Homestead mailing list

[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

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