The origins of humanity are a regular topic of debate in much of the world. Here, Steven Keith considers Christian and Hindu texts, and 'haplogroups’ as the basis for a less well-known argument on the origins of cultures and civilizations in the world.
You can read Steven’s article on the origins of Scotland here, and the origins of the Picts, Gaels and Scots here.
A 18th century depiction of Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism.
From the creation of Adam, until the birth of Noah (as a significant proportion of the world believes), there are eleven generations of his line; Adam, Cain and his brother, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Cainain, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah and Lamech, before we arrive at Noah, born, it is written and said, in 3300 BC. Although there are documented eleven generations, born between the dawn of civilization and the great flood (believed to have been an historical event by almost the entire world’s population) that would drown every living creation, other than Noah, his three sons and their wives, there are twelve individuals named specifically; Cain always being mentioned together with his sibling, Abel.
So, as the story goes, for the first score of centuries since this perfect creation, by an omnipotent creator, these twelve men lived longer lives than any of their contemporaries managed to do on this infant earth and they possessed extraordinary, superhuman powers, that each had inherited as a consequence of their blood connection to the original manifestation of human consciousness, their ancestor, Adam. Were these men the guides for the burgeoning human population who had been blessed by a birth in a bountiful and boundless world?
The Adityas
May I suggest that it is not a coincidence, that from one of the Vedic perspectives, according to the Vishnu Puranaspecifically, there were twelve Adityasor divine, holy men, who were born from the womb of the Goddess,Aditi, the wife of Kasyapa, the son ofMarichi, (son of Brahma), and his wife, Kala,and from their twelve sons grew the human race. Grew civilizations. In Book 3, Chapter 134, verse 18 of the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, Ashtavakra writes, ‘and twelve, according to the learned, is the number of the Adityas.’
To complete this triumvirate of twelves, are the haplogroups (human genetic family groupings) beginning with ‘A’, and running alphabetically (though not always chronologically), through until, ‘L’. At group ‘K’, the most recent, there was a fracturing, the very same splintering that our friends from both the ancient Hebrew and Hindu traditions had taught had happened in the long forgotten past, when the earth was still being populated by migrating clans of families, forging new nations and creating cultures that would over time develop into civilizations, some of which would shine for thousands of years as material entities and indeed, some of them continue to influence our existences as individuals and as civilizations today.
Could not these twelve individuals, irrespective of their whether their names be spelled and pronounced according to the Hebrew or the Hindu tradition, correspond to the twelve haplogroups, each emerging one after the other, until clade ‘L’ split from it’s sibling, ‘K’, leaving it alone, the earth already having been peopled by the migratory nature of the human ‘beast’?
The Groups
Group A emerged as an outburst of consciousness, allowing group BT to emerge later as it’s sibling. Two initials together (unlike the other clades, in which, as a rule, each capital letter represents a particular genetic line) that contained the necessary genetic information for all the mutations that would follow over time. Similarly, in the line of relatives that descended from Adam to Noah, only Cain and Abel, the second generation, are mentioned together as a pair. Those men who came after, are mentioned alone, as individuals, as themselves, irrespective of whether or not they had any brothers. Like BT.
From BT came B, before mutating (M168) to give group CT. All the haplogroups that emerged after B retain the evidence of this mutation that occurred some 65,000 years ago. Group B had emerged in central Africa about eighty thousand years ago and spread across the continent, sharing it with men carrying the genetic information that we associate with group A. Today the B lineage is found in significant proportions almost exclusively among the men of the Pygmy tribes of the Congo rainforest in tropical Africa. These people today, are still dominated by the Bantu African (E) population, who overwhelmed and displaced them myriad years previously and who continue to surround their forest home with the pasture necessary for the livestock that remains the mainstay of their economies and societies.
There is next to no trace of group B outside of Africa. They seemed to have been fixed to the land that they worked, unlike group C that emerged around 60,000 years before our present age, whose men would become the aboriginal Australian clans upon reaching that continent, after moving along the coastline of the Arabian, Indian and Malaysian peninsulas, as well as reaching and first populating the new world. They arrived there so early that Australia had not yet developed as the island continent that we know today. The ‘C’s’ have left their genetic imprint all along their journey, their clade still significantly represented in communities throughout the Middle East, the subcontinent and South-East Asia. It suggests that they migrated, looked for and found places to settle and develop. Along the way, Clade D had arrived on what today are known to us as the archipelagos of Japan and the Andaman Islands, each of which may have been connected, or at least partially so, to the Asian mainland at that time.
Group D had also arrived on the plateau of Tibet, an unlikely destination for anyone looking for lands with hospitable environmental conditions, upon which they could settle. One clade in three distinct groups, far apart from each other geographically and linguistically, and each community survives to this day in relative isolation, genetically speaking. The ancient indigenous Aino people of Japan (and southern Russia) and the indigenous people of Tibet and the Andaman Islands have each retained their cultural heritage to some degree, but more importantly, the knowledge of the great antiquity of their ancient ancestors. People and their places still visited today by anthropologists and the like, all trying to unravel and decode their deeply held knowledge. The immediate sibling of the Ds are the E group. They spread south through Africa, conquering all before them and seeding almost all of her with their genetic sequences and displacing the A and B groups that had previously experienced that massive continent by themselves. Rather like the Aryan tribes are assumed to have done many millennia later. Clade F would give rise to the group GHIJK approximately 50,000 thousand years before present. At the point of the emergence of F, there was a mutation (M89) that is carried by all men who would follow until today.
The Groups’ Impact on the World
Could it be that these were the original castes to populate the world and make the growth and development of civilization both possible and inevitable? In one of the Hindu traditions, God had pulled four castes of human beings out of his own body, each designed and imbued with the skills necessary for humanity as a collective to progress. To build society requires a collection of skills to be present simultaneously in place and time and working in harmony. These four clades emerged around the same time as each other, approximately between sixty and sixty-five millennia ago. Several more tens of thousands of years would pass until the conglomerate of clades that had grown out of F, GHIJK, would bring a third diffusion of four castes into society, the castes that would provide us with revolutions in farming (perhaps haplogroup G), commerce (perhaps haplogroup J, the Semitic peoples) and would become the ancestral Europeans (haplogroup I).
At the time that clades I and J had split away from K, groups L and T (previously known as K2) had emerged in their own right, having been dormant in the jumble of letters (clades), biding their time. Clade L is now found in it’s highest density along the Malabar Coast of India (Kerala) and in the area of the delta of the Indus River, and in the high mountains, from where it emerges into the plains. The heartland of the former Indus/Harappan civilization. By the time that clade K had seen it’s siblings grow up and leave the GHIJK family nest, each of the earth’s land masses had been colonized, if not every landscape. That would come with the virtual disintegration of K, sending pioneering new clades into unexplored virgin territories.
Can the disparate understandings of the Divine be reinterpreted as being one in the same story and can that story, that appears to fly in the face of the modern scientific theory on the origins of the human race, be demonstrated to be a true testament of our common culture, by the knowledge gained by the scientists themselves, in the field of genetics? Has the earth actually been formed, complete with man and beast? Populated by successive outbursts of consciousness, representing the four castes necessary for evolution of society? Guided by divine sages, each a guardian of an age. Does the movement, on the axis of the earth itself, every 23,000 years, known as the precession cycle, correspond with the mutation of clades? Coincidence always seems to be an unlikely answer when trying to explain away these connections, in a world that appears to us as being fundamentally magical, from whichever perspective that you want to look at it from.
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Steven Douglas Keith is a Scotsman living for twenty years in the mountains of India, an essayist, an artist and a poet. His work seeks to find the commonalities shared by cultures, specifically between the traditions of the orient and occident.
He can be found on Twitter @k_el_phand http://twentythirstcenturynet.wordpress.com/.
