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 _______________________________________________ Homestead list
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