

I have been looking over the results of the 23and me dna testing of my whole genome. It just came in today, earlier than I had expected. I have now been given a list of 985 relatives who share some dna with me. I've already heard from the one who matches me with the highest %. This is so exciting. Now we just have to figure out where we are connected.

Besides finding people who are connected, the main reason so many take this test with 23 and Me is to get their health report. A lot of people are not interested in their family trees, sadly. It is amazing to me how the science shows why I've had certain problems, but it also told me that I have good reason to think I can live to 100 years.

We can contact 5 people each day and hope for a reply. That would make it 35 in a week if I did this every day or about 140 per month. I have a lot of messages to send out in the next 7 months.

Labels: 23 and Me, dna, health

Hand axes, scrapers and other tools were found at Jebel Faya, Sharjah Emirate of United Arab Emirates show that they were made by people from East Africa. Anthony Marks from Southern Methodist U. in Dallas made this statement. It shows that people like you and me took an unknown till now route between 100,000 and 125,000 years ago. This was in the Journal Science. They call this the southern route and happened much earlier than thought. At the time, Saudi Arabia had a wonderful climate of lots of rain and would have been a grassland with lots of animals for hunting. The sea levels were lower. The point at the southern end of the Red Sea would have separated Africa and Arabia by only a few miles which would have been crossed with rafts or boats. My personal feeling is that our ancestors followed animals in their hunting who led them this way. They would have then taken their families on this trail and worked their way into the Middle East.

What has been known was that about 60,000 years ago man left Africa and came to other parts of the world. Evidence showed that they spread out along the Nile River valley and into the Middle East. at that time. This is known as the northern route.

There were not many routes leading out of Africa. The choices were:
1. Take the Sinai north of the Red Sea
2. Cross the straits at the south end of the Red Sea
This is from Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the Center for Scientific Archaeology of Eberhard-Karls U. in Tuebingen, Germany.

This was announced today when the Today TV show showed a male gorilla who walks upright like a human. His father walked upright at times. This son prefers to do it all the time. It's just amazing. I wonder if this is what happened with mankind. Through a mutation of genes, one walked upright and liked it.

From 230,000 up till just 30,000 years ago there was another kind of human on earth. He was called Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. He was living at the end of the Ice Age and was fit for cold living with a body about 5'5" tall, short arms and legs. Amazingly, his brain was bigger than ours but in a more oval shape whereas ours is rounded. He made tools with pointed tips and even buried his dead, so there was some intelligence here.

Fossils have been found of species that are similar to humans that were alive 5.8 million years ago. It's taken a long time to perfect Homo Sapiens (us). We were quite slow developing tools. In fact, it took us thousands of years. It's amazing being our rate of learning has increased by leaps and bounds just in the last 100 years. My mother was born in 1913 and saw a time period where she rode in a Model T Ford up to a 1989 Cadillac DeVille and flew in a jet while watching movies. She just missed the slim line TV era and had to watch on the one I am still using. From World War I to seeing the Twin Towers Fall covers a lot of tools using in wartime. Where will we go from here?

Resource: Oregonian 1/28/2011 page A7: Humans may have taken earlier exit from Africa.
https://www.msu.edu/~robin400/neanderthalensis.html

Labels: East Africa, Homo Sapiens Neaderthalensis, humans, science, tools Saudi Arabia