Angela
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Basal Eurasians, my guess?
A group whose Y and mt DNA went extinct.
Todays Y and mtDNA is from a group of people that expanded from SW Asia into Eurasia 50 ka.
But 125 ka, there were already humans in Jebel Faya. They expanded too. 73 ka in Jwalapuram, India, 80 ka in southern China and 65 ka in Kakadu National Park, Australia.
After the 50 ka expansion from SW Asia, their Y and mtDNA went extinct.
But some of their autosomal survived. Their autosomal was Basal Eurasian.
And haplo G and H2 brought this autosomal back from India to SW Asia during LGM, when the Thar desert expanded.
Iran and the Levant had 2 very different agricultures.
The Levant farmers grew cereals.
The Iran herders had goat, sheep, pigs and cattle, and supplemented that with some pulses.
With PPNB, both blended in the Levant. Y-DNA T and mtDNA X had arrived in the Levant.
I think that's probably right, but I'd like to believe in Ironside's version. I do believe that it was women who first started experimenting with farming, the grains and pulses part if not the animal domestication, but maybe the animal domestication part too.
If you're the one who has to go foraging for miles, then have to bend over with a digging stick for hours, I think you'd be the one to remember where the good stands of these plants were, and later you might try to plant them closer to "home" and see if they'd take. With the goats and sheep and cows I don't know. I know in Italy the men usually took care of the transhumance part. Even when they were closer to home, it was usually the young boys who moved the goats and sheep around, making sure they didn't eat the grass down to the roots. They made cheese out in the mountain pastures during the summer too, while sleeping in little stone huts.
This is the first one that came up...it's from Croatia.
I don't know how they did it out there. They must have had to bring some rennet or a substitute, a cauldron of some sort; by the 19th century they were of copper. I have a dim memory of some shepherd boys coming through town with little cheeses in baskets lined with chestnut leaves. They had to make their own baskets too. Those days are over; thank God. Those boys were like slaves. In our area there wasn't enough pasture for cows, not like my father's area where there were more cows than people. Usually there was only one or two cows, a small herd at the most, and the women milked them and made butter and cheese.