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They Probably Always Talked Like That

One of the startling revelations by Stephen Oppenheimer is that a form of English was probably spoken from the beginning of the colonization of the British Isles. Just as genetic bedrock was laid down by the earliest inhabitants, to persist relatively unchanged through subsequent invasions by other peoples like the Romans, the English tongue has been dominant as the language of the land, admitting little admixture with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. (See Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, pp. 303ff.)

Pretty heady stuff, but Mick Harper, author of The Secret History of the English Language (Hoboken:  Melville 2008), goes Oppenheimer one better by proposing that it was not proto-Anglo Saxon that the Ice Age inhabitants of Britain spoke but something very like Chaucer’s pilgrims, only lacking, clearly, later invasive elements due to the Celts, Belgae, Romans and Normans.

Harper compares a sample of Old English (which we are taught is the same as “Anglo-Saxon”) with Middle English and Modern English to show that Anglo-Saxon does not appear to be the same language as English—something all English graduate students suspect from the moment they are forced to read Beowulf for their comps. In the Anglo-Saxon epic (which survives in a single copy turning up in suspicious circumstances in Tudor England and is set in Sweden and never mentions England), “virtually every single word is incomprehensible except by translation,” while in “the early English poetry of Chaucer and Piers Plowman…virtually every single word is comprehensible except for spelling.”

In case you do not believe it, here are the samples:

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,

Metudaes maeti end his modgidanc,

Uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,

Eci dryctin, or astelidae.

(Caedmon, ca. 8^th cent.)

A swerd and bokeler bar he by his side…

A whit cote and a blew hood wered he.

A bagpipe wel koude he blow and sowne,

And therwithal he brought us out of towne.

(Chaucer, The Prologue, 14^th cent.)

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

(T. S. Eliot, 20^th cent.)

Harper’s comment is:  “If Anglo-Saxon/English is one language, it’s unique in the entire annals of languages on this our Earth, since it changes every goddamn word of itself” (p. 44). (Yes, he writes like that, too.)

The Anglo-Saxons were a small, obscure and illiterate tribe from, well, no one is quite sure, but perhaps northeast Germany, who arrived in waves after the Romans abandoned Britain in the fifth century, and who conquered most of the land and held it until the Danes and Norse (ca. 900) and Normans (1066) replaced them as rulers. In Harper’s view, they were just like the previous invaders, the Romans, Belgae and Celts, in having little effect on the language and customs of the populace. Just as there are only a handful of Celtic words in the English language, there was little impact on the linguistic bedrock of the kingdom the Anglo-Saxons carved out before they too had had their day. The fact that they left few monuments is unsurprising.

Which brings us to questions about the depth and breadth of Celtic heritage in Britain. If you are a Celtic fan (I’m not referring to the basketball team) you will not want to read The Secret History of the English Language. This book will disabuse you of many cherished notions. In Harper’s view, the Celts were just one of the alternating foreign conquerors of the long-suffering English-speaking peoples. Their numbers were few, even on the Continent, and they left little genetic or cultural footprint except on the “Celtic fringe” where they were squeezed in their final days.  

England has always been England. It’s always spoken English. And France has always spoken French. "But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."We will have to save the French linguistic heresy for another post.

If you like the unusual and provocative ideas of M. J. Harper, who lives in London, check out the community of people who have bid farewell to the dunciad of academic research and unleashed their own personal pursuit of truth on a variety of intellectual topics at The Applied Epistemology Library. You can browse on the sly but must register (for free) to post your own comments and questions on threads.

Ancient flint meat-cutting tools found in sediment along a highway in Dartford, Kent, prove Neanderthals were present in Britain before the beginning of the last ice age (and possibly before the previous two or three cold periods or interglacials), when the British Isles were joined to mainland Europe due to low sea levels. The find pushes back the earliest known evidence for Neanderthals in England by 40,000 years, according to a June 1  report in the Daily Mail headlined "Neanderthal Man Was Alive in Britain at Start of Ice Age.

Previous notions postulated "pre-Neanderthals" (perhaps H. heidelbergensis) sparsely occupying Britain in the Pleistocene Period but vacating it when the climate became prohibitively cold about 200,000 years ago. It was thought that true Neanderthals did not reach Britain until about 60,000 years ago, not far in advance of their cousins, H. sapiens sapiens.

Neanderthals were known to be in northern France and Belgium about the same time. Their range must now be extended to Britain, and that country's prehistory recast. As in the rest of Europe, it appears Neanderthals were living in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago since a date like the Dartford find is only a terminus ante quem. If Neanderthals were living 100,000 years ago off the present-day junction of the M25 and A2, they probably had not just arrived. Similarly, they probably did not die off or move out of Britain in the next generation. It was not an excursion or isolated incident. The chances are unlikely that the first, and so far only, evidence of Neanderthals in Britain would be from the exact beginning or precise end of their population's stay.

Current thinking about interglacials is changing, well, like the weather, but there have undoubtedly been many eons-long stretches of time during which Britain was temperate and hospital to humans. Since the Middle Pleistocene about 600,000 years ago,significant advances of continental ice sheets in Europe have occurred at intervals of approximately 40,000 to 100,000 years. These long glacial periods were separated by more temperate and shorter interglacials. The age of Neanderthal humans is conventionally set at 400,000 years before present but may be revised backward as we learn more and encounter more fossil evidence.

Why You Do Not Have (and Don't Want) Enemy Ancestors

When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico I got a creepy feeling. Who were these people? The staff, mostly Navajo and not descendants of the original inhabitants of the site, said they were the Anasazi, a Navajo term meaning "enemy ancestors." When I pressed for more answers, I was told they belonged to the Chaco Culture. They were Chacoans.

Anthropologists are used to calling people they don't understand a culture, but as I learned more of this one I don't think they had much of it. The culture of the Anasazi turns out to be one of head-hunting, terrorizing human slaves, drug use and cannibalism.

 Hamatsi, a Kwakiutl Indian of the cannibal spirit. Feldman.

In a book subtitled A History Forgotten, George Franklin Feldman dispels the parlor concepts and sanitized history surrounding Native American practices and pieces together the frightful truth. It is the only book on its topic:  Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America (Hood:  Chambersburg, 2008), and the author's work was an uphill battle against political correctness.

Forget about the Donner Party. When anthropologists and explorers first encountered the monuments and ruins of the people politely called the Ancestral Pueblo they found widespread evidence of a cannibalistic society that had gotten out of control and succumbed to its own inhumanity.

"The best documented indication that the Baskemakers were headhunters is . . . Kinboko Canyon, evidence discovered by archeologist Samuel J. Guernsey of the Peabody Museum of Harvard in 1915, and reported in a 1919 publication of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology," writes Feldman in the chapter on the Anasazi. He goes on to describe this and other early excavations in the Four Corners area that were quickly hushed up and reburied in horror, including Battle Cave in Canyon del Muerto, now part of the Canyon de Chelly National Monument inside the Navajo Indian Reservation. We read now of flesh-stripping, bone crushing, roasting pits, and sliced off mastoids.

Around 950 A.D., eleven persons, including women and children, were killed and butchered, cooked, and eaten on Burnt Mesa in New Mexico north of the San Juan River. At a site near the Hopi villages in Arizona, a group of thirty individuals, forty percent under the age of eighteen, were slaughted and eaten. In a Colorado rock shelter, a large jar was found filled with splintered human bones. . .

The grisly record goes on and on. Feldman writes that by the year 2000 the number of such sites in the San Juan drainage where the Chaco Culture was centered had risen to forty (p. 136).

To their credit, the Indians who were the Chacoans' food supply eventually overthrew their masters and left the area to settle far away, on the three Hopi mesas in Arizona and along the Rio Grande in new pueblos that survive today such as Taos and San Juan. We suggest that the aristocrats of Chaco may have been subject to degenerative neurological disorders like kuru or mad cow disease. But whether they self-destructed or were destroyed by their subject population, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to claim them as ancestors.

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to Eastern Mediterranean Origins

In memoriam Gloria Farley

Donald N. Yates

DNA Consultants

Keynote address for Ancient American History and Archeology Conference, Sandy, Utah, April 2, 2010

SUMMARY  Three examples of North American rock art are discussed and placed in the context of ancient Greek and Hebrew civilization. The Red Bird Petroglyphs are compared with Greek and Hebrew coins and the Bat Creek Stone. The Possum Creek Stone discovered by Gloria Farley is identified as a Greek athlete’s victory pedestal. The Thruston Stone is interpreted as a record of the blending of Greek, Cherokee, Native American, Egyptian and Hebrew civilization. Keetoowah Society traditions, as captured in The Vision of Eloh’, are adduced to confirm a general outline of the origins of the Cherokee people in a Ptolemaic Greek trans-Pacific expedition joining pre-arriving Greeks, Jews and Phoenicians in the Ohio Valley around 100 c.e.  Recent DNA investigations showing Egyptian, Jewish and Phoenician female lineages and the Y chromosome of Old Testament Priests among the Cherokee are also touched upon. Greek words and customs in the Cherokee are reviewed as time permits. Slide projector requested.

A cave entrance overlooking the Redbird River, a tributary of the South Fork of the Kentucky River in Clay County, Kentucky in the Daniel Boone National Forest, has inscriptions which according to Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati display a nineteenth-century example of writing in the Cherokee syllabary. A local resident (Burchell) recognizes Greek writing in one inscription (called Christian Monogram #2) but his reading is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Evaluation by experts in Greek and Semitic epigraphy identifies two distinct inscriptions, one in Greek and one in Hebrew.  They appear to be contemporaneous with the Bat Creek Stone unearthed in the 1889 excavation of a tomb in East Tennessee by Cyrus Thomas of the Smithsonian Institution.

Another record of Greek-speaking people in ancient America is the Possum Creek Stone, discovered by Gloria Farley in Oklahoma in the 1970s. It is discussed by her in Volume 2 of In Plain Sight as proof that the man history knows as Sequoyah did not invent the Cherokee syllabary.  The inscription can be read as Greek, HO-NI-KA-SA or ‘o nikasa, i.e. “This is the one who takes the prize of victory,” a common inscription for the pedestal upon which victors were crowned at athletic games.  The use is Homeric, and the spelling Doric.

A third piece of evidence helps fill in the background of the arrival of Greeks and their intermarriage with Asiatic and other Indians in North America. In 1870, an engraved 19 x 15 inch limestone tablet was uncovered in a mound excavation on Rocky Creek near Castalian Springs in Sumner County, Tennessee (see Ancient American, vol. 12, no. 77). Dating to an earlier time than its Mississipian Period context, it commemorates a peace treaty between the Cherokee and Shawnee. The Cherokee chief wears a horse-hair crested helmet and carries the spear and shield of a Greek hoplite. His Shawnee adversary clasps hands in a wedding ceremony with a Cherokee woman who bears wampum belts as a pledge of peace, has her hair in a maidenly bun, wears a Middle Eastern-style plaid kilt, and displays a large star of David. In the Red Record or Walam Olum, we learn that before crossing the Mississippi, somewhere along the south bank of the Missouri, the Algonquians or Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indians), who are later allied with the Cherokee, encounter a foreign tribe they call the Stonys. Cherokee legends about Stone-coat demonstrate that the original Cherokee had metal armor and weapons. DNA studies confirm a mixture of “anomalous” East Mediterranean mitochondrial lineages such as Egyptian T, Greek U and Phoenician X with “standard” American Indian haplogroups A, B, C and D in the Cherokee and certain other Eastern Woodlands Indians.

To sum up, the Red Bird Petroglyph is a Greek inscription from the 2nd to 3rd century c.e., not a crude Cherokee scratching of around 1800 as announced recently by the Archeological Institute of America and the New York Times. It occurs above what is, in all likelihood, an inscription in Maccabean-era Hebrew. The Sequoyan syllabary for which these Greek and Hebrew inscriptions were mistaken originated in the Greek world of the Bronze Age along with other syllabaries like Linear A, Linear B and Cypro-Minoan. The Cherokee language, which today is Iroquoian, is the result of a relexification process in the distant past. It contains many relics of words of Greek origin, especially in the area of government, military terminology, mythology, athletics and ritual. Cherokee music also reflects Greek origins.  The Cherokee Indians are, quite literally, the Greeks of Native America.

Possum Creek Stone and Anomalous Cherokee DNA Point to East Mediterranean Origins (PPT)

Greek Words and Customs in Cherokee

To Do DNA or Not to Do DNA?

Much Ado about Nothing

American education is in such a state of decline and confusion that the following new program, with all its pros and cons, seems tantamount to a mad hatter's tea party. We reproduce a description of it from Nature in all its carefully nuanced and agonizing detail. We suggest that rather than fretting over whether DNA testing companies might use predatory marketing on teenagers or students be pressured into making purchases and be psychologically damaged by DNA results, the school authorities worry about real threats like the fast food poisons served up in the cafeteria franchises on their campuses. Or overpriced and watered down textbooks. Or alcohol in dorms. Or date rape. Or just about anything else.

A DNA education

Nature 465: 845-46 16 June 2010

Taking personal genetic testing into the classroom brings ethical and legal sensitivities to the fore. Although personalized genetic testing is still very new and controversial, its increasing use in health care seems inevitable — a trend that makes it essential to give consumers and physicians a better education in the technology's strengths and weaknesses.

That was the rationale behind an announcement made last month by the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Berkeley. This year, instead of sending its incoming students a book for later discussion in class, the college will send them a kit to swab their DNA. If they so choose, students can send in their sample to be analysed for three common gene variants that indicate how an individual metabolizes alcohol, lactose (found in dairy products) and folic acid, a vitamin common in leafy green vegetables.The impulse behind Berkeley's announcement was commendable.

But officials there were too hasty in designing the programme, as evidenced by the firestorm of criticism it triggered and the changes the university has instituted in response. For example, each student's kit will now include not just details of the measures being taken to safeguard and anonymize the data and descriptions of the genes to be tested, as originally planned, but also information about the ethical and legal issues surrounding genetic testing. In addition, the university has modified a contest that accompanies the programme: the prize will no longer be a full genetic test conducted by a commercial testing company, which could be perceived as an endorsement of such firms, but will instead be cash.

Finally, organizers have decided to hold off revealing the tests' results until just before a lecture at which the benefits and limits of genetic testing, as well as the three chosen genes, will be discussed in detail. They will also give an accompanying lecture on the ethical and social dimensions of genetic testing. And students will be able to seek private counselling about their results if they wish.

Although it was wise of Berkeley to make these improvements, concerns remain. The university contends, for example, that there will be no pressure on students to participate in the genetic testing. Not only will they be told it is entirely optional, but students — or in the case of those under 18 years of age, their parents — will sign an informed consent document. Moreover, faculty members will never learn which students participated and which did not. But critics still worry about indirect pressure: the very fact that the kits are being sent to all of the college's incoming students could give them the impression that their participation is expected, in which case their choice may not feel so free.

A telling contrast in approach has been provided by Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which announced a similar course designed for medical students shortly after Berkeley announced its programme. Recognizing the potential for controversy from the outset, Stanford officials first appointed a task force of basic scientists, clinicians, legal professionals, genetic counsellors, ethicists and students who spent a year designing precautions against coercion and conflicts of interest by the institution, and working out access to counselling.

The result is a well-thought-out programme — which also includes a research component designed to test a commonly held belief: do students truly learn better when the information presented to them is of personal relevance?

That said, the Berkeley and Stanford programmes are both still experimental. No one has all the answers to the issues they raise, which is why designing such curricula will involve constant refinement and evolution. It is shortsighted for critics to oppose such endeavours on the grounds that experts don't yet know how to interpret genetic information or how to integrate it into medical care. That is changing rapidly — and these two programmes are only the beginning of a long conversation that needs to happen on campuses worldwide.

Mary Settegast is described on the jacket simply as an archeological researcher, the 20-year-old book being Plato Prehistorian; 10,000 to 5,000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology (Hudson:  Lindisfarne, 1990). It's obvious she is not a member of the entrenched academic community of archeologists and prehistorians, for she spends most of the introduction to her fascinating study inveighing against the Old Model and New Archeology and defending the value of myth. She then retells the Egyptian Priest's tale from Plato's Timaeus about how Solon's ancient Greek ancestors defeated an aggressive Atlantic sea-power situated on a now-lost continent beyond the Straits of Gilbraltar--the so-called Atlantis myth, which has no other source but the writings of Plato. Her thesis is that Plato is representing what he believed to be historical fact. Among other arguments, Settegast points out that it would have been impious for him to contrive a political fiction and put it in the mouth of Critias, who attributes the story to his grandfather, who received it from Solon himself, given the occasion of the dialogue, a celebration of Athena's festival day. She asks, "Would Socrates have Critias offer to the goddess as 'a just and truthful hymn of praise' (Timaeus 21) an intentional misrepresentation of Athena's own past history with the Greeks?"

Once Plato's word and intentions are vindicated it is possible to study the scattered clues he gives us to prehistory of the Mediterranean world in a new light. Settegast makes a good case that the Magdalenian cave art of 17,000/15,000 to 9000 BCE preserves the fading glory of an Atlantic culture of enormous power and sophistication that came to an abrupt end toward the end of the tenth millennium. She brackets the question of the location of a sunken continent and dwells instead on the blunders of modern prehistorians who fail to grasp the advanced picture of civilization left to us in Paleolithic remains like the Lascaux paintings. For instance, most anthropologists have explained the paintings as vehicles for sympathetic hunting magic without noting that it is the horse that is most commonly depicted while excavations of Magdlenian sites reveal almost exclusively the remains of reindeer as their principal animal food. The religious significance of the animals is lost on most analysts. Plato, as usual, provides the pertinent clue: the Atlantics worshipped Poseidon and regarded his sacred animal the horse with great awe. A revisionist look at the horses in cave paintings clarifies that the lines on horses' heads represent harnesses, not natural contours or anatomical details, proving that the Magdalenians or Atlantic peoples had tamed the horse by 12,000 BCE, some eight thousand years before the date assigned to the domestication of the horse in the conventional model.

Upper Paleolithic writing recovered from Magdalenian cave sites (top) compared to characters in three early written languages:  (b) Indus valley signs, (c) Greek and (d) Runic. Settegast (p. 28) after Forbes and Crowder, 1979.

I've just started to read the book and will conclude this "preview" for the blog by mentioning that one obstacle to accepting Plato's story at face value was that he describes the Atlantics as literate. The recent reevaluation of the "magic signs" in Magdalenian caves as a writing system with heirs in many Old World alphabets seems to bear him out once again...and make his detractors look stupid and full of hubris. It is the effect many Socratic dialogues were meant to have on their readers.

Addendum:  One of the offshoots of Atlantic Culture according to Plato Prehistorian was the Çatal Hüyük civilization that flourished in Anatolia from 6200-5300 BCE. Only 2-3 % of the 32 acre site has been excavated, but what has come to light so far includes amazing cyclopean walls, refined wall paintings and peculiar religious practices such as a vulture-bull rite, leopard shrine and Mistress of the Animals cult reminiscent of Venus figurines. It is conceivable that Atlantic Culture itself was spurred to life originally by admixture of Europeans with Neanderthals, since there are numerous signs of Neanderthal culture in  archeological remains. Significantly, the Venus figures once associated with Gravettian Culture now appear to have had their origins with Neanderthals, who occupied Europe for 350,000 years before H. sapiens sapiens. Venus figurines were worn about the neck by Neanderthals, as proved in several excavations in Spain and elsewhere. In 1961, archeologists unearthed the skull of a Neanderthal man in the ancient site of Chalcedon on the east side of the Bosporus in Asia Minor, although the find is seldom mentioned today.

Our Neanderthal Index is based on affinities with archaic populations presumed to carry the highest rate of admixture with Neanderthals. These include many of the Atlantic and Mediterranean populations mentioned in Plato Prehistorian, including Greek, Turkish, Syrian, Arabian, Basque, Egyptian and Berber.