[Avodah] Proto-Semitic?

[Ira Tick]

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 8:04 AM, kennethgmiller at juno.com <
kennethgmiller at juno.com> wrote:

> I have no problem with this, especially since you were careful to use the
> word "seems", which suggests that you're willing to reconsider your position
> if new evidence appears.
>
> > those parts of the world with the oldest human remains -
> > in Africa, not the Levant.
>
> This is a separate point, and I suggest everyone keep their mind open to
> the possibility that not all the evidence is yet in. Wikipedia's article
> "List of human evolution fossils", for example, does not show any
> discoveries prior to 1848. Who knows what will be found in the next hundred
> or two hundred years?
>
> Akiva Miller


R Akiva ( i love typing that! ),

It's interesting that you mention lack of fossil discoveries *before *a
certain date in history... I'm not sure how that's relevant, except to show
that with time and tech, more fossils can be found.  I for one like to think
in terms of patterns, and if the pattern of discovery continues, we will
simply find more evidence that modern human populations dispersed (no pun
intended) from sub-Saharan Africa.  Perhaps the descendants of Shem, if he
walked the earth much as you or I do, had a common language very similar to
Hebrew, and they dispersed more recently throughout the Levant from the
Black Sea, where we know a catastrophic flood destroyed thousands of square
miles of coastal civilization around 5000 years ago.  I've never studied
what language group was supposedly spoken by those peoples around the Black
Sea at that time, but maybe someone else has...

Maybe the people of ancient, really ancient Bavel contained a large group of
emigres from further North?  Certainly historians claim that Semites
originated not from the Arabian Desert, but from somewhere near Syria.
Maybe they came there from the further north.  One problem with this is that
eastern Black Sea peoples are Caucasians, not Mediterraneans and many of
them are, uh, white or only slightly dark skinned...  I would guess that
Moses looked more like a Yemenite or an Arab, so what did Noah or Avraham
look like?  Hopefully, no one uses my hypotheses as an affirmation of the
"Jesus Christ Superstar" Nordic Goldylocks look for any biblical figure...

Maybe, Noah and Avraham were from orginially (antedeluvian) from Ufra in
Turkey, whose ancient people Victorian scholars identified with
Arpachshad... (Truthfully, this is when it becomes easier to simply separate
Avraham from Noah historically, leaving Noah as a mythic figure, replacing
Adam as the "Father of Mankind" in the Torah's description of the 70
original nations of humanity and how people like Shem, Ever, Nimrod, etc
distinguished themselves from all people of all nations for their good or
evil works.  From then on, it becomes easier to let Nimrod, Shem, and
Avraham play their respective roles together in the same time period, freed
from attachement to the Flood or the Dispersion.  Listen to R Jeremy
Wieder's shiur on literal and non-literal interpretation of Torah from
YUTorah.org)

As for Adam until Noah, I don't know and wouldn't guess, but for me, a
literal discussion of Adam and Eve is much less pertinent for a Torah view
of history than a literal discussion of the Dispersion, which as discussed
above, happened in the time of Avraham Avinu, who I very much like to think
of as a historical figure, if you catch my drift.  (Don't think people
haven't had to defend the historicity of Avraham until modern times.  R
Berel Wein's book "Herald of Destiny" cites some ShU"T of the Rashba wherein
he castigates Jewish students of philosophy and history for, among other
things, trying to deny the existence of the Avos and claiming that only a
belief in Moshe Rabbeinu was required dogma.)

For a good introduction to modern science's theory on early human migration,
read the first chapters of Jared Diamond's excellent book "Guns, Germs, and
Steel."  You can watch the National Geographic DVD if you want instead, but
then you miss Diamond's debunking of the so-called "pathetic inaccuracy" of
Carbon-dating.  In the book, Diamond goes through all of the science and
deduction involved in dating of fossils, etc, including the different
methods of Carbon-14 dating and their discrepancies and limitations.  He
convinced me that there is no vast conspiracy on the part of scientists
regarding fossil dating, and that they have a pretty good, if rough, idea of
when humanity got to everywhere and with what basic patterns of travel out
of africa.  The major problems are Polynesia and the Americas, because some
really old fossils were found in South America, older than the Bering Strait
Ice Brigde.  (Please tell me somebody knows what I'm talking about.)  Not to
say that the Out-of-Africa hypothesis is proven, but its a start.

BTW, I just saw on Wikipedia that apparently the Muslims built a Mosque in
Ufra over the supposed site of the birthplace of Abraham!  Cool huh.  It's
also a neat coincidence that carbon-14 has a half life of 5700 years, for
those who want to think that's some kind of hint to its 20th century
discoverers... Of course, stray amounts of carbon-14 in a fossil imply that
there was a lot more carbon-14 in it hundreds of thousands of years ago.
(If you already don't like my view of natural history or my sense of humor,
it gets worse...I love the fact that my dog's name is Lucy, just like the
first major fossil discovery of *Australopithecus afarensis*, perhaps the
earliest "human ancestor" according to modern science, though the dog is
named after Lucy from *Peanuts*.  I also love the fact that the most
complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex, at the Field Museum in my very own
Chicago, is named Sue, sort of like the Johnny Cash song...then again,
Johnny Cash wrote a song about a man named "Ira" too)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20080902/498633d9/attachment-0002.htm>