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homestead - Re: [Homestead] OT for Don, or anyone, really

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  • From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] OT for Don, or anyone, really
  • Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 14:09:21 -0700

SISU! wrote:

To all..
This is really not related to homesteading as we usually discuss it at
all...more genealogy related, so go ahead and delete if you aren't
interested in this conversation. For me, knowing that I come from a
fishing Sami tribe, this makes me feel more connected to nature and it
is that connection that motivates me to feel closer to the land, so for
me this is homestead related, but obviously this won't be the case for
everyone. My apologies.


I sure wouldn't worry about that. It so beats the usual barrage of character assassinations against politicians.

Did I hear that you, or one of the kids, was studying linguistics? I've had enough courses to make a degree, but my little state-run diploma mill had hardly any courses in comparative or historical Lx. The new data on genetics makes me want to go back to college. In the old days, there was really no way to know whether Joseph Greenberg's Eurasiatic superfamily (encompassing Uralic, Turkic, Indo-European, Siberian, and Inuit) existed or not, but now we can see that all those languages are spoken by the descendants of one Central Asian "ice" people (actually, one particular man). Greenberg also believed Amerind to be the closest superfamily to Eurasiatic, and the genetic data show that he was exactly right on that point as well. I think he even subscribed to the POV that IE was creolized Uralic with a Caucasian substratum. If you look on the interactive map, north of the Black Sea around the Volga/Don divide, you can see where the men from Central Asia first meet up with the women streaming north from the Caucasus. So for millions of us, "Mother Russia" really existed. The IE language was born in these smoky bilingual yurts on the snowy Russian steppe, where children first imperfectly learned their fathers' agglutinative Uralic verb systems and created the impossibly illogical inflectional endings that we all came to know in school.

We can probably guess why no male "Caucasian" DNA survives this far north. But you might wonder why very few women from haploid group X journeyed westward into Europe along this route. Remember, compared to lotus eaters recently arrived from southern latitudes, these were tough Ice Age women from Central Asia. It's not hard to stretch the imagination and visualize the missing Madame X as Scythian, or perhaps the Amazons of Herodotus. Certainly it's the right geographical area. And now that hypothesis is completely testable, thanks to the fact that they're even able to analyze archaeological remains for both sex-linked types of DNA, in some cases, and autosomal DNA as well.

Bill




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