“…Hiernaux's perspectives are relevant to the creators of ancient Nile Valley culture, which is an integral part of, and originated in a larger African context (Frankfort, 1950;Childe, 1953;de Heinzelin, 1962;Arkell and Ucko, 1965;Fairman, 1965;Clark, 1970;Shaw, 1976;Vercoutter, 1978;Aldred, 1978;Hassan, 1988), and is not simply a part of, or a corridor to or from the "Mediterranean world"-a cultural construct with limited explanatory power today, as noted by Herzfeld (1984), and almost certainly less in the early Holocene. "Mediterranean," connoting a "race," "one interbreeding population," at the craniometric level, is questionable as defining the "Middle East" during the Bronze Age (Finkel, 1974(Finkel, ,1978, invalid as a term linking geography to a uniform external phenotype (see Snowden, 1970;MacGaffey, 1966;Keita, 1990), inaccurate as a metric taxon for many groups previously assigned to it (Rightmire, 1975a,b), and problematic as a bony craniofacial morphotype denoting a "race" or mendelian population because of its varied soft-part trait associations and wide geographical distribution (see "Hamitic" in Coon et al, 1950;Gabel, 1966;MacGaffey, 1966;Hiernaux, 1975;Rightmire, 1975a). "Hamitic", a label once used for some African groups (Fulani, Galla, Beja, southern ancient Egyptian), is seen by some as equivalent to "Mediterranean White" (e.g., Vercoutter, 1978), but Hiernaux (1975) points out that it is incorrect to view fossil and living groups once so designated as being "closely related to Caucasoids of Europe and western Asia."…”