Alt Left: Repost: Setting the Record Straight About Pre-Contact Africa

This is an old piece but people are still commenting on it so I will republish it with an extensive introduction.

John Engelman is a race realist liberal who was a frequent commenter on the White nationalist American Renaissance. He’s not a White nationalist. He’s just a liberal who got mugged by Blacks several times, the last time leaving him with permanent injuries. He’s the proverbial “liberal who’s been mugged by life.”

As the old saw goes, White liberals are all liberals until they get mugged by a Black.” After that, maybe not so much. Nevertheless, I think he is wrong here.

I do not think agriculture was innovated in Babylonia 11,000 YBP. It would be news to me. I’ve always heard it was simultaneously innovated 9,000 YBP in three different places, though the latest information is that agriculture was actually innovated by Africans 12,000 YBP, starting with proto-agriculture in fencing off fields of edible foods (yes, that is proto-agriculture).

The Indians in California nearly cultivated individual oak trees for their acorns. I told my mother they way they treated those trees and the ground around them and asked her if that was agriculture. She said, “Not really, but it sure is awful close.” Keep in mind that agriculture does not necessarily involve sticking seeds in the ground.

Another fallacy is that because Africans, Papuans, etc. have quite low IQ’s now and are behind Whites and Asians, that this means it has always been way. This is a backwards projection of White Supremacist. “Whites are better now, so we’ve always better!” Not necessarily so! No one knows what the IQ’s of any groups were long ago, and higher IQ’s in Whites and Asians may well be a quite new development far along into the Holocene.

Furthermore, like it or not, Africans truly innovated almost all of the most important aspects of human civilization. Language, fire, stone tools, toys, agriculture, animal husbandry, art, decoration, jewelry, fishing with hooks, sewing – it all came out of Africa first, every single bit of it. When you see a Black person, you’re not looking at some alien species. You’re looking at your oldest grandparent of them all.

All humans came from African Blacks. For some reason, the idea that “Grandpa was a nigger” is insulting to White Nationalists, who go to great lengths to try to show that OOA is not true. This shows the extreme insecurity that lies at the base of all supremacism.

I told a Chinese commenter about this and he laughed and said Chinese people didn’t care if they came from Blacks. He said, “If you go back further than that, we were all frogs. We Chinese are just the latest model.” I told my mother what he said and how it differed from the insecurity of White Supremacists, and she said, “See! That proves that Asians are smarter than Whites. We Whites aren’t all that smart, you know.” I don’t know about that, but we are apparently more secure.

Also although the Out of Africa people left Africa at least 60,000 YBP, they didn’t progress all that much in the meantime, and in fact, they continued to resemble Blacks for a long time. Most of the OOA people looked like Aborigines, Papuans, Negritos, and Melanesians until quite recently. The earliest White man looks like some sort of an ugly freak, resembling an African Bushman most of all. 20,000 years ago, Europeans looked like the Makah Indians of Washington State in skull structure. Go look at them. They look like Asiatics.

A Swedish girl from several thousand years ago has green eyes and quite dark, though not Black, skin. I’m not aware of any important human innovations that the OOA people made until the Holocene that were not made in Africa. Yes, they had arrowheads, but I think Africans had those too. The advancements of the White and Asian man, while impressive, are quite recent indeed.

European Whites have only appeared in the last 9,000 years. All “Whites” before then looked something like Arabs. So in a way, Arabs are “the oldest Whites of them all.” South Indian Dravidians and some odd-looking North Africans like Moabites may also be the remains of the most primitive Whites. The claimed achievements of Mesopotamia 11,000 YBP that the White Supremacists like to harp on were done by Arabs at a time when all Whites looked like Arabs. And White nationalists say Arabs are non-Whites or at the very least are “mongrels” or “off-Whites.” So there.

John Engelman: Agriculture and civilization select a race for intelligence. Caucasians began agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. We began civilization about five thousand years ago. Negroes only adopted agriculture about four thousand years ago. They never developed their own civilizations. They have only recently been exposed to White civilization.

Agriculture was probably developed by Africans before it was developed by anyone else. There is evidence for agriculture or pre-agriculture in Africa (West African Guinea Highlands) as early as 12,000 YBP. You must realize that Africans originated many things that we as humans do.

The next to develop agriculture were the Mayans (corn), the Chinese (rice), and the Papuans (yams), all at 9,000 YBP. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were not far behind. Africans even had plantation agriculture as early as 900 CE in Tanzania. I doubt if Caucasians developed agriculture 11,000 YBP. Are we referring to Mesopotamia, the Levant, or Egypt here?

Animal husbandry was also developed very early on in Africa. It may have been developed in the Western Sahara before anywhere else on Earth. A figure of 9,000 YBP is suggested for animal husbandry in the Sahara. However, pigs may have been domesticated in Papua around this time also. Animal husbandry was widespread in Africa, particularly in the Sahara, the Sahel and Ethiopia, on contact. I don’t know much about animal husbandry further south, but I have heard there was a shortage of animals to domesticate.

At any rate, the invention of the hoe and subsequent hoe agriculture along with the spear played a major role in the history of Africa. Both derived from the early development of metallurgy in the form or iron. Indeed, the Iron Age came to Africa before it came to Europe. The development of iron metallurgy and the subsequent creation of those two iron tools allowed the Bantus to expand massively all over Central and South Africa in only the last 2-3,000 years.

Africans definitely had civilizations, that’s for sure. Mostly in West Africa but quite a few in the Sahel too. There was even a civilization in Rhodesia. Early European explorers drew drawings of large African cities. Looks like civilization to me. Civilizations were especially common in Nigeria. They had manufacture, trade, agriculture for export, all sorts of things.

Japanese Versus Chinese Influence in Southeast Asia

Polar Bear: I’ve always wondered why Japanese don’t have the stranglehold Chinese have in SEA?

Your answer, among other reasons,  may be found in your second sentence:

Polar Bear: They have the potential and did so in a fascist way during WWII.

There ya go. Furthermore, none of those countries have any Japanese blood. There is little to no Japanese blood in Taiwan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, or even Southern China for that matter. There is quite a bit of Chinese blood in all of those places, in particular in Thailand, Vietnam, Burma, and of course Taiwan. There is also a fair amount of Chinese blood in the Philippines and Indonesia. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma all have heavily Sinicized cultures, some dating back thousands of years in the case of Vietnam.

If we want to go even further back, all speakers of Austroasiatic languages came out of a homeland in Yunnan, China 5,000 years ago. This includes almost all Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais, and Burmese, and also includes Northeast Indians and some Indian aboriginals.

All speakers of Austronesian languages came out of Taiwan 4,000 years ago. Before they were in Taiwan, they were in the part of China across the strait. This includes all Filipinos and Malays, most Indonesians, the Papuans who live along the coast, and all residents of the Pacific Islands. Although it’s uncertain how much Chinese culture was retained after thousands of years, all of these people have an ultimate homeland in China. Really all of Asia came out of a Chinese homeland!

Even Japanese and Koreans came out of a Chinese homeland in the parts of China around the Bohai Sea and the Shandong Peninsula where they had their homelands 8,000 years ago.

The Vietnamese language itself is 7

Vietnam and Thailand were also largely settled by Chinese invaders, 2,300 years ago in the case of Vietnam and 900 years ago in the case of Vietnam. Both nations are about half Chinese genetically.

By contrast, Japan has been an inward hermit Kingdom forever. They didn’t even bother invading and conquering other lands. That’s how inward they were. They only opened up to most of the world in the 1870’s and even then most reluctantly. They think they are better than any other race of humans. Why conquer inferiors? Why even visit their lands, if only on vacation? Why trade with inferiors? What could you possibly learn from inferiors, other than how to be more stupid?

It’s an inward attitude similar to the one that the Ottoman Empire had towards Christian Europe for millenia. Visitors would come to the royal court and show the Emir the great inventions from Christian lands. He would look at them or hold them in his hands and study them and then give them back to the visitors and shrug his shoulders.

Anything invented by the infidels couldn’t possibly be any good and besides, why would we wish to learn anything from infidel inferiors anyway? Let the infidels make their fancy toys. These things are of no concern to us superior Muslims. It’s an unfortunate attitude that set the Muslim world back for many centuries and left them mired in backwardsness.

The only place on Earth with a good amount of Japanese blood is Hawaii. Some of the other islands in Polynesia or especially Micronesia may have some Japanese blood too. I am thinking of places like Guam and Saipan.

And, yes, when the Japanese finally decided to interact with the rest of Asia, they did so in a totally fascist manner, invading, conquering, and in many cases, mass murdering or even genociding the natives who they saw as utter inferiors. Most of the places that were conquered by these fascist Japanese militarists are not real happy about being treated like that, and the Chinese, Taiwanese, and Koreans are still pretty pissed off.

I’m not sure how the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Burmese, and Filipinos felt. I doubt if they were happy but they don’t seem to have made a big deal out of it. The Chinese are stark raving furious about it to this day, especially when they are made aware of atrocities like the Rape of Nanking. Further, the Japanese have not been real great about saying they were sorry.

Repost: Do the Races Smell Different?

This is a repost of a very popular old article. Enjoy.

From a very interesting discussion over at American Renaissance in an article about how the Pill disrupts women’s sense of smell. The article itself is interesting. Females have an evolutionarily developed sense of smell that makes them prefer males who differ in a set of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which governs the immune system. When they choose men with a different set of MHC genes, the offspring gets a complementary set of MHC genes, or the best of both parties, and has an increased resistance to disease. However, women on the Pill lose this preference. Researchers worried that women on the Pill might lose interest in their boyfriends or husbands while on the Pill.

But the comments were even more interesting. I have been wanting to write for a long time about the notion that some Whites say that Black people stink, or smell bad. There did not seem to be a way of writing about this without sounding like a racist asshole, so I put it off.

A relative told me that many Whites say that Blacks smell bad. He even said that they are called “Stink Bugs” by some Hispanics here in California. I said that I had been around Blacks most of my life, including having Black girlfriends, Black best friends who I hung out with every day, and teaching whole classes full of Blacks every day for months on end, and I never noticed it.

It’s not really known what Blacks smell like to those who say they are stinkers. Some say they smell like sweat or onions, but a lot say that they just flat out stink, period.

There is also evidence that Northeast Asians find the odor of Blacks particularly offensive, perhaps more so than Whites do. Asians also say that we Whites stink too, but not as much as Blacks do. They often say that we smell like red meat. Some of this may have to do with diet. But one White Vietnam vet said that Vietnamese could hardly smell Blacks at all, but could smell a White a block away.

Even Hispanics are said to be stinky by some Whites.

So far, this post sounds pretty racist. Black folks are getting screwed like they always do. The other races think they’re stinky, and there’s no hope. Ah.

But there is hope for Black folks. It seems that a lot of Blacks say that we Whites stink too. Equal time! In the comments to the article (which Amren will not keep and I could not get Google too cache), commenters noted that Blacks often refer to Whites as having a “wet dog smell”.

There is supposedly even a type of spray called “Wet Dog” that you can spray on yourself to give yourself a scent that Blacks hate, though this may be an urban myth. What a way to keep people away! Along the same lines, a female commenter said that a Black woman told her that Black females can’t stand to take showers with White women in gymnasiums or at school since they think White women smell terrible when they get wet.

Even other Whites say we Whites stink. A White woman said that White men often smell like corn on the cob. A White man said if you get a lot of White guys together in a locker room, they smell like rotten peppers.

I’m a little upset that in yet another lineup between the three great races, those darned cunning, inscrutable Oriental despots come out on top, smelling like a rose even.

But alas, all is not lost. It seems that some Whites say that foreign-born Asians and FOB’s (recent immigrants) smell bad. It’s something like sesame oil plus old socks with a drop of rice wine. It’s subtle, but one woman described it as almost nauseating. A White man who served in Vietnam said that he could smell differences between Vietnamese and Chinese (the Chinese stunk worse), so there may be national variations in stinkiness. I’m happy that some folks think Asians stink too. All’s fair.

I supposedly have a great sense of smell, but I’ve been missing out on all these stinky races. I can’t detect any racial or ethnic differences in smell, though I used to work with this nice older White woman who smelled horrible for some reason.

But I find it amusing that in this area of dictatorially enforced anti-racism that so many Blacks, Whites, and Asians all think the other races stink.

Alt Left: Repost: Interview With a Bhutanese Maoist Leader

This is a repost from some time ago. The old posts are nor formatted properly, so they are very difficult to read. A lot of them are pretty cool for reposts though. This is an interview with a leader of the Bhutanese Maoists who are beginning an armed insurgency against the Bhutanese state.

A little background: Actually, in some ways, this is a racial conflict. About 100 years ago, many Nepalese moved into Southern Bhutan as immigrants. Apparently this immigration was completely legal, as in they were not illegal immigrants. The majority of the people in Bhutan were more Mongoloid Asian types, Buddhists who phenotypically resemble Tibetans and speak a Tibeto-Burman language. The Nepalese were Hindus speaking Nepali, an Indo-European language.

Phenotypically, Nepalese are very unusual. They are on the border between Caucasians and Asians. Some more resemble Caucasians and some more resemble Asians. Most of the ones who moved into Southern Bhutan were more Caucasian types. Anyway, at some point, they become 6

A few decades ago, for some unknown reason, the monarchy simply ethnically cleansed most of the Nepalese out of the country and so ended up with a more mono-ethnic and monocultural state. Furthermore, the Nepalese were forbidden from returning. They have been festering in refugee camps ever since, and have been growing more and more radical.

Soon a Maoist party was born and it developed a huge following in the camps. Very huge! In the past few years, they have began an armed struggle inside Bhutan, but there have only been a few incidents. Apparently they are laying the groundwork for people’s war, which they claim they have not yet began.

Sushil claims that the Bhutanese state is feudal or semi-feudal, and I think he is probably correct. The entire region remains feudal to semi-feudal – India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan. The feudalism tends to cut across ethnic and religious boundaries and seems to be a regionalism. Recall that Tibetan was actually feudal until the Maoists took over in 1949 and overthrew the feudal monarchy.

In this region, the feudal monarchs usually use religion, as such folks always do and have always done, to enforce feudalism. The Hindu monarchs in Nepal claimed tied closely into their Hindu Gods. More or less the same with the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, similar to the divinely appointed religous-political monarchs that ruled in Europe for so long.

I figure if you throw a bunch of humans on an island, after a while, the strongest will kill and or subject the weaker ones. Some total prick will rise up, call himself ruler – king – whatever, somehow gather up 9

This group has connections to Maoists in Nepal who now form a huge portion of the government (4

An Interview with Comrade Sushil of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist-Leninist- Maoist), the party which is waging armed struggle against the Monarchy in Bhutan. Talks about tactics, strategy and aims of the party.

———— ——— ——— ——— –

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The following Interview was conducted at some point in the previous few weeks. It occurred somewhere in the area of the Indian-Bhutan border.

Lal Salam Blog: Thank you very much for meeting with me. So are you from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes, from Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: From the Bhutanese refugee camps?

Comrade Sushil: Uhh, actually people think that all our party are from the refugees, but i am from Bhutan. I have spent allot of time in India, working, but then also in Bhutan and then in Nepal working for the party as well.

Lal Salam Blog: So you are a cadre of the Communist Party Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoists)?

Comrade Sushil: Yes i am a member of the Communist Party of Bhutan (Marxist Leninist Maoist). I have been a member since 2003 and i have worked actively as a whole timer since the same year. I joined the party from within Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: What is the history of the Party?

Comrade Sushil: The CPB (MLM) was established on the 7th of November 2001, and the announcement of the Party was on the 22nd of April 2003. From this time the party has been working with the exploited people in Bhutan. The people are all exploited by the regime, so our party has been working with all the people, mainly in rural areas, but in urban areas also. Mostly we work with the people in the villages.

Lal Salam Blog: So what are the problems in Bhutan? What sort of oppressions are forced on the people of Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: The biggest problem is the feudal monarchy. Because of this monarchy the problems are created. Peoples standard of living has been kept backwards because of the Monarchy. In a third world country like Bhutan, this is because of feudalism. This feudalism is the main problem of Bhutan. This is why the Communist Party, our glorious party, is working to overthrow the regime, and to overthrow feudalism.

Lal Salam Blog: So the goal of the Party for now is to throw out feudalism from Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Definitely. The main aim of our party is to overthrow feudalism and to establish the peoples rule in Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: So you would like to establish a People’s State in Bhutan? Is that what you would have replace the King?

Comrade Sushil: We should not understand like this. We should replace the king with a Proletarian Dictatorship. Our aim, our hope, no our dream is to establish a New Democratic Socialism. Only after that can we achieve our ultimate goal, which is to achieve communism. It is not only our goal to throw out the king and overthrow feudalism in Bhutan, but to establish a peaceful society that can achieve socialism and communism.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year your party started a Peoples War in Bhutan…

Comrade Sushil: No. We have not initiated a protracted peoples war in Bhutan. Since our parties establishment we have however had many rural peoples class struggles and these struggles have used different means. In different ways we have launched many struggles and programs, and we have the aim of reaching a level where we can launch a Protracted Peoples War.

Last year we did initiate some armed struggles, which is only a factor of the rural class struggle. Much of the media proclaimed this as the beginning of the Peoples War, but we are not at that phase. We are trying to reach the level of Peoples War, but we have not yet reached it, and are preparing for it. We do not know how long this will take, it will depend on many factors.

Lal Salam Blog: So there will be more attacks, more bombs and more armed actions in the future?

Comrade Sushil: Certainly. We are preparing for this. There will be more armed struggle. Without the armed struggle, we cannot change the situation in our country. We cannot change the state power. We will one day take the state power, but for now we are in preparation, making networks with the peasants and in the cities, training, preparing for the struggle.

Lal Salam Blog: Do you think Peoples War can be successful? Bhutan is already a very brutal state. As many as a sixth of the population lives in exile and the state has beaten, attacked, arrested and even raped and murdered those it perceives to be political activists?

Comrade Sushil: Our parties thought is that only by waging the armed struggle and the Peoples War can we win the liberation of our exploited people. I believe so. Thousands of people have been evicted from Bhutan, we are very aware of this. Why were they evicted? They were evicted after political activism and movements. They were evicted because the people in the southern belt had a high political consciousness. This is totally not a refugee problem, this is a political problem. It is a problem of a brutal monarchy and a restrictive feudal system. Without destroying these institutions we cannot solve these problems.

Our party is launching this armed struggle to liberate the exploited people and we know that one day we will be successful. This is a long term plan, it will take many preparations, and without this and without correct politics we cannot be successful. We have this ideology, the Marxist-Leninist- Maoist and this is a political weapon. With this weapon we believe that one day we will be successful.

Lal Salam Blog: So have you learnt much from the experiences of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and their experiences in Nepal? Are there close or special links between your parties?

Comrade Sushil: We do not have special or direct links with this party. But, and also like communists all around the world, in Peru, India or the Philippines we have ideological links. These places all have communist parties leading revolution through the armed struggle, and with all of them we have ideological links and an ideological relationship.

That means we support them ideologically and they support us ideologically. We have a relationship with the CP Nepal (Maoist) , but also with the CP India (Maoist) who are also waging an armed struggle. We don’t receive any physical support, or anything like that, but we should understand that we are all communists, and we are all internationalists, and we receive and give moral support.

Lal Salam Blog: What does your party think about Prachanda Path and the Nepali Maoists synthesis? It has been controversial to some international communists.

Comrade Sushil: About this Prachanda Path. It is something we should study. And also it is not only a thing to be studied, it has shown it has the ability to guide workers actions. I don’t want to comment more because the ideological things i have had not sufficiently studied, and till now our party has not discussed at length Prachanda Path.

Lal Salam Blog: The Maoists in Nepal have given up their Peoples War and taken a new tactic in pursuing the Constituent Assembly elections. Is this a correct tactic in your parties opinion?

Comrade Sushil: In regards to the UCPN (M) we do not think that they have given up their goals. We think they are pursuing another way, another tactic to establish a peoples state. We don’t think they have established the proletarian dictatorship. So we, our party, does not think that they have achieve state power. We too will go for a Constituent Assembly at first, and only after that can we step or jump or leap forward to a New Democratic revolution.

In the context of the Maoists we don’t think they have state power, and are still struggling for it. It is a fact that the future shows you which path you must take, you can only pick your path depending on the concrete situation you face. We will also move for a constituent assembly elections and a new state, but without establishing the proletarian people at the center of this new state then it cannot reach higher and improve the lives of the people. We think that the Maoists of Nepal face similar situations to us, and have similar actions, so we will continue to watch closely.

Lal Salam Blog: So a Constituent Assembly is a tactic that you are interested in for change in Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Actually it is the tactics and strategy of communist parties in the third world. Third world countries are semi-colonial and semi-feudal. So without a New Democratic Socialism stage we cannot reach socialism. So we are in this revolution, it is a peasant revolution we can say. So to reach our aims, to some extent we should aim for a Constituent Assembly, and this is our main slogan and the main aim of the present situation in our revolution.

That is not our only slogan, and out only goal, and it isn’t the only thing that we campaign around with the peasants and people of Bhutan. And we don’t want or aspire to another bourgeois constitution, but we need a constitution that is in favor of the oppressed and poor people of Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: Last year the government of Bhutan held elections, in a very restricted and controlled way, but the western media still presented this as a opening up and of “democracy”. If there was to be a more open electoral system, would the CPB (MLM) pursue peaceful politics through elections?

Comrade Sushil: WE think there is only one path to real democracy in Bhutan. We don’t believe in the current “democracy” this is well known. And we don’t think that this system can lead to real democracy. The international community has its formula and they see votes and call it democracy- but there is no such thing in Bhutan and it is not possible to impose a real democracy from the outside into Bhutan.

Any “democracy” that the regime brings into practice itself will be done in such a way so that real power continues to be restricted and kept in the hands of the old order, and not in the hands of the mass of exploited people, so that this “democracy” could not be used against the regime. Even if the regime cast out the king, it would not fundamentally change it. Our party will not make compromises with that order. We wont co-operate with their agenda, we have another agenda that is contradiction to theirs.

We are going to establish the rule of all the people while they just want to exploit them. There is this contradiction between the people and the regime. Our party struggles because of that. If they were to try and set up a “democracy” for then when we should not be a part of it. When i say this it does not mean that we are militarists. The people want peace, and don’t want to live in terror but this regime suppresses and exploits the people, they already live in terror. It is not a hobby to carry out armed struggle, it is our only option the liberation of our people.

Lal Salam Blog: Bhutan is such a tiny country, and it has very close relations, with India in particular. If you care to reach peoples war, do you think India would interfere to defend its interests?

Comrade Sushil: On this the whole party is very much conscious. But in the present situation India is not so dangerous to Bhutan. China is quite dangerous. 11,500 square kilometers of Bhutan’s lands have been occupied and taken by China. So we are surrounded by two very large and powerful countries, who are always looking to interfere into Bhutan. They have two ways of interfering. Political intervention and direct intervention. There are Indian Army camps established in Bhutan. There are several big barracks. We have known this but we don’t think they will intervene directly.

Maybe at some point in the future. There will be political intervention, and we can try to counter this with our allies by rousing grassroots support for our cause in India. We are already doing this. If they try to intervene militarily it will be a heavy cost for them, a bloody and long civil war. Also the regime and the fuedalists don’t want this. They want to defend their borders, protect his kingdom. We also want to establish the sovereignty of Bhutan, so we will always fight foreign influence, from India as well as China.

Lal Salam Blog: I understand that your party has allot of support amongst the refugees in Nepal.

Comrade Sushil: We are not just a party for the refugees. We have support where ever our people are.

Lal Salam Blog: So in India, Nepal and Bhutan?

Comrade Sushil: Yes.

Lal Salam Blog: And your party does work amongst all the communities of Bhutan and across the whole country, not just in the southern Belt that is largely Nepali speaking?

Comrade Sushil: The southern belt is not only Nepali speaking, but there are people from many communities there as well. Myself i haven’t been to the north as yet, our party does work there, but i have been working in the south and also in the east. In allot of people, and in the media there is allot of confusion. The CPB (MLM) is not just a party in the refugee camps, and not just Nepali speaking. We have cadres of many ethnic backgrounds, and our party works all over Bhutan.

Lal Salam Blog: For the refugees in Nepal is it true your party favors repatriation in Bhutan rather then resettlement in third countries?

Comrade Sushil: It is not that our party policy is just to return people to Bhutan. It is not a solution. Liberating the people of Bhutan is the only real and long term solution to this problem. We are not for resettlement, and we are not for repatriation in Bhutan without changing anything else. Moving people around like they are animals is not a solution. That is our position. There needs to be a political solution to this, and only then can the refugees get their rights.

Some people have said our party was created to agitate for the repatriation of refugees, this is not the case. Our party was established within Bhutan and amongst the people. We are in favour of all the oppressed people.Only understanding the problem of the refugees as a problem of the political structure of Bhutan that we can find a solution. Our party was not established for the refugees, but for all the Bhutanese.

Splitters Versus Lumpers in Historical Linguistics

Warning:  Long, runs to 57 pages. This article is intended at the moment more for the general audience than for specialists,  but specialists may also find it of interest. At the moment, it is not properly formatted or edited to be of use for publication in an academic journal, but perhaps it could be published in such a format some day.

For background into what Historical Linguistics is, see this Wikipedia article. Basically it involves determining which languages are related to each other via various means and once that is determined, reconstructing a proto-language that the related languages descended from, along with, hopefully, regular sound correspondences which supposedly proves the relationship once and for all. The argument in Historical Linguistics now is between conservatives or splitters or progressives or lumpers.

Splitters say that the comparative method – described above as reconstructing a proto-language with regular sound correspondences – is necessary in order to prove that two or more languages are related. However, they also say, probably correctly, that this method is not useful beyond ~6,000 years. Any relationships beyond that time frame would not be provable by the comparative method and hence could never be proven. This effectively shuts down all research into long-range older language families.

Some lumpers say that this method is not necessary and instead relationships can be determined by simply looking at the two or more languages, a process called comparison or mass comparison. I point out below that comparison need not be cursory but could mean deep study of languages over 10, 15, or 20 years.

They tend to focus on core vocabulary, numerals, family terms, pronouns, and deictics, in addition to small morphological particles – all things that are rarely borrowed. Once they find a number of these items that resemble one another greater than chance, they say that the two languages are related because chance and borrowing are ruled out.

They say that this is the way to prove language relatedness, not the comparative method. The comparative method instead is used to learn interesting things about language families that have already been discovered via comparison, such as reconstructing proto-languages and finding regular sound correspondences.

Splitters say that comparison or mass comparison is not a valid way of proving that languages are related and that only the comparative method can be used to prove this. However, as noted, they set a 6,000- year time limit on the method needed to prove this, and this walls off a lot of potential knowledge and about ancient and long-range language relationships as unprovable and hence undiscoverable. In a way, they are shutting the door to new scientific discovery beyond a certain time frame by claiming that the method needed to make these discoveries doesn’t work beyond X thousand years.

Other lumpers disagree that the comparative method has a time limit on it and are attempting to use the comparative method to reconstruct ancient long-range language families and find regular sound correspondences between them. Unfortunately, most of their efforts are in vain as splitters are using increasingly strict criteria for proof of language relationship and hence are shooting down most if not all of these efforts being done “in the proper way.”

So they are saying that proof must be done in a certain way, but when people try to play by the rules and use that way to find proof, they keep moving the goalposts and using increasingly strict, petty, and quibbling methods to in general say that the relationship is not proven.

So the say, “You must use this tool for your proof!” And then people play fair and use the tool, and almost always say, “Sorry, you didn’t prove it!” It all feels like a game that is rigged to fail is most if not all cases.

Hence, the current trend of extreme conservatism in Historical Linguistics has set up rules seem to be designed to prevent the discovery of most if not all new language families, in particular long-range families older than 6-8,000 years.

I am quite certain that long-range language families such as Altaic (with either three families or five), Indo-Uralic, Uralic-Yukaghir, Hokan, Penutian, Mosan, Almosan, Japanese-Korean, Gulf, Yuki-Gulf, Elamite-Dravidian, Quechumaran, Austroasiatic-Hmong Mien, Coahuiltecan, North Caucasian, or Na-Dene will never be proven in my lifetime, and that’s not to mention the more extreme proposals such as Eurasiatic, Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Austric, and Amerind, although the evidence for the first and last of these is quite powerful.

There are simply too many emotions tied up in any of these proposals. Further, many linguists have spent a good part of their careers arguing against these proposals. It is doubtful that any amount of evidence will cause them to change their minds. Scientists, like any other humans, don’t like to be shown that they’re wrong.

Lyle Campbell, Maryanne Mithun, Mauricio Mixco, Sarah Grey Thomason, Joanna Nichols, William Poser, Peter Daniels, Dell Hymes, Larry Trask, Gerrit Dimmendaal, Donald Ringe, Juha Janhunen, William Bright, and Paul Sidwell are among the leaders of this new conservatism.

At first I was very angry at what these people were doing, especially the most egregious cases such as Campbell. Then I realized that people lie and misrepresent things all day long every single day in my life and that this behavior is fairly normal behavior in humans, especially in a mushy area like this one where hard truths are hard to come by and most stated facts are more properly matters of opinion or could be construed that way.

I realized that they are simply defending a scientific paradigm and that unfortunately, this is the rather underhanded and emotion-ridden environment that defending paradigms tends to produce.

Though to be completely honest, I should not be singling these people out because the current conservatism is simply consensus and acts as the current paradigm on the language relatedness question in Historical Linguistics. The people listed above are at the top of the profession and are often considered the best historical linguists. They write books on historical linguistics. A number are considered to be ultimate authorities on questions of language relatedness. They are simply the leading edge of the current conservative consensus and paradigm in the field.

Although granted, of all of them, Campbell seems to be the most extreme conservative. He is also one of the top historical linguists in the world. Mixco, Mithun, and Poser are about on the same level as Campbell.

Campbell, Mithun, Thomason, and Mixco are Americanists whose conservatism was set off by the publication of Joseph Greenberg’s Language in the Americas (LIA) in 1987.

All of the linguists above are noted for the excellent scholarship.

The conservatives who are denying most if not all new families are are called splitters.They tend to be very angry if not out and out abusive, engaging in bullying, mockery, ridicule, ostracization, and all of the usual techniques used in science against the proposers of a new paradigm.

The people who propose long-range families are called lumpers. Lumpers are heavily disparaged in the field nowadays such that almost no one wants to be known as a lumper or associated with such. However, many other historical linguists seem to be taking a more moderate fence-sitter stance where they are open to questions of new language families, including long-range families.

Among the long-range families that the moderates are open to considering nowadays are Indo-Uralic, Dene-Yenisien, and Austro-Tai. Some of the smaller long-range families in the Americas even have supporters among the most hardline of splitters. I’m even dubious about well-argued proposals such as Dene-Yenisien.

Thomason takes extreme umbrage to the notion that splitters have a bias that will not allow few if any new families to be discovered after Greenberg compared them with Malcolm Guthrie’s objections to Greenberg’s new classification of Bantu. However, after thinking this over for some time now, I now believe that Greenberg is correct. The splitters have their minds made up. They are going to allow few if any new families to be discovered. A few of them have caved a bit.

I also work in mental health, and it’s pretty obvious to me when something is not right about a scientific debate. I’ve been getting that vibe about the splitters versus lumpers debate from the very start. When a debate in science has degenerated into bias, ideology and ideologues, propaganda, politics, and in particular extreme emotion, it gives off a certain intuitive feel about it. This debate has felt this way from Day One. To put it simply, the debate simply doesn’t smell right. I have a feeling that science left the room along time ago here.

One thing I noticed was that people who have worked on one particular language or family for much of their careers are especially angry and aggressive about the notion that their family could possibly be related to anything else. Indeed famous linguists were remarking on this tendency as early as 1901. Among the reasons given was that they had their hands full already without new work to take on and a disinclination to see their language family related to anything else as this would deny its specialness.

Trask is forceful that Basque could not possibly have any outside relatives.

I saw a debate on the Net some years ago with Trask and a Spanish assistant holding court over a debate over the external relations of Basque. Those who argued for external relations were pushing a relationship with the Caucasian languages, which is possible though not proven in my opinion. Trask and his assistant were very angry and aggressive in holding down the fort. Apparently everything was a Spanish borrowing. The debate didn’t smell right at all.

With a background in psychology, I wonder what is going on here. One possibility is as Greenberg suggests and as was suggested back in 1901 – simple narcissism. When one specializes in a language family for a long time, it probably become blurred with the self such that the self and the family become married to each other, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Yourself and the family you’ve spent your career working on become one and same thing. If your family is not related to anything else, it’s special.

We all think we are special. This is the essence of human narcissism. To say that their favorite language has relatives is to deny its specialness almost as if to say that our egos were not real but were instead extensions of other people’s egos. Actually if you read Sartre or study modern particle physics, that’s not a bad theory, but most people bristle at the notion.

I met Korean and Japanese people when I was doing my Masters. Both beamed when they told me that their language had no known relatives. Of course that made it special in their eyes and played right into their ethnocentrism.

Another problem may be the trajectory of one’s career. If one has been arguing forcefully for 30 years that there are no known relations to your family, your reputation is going to take a huge hit if you have to agree that you were wrong all those years.

There is also a politics question.

Another reason is Politics. We are dealing here with a Paradigm. For a good description of a Scientific Paradigm, see Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn holds that science is by its nature very conservative, some sciences being more conservative than others. A Paradigm is set up when the field reaches a satisfactory consensus that a particular theory is correct. After a while, serious barriers go up to any challenges to overthrow the proven theory.

The challenges are first ignored, then ridiculed (often severely), then attacked (often ferociously) and then, if the challenge is successful, it is accepted (often slowly and grudgingly). Kuhn pointed out that defenders of the old theory are usually so reluctant to see the paradigm overthrown that we often must wait literally until their deaths to finally overthrow the paradigm. They defend it to their deathbeds. I suggest we are dealing with something more than pure empiricism here.

It is quite risky to challenge a paradigm in science. People’s careers have suffered from it. A supporter of Keynesian economics, then challenging the current paradigm in economics, could not get hired at any university in the US during the 1930’s.

In the splitters versus lumpers debate, we have been in the Anger phase for some time now. We seem to be settling out of it, as many are taking a fence-sitting position and arguing for attempts to resolve the debate to make it less heated.

The Paradigm here involves extreme skepticism about any new language families to the point that any new families are simply going to be rejected on all sorts of grounds. Paradigms involve politics at the academic level. When a Paradigm is set up in science, almost all scientists write and do research within the paradigm. Anything outside of the paradigm is derided as pseudoscience or worse.

The problem is that when a Paradigm in in effect, all scholars are supposed to publish within the Paradigm. Publishing outside the paradigm is regarded as evidence that one is a kook, a crank, is practicing pseudoscience, or that one is crazy or a fool. It is instructive in this debate to note that most of the prominent lumpers are independent scholars operating outside of the politics of academia.

I have had them tell me that the only reason they can take the lumper position that they do is because they are independent and don’t have a university job, so there are no repercussions if they are wrong. They told me that if they had a professorship, they would not be able to do this work. They have also told me that they know for a fact that certain splitters might jeopardize their jobs, careers, and especially their funding if they took a lumper position. This was given as one of the reasons for their dogmatic splitterism.

In addition, science works according to fads, or more properly, standard beliefs. The trends for these beliefs are set by the biggest names in the field. The biggest names in Linguistics are all splitters now. They are the trendsetters, especially in whatever specialty of Historical Linguistics you are working in. Everyone else in the field is dutifully following in their footsteps. As an up and coming young scholar, you are supposed to follow the proper trends and hypotheses of your field to uphold the consensus of scholars in your area of specialty. As you can see there is a lot more than simple empiricism going on here.

With my background, I look for psychological motivations anywhere I can find them. And science is no stranger to bias and emotional psychological motivations driving, or usually distorting it. We are human and humans have emotions. Emotion is the enemy of logic. Logic is the basis of empiricism. Hence, emotions are the enemy of science.

Scientists are supposed to remain objective, but alas, they are humans themselves and subject to all of the emotional psychological motivations that the rest of them are. Scientists are supposed to police themselves for bias, but that’s probably hard to do, especially if the bias is rooted in psychological processes or in particular if it is unconscious, as many such processes are.

Campbell’s case is an extreme one, but I believe it is simply motivated by internal psychological process inside of the man himself.

Campbell is driven by psychological complexes. His entire turn towards extreme conservatism in this debate was set off by the huge feud he had with Greenberg, and everything since has flowed from that. He took a very angry position that LIA was completely false and did his best to trash its reputation far and wide. This disparagement is still the order of the day, and Greenberg’s name is as good as mud in the field.

Then Campbell generalized his extreme splitterist reaction to LIA out to all of the language families in the world because if he allowed any new families elsewhere in the world, he might have to allow them in the Americas, and he could not countenance that. Note also that Campbell has gone out of his way to specifically attack Greenberg’s four-family split in his proposal for language families in Africa.

This proposal, done with Greenberg’s derided method of mass comparison, has had a successful result in Africa and has been proven with the test of time. Campbell cannot allow this because if he admits that Greenberg was right in Africa, he might have to accept that he might be right in the Americas too, and that’s beyond the pale. So in his recent works he has specifically set out to state that Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian, and Khoisan – the four families of Greenberg’s classification – have not been proven to exist yet. The truth is exactly the opposite, but the psychological process here is bald and naked for all to see.

Here he specifically trashes these language families because they were discovered by Joseph Greenberg, Campbell’s bete noir. Campbell’s agenda is to show the Greenberg is a preposterous kook and crank, although he was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. Greenberg’s African work is regarded as true, and this poses a problem if Campbell is to characterize Greenberg as a charlatan.

If Greenberg was right about one thing, could he not be right about another? In order to lay the foundation for the theory that Greenberg’s method doesn’t work and that it cannot discover any language relationships, Campbell will have to deny the method ever had any successes. So he sets about to deny that Greenberg’s four African families are proven.

Splitters have come up with a repertoire of reasons to shoot down proposed language relations and most are pretty poor.

They rely on overuse of the borrowing, chance, sound symbolism, nursery word, and onomatopoeia explanations for non-relatedness. There is also an overuse of the comparative method with excessively strict standards being set up for etymologies and sound correspondences. In a number of cases, linguists are going back to the etymologies of their proto-languages and reducing them by up to half.

In the last 20 years, Uralicists have gone back over the original Proto-Uralic etymologies and gotten rid of fully half of them (from 2,000 down to 1,000) on a variety of very poor reasons, mostly irregular sound correspondences. It appears to me that while there were some obvious bad etymologies in there, most of the ones that were thrown out were perfectly good.

Irregular sound correspondences is a bad reason to throw out an etymology. Keep in mind that 5

This is not just conservatism. It is out and out Reaction. Worse, it is nearly a Conservative Revolution, which I won’t define further. It is akin to a city council declaring that all of the old, beautiful buildings in the city are going to be torn down because they were not constructed properly. Will they be rebuilt? Well, of course not. Most of the top Uralicists are involved in this silly and destructive project.

In a recent paper, George Starostin warned that the splitters were not just conservatives determined to stop all progress. He pointed out that there was actually a trend towards rejection and going backwards in time to dismantle families that have already set up on the grounds that they were not done perfectly enough. As we can see, his warning was prescient.

There are statements being made by moderates that both sides, the splitters and the lumpers, are being equally unreasonable. As one linguist said, the debate is between lazy lumpers (Just believe us, don’t demand that we prove it!) and angry splitters (Not only is this new family false, but all new families proposed from now on will also be shot down!). He suggested that they are both wrong and that the solution lies in a point in the middle. I don’t have a problem with this moderate centrist belief

The splitter notion itself rests on an obvious falsehood, that there are hundreds of language families in the world that have no possible relationship with each other.

According to Campbell, there are 160 language families and isolates in the Americas. The question is where did all of these entities come from. Keep in mind, in Linguistics, the standard view is that these 160 entities are not related to each other in any way, shape, or form. Thinking back, this means that language would have had to have developed in humans 160 times among the Amerindians alone.

The truth is that there was no polygenesis of language.

Sit back and think for a moment. How could language possibly have been independently developed more than one time? Obviously it arose in one group. How could it have arose in other groups too? It couldn’t and it didn’t. Did some of the original speakers go deaf, become mutes, forget all their language, and  then have children, raising them without language, in which case the children devised language for themselves?

Children need comprehensible input to develop language. No language to hear in the environment, no language for the children to acquire on their own. With coclear implants, formerly deaf people are now able to hear for the first time. A woman got hers at age 32. Since she missed the Critical Period for language development, the window of which closes at age 8, she  has not, even at this late  date, been able to acquire language satisfactorily. She missed the boat. No input, no language.

Obviously language arose only once among humans. It had to. And hence, all human languages are related to each other de facto whether we can “prove” it by out fancy methods or not. In other words, all human languages are related. Those 160 language families and  isolates in the Americas? All related. Now we may not be able to prove which languages they are related to specifically and most closely, but we know they are all related to each other.

In the physical sciences, including Evolutionary Psychology, many things are simply assumed because the alternate theories could not have happened. But we have no evidence of much of anything in Evolutionary Psychology or Evolutionary Anthropology. We know our ancestors lived in X place at Y times, but we have no idea what they were doing there. We can’t go back in time to prove that this or that happened.

Using the logic of linguists, since we cannot make time machines to go back in time and make theories about Evolutionary Anthropology and Evolutionary Psychology of these peoples, we can make no statements about this matter, as the only way to prove it would be to see it. In physics, there are particles that we have never seen. We have simply posited their existence because according to our theories, they have to exist. According to linguists, we could not posit the discovery of these particles unless we see it.

Contrary to popular rumor, everything in science does not have to be “proven” by this or that rigorous method. Many things are simply posited, as no real evidence for their existence exists, either because we were not there or because we can’t see them, or in the case of pure physics, we can’t even test out our theories. They exist simply because they have to according to our existing theories, and all competing theories fall down flat.

Well, the Americanists beg to disagree. Greenberg’s theory was so extreme and radical that the entire field erupted in outrage. None of their alternate theories, not even one of them, make the slightest bit of sense.

Despite the fact that these languages are obviously related to each other, in order to “officially prove it” we have to use a method called the comparative method whereby proto-languages and families are reconstructed and regular sound correspondences are shown between the languages being studied.

This is the only way that we can prove one language is related to another. That’s simply absurd for a few reasons.

First of all, I concur with Joanna Nichols that the comparative method does not really work on language families older than 6-8,000 years. Beyond that time, so many sound changes have taken place, semantics have been distorted, and terms fallen out of use that there’s not much of anything left to reconstruct. Furthermore, time has washed away any evidence of sound correspondences.

Although Nichols is a splitter, I have to commend her. First, she’s right above.

Second, realizing this, she says that the comparative method will always fail beyond this time frame. I believe she thinks then that we need to use new methods if we are to prove that long-range families exist. The method she suggests is “individual-identifying evidence,” which seems to be another way of saying odd morpheme paradigms that were probably not borrowed and are hardly existent outside of that family.

This harkens back to Edward Sapir’s “submerged features,” where he says we can prove the existence of language families by these small morphemic resemblances alone.

The rest of the field remain sticks in the mud. They say that we must use the comparative method to discover that languages are related because no other method exists. The problem is that as noted, as splitters themselves note, if the comparative method fails beyond 6,000 years back, all attempts to prove language families that old or older are bound to fail.

The splitters seem positively gleeful that according to their paradigm, few if any new language families will be discovered. This delight in nihilism seems odd and disturbing. What sort of science is gleeful that no new knowledge will be found? Even in the even that this is true, it’s depressing. Why get excited about something so negative?

Many language families in the world were discovered by Greenberg’s “mass comparison” or simply comparing one language to another, which should be called “comparison.” And in fact, many of the smaller language families in the world are still being posited by the means of comparison or mass comparison. Comparison need not be the broad, sweeping, forest for the trees, holistic method Greenberg employs. I argue that it means lining up languages and looking for common features. We could be lining up one language against another and that would also be “comparison.”

It need not be a shallow examination. One could examine a possible language for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years.

After studying a pair or group of languages for some time, if one finds a group of core vocabulary items that resemble one another and are above the rate found by chance (

I fail to understand why examining a language or group of languages for a long period of time to find resemblances and try to rule out chance or borrowings is a ridiculous method. What’s so ridiculous about that? Sure, it’s nice to reconstruct and get nice sound correspondences going, but it’s not always necessary, especially in long-range comparisons when such methods are doomed to failure.

One more thing: if splitters say that the comparative method fails beyond 6,000 years, why do they keep putting long-range families to the test using the comparative method? After all, the result will always come up negative, right? What’s the point of doing a study you know will come up negative? Just to get your punches in?

There are a number of folks who have bought into the splitters’ arguments and are trying to discover long-range families by the comparative method of reconstructing the proto-language and finding regular sound correspondences between them. A number of them claim to have been successful. There have been attempts to reconstruct proto-languages and find regular sound correspondences with Altaic, Nostratic, Dene-Caucasian, Dene-Yenisien, Austro-Tai, Totonozoquean, and Uralo-Yukaghir.

Altaic, Nostratic, and Dene-Caucasian all have proto-languages reconstructed with good sound correspondences running through them. Altaic and Nostratic have etymological dictionaries containing many words, 2,300 proto-forms in the case of Altaic in a 1,000 page volume. Further, a considerable Nostratic proto-language was reconstructed by Dogopolsky and Illich-Svitych.

All of these efforts claim that they have proven their hypotheses. However, the splitters such as Campbell have rejected all of them. So you see, even when people follow the mandated method and play it by the book the way they are supposed to, the splitters will nearly always say that the efforts come up short. It’s a rigged game.

How about another question? If the comparative method fails is doomed beyond 6,000 years, why don’t we use another method to discover these relationships? The splitter rejoinder is that there is no other method. It’s the comparative method or nothing. But how do they know this? Can they prove that other methods can never be used to successfully discover a language relationship?

The following quotes are from a textbook or general text on Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell and Mario Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. The purpose of this paper will be misrepresented as critics who will say that I am a lumper who is saying criticizing splitters for their opposition to known language families.

There is some of that here, but more than lumper propaganda, what I am trying to do here more than anything else is to show how Campbell and Mixco have been untruthful about linguistic specialist consensus regarding these families. In most cases, they are openly misrepresenting the state of consensus in the field.

As will be shown, Campbell and Mixco repeatedly seriously distort the state of consensus regarding many language families, particularly long-range ones. They usually favor a more negative and conservative view, saying that a family has little support when it has significant support and saying it is controversial when the consensus in the field is that the family is real. Campbell and Mixco engage in serious distortions of fact all through this text:

Campbell and Mixco:

Afroasiatic: Enjoys wide support among linguists, but it is not uncontroversial, especially with regard to which of the groups assumed to be genetically related to one another are to be considered true members of the phylum.

There is disagreement concerning Cushitic, and Omotic (formerly called Sidama or West Cushitic) is disputed; the great linguistic diversity within Omotic makes it a questionable entity for some. Chadic is held to be uncertain by others. Typological and areal problems contribute to these doubts. For example, some treat Cushitic and Omotic together as a linguistic area (Sprachbund) of seven families within Afroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco are wrong. Afroasiatic is not controversial at all. There is widespread consensus that the family exists and that all of the subfamilies are correct.

The “we can’t reconstruct the numerals” argument is much in evidence here too. See the Altaic debate below for more on this. One argument against Altaic is “We can’t reconstruct the numerals.” However, Afroasiatic is a recognized family and not only has reconstruction itself proved difficult, but the numerals in particular are a gigantic mess. It seems that one does not need to have a fully reconstructed numeral set after all to have a proven language family.

There is consensus that Cushitic is a valid entity. Granted, there has been some question about Omotic, but in the last 10-15 years, consensus has settled on an agreement that Omotic is part of Afroasiatic.

The great diversity of Omotic is no surprise. Omotic is probably 13,000 years old! It’s amazing that there’s anything left at all after all that time.

Where do we get the idea that a language family cannot possibly be highly diverse? Chadic is also uncontroversial by consensus. I am not aware of any serious proposals to see Cushitic and Omotic as an Altaic-like Sprachbund of mass borrowings. Campbell and Mixco’s comments above are simply not correct. The only people questioning the validity of Afroasiatic or any of its components are Campbell and Mixco, and they are not an experts on the family.

Campbell and Mixco:

Berber is usually believed to be one of the branches of Afroasiatic.

This is far too pessimistic. Berber is recognized by consensus as being one of the branches of Afroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco:

Niger-Kordofanian (now often just called Niger-Congo): A hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Joseph H. Greenberg in his classification of African languages. Estimated counts of Niger-Kordofanian languages vary from around 900 to 1,500 languages. Greenberg grouped ‘West Sudanic’ and Bantu into a single large family, which he called Niger-Congo, after the two major rivers, the Niger and the Congo ‘in whose basins these languages predominate’ (Greenberg 1963: 7).

This included the subfamilies already recognized earlier: (1) West Atlantic (to which Greenberg joined Fulani, in a Serer-Wolof-Fulani [Fulfulde] group), (2) Mande (Mandingo) (thirty-five to forty languages), (3) Gur (or Voltaic), (4) Kwa (with Togo Remnant) and (5) Benue-Congo (Benue-Cross), with the addition of (6) Adamawa-Eastern, which had not previously been classified with these languages and whose classification remains controversial.

For Greenberg, Bantu was but a subgroup of Benue-Congo, not a separate subfamily on its own. In 1963 he joined Niger-Congo and the ‘Kordofanian’ languages into a larger postulated phylum, which he called Niger-Kordofanian.

Niger-Kordofanian has numerous supporters but is not well established; the classification of several of the language groups Greenberg assigned to Niger-Kordofanian is rejected or revised, though most scholars accept some form of Niger-Congo as a valid grouping.

As Nurse (1997: 368) points out, it is on the basis of general similarities and the noun-class system that most scholars have accepted Niger-Congo, but ‘the fact remains that no one has yet attempted a rigorous demonstration of the genetic unity of Niger-Congo by means of the Comparative Method.’

There is consensus among scholars that Niger-Kordofanian is a real thing.

Campbell and Mixco:

Nilo-Saharan: One of Greenberg’s four large phyla in his classification of African languages. In dismantling the inaccurate and racially biased ‘Hamitic,’ of which Nilo-Hamitic was held to be part, Greenberg demonstrated the inadequacy of those former classifications and argued for the connection between Nilotic and Eastern Sudanic.

He noted that ‘the Nilotic languages seem to be predominantly isolating, tend to monosyllabism, and employ tonal distinctions’ (Greenberg 1963: 92). To the extent that this classification is based on commonplace shared typology and perhaps areally diffused traits, it does not have a firm foundation. Nilo-Saharan is disputed, and many are not convinced of the proposed genetic relationships. It is generally seen as Greenberg’s wastebasket phylum, into which he placed all the otherwise unaffiliated languages of Africa.

First of all, Nilo-Saharan is not classified based on its language typology which were perhaps areally diffused. There is also a great deal of the more typical evidence in favor of this language family. Second,  it is not true that it lacks a firm foundation and that many are not convinced of its reality. The consensus among experts is that this family exists and the overwhelming majority of the subfamilies and isolates Greenberg put it in are correct.

Saying that it is a wastebasket phylum does not make sense because the Nilo-Saharan languages are only found in  a certain part of Africa. If it was truly such a phylum, there would be languages from all over Africa placed in this family.

According to Roger Bench, a moderate, there is now consensus in the last 10-15 years that Nilo-Saharan is a real thing.

Consensus has formed that 7

Yes, Campbell and Mixco say that Nilo-Saharan is not real, but they are not specialists.

Campbell and Mixco:

Khoisan: A proposed distant genetic relationship associated with Greenberg’s (1963) classification of African languages, which holds some thirty non-Bantu click languages of southern and eastern Africa to be genetically related to one another. Greenberg originally called his Khoisan grouping ‘the Click Languages’ but later changed this to a name based on a created compound of the Hottentots’ name for themselves, Khoi, and their name for the Bushmen, San.

Khoisan is the least accepted of Greenberg’s four African phyla. Several scholars agree in using the term ‘Khoisan’ not to reflect a genetic relationship among the languages but, rather, as a cover term for all the non-Bantu and non-Cushitic click languages.

Although it is probably true that Khoisan is the least accepted of Greenberg’s families, that’s not saying much, as it only means that 8

According to George Starostin, in the last 5-10 years, there is now consensus that Khoisan exists. There are five major Khoisan scholars, and four of them agree that Khoisan is real, with all of them including Sandawe and most including Hadza. There is one, Traill, who says it’s not real, but he is also a notorious Africanist splitter.

Campbell and Mixco:

Eurasiatic: Greenberg’s hypothesis of a distant genetic relationship that would group Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean–Japanese–Ainu, Nivkh, Chukotian and Eskimo–Aleut as members of a very large ‘linguistic stock’. While there is considerable overlap in the putative members of Eurasiatic and Nostratic there are also significant differences. Eurasiatic has been sharply criticized and is largely rejected by specialists.

I have no doubt that Eurasiatic has been sharply criticized, but apart from a negative review in Language by Peter Daniels, the controversy seems quite muted compared to the furor over Amerind. I am also not sure that it is largely rejected by specialists. It probably is, but most of them have not even bothered to comment on it. I believe that this family is one of the best long-range proposals out there.

Based on the data from the pronouns alone, it’s obviously a real entity, though I would include Indo-European, Uralic-Yukaghir, Altaic including Japanese and Korean, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut, leaving out Nivki for the time being and certainly leaving out Ainu. Nivki does seem to be a Eurasiatic language but it’s not a separate node. Instead it may be a part of the Chukotian family. Or even better yet, it seems to be part of a family connected to the New World via the Almosan family in the Americas.

I feel that Eurasiatic is a much more solid entity than Nostratic. Not that I am against Nostratic, but it’s more that Eurasiatic is a simple hypothesis to prove and with Nostratic, I’m much less sure of that. On the other hand, to the extent that Nostratic overlaps with Eurasiatic, it is surely correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

Indo-Anatolian: The hypothesis, associated with Edgar Sturtevant, that Hittite (or better said, the Anatolian languages, of which Hittite is the best known member) was the earliest Indo-European language to split off from the others. That is, this hypothesis would have Anatolian and Indo-European as sisters, two branches of a Proto-Indo-Hittite.

The more accepted view is that Anatolian is just one subgroup of Indo-European, albeit perhaps the first to have branched off, hence not ‘Indo-Hittite’ but just ‘Indo-European’ with Anatolian as one of its branches. In fact the two views differ very little in substance, since, in either case, Anatolian ends up being a subfamily distinct from the other branches and in the view of many the first to branch off the family.

The view that Anatolian is just another subgroup of IE is not the more accepted view. In fact, it has been rejected by specialists. Indo-Europeanists have told me that Indo-Anatolian is now the consensus among Indo-Europeanists, so Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Indo-Anatolian is a minority view is false.

Campbell and Mixco:

Nostratic (< Latin nostra ‘our’): A proposed distant genetic relationship that, as formulated in the 1960s by Illich-Svitych, would group Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian and Hamito-Semitic (later Afroasiatic), though other versions of the hypothesis would include various other languages. Nostratic has a number of supporters, mostly associated with the Moscow school of Nostratic, though a majority of historical linguists do not accept the claims.

There are many problems with the evidence presented on behalf of the Nostratic hypothesis. In several instances the proposed reconstructions do not comply with typological expectations; numerous proposed cognates are lax in semantic associations, involve onomatopoeia, are forms too short to deny chance, include nursery forms and do not follow the sound correspondences formulated by supporters of Nostratic.

A large number of the putative cognate sets are considered problematic or doubtful even by its adherents. More than one-third of the sets are represented in only two of the putative Nostratic branches, though by its founder’s criteria, acceptable cases need to appear in at least three of the Nostratic language families. Numerous sets appear to involve borrowing. (See Campbell 1998, 1999.) It is for reasons of this sort that most historical linguists reject Nostratic.

It is probably correct that consensus among specialists is to reject Nostratic, but serious papers taking apart of the proposal seem to be lacking. Nevertheless, most dismiss it and it is beginning to enter into the emotionally charged terrain of Altaic and Amerind, particularly the former, and belief in it is becoming a thing of ridicule as it is for Altaic. Nevertheless, there have been a few excellent linguists doing work on this very long-range family for decades now.

Campbell and Mixco:

Indo-Uralic: The hypothesis that the Indo-European and Uralic language families are genetically related to one another. While there is some suggestive evidence for the hypothesis, it has not yet been possible to confirm the proposed relationship.

This summary seems too negative. Indo-Uralic is probably one of the most promising long-range proposals out there. I regard the relationship between the two as obvious, but to me it is only a smaller part of the larger Eurasiatic family. Frederick Kortland has done a lot of good work on this idea. Even some hardline splitters are open to this hypothesis.

Campbell and Mixco:

Altaic: While ‘Altaic’ is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related. In spite of this, Altaic does have a few dedicated followers.

The most serious problems for the Altaic proposal are the extensive lexical borrowing across inner Asia and among the ‘Altaic’ languages, lack of significant numbers of convincing cognates, extensive areal diffusion and typologically commonplace traits presented as evidence of relationship.

The shared ‘Altaic’ traits typically cited include vowel harmony, relatively simple phoneme inventories, agglutination, their exclusively suffixing nature, (S)OV ([Subject]-Object-Verb) word order and the fact that their non-main clauses are mostly non-finite (participial) constructions.

These shared features are not only commonplace typological traits that occur with frequency in unrelated languages of the world and therefore could easily have developed independently, but they are also areal traits shared by a number of languages in surrounding regions the structural properties of which were not well-known when the hypothesis was first framed.

This one is still up in the air, but Campbell and Mixco are lying when they say that idea has been abandoned. Most US linguists regard it as a laughingstock, and if you say you believe in it you will experience intense bullying and taunting from them. Oddly enough, outside the US, in Europe in particular, Altaic is regarded as obviously true. However, notorious anti-Altaicist Alexander Vovin has camped out in Paris and is now spreading his nihilistic doctrine to Europeans there.

The problem is that almost all of the US linguists who will laugh in your face and call you an idiot if you believe in Altaic are not specialists in the language. However, I did a study of Altaic specialists, and 7

So the anti-Altaicists are pushing a massive lie – that critical consensus has completely abandoned Altaic and regards as a laughingstock, but their project is more Politics and Propaganda than Science. In particular, it’s a fad. So Altaic is in the preposterous position where almost all of the people who know nothing about it will laugh in your face and call you an idiot if you believe in it and the overwhelming majority of specialists will say it’s real.

Altaic must be the only nonexistent family that has an incredibly elaborate 1,000 page etymological dictionary, full reconstructions of the proto-languages, etymologies of over 2,000 Altaic terms, and elaborate sound correspondences running through it. The anti-Altaicists use the silly “we can’t reconstruct the numerals so it’s not real” line here.

Altaic is obviously true based on 1-2 person pronoun paradigms at an absolute minimum. The anti-Altaic argument of course, is preposterous. As noted, they dismiss a vast 1,000 page Etymological Dictionary with 2,300 reconstructed etymologies as a hallucinated work.

There are vast parallels in all three families at all levels, in particular in the Mongolic-Tungusic family, which gets a 10

The argument that entire 1-2 pronoun paradigms have been borrowed is particularly preposterous because 1-2 pronouns are almost never borrowed anyway, and there has never been a single case of on Earth of the borrowing of a 1-2 person pronoun paradigm, much less the borrowing of one at the proto-language level. So the anti-Altaicists are arguing that something that has never happened anywhere on Earth not only happened, but happened more than once among different proto-languages. So the anti-Altaic argument is that something that could not possibly have happened actually occurred.

This is the conclusion of every paper the splitters write. Something that has never occurred on Earth and probably could not possibly happen not only occurred, but occurred many times around the globe for thousands of years.

Many regard including Japonic and Koreanic in Altaic as dubious, although having looked over the data, I am certain that they are part of Altaic. But they seem to be further away from the traditional tripartite system than the traditional three families are to each other. If we follow the theory that Japanese and Korean have been split from Proto-Altaic for 8,000 years, this starts to make a lot more sense.

The ridiculous massive borrowings argument specifically fails for geographical reasons. Proto-Turkic was never next door to Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic. The Proto-Altaic homeland is in the Khingan Mountains in Western Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia. Tungusic split off from Altaic 5,300 years ago, leaving Proto-Turkic-Mongolic in Khingans. 3,400 years ago, Proto-Turkic broke from Proto-Turkic-Mongolic and headed west to Northern Kazakhstan and the southern part of the Western Siberian Plain, leaving Mongolic alone in the Khingans.

Proto-Transeurasian – Khingans 9,000 YBP

Proto-Korean – Liaojiang on the north shore of the Bohai Sea 8,000 YBP.

Proto-Japanese – Northern coast of the Shandong Peninsula on the southern shore of the Bohai Sea 8,000 YBP

Proto-Tungusic – Amur Peninsula 5,300 BP. Breaks apart 2,000 YBP.

Proto-Turkic – Northern Kazakhstan 3,400 BP.

Proto-Mongolic – Khingans 3,400 BP.

Can someone explain to me how Mongolic and Tungusic borrow from Turkic 3,000 miles away in a different place at a different time in this scenario? Can someone explain to me how any of these proto-languages borrowed from each other at all, especially as they were in different places at different times?

Not only that but supposedly both Proto-Mongolic and Proto-Tungusic each borrowed from Proto-Turkic separately. These borrowings included massive amounts of core vocabulary in addition to an entire 1st and 2nd person pronoun paradigm.

Keep in mind that the borrowing of this paradigm, something that has never happened anywhere, supposedly occurred not just once but twice, between Proto-Tungusic 5,300 YBP on the Amur from Proto-Turkic in North Kazakhstan 3,000 miles away 2,000 later, and at the same time, between  Proto-Mongolic in the Khingans and Proto-Turkic in Northern Kazakhstan 3,000 miles away. How exactly did this occur?

And can someone explain to me how Proto-Korean and Proto-Japanese borrow from either of the others under this scenario?

Campbell and Mixco:

Turkic: A family of about thirty languages, spoken across central Asia from China to Lithuania. The family has two branches: Chuvash (of the Volga region) and the non-Chuvash Turkic branch of relatively closely related languages. Some of the Turkic languages are Azeri, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, Uighur, Uzbek, Yakut, Tuvan, and Tofa. Turkic is often assigned to the ‘Altaic’ hypothesis, though specialists have largely abandoned Altaic.

As noted above, it is simply incorrect that specialists have largely abandoned Altaic. This is simply carefully crafted propaganda on the part of Campbell and Mixco. In fact, my own study showed that 7

Campbell and Mixco:

Some scholars classify Korean in a single family with Japanese; however, this is a controversial hypothesis. Korean is often said to belong with the Altaic hypothesis, often also with Japanese, though this is not widely supported.

Japonic-Koreanic has considerable support among specialists in these languages, although it is not universally accepted. Campbell and Mixco are excessively negative about the level of support for an expanded Altaic. In fact, an expanded Altaic which includes Japanese and Korean in some part of it has significant though probably not majority support. Perhaps 30-4

Shandong Peninsula with Tianjin and Liaojiang across the Bohai Sea, location of the Proto-Japonic and Proto-Korean homelands.

Proto-Japanic and Proto-Koreanic were both spoken in Northeastern China 8,000 YBP. Proto-Japonic was spoke on the north of the Shandong Peninsula and Proto-Koreanic was spoken across the Bohai Sea in Tianjin and especially across the Bohai Straights on the Liaodong Peninsula. They may have stayed here next to each other for 3,000 years until the Proto-Koreanics moved to the Korean Peninsula 5,000 YBP, displacing the Ainuid types there. Proto-Japonics probably stayed in Shandong until 2,3000 YBP when they left to populate Japan and the Ryukus, displacing the Ainu who were already there.

Campbell and Mixco:

Yeniseian, Yenisseian: Small language family of southern Siberia of which Ket (Khet) is the only surviving member. Yeniseian has no known broader relatives, though some have been hypothesized (see the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis).

Campbell and Mixco state and serious untruth here, including some weasel words. By discussing Dene-Caucasian in the same breath as relatives of Yenisien, they are able to deflect away from the more widely accepted proposal of a link between Yenisien in the Old World and Na-Dene in the New World. This is Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yenisien proposal.

The problem is that this long-range proposal has the support of many people, including splitter Johanna Nichols. Of the 17 experts who weighed in on Dene-Yenisien, 15 of them had a positive view of the hypothesis. Campbell and Mixco are the only two who are negative, but neither are experts on either family. All specialists in either or both families support the proposal. When 15 out of 17 is not enough, one wonders at what point the field reaches a consensus. Must we hold out for Campbell and Mixco’s approval for everything?

Campbell and Mixco:

Nivkh (also called Gilyak): A language isolate spoken in the northern part of Sakhalin Island and along the Amur River of Manchuria, in China. There have been various unsuccessful attempts to link Nivkh genetically with various other language groupings, including Eurasiatic and Nostratic.

Granted, there is no consensus on the affiliation of Nivkhi. However, a recent paper by Sergei Nikolaev proved to me that Nivkhi is related to Algonquian-Wakashan, a family of languages in the Americas. One of these languages is Wakashan, and there has been talk of links between Wakashan and the Old World for some time.

Michael Fortescue places Nivkhi in Chukotko-Kamchatkan. Greenberg places it is Eurasiatic as a separate node. But as Chukotko-Kamchatkan is part of Eurasiatic, they are both saying the same thing in a way. My theory is that Nivkhi is Eurasiatic, possibly related to Chukoto-Kamchatkan, and like Yeniseian, is also connected to languages in North America as some of the Nivkhi probably migrated to North America and became the American Indians. In this way, we can reconcile both hypotheses.

There are three specialist views on Nivkhi. One says it is Eurasiatic, the other that it is Chukotian, and the third that it is part of the Algonquian-Wakashan or Almosan family in the New World. Consensus is that Nivkhi is related to one of two other entities – other languages in Northeastern Asia or a New World Amerindian family. So expert consensus seems to have moved away from the view of Nivkhi as an isolate.

Campbell and Mixco:

Paleosiberian languages (also sometimes called Paleoasiatic, Hyperborean languages): A geographical (not genetic) designation for several otherwise unaffiliated languages (isolates) and small language families of Siberia.

Perhaps the main thing that unites these languages is that they are not Turkic, Russian or Tungusic, the better known languages of Siberia. Languages often listed as Paleosiberian are: Chukchi, Koryak, Kamchadal (Itelmen), Yukaghir, Yeniseian (Ket) and Nivkh (Gilyak). These have no known genetic relationship to one other.

Taken as a broad statement, of course this is true. However, Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal or Itelmen are part of a family called Chukutko-Kamchatkan. This family has even been reconstructed. Campbell and Mixco’s statement that these languages have no known genetic relationship with each other is false.

Campbell and Mixco:

Austroasiatic: A proposed genetic relationship between Mon-Khmer and Munda, accepted as valid by many scholars but not by all.

The fact is that Austroasiatic is not a “proposed genetic relationship.” Instead it is now accepted by consensus. That there may be a few outliers who don’t believe in it is not important. I’m not aware of any linguists who doubt Austroasiatic other than Campbell and Mixco, and neither is a specialist. Austroasiatic-Hmong-Mien is the best long-range proposal for Austroasiatic, but it has probably not yet been proven. Austroasiatic is also part of the expanded version of the Austric hypothesis.

Campbell and Mixco:

Miao-Yao (also called Hmong-Mien): A language family spoken by the Miao and Yao peoples of southern China and Southeast Asia. Some proposals would classify Miao-Yao with Sino-Tibetan, others with Tai or Austronesian; none of these has much support.

This seems to be more weasel wording on the part of the authors. By listing Tai or Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan as possible relatives of Miao-Yao and then correctly dismissing it, they leave out a much better proposal linking Hmong-Mien to Austroasiatic.

This shows some promise, but the relationship is hard to see amidst all of the Chinese borrowing. As noted, the relationship between Hmong-Mien and Sino-Tibetan is one of borrowing. The relationship with Tai or Austronesian is part of Paul Benedict’s original Austric proposal. He later turned against this proposal and supported a more watered down Austric with Austronesian and Tai-Kadai, which seems to be nearing consensus support now.

Campbell and Mixco:

Austric: A mostly discounted hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Paul Benedict that would group together the Austronesian, Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao.

More weasel wording. It is correct that Benedict’s original Austric (which also included Austroasiatic) was abandoned even by Benedict himself, a more watered down Austric that he later supported consisting of Austronesian and Tai-Kadai called Austro-Tai has much more support. They get around discussing the watered down Austro-Tai with good support by limiting Austric to Benedict’s own theory which even he rejected later in life. In this sense, they misrepresent the debate, probably deliberately.

In fact, evidence is building towards acceptance of Austro-Tai after papers by Weera Ostapirat and Laurence Sagart seem to have proved the case using the comparative method. Roger Blench also supports the concept. In addition, to Benedict, it is also supported by  Lawrence Reid, Hui Li, and Lawrence Reid. It is opposed by Graham Thurgood, who is a specialist (he was my main academic advisor on my Master’s Degree in Linguistics). It is also opposed by Campbell and Mixco, but they are not specialists. Looking at expert opinion, we have seven arguing for the theory and one arguing against it. Specialist consensus then is that Austro-Tai is a real language family.

Even the larger version of Austric, including all of Benedict’s families plus Ainu and the South Indian isolate Nihali, has some supporters and some suggestive evidence that it may be correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

Tai-Kadai: A large language family, generally but not universally accepted, of languages located in Southeast Asia and southern China. The family includes Tai, Kam-Sui, Kadai and various other languages. The genetic relatedness of several proposed Tai-Kadai languages is not yet settled.

Tai-Kadai is not “mostly but not universally accepted.” It is accepted by consensus as an existent language family. Perhaps whether some languages belong there is in doubt but the proposal itself is not controversial. Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Tai-Kadai remains controversial is a serious distortion of fact.

Campbell and Mixco:

Na-Dene: A disputed proposal of distant genetic relationship, put forward by Sapir, that would group Haida, Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan. There is considerable disagreement about whether Haida is related to the others. The relationship between Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan seems more likely, and some scholars misleadingly use the name ‘Na-Dené’ to mean a grouping of these two without Haida.

Levine and Michael Krauss, two top Na-Dene experts, are on record as opposing the addition of Haida to Na-Dene for 40 years. A recent conference about Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yenisien concluded that there was no evidence to include Haida in Na-Dene. However, a recent paper by Alexander Manaster-Ramer made the case that Haida is part of Na-Dene. This paper was enough to convince me. Further, the scholar with the most expertise on Haida has said that Haida is part of Na-Dene. So Campbell and Mixco are correct here that the subject is up in the air with both supporters and opponents.

The statement that a relationship between Tlingit and Eyak-Athabaskan seems “more than likely” is an understatement. I believe it is now linguistic consensus that Tlingit is part of Na-Dene, so Campbell and Mixco’s statement is not quite true.

Campbell and Mixco:

Tonkawa: An extinct language isolate of Texas. Proposals to link Tonkawa with the languages of the Coahuiltecan or Hokan-Coahuiltecan hypotheses have not generally been accepted.

I’m sure it is the case that Coahuiltecan and Hokan-Coahuiltecan affiliations of Tonkawa have been rejected. A Coahuiltecan connection was even denied by Manaster-Ramer, who recently proved that the family existed. That said, there are interesting  parallels between Tonkawa and Coahuiltecan that I cannot explain. However, a recent paper by Manaster-Ramer made the much better case that Tonkawa was in fact Na-Dene.

Campbell and Mixco:

Amerind: The Amerind hypothesis is rejected by nearly all practicing American Indianists and by most historical linguists. Specialists maintain that valid methods do not at present permit classification of Native American languages into fewer than about 180 independent language families and isolates. Amerind has been highly criticized on various grounds.There is an excessive number of errors in Greenberg’s data.

Where Greenberg stops – after assembling superficial similarities and declaring them due to common ancestry – is where other linguists begin. Since such similarities can be due to chance similarity, borrowing, onomatopoeia, sound symbolism, nursery words (the mama, papa, nana, dada, caca sort), misanalysis, and much more, for a plausible proposal of remote linguistic relationship one must attempt to eliminate all other possible explanations, leaving a shared common ancestor as the most likely.

Greenberg made no attempt to eliminate these other explanations, and the similarities he amassed appear to be due mostly to accident and a combination of these other factors.

In various instances, Greenberg compared arbitrary segments of words, equated words with very different meanings (for example, ‘excrement/night/grass’), misidentified many languages, failed to analyze the morphology of some words and falsely analyzed that of others, neglected regular sound correspondences, failed to eliminate loanwords and misinterpreted well-established findings.

The Amerind ‘etymologies’ proposed are often limited to a very few languages of the many involved. Finnish, Japanese, Basque and other randomly chosen languages fit Greenberg’s Amerind data as well as or better than do any of the American Indian languages in his ‘etymologies’; Greenberg’s method has proven incapable of distinguishing implausible relationships from Amerind generally. In short, it is with good reason Amerind has been rejected.

The movement into the Americas came in three waves.

The first wave brought the Amerinds. It is here where the 160 language families reside. According to the reigning theory in Linguistics, this group of Amerindians came in one wave that spoke not only 160 different languages but spoke languages that came from 160 different language families, none of which were related to each other. These being language families which, by the way, we can find scarcely a trace of in the Old World.

The second wave was the Na-Dene people who came along the west coast and then went inland.

The last wave were the Inuits.

Greenberg simply lumped all of the 600 languages of the  Americas into a single family. The argument was good, though I’m not sure he proved that every single one of those languages were all part of Amerind. But a lot of them were. The n- m- 1st and 2nd person pronouns are found in 450 of those languages. The ablauted t’ana, t’una, t’ina word, meaning respectively human child  of either sex, all females including family terms, and all males including family terms are extremely common in Amerind.

So t’ana just means child. T’una means girl, woman, and includes various names for all sorts of female relatives – grandmother, cousin, aunt, niece, etc. T’ina means boy, man, and includes the family terms grandfather, brother-in-law, uncle, cousin, and  nephew. This ablauted paradigm is found across a vast number of these Amerind languages, and it is nonexistent in the rest of the world.

Quite probably most to all of those languages having that term are part of a single family. What are the other arguments? That 300 languages independently innovated these terms, in this precise ablauted paradigm, on their own? What is the likelihood of that?

That these items occurring across such vast swathes of languages is due to chance? But this paradigm does not exist anywhere else, so how could it be due to chance? That these core vocabulary items were borrowed massively all across the Americas, when family terms like that are rarely borrowed? That’s not possible. None of the alternate theories make the slightest bit of sense.

Hence, the Amerind languages that have the n- m- pronoun paradigm and the t’ana, t’una, t’ina ablauted names for the sexes and the terms of family relations by sex are quite probably part of a huge language family. I’m well aware that a few of the languages having those terms could be due to chance. I’m pretty sure that about zero of those pronouns and few, if any, of those family terms were borrowed.

However, not all Amerind languages have either the pronoun paradigm or the ablauted sex term. In those cases, I’m unsure if those languages are all part of the same language. But if you can put those languages in families and reconstruct to the proto-languages and end up with the pronoun paradigm or the ablauted family term reconstructed in the proto-language of that family, I’m sure that family would be part of Amerind. That’s about all you have to do to prove relationship in Amerind.

Campbell and Mixco:

Penutian: A very large proposed distant genetic relationship in western North America, suggested originally by Dixon and Kroeber for the Californian language families Wintuan, Maiduan, Yokutsan, and Miwok-Costanoan. The name is based on words for ‘two’, something like pen in Wintuan, Maiduan, and Yokutsan, and uti in Miwok-Costanoan, joined to form Penutian.

Sapir, impressed with the hypothesis, attempted to add an Oregon Penutian (Takelma, Coos, Siuslaw, and ‘Yakonan’), Chinook, Tsimshian, a Plateau Penutian (Sahaptian, ‘Molala-Cayuse,’ and Klamath-Modoc) and a Mexican Penutian (Mixe-Zoquean and Huave).

The Penutian grouping has been influential, and later proposals have attempted to unite various languages from Alaska to Bolivia with it. Nevertheless, it had a shaky foundation based on extremely limited evidence, and, in spite of extensive later research, it did not prove possible to demonstrate any version of the Penutian hypothesis and several prominent Penutian specialists abandoned it. Today it remains controversial and unconfirmed, with some supporters but with many who doubt it.

The statement that today it “remains controversial and unconfirmed, with some supporters but with many who doubt it,”  has no basis in fact. It is surely controversial and it is probably unconfirmed by linguistic consensus. Yes, it has a number of supporters, and there are quite a few who doubt it. However, among those who doubt it, none of them are specialists in these languages. Hence, we are dealing with an Altaic situation here, where the specialists believe in it but the non-specialists insist it’s nonsense.

In fact, the consensus among the specialists on these languages is that Penutian exists. A Penutian family comprising Maiduan, Utian (Miwok-Costanoan), Wintuan, Yokutsan, Coosan, Siuslaw, Takelma, and Kalapuyan and Alsean (Yakonan), Chinookan, Tsimshianic, Klamath-Modoc (Lutuami), Cayuse and Molala (Waiilatpuan), Sahaptian has been proven to my satisfaction. I am uncertain of the Penutian status of Mixe-Zoque and Huave (Mexican Penutian), although I believe that Huave and Mixe-Zoque are related to each other, albeit at a very deep time depth of 9,000 years.

Anti-Penutianists have not published a paper in a long time. The last one I remembered was published by William Shipley, and he’s been gone for a while. I am not aware of one expert on these languages who says Penutian does not exist.

Campbell and Mixco:

Cayuse-Molala: A genetic classification no longer believed that linked Cayuse (of Oregon and Washington) and Molala (of Oregon) in a single assumed family. The evidence for this was later shown to be wrong and the hypothesis was abandoned.

According to Campbell and Mixco, Cayuse is an isolate. I assume they see Molala as an isolate too. There probably is no Cayuse-Molala family, but Molala is part of Plateau Penutian, and Cayuse may be part of the same group. Plateau Penutian is part of the Penutian hypothesis, which appears to be true. By not mentioning these facts, Campbell and Mixco’s statement is quite misleading.

Campbell and Mixco:

Mosan: A now abandoned proposal of distant genetic relationship that would group Salishan, Wakashan and Chimakuan together.

Another part of this proposal was that Mosan was part of a larger family with Algonquian called Almosan. An excellent series of papers was published recently by Sergei Nikolaev that validated Almosan and proved to me that it was related to Nivkhi in the Old World.

Michael Fortescue argued a few years before that Mosan was a valid entity and that was related to the Old World language Nivkhi. Recently, Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin also supported Almosan and grouped it with Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Nivkhi. David Beck recently argued that Mosan is a language area or Sprachbund instead of a genetic family.

So far we have four specialists arguing that Mosan exists, and one saying it does not. The consensus among specialists seems to be that Mosan is a valid language family. At any rate, Campbell and Mixco’s statement that this proposal is “now abandoned” is false.

For Almosan, we have four specialists saying it exists and two apparently saying it does not. Expert consensus on Almosan is optimistic.

Hokan: A controversial hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Dixon and Kroeber among certain languages of California; the original list included Shastan, Chimariko, Pomoan, Karok, and Yana, to which they soon added Esselen, Yuman, and later Chumashan, Salinan, Seri, and Tequistlatecan. Later scholars, especially Edward Sapir, proposed various additions to Hokan. Many ‘Hokan’ specialists doubt the validity of the hypothesis.

It is not true that many Hokan specialists “doubt the validity of the hypothesis.” I can’t remember the last time I saw an anti-Hokan paper. Yes, Campbell, Mixco, and Mithun say Hokan does not exist, but they are not specialists. The consensus among specialists such as Mikhail Zhikov, Terence Kaufman, and Marcelo Jokelsy is that Hokan exists. I have only found one specialist who disagrees with the Hokan hypothesis, and she merely doubts the existence of Ch’imáriko.

I believe that a Hokan family consisting of Karuk, Shasta-Palaihnihan, Ch’imáriko, Yana, Salinan, Pomoan, Yuman, Seri, and Tequistlatecan exists, although I would leave out Chumashan, Washo, and Jicaquean or Tolan. Chumashan is an isolate, and while Washo and Tolan may be Hokan at a very deep time depth, the few possible cognates are not enough to provide evidence of this. I am agnostic on Esselen, which is only known from a 350 word list collected by friars at a California mission.

I have not seen any evidence that Coahuiltecan is Hokan. There is some evidence, though not probative enough for me, that Lencan and Misumalpan may be Hokan. Nevertheless, Lencan and Misumalpan form a language family that has even been accepted by Campbell himself. This is the only long-range family proposal he has supported since the publication of LIA.

Although Campbell’s opinion on many hypotheses may be waved away as he is not an expert on that family or language, Lencan and Misumalpan are right up his alley as he is an expert in languages in Central America. He has focused mostly on Mayan, but he also knows the other languages of the region well.

Campbell and Mixco:

Cochimí–Yuman: A family of languages from Arizona, California and Baja California, with two branches, extinct Cochimí (of Baja California) and the Yuman subfamily (members of which are Kiliwa, Diegueño, Cocopa, Mojave, Maricopa, Paipai, and Walapai–Havasupai–Yavapai, among others). Cochimí–Yuman is often associated with the controversial Hokan hypothesis, though evidence is insufficient to embrace the proposed relationship.

The consensus among experts in the Cochimí–Yuman family, including Mikhail Zhikov and Terence Kaufman, is that it is part of the Hokan family. Campbell disbelieves in the association but he is not an expert. However, Mixco opposes the Hokan affinity of Cochimi-Yuman, and granted, he is actually a specialist on these languages. So among specialists, we have two who support the Hokan association and one who opposes it. The specialist consensus then would be that they are this association is a promising hypothesis, but it is not yet proven. This is different from Campbell and Mixco’s wording, which is more negative.

Campbell and Mixco:

Coahuiltecan: A hypothesis of distant genetic relationship that proposed to group some languages of south Texas and northern Mexico: Coahuilteco, Comecrudo and Cotoname, and sometimes also Tonkawa, Karankawa, Atakapa and Maratino (with Aranama and Solano assumed to be varieties of Coahuilteco).

Sapir proposed a broader classification of Hokan–Coahuiltecan, joining the Coahuiltecan proposal with the broader Hokan hypothesis, and placed this in his even larger Hokan–Siouan super-stock. None of these proposals has proven sufficiently robust to be accepted generally.

I am not aware of any specialists who have recently argued against the existence of Coahuiltecan. Yes, Campbell and Mixco do not accept it, but they are not specialists. A recent paper by Alexander Manaster-Ramer proved the existence of Coahuiltecan to my satisfaction. I believe that a Coahuiltecan family consisting of Comecrudo, Cotoname, Aranama, Solano, Mamulique, Garza, and Coahuilteco absolutely exists. Karankawa is probably a part of this family. I am not aware that any specialist is arguing against the existence of this family at the moment.

I do not think there is good evidence for other postulated languages such as Atakapa and Tonkowa. First of all, Tonkawa is probably Na-Dene as per another paper by Manaster-Ramer. Atakapa is part of the Gulf family. However, I am not yet convinced that Coahuiltecan is as member of the Hokan language family.

Campbell and Mixco:

Gulf: Hypothesis of a distant genetic relationship proposed by Mary R. Haas that would group Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and Chitimacha, no longer supported by most linguists.

The notion that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists is simply incorrect. There have only been four linguists who studied this family.

The first was Mary Haas, who also proposed a relationship with Yuki as Yuki-Gulf. Haas was always dubious about Chitimacha’s addition to Gulf.

Greenberg resurrected Yuki-Gulf in LIA.

Pam Munro is an expert on these languages. A while back she published a paper on Yuki-Gulf. I read that paper. The resemblances are so stunning between Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and Chitimacha that I was shocked that anyone doubted the relationship. Furthermore, the relationship with Yuki and Wappo, a full 2,500 miles away in Northern California, was shocking.

The fourth was Geoffrey Kimball, who concluded that Gulf was probably a family but that this could not be proven.

There evidence for Gulf in Munro’s paper was good, and there even appeared to be sound correspondences running through the relationship. What was shocking about it was that Yuki and Wappo could not possibly have borrowed from Gulf because Gulf is in Louisiana 2,500 miles away. So how did all these resemblances come in? Chance is ruled out. Borrowing could not have happened. Therefore a relationship at least between Yuki and the Gulf languages is obvious.

Munro’s paper took the position that Greenberg’s Yuki-Gulf hypothesis was correct. However, there are some problems. First, Atakapa as part of Gulf has been controversial, in part because it has also been tied in with Coahuiltecan. Indeed there are resemblances between the two, and they were not spoken next to each other so borrowing can be ruled out.

Perhaps a way of solving the matter is to posit not only Yuki-Gulf but a larger family that includes Coahuiltecan as Greenberg does in LIA. I have no idea how justified this is, but there are certainly surprising resemblances between Atakapa and the Coahuiltecan languages.

Furthermore, whether or not Chitimacha is part of Gulf has been up in the air from the beginning when Haas published her paper. Recent papers have made the case that Chitimacha is related to Mesoamerican language families of Mexico such as Mixe-Zoque and Totonacan. These papers used the comparative method. Campbell has rejected this hypothesis.

That Tunica at the very least shows a close relationship with Muskogean is not even controversial. The idea has a long pedigree and is presently supported by all experts in this family.

Geoffrey Kimball examined the data recently and concluded that from the evidence, it appears that Gulf exists, but we will never be able to prove it, as he puts it. However, he stated that Tunica is almost certainly related to Muskogean. At this point, I would think that Tunica-Muskogean at the very least should be considered consensus among specialists.

Kimball’s paper had a number of problems, mostly that he was operating with a negative stance towards the existence of the family. Further, there were issues with his notions of sound symbolism and borrowing in the paper where his explanations made no sense at all.

Let’s evaluate Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists.

We have four specialists on record about whether or not a Gulf family exists.

Mary Haas: Positive, minus Chitimacha

Joseph Greenberg: Positive

Pamela Munro: Positive

Geoffrey Kimball: Probably exists but it’s not possible to prove it.

Brown et al: Chitimacha is a part of the Totonozoquean family, not the Gulf family. The other members of Gulf are not members of this family.

Three out of the four specialists on the Gulf family say that the Gulf family is a reality. The other feels it exists but cannot be proven. And there is uncertainty about whether Chitimacha is probably not part of Gulf. The consensus among experts is that Gulf is a real language family.

Campbell and Mixco’s statement that Gulf is no longer supported by most linguists is simply false.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that a good case can be made for the existence of a Totonozoquean family consisting of the Mixe-Zoque and Totonacan languages. Whether this is consensus among experts is somewhat up in the air.

Campbell and Mixco:

Macro-Gê: A proposed distant genetic relationship composed of several language families and isolates, many now extinct, along the Atlantic coast (primarily of Brazil). These include Chiquitano, Bororoan, Botocudoan, Rikbaktsa, the Gê family proper, Jeikó, Kamakanan, Maxakalían, Purian, Fulnío, Ofayé and Guató. Many are sympathetic to the hypothesis and several of these languages will very probably be demonstrated to be related to one another eventually, though others will probably need to be separated out.

This is much too pessimistic. Macro-Gê is not a proposed long range family -it is a large language family in South America accepted by consensus. It is not true that many are sympathetic to it; instead, the consensus is that it is correct. Nor is it correct to say that it will probably be demonstrated eventually. In fact, it is already an accepted reality.

Campbell and Mixco:

Quechumaran: Proposed distant genetic relationship that would join Quechuan and Aymaran. While considerable evidence has been gathered in support of the hypothesis, it is extremely difficult in this case to distinguish what may be inherited (and therefore evidence of a genetic relationship) from what may be diffused (and therefore not reliable evidence of a genetic connection).

It is true that there is no consensus on the existence of Quechumaran. The consensus seems to be as above that it is not yet proven. Those opposed to the idea throw out the usual borrowing scenario, but they have had to push the large number of borrowings in core vocabulary all the way back to Proto-Aymara and Proto-Quechua. In my opinion, “massive borrowing of core vocabulary at the proto-language level” is simply another word for genetics.

Gerald Clauson, the famous Turkologist opponent of Altaic, had to keep pushing his massive borrowings of core vocabulary further and further back until he eventually had the scenario taking place at the Proto-Turkic, Proto-Tungusic, and Proto-Mongolic levels. See above for my analysis on why these three proto-languages could not possibly have borrowed from each other as they were in different places in different times.

A similar problem exists with opponents of the Uralo-Yukaghir theory, in which they are also forced to deal with a large amount of core vocabulary dating back a long time. Hakkinen tried to solve this problem by pushing the borrowing all the way back to not just Proto-Uralic but Pre-Proto-Uralic. Pre-Proto-Uralic at 8,000 years to me means nothing less than Uralo-Yukaghir. What else could it mean? He has heavy borrowing of core vocabulary between Pre-Proto-Uralic and Proto-Yukaghir. That’s another way of saying genetics.

Campbell and Mixco:

Macro-Guaicuruan (also spelled Macro-Waykuruan, Macro-Waikuruan): A proposed distant genetic relationship that would join the Guaicuruan and Matacoan families of the Gran Chaco in South America in a larger-scale genetic classification. Grammatical similarities, for example in the pronominal systems, have suggested the relationship to some scholars, but the extremely limited lexical evidence raises doubts for others. Some would also add Charruan and Mascoyan to these in an even larger ‘Macro-Waikuruan cluster.’

It is not true that this is a proposed long-range family suggested by some by doubted by others. In fact, Macro-Guaicuruan is accepted by consensus and is as uncontroversial as Macro-Gê, Pama-Nyungan, and other such families. There is however debate about which families are members outside of the Guaicuruan and Mataguayo language families that make up the essence of the family. There have been suggestions to add Lule-Vilela and the Zamucoan, Charruan, and Mascoyan families to this family. I do not feel that these additions are yet warranted.

Campbell and Mixco:

Pama-Nyungan: A very large, widely spread language family of Australia, some 175 languages. The name comes from Kenneth Hale, based on the words pama ‘man’ in the far northeast and nyunga ‘man’ in the southwest. Languages assigned to Pama-Nyungan extend over four-fifths of Australia, most of the continent except northern areas.

Pama-Nyungan is accepted by most Australianists as a legitimate language family, but not uncritically and not universally. It is rejected by Dixon; it is held by others to be plausible but inconclusive based on current evidence. Some Pama-Nyungan languages are Lardil, Kayardilt, Yukulta, Yidiny, Dyirbal, Pitta-Pitta, Arrente, Warlpiri, Western Desert language(s), and there are many more.

Actually, consensus now is that this family of Australian languages does indeed exist. True, Dixon challenged the existence of Pama-Nyungan recently, but his opposition was so outrageous and it prompted a quick surge of papers from Australianists defending the existence of Pama-Nyungan. The notion that other Australianists feel that Pama-Nyungan is possible but presently inconclusive is not correct. I am not aware of a single Australianist other than Dixon who feels this way. Instead, Pama-Nyungan is about as uncontroversial as Macro-Gê, Afroasiatic, or Austroasiatic.

Campbell and Mixco:

‘Papuan’ languages: A term of convenience used to refer to the languages of the western Pacific, most in New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya), that are neither Austronesian nor Australian. Papuan definitely does not refer to a genetic relationship among these languages for no such relationship can at present be shown.

That is, the term is defined negatively and does not imply a linguistic relationship. While most are spoken on the island of New Guinea, some are found in the Bismark Archipelago, Bougainville Island and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor Archipelago to the west.

There are some 800 Papuan languages divided in the a large number of mostly small language families and isolates not demonstrably related to one another.

For what it’s worth, this statement by Campbell and Mixco is correct.

Campbell and Mixco:

One large genetic grouping that has been posited for a number of Papuan languages is the Trans-New Guinea phylum, which is promising but not yet confirmed.

Trans-New Guinea is not “promising but not yet confirmed.” Instead it is an uncontroversial language family accepted by the consensus of all specialists.

References

Beck, David (1997). Mosan III: A Problem of Remote Common Proximity. International Conference on Salish (and Neighbo(u)ring) Languages.
Benedict, Paul K. (1942). “Thai, Kadai, and Indonesian: A New Alignment in Southeastern Asia.” American Anthropologist 44, 4: 576–601.
Benedict, Paul K. (1975). Austro-Thai Language and Culture, with a Glossary of Roots. New Haven: HRAF Press.
Blench, Roger (2008). The Prehistory of the Daic (Tai-Kadai) Speaking Peoples. Presented at the 12th EURASEAA Meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands, 1-5 September 2008.
Blench, Roger (2018). Tai-Kadai and Austronesian Are Related at Multiple Levels and Their Archaeological Interpretation (draft).
Blust, Robert (2014). “The Higher Phylogeny of Austronesian and the Position of Tai-Kadai: Another Look,” in The 14th International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL-14).
Campbell, Lyle and Marianne Mithun (Eds.) (1979). The Languages of Native America: An Historical and Comparative Assessment.
Campbell, Lyle and Mauricio J. Mixco (2007). A Glossary of Historical Linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.
Campbell, Lyle and William J. Poser (2008). Language Classification: History and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Fortescue, M. (1998). Language Relations across Bering Strait: Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence. (Nivkhi is Mosan.)
Fortescue, Michael (2011). “The Relationship of Nivkh to Chukotko-Kamchatkan Revisited.” Lingua 121, 8: 1359-1376. (Nivkhi is Chukoto-Kamchatkan.)
Gell-Mann, Murray; Ilia Peiros, and George Starostin (2009). “Distant Language Relationship: The Current Perspective.” Journal of Language Relationship.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2000). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1, Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. (2002). Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 2, Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Heine, Bernd (1992). African Languages. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, ed. by William Bright, Vol. 1, pp. 31-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (No such thing as Nilo-Saharan.)
Krauss, Michael E. (1979). Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. The Languages of Native America: Historical and comparative assessment, ed. by Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun, pp. 803-901. Austin: University of Texas Press. (Haida not part of Na-Dene.)
Levine, Robert D. (1979). Haida and Na-Dene: A New Look at the evidence. IJAL 45: 157-70. (Haida not part of Na-Dene.)
Li, Hui (李辉) (2005). Genetic Structure of Austro-Tai Populations (Doctoral Dissertation). Fudan University.
Mixco, Mauricio J. (1976). “Kiliwa Texts.” International Journal of American Linguistics Native American Text Series 1: 92-101
Mixco, Mauricio J. (1977). “The Linguistic Affiliation of the Ñakipa and Yakakwal of Lower California”. International Journal of American Linguistics 43: 189-200.
Nicola¨i, Robert (1990). Parent´es Linguistiques (`A Propos du Songhay). Paris: CNRS. (Dimmendaal says Songhay is Nilo-Saharan.)
Nikolaev, S. (2015). Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 1: Proof of the Algonquian-Wakashan Relationship.
Nikolaev, S. (2016). Toward the Reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 2: Algonquian-Wakashan Sound Correspondences.
Ostapirat, Weera (2005). “Kra-Dai and Austronesian: Notes on Phonological Correspondences and Vocabulary Distribution,”  in Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics, pp. 107-131. London: Routledge Curzon.
Ostapirat, Weera (2013). Austro-Tai Revisited. Paper Presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 29-31 May 2013, Chulalongkorn University.
Reid, Lawrence A. (2006). “Austro-Tai Hypotheses.” In Keith Brown (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition, pp. 609–610.
Sagart, Laurent (2005b). “Tai-Kadai as a Subgroup of Austronesian,” in L. Sagart, R. Blench, and A. Sanchez-Mazas (Eds.), The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics, and Genetics, pp. 177-181.
Sagart, Laurent (2019). “A Model of the Origin of Kra-Dai Tones.” Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale. 48, 1: 1–29.
Thurgood, Graham (1994). “Tai-Kadai and Austronesian: The Nature of the Relationship.” Oceanic Linguistics 33: 345-368.

Alt Left: Russian Thinking on Black-White Versus Grey Areas

Commenter Siberiancat, who is a Russian, left this comment a while back:

Russians are pretty good with gray areas.

An illustration:

A Russian emigrant mathematician and psychologist Vladimir Lefevre was an adviser to Reagan on how to conduct negotiations with Gorbachev. He had a theory that Western and Eastern European (in this case, Soviet) ethics were completely different.

In Western thinking, there is a clear difference between Good and Evil. One should confront evil, yet compromise with an enemy is a good thing

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray. The ends justify the means, and one should not compromise with an enemy.

The advice was to conduct negotiations in such a way that the Soviets would not look like compromising to the domestic constituency. Make negotiations mostly informal. Avoid formal deals that might be seen as defeats by the ordinary Russians.

I would not say that Russians are Easterners, having nothing in common with the Chinese or Indians, yet the ethical systems between them and the West are obviously different.

Oh, and Lefevre was the guy who coined the term Evil Empire.

I find it interesting that he ties Eastern European (as in Slavic?) thinking with Russian thinking. What about in the Baltic states? They’re so Westernized. And the Czechs are so Western they are barely even Slavs. And what do we do with the Romanians? The culture and religion of the East, yet the language of the West? I suspect they are more Eastern than we think. The Balkans, Greece, …Hell, even Bulgaria, are more Southern European or better yet, Southeastern European.

I know everyone over there hates the Turks and I don’t blame them, but I’m afraid that they’re more Turkified than they think, especially the Greeks. Or perhaps the entire region is Southeast Europanified, Southeast European being different from both Eastern and Southern Europe. The Turks like to delude themselves that they are part of general Southeastern Europe, but that is just more Muslim arrogance. They’re so much closer to the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds that they hate so much than they will ever admit. Religion isn’t as big a part of human culture as everyone thinks. In a lot of areas, it’s almost a cultural “add-on.”

I do like this part though:

In the Eastern approach, there is no Good and Evil. Everything is gray.

Reminds me of the great line from Rumi:

Over there In that field Beyond good and evil I will meet you there

– Rumi

That is just so perfect, I am sorry. And it’s so…Eastern…Hell, it’s almost downright Chinese for Chrissake. Rumi was an Iranian Shia Sufi poet. I wonder to what extent Iranian thinking is “Eastern?” I hate to say like Chinese, but I sense a deep vibe of Chinese philosophy in that bit of terse poetry.

Slurs! Let’s Talk about Slurs!

Slurs! Let’s Talk about Slurs!

Fags, Faggots, and Dykes!

I don’t like faggot, but I do use fag. I usually use it in a matter of fact way that is simply descriptive. The way I use it, it means the same thing as “gay men” except it’s one word instead of two. No pejorative sense implied. But even then, I don’t use it that much. Only with certain carefully selected bigots.

I don’t usually call lesbians dykes, but damn, that sure is tempting too. Ever seen a totally dyked-out butch lesbian? Isn’t there a huge part of you that wants to scream dyke just looking at her? What else can you call her? It’s the only word that fits. Plus, most lesbians are real mean, and they really, really hate men, so let’s face it, men, they’re pretty much earned our slurs, right?

Niggers, niggers, and niggers!

I know there are other slurs for Black people, but I couldn’t think of any, so I said niggers three times instead. Pardon my Tourette’s!

I really don’t like to use nigger, but I do use it when I’m alone if I’m really mad at some Black people. In other words, I use it when I talk to myself. I don’t wish to use it in conversation, though. I live with a White man now who refers to Blacks as niggers as a matter of course. He’s a Centrist Democrat and he supports civil rights 10

He calls Blacks niggers all the time, but I just can’t bring myself to do it, though I’d be more sociable if I did, let’s face it. It’s just such a horrible word, nigger. I can say it to myself, but even then only about select Blacks who have very much earned the epithet. But it’s so hard to say it to another human! There’s something so awful about it.

I ran into a gaggle of young ghetto Black women the other day. They were all hot, so of course I could not help looking at them because, you know, I’m not gay?

That’s what I’d say. If some shithead ever complained to me, “Look at that man over there! He’s looking at women!”…well, first of all, let’s hope I never meet anyone that stupid ever again. But should I have such a misfortune, I’d like to say, “Well, God bless him! At least he’s heterosexual!” With a shrug of my shoulders and a chuckle. Isn’t that the coolest thing you can say about some idiot bitching about a man trying to fulfill his basic human needs?

Cunts, I mean women, excuse me, just don’t get it. They are stark raving furious at us straight men because, get this – we have the temerity, the audacity, the very nerve – to actually look at women when we are out and about. According to cunts, this makes us evil. We men are literally evil for looking at women. Don’t ask me why they think this. They’re dumb bitches and lame cunts. What reason do they have for any crazy thing they think? Do you ask a two year old why they say or do anything? Ok, then.

Anyway, one of these Black cunts yelled, excuse me, shrieked at me, like a mammal in a zoo, “Why are you watching us?” How embarrassing. It would be even more embarrassing except that I, a human, just got yelled at by what appears to be an animal – not even a person – an animal. And dumb as a rock too. What…a…cunt! And she was looking at me too. I would look over there and she would look back at me. I wasn’t even looking at them that much. Look a bit, look away, you know how it goes.

I would like to point out that the behavior of this Black lame cunt was particularly outrageous. You simply don’t do that in a public place unless the man’s behavior is completely out of line. If you don’t like men looking at you, there are other things to do. You can always glare at them. Or ignore them. I get that all day long every single day. Hasn’t killed me yet.

Men look at women all the time as a matter of course. I’ve been doing it my whole life, and almost no one has ever yelled at me. They mostly just get resting bitch face and act like I’m not there.

We straight men literally cannot not look at hot women who are around us. You can try to do it, but something in your mind will keep pulling you back and almost forcing you to look at them. It’s a real struggle to not look at them. It’s like there’s this force constantly trying to break away and look at them. Cunts, I mean women, will still hate us and say we’re evil for looking at them anyway, so I don’t expect to convert anyone here. On the other hand, if there are any non-cunts out there – in other words, real women – this is to help you understand us better. You already suspected we couldn’t help it, right, ladies?

To yell at a man loudly in public for looking at you in the common, typical way that all normal men do is the utter nadir of uncivilized, base, rude, animalistic, and barbaric behavior. I don’t think Black people realize how Goddamned rude so many of them are or how outraged it makes so many of us uptight white bread picket fence housing tract suburban White folks.

I keep trying to explain to them how outraged this sort of rudeness makes us, and it’s like I’m talking to a wall. It’s an extreme, outrageous violation of everything we were brought up to be. It’s the opposite of everything we hold near and dear. Most Black people act like, “What’s the big deal?” They just don’t get it.

Ghetto Blacks engage in behavior, day in and day out, all day long, every day, all year long, until they die of the sort that you almost never see growing up in a White community. They do things routinely that would cause the most utterly scandalous outrage in the communities we grew up in and are still a part of. I don’t think Black people will ever comprehend how much this offends and outrages us.

Spics, Beaners, Latrinos, Mexicants, Miggers, and Mexiniggers!

I don’t like to use of those slurs towards Mexicans or Hispanics. Although you gotta admit, some of them are damn funny.

Mexicants? +1.

Latrinos? LOL oh man, whoever made that up is genius.

Miggers? Mexiniggers? Those are just mean, come on.

Spics? Old.

Beaners? Old and tired.

They’re all over around here, and honestly, they don’t act very bad at all. They’re quite tolerable on a day to day acquaintanceship basis. Now, once you start making friends with them, it’s a whole other ballgame, but still, a shocking number of them are quite decent people.

I take my car to a Guatemalan guy. I shop at a local store with a Salvadoran guy behind the counter. I just got my haircut by a Mexican woman. I just got my tires changed at a store that hires a bunch of Mexicans.

They are all immigrants. The immigrant Hispanics actually act better than the ones who are born here. Once they’re born here, they grow up as part of shitty, rude American culture

It’s generally better to take your car to “the Mexicans” as we call them here because they tend to be cheaper, and they do quite good work.

Also, they are very laid back. The Guatemalan guy lets me buy my own parts and bring them in. He just charges me labor. No White mechanic ever lets you do that.

Also, they don’t necessarily close at 5. White mechanic? 5:01, the door’s shut, and they won’t be very nice about it, either.

Plus, the “Mexicans” are usually very nice. The White guys? All White people know what uptight dicks White people can be. Uptight and downright unfriendly. The Mexicans are not like that at all. Very friendly, effusive, warm, outgoing. The Mexican mechanic is your best friend.

I practice my Spanish with all these guys, and they just love me to death for speaking three words of their language. Plus I can speak it far better than your average gringo idiot my age, so that gets points. They point to me and say with eyes open with wonder, “He speaks Spanish!” like they can’t believe their eyes. Plus, my accent is pretty good because I started learning at six. A guy at the bank likes to call the other bank tellers around. Then he tells me to say something in Spanish. I start rattling away and he turns to them and says, “See?” They shake their heads, “Yeah, you’re right.”

Towelheads, Ay-rabs, Mudslimes, Sandniggers, and Camel-jockeys!

I don’t use any of those slurs towards Arabs because I like Arabs. They’re too nice. How can you use a slur towards a nice person? How cold are you? We had Yemenis and Syrians here in this town. And I just met a Palestinian the other day. And Iraqis run the gas station. A Jordanian guy used to work there. The Yemenis, Palestinians, Iraqis, and the Jordanian were effusively friendly. Great people. The Syrians are a mixed bag but some were pretty friendly. They were Christians so they were a bit more reserved. The Muslims are so warm it’s shocking.

Dotheads and Curryniggers!

I don’t use any of those slurs towards Indians because I like Indians. Although curryniggers is funny! I gotta admit it!

We have Punjabis around here. They’re pretty nice. Not nearly as friendly as the Arabs or Hispanics but friendly enough. They sort of keep their distance for some odd reason. I think they don’t really wish to assimilate. And they look just like White people. Their religion is an improvement on shitty Hinduism. At least they’re monotheistic.

Chinks, Gooks, Slants, Chiggers, and Japs!

I don’t use any slurs against Asians. Chiggers is nice though, even though it’s really a biting insect. Some of them just deserve it. Come on. A Chinese dude. Trying to act like a rapper? Nigga please. Sit down. See that Black guy over there? Hand the mike to him, please. Thanks.

They’re just too nice and well behaved. How could you call such a decent, civilized, non-animalistic, respectable, well-mannered, well brought up, dignified, classy, polite person a Jap, chink, gook or God forbid, slant. The better a race acts, the harder it is to call them ugly names. The worse a group acts, the more calling them names seems like the right thing – or even the only thing – to do.

Seaniggers!

These are Islanders. I would never call them seaniggers, though I gotta admit, that’s pretty damn funny. I guess it just goes to show you that no matter where you go in the world, there’s always some type of nigger there, and most of them aren’t even Black. And that’s leaving out the wiggers! We’re all a bunch of niggers when it comes down to it. Sort of like World O’Niggers, ya know?

They’re very sensitive about being Islanders because pretty much nobody really likes them because they don’t act real great and they’re a poor fit for Western societies. Here we include the Samoans, Tongans, Hawaaians, Maoris, Chamorros, Marshall Islanders, Saipanese, Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians. There’s nothing really wrong with any of these jolly sun-and-surf loving folks, but then, I’ve never lived near large numbers of them. I used to teach Samoans in school, and a lot of them were pretty funny. They didn’t do any work, but they sure knew how to ham it up.

Abos and Lucys!

Abos of course are Aborigines. I’m afraid they’re not real well-suited for the modern world. Darwin thought they were so poorly adapted for modernity that they’d go extinct. That hasn’t happened yet. I must say I’ve never met me an Aborigine. Calling them Lucys after the primitive proto-hominid chick whose bones were left in Africa 3.3 million years ago is just mean. On the other hand, it’s also hilarious. They are pretty primitive looking, face it. I’d never call an Aborigine an Abo or especially a Lucy. These poor folks have enough problems in this world without us sitting back and using them as verbal dartboards.

Prairie Niggers!

We just can’t get away from these niggers, can we? We think we can escape them, but wherever you go in the world, it seems like you turn around, and whaddaya know, there’s some species of nigger standing right next to you. And most of them aren’t even Black! This is what Canadians call their Indians or Native Americans when they’re in a bad mood. I gotta admit it’s funny. I love all these nigger variations. Might as well spread these slurs around, right? Let’s be fair about this!

Kikes, Jewboys, ((( ))), and Yids!

I do use slurs towards Jews but only towards Israel-firsters and Israelis. They’re monsters anyway, so they’re lucky I even acknowledge their humanity, assuming they even have any, which is increasingly dubious. Aside from that, I could care less about Jews. If you want to know, I call them kikes, even in casual conversation with carefully selected bigots like myself. Coincidence marks ((( ))) are great conversation starters on the web but only for Israel-firsters. Because Israel firsters? That’s what they are. They’re a bunch of Goddamned kikes. You don’t like that? You think that’s antisemitic? Tell you what. You quit being a monster, and I’ll quit calling you a kike? Deal? Whaddaya say?

Alt Left: Lousy People Make Lousy Countries

If you want to know just how shitty a group of people are, just give them their own country and see what they do when they get a hold of it. Israel is the nation of the Jews. It’s one of the worst countries on Earth. What does that tell you? Turkey is the nation of the Turks, the Gulf Arab countries are the countries of the Gulf Arabs, and India is the country of the Indians. Three of the worst countries on Earth by far, in the running with (((that shitty little country))).

Israel sucks because it’s full of Jews, and this is how Jews act if you give them a country.

Turkey sucks because it’s full of Turks, and this is how Turks act if you give them a country.

Gulf Arab countries suck because they’re full of Gulf Arabs, and this is how Gulf Arabs act if you give them countries.

India sucks because it’s full of Indians, and this is how Indians act if you give them a country.

Why does Mexico blow? Because it’s full of Mexicans, that’s why.

What other reason could there be? Every nation is created by the people who make it up. If the people suck, you get a crappy country. If the people are decent, you tend to get a pretty good country. The only times this might not be true is when the majority oppose the state, but that’s not the case in any of the above nations except Bahrain, where the majority Shia oppose the awful government.

Colombia sucks because it’s full of Colombians.

Guatemala sucks because it’s full of Guatemalans.

El Salvador blows because it’s full of Salvadorans.

Honduras sucks because it’s full of Hondurans (although to be fair, most of the people oppose the state).

Haiti sucks because it’s full of Haitians. Now, I happen to like Haitians in a political sense because 9

Brazil blows because it’s full of Brazilians, a half good and half bad people. Looks like the majority tips bad though because they just voted in a picture-perfect model of Mussolini.

And don’t give me this, “Oh, the people are wonderful! It’s just their terrible government!”

But people aren’t set in stone. Germans and Japanese used to be the worst people on Earth, and now they’re some of the best. But I’m not quite so hopeful about some others. Haitians, for instance, may be problematic for a long time. But electing a Lavalas leader would sure be a step forward.

Eastern Thinking Versus Western Thinking

Say you don’t love something or hate something but instead that you have a whole range of feelings towards it ranging from love to hate to everything in between, and most Westerners will either look at you in awe like you are a Godhead or condemn you as a crazy person, with the latter reaction being the norm.

Most Westerners are silly Manicheans, so that sentence is seen as insane. But any intelligent Asian man would just nod his head. Long ago, they figured out that everything’s a grey area. Remember what Mao said about Stalin? “Stalin was 7

To a Westerner, perhaps especially to an American, that sentence is “insane.” And most Westerners would describe it exactly as such. Westerners don’t do grey areas. Neither do Muslims. Nor Jews. Must have to do with those Abrahamic religions, where things are either good or evil and no ifs, ands or butts about it.

The Jews do try to get away from that with their Talmud, which is 13,000 pages of a bunch of rabbis sitting around debating this or that and never really coming to much of a conclusion about anything. Except most Jews never read one page of the Talmud. Tell a Jew about the evil and sick stuff in that book and they will yell at you. Except you’d be right.

Hinduism tried to get away from that too but mostly by deciding that there wasn’t really such a thing as evil, except the only evil being not fulfilling your Dharma, that is, taking care of your loved ones, tribe, caste, etc. And if you have to do that by stealing millions of dollars, Hinduism says that’s a-ok.

Of course Buddhism tries hardest to get away from this the most to the point where Zen will hardly admit that much of anything is true or even worth pondering about. Instead, as Candide wisely opined, one should simply cultivate one’s garden. Do that, think of nothing but what precisely you are doing, and there you will find satori.

Repost: Frances Cress Welsing

This is an old post from, believe it or not, 10 years ago! The old post also had a lot of comments too. I’ve changed my views in the last 10 years, and I am now less “racist” (LOL) than I was in this post. Still I think it’s for the better. There’s something umcomely about my smirking and smug attitude towards the Black race in this post. I’d like to think I’m beyond that. What I would say now is that most Whites do not necessarily feel that we are superior to Blacks in general. We tend to regard Blacks on an individual level.

Nevertheless, we do see the average Black as existing on a somewhat lower basis than the average White. They are human of course, but they’re just not up there with us. Sort of the way that white collar workers somewhat look down on blue collar workers or how moneyed people look down on the poor. They may be perfectly nice people, but they’re just not on our level.

Now I for one don’t like this particular mindset, yet most Blacks I regard as inferior are decidedly that. They tend to be part of that ghetto culture. It’s an inferior culture that creates inferior human products. Not biologically inferior. Culturally inferior. And I’m not sure to what extent any of them are recoverable.

The recoverable ones are capable of two existences: a middle class one where they more or less conform to satisfactory values, and  ghetto one where they revel in the ghetto culture they apparently find so appealing. This is why the split between ghetto Blacks and middle class Blacks is somewhat false. Because so many Blacks are “floaters.” They float in between both ghetto and middle class cultures. They’re capable of either more or less, but one gets the feeling that they feel most at home in ghetto culture.

Because I feel bad about this, I’m always on the lookout for Blacks who I can see as being on my level. And I’m pretty generous about my endowing them with that trait.

Anyway, this post is good for seeing where my mind was at 10 years ago, and unfortunately, I’m sure many Whites think in exactly this same way. Not that this is such an evil racist way to think. It’s not. But it’s a little bit racist, and I for one think it’s a bit too much. Black people have a whole world of problems. Last thing we Whites need to do is hate them on and make everything all that much worse.

Frances Cress Welsing has written many a ridiculous thing in her career as a Black radical. God pray she is not a tenured academic somewhere. Here are a few. Check out the mouth-feel as you read over them. Scrumptious!

The color of White people is the result of leprosy and genetic inferiority and the ancestors of White people are the sexual partners of dogs and jackals. It took 600 years to breed them, part man and part beast. Hence is it any wonder that Whites lack true emotions in their creation? Is it any wonder that white people are never peaceful? Whites were only created to fight other invading races, to protect the God race of the Black man…

LOL.

White men give there women chocolate with nuts on Mothers day, so they can feel sexual equal to the Black man. You notice the way so many White males are homos? It’s because through anal intercourse, the sick self-debasing White male may fantasize that he can produce a product of color, albeit that the product of color is S**T. Do not take what I say lightly, this is the truth.

LOL wut.

You know something, silly Blacks? Most White guys don’t go around all the time being worried about Black guys and their big Black cocks.

Anyway, some of us White guys, like the author, are pretty big themselves, not that it matters, but still. I once had a Black woman tell me, in the midst of the frolics but before the penetration, “You’re pretty big, you know?” Her terrified eyes were as big as moons. I’ll take that compliment to the bank, hun. Really, how big do you need to be? I’m big enough for my own ego. Who needs more?

Most White guys think that White women who slut for big Black cocks are whores anyway. Many of us effectively throw them right on out of the White race. That’s punishment enough.

White guys? I hate to break it to you Black guys. We feel superior to you. You can argue on and on how this is racism, how it’s crap, how it’s really inferiority transposed as superiority, but still. We just think Black guys are inferior. On a group level, at worst, you’re animals. At best, you’re still below us. On an individual level that may vary, but we still often don’t feel that the individual Black guy is our better. A lot of us have residual racism that gets in the way of that.

That sucks but that’s how we feel, even White liberals. Sure, Black guys are better at some stuff, but nothing that’s important. Sure, White women dump us for Blacks, but those are women of the street, nothing more than silly whores who are being evicted from the Great Race. Who worries about whores?

A much better analysis is to see White Supremacy for what it is, not psychoanalyze it away with nonsense. Yeah! We think we’re better! Not just better than you Blacks, but better than everyone else on Earth! And we really, really do believe it, too.

All races are supremacist in a sense, ethnocentrism being what it is after all.

But there are a few races, like the European Whites (North Europeans worst of all) and the NE Asians (Japanese worst of all) who have a truly extreme sense of their superiority. They don’t just feel superior to those “wife-stealing bastards over the hill” as most tribes do, they actually feel better than most other humans on the planet! And they really believe it.

The consequences of Super-Supremacism are not good. That Germany and Japan, two ultra-supremacist nations, engaged in mass genocides recently is not incidental. It’s easy to kill the inferior, not much harder than stomping on bugs.

Blacks and humanist Whites have written whole libraries full of the harm that White Supremacy as an ideology has done especially to Blacks and to other non-Whites.

  • We think we’re better. This is the real problem. Discuss.
  • We don’t think we’re worse. This is a Black fantasy to avoid dealing with the painful reality of number 1, that the Black is the butt of jokes and the object of humiliation by Supremacist Whites.

Repost: Englishes, Portugueses, and Chineses

In the comments to a previous post, Goyta made several comments. First of all he noted that the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are considerable, especially when a Brazilian hears a less educated, working class or rural Portuguese.

He also said that when European Portuguese are interviewed on Brazilian TV, Brazilians wish they had subtitles. Wanting to have subtitles when you see a video of someone speaking is actually a symptom that you are dealing with another language. He said the differences are particularly severe when it comes to IT. He said he cannot understand 9

It does appear that the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are pretty significant, more significant than the differences between US and British English.

On other hand, I find Hibernian English spoken in Ireland to be nearly incomprehensible, though it is said to be just a dialect of English. It’s clearly been influenced extensively by the Irish language. Scots, the regional English spoken in Scotland and exemplified by the movie Trainspotting , is actually a completely separate language from English. That movie actually needed subtitles. On the other hand, there is a Scottish English dialect that is not Scots that is pretty intelligible.

We can always understand British English no matter who is writing it. Same with understanding spoken Australian and New Zealand (Kiwi) English. British English is often written a bit differently in slang expressions, but we pick them up. The formal writing is totally understandable.

There have been huge fights on Wikipedia between British English and US English speakers with complaints from the Brits of bullying by the Americans. There was an attempt to fork the English Wiki into Br and US versions but it failed. Wikipedia demands that you have an ISO code in order to get a Wikipedia and ISO codes only come from SIL, who publishes Ethnologue. I petitioned for a few new languages a couple of years ago and they all got shot down.

There is an ongoing war between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese on the Portuguese Wikipedia with complaints from the European Portuguese of bullying on the part of the Brazilians. Gotya noted that he, a Brazilian, could not read Portuguese IT materials. This is unfortunate. All written British is intelligible to us. We can read anything written in the UK, though most of our reading material here is from the US. I can read The Economist and The New Standard and The Spectator with no problems at all.

As a Californian, I speak completely normally, of course, and have no accent whatsoever! Haha. We can understand the Midwest accent perfectly, though it can be different. It sounds “flat”. They also insert rhotic consonants before some consonants at the end of a word and the raising of the preceding vowel – “wash” becomes “worsh”.

The Oklahoma accent is different and sometimes it can be hard to understand. I heard some people speaking Oklahoman in the doctor’s office the other day for a minute or so I thought they were speaking a foreign language! Of course they were mumbling too. Then I asked them where they were from and they said Oklahoma. At that point, I had caught onto their accent and could understand them perfectly.

I do not know why the Texan accent is said to be hard to understand. We understand it perfectly, but it sounds funny. We make a lot of jokes about it. George Bush has a strong Texan accent. There is also an Arkansas accent (Arkies) that is different but understandable. This is also the source of jokes. In this part of California there are many Whites who still speak Arkie and Okie. They are the descendants of those who came out here from the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s. Steinbeck wrote a book about this called The Grapes of Wrath.

Other than that, there are no accents in the West.

There is some sort of a Kentucky-Tennessee accent, but I am not sure if they differ. This is also a source of jokes. It’s sort of a general Appalachian accent, and it’s the source of jokes about inbred hillbillies and whatnot.

The Southern accent is well-known but usually understandable. My brother went to live in Alabama though and he said that the workers in the factory he worked at were often completely unintelligible. The Blacks were worse than the Whites, and they had separate accents. He has imitated their incomprehensible accent to me and it’s pretty hilarious.

I have heard poor Blacks from Memphis on the Cops show who were completely unintelligible to me. People with more money and status tended to be more comprehensible. I sometimes have a hard time understanding a Mississippi or Alabama accent, but it’s no problem. Our Southern politicians all have thick Southern accents.

Cajun English from Louisiana is often unintelligible to us, but the people with more money and status are quite intelligible.

There is also a Black accent from the coast of South Carolina called Gullah that is hard to understand. The Blacks from around there speak something like it and you can pick it out if you are sharp. It has a pretty, lilting sound to it. It’s different from the standard Southern accent and is sort of charming. Moving up the coast, there is a Virginia accent that is softer, pleasant and charming.

There is the famous New York accent, which to us laid back Californians sounds horribly rude, obnoxious, loud and belligerent. Some forms of it also sound ignorant – these tend to be associated with working class Whites in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

One thing they do is to glide and lengthen rhotic consonants – “New York” becomes New Yawwk” “Brooklyn” becomes “Bwwoklyn”.

A similar accent seems to be spoken in New Jersey, but it may be different. One again, it involves lenition of rhotic consonants, in this case turning them into dipthongs with long vowels. “New Jersey” becomes “New Joiisey”. This is also a source of jokes. There is a Boston accent which is completely understandable. Ted Kennedy speaks that. It involves the lenition of hard consonants into glides and the end of a word – “car” becomes “caw”.

I believe there is a sort of a slow drawl from Vermont and New Hampshire too. Those people, especially the older men, are known for not talking much. Men of few words.

Some Blacks around here still talk with thick Black accents that sound Southern even though they were born in the Central Valley. There is also an “Ebonics” English (for lack of a better word) that is spoken here by sort of ghettoish or semi-ghettoish Blacks. It is frankly, almost completely unintelligible. They seem like they are talking with their mouths full, mumbling and speaking extremely fast, running all of the sounds together.

Everyone who talks like this can also speak Standard English thank God, and they can quickly move in and out of that Ebonics talk when you talk to them. It’s sort of a language for them to talk so that we can’t understand them, I think. To us, it sounds sloppy, low class and ghetto, but it reportedly a full-fledged language. The Blacks in the Caribbean do not speak English! That makes me feel good because I can hardly understand a word they say. Each island has its own form of Creole English which is a completely separate language.

I think that Indian English (Chichi derogatorily) and West African English need to be split into separate languages because they are often incomprehensible to us. This is a case of regional Englishes evolving on their own. Further, West African English often differs a lot in its written form.

Indian English is often so mangled in its written form that it is incomprehensible, but more educated writers are comprehensible. The tendency to drop articles is very annoying and makes written Indian English sound ignorant to us. Don’t mess with our damned useless articles!

Reading about the Chinese languages, there are efforts underway to get speakers to speak proper Putonghua, whatever that means. Speakers from different parts of China still speak Putonghua with an accent that can be heavy at times.

Here in the US, we do not have this problem. Even our politicians still speak in heavy regional accents, and no one cares. We can always understand them. There is no national effort to get everyone to speak proper English that involves wiping out regional accents, though I understand that in the corporate world, they are offering classes to help people get rid of Southern accents, which are stereotyped as sounding backwards, ignorant and racist. I think this is sad. Our regional accents are what makes this country great.

Goyta also notes that Brazilians are starting to speak Spanish and the neighboring Spanish speaking countries are starting to speak Portuguese. When I was dealing with them 5-10 years ago, most Brazilians did not speak much Spanish (They acted like it was extremely low on their list of priorities) and Spanish speakers had zero interest in learning Portuguese (In fact, they regarded the suggestion as offensive and preposterous!)

Goyta notes that with regional integration, more Portuguese are speaking Spanish and more Spanish speakers from nearby countries are learning Portuguese. Spanish is becoming a prerequisite to getting a good job in Brazil. This is good as it’s good to see Latin Americans getting together.

It is also true that in China there has been a big fight over Chinese language classification. The unificationist – fascist types, associated with the Communist government (and actually with the Nationalist government before also – this is really a Chinese elite project) insist that there is only one Chinese language. This goes along with racism of Northern Chinese against Southern Chinese and to some extent vice versa. This racism is most evident in the Cantonese vs Mandarin war in China.

Cantonese speakers say that they speak the real Chinese and that Northern Chinese speak a bastardized tongue derived from the old Manchu language. Cantonese speakers also resent that a Northern Chinese was turned into the national tongue and imposed on them against their will. They also say that Northern Chinese are really from the South and that the real NE Asians are the Mongolians, Koreans, Manchu, Japanese, etc. Genetic studies show that this is not the case.

Northern Chinese say that Southern Chinese are not real Chinese and their blood is “contaminated” with Tai types like the Tai, Zhuang, Vietnamese, etc. There is probably something to this. Although Putonghua is the only official language in China and there is a war going on against the regional Chineses, enforcement has been held off against Cantonese. And Cantonese  areas are still where you will hear the least Putonghua and the most regional Chinese in all spheres of life. Cantonese is also allowed on the radio and TV, whereas regional Chineses had previously banned from the media.

The Putonghua-only campaign has been too successful and regional Chineses are being wiped out. There is now a regionalism movement arising in China to promote and retain regional Chineses.

I think that the Putonghua campaign has been good, but that China should promote bilingualism. The Putonghua campaign has not yet been successful. As of 2001, only 5

China clearly needs a language that they can all speak. For its entire history, many Chinese have not been able to speak to each other, including folks from one village to the next if you go to the southeast and the central coast. Provinces like Fujian, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Henan and Hunan are notoriously multilingual.

Most of these places have a lot of very high mountains, and transportation was typically very poor. Even today, you can scarcely get around by vehicle and you sometimes have to walk from one place to the next, sometimes for dozens of miles! Bottom line is they were very isolated from each other.

These places also retained a tradition of being hideouts for “hillbilly” types where there was a lot of unemployment and many folks turned to crime. Also criminals fled to the mountains where they could hide. Upshot was that due to all of this, and people seen as backwards, lazy, stupid and thieving, people from the rest of China had no interest in going to these places anyway. When people left these parts of China to go to big cities, they were stereotyped in a way similar to how ghetto Blacks and Browns are in the US. This made them want to stay in their mountains.

Repost: Are Amerindians Related to Polynesians?

Are Amerindians Related to Polynesians?

Regarding the post on the Moriori, a commenter asks if any of the Amerindians, in particular the South American Amerindians, are related to Polynesians. They are not.

All of the Amerindians go back to the area where Mongolia, Russia, and China all come together – the Altai Mountains east to Lake Baikal. Another smaller group comes from the area around the mouth of the Amur River where China, Russia, and North Korea meet.

Click to enlarge. The Lower Amur region of Russia can be seen to the left of Sakhalin Island. On this map, tribes residing in the Lower Amur region include the Negidal, Ulchi, Nivkhi, Oroch, Udeghe and the Nanai.

Click to enlarge. There is no evidence that South American Amerindians, or any Amerindians, are primarily Polynesian. As you can see in this chart, Pacific Islanders and Amerindians are on completely different ends of the evolutionary spectrum. Amerindians are closer to NE Asians (Japanese, Koreans and Northern Chinese) and Caucasians than they are to Polynesians. Polynesians are closer to Aborigines and Papuans than they are to Amerindians or NE Asians.

However, a Polynesian gene has been found in some tribes on the Pacific Coast of Peru and Chile. It’s theorized that Polynesians must have landed there at some point, but it wasn’t a big settlement. Going back 7-9,000 years ago, all Amerindians looked like Polynesians. The closest match to the Kennewick Man’s (Who is not Caucasian!) skull is nothing other than the Moriori whom we just discussed.

However, that does not mean that Polynesians were in the New World then. 9,000 yrs ago, there were no Polynesians. We are talking about races that no longer exist.

It’s probable that some of the Ainuid ancestors of the Polynesians resembled the Ainuid ancestors of these ancient Amerindians. In the chart above, the Ainu are one of the links between the SE Asians, NE Asians, Australians and Amerindians.

The Ainu types are really the clue to this whole puzzle. Ainu types or Ainu types transitioning to pure Mongoloids were generalized over much of Asia back in those days.

References

Powell, Joseph F. and Rose, Jerome C. 2004. “Chapter 2, Report on the Osteological Assessment of the “Kennewick Man” Skeleton (CENWW.97.Kennewick),” in McManamon, F.P. Kennewick Man. Washington, DC: US Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Archeology Program.

Repost: Berber Genes in Europeans

Interesting stuff about Berber

Berber Genes in Europeans

It seems reasonable that Southern Europeans especially would have a considerable amount of Berber genes in them. This has been disputed by certain Southern European White racist bloggers like Dienekes Pontikos and Racial Reality. These bloggers are vociferously opposed to the notion that Southern Europeans are anything but pretty near pure White.

For instance, here Dienekes states gives Berber percentages in Europeans as follows:

Nation          Berber

Spain           
Italy           1.7
France          

I am going to disagree with this assessment, though I admit I am not an expert on the subject. Looking at this journal article (table here). we come up with something a lot different. From Cruciani et al 2004:

Ethnic Group                Berber

Spain (Cantabrian Pasiegos) 3
Spain (Cantabria)           1
Southern Portugal           12.
Northern Portugal            
Spain (Basques)              3.
France                       3.
Spain (Asturias)             2.
Southern Spain               1.
Northern Italy               1.
Central Italy                1.
Italy (Sicily)                .
Sardinia                      .

The Berber genes seem to have come to Europe for the most part in the past 3,000 yrs. Cantabria is an interesting place. The Cantabrians, in particular the Pasiegos, are said to be quite distinct genetically, almost like the Basques. No one really knows what this is all about.

During the Moorish invasion, they conquered all the way up to the southern mountains of Cantabria, a province in the far north of Spain on the coast next to the Basque region. Perhaps this is where the Moorish (Berber) genes came in.

Looking at the figures above, most Berber genes appear to have gone into Iberia in tandem with the Moorish conquest. Strangely, they are concentrated in the North of Spain. This doesn’t make much sense to me.

The Cantabrian language is still spoken here. It is said to be a dialect of Spanish, but actually it is part of the Extremaduran language spoken in Caceres in Extremadura. People say it is dying out, but in the mountains children are still being raised speaking Cantabrian. They show up in school as Cantabrian monolinguals and their teachers cannot understand them.

Extremaduran-Cantabrian is really just Eastern Leonese, which got cut off from the rest of Leonese ~400 years ago and came under heavy influence from Old Castilian. Nowadays East Leonese proper scarcely exists in either Asturias or Leon. Extremaduran itself spoken in Caceres is endangered, has no official status, and but has 500,000 speakers, including monolinguals (!). A Spanish informant who grew up in the region told me that Extremaduran has only 1

Leonese has only 50,000 speakers, is considered very endangered, but does have special status in Castile and Leon. And children are still being raised speaking Southeastern Leonese or Porteno. Leonese is part of the Asturian-Leonese language, with Asturian spoken in the north in Asturias and Leonese spoken to the south in Castile y Leon.

Asturian has 550,000 speakers, but is considered endangered.

A related language is Mirandese, spoken in Portugal. This language looks a lot like Portuguese, but it is actually a branch of Asturian-Leonese. It has 8

About the Berbers, I consider them to be one of the most ancient, if not the most ancient, Caucasian groups in existence. Berbers go back at least 20,000 years and possibly up to 50,000 years in North Africa. Much of the Berber group may have come from the Middle East in the past 10,000 years. There is a huge split between Berbers and Sub-Saharan Africans.

The Mozabites, the Tuaregs and the Chenini-Douiret are quite different from the rest of the Berbers. Why? Probably genetic drift.

These men are Mozabites, possibly some of the most ancient Caucasians on Earth, with a genetic line going back up to 50,000 years. Though White nationalists probably freak out if you say these people are White, they are most definitely Caucasians. The fellow in the right forefront also looks Caucasian – he looks somewhat East Indian.

The two men standing at the top could be East Indians or some strange Mediterranean type. Given that East Indians are also one of the most ancient Caucasian groups on Earth, it figures that these Berbers resemble Indians. Both groups came out of the Middle East – the Berbers probably 42,000 years ago, and the East Indians about 17,000 years ago.

There are few genetic differences between Berbers and North African Arabs, which means that North African Arabs are simply Arabized Berbers. There are lots of great photos of Berbers at this link.

The origin of the Berbers is nevertheless quite obscure. This article suggests that both Berbers and Europeans came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago. Obviously, prior to that, they came out of Africa. A date of 40-45,000 years is about right for the genesis of the Caucasian race. The homeland of the Caucasians is often said to be located in the Caucasus itself.

This line rose in Southwest Asia (the Caucasus) and then moved to Africa along the Mediterranean, not via Somalia – Yemen as the Out of Africans went. They moved first into the Levant, and from there went to Europe and to North Africa, both at the same time. This line went to the Cro-Magnon as well as the Berber, and both came out of the Levant about 40-45,000 years ago.

Another very interesting looking Mozabite fellow. There are some Mediterranean types who look something like this, but I have a hard time pinning this phenotype down. Clearly, they are Caucasians, but other than that, they look pretty sui generis. A recent genetics study, though poorly done, seemed to show the Mozabites as one of the most ancient ethnic groups on Earth and a source population for many other groups outside of Africa.

The Uighurs in Central Asia were also a source population for many diverse groups all over the place. The Uighurs may be the remains of ancient Caucasian-Asian hybrids that go back up to 40,000 years.

The first Caucasians were probably a mixture of 1/2 Africans (possibly Maasai and Tutsi types from Central Africa) mixed with ancient proto-Asians from China (who may have resembled the Ainu). From this strange mixture arose the original Caucasians, probably in the Caucasus and southern Russia, but maybe also in Iran.

There is good evidence that the first Caucasians, including the Cro-Magnons, looked a lot like Black Africans, in particular the Caucasoid-appearing Africans such as the Maasai and the Tutsi. Cro-Magnon skeletons look like the Masai more than any other modern skeleton. Cro-Magnon skulls are more likely to be confused with Negroid skulls than any other.

References

Cruciani, F.; La Fratta, R.; Santolamazza, P.; Sellitto, D.; Pascone, R.; Moral, P.; Watson, E.;  Guida, V.; Colomb, EB.; Zaharova, B.; Lavinha, J.; Vona, G.; Aman, R.; Cali, F.; Akar, N.; Richards, M.; Torroni, A.; Novelletto, A.; and Scozzari, R. 2004. “Phylogeographic Analysis Of Haplogroup E3b (E-M215) Y Chromosomes Reveals Multiple Migratory Events within and out of Africa.” American Journal of Human Genetics 74:1014-1022

Repost: Genes and Language Match Well

Genes and Language Match Well

This post will look into whether or not genes and language line up well. The question may seem academic, but it is important for linguists in the battle for whether or not there is anything to the large macro-families that the “lumpers” are creating.

It’s yet another skirmish in the lumpers versus splitters battle in Historical Linguistics. Historical is the branch that deals with language families, language relationships, and reconstruction of old languages that are no longer spoken.

The debate has heated up in recent years due to the prominence of lumper theories publicized by the late Joseph Greenberg and his disciples, notably Merritt Ruhlen at Stanford University. Ruhlen and Greenberg use a technique called mass comparison which has come under a lot of wild and irrational abuse but seems to be a valid scientific method in the hands of an expert.

Greenberg used it to come up with the four major language families of Africa a long time ago, and his classification there has remained pretty solid ever since.

He since published a book called Language in the Americas, which broke down all Amerindian languages into three large families – Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. I have read that book many times, and I concur with its analysis. Unfortunately, a detailed examination of the evidence goes beyond the scope of this post.

Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut are not very controversial, though the position of Haida within Na-Dene is regarded as unproven. However, looking at evidence mustered by Alexander Manaster-Ramer, I believe that Haida is definitely Na-Dene, though possibly a sister to the entire group as it is so distant.

In the same way, the ancient Indo-European Anatolian language is now regarded as a separate branch of Indo-European – Indo-Hittite or Indo-Anatolian. My Indo-Europeanist sources told me that Indo-Hittite or Indo-Anatolian is now regarded as consensus in the field.

Bengston promotes a family called Dene-Caucasian that involves the North Caucasian languages of the Caucasus, Basque, Edward Vajda conclusively proved that the Ket language is related to the Na-Dene languages.

A Ket man in Siberia. His phenotype looks a bit Japanese. He doesn’t look like an Amerindian. The situation of the Ket is deplorable, as most live in serious poverty and do not see any hope for improving themselves. The Ket language is also in bad shape, as hardly anyone under 35 can speak it well, and 3
The USSR did a better job with minority tongues than Putin.
Relating to the Ket, along with the Selkup nearby, the theory linking these groups to the Amerindians supports a single migration to the Americas 16,000 years ago, but it’s not at all definitive. According to Click to enlarge. I believe that the latest evidence is showing that all of the various Altai peoples – Northern Turkics would be the various Altai groupings – the Altai, the Tofalar, the Khakass and the Shor – are related to the Amerindians. These are often referred to as Northern Turkics. They aren’t really Turks per se as in people from Turkey, but even the Turks from Turkey are thought to be partly related to these Northern Turkic tribes.

Northern Turkics are right on the border between Asians and Caucasians on gene charts, and some Amerinds are not so far genetically from that border either. If you look at the Cavalli-Sforza gene chart below, you can see that next to the Eskimo-Aleuts, the Chukchi, and the Northern Turkics are the people most closely related to the Amerindians.

It also looks like the Ket and Selkup came from what is now the Northern Turkic Altai region. Anthropologically, these various groups are either Uralics, South Siberian, Central Asian or North Asian Asiatics. The Altai region is where Russia, China and Mongolia all come together.

This is the first connection of a New World language family with an Old World language family.

Here is a Nenets woman from Siberia. She definitely looks Northern Chinese or Korean. They have a population of 44,000, and there are 31,000 speakers of the language. It’s really two languages – Here is a rare photo of Ed Vajda with two Ket women in Siberia described as “experts in the Ket language.” I’m not good at judging ages, but these women look to be about 40-60. If so, that is good, as I thought all of the speakers were elderly, and hardly anyone spoke the language well anymore. Ket has anywhere from 537-1,000 speakers. A related language, Yugh, is thought to have recently gone extinct. The rest of the Yeniseien languages went extinct about 150-250 years ago.

Greenberg and Ruhlen are the most vilified of the lumpers, but there are others who are following more orthodox methods of reconstruction to prove the existence of ancient language families, such as the late Sergey Starostin, his son George Starostin, John Bengston, the late Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (a prodigy, dead at the young age of only 32), Aharon Dolgopolsky and Vitaly Victorovich Shevoroshkin.

The Starostins, Illich-Svitych, Dolgopolsky, and Shevoroshkin all worked on Nostratic, a vast family consisting variously of Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Nivkh, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, and Eskimo-Aleut. I now think that Afroasiatic and Dravidian are sisters to Nostratic instead of part of the family per se because they are so far removed from the rest of the family.

I would accept IE, Uralic, Altaic, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut in Nostratic. The Altaic family is itself controversial, but I regard it as fact, having studied it. Altaic also includes Japanese and Korean. I would toss Yukaghir in with Uralic.

Nostratic has a lot more going for it than some of the other long-range proposals, and since these scholars are using classic reconstruction, it gets respect from splitters. Starostin’s webpage is a great resource for looking into long-range theories, especially Nostratic and Altaic.

Bengston, Shevoroshkin, and the Starostins all worked on Dene-Caucasian. This hypothesis seems a lot more controversial.

Click to enlarge. Here is a tree of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza’s human genetic families on the left and various human language families on the right, including some big families. The only one that is seriously out of place is Tibetan. This is because the Tibetans are a genetically North Chinese people who have moved down into Southern China in recent years. They cluster with South Chinese linguistically but NE Asians genetically.
All the rest lines up pretty well, including super-families like Nostratic and Eurasiatic (a Nostratic-like family created by Greenberg).
The hypothesized Austric family is interesting. I’m not sure if I buy this super-family or not, but I have not really looked into it.
With recent genetic evidence linking Indonesians and Vietnamese to Daic peoples of South China and SE Asia, it seems worth looking into. At the very least Austro-Thai, a language family consisting of the Austronesian and Tai-Kadai families. seems to have been proven in the last 10 years with the publication of a couple of important articles. Laurence Sagart is doing good work in this area.

References

Campbell, Lyle & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.) 1979. The Languages of Native America: An Historical and Comparative Assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Campbell, Lyle. 1988. “Review of Language in the Americas, by Joseph Greenberg.” Language 64: 591-615.

Campbell, Lyle. 1997. American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Greenberg, Joseph. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Greenberg, Joseph. 1989. “Classification of American Indian languages: a reply to Campbell.” Language 65:1, 107-114.

Repost: Update to Races of Man Post

Update to Races of Man Post

 

My earlier piece, The Major and Minor Races of Mankind, has been given a major update. The previous incarnation was:

3 Macro Races

Caucasian (Caucasoid) Asian (Mongoloid) African (Negroid)

I left the three macro races intact. I have debated whether or not to include new macro races but I haven’t been able to come up with anything. The main problem is that all of the potential splits – Kalash, Pacific Islander, Papuan, Amerindian and Aborigine are all part of the macro races. The Kalash are part of the Caucasian race and the rest are all indisputably Asians (yes, even Aborigines).

Previous version:

6 Major Races

Northeast Asian Southeast Asian Papuan Aborigine Caucasian African

Revised version:

9 Major Races

Northeast Asian Southeast Asian Papuan Aborigine Caucasian African Kalash Pacific Islander Amerindian

The result looks something like this:

African Macro Race

General African Major Race

15 minor African races

Caucasian Macro Race

General Caucasian Major Race Kalash Major Race

19 minor Caucasian races

Asian Macro Race

Northeast Asian Major Race Southeast Asian Major Race Amerindian Major Race Papuan Major Race Aborigine Major Race Oceanian Major Race

53 minor Asian races

The last three above, Kalash, Oceanian and Amerindian, were added, giving me a 9-race theory in addition to the standard 3-race theory. Genetically, the Kalash are extremely bizarre. On one chart, they form a As you can see, very European looking phenotypes are not rare at all in the Kalash. This 2 year old girl could well be German, except for the strange “elf-ears”, which supposedly are very common among these people. The elf ears are probably a consequence of genetic drift. Drift occurs when a population is isolated for a long time without many outside inputs.The Kalash, unlike all other peoples in the region, have little or no South Indian or Asian genes.

More than anything else, this indicates a West Eurasian origin for the Kalash. West Eurasia is a term that is hard to define, and some say that the region does not even exist. There are some hazy definitions of West Eurasia out there, but in the way it is most used by population geneticists, it appears to mean the Near East and the Caucasus.

As West Eurasia is in the area of the purported homeland of the Caucasian race (Caucasus), we once again deal with the question of the Kalash being an ancient Caucasian tribe, perhaps one of the most ancient Caucasian stocks on Earth.

I saw one genetic map that had all proto-Caucasians (and all proto-NE Asians for that matter) coming out of the Borogil Pass on the border of northern Pakistan and the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan 35,000 years ago. Originally the group was something like Pre-Caucasian–NE Asian. The group went north and one line went to proto-Caucasians and the other went northeast to Proto-NE Asians.

We don’t have the foggiest idea of what these people may have looked like, but skulls from India 24,000 years ago look more like Aborigines than anything else.

The Borogil Pass in the area of Pakistan, Afghanistan and China. As you can see, it is pretty tough going. This is the lowest pass leading out of South Asia and up into the steppes, so it is logical that early men may have migrated in this way.

Actually I think the genesis of NE Asians is more complex than that, but the article was interesting. The genesis of Caucasians is one of the least understood of all the major races. The homeland of the proto-Caucasians is either in the Caucasus or in Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa seems to be a major staging ground. At this time, the most ancient Caucasians seem to be South Indians and Berbers.

South Indians go back about 15-20,000 years and have been evolving right there with few outside inputs for all that time. Before 20,000 years ago, the Proto-South Indians are thought to have come from the Middle East. They probably bred in with or displaced an Australoid people resembling Aborigines who were the original people of India.

The Berbers may go back even further than that and there are suggestions that they may have had an origin in northeastern Africa near Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea. That area was the jumping off point for the human race to leave Africa 60-70,000 years ago, pointing once again to very ancient Berber origins. European-like skulls only go back 10,000 years or so and white skin only goes back 9,000 years.

All humans originally were dark-skinned. The people with the darkest skin evolved in the areas where the UV rays were the brightest. It was thought at first that dark skin was an adaptation to prevent sunburn and melanoma, but a there are problems with this analysis.

Sunburn does not usually kill you, and melanoma tends to hit older in life, after one has already produced offspring. A better explanation may be that intense UV rays cause destruction of folic acid stores in the body. Then pregnant women, with their folic acid destroyed, have a high potential of giving birth to deformed babies.

White skin was actually a depigmentation process to enable people to get more Vitamin D, which is scarcer at northern altitudes in Northern Europe due to weak UV rays. Lighter skin is necessary to grab all the Vitamin D that one can. An argument against this is that Vitamin D deficiency does not occur in areas of low UV radiation.

But this is not true. Even today, darker skinned people, such as South Indians, who immigrate to the UK are coming down with various Vitamin D deficiency syndromes, including rickets. It is probably necessary for darker-skinned people who live at high latitudes to take Vitamin D supplementation.

The proto-Caucasians may have split off as early as 35,000 years ago. Some NE Asians are quite close to Caucasians and vice versa. The groups straddling the Caucasian-Asian border form a sort of a line from Turkey to Korea and then up to the Chukchi Peninsula. Along the way we have Turks, Iranians, Jews, West Asians, Central Asians, Northern Turkics, Mongolians, Northern Chinese, Koreans and Chukchi.

West Asians include Punjabis and Pashtuns and live in Pakistan, NW India and Afghanistan. Central Asians include Kazakhs, Turkmen and Uzbeks. Northern Turkics include the Altai, the Yakut and other groups. Many of them live around where China, Mongolia and Russia all come together. Interestingly, this seems to be exactly where most Amerindians came from – the Altai Mountains.

The Chukchi are an Eskimo-like people who live on the Chukchi Peninsula on the far eastern end of Siberia where the Bering Straight separates Russia from Alaska.

What’s curious about the Chukchi is that Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza’s Principal Coordinates chart in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes (chart here) puts the Chukchi in with Caucasians. Yet by appearance and apparently also genetics, the Chukchi cluster with Asians.

So there are some groups that are really on the border. I had a hard time knowing what to do with Turkics, Northern Turkics and Central and West Asians, as the genetics was so hazy. I usually just dropped them in either NE Asians or Caucasians based on appearance.

The Kalash are a group of about 3,000 people living in Chitral Province in Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan.

The valleys of the Kalash. The villages are at about 6,000 feet and as the soil is very rich, they grow many crops. They also do a lot of herding, mostly of goats it seems. They do observe a menstruation taboo, where the women have to go off to special hut during that time, but this is a very old taboo in many human tribal groups. The Kalash bury their dead above ground in caskets. Burial of the dead above ground is a very ancient human tradition.

The Negritos of both Papua and the Andaman Islands, one of the most ancient human groups, bury their dead above ground in little tree houses. The Zoroastrians, one of the most ancient human religions, bury the dead on rooftops and let the vultures eat them. This is getting to be a problem in parts of India where they live as the neighbors are starting to complain!

They still retain an ancient pagan religion. The are remarkably egalitarian for that part of the world, and women work in the fields side by side with men. They have somehow managed to resist Islamacization for centuries, possibly due to the remote and multiethnic nature of the Chitral region.

Four Kalash students. The fellow on the right is a dead ringer for a European. He could be a German or an Englishman. The fellow on the left could easily be an Italian, a Greek, an Armenian, an Iranian or a Turk. The other two are awfully hard to classify. They almost look a little Amerindian.

There are some similar phenotypes across the border in Afghanistan in Nuristan amongst people called Nuristanis. They were converted to Islam at the point of a sword by a genocidal Pashtun maniac named Amir Abdur-Rahman during Afghanistan’s nation-building process in the 1890’s. His genocide of the Hazara was similar proportionally to the Jewish Holocaust.

A Kalash woman with some children, apparently her own. She and her kids do not look quite so Caucasian; they look more Asian. Actually the woman is hard to classify as belonging to any known race that we are familiar with. In California, you might think she was an Amerindian from Latin America.

The legend is that the Kalash and the Nuristanis were the remnants of Alexander the Great’s army that invaded and conquered the region 2000 years ago. This was the reason for all the European phenotypes in the area. Recently, this was thought to be a legend with no basis in fact, but recent controversial genetic testing suggests that the Kalash may have up to 2

Macedonian and Kalash female costumes compared – note the similarity in costumes. Also the Kalash continue to worship a creator God cognate with the Greek Zeus. I cannot help but think that some of those Macedonian phenotypes are also present in Kalash females. And the terrain looks rather similar too.

Maybe some of Alexander’s men did stay here, thinking they were home away from home. This story is definitely widespread in that part of the world. I had an Afghan doctor from Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan who insisted it was true.

This has been challenged since although there is one Greek marker in the Kalash, the other major marker that ought to be there, since it is apparently present in all Greeks, is not there. One counter-suggestion is that the Kalash got the Greek marker by chance through genetic drift. This seems dubious. The question remains highly confused .

A Kalash man, possibly with his wife by his side. He could easily be an Italian, an Albanian, a Spaniard or a Portuguese. She’s harder to classify, but could be an Italian.

The Kalash worship a God called Dezau, which is from the Indo-European sky God *Dyaos (reconstructed form), from which the Greeks derived Zeus and the Romans Jupiter. So the Kalash are the last practitioners of ancient Indo-European mythology.

A Kalash woman with Caucasian features and somewhat Asian eyes. It’s hard to place her into a known ethnic group, but there are Kurds who look something like this. The Kalash probably originated in an area near Kurdistan, but no one really knows. The child looks more Asian. Love the costumes.

They have some odd customs.

One I particularly love is called the Festival of the Budalak. A strong teenage boy is sent up in the mountains for the summer with the goats. He practically lives on goat milk, which supposedly makes him even stronger.

When he comes back there is a festival, and at the festival he gets to have sex with any woman he wants, even his own mother, a young virgin or another man’s wife, but he only gets to rampage like this for 24 hours. Any child born of these encounters is considered to be blessed. They supposedly quit practicing this custom recently due to bad publicity, but many think that they still practice it in secret.

Definitely one of the world’s greatest customs!

A beautiful Kalash woman who eloped with a man recently to get married. Although many times the couple who do this are single, in quite a few cases a married woman can elope with another man. The new husband just has to pay double the bride price. The cuckold just takes it all in stride, or at least he doesn’t get homicidal. It’s amazing the kind of rights women have in this group. Too bad so many of them convert out to Pakistani Islam where women are pretty much chattel.

This woman obviously resembles some European phenotype, but I don’t know my European racial types a la Coon, etc, very well. I almost want to say Norwegian?

The Kalash are coming under pressure from radical Islamists recently and several villages have been converted by force (I thought Muslims never do this!) Also radical mullahs incite local Muslims to go into Kalash villages and smash their religious idols.

A Kalash shamaness or female shaman. It is amazing that in this misogynistic part of the world that women are granted such a high religious position. Druze women in Lebanon and Syria are also allowed to become high religious leaders. The costume is amazing. Shamans are one of the oldest aspects of human religions, characteristic of animist type religions.

As the world is full of spirits (or Gods in a polytheistic world) the shaman works via human psychology to manipulate the spirit world to the benefit of the patient. It is hard to say how much there is to it, but areas of the world where humans have been practicing this sort of thing for a long time can do some pretty amazing things.

There are reports out of the South Seas that whole villages would get together to cast evil spells on leaders of neighboring islands. In a number of cases, the leader died soon afterward. The cause of death was typically massive and multiple organ failure. It was as if he simply exploded inside. There are persistent reports that saying a prayer over water or a meal makes it taste better.

There are many reports of dying people communicating over long distances with loved ones just before they die.

And there are also many reports of people sensing nearby tragedies as they are occurring. All of this needs to be investigated by science but there are good reasons to think that this sort of thing is compatible with modern science, especially particle physics where we are all part of each other.

I am also convinced that clairvoyance and sharing of hallucinations are possible, having experienced both of these things. Of course, we were tripping on LSD-like woodrose seeds at the time, but still.

Pacific Islanders and Amerindians were also added, as there is good evidence that these two groups form valid major groupings. Cavalli-Sforza’s eight-race theory listed Amerindians and a group he called Pacific Islanders that apparently also included Papuans.

Rosenberg et al’s six-race grouping also included Amerindians and a group he called Melanesians, consisting of Papuans and Melanesians. Since other evidence indicates significant distance between Papuans and Melanesians and Papuans and Pacific Islanders in general, I decided to leave Papuans as a separate major group.

Yet a good case can be made to split off Polynesians, Micronesians and Melanesians in a compact grouping. The creation of the Polynesians is a result of the spread of the Lapita culture, one of the world’s greatest sea journeys undertaken by Austronesian mariners, Taiwanese aborigines (Chinese people) who left Taiwan 1000’s of years ago to settle Island SE Asia. First they went to the Philippines, then to Indonesia.

From Central Indonesia, they left and settled coastal New Guinea, bringing an advanced culture to New Guinea. They also may have settled as far east as the Solomons.

The Trobriand and Solomon Islands are said to be one of the centers for Proto-Papuan culture in the region, and may have been settled as long ago as 35,000 years ago.

Later, a new wave of Austronesians came out of Central Indonesia (near the Wallace Line) and moved through Melanesia, picking up only a few Melanesian genes along the way. These mariners then went off to populate the entirety of Polynesia in the past 2000 years.

So, according to this theory, Polynesians are mostly Chinese (Taiwanese aborigines) with some Melanesian in them.

One interesting question is why the Polynesians got so huge. First of all, they are not all huge. I have taught a lot of these people in the LA schools and there are a variety of phenotypes, including one that is short and thin.

One theory is that the journey to populate Polynesia was so harsh that only the strongest survived and the weakest died. It may have been necessary to eat the dead for the survivors to go on. Perhaps they fought to the death for scarce resources. Anyway, on many Polynesian islands an extremely brutal culture of continuous, potentially genocidal warfare was the norm and this was probably the world center for cannibalism.

Finally, the last wave to move out was the Micronesians. This group consisted of Polynesians who moved out of Polynesia to populate Micronesia. According to the theory above, they are mostly Chinese (Taiwanese) with only a small amount of Melanesian in them.

The suggestion above was that both the Polynesians and the Melanesians are mostly-Chinese (Taiwanese) people. That conclusion is based on a recent paper that has not yet been widely distributed.

However, another paper suggests that the major Haplogroups in Polynesians – C and F – are indigenous to the region, meaning they are related to the original Melanesian and Papuan settlers.

That paper, and many others, suggests that Micronesians and Polynesians are about 5

Interestingly, the vast majority of the Chinese genes in Melanesians and Polynesians seem to have come from one group of Taiwanese aborigines – the Ami.

A group called the Alor in far eastern Indonesia clusters with Melanesians and a group called the Toba Batak of northern Sumatra in Indonesia clusters with Micronesians.

Alor of far Eastern Indonesia after a major disaster. They are Melanesians who speak Papuan languages. The languages are endangered and very poorly documented. There is a major undertaking underway right now to at least document these languages.

Some very interesting looking Alor women. Although they are Melanesians, they look a bit different from many other Melanesians. The woman on the left has some pretty Asian looking eyes. This may be because they speak an Austronesian language. Melanesians who speak an Austronesian language have some Chinese (Taiwanese) genes, but never more than 2

Both White Nationalist and Afrocentrist varieties of ethnic nationalist idiots keep trying to insist that these folks are either Black or closely related to Blacks.

These people are some of the furthest away from Africans on the planet. You can’t go by phenotype or appearance or even behavior. None of that means much. You have to go by genes. As these people were some of the first to split off from Africans, they have been evolving away from them for the longest. Whites are much closer to Blacks than these Melanesians.

An Alor man who is working with a linguistic team that is documenting Alor languages. Alor is a major diving site for commercial recreational diving crews. The water is still nice and clear here and the coral reefs are still intact. The fish population is good too as there are not a lot of people living in this part of Indonesia. The famous Komodo Dragon lives near here on Komodo Island in far eastern Indonesia.

The reason these people, who are much less related to Black people than I am, are always called Black, is due to the color of their skin! But that has nothing to do with anything. A bobcat and coyote are similarly colored too. Truth is that if you evolved in the areas of the Earth with the highest UV radiation, you often ended up with very dark skin, which does resemble that of Africans.

But this is just convergent evolution and has nothing to do with relatedness. This guy is a lot more closely related to Chinese than to Black people. The Alor do seem to have about 2

The Toba Batak of Northern Sumatra. The guys in this photo actually do look Micronesian – I have seen photos of Micronesians. How these Micronesians ended up on the north coast of Sumatra is news to me. The Toba Batak live west of Medan in the area around Lake Toba, especially on Samosir Island. Their elaborately carved wooden houses are a popular tourist attraction.

A photo of a Toba Batak family. I had a hard time finding quality pics of the Toba Batak. You can see that they are extremely dark – much darker than most people living in this area. Also I think that some Micronesians may have wavy hair like that. The Toba Batak are Micronesians who somehow ended up in northern Sumatra.

This shows that Indonesians are not any particular race, although most are more general SE Asian types fairly close to Filipinos.

Classification of races is a tricky business. In my post, I went by genetic distance alone and not phenotype, culture, behavior, etc. I also treated very gingerly all contributions by ethnic nationalists, who are known to be profoundly dishonest about this stuff. Despite PC nonsense, there clearly are races of mankind. In fact, my classification scheme posits 87 minor races, and it is still undergoing revision.

References

Capelli, C.; Wilson, J. F.; Richards, M.; Stumpf, M. P. H.; Gratrix, F.; Oppenheimer, S.; Underhill, P.; Pascali, V.L.; Ko, T. M.; and Goldstein, D. B. (2001). “A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania”. American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432-443.

Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., P. Menozzi, A. Piazza. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. (2000) “The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration”. Journal of Human Evolution.

Game/PUA: Are Asian Men Cucked? Are They Alphas or Betas?

Vicmund the Han:  Hey Rob, are Asian men cucked? Are they Alphas?

Asian men are pigs! Nah, they’re not cucked at all, and in Asia, they have set up a system where they are seen as Alphas by the women.

However, the mass Beta-ization of young Japanese men in the form of the Hikkimoris and their inevitable rejection by Japanese women seems to be grinding a hole in that model.

Here in the West, I am not sure. The older men are complete pigs and act very Alpha. The younger men still act quite Alpha if they remain deep within their traditional cultures. I went to some Asian markets in Mountain View when I was there a few years ago. These markets were filled with young Chinese men and women. The young men were very masculine, almost stoic, and the women followed suit, being very feminine and falling submissively behind their Alpha boyfriends. As the world is meant to be. But these Chinese young people were still very deep in Chinese culture, still speaking the language, possibly being immigrants, etc.

For the rest of Asian men who are more assimilated, they have an Alpha mindset due to their pig cultures, but to their women, they seem Beta physically compared to White and Black men. Many of their women are marrying out either due to seeing their men as Beta in the West or disgust over the pig nature of so many Asian men: “White men treat us better.”

I don’t think they’re cucked at all, though. Hell no. Their cultures are too piggish to get cucked, and that is something I respect about Asian men very much. For White men, cuckdom was sadly a pretty natural fit after decades of Beta-ization by White feminized and feminist culture. Black and Hispanic men will be very late to cuckdom too, if they ever go over at all.

The Asian, Black, and Hispanic men will be some of last men to be felled by feminist societal lumberjacks sawing down the titans of patriarchy to go crashing down into the woods where the former giants lie in pathetic Betatude on the floor of the world to be walked over by any and all who stroll their way.

Repost: Alt Left: The Birth of the Caucasian Race

The Birth of the Caucasian Race

An early European, possibly of the M173 line. He may somewhat resemble a Khoisan or Bushman.An early European, possibly of the M173 line. He may somewhat resemble a Khoisan or Bushman.

A reconstruction of a very early European, based on fragments found in caves in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania from 2002 on, offers a tantalizing glimpse at what early Europeans must have looked like.

He actually looks a bit like Richard Steele, boxing referee and possible throwback.

Previously, the oldest European skull was 30,000 years ago and was said to look like a modern European, with closest affinities to Finns.

As you can see, the White nationalists are furious about this. White nationalism has always opposed the Out of Africa theory, now accepted as the Gold Standard by nearly all of anthropology. It’s just too offensive to imagine that Grandpa may have been a nigger*.

Yet obviously he was.

The “White European” phenotype as we know it today did not come into existence until after 12,000 years ago, or maybe sooner.

Before that, European Caucasians resemble Arabs. For instance, A 24,000 year old Cro-Magnon European shows DNA similarities to Near East (Arabs or the Caucasus). A 23,000 year old Italian Cro-Magnon sample genetically resembles modern Middle Easterners from Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

It’s time for WN’s to quit claiming Cro-Magnon as The Original White Man. Forget it! He was a Middle Easterner – an Arab – Iranian type. As almost all WN’s say that Arabs are not White, and many, even more bizarrely, state that Iranians are not White (genetically, Iranians look like British, Danes and Norwegians), WN’s need to quit claiming Cro-Magnon as some Super White Cave Man.

The original Proto-Asians came out of Africa 65,000 years ago, probably descendants of the M168 line, although NE Asians are probably partly M89.

The original Caucasians did indeed come out of Africa about 40-45,000 years ago, probably descendants of the M89 line. Whites and Caucasians in general are probably a legacy of M89 and not M168.

M89 birthed M45, which are the Proto-Amerindians of 35,000 years ago on the steppes and in the Mongolia-Siberia region. A child of M45, M173, were the first Europeans, and may be represented by this fellow. Later, M343, the real Cro-Magnon, appeared. It is a bit confusing whether Cro-Magnon is M173 or M343 or both.

The early genesis of the Caucasoid race involved a large injection of Asian genes from Mongolia, Siberia and East Turkestan. This occurred about 40-45,000 years and represents about 2/3 of the Proto-Caucasian genetic line (Bowcock 1991). These Proto-East Asians probably looked something like Aborigines or possibly Ainu. Modern NE Asians do not appear until about 9,000 years ago.

Before that, all Asians looked like Aborigines, Melanesians, or Ainus. As noted above, the modern European phenotype also only appears 10,000 years ago. So both modern Whites and modern East Asians only go back 10,000 years, to the Last Glacial Maximum. All humans had dark skin until 10,000 years ago. What birthed light skin? The glaciers.

For an analysis of this early process, which injected a lot of Proto-Asian genes into the Northern European Cro-Magnon line, see this early discussion on my now-banned blog:

Based on y-chromosome lineages, Atlantic and north European men (Cro-Magnon descendants) are related to N.E Asian men.

They all descend from haplogroup Q which arose in the north Himalayas and south Siberia 45,000 years ago, with one group branching off west eventually ending up in the Pyrenees, the Caspian sea and northern Scandinavia. The other group would go across east Asia and even to the Americas.

Indeed, there were movements in the other direction too – from Northern Europe back to Siberia. An ancient line of Europeans called Orcadians (named after barren islands in the north of Scotland) went back to Siberia at some point and contributed significantly to the genetic line of the Yakut, a Siberian grouping that is now only

The other 1/3 of the line was an early African  (Bowcock 1991), possibly a Khoisan or Bushman type, but maybe a Proto-Caucasian African out of South Africa (see below). Out of the Proto-African and Proto-Asian mixture was birthed the Proto-Caucasian.

The African phenotype was Bushman or Hottentot or S African Proto-Caucasoid, not Bantuoid, because modern Blacks do not appear in Africa until about 12,000 years ago. Before that, all African look like Pygmies or Bushmen.

I have always wondered what these folks looked like, and this is an interesting part of our heritage.

In the Amren article linked above, commenter JPT is not correct that Whites are on our way to being a different species. Caucasians are closer to Blacks than any other group since we were the last to split from them. Ouch! That’s painful, huh WN’s? Caucasians and NE Asians are also quite close, but not nearly as close as Caucasians and Africans.

The furthest apart are Blacks and Aborigines. If anyone is evolutionarily on their way to becoming a separate species or subspecies, it is the Aborigines and the Papuans of New Guinea. The distance between them and Africans is greater than the distance between any two human groups.

It might be interesting to see what happens if they mate. I am pretty sure that they can mate successfully, but it might be interesting to see if their couples are less fertile than others. As genetic distance increases, infertility does too, because you are moving closer and closer to separate species. I know that Europeans and Aborigines can mate successfully, as there has been a ton of this going on since the first White invaders attacked (I mean landed on) Australia several hundred years ago.

Speaking of Aborigines, yes, they are very different, but they are not Homo Erectus as many say. They are fully human. Homo Erectus lives to this day in large numbers in San Fransisco. Whoa! Sorry, that was a joke!

What follows is reconstruction of the genesis of the early Caucasians.

First of all, a line descended from the original M1 line out of Africa arose in Southwest Asia, frankly in the Levant (Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria). This line had come out of Africa via Somalia to Yemen and Arabia 40-45,000 years ago.

It’s known that they went back to Africa, but it was always thought that they went back the same way that they came, via the Red Sea. Instead, they moved out through the Sinai and into North Africa to become the Proto-Berbers. This same line moved into Europe via the same Mediterranean route, this time along the Northern Mediterranean. These folks indeed may have been related to the fellow pictured above.

The most succinct summary of the Proto-Caucasians is found here. The actual birthplace of the Proto-Caucasians was in the Caucasus, as one may expect. A figurine has been found in the Don River area of southern Russia dating from 45,000 years ago. It is thought that this is a remnant of this earliest Proto-Caucasian culture.

Proto-Caucasian Man came out of the Caucasus 39-52,000 years ago. One went west to Europe (possibly resulting in the fellow above) and N Africa (this is the line out of the Levant described above) and other east to NE Asia (probably the M89 line described above, and this in part explains Caucasian affinities of Koreans, North Chinese, Mongolians, etc.

There were also further returns to North Africa from Caucasus and India 30,000 years ago. It appears that the birthing grounds of the Caucasian Race were in the Caucasus, the Middle East, India and North Africa. The highly modern East Indian and North African Berbers – both diverse groups of Caucasians – may be the remains of the earliest Proto-Caucasians.

It is interesting to postulate on what the Proto-Caucasians who moved out of Africa via the Red Sea 42,000 years ago looked like. No one knows. However, curiously, 36,000 years ago a new line arose in South Africa that did not look like the Khoisan types prevalent at the time. Instead, it looks like a Caucasian, specifically like Cro-Magnon and other Late Pleistocene cave man types in Europe.

No one knows what happened to this line, but this Proto-Caucasian in South Africa 36,000 years ago could have moved up to the Rift Valley area and then to Arabia to give rise to the Caucasians. Keep in mind that by the time that Africans moved out of Africa, only 2 lines left.

At 65,000 YBP (years before present) an incredible 40 different lines had already evolved separately in Africa, and they were all quite different. Only two of these 40 diverse lines left Africa. The rest stayed and birthed the tremendously diverse African race of today.

It’s often said that the Khoisan-Bushmen of Southwest Africa are the most ancient living people. However, recent research shows that this is wrong. The most ancient humans are from East Africa, specifically from around Kenya and Tanzania.

This includes the Masai (thought to be originally from the Sudan), the Sandawe (a Khoisan type in northern Kenya), the Datog (similar to the Masai, and probably also originally from the Sudan), and the Burunge and Gorowaa, both of whom came from Ethiopia recently.

The African Eve, the first human, was probably a Northeast African or East African. Man probably originated in Ethiopia or Sudan, close to the Rift Valley that transformed the first men from apes and watered the fields of the long line of Homo that ended in ourselves.

From a dead link discussing Tishkoff’s findings:

Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and a team of coworkers reported genetic analyses of more than 600 living Tanzanians from 14 different tribes and four linguistic groups. They analyzed mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) the tool of choice for tracing ancestry because it is inherited only through the mother as part of the ovum.

The number of mutations that have accumulated in mtDNA is a rough measure of the time that has passed since that lineage first appeared.

The owner of the first modern human MtDNA (by definition, a woman) is often referred to as “Eve,” although many women of that time are likely to have shared similar mtDNA.

Genetic diversity

Tishkoff and her colleagues chose to investigate East African peoples for specific reasons. The number of linguistic and cultural differences is unusually high in the region, as is the variation in physical appearance – East Africans are tall or short, darker-skinned or lighter-skinned, round-faced or narrow-faced, and so on.

This observation suggested that the genetic composition of the population is highly diverse, and as expected, the team found substantial variation in the mtDNA.

In fact, members of five of the lineages showed an exceptionally high number of mutations compared with other populations, indicating that these East African lineages are of great antiquity.

Identified by tribal affiliation, these are: the Sandawe, who speak a “click” language related to that of the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert; the Burunge and Gorowaa, who migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last five thousand years; and the Maasai and the Datog, who probably originated in the Sudan.

The efforts of the University of Maryland group reflect a substantially larger database and more certain geographic origins for its subjects than earlier mtDNA studies.

Further, the work by Tishkoff’s team reveals that these five East African populations have even older origins than the !Kung San of southern Africa, who previously had the oldest known mtDNA.

“These samples showed really deep, old lineages with lots of genetic diversity,” Tishkoff says. “They are the oldest lineages identified to date. And that fact makes it highly likely that ‘Eve’ was an East or Northeast African. My guess is that the region of Ethiopia or the Sudan is where modern humans originated.”

For more links between the Tutsi – Masai types and the original Europeans, see the following early discussions (here, here, here) from my previous (now shut down) blog. It’s a bit hard to get your head around, but if you think hard, you can start to understand it.

I spent months trying to figure out exactly what this guy was saying, and I think I have it now. His intriguing comments strongly suggest that the earliest Cro-Magnon ancestors were derived from populations that are now the East African Masai, Tutsi, etc:

Masai and Tutsi are doliocephalic and orthaganus. Tutsi and Masai Central African types are quite low-skulled, like the original Cro-Magnons were. Also MtDNA retrieved from a Cro-Magnon in Europe was found to belong to haplogroup *N, which directly and immediately descends from L3, which originated in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Some of its clades went south and then east onto Australasia, while the northern clade went to the Middle East and gave birth to *N, and other clades went to West Africa and south.

It’s the northern subclades of L3 that gave birth to *N (like l3a1) that are the most closely related L3 members, and Sub Saharan Africans are closest to *N bearing Cro-Magnons, as they are their most immediate and closest ancestors.

It would be interesting to see if the Tutsi and Masai have any of these northern subclades of L3, as they are more closely related to Cro-Magnon *N than any other MtDNA lineage in the world.

What I cant get my head around is the overlap in identical SNP clusters (Caucasoid) between populations of predominantly different patrilineal and matrilineal ancestry. e.g. e3b Ethiopians (also predominantly indigenous African on mtDNA) and r1a/I1a Norwegians.

R1a and Ia descend from K, which arose in the Middle East, and e3b descends from YAP, which arose in Uganda. The nearest ancestor of R* and I* and J* Europeans/Middle Easterners with E3b Ethiopians is the M168 male, which is the ancestor of all other modern humans, so they share as little as possible recent ancestry.

On mtDNA East Africans are predominantly L3, which is the direct ancestor of mtDNA N*, which is the original Middle Eastern Caucasoid mtDNA marker, which has been retrieved from 2 European Cro-Magnon specimens too. I wonder if East Africans have northern subclades of L3, as they would be the most closely related L3 subclades to N*.

See below. They do look like White people, don’t they?

An example of a Dinka, an example of what I call a West Sudan Elongated Desert-Adapated African. This man is a negotiator for the SPLA, the Sudanese People's Liberation Army.An example of a Dinka, an example of what I call a West Sudan Elongated Desert Adapted African. This man is a negotiator for the SPLA, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.

A Masai man. The more I look at this guy, the more I think he looks like our 36,000 year old Caucasian guy reconstructed at the start of the post. Or am I hallucinating? A Masai man. The more I look at this guy, the more I think he looks like our 36,000 year old Caucasian guy reconstructed at the start of the post. Or am I hallucinating?

More Dinka West Sudan Elongated Desert African phenotypes.

Another West Sudanic type, from an old anthropological textbook, back in the days when race still existed and we could still discuss phenotypes and whatnot. You know, before the Cultural Marxist dickwads took over?Another West Sudanic type, from an old anthropological textbook, back in the days when race still existed and we could still discuss phenotypes and whatnot. You know, before the Cultural Marxist lunatics took over?

A Tutsi, possible ancestors of the original Proto-Caucasians. Note the Caucasoid appearance.

Another Tutsi. I must say they are handsome folks. Hey WN's, say hello to Grandpa! Another Tutsi. I must say they are handsome folks. Hey WN’s, say hello to Grandpa!

Yet another Tutsi. I can't get over how much these Africans look like Caucasians or Whites in facial structure. Yet another Tutsi. I can’t get over how much these Africans look like Caucasians or Whites in facial structure.

Eastern Desert Elongated Africans, possible progenitors of the Caucasoids, look like Caucasians. One argument is that this is due to inbreeding with Caucasoids. In fact, they are pure Africans. See the chart. Eastern Desert Elongated Africans, possible progenitors of the Caucasoids, look like Caucasians. One argument is that this is due to inbreeding with Caucasoids. In fact, they are pure Africans. See the chart.

Another chart showing the African purity of the possible proto-Caucasoids of Africa. Take home point: Caucasian appearance is not due to Caucasoid interbreeding; it's de novo. Another chart showing the African purity of the possible Proto-Caucasoids of Africa. Take home point: Caucasian appearance is not due to Caucasoid interbreeding; it’s de novo.

*Used sardonically.

References

Bowcock, A. M.; Kidd, J. R.; Mountain, J. L.; Hebert, J. M.; Carotenuto, L; Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. and Kid, K. K. 1991. “Drift, Admixture, and Selection in Human Evolution: A Study With DNA Polymorphisms.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1991 February 1; 88(3): 839–843.

Cabrera, Vicente M, Maca-Meyer, Nicole, González, Ana M, Larruga, José M, Flores, Carlos. 2001. “Major Genomic Mitochondrial Lineages Delineate Early Human Expansions”. BMC Genetics 2:13

Hellenthal G, Auton A, Falush D. 2008. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. East Rutherford, New Jersey, USA: Penguin Group.

Repost: Alt Left: Black Males and Testosterone: Evolution and Perspectives

Black Males and Testosterone: Evolution and Perspectives

Repost from the old blog. Interesting stuff.

Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels. Groups with the highest testosterone in the world today are primitive agriculturalists.

Hunter-gatherers tend to have lower testosterone. This is because in hunter-gatherer society, women need men to survive. So they  grab one pretty quickly and get married.

In primitive agricultural societies, women do not need men, since they can farm on their own. So they can afford to be choosy. These societies have tended to develop in a polygynous way, where a few high-ranking males monopolize most of the females, and the rest of the guys get none. It’s kind of like high school, except it keeps going for your whole life.

Sub-Saharan Blacks are highly polygynous, and this resulted in intense competition for fewer women and selection for very robust male body types. SS Blacks are more robust than Whites on all variables. In Namibia, the polygynous Kavango have much higher testosterone than the much less polygynous !Kung.

Young Black males have higher levels of active testosterone than European and Asian males. Asian levels are intermediate to Blacks and Whites, but Asians have lower levels of a chemical needed to convert testosterone to its active agent, so effectively they have lower levels. Androgen receptor sensitivity is highest in Black men, intermediate in Whites and lowest in Asians.

US Blacks have the highest rate of prostate cancer on Earth, and the levels in African Blacks may be just as high.

Blacks do results in lower IQ in males but better fighting and mating skills. Interestingly, the black male IQ is 83 and black female IQ is 87.

By the same token, Black females earn 9

Testosterone is an interesting hormone. A little extra testosterone makes a man – good visuospatial skills, etc. Lots of extra testosterone is too much of a good thing – it lowers IQ.

In the UK, young Black females have higher IQ’s than young Black males. However, Black females also have higher testosterone than White females.

Black boys’ exposure to high testosterone begins in the womb. Black mothers’ wombs have higher testosterone, and this feeds to the fetus.

Assuming that higher Black testosterone levels are a causative agent in Black crime, aggression and lowered IQ, experimental interventions could be tried: two pills – first one pill to lower testosterone to Black fetus’s brains by 2

Of course, in our insane PC anti-racist society, such interventions are banned now and forevermore as “racist.”

Repost: The Major and Minor Races of Mankind

The Major and Minor Races of Mankind

Repost from the old site that was shut down. This post is very long and complicated – it runs to 83 pages – but I have tried to make it as easy to understand as possible. Please feel free to dip into it at your leisure. Updated January 28, 2013. Regularly updated.

As you can see by the title, this is an awfully ambitious post. Those who believe that race does not exist, or that Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid and Australoid are outdated terms of no use, might as well bail out right now and save yourself the exasperation.

Recent prior attempts include the usual Mongoloid – Caucasoid – Negroid Three Race Theory, which is discussed below. The main problems with this theory are twofold: that it fails to classify a group called Australoids and that it fails to note the huge split between SE Asians and NE Asians.

From Cavalli-Sforza’s recent work comes an eight-race theory: European Caucasoids, South Asian and North African Caucasoids, Northeast Asian Mongoloids, Southeast Asians extending from Thailand to Indonesia and the Philippines, Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines, Negroids and American Indians.

This is not bad, but I would argue that there is no reason to put both Arabs/Berbers and South Indians in one race (see Cavalli-Sforza’s own map below). Genetically, they are quite distant.

From my World Book Encyclopedia 1990 comes a nine-race theory: Negroids, Caucasians, Asians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Aborigines, South Indians and Amerindians. To this I recently added three more very distinct groups, Khoisan (Bushmen), Pygmies and Negritos, to come up with 12 races.

But we can go further than this. If Polynesians and Melanesians are widely regarded as separate races, we should be able to distinguish races based on any other major grouping at least as genetically distant as Polynesians and Melanesians. When I finally found two hapmaps showing the distance between Polynesians and Melanesians, I got the idea for a new race theory based on genetic distance alone.

This theory in most cases is based only on genetic distance, and not physical appearance of physical anthropology. In a few cases, races were grouped into a major group based on appearance – for instance, genetically, Chukchis are in the Caucasian square below, yet they look anything but Caucasian.

Though many distinguish Melanesians and Papuans, Capelli’s (see below) genetic analysis puts them in one race. But see Figures 1-4 below which clearly put them in separate groups. Also, Melanesian and Papuan teeth are very different from each other.

Some people are likely to be upset by this theory.

Surely the Japanese will not be happy to learn that they are virtually identical to the despised Koreans. White Nationalists will not be happy to learn that Turks, Jews, Kurds and Iranians are included in the European race and that they cannot include South Indians with Australoids.

NE Asians and ignorant amateur anthropologists will be unhappy to learn that there is no reason to lump SE Asians with Australoids and that the hated Filipinos (which some refer to as the “niggers of Asia”) are very close to the high-IQ, high-achieving Southern Chinese and the Filipinos haven’t a trace of Negrito in them.

It is standard of NE Asian racialists and amateur anthropologists on the Net to say that the Filipinos are heavily-Negrito.

There are traces of Australoid (Papuan) genes in the Malay, some Indonesians, the Southern Thai and the Coastal Vietnamese, but these admixtures are not large, and the Filipinos haven’t any observable Australoid traces.

Filipinos are closer to Southern Chinese than any other race below, although they are also close to the Aeta Negritos. This is because the Aeta and Ati Negritos are not Australoids genetically but instead are related to SE Asians. Anthropomorphically, they are Australoids.

There is also a more substantial Melanesian component in many Indonesians (except those in Western Indonesia), but there is In fact, as Figures 1-3 below indicate, they are Asians and are most closely related to other Pacific Islanders. In fact, the distance between SE Asians and Australoids is greater than the distance between NE Asians and Caucasians.

Afrocentrists will be unhappy to learn that various dark folks like South Asians, Melanesians, Papuans and Negritos cannot be considered to be “Black” by any sane definition of the word.

This theory creates nine major races and 113 minor races. It is a work in progress.

Most of this document comes from Cavalli-Sforza’s haplogroup gene map of the human race below.

Figure 1: Cavalli-Sforza’s Principal Coordinate (PC) autosomal DNA haplogroup gene mappings of major human ethnic and racial groups. There are differences between a PC mapping and the tree mappings below.Much of the racial grouping below is based on this map – on genetic distance between groups, not on superficial resemblances between groups. The upper left square can be called NE Asian. The lower left square can be called SE Asian. The upper right square can be called Caucasian. The lower right square can be called African.Figure 2: Another Cavalli-Sforza map showing general genetic distance, with tremendous overlap with the map above. This map clearly separates out Papuans and Melanesians and also Filipinos and Thais. There is some confusion here regarding the placement of Northern Turkics with Amerindians and whether NW Amerindians should be cleaved off into a separate race.

This map is actually interesting because it implies that there are six major races of humans – not three – NE Asians, SE Asians, Oceanians (Australoids), Pacific Islanders, Caucasians and Africans. As you can see, the distance between NE Asians and SE Asians and between SE Asians and Pacific Islanders is greater than that between NE Asians and Caucasians. SE Asia is clearly an area of profound genetic diversity.

Figure 3: Yet another map, in this case a genetic tree. Once again, Papuans must be cleaved from Melanesians and Thai, and Chinese are clearly separated. This is the first tree that shows the Northern Chinese, and it seems clear it wants to put them with the Koreans and Japanese. This map shows five major races – Caucasians, NE Asians, SE Asians, Africans, Papuans and Aborigines.

Figure 4: More from Cavalli-Sforza showing genetic distance. This was apparently used to map one or both of the maps above. Based on this, I split the Thai off from the Filipinos. This map also shows that Aborigines are most closely related first to Mongolians and Siberians and second to Japanese and Koreans.

I usually wanted about 150 points difference to split off into a separate race, but in some cases I split off closer groups if they were distinguished somewhere else, like in any combination of Figs. 1, 2 or 3. You need to click on it to read it properly.

The initial impulse for this post was this paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics, A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania (Capelli et al 2001). If you look at Table 4 in Capelli, you can see that they carefully delineate out Polynesian and Melanesian groups based on Haplogroup mapping.

Since many scholars of race include both Melanesians and Polynesians as separate races, this table serves to delineate what the proper genetic distance between genetic groups needs to be in order for them to be separate races.

Based on Polynesians and Melanesians as separate races in Table 4 in Capelli, I was able to sort out four more groups in that table, if only to get some idea of the distances between racial groups.

First, an Indonesian Race was separated out, including all but the easternmost island groups such as the Alor that go into Melanesian. Javanese and Sarawak were later included based on Figure 5. Later, based again on Figure 5, the Toraja and Mentawi were separated out, each into their own groups. The Toraja are an ancient farming group in South Sulawesi. The Mentawi are the indigenous peoples of the Mentawi Islands west of Sumatra. They still live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

A Lesser Sunda Race was also split out (see Figure 5), but the Alor were not covered, as they lumped more with Melanesians. The Lesser Sunda Race included the Lembata, the Lamaholot, the Manggarai and the Kambera. These people have mixed Indonesian and Melanesian ancestry. The Lembata and Lamaholot live on Lomblen Island east of Flores Island. The Kembara live on Sumba Island and the Manggarai live in the West of Flores Island.

Second, a Filipino-Ami Race, composed of Filipinos and the Ami, a Taiwanese aborigine group (the Filipinos are almost genetically identical to the Ami and are quite close to the Southern Chinese – see Figure 1 in Capelli) was split off.

Third, a South Chinese Race consisting of unknown groups that was later expanded below was split off.

Based on the distances between these clearly differentiated races in Capelli, I was able to plot plot racial distances in Figure 1 above to infer major and minor races based on distance.

All of the groups created via Capelli were then further chopped up based on Cavalli-Sforza here (p. 234-235). An Indonesian Race consisting of Sulawesi, Borneo and Lesser Sunda survived the cut, while the Alor of Lesser Sunda went into Melanesians. Malays themselves are distinct enough to create a Malay race.

The proto-Malay or Temuan, who have some of the most ancient genes on Earth of all of the Out of African peoples, are an ancient aboriginal group in Malaysia. They have an extremely diverse genetic signature (See Figure 5), enough to split off a category all of their own.

The Bidayuh or Land Dayaks are the indigenous peoples of Sarawak. Their genetics are wildly divergent (Figure 5), as we might expect from such an ancient people, hence, they form their own stock.

Some comments are in order.

Although separate NE Asian and SE Asian Major Races were created in order to account for both the vast differences between NE and SE Asians (the distance between NE and SE Asians is greater than the distance between Caucasians and NE Asians) it should still be noted that at a deep level, this is clearly one race.

The Gilyak and Ainu are leftovers from the original Proto-Northeast Asians. The Proto-Northeast Asian homeland was around Lake Baikal maybe 35,000 years ago. The Ainu themselves may go back 18,000 years to the Jomons, who arrived from Thailand. These people resembled Australoids.

In Figure 1 above, Northern Turkic forms a clear race with various Amerindians, yet in Figure 4, they seem to be quite distant. The Buryat have also been linked to Amerindians, even though anthropologically, they are linked to Mongolians and genetically they are close to Koreans.

The North Turkics are closest to the Northern Chinese and the Nepalese, both of which were split off into separate groups. The Manchu and Qiang were added to the Northern Han based on genetics for the Manchu and the fact that the Qiang have an origin in the north. The Yunnan Han, a southern group, oddly cluster with Northern Chinese, as do the Hui.

The Oroqen, a Siberian Tungusic tribe in northeast China that is genetically very divergent, was split off into its own group.

The Nepalese, consisting of Nepalis and Newaris, are genetically Asians, though they resemble Caucasians. They pretty much straddle the line between Caucasians and Asians. A lot of groups close to them – Turkics, Mongols, Northern Chinese, and Altaics, straddle the line between Caucasian and Asian.

Nepalis are closely related to South Indians. They are also close to Central Asians. The Central Asian Race includes the Kirghiz, Karalkalpaks, Uzbeks, Turkmen and possibly others. Although they are mixed Caucasian-Mongoloid people, genetic analysis shows that they can be included with Asians. However, other analysis (Table 2) shows that they are best placed in with Caucasians, though only barely.

Others, such as Kazakhs, are closer to Tuvans and also Mongolians (Table 2). The Kazakhs were placed into a Mongolian Race, somewhat arbitrarily.

The Sherpas were then further split off and placed in with the Yakut (p. 231). All of these splits were based on this data (p. 229). The Tuva were given a separate race based on data showing them splitting away from the Yakut-Sherpas (p. 229)

Northeastern Indians were put into the Mon-Khmer Race somewhat arbitrarily, since this is who they cluster with. There was some confusion. In one paper, the Naga, Apatani, Nishi and Nemang cluster with the Mon-Khmer, and the Adi go in with Tibetans.

The situation is somewhat contradicted by this Y-DNA graph (Reddy 2007), which puts the Apatani, Nishi and Adi, along with the Tripuri, Jamatia, Mog and Chakma, in a single Indian Tibeto-Burman Race. Because of this cluster, and because this group tends to separate somewhat from General Tibetan, I created an Indian Tibeto-Burman Race.

Note that the Tibeto-Burman Tujia, Yizu and Shan cluster away from Indian Tibeto-Burman to some extent. The Mizo and Yizu, Indian Tibeto-Burman groups, cluster more with General Tibetan. However, the Mizo are far enough away from the rest of General Tibetan to warrant their own stock (chart). The Garo also cluster with General Tibetan on Y-DNA, but on Mt-DNA, they are very different (chart) (Reddy 2007).

A group of the Mundas was split off as a Meghalaya Race on the basis of their differentiation on MtDNA (chart) (Reddy 2007). Some Indian Tibeto-Burman groups such as the Bai and the Pnar were included. This race includes the War Jantia, Bhoi, Maram, War Khasi, Kynriam, Nishi, Pnar and Bai. All of these groups are found in Meghalaya or over the border into China.

A group consisting of the Santhal, Naga, Munda, Kurmi and Sudra were split off from this group due to their dramatic difference on MtDNA (chart). This group also lives in NE India.

There is a group of Indo-European speakers in NE India that can be differentiated from the rest of the groups on Mt-DNA. This NE India Indo-European Race consists of the Mahishya, Bagdi, Gaud, Tanti and  Lodha.

The Mon-Khmer are close enough to Thai and Southern Chinese in Fig. 4 to be included with the Tai, but they were split off due to the obvious distance in Fig. 1. The Mon-Khmer, Southern Chinese and Thai groups are clearly all closely related.

The Zhuang were split off from Mon-Khmer into a Munda Race on the basis of this autosomal DNA table (p. 235) (Cavalli-Sforza 1994). The The Austroasiatic Race consists of the Mon, Zhuang, She, Santhal, Ho and Lyngngam. Most of these groups are found in NE India, but the Mon are in Burma. Most speak Austroasiatic languages, but a some speak Tibeto-Burman or even Indo-European languages. The Nongtrai group with this race in Y-DNA (chart) but not on MtDNA (chart), where they may well form their own group.

The Zhuang are a group in Southern China. They left Central China for Southern China 5000 yrs ago. This group was originally thought to be part of the proto-Tai group in Southern China that later moved down into SE Asia and gave rise not only to the Thai, but also helped form many other SE Asian groups.

At the time of the split from proto-Tai to Tai, the Zhuang went to Guangxi Province and the Tai went to Yunnan. In 1200, the Tai moved down into Indochina and mixed with local groups, becoming the Thai, Lao and Shan.

The Senoi are an ancient group in Malaysia dating back about 4,000-8,000 years. From the close genetic relationship, it seems that the Senoi may have split off from the proto-Zhuang or an earlier group soon after the group left Northern China for Southern China. The Santhal, Ho and Shompen may also have been early split-offs.

The Shompen at least are thought to be a very old group. Originally it was thought that they were remnants of the early people (Negritos) who settled the area, but further research indicated that they are an Austroasiatic group, albeit an ancient one.

Although there is much controversy about the origins of the Senoi (Are they Negritos?) a variety of points of inquiry converge on the notion that they are related to SE Asians.

The Senoi are Veddoids, an ancient group with possible links to the Negritos and the original settlers of Asia 70,000 years ago. There is fascinating evidence for this as Senoi skulls cluster with skulls from the Andaman Islands, Coastal New Guinea and Tamils. Andaman Islanders are Negritos, the New Guinea population is Melanesian and the Tamils are thought to be Veddoid.

The Senoi speak an Austroasiatic language and are also thought to be related to the Vietnamese and the Khmer. Senoi teeth resemble SE Asian and Polynesian teeth. It is thought that the Senoi came down from Southern China and bred in heavily with the Negrito Semang in Malaysia. The Senoi have wavy hair like most Veddoids, though some have straight hair and a few have woolly hair like Negritos.

I recently split the Greater Andamanese and the Onge into two separate major races each based on new data showing that they are profoundly different from all other humans. Whether or not they get separate major races of their own each is open to debate and is determined by the depth of their differences.

However, the data does show that they are each completely separate branches on the human tree. As the Andaman Islanders were the first people to split off after we left Africa and they have been evolving for ~70,000 years in isolation, it figures that they would be extremely different.

I also decided to split Australoids into a macro race alongside Caucasians, Africans and Asians due to charts showing that they are extremely different from all other humans. This group would include for now Papuans, Aborigines and Andaman Islanders.

The Tungus, a group of mostly reindeer-herding tribes, including the Even and the Evenki, were given a separate group based on this map (p. 227). The Evenki are also close to various Tibetan groups, because these Tibetan groups came from NE Asia also.

Amazingly, the Yenisien (of which Ket is the last surviving member) Language Family has now (in 2004) been conclusively tied to the Amerindian Na-Dene Language Family, the first conclusive linking of a New and Old World language family. Even though the Ket presently reside quite a bit to the north of the Altai region where most Amerindians came from, the Ket used to live down near the Altai thousands of years ago.

Northern Turkics include such groups as the Altai, Hazara, Shor, Tofalar, Uighurs, Chelkan, Soyot, Kumandin, Tuva and Teleut. They are located around the Altai Mountains where China, Mongolia and Russia all come together. This is where most of the Amerindians came from.

Evidence for including the Hazara, who speak a language related to Persian, in the Northern Turkic group is a chart that shows the Hazara clustering with the Uighur.

Malay Negritos (the Semang) were given a separate race based on a recent study finding them highly differentiated from other Asian populations. The Jehai and Kensui are related Negrito groups in Malaysia (Figure 5).

Though Cavalli-Sforza includes Berbers barely into the African square, I include them with Caucasians due to their greater resemblance to Caucasians than African, and also due to genetic analyzes that show that they have little Black in them. However, some Berbers are clearly African. Analyses of the more-Caucasian Berbers find that, across the board, they are on average Tuaregs were given separate races because they are clearly separate from Berbers and all of the African groups in Fig. 1.

However, Tuaregs do cluster (p. 169) with Algerians and Bejas. Since Algerians are Caucasian and most Tuaregs are Africans (though they vary considerably), I had to separate them into major races based on appearance. This is one of those cases where genes flies in the face of physical anthropology.

Bejas are a mixed-race people living in northeastern Africa and speaking a Cushitic language. They look like Ethiopians. Ethiopians are about 5

Similarly, Nubians are grouped (p. 169) in with the Caucasian Berbers, although most people consider them to be Black people. With examples like this, you can see why Fig. 1 has Berbers on the border of African and Caucasian.

Figure 1 also puts the Chukchi in the Caucasian square, though they clearly resemble Asians. I lump them in with Asians due to their obvious resemblance to Asians. I included Aleuts with Chukchis due to a recent paper showing a linkage.

Siberian Eskimos were included for the same reason. The entire group was called the Beringian Race. The Koryaks were split into a separate group due to Cavalli-Sforza’s data. The Itelmen were later added to the Koryaks due to evidence showing that they are related. Both were combined into a Paleosiberian Race. The Reindeer Chukchi, apparently a more Siberian group, was split off due to its great (p. 228) genetic distance from other groups.

The Uralic Race was split into a Siberian Uralic Race including the Samoyed, Ket and Nentsy subgroups (p. 227). The Nganasan are an outlier (p. 229) in this group, and there was barely enough evidence to split them into a separate group.

Northern Na-Dene speakers were split from the North American Eskimos whom they resemble (p. 323), on the basis of this tree (p. 227). Similarly, Ge and Tucanoan (linguistic groups) Amerindians were split off from the rest due to great distance (p. 322) between them and the others.

A Fuegian Amerindian Race was created based on evidence that they exhibit extreme genetic differences with all other Amerindians. They are probably the ancestors of the original peopling of the Americas.

The Nootka, or Nuuchahnulth, were also split off due to the finding of a fifth major haplogroup lineage (p. 1166) in them in addition to the main four lineages – A-D – usually found in Amerindians. This line links back to ancient Amerindian remains and goes back to Mongolia.

I started out with a General Amerindian Race, but I decided to split it into four races – Northwest American, Northern, Central and Southern, based on Figure 2. It is true that I could not make these splits on the basis of Figure 1 or the genetic distance charts, but as most serious splits on Figure 2 went into separate races, I decided to split the Amerinds in the same manner.

Further, the Amerinds have some of the greatest internal genetic distances of any geographical group, far more, for instance, than the Europeans and Iranians, so the splitting seemed valid.

South Indians are included with Caucasians based on a general consensus that these are an ancient group of Caucasians. The reason being their resemblance in facial and body structure to Caucasians. In addition, Figure 1 clearly puts them in the Caucasian square, and the other three figures clearly show that they are most closely related to Caucasians.

Although genetic studies say that South Indians are all one race and there is good reason to believe this, Figure 1 delineates South Indians and North Indians into separate groups, though there is a clear transition from one to the other. Figures 2 and 3 reiterate the distinction between South and North Indians.

There is data linking Vietnamese genetically with Cantonese. Vietnamese genetics are very complex and it is all being worked out. They are clearly an Austronesian-Tai mix with heavy S. Chinese admixture and some undetermined amount of Khmer and Cham mixed in. Vietnamese does not include the Montagnards, who are the indigenous people and seem to be related to Negritos.

There is good evidence also linking the Vietnamese and related groups to the Tai, however, there seems to be better evidence linking to them to a small group of mostly Mon-Khmer speakers. The Deang or Paluang,  the Jinuo and the Blang lump together with the Vietnamese (Lĭ 2006). The Mon-Khmer speaking Deang live in Yunnan, Burma and Thailand,  the Tibeto-Burman speaking Jinuo live in Yunnan and the Blang also live in Yunnan. So the closest living relatives to the Vietnamese people are in Yunnan, and next in Burma and Thailand.

Since there is quite a bit more distance between Filipinos and Thais than between Filipinos and Southern Chinese, I split off Thais into a separate race. I also kept the Filipino-Ami Race above, but added the Guangdong Han (Guangdonren in Chinese) to the group based on evidence that they are linked to the Ami.

Based on Fig. 5, I further refined the Filipino portion of this group into Tagalog, Visaya and Ilocano speakers, while splitting off the Manobo into a separate group, as they are divergent (Fig. 5). Tagalogs are an ethnic group who live mostly in Luzon and Oriental Mindoro, while Visayan languages are spoken in the Visayas region in the central Philippines, encompassing the islands of Panay, Negros, Cebu, Bohol, Leyte, Samar and Palawan. Ilocano speakers are located in the far north of Luzon.

A race called the Southeast China Race was created based on a tight clustering of the Minnan Nan, Hakka, and overseas Chinese of Singapore and Thailand. Based on Figure 5, the Cantonese Han (outside of Hong Kong) were added to this race.

A separate Taiwanese Aborigine Race was split off, based on Cavalli-Sforza’s work. This group, best seen as the principal Taiwanese Aborigine Race, consists of the Atayal, Bunun and Yami. Another Taiwanese Aborigine group, the Paiwan, was split into an Island SE Asian Race based on Cavalli-Sforza. Interestingly, the Paiwan, Atayal and Yami are also somewhat close to the Tai Race (see below).

The Taiwanese Aborigines have an interesting background, and their prehistory is in need of further research.

In addition to the Thais proper, I also include other Tai groups such as the Tai Lue, Tai Kern, Tai Yong and Tai Yuan on the basis of Figure 5. All are found in Thailand. Many groups are related to the Thais. They are the Lao, Shan, Dai, Lahu, Aini and Naxi. The Lahu, Dai and Aini were included on the basis of this report. All of them are found in Yunnan. This group is found in Southern China (especially Yunnan), Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. The Buyei are also related to the Thai.

Two aboriginal groups of Thailand are so different as to warrant a separate stock each.

The Htin, or Mal, are ancient aborigines of Thailand speaking a Khmuic language. In Figure 5, they are different enough to constitute their own stock.

The Mlabri are a very strange group of hunter-gatherers in Thailand who are very poorly understood. They live very primitive lives. Their genetics is wildly diverse and suggests that they were founded from a small stock only 800 years ago or so. That is, they went through a genetic bottleneck. Some think that they are former farmers who went back to land for some reason. They are one of the most genetically wildly diverse people in Asia (see Figure 5).

Although Fig. 4 suggests that Southern Chinese and the Thai should be grouped together, Figs. 1-3 suggest otherwise. Clearly, the two groups are very close, but I decided to break Southern Chinese off due to the other figures above, especially Figure 1, that suggest they are a separate grouping.

I lumped a number of groups into a Southern Chinese Race, including the Dong, Yi and the Han living in Henan Province, China, based on evidence that they form a group with the Southern Chinese. These groups are found in the Southern Chinese provinces, including Henan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Hainan and Fujian.

I created a Hmong-Mien Race for the Hmong and the Mien, since, while they are close to the Southern Chinese Race, they are different enough to merit their own category (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: Click to enlarge. A good chart of many of the Asian races, showing how well genes and language line up.

The Li is a genetically divergent Chinese ethnic group that forms it’s own outlier between the Southern and Northern Chinese. However, it trends more towards Southern Chinese. They also link up very closely to the Khmer. The suggestion here is that the ancestors of the Khmer were the Li.

What we are learning about Negritos is that instead of forming a distant group, they are often closest to the people they are living around. So the Philippine Negritos (Aeta) are closest to other Filipinos, and the Veddas are closest to other South Asians.

The Mamanwa, a Negrito group on Mindanao Island in the Philippines, are highly divergent from the rest of the Philippine Negritos. The Mamanwa are thought to be remnants of the original Negrito population in the Philippines.

The Palau, a Micronesian group, curiously cluster with Aeta and Agta Negritos, indicating that they may be the remains of the original settlers of SE Asia. The Agta and Aeta cluster together also (Fig. 5). The Aeta and Agta Negritos both live in mountainous areas of Luzon.

The Iraya Mangyans of the Philippines are also quite different, but they are close to the Ati Negritos, also of the Philippines (Fig. 5). The Ati live on Panay Island, in the Visayas Group. The Iraya are a Mangyan group living on Mindoro Island. The Mangyans are not Negritos, but they are still an indigenous group in the Philippines and are different from most Filipinos.

The Toba Batak, a tribe in northern Sumatra, curiously clusters with the Kanaka and Yap Micronesians. On Figure 5, the Karo Batak line up with the Toba Batak. They may be leftovers of the original Melanesian-Polynesian mix that populated Micronesia. The Kanaka is an old name for a The Veddas are clearly related to the Negritos as one of the sole remaining leftovers of the group that left Africa 70,000 years ago and populated all of Asia. There are interesting links between them and the Toala of Southern Sulawesi and the Senoi of Malaysia. Nevertheless, almost all Veddas except the Kerala Kadar cluster with the South Indian Race.

North Indians include the Punjabis, Central Indic, Punjabi Brahmins, Rajputs, Vania Soni, Mumbai Brahmins, Jats, Kerala Brahmins, Pakistanis and Koli.

South Indians include the Munda, Bhil, Maratha, Rajbanshi, Oraon, Parji, Kolami-Naiki, Chenchu-Reddi, Konda, Kolya, West Bengal Brahmins, Parsi and Gonds. Although many of these groups are thought to be related to Veddas or Negritos and part of the original people of India, they now resemble other South Indians.

Kerala Kadar are a highly diverse Vedda group who are probably the ancestors of the original people of India. They live in the forests of Kerala and resemble Australoids.

The Gurkha and Tharu are two highly diverse groups in Nepal. In Figure 5, the Ladakhi are close to them, so a Himalayan Race was created to encompass them.

The Kanet live in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat and probably have some Tibetan mixture. The inclusion of the Uttar Pradesh Brahmin with these people in unexplained.

The Nicobarese and the Senoi cluster with the Munda Race on Y-DNA, but on Mt-DNA, they are extremely different (chart here) (Reddy 2007), which is suggested by their ancient origins. Each got a separate race due to their extreme divergence.

The Khoisan were divided into three groups, the San, Khoi and Hadza. The Khoi are probably a creation of intermarriage between SW Bantus and San. The Hadza are an ancient group in Kenya and Ethiopia. The San form a separate race with the Somalis.

The Sandawe are another Khoisan group that was also divergent, but not enough to form a separate group, on the table here (p. 176), but was split off due to its divergence on the tree here (p. 169) .

The Sara are a a very divergent Nilotic group from Chad, who form a race with Biaka Pygmies from Central African Republic. All of the African splits are from here (p. 169).

The Funji, a Nilo-Saharan group, was both split off due to their diversity (p. 169). The Bedik, a small group of 5,000 in Senegal, are also divergent. Though they are not divergent enough to be a race on the distance chart, they are on the PC and tree charts. The Funji, or Gule, live in Sudan on the Blue Nile near the Ethiopian border (p. 170). The Bedik are a small group in Senegal.

Three groups in Senegal, the Peul, Serer (650,000) and Wolof (2 million), were split off into a separate group although they they do not have enough distance in the distance chart to warrant that, similar to the Southern Chinese, Thai and Khmer. However, like these three groups, the Senegalese groups are quite different on the PC Chart and on the tree chart, so they were split off (p. 181-182).

The Peul (700,000) speak Fulani (Peul is just French for Fulani), but are settled African farmers, unlike the more pastoralist Caucasian – Berber group that roams across the Sahel.

Figure 1 appears to divide humanity into four racial squares – Northeast Asian, Southeast Asian, Caucasian and African. Although the difference between SE and NE Asians is deeper than that between Asians and Caucasians, it is clear that this is all one race – the Mongoloids. Inside of that group, all of the Chinese are related.

The homeland of the proto-Asians dates back over 60,000 years and is in northern Vietnam and southern China. We know this because the Vietnamese have the greatest genetic diversity in all of Asia. The split between the NE Asians and the SE Asians is at least 53,000 years deep. There is a Hmong-specific line alone that may date as far back as 26,000 years.

The traditional tripartite system favored today by racial minimalists – Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid – is appealing, but I could not reproduce it. As there is as much difference between Asians and Caucasians as between SE Asians and NE Asians, why should I create a Mongoloid Race?

Instead, I split it into nine separate major races. This enabled me to account for the fact that while Australoids are Asians (genetic analysis of various Australoids has proven this), they are definitely an extremely divergent group.

This analysis also recognizes the deep diversity of Australoids – the Aborigines are more distant to Africans than any other race (once again despite physical appearance), due to genetic drift in Australia for millenia.

At first I put Papuans into an Australoid Race with Aborigines, but later I split them off. The distance between Aborigines and Papuans is as great as between Caucasians and Asians, so why lump the two Oceanians together? At the same time, we should recognize that there is a Mongoloid super-group that does encompass Aborigines, Papuans and both NE and SE Asians.

Figure 1 puts Aborigines barely into the NE Asian square, Papuans on the line between SE and NE Asians and Melanesians further down in the SE Asian square. Figure 4 shows that Aborigines they are mostly closely related first to Mongolians and Siberians and next to Japanese and Koreans. This is due to the Ainu substructure in these groups.

I also reluctantly split off the Kalash into a separate major race, inside of Caucasians, based on a stunning paper that differentiated the Kalash among groups such as Africans, East Asians, Oceanians, etc.

Based on Cavalli-Sforza’s six-race theory above in part, I split off Amerindians into a separate race inside of Asians. I also split off Pacific Islanders into a group called Oceanians, but contra Cavalli-Sforza, I did not include Papuans with the rest of the Pacific Islanders.

My Pacific Islander group includes Melanesians, Micronesians and Polynesians. Note that one group of Indonesians is included in each of the Melanesian and Micronesian subgroups. Therefore, there is no Indonesian race per se, as Indonesians encompass a variety of groups, although most can be put into a few SE Asian minor races.

That is based on genes. If you go by anthropometrics, you can get a group called Australoids that includes Negritos, Melanesians, the Ainu, Papuans, Aborigines, the Senoi, Tamils and Fuegian Amerindians.

The Andaman Islands Negritos are also profoundly different from other groups, and are said to have the “purest” genetic profile of any group, once again due to genetic drift and lack of outside inputs. Papuans, Melanesians and Negritos are also extremely distant from Africans, once again despite physical appearances.

The Khoisan (San and Bushmen) in Africa are the oldest race on Earth based on genetic signatures dating back 53,000 years, and this is what the original humans who came out of Africa 70,000 years ago may have looked like.

The various Negrito groups, the Aborigines and possibly the Papuans are also very ancient.

Mongoloids as we now know them are only 9,000 years old – previous groups in Asia looked more like Australoids – of which the Ainu and Gilyak are the last remaining descendants.

Australoid types and their ancestors are the original peoples of India , Burma, ThailandThe Bantu (or the Africans that we are familiar with) may go back much further – it has been up to 40,000 years since they split off from the Pygmies. There is a suggestion that they were distinguishable from Khoisan (Bushmen) even 100,000 years ago (p. 160). The ancestors of all Africans seem to have come from West Africa at least 35,000 years ago (p. 160).

Amerindians at the tip of South America are very different in head shape than the rest of the Amerindians – looking more like Australoids – and their genetics is also profoundly different.

The proto-Caucasian homeland may have been in the Caucasus about 45,000 years ago. Another theory says it was in Central Asia.

The most ancient Europeans are the Saami and an ancient, isolated group of Sardinians. Among Caucasians, the Berber and South Indian Races appear to be very ancient, and both are extremely divergent within the Caucasian group. They may be surviving remnants of the most ancient Caucasians.

The South Indians are actually midway between Caucasians and Asians genetically and are only lumped with Caucasians because this is who they most resemble.

Europeans proper only go back 10,000 years or so, but the Saami (best seen as proto-Europeans) seem to go further back than that.

South Indians have been evolving in considerable isolation for about 15-20,000 years in the subcontinent. Prior to that, they appear to have come from the Middle East. The Berbers of today appear to be continuous with Berbers of up to The rest of the groupings mostly follow from Figure 1. More tables like Table 4 in Capelli would be very helpful in order to tease out more minor races.

A single asterisk indicates considerable genetic difference from related groups, two asterisks indicates a highly divergent group, and three asterisks is a profoundly divergent group. Major races are in red.

Some groups are not represented. I was not able to classify many groups with Negrito or Veddoid affiliations, such as the Tamils of South Asia and the Montagnards of Vietnam.

Mien and Qiang are Northern Chinese tribes, but the Mien have moved to the South lately. I could not find any good genetic data on the Qiang. The Nu were arbitrarily included in the Tibetan Race because they came from Tibet, but I don’t have good genetic data to prove that this is really a single unit. The chart here does not clarify things much.

The Bhutanese, though most closely related to Tibetans, were given their own race based on data showing that they are nevertheless considerably distant from Tibetans.

The Barya are a mixed-race group in Western Eritrea.

The Gilyak or Nivkhi are an ancient tribe living on the border between Korea, Russia and Japan that has ties to the Ainu. Ryukyuan is another name for Okinawan. They were given a separate race based on studies showing them intermediate between the Ainu and modern Japanese.

The Va (or Wa) are an ethnic group in Yunnan and Burma that seems to be distinct from the Northern, Southern and Tibetan Chinese groups. The Va seem to be about equally related to the Northern and Southern Chinese, indicating some sort of a dual origin. The Jingpo, or Karen, another Yunnan group that also occurs in Burma, were included with them based on this paper. The Lawa of Thailand were added to this group based on Figure 5. Interestingly, the languages of the Lawa and Va are also closely related.

A Southern Japanese Race was split off from the Japanese, Ryukuyans and Ainu. This group is made up of Kyushu Island, the southernmost island, and the Kinki region of Honshu, near the city of Kyoto. The Japanese in this area are highly divergent (p. 232).

The European-Iranian Race includes almost all Europeans except the Saami, Basques and Sardinians. The Saami and the Sardinians are very distant and the Basques much less so from the rest of the Europeans.

Although Cavalli-Sforza classes the Basques, Yugoslavs and Greeks as genetic outliers, there was not enough distance between the Yugoslavs and Greeks and other Europeans to split them into a separate group on the basis of genetic distance. Furthermore, the Greeks are clearly in the European group in Fig. 1 – they are quite close to English and Danes in the PC analysis.

However, I did split the Basques off based on their lying outside the European-Iranian cluster on the PC chart in Fig. 1. Most groups that were distinguished as independent units outside of clusters on Fig. 1 were given separate races.

The Greeks are interesting in that, while they are obviously a part of the Europeans on all charts, they are also the only Europeans that are are also close enough to most Middle Easterners to be included in their group. So the Greeks are a link between the European and Middle Eastern groupings inside the Caucasian Race.

The Iranian branch includes Jordanians, Iraqis, Assyrians, Druse, Lebanese, Kurds, Georgians, Caspians, Turks, Jews, and related groups in the area. It was difficult to decide whether to put the Turks in the Iranian subgroup or in the Central Asian subgroup, as they are close to both.

It was also very difficult to decide whether to put the people of the Caucasus, the Kurds, Turks, Caspians and Jews in the Iranian group or the Central Asian group as they cluster with both. I decided on sheer geographic grounds to put them in the Iranian group. The Russian Saami are closer to the Tungus and were included in that group.

Although some Arabs, West Asians and all South Indians were split off, this was somewhat arbitrary. Although they form separate groups on the Fig. 1, the Arabs are closely enough related to various Europeans, including Greeks, to be included with Europeans (Fig. 4). However, the Arabs were not as close as the Iranians.

Likewise, South Indians are close to Iranians, who are in turn close to Greeks and Italians – note that Iranians are also somewhat close to Danes and English (Fig. 4). As the Greeks link Europeans genetically with Middle Easterners, the Iranians link Europeans genetically with India. Arabs and South Indians were only split off due to the distance observable in Fig. 1.

West Asians were also split off due to their divergence. Based on this chart, they seem to be a compact grouping. This group includes the Pashtuns, Brahuis, Balochis, Makranis and Sindhis.

Further research shows that the Tajiks and Hunza, who at first appear to group with the West Asian group above, actually compose two groups divergent enough to be split into 2 different races. The first group is made of the Hunza of the Karokorams, the Bartangi of the Pamir Range and the Roma or Gypsies of Europe. So the Gypsies have a Himalayan origin.

The second group is made up of Tajiks, the Shugnan of the Pamirs, Bukhara Arabs and three groups in India – the Kallar of Kerala, the Sourashtran of Tamil Nadu and Yadhava of various parts of the region.

The Kalash, a strange, ancient, tiny tribe with Caucasian roots in northwest Pakistan in Chitral Province, are so diverse that they could very well form their Since making a macro race out of a tiny ethnic group in Pakistan is absurd, I decided to throw them as a major race subsumed under Caucasians, albeit on the grounds that they are an extremely divergent race. They were classed with Caucasians because there is a general consensus that this is what they are (last two links are racist).

Due to their divergence, Kuwaitis and Arabians – consisting of Saudis, Yemenis and Bedouins – were split off into separate groups.

The are numerous groups that are more or less recent combinations of various groups and do not yet deserve their own racial category.

Hispanics are in general a mixture between Caucasians (typically Iberians) and Amerindians. They have been evolving for a short time and have not had time to differentiate into anything suggesting a race yet (despite nonsense from La Raza demagogues).

There are other Hispanics who are heavily mixed with Blacks, Caucasians and Amerindians. This is especially seen in South America in Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia, and even in Central America and Mexico.

There are large Black-White mixed populations in the West Indies. In Singapore and Hawaii, there are rapidly mixing populations that defy categorization.

This paper is basically just a shot in the dark and is more properly termed a pilot or exploratory study. I welcome evidence-based inputs from any knowledgeable persons who wish to add to this preliminary grouping of the human races, major and minor. All suggestions coming from nationalists of various types, ethnic or otherwise, typically lacking evidence, will probably be rejected outright.

There are 4 macro races of man, 11 major races of man and 115 minor human races of man.

* = significant genetic distance from most other groups

** = major genetic distance from most other groups

*** = extreme genetic distance from most other groups

Asian Macro Race

Northeast Asian Major Race*

Japanese-Korean Race (Japanese – Korean)

Southern Japanese Race (Honshu Kinki – Kyushu)

Ryukyuan Race (Okinawans)

Ainu Race*** (Ainu)

Gilyak Race** (Gilyak)

Northern Chinese Race (Northern Han – Qiang – Manchu – Hui – Yunnan Han)

Oroqen Race (Oroqen)

Sherpa-Yakut Race (Sherpa – Yakut)

Nepalese Race (Nepali – Newari)

Mongolian Race (Mongolian – Inner Mongolian – Buryat – Kazakh)

Northern Turkic Race*** (Dolgan – Altai – Shor – Tofalar – Uighur – Chelkan – Soyot – Kumandin Teleut – Hazara)

Central Asian Race (Kirghiz – Karalkalpak – Uzbek – Turkmen)

Tuva Race (Tuva)

Tungus Race (Even – Evenki – Russian Saami)

Siberian Race

Beringian Race** (Chukchi – Aleut – Siberian Eskimo)

Paleosiberian Race (Koryak – Itelmen)

Reindeer Chukchi Race (Reindeer Chukchi)

General Tibetan Race (Tibetan – Lisu – Nu – Tujia – Akha – Burmese –  Yizu)

Mizo Race (Mizo)

Bhutanese Race (Bhutanese Buddhist)

Siberian Uralic Race (Nentsy – Samoyed – Ket – Mansi – Khanty)

Nganasan Race (Nganasan)

Uralic Race (Komi – Mari)

North American Eskimo Race (Inuit)

Amerindian Major Race*

Northern Na-Dene Race

Northwestern American Amerindian Race

Northern Amerind Race

Central Amerind Race

Southern Amerind Race

Ge Amerindian Race (Ge Language Group)

Tucanoan Amerindian Race (Tucanoan Language Group)

Nootka Amerindian Race (Nuuchahnulth – Makah)

Fuegian Amerindian Race (Ona – Yaghan – Kaweskar – Aonikenk – Alacaluf)

Southeast Asian Major Race*

Southern Chinese Race (Dong – Henan Han – Yi – She – Punu – Naxi)

Hmong-Mien Race (Chinese Hmong – Thai Hmong – Mien)

Li-Khmer Race (Li – Khmer)

Southeast China Race (Hakka – Min Nan – Singapore Chinese – Thai Chinese – Cantonese Han)

South China Sea Race (Tagalog – Ilocano – Visayan – Ami Taiwanese Aborigine – Guangdong Han)

Manobo Race (Manobo)

Philippines Negrito Race (Aeta – Agta – Palau Micronesian)

Mangyan-Ati Race (Iraya – Ati)

Mamanwa Philippines Negrito Race (Mamanwa)

Tai Race (Thai – Tai Lue – Tai Kern – Tai Yong – Tai Yuan – Lao – Lahu – Aini – Shan – Dai – Muong – Buyei)

Vietnamese Race (Vietnamese – Deang – Jinuo – Blang)

Mlabri Race** (Mlabri)

Htin Race (Htin)

Kachin Race (Kachin – Karen – Va – Nung – Lu – Lawa)

General Taiwanese Aborigine Race (Ayatal – Bunun – Yami)

Island SE Asian Race (Paiwan Taiwanese Aborigine – Sea Dayak – Sumatran – Balinese)

Bidayuh Race** (Jagoi)

Indonesian Race (Sulawesi – Borneo – Lesser Sunda – Sarawak – Javanese)

Mentawi Race (Mentawi)

Toraja Race (Toraja)

Lesser Sunda Race (Kambera – Lembata – Lamaholot – Manggarai)

Malay Race (Malaysia Malay – Singapore Malay)

Proto-Malay Race** (Temuan)

Austroasiatic Race (Mon – Zhuang – She – Ho – Lyngngam)

Nongtrai Race (Nongtrai)

Santhal-Naga Race (Santhal – Naga – Munda – Kurmi – Sudra)

Meghalaya Race (War Jantia – Bhoi – Maram – War Khasi – Kynriam – Nishi – Pnar – Bai)

Senoi Race (Senoi)

Shompen Race (Shompen)

Garo Race (Garo)

NE Indian Indo-European Race (Mahishya – Bagdi – Gaud – Tanti – Lodha)

Indian Tibeto-Burman Race (Apatani – Nishi – Adi – Tripuri – Jamatia – Mog – Chakma)

Semang Malay Negrito Race*** (Semang – Jehai – Kensui)

Oceanian Major Race*

Micronesian Race (Yap – Kanaka – Toba Batak Indonesian – Kora Batak Indonesian)

Polynesian Race* (Tonga – Western Samoa – French Polynesia – Cook Islands)

Melanesian Race (Fiji – Vanuatu – New Ireland – Papuan Melanesian – Nasioi – Alor Indonesian)

Australoid Macro Race

Australian Major Race***

General Australian Aborigine Major Race***

Queensland Aborigine Race***

Western Territory Pama-Nguyan Aborigine Race***

Papuan Major Race***

General Papuan Race***

Motu Papuan Race***

Sepik-Ramu Papuan Race***

Greater Andaman Islands Major Race***

Greater Andaman Islands Negrito Race***

Onge Andaman Islands Major Race***

Onge Andaman Islands Negrito Race***

Caucasian Macro Race

General Caucasian Major Race***

European-Iranian Race (Most European – Caucasus – Armenian – Jewish – Turk – Kurd – Iranian – Jordanian – Iraqi – Assyrian – Druze – Lebanese – Georgian – Caspian – Palestinian)

Basque Race (Basque)

Norwegian-Swedish Saami Race*** (Norwegian Saami – Swedish Saami)

Finnish Saami Race** (Finnish Saami)

Sardinian Race** (Sardinian)

Kuwaiti Race* (Kuwaiti)

Arabian Race (Saudi – Yemeni – Bedouin)*

West Asian Race (Pashtun – Brahui – Balochi – Makrani – Sindhi )

Tajik Race (Tajik – Bukhara Arab – Shugnan – Kallar –  Sourashtran – Yadhava)

West Himalayan Race (Hunza – Bartangi – Roma)

Berber Race*** (Berber)

Egyptian Race (Egyptian)

North African Race (Moroccan – Libyan – Tunisian – Canarian)

Algerian Race (Algerian)

North Indian Race** (Punjabi – Central Indic – Punjabi Brahmin – Rajput – Vania Soni – Mumbai Brahmin – Jat – Kerala Brahmin – Koli)

Himalayan Race*** (Gurkha – Tharu – Ladakhi)

Karnet-Uttar Pradesh Brahmin Race*** (Karnet – Uttar Pradesh Brahmin)

South Indian Race** (Munda – Bhil – Maratha – Rajbanshi – Oraon – Parji – Kolami Naiki – Chenchu Reddi – Konda – Kolya – West Bengal Brahmin – Parsi – Gond)

Kerala Kadar Race*** (Kerala Kadar)

South Dravidian Race*** (Sinhalese – Lambada – Irula – Izhava – Kurumba – Nayar – Toda – Kota – Malayaraya – Tamil)

Kalash Major Race***

Kalash Race*** (Kalash)

African Macro Race

African Major Race***

Tigrean Race*** (Tigrean)

Amharic Race*** (Amharic)

Sudanese-Barya Race*** (Sudanese – Barya)

General Nilotic Race (Shilluk – Masai – Nuer – Dinka – Luo – Turkana – Karanojo – Mabaan)

Funji Nilotic Race (Funji)

Tuareg-Beja Cushitic Race*** (Tuareg – Beja)

Nubian Race*** (Nubian)

Wolof-Peul-Serer Race (Wolof – Peul – Serer)

General Bantu Race (Most Bantus)

Bedik Bantu Race (Bedik)

West African Race (Most West Africans)

Mbuti Pygmy Race

Sara Nilotic-Biaka Pygmy Race (Sara – Biaka)

San Khoisan-Somali Race*** (San – Somali)

Khoi Khoisan Race*** (Nama – !Ora)

Hadza Khoisan Race*** (Hadza)

Sandawe Khoisan Race (Sandawe)

References

Capelli C., Wilson J. F., Richards M., Stumpf M. P. H., Gratrix F., Oppenheimer S., Underhill P., Pascali V. L., Ko T. M., and Goldstein D. B. 2001. A Predominantly Indigenous Paternal Heritage for the Austronesian-Speaking Peoples of Insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. American Journal of Human Genetics 68:432-443.

Cavalli-Sforza L. L., Menozzi P,. Piazza A.. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chu J. Y., Huang W., Kuang S. Q., Wang J. M., Xu J. J., Chu Z. T., Yang Z. Q., Lin K. Q., Li P., Wu M., Geng Z. C., Tan C. C., Du R. F., and Jin L.. 1998. Genetic Relationship of Populations in China. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). 95:11763-11768.

Harihara S., Saitou N., Hirai M., Gojobori T., Park K. S., Misawa S., Ellepola S. B., Ishida T. and Omoto K. 1988. Mitochondrial DNA Polymorphism Among Five Asian Populations. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 43:134-143

Jablonski, N. and Chaplin, G. 2000. The Evolution of Human Skin Coloration. Journal of Human Evolution. Available on this blog here.

Lĭ H., Pan S., Donnelly M., Tran D., Qin Z., Zhang Y., Cheng X., Yin R., Lin W. and Hoang V. 2006. Dermatoglyph Groups Kinh Vietnamese to Mon-Khmer. International Journal Of Anthropology 21:3-4, pages 295-306.

Lin M, Chu CC, Chang SL, Lee HL, Loo JH, Akaza T, Juji T, Ohashi J, Tokunaga K. March 2001. The Origin of Minnan & Hakka, the So-called “Taiwanese”, Inferred by HLA Study. Tissue Antigens:57(3):192-9.

Omoto, K. (1984). The Negritos: Genetic Origins and Microevolution. Acta Anthropogenetics 8(1-2):137-47.

Omoto K., Ueda S., Goriki K., Takahashi N., Misawa S., and Pagaran I. G. (1981). Population Genetic Studies of the Philippine Negritos. III. Identification of the Carbonic Anhydrase-1 Variant With CA1 Guam. Am J Hum Genet. 33(1): 105-111.

Reddy BM, Langstieh BT, Kumar V, Nagaraja T, Reddy ANS, et al. 2007. Useem, John. 1948.  Robert LindsayPosted on Categories Aborigines, Africa, Ainu, Americas, Amerindians, Andaman Islanders, Anthropology, Arabs, Asia, Asians, Assyrians, Australia, Basques, Bedouins, Berbers, Black-White (Mulattos), Blacks, Cambodia, Caribbean, Central Africa, Central African Republic, Central Asians, China, Chinese (Ethnic), Chuckchi, Dene-Yenisien, East Africa, East Indians, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Europeans, Filipinos, Genetics, Georgians, Greeks, Hispanics, Hmong, India, Indonesia, Indonesians, Inuit, Iranians, Iraqis, Italians, Japanese, Jews, Jordanians, Kazakhs, Kenya, Khmer, Khoisan, Koreans, Kurds, Kuwaitis, Language Families, Lao, Laos, Latin America, Lebanese, Linguistics, Malays, Malaysia, Melanesians, Mestizos, Micronesians, Mixed Race, Mongolians, Na-Dene, Near Easterners, Negritos, North Africa, North Africans, Northeast Asians, Oceanians, Oroquen, Pacific, Pakistanis, Papuans, Philippines, Physical, Polynesians, Pygmies, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Roma, SE Asia, SE Asians, Siberians, South Asia, South Asians, Spaniards, Sudan, Taiwanese Aborigines, Tajiks, Thai, Thailand, Tibetans, Turkmen, Turks, Uighurs, Uzbeks, Vietnam, Vietnamese, Yemenis2 Comments on Repost: The Major and Minor Races of Mankind

Alt Left: Particularly Ugly Racist Propaganda about Black Murders of Whites

Rishi: Off topic, Robert, but what do you make of this news? It’s left me sad seeing the faces of the victims.

This stuff happens all the time, but keep in mind that the vast majority of those killed by Black criminals are just other Black people. Black criminals positively nuke their own people. If Blacks should be getting mad at anyone, they should be getting mad at their own criminal class which is devastating them. Blacks bear by far the largest brunt of the damage that these men cause, and of course, they are almost all men.

Whites are not particularly at risk of homicide from Blacks.

Blacks make up 1

The average Black person you see on the streets is 2

Whites having a 2

Note that that 2

Most Whites are killed by other Whites. If you are White and you get murdered, chances are another White person will have killed you. 8

People don’t get it.

Black men are highly homicidal. Their homicide rate is fully 8X higher than that of White men. But they’re not real particular about who they kill. Actually in fact they are. Black killers massively over-select their own kind for homicide and appear to under-select or go out of their way to not kill Whites.

Black criminals kill everyone. They kill their own people (for the most part), they kill Whites, they kill Hispanics, they kill Asians. And they victimize all these groups for violent crime too. Black criminals simply prey on and kill other humans. If you’re human, you’re at risk from them.

This idea that these evil Black criminals are going out of their way to massacre, wage race war on, and even genocide our White race is a particularly ugly and nasty racist lie. Granted, these folks are murderous and some of us Whites are among their victims, but I assure you that they don’t go out of their way to select us for murder.

People wonder what real racism looks like. Well, it looks like this – this lie that Colin Flaherty et al are pushing. You want to print articles about Blacks killing Whites? Fine, if you run a newspaper. But if not, why not run articles about all of the other races being killed by these people too? Or run articles about every race getting kiled by every other race. In other words, leave race out of it. You’re writing about homicide, not race relations. Homicide isn’t a race problem. Homicide is a human problem, part of the human condition.

Because if you solely focus on Blacks killing Whites, you are pushing a racist lie that Black killers are preying on us Whites like hunters against prey, going out of their way to murder us for some reason, possibly due to their extreme racist hatred of us.

There is a very racist publication (and note that I don’t use the word racist lightly – I only use it where it absolutely applies) called New Nation News. Every month they print an issue of all of the Black on White homicides that month. In a typical month, there might be ~25. Of course most of the cases are very tragic.

If you read that and don’t know what’s going on, you will be outraged and infuriated. It will seem like Black killers are waging a genocidal war against us Whites. And you will start to hate Black people. The more articles you read like that, the more you will hate Black people. Which makes sense because the only reason White people write those articles is to get White people to hate Black people or hate them more if they already do. Their inciting people to anti-Black racism. It’s outrageous.

But that needs to be taken in context.

First of all, 8

Victims of Black Murderers

Blacks Whites Hispanics Asians Unknown

8

Since Whites make up 6

But they are 64

Victims of Black Murderers Odds Ratios

Blacks Whites Hispanics Asians

+64

So while Blacks may have killed 27 Whites in the US in November, a similar article about Black victims would show that Blacks killed 224 of their own people in that same month! Holy homicide, Batman! That article would be almost 10 times longer than the one above and would contain almost 10 times more victims.

So what’s the real problem here? 27 White people getting killed by Blacks every month or 224 Black people getting killed by Blacks every month. Clearly the latter, no?

And this is the particularly vicious racist lie being pushed in these publications – that the murders of 27 Whites every month by Blacks is somehow a phenomenally worse problem than the 224 Blacks (8.3X more!) murdered by these same folks. I guess those 224 Black people don’t matter. Why should they? They’re just a bunch of fucking niggers, right? But when a White person is killed? Holy Moses! It brings the house down and it’s a national emergency. Whites lives matter! Black lives clearly don’t. I hate BLM but I will give them that one.

The very notion that one White homicide victims is a vastly worse moral offense than five Black homicide victims feels like an ugly racist lie to me. Black lives are only 1/8 the worth of White lives, if that? We are back to Dred Scott now and going even beyond that. What an appalling mindset.

In recent years there have been reports that in certain large cities, 9

And the homicides are very closely associated with gang warfare, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of the killings. Racists freak out about this and scream and yell, but shouldn’t they be happy? Hey, the niggers they hate so much are Shoah’ing each other. Should be time for celebration, right, boys? Break out the champagne. Guess not.

If anything, these crime waves ought to make us feel overwhelming sympathy for any innocent Black lives that are taken by these killers.

We should also feel sad that Black America has descended this low and debased itself in this matter.

But these city massacres have about

It’s basically a Black on Black Civil War. In a way, I hate to say it, but it’s really not even our problem. They started it and they’re continuing it. They own it. It’s their problem. Maybe they should sort it out.

Alt Left: A Bit on the Vietnam War from a Boy Who Had a Front-row Seat

In 1972, we were in the fourth year of Nixon’s stupid “Vietnamization” slow withdrawal, otherwise known as “peace with honor.” This idiot’s peace with honor crap got another 20,000 and God knows how many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dead. So Americans could have honor. 500,000 human beings dead so Americans could feel honorable. You know what? Fuck that. I was a sophomore in high school at the time.

I remember my father hated Nixon and Vietnamization. The Paris Peace Talks were going on all this time too. (((Henry Kissinger))) (The Evil One) was representing the US, so of course almost nothing got done. Nixon was bombing North Vietnam all this time. The Vietnamese had good anti-aircraft weapons (often manned by women!) and they shot down quite a few of our planes.

In addition, they had a lot of Russian MIG fighter jets. I’m not sure if it was Russians or Viets flying them, but they were very good. They were move than a match for our F-15’s and F-16’s, which were very good jets by the way. A lot of our jets got shot down in dogfights with MIGs. I believe he mined the harbor at Haiphong too. The schmuck even invaded Cambodia. I remember that. My father was livid.

This was also the time of My Lai. And the POW’s making broadcasts in North Vietnamese prisons.

Of course, over South Vietnam, we ruled the skies and our jets were never shot down. But we also used helicopters for air cover, and those things did get shot down a lot by Vietnamese troops on the ground. There was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, not really a road but endless paths cut through the thickest jungle on Earth. We flew planes over that trail all the time bombing it, but we never could shut it down, and the Viets still moved an incredible amount of men and equipment through that trail. The vehicles were often camouflaged with leaves.

Keep in mind that the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese Communists) were basically wiped out by the Tet Offensive. After Tet, the North Vietnamese took over the war and they were a much more formidable opponent – a real army – than the Viet Cong, who were also very good but specialized in guerrilla war.

We were also bombing the Hell out of Laos at the time. Most of the bombing was focused on the Plain of Jars in the north. A number of our jets got shot down over Laos too. I’m not sure how they did it. POW’s were not just in North Vietnam. The Pathet Lao (the Laotian Communists) held quite a few US POW’s too. Neither they nor the North Vietnamese treated the POW’s well, but the Pathet Lao were probably worse. One small group of POW’s managed to escape a Pathet Lao prison camp. It is quite an impressive story.

In Laos, we recruited the Hmong, primitive tribesmen who didn’t understand the meaning of the words communism or capitalism and couldn’t have cared less even if we did. We paid these suckers and bribed them to be our mercenaries.

The CIA also smuggled a vast amount of opium out of this area called the Golden Triangle via the Nugen Hand Operation.

In 1968, I walked precints with my father for the antiwar candidate, Gene (Clean Gene) McCarthy. I was 10 years old. I think my father supported the war but he turned after the Tet Offensive. That’s when US support for the war dipped below 5

Westmoreland kept telling us that we were winning all the time, getting closer and closer to total defeat of the enemy. The phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” was used many times. Then Tet hit. The Viet Cong attacked every significant city and US military base in South Vietnam simultaneously. They infiltrated Saigon where there were guerrilla battles everywhere. They invaded the US embassy and almost took it over. The Marine guards shot the invaders, who lay on the front lawn, but some of the attaches had to retreat up to higher floors to be rescued.

This was the enemy, that was on its last legs, nearly defeated. Yeah right. Tet showed this for the massive lie it was. Light at the end of the tunnel my ass. Slowly getting better my ass. People had had enough. There was already an antiwar movement, but it really took off after Tet.

Back then we had an actual free independent First Amendment style media, unlike the stenographers, hacks, and state controlled media we have now. Journalists would actually get on TV and criticize a US war! It was during Tet that the great Walter Cronkite (yes, I saw him on TV many times) said the war was hopeless and he was withdrawing support for it. Can you imagine any US TV presstitute saying that about any US war nowadays? Hell no! A free press was a beautiful thing. Too bad we haven’t had one for a very long time in this country, a good 30 years, maybe more.

Alt Left: About That White Ethnostate The White Nationalists Want

She’s in Parties: All White state/country

Good luck attracting White liberals or Jews. How many Whites would support an all White state?

Can I get an amen?

Amen!

I think maybe 6-

They will all be xenophobloic racists, that’s for damn sure.  And extreme racists as far as racism goes. Say racism is on a spectrum, especially nowadays with theses fool definitions. These White nationalists are ultra-racists. They’re wildly racist. They’re so racist that they are so dramatically out of touch with everyday society as to be near cartoon caricatures.

The overwhelming majority of them will be reactionaries too, and particularly crazy ones at that. Not only that but almost all of them will support Jim Crow, the Confederates in the Civil War, apartheid in Rhodesia and South Africa, and the Nazis in WW2. They will all say slavery is no big deal. They will all oppose Brown vs. the Board of Education, and the Civil Rights, the Voting Rights, and Housing Rights Acts.

They will all support legal segregation and oppose all integration on the dubious basis of freedom of association. They all (even the White nationalist liberals, and there are a few) want to wipe out all social programs, which they call welfare. To them all social programs just means taking the hard-earned money of Whites and giving it out in freebies to a bunch of stupid, criminal, worthless niggers and beaners. They don’t see that many Whites use these programs too. In fact, if you mention that Whites use these programs, they will all say you are lying and laugh at you.

And they will be anti-liberal and especially anti-Communist fanatics. They will basically be fascists, in other words. Almost all White nationalists are pretty much fascists.

In a word, these people are wildly, cartoonishly ultra-racist fanatics. They are not good for Black people! They are not good for most Hispanics. They are not even any good for Asians. They are especially bad for Black people, for whom they reserve much of their ire. No Black person should have anything to do with these maniacs.  They hate you. Every single one of you. Trust me. I know these people very, very well.

TIL that everyone who likes being White, like the commenter and me, has to be an extreme rightwing fanatic! Can’t you like being White and be a Centrist? Or a liberal? A progressive? A socialist? Hell, even a Communist? Why not?

Why all “Whites” have to be ultra-rightwing fanatics is something I will never understand.

Alt Left: Sadism and Creativity in Society Are Related to Economic and Societal Structure

Another interesting post from commenter Brian. He ties societal sadism and Social Darwinism into economic changes and ties societal creativity into societal structure, in particular its degree of flexibility.

I completely agree that there is a sadistic tendency in people that is expressed toward those deemed socially inferior. I’ve seen it and, having been in foster homes for a time growing up, experienced it.

I’ve often wondered at what seems to be a mean-spiritedness of the culture in general during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and if this mean-spirited character was linked to industrialization and to the growth of severe inequalities in society, both class and race based.

Those inequalities existed before the industrial revolution, but industrialization marked a new level of complexity in social organization, and the rise of many “new men” as elites. In the transformation of a society toward a new economic system and set of social relations, old inequalities are exacerbated, and the new elites who have risen to the top seem eager to shore up their position by waging a reactionary crackdown on dissent and calls to moderate their avarice.

The Social Darwinist, let-the-undeserving-poor-rot, bootstrap mentality of the upper class was encouraged in the general population by those who had risen to the top as a way to justify their behavior, and it had the effect of drawing out the worst tendencies in human nature in society at large. It was a bully’s ideology and encouraged ordinary people to let out their inner sadism, which ordinarily – without authoritative encouragement – would have been more repressed.

This is how you get gleeful lynchings, the hanging of elephants from a giant chain, the proliferation of freak shows where people can satisfy their inner monster by laughing at folks with severe genetic deformities.

I wonder if this witches’ brew of inhumanity cooked up by the propagandists of the new robber baron class was a factor precipitating World War I. Indeed the displacements of industrialization along with repression of the working class by disconnected and haughty elites and the whole toxic culture this gave rise to poisoned Europe just as badly as it had the United States.

The periods of the cruelest treatment of ordinary people tend to coincide with episodes of great economic expansion, the rise of new men and new families to positions nearer the top of society, and the complexification of society in general.

Another example is a century earlier in Britain, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the very beginning of the industrial revolution – or the first industrial revolution, as opposed to the second which I was referring to above – and began with the Enclosure Acts that forced peasants off the common lands so they could become the new urban class of industrial laborers.

During this time the Bloody Code reached its bloodiest extreme and more than two hundred crimes could be punished by death, even as a number of minors were executed for rather petty crimes. These were the classic Dickensian times, and they are marked by great new opportunities for moneymaking that attracted a class of people willing to subject other humans to appalling degradations for their own profit.

When we think of the medieval period, we often think of brutal tortures. But in fact such tortures, while they occurred in the medieval period, were used far more extensively in the Renaissance and early modern times than in the medieval period as was the death penalty in general.

Once again, what we find at that time is a transformation in the socioeconomic system, specifically moving away from feudalism in Western Europe and the rise of a new middle merchant class across much of Europe, starting in Italy. Perhaps the use of such punishments is meant to break the spirits of those who suffer most during such transitional periods so they are less of a threat to the elites, especially the new and very insecure/paranoid elites.

I suspect that what we see today, with the mean-spirited attitude of the neoliberal age – the expansions of the prison system going back to the 70s and 80s (the very dawn of the neoliberal age) and the electronics and digital boom – is another such period of social complexification, economic transformation, dispossession of whole sections of society and even of regions in general like the rust belt, and the rise of many new men (and women now) into the ranks of the ruling class.

For around forty years I’ve been seeing among the upper middle classes and above is an increase in callousness, selfishness towards and even dehumanization of various groups of people, from Blacks to working class (now often poor) Whites and anyone who isn’t at least upper middle class.

To address the idea that such periods help to breed out criminal genes from a population, I do not doubt this is true. These phases of societal transformation seem to yield a more docile population on the other end of them. But I think this process will eventually eliminate the spark of genius in our population and in the West in general.

It largely has eliminated this spark already. At least in the realm of the social sciences of fundamental thought like philosophy, modern European philosophy having seen its best days some two to three centuries ago. Other fields that are downstream of basic thought have been able to flourish since then, but they will stagnate, and some are stagnating already.

Going back to civilizational and race theory, the difference between White civilization and Asian seems to be that White civilization has been far more creative for centuries now, despite Asians having higher average IQ’s. The spark of genius requires a high IQ but also creativity and originality, which mostly comes from people who are off-kilter and don’t easily fit into a very conventional, static society that looks down on new ideas or unusual behavior.

You, Robert, have mentioned before that many very intelligent and interesting people work in odd jobs and have little to show for their talents. I think such people have struggled in any society, but they struggle more as society becomes more closed-minded and starts distrusting anyone who isn’t stable, conventional, and predictable; in other words, someone who fits ready social expectations.

A lot of academics are very bright, but few have that special spark of brilliance in them, and if anything, having that is a detriment for someone in academia today.

As our society stiffens we will likely become less creative, whereas in the past few centuries, we’ve seemed to be able to accept originality even if many geniuses are not exactly paragons of stability. I am not saying that Asians are without creativity or the spark of genius, just that as their populations became more controlled and regimented, they exhibited fewer instances of real inspiration.

We are moving towards greater control and the consequent heavy formalization of life which sucks the naturalness out of life. We should probably expect relative cultural stagnation, at least compared to what we’ve been experiencing for centuries in the West.

The problem with African peoples and societies is an excess of naturalness or primal behavior, which, while it is energetic and creative, lacks the mental and social channels to develop it.

Higher intelligence on the other hand takes that same primal energy the Africans have in excess and focus that energy into socially accepted interests and goals. The problem with Asian societies is there is a serious lack of primal behavior, though I suspect some genetic potential for creativity remains in their populations and could be freed up if they loosened up a bit.

As to our current period of neoliberalism in the West, I think whatever good it did in juicing the development of the new electronic and digital economy is already finished and have been since probably 2008. At this point neoliberalism’s effects on society are very detrimental and could even touch off serious convulsions across Western society if it isn’t moderated.

Continuing on this path can only benefit a small handful of elites and only if they are able to maintain control. But they are gamblers, so they will try, and they seem unlikely to concede much to the population for the sake of reconciliation.

Alt Left: Civilized and Less Civilized Cultures: Differences in Impulsiveness, Forward Planning (Thinking Ahead), and Deferment to Higher Orders of Logic

Polar Bear: Of course, letting women dominate men is worse. Men should play the role of loving father to women but be damn sure not to let her hold the reigns.

Men have to dominate. Or at least they have to be seen as dominant. Or at the very least, as masculine. One thing I will never do is seriously insult a man’s masculinity. I won’t call a man gay either. I never do that. I don’t call men faggots, even if they are. If they are, it’s just mean, and I don’t torment homosexuals. If they’re not, no matter how wimpy they are, they might attack me. Any man, if you call him a homosexual or attack his masculinity and say he’s not a man, is liable to hit you, or perhaps worse. It’s a perfectly natural, normal, logical, and sensible reaction.

That it’s illegal doesn’t matter. A lot of perfectly normal and sensible reactions are highly illegal. Quite a few of them might land you in prison for life. That’s why you don’t act normal and sensible all the time. At times we must submit to a higher law or at least a higher level of logic. Of course it’s logical to assault or even kill a man who attacks your masculinity or calls you gay! What could be more reasonable than that? On the other hand, if we do that, then a higher level of logic comes in – the logic of the law and society.

And in this case the logic of the law and society trumps the logic of the primal man of which we are no longer. The higher logic says that if we do that, we will probably get caught and sent to jail or possibly prison, maybe for a long time. So in this case, the higher logic predominates.

Probably the main difference between civilized societies and less civilized or uncivilized societies is that the more civilized societies, men tend to defer to the higher law more often.

In a more primitive society a man simply acts on his whims as the primal man inside of him demands. There are few or no higher orders of society or law to constrain him. This is why you see so much crime, violence, homicide, and general disorder in such places. Too much primal, low-level thinking and not enough civilized, higher-level thinking.

This also has to do with impulsiveness. In less civilized places, people are more impulsive. One of the best things that civilization brings is a decrease in impulsiveness. Instead of just getting an impulse and acting on it, people in more civilized places tend to think it over, at least a bit, before they decide whether to act on it or not.

They think, “Suppose I act on this impulse, what will happen then?” If something bad will happen to them if they act on the impulse that is worse than acting on the impulse, then they often will not act on it. This is called forward thinking, thinking ahead, planning, or thinking for tomorrow.

The less civilized people are, the less they think of tomorrow. They can think maybe 24 hours ahead and that’s it, if they can even think for that long. Increased forward planning and thinking ahead is associated with more civilized peoples. Perhaps the most civilized people on Earth, the Asians, think ahead not just in terms of years or even decades, but in terms of centuries or even millennia! Compare that to an Amazonian jungle tribe, perhaps the least civilized people on Earth, where no one thinks beyond the next 24 hours, if that long.

Alt Left: A Theory about Race, Personality, and Civilizational Trajectory with Assistance from Spengler, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

A great new and very long comment from someone who is apparently a new commenter. A fascinating theory about race and personality and how they tie in with civilizational trajectories, be they forward, backward, or flat. He utilizes and owes a debt to Spengler first, then Schopenhauer, and last Nietzsche to help flesh out his theory.

I’d really like to see what you all think of this post. Please feel free to comment if you can make it through and figure out what he’s talking about. It’s a bit dense but it’s not really that complicated and a lot of you ought to be able to understand it pretty well.

Brian: This is a theory that’s been turning around in my head for around a decade, and I won’t go over every detail, just the gist of it, since to think out every caveat would take too long, and it’s not like a primary interest of research for me, but suffice it to say there is Spenglerian influence here, and through him, Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian influence. I’ve often called it the “I think we’re turning Japanese” theory.

The idea here is that Whites are in the middle of a spectrum between Blacks and Asians, where Blacks are the most chaotic, as you say, and Asians are the most orderly and staid, personified by the Spock stereotype.

The Germanic peoples, who pretty much seeded all of Europe during the Migration and Viking period, were, 2000 years ago during Rome’s heyday, barbarians, quite wild, living for the day, warring with each other to the point where, aside from the Battle of Teutoborg Forest, they could not unite with each other to fight a common enemy, which made them easy pickings for Rome.

The Celtic culture never took off into a high civilization due mainly to the Roman conquests of Gaul and Iberia and also of much of Britain, which eliminated the source-lands and most of the territory in which the Celtic culture had grown. So the civilization that arose after the collapse of the western portion of the empire was seminally Germanic: even France is heavily Germanic (land of the Franks), though it lies in between the more fully Germanic Northern Europe and the more Mediterranean Southern Europe.

Through the Dark Ages and High Middle Ages, the tribal polities of Northern Europe gradually coalesced into larger nations with, it must be stated, the help of the stabilizing factor of the Catholic Church. And by the Renaissance, Europe was becoming, artistically and intellectually, the most dynamic place in the world so that by Early Modern times, European art and science had eclipsed anything that had previously existed in the world.

Note how Asians beat Europeans in math and science in terms of raw ability, but Europeans have produced more than the Asians, which led to the core Asian lands (mainly China, Japan, and Korea) being not directly colonized by European empires but certainly feeling colonialism’s effects and even, especially for China, its boot heels. From the wild and more primitive European stock of two millennia ago eventually arose a civilization more advanced than what Asia had produced over thousands of years.

I suggest that the reason for this was that, although primitive, the Germanic peoples were also like a ball of energy that, if properly tamed, which of course means diminishing some of their raw energy, could produce an explosion of civilizational progress, and this taming is exactly what happened over the course of the Medieval Period.

The Church was a great factor, with its universalist vision of all reality being centered on a single thing, i.e. God (basically it’s a rational vision of the cosmos as opposed to a fragmentary and irrational understanding of it).

But another factor in this shift is likely social selection.

Over that 1,500 years of interaction with Rome and then of forging their own kingdoms after the constant interference from Rome had ended with the collapse of the western part of the Empire, European societies were able to grow into nations, become more complex and therefore more demanding about the intellectual demands on their own people and, whether through sexual selection initiated by women or through some other factor, began “weeding out” those who were too dumb or wild from the gene pool.

So by around 1500-1600, there existed a civilization with much of the raw energy of a primitive people but now harnessed and directed to intellectual and artistic ends, ready to make a gigantic mark on the world.

The point is that primitive peoples are like stores of raw energy or pools of potential that can, in the right circumstances, be transformed into a flourishing of civilization that even outdoes what groups with higher (or previously higher) IQ’s have accomplished. The white IQ might have increased during that transition from tribal chieftainships to modern states, with the selection pressures that such a transition brings.

Spengler believed that Western civilization was becoming old and sclerotic, ready either to dissipate or, like East Asia, ossify for a very long time, its main ideas having already mostly been expressed. He saw Russia as the next civilization to rise, since it was in that nether phase of being quite brutal compared to Western Europe and its descendant nations overseas, but nevertheless already being quite tamed.

Perhaps this explains why Europe, for centuries, has had a visceral fear of Russia, from the Great Game in the 19th century to the Nazi invasion and destruction of the country down to the present-day Establishment fear of Russia and Putin. Perhaps there is a sense that if Russia can break free of the West and get its act together, its potential is great, and in time – centuries perhaps – Russia could eclipse the ever-more sclerotic West.

But even more long-term, if this theory is correct, I can see Latin America rising as a major civilization. It would have to go through centuries of real nationbuilding first as Europe did in the Dark Ages and High Medieval Period into the Renaissance, but there is certainly great natural vigor among Latin American peoples, already somewhat tempered by the widespread infusion of Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention some German and other European) genes in those populations.

Perhaps in a millennium, when the raw potential has been converted into actionable works through a combination of genetic selection and cultural controls, Latin America will be a great civilization offering new artistic and scientific insights to the world and perhaps being expansionist, as civilizations born of wild people getting their act together tend to be. There seems to be a golden mean when a people is no longer too primitive but not yet too domesticated when that people makes its mark.

Which brings me to Africa. Africa today is comparable to Germania in Roman times: getting the first inklings of advanced civilization from the West, which had often mistreated it, and struggling to form real nations in the face of their own enormous divisions and external interference. Africans are chaotic but also wildly creative, especially musically – and music is the closest thing to the human Will or Engine of Life, as Schopenhauer teaches.

Africa in the coming centuries and millennia could go through a filtering that eliminates from the gene pool many of the wildest elements, for example through frequent warfare and sexual selection by women who demand more intelligent mates, as it becomes obvious that the trajectory of society is toward greater complexity.

The continued presence of Christianity and Islam are likely also beneficial for taming the most wild spirit of Africa, whose people are truly at present the most primal version of mankind. But in the intervening centuries or millennia some new religion might come along in Africa as shape the minds of the people as Christianity did to the Europeans during Roman times.

I would think that the Africans, in maybe a millennium or two, after the Slavic nations and the Latin American peoples have “come online” so to speak in the procession of great civilizations, could become the culmination of human civilization, since they are starting with the most raw energy that, were it tamed, would entail the greatest outpouring of intellectual and artistic – i.e. civilizational – creativity that humans could produce.

But a great deal of selection pressure and cultural maturation would be required before this could happen.

Later this century, Africans are expected to comprise ~4

But this fits not only my thesis but also the Spenglerian model to which it is mostly in debt. The ensuing collapse of the West could be the opening that Slavic nations need in order to truly rise and express themselves fully. The development of Africa into a high civilization is a process I expect to take many centuries amid the vicissitudes of other civilizations rising and falling.

As for current White civilization which is headed by “The West” or those nations descended from or heavily influenced by the Germanic peoples, I think we are turning Japanese. We are past the Golden Middle Period and into a period where much of our primal nature remains but is channeled by genetic and cultural discipline and we are in effect slowly evolving into more staid, quiet, competitive – i.e. more Asian-like – peoples.

You can see it with the younger generations who are subject to far more social controls than even I was when younger, and I am not that old. The younger generations seem socially skittish, often autistic, and very different from kids even thirty years ago. Of course much of this is due to technology, but much is also due to our societies becoming increasingly rule-based and micromanaged.

And it is our culture itself that is insisting on this bureaucratization and rationalization of social life, with technology being merely a tool to push this cultural tendency forward.

As one final note, my theory might not work if indeed the different personality types and intelligence levels of the major races cannot change over a millennium or two in such a way that a wilder and less intelligent race can be pared down through social selection to a more disciplined and intelligent race.

If this is not a long enough span of time for such a transition to unfold, then the rise of the Northern and Western European peoples from tribal barbarians 2,000 years ago to the epitome of civilization just a few centuries ago was not due to a lack of enough intelligence to produce such a civilization.

Instead it occurred because this spark already existed during the Roman Empire, except that its expression was limited by a lack of social development until those cultural constraints needed to mold it into an advanced civilization had taken shape.

If this was true, then difference between the primitive culture and the high civilization it became was sociocultural, not genetic.

But even if this were true, it could mean that Africa could still rise as a high civilization, only that it will take longer, since a lot of not sexual but social selection would have to occur in order for this to happen.

Basic Personality Structures of the Three Great Major Races – Blacks, Whites, and Asians

Alpha Unit: Hi, Robert. That was an interesting detour about personality types. How would you describe the Basic White Personality?

I’m not sure. The White man is awful inhibited and repressed, I’ll give you that much. I suppose the pure White personality is seen more commonly in children.

White children are less cruel, sadistic, and antisocial than Black kids but much moreso than Asians.

Whites are less extroverted than Blacks but not as introverted as Asians.

Whites don’t have as high of a sex drive as Blacks, but they have a higher sex drive than Asians.

There’s less lying, cheating, and thieving among (most) Whites (with some glaring exceptions) than among Blacks but more than with Asians.

Blacks have higher psychopathy scores than Whites, but Whites have higher scores than Asians.

White cities are much less chaotic and disordered than Black cities but more disorderly than Asians cities.

Whites don’t commit nearly as much crime as Blacks. Blacks commit 6X as much crime as Whites, but Whites commit 5X more crime than Asians, and that applies to violent crime too. It’s more than appropriate for Asians to see us Whites as “a bunch of niggers” because in some ways, that’s exactly what we are to them.

Whites are much more inhibited and polite than Blacks but much less so than Asians, as Whites find extreme Asian politeness to be ridiculous and over the top.

Whites are much more studious than Blacks but less studious than Asians.

Whites are more serious than Blacks but not as serious as Asians.

Whites plan for the future much more than Blacks but not nearly as much as Asians, who literally see the past and future in terms of decades and even millennia. See the recent quotes on this site by Deng Xiaoping and Chou en Lai for examples.

Conversation between Richard Nixon and Chou en Lai in 1971:

Nixon: So what do you think of the French Revolution?

Chou: It’s too soon to tell.

Whites are poorer athletes than Blacks but much better athletes than Asians.

Among males, Whites have less testosterone than Blacks but more than Asians.

Blacks are freer and like to live in a society with loose laws and rules, which Whites find appalling. Yet Whites are outraged by the extremes to which Asian desire a rules-and-laws based- (and nearly totalitarian) culture goes.

Whites are poorer musicians than Blacks but better musicians than Asians.

Whites have much more capacity for organized violence than Blacks, but possibly Asians may be even more genocidal and mass-murdering than Whites. The capacity for disorganized violence (street crime) seems to rise as IQ falls, but the capacity for organized violence (mass slaughters and massacres in wartime) almost seems to rise with IQ. Does that seem odd?

Blacks and Asians are both cruel to animals, Blacks due to higher sadism and psychopathy, and Asians by a ruthless utilitarianism that sees anything that moves as something to eat. Whites are very softhearted and love and treat animals as human surrogates far more than any other race.

For God’s sake, Whites will shut down development to literally protect a weed, fly, frog, rat, minnow, or a shrimp so small you can barely see it. Whites truly see the “glory and beauty of all God’s creation.”

Of course, they were not always this way, and Whites were horribly cruel, savage, and even genocidal towards many animal species forever, with the massacres being prevented for millennia only by the lack of good killing tools, although there were notable and sad examples on many islands. Who can forget the tragic Dodo bird? White men literally stalked and slaughtered these creatures for pure kicks all over the sad island of Mauritius. Having evolved on an island with no predators that necessitated flying away from, the poor bird was flightless. And this was in the 1700’s!

Remember how buffaloes were literally shot out of trains for sheer kicks? Remember the White men clubbing those poor baby seals to death. Those were White guys, not gleefully mean Blacks or cruelly efficient and callous Asians.

In other words, it’s not that we lack a capacity for animal cruelty and massacre, but it’s more that it’s been enculturated out of us in recent years. We are starting to see some signs in Asian societies that their callousness towards animals being enculturated out of them.

The key seems to be the growth of a large urban middle class. Country people kill animals. It’s part of life in the country. There are few animals in cities other than pets and pests, and no one cares about the latter. So city people see no benefit in animal killing and see only a possible horrorshow of pet and pretty bird massacre. Further, cities are so animal-free that urbanites come to relish the mere presence of critters, which makes them softhearted and conserving.

Of course White boys are generally murderous towards lower life forms as all boys are, with most of their killing impulses directed at insects, then fish, next amphibians and reptiles, then birds, and finally mammals. As we ascend up the scale, the psychopathy level necessary in the boy in order to kill the animal correspondingly increases.

It’s no secret that the man who started a senseless war that killed 1.4 million Iraqis also used to stick firecrackers into the mouths of frogs and set them off. That’s lamentable and disturbing behavior, but most boys grow out of it and feel bad about it later on as adults. Apparently W. never did as best I can tell, and I wonder if he’s ever felt bad about much of anything.

Mr. Bush definitely had high psychopathy levels, and he was as viciously cynical and devious as any politician. And having read an interview with him after his disastrous terms were over in Rolling Stone, I also realize that he was very smart in a wicked and purely politicized and mercenary way.

His whole worldview was literally boiled down to the most vicious and amoral politicization. Everything was political, probably even the cereal he ate for breakfast. All of life was a form of Politics, as Rove put it so well. There was scarcely a thing in his world that was not politicized and dogmatized. And he had mastered the art of clever lying as well as any politician does.

Whites are less religious than the wildly religious Blacks but much more so that the brutally atheistic Asians. The life view of Asians is so clinical and near-scientific that it’s almost crushingly sad. It’s hard to live a hopeless life no matter how devoted to empiricism you are.

Whites are calmer than Blacks but are appalled by the frozen silence of the Asians. Black 8th graders are a horrorshow. White 8th graders are annoying or possibly worse. Asian 8th graders are merely squirrely and silly.

Blacks are way more fun to be around than boring Whites, but Whites think Asians are dullsville. On the other hand, Whites can be a Goddamned blast once they cut loose. It’s just that Whites think there is a specific time and place to cut loose at which they gleefully untie their moorings. Blacks think the time and place to cut loose is everywhere, all the time.

Sure, it’s never-ending good time, and everyone except prudes, prigs, and humorless SJW’s loves a party, but Blacks also get sick and hurt a lot, die young, and not much gets done in their locales, with a tragic sense of ongoing indifferent decay, possibly due to lack of upkeep because they are too busy living in the moment to repair things when they fall apart.

Whites are not as humorous as Blacks, but they’re funnier than Asians. But all humans love a good joke, and as a White male, of course I’ve gotten the giggles and uncontrollable laughs, plus I have this Black attitude that everything in life is basically a joke. A sad joke, a mean joke, a pathetic joke? Sure, a lot of the time. But a joke all the same. I find it hard to take this world seriously, especially in its Clown World manifestation in the Current Year. I was shocked when I found out how loose Asians got at parties. They drink and laugh it up bigtime. I had actually thought they were incapable of this.

Whites are much better at math and science than Blacks but dramatically less proficient than Asians.

Whites are much more conformist than freedom-loving and wildly creative (and correspondingly chaotic) Blacks, but they find the extreme conformism of Asians to be appalling and anti-human.

Whites are far less lazy and parasitical than Blacks but dramatically more irresponsible and work-shy than Asians.

White men support their children much more than Black men, but there are still quite a few White men who run out on their kids. This sort of thing is almost unseen among Asians.

Blacks love parties far more than Whites do, but Whites party a lot more than staid Asians.

Whites are far quieter and less noisy than animated Blacks, but they find the dead silence and stoicism of Asians to be downright creepy. Of course all three races can get pretty noisy and riled up, and White riots are pretty common – Hell, I’ve even been in a few police riots myself! Ever been in an agitated crowd? Scary, isn’t it? You can easily get crushed. That’s how evil a crowd of Whites can get.

Black toddlers are quite active at an early age. Asian babies and toddlers are calm, cool, and collected as a Zen priest. Whites are somewhere in between. As an aside, Amerindian babies are so silent and unmoving that many people wonder if they are dead. The stoical Indian warrior, silent in the forest as he waits for the deer to come into range.

Blacks are extremely self-centered and even selfish, Whites less so, but still self-centered and even selfish Whites are everywhere you look, probably even in your own mirror. Yet White society still looks down on raw selfishness as disgusting and animalistic, and I suspect a lot of Whites have to fight off their self-centered tendencies. Yet Whites find the selflessness and collectivism of Asians to be totalitarian and creepy.

Blacks aren’t particularly competitive. They are too busy having a good time to mess with that, plus they have short attention spans.  Face it – brutal competition is a drag, and it’s going to cut way into the warmth and gregariousness of hyper-social Blacks. Also, their chaotic tendencies get in the way of nose-to-the-grindstone competitiveness.

I don’t think the chaotic nature of Blacks is necessarily terrible or even bad. I think maybe Blacks just like things, loud, stirred up, adventurous, and maybe a bit dangerous, sort of like life is this endless out of control party. We Whites think it’s horrifying and fear for our safety amidst such scenes, but maybe Blacks actually like to live this way. It’s a pretty wild way to live – lots of thrills, chills, and spills – I’ll give them that.

Black behavior is simply too disorderly and disorganized (I don’t mean that in a bad way – more of an “I don’t give a damn, live for the day” sense) to be competitive because competition requires patience, deep attention spans, and very hard, often boring work. Asians are so competitive that to Whites they almost seem anti-human, vicious, brutal, and cruel.

As you can see, the personalities of the three great major races differ quite a bit. Along the lines of Masculine and Feminine Principles, are there White and Asian Principles in the same way that there seems to be a Black Principle described in the early post? It almost seems racist to posit something like that, but maybe it makes sense after all.

A Comparison of Artistic Styles of the Three Great Major Races: Blacks, Whites, and Asians

Black art is often spare and primitive yet still quite good, an African mask for example. Whites take art to the ultimate heights – compare the development of Perspective with an African mask – not the same thing, is it?

To Whites, Asians seem so flat and non-creative that even their art seems to Whites to be odd, spare, trite, and even boring. See classical Japanese and Chinese simple landscapes with birds, water, and low light for example. It’s literally Zen art. On the other hand, my artist friends have told me that it’s fantastic for what it is trying to do.

Black literature can be good, but it tends towards the heavily verbal sort that is so loud and musical that it almost demands to be read aloud for affect.

Whites strive for the heights.

Asians can reduce literature to its utter basics – see the haiku for example. Haikus are often beautiful, but Whites find the spareness and simplicity of these forms to be almost unsettling and odd. However, Asians also stretch art to its ultimate limits – see the great Chinese classics with ~2,300 pages. It’s as if they either try for the perfect bare minimum or the ultimate definition of infinity.

Asians strip art down to the utter basics, Zen-like. There’s a logic to that, but Whites think it’s excessively simplistic.

Whites once again go for the heights.

Great Works of Literature by Whites

Great books by Whites? How bout we look at the Top 50? Oh well, call it Top 54. I couldn’t help but toss a few more in there. Tolstoy (Anna Karenina and War and Peace), Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment), Joyce (Ulysses and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), Melville (Moby Dick), Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow), Nabokov (Lolita), Shakespeare (Hamlet) George Eliot (Middlemarch), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Anonymous (1001 Nights), Forster (A Passage to India), Cervantes (Don Quixote), the Brontes (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre), Austen (Pride and Prejudice), T. S. Eliot (The Wasteland), Pound (The Cantos), Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Camus (The Stranger), Twain (Huckleberry Flynn), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom), Dickens (Great Expectations and David Copperfield), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey), Stendhal (The Red and the Black), Proust (Remembrance of Things Past), Kafka (The Trial), Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), Milton (Paradise Lost), Voltaire (Candide), Carroll (Alice in Wonderland), Sterne (Tristram Shandy), Dante (The Divine Comedy) Chekhov (stories), Heller (Catch-22), Orwell (1984), Borges (Ficciones), Rushdie (Midnight’s Children), Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Virgil (The Aenid), Whitman (The Leaves of Grass), Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), and Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse).

Great Works of Literature by Blacks

Yes, Blacks have written some great works. But not The Color Purple or Beloved, please, or at least let’s wait a while, and yes, I’ve read both. Neither is in the same category as what follows. They only make the great books list because people are trying to be PC and throw some Black authors in. That’s very nice of them, but it’s not solid Lit Crit, if such a thing even exists any more in these mushy, truth-free postmodern times.

Richard Wright (Native Son) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) come to mind. Also, try Zora Neale Houston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time), or Jean Rys (Wide Sargasso Sea).

Despite Aphra Behn’s Oronoko – Possibly the first true modern-style novel written in the West! – Blacks got a rather late start at things. Nevertheless, there are some works there that reach for the same skies as the Whites’ works do. Houston’s book in particular nearly matches Eliot’s Middlemarch in the glory of its prose.

Look – I am not saying that Black authors have not done some great work – e.e. cumming’s poetry comes to mind too, but if you notice, this list is a lot shorter than the proceeding one, right? Do check out some of the recent (last 75 years) classics out of Black Africa though. There are some great books in there.

Great Works of Literature by Asians

Where are the comparable great Asian books? From Japan, we have Yukio Mishima (The Sea of Fertility), and of course Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of the Genji – a very long Chinese-like epic with 1,306 pages). There has definitely been some fine literature coming out of Japan for the last 100 years. Japan also got a fairly late start, only beginning to write Western-style literature ~1900. This work has been greatly accelerating in recent years, but it’s not much read in the West. Haruki Murakami is very good though. When is he going to win the Nobel Prize anyway?

But other than the millennia-old Genji, Mishima is the only one who has seen his work rise to true greatness in the West so far.

China was much later to Western-style literature, only showing up in the last 50 years, if that. Though there are a few stars on the horizon. Previously their works were very different – typically very long epics – Cao Xueqin (The Dream of the Red Chamber – 2,339 pages), Shi Nai’an (Water Margin – 2,304 pages), Wu Cheng’en (Journey to the West – 2,346 pages), and Luo Guanzhong (Romance of the Three Kingdoms – 2,340 pages). Maybe add Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (The Plum in the Golden Vase – 3,334 pages) and Yu Xiangdou (Journey to the North – much shorter at 392 pages) while we are at it. Those are all incredible works.

Are they in the same category as the books by Whites? I’m not sure. It’s sort of like the painting. It’s not that Asian painting is bad – it’s incredibly great for what it’s trying to do in its minimalist way.

Are Japanese haikus as good at the great White literature above? I’m not sure. The Asians, with epics stretching for thousands of pages, their spare naturalistic art, and their compact yet gorgeous haikus – the first towards wild excess and the latter two, like a Bonsai garden, towards extreme minimalism – are instead trying to do something completely different from what the Whites have been doing, so any comparison is between apples and oranges. You can’t really compare them.

Asian art and literature is great and so is Western art and literature, but they are trying to do completely different things. I might say the same thing about an African mask. It’s a wonderful work of art, but is it the same thing as a work by Rembrandt, Bosch, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, or even a Picasso or Dali? Well, no. But maybe once again we can’t compare because the Africans were trying to do something completely different than the Whites with their White reach to the skies paintings.

Comparing lions and tigers. Which is better, a lion or a tiger? Besides neither one if I’m walking in the jungle, I’d say neither one in any case. A lion is great at being a lion. Nothing else comes close. Likewise with a tiger. He wins the gold at being a tiger. They’re both the best at being what they are and at what they are trying to do.

Alt Left: Childhood Never Ends: Why Large Groups of Adults Continue To Engage in Childish Games of Sadistic Dominance of Hated Inferiors

Alpha Unit: OK, Jim Crow laws were proposed as a solution to a problem: White Southerners were being ordered to treat newly freed slaves (and free Black people) as equals, when it was clear that newly freed Black people were in no position to live as their equals.

Their solution? Forget all this “equality” stuff; it’s costing us too much. Let’s bring back the old, tried-and-true way we used to do things: Blacks subordinate to Whites and kept in their place. We’ll make sure it’s “legal.”

Occam’s razor. Look for the simplest explanation. This makes the most sense to me. The whole idea that Claudius is putting forward that White folks are just too nice to do this sort of thing, well, nope. Humans have a need to dominate others. The strong dominate the weak and the weak dominate the weaker. See countless works of literature, drama, and cinema, or, Hell, just read Nietzsche if he makes sense to you.

Also there are different types of sadism.

The First Type of Sadism – the Raw Animal Lust for Cruelty and Love of Humiliating Others Seen Most Prominently in Boys

I’m thinking this type is genetic or biological. This is a pure sadism that can be seen in boys, non-human mammals, and in  adults, most especially in Black adults, especially African Blacks (US Blacks have had a lot of it enculturated out of them, but you still see it a lot).

Sure, all the other races display this raw sadism too, especially in times of war, but you see it most prominently in Blacks to the point where some feel it is an essential aspect of the Black Character, Personality, or perhaps, I would argue, Black Principle (if Black is a Principle like Masculine and Feminine are Principles).

This is extremely prominent in Black children, especially boys, and they are much more sadistic than White boys (Yes, I know all boys are sadists). It gets slowly enculturated out of Black boys as they grow up as with most of us males, but you still see it a lot in the ghetto types in young adult men and even women sometimes, where the basic Black Personality is at its rawest and least enculturated.

This is a raw delight in torture, torment, inflicting pain, violence, and even death on a suffering and tormented Other. It includes the love of observing a victim’s suffering.

Of course, you also see this same sadism in young White men (college boys in particular can be terribly cruel), but it’s just not as prominent as in Blacks.

Also, White culture profoundly dislikes displays of childish sadism in White adults. As an man, you’re supposed to have grown out that boyhood crap or had it beaten out of you if you were particularly diabolical.

In some ways, this sadism can be fun. I recall a Black man I knew named Michael. He hung out with this other Black artist, William, who was very introverted and odd. He couldn’t get laid with God’s help. His name was Charles and he had a university degree in art.

The cool guy’s name was Michael and he was a White-acting Black artist with a university degree in art. I was over at a mutual friend’s house and our friend commented that William had a date.

William was a very shy guy with low-self esteem and a hurt and somewhat confused expression on his face. I believe also had a strange high-pitched voice. He was extremely weird but completely harmless, and once you figured out how harmless he was, you mostly just wanted to laugh at him because he was such a nerd that he was a laughingstock, a comical figure.

He also couldn’t get laid with God’s help, even though he was quite straight. I’d never known him to have a girlfriend or even a date. At age 29, he was not only undoubtedly a virgin, but he’d probably never even been kissed.

I was absolutely dumbfounded.

“What?!” I nearly shouted across the room. “No way does William have a date! No way! That’s not even possible! Tell me you’re joking!”

This was a pretty mean thing for me to say, but I can be a dick. The Black guy, Micheal, roared with laughter so hard he nearly rolled on the floor for ten minutes. As you can see, he was laughing his ass off at the cruelty of my comment.

So Blacks can be a lot of fun if you want to get down with some mean, no-holds-barred humor. A lot of humor is cruel – face it – but Whites’ distaste for sadism limits their potential for humor a lot. We see this especially in the dour, party-pooper, no-fun SJW crowd, where every other joke is an evil bigoted crime that someone needs to get fired over.

In many ways, Idi Amin was the ultimate primal Black man. He displayed most of the raw material of the Black personality to an exaggerated degree. Not all of it is bad. He was wildly extroverted, always smiling and happy, had a nearly inborn sense of humor to the point of being a natural humorist, loved to party and have fun, and had a tremendous love of promiscuous sex. Idi Amin was a good time! As long as you were on his good side, that is.

And then there was his bad side, also in spades.

Whites and most other races probably used to be like this too, but centuries of civilization may have bred it out of us culturally and genetically. We can surely see a lot of examples of horrific sadism in Whites and Asians only centuries ago. One argument is that for a thousand years of civilization, most White criminals were quickly killed, often by public hanging. The idea is that this bred a lot of the criminal genes out of us.

Blacks from Africa, never having good through this process of weeding out criminal genes by execution, didn’t experience such a cleansing. On the other hand, perhaps White and Asian cultures have also accelerated so much in civilizational terms that this behavior is enculturated out of us.

That this love of sadism and cruelty appears so normally and freely in boys of all races suggests that it’s still part of the raw human personality. Although the dramatic morally superiority of US Blacks as opposed to African Blacks suggests that 300 years of exposure to White Christian civilization has had a calming, civilizing, and perhaps eugenically intelligence-increasing effect on US Blacks, which argues for the effects a more advanced civilizing culture can have on a population of a less civilized race.

The Second Type of Sadism – The Dominant Lording It Over Their Brutalized Inferior Victims

I’ve thought about this a lot, and there is another sort of sadism, that of the dominant inflicting their sadistic lordly violence against those they see as inferior.

Look at the delighted faces of those German policemen tormenting Jews in the street. You can say it’s revenge, but isn’t it more than that?

Look very closely at the faces of those Whites at those lynchings – boys, girls, men, women. There’s that same look as you saw in those Nazis above: the wicked gleeful look of the dominant bully inflicting torture and/or death at a contemptuously hated inferior. This poor Black sod’s hanging from a tree with his neck broken in a sickening way, and these Whites who look like your nice White relatives at Thanksgiving are having the Goddamned party of their lives.

What was all that habit of calling Black men boys and Black women girls about?

Why were Black children forced to apologize to White children they bumped into by addressing the White children as Mr. or Mrs. as if the White kids were adults and the Black child was still a child?

Why were the schoolbooks given to Black schools the refuse of the White schools – ripped, torn up, wrecked, and coming with a sticker on them saying that they were too destroyed to be of use to White kids, so they were only worthwhile for Black kids?

What was up with the torching of the Black business district in Tulsa?

Why were Black men lynched and murdered for the crime of standing up to White men and fighting back against them, even if the Whites were trying to kill them? In this case, the message was that of the bully: We will attack you in any way we choose, and if you dare to fight back and hurt one of us, you will die.

Why did White children torment their Black “friends” by forcing them, like slaves, to carry the White kids’ books to and from school for them?

Why did White boys manipulate and laugh behind the backs at their Black male friends and encourage them to commit crimes, so if anyone was caught, the Black would take the blame?

Why were Blacks waited on last in stores, and, even after waiting an hour, passed over again if a White person walked in?

Why did Whites whose land had been sold to Blacks long ago return to their land 50 years later and demand that Blacks hand over the sold land to its original owners, or else?

Why did even White women tell Black men who talked back to them, “I could have you hung from a tree just like that.”? See Of Mice and Men – and this was California in the 30s!

This is all nothing but raw, naked cruelty, and furthermore, there’s a brutal logic behind it: the societal enforcement of White dominance and superiority over Black submission and inferiority. That’s all it is. No need to conjure up fancy theories. Back to Occam’s again.

They did all of this abject and unnecessary cruel stuff because otherwise Blacks would commit a lot of crime? Get out. If anything, such treatments are designed to push people to their limits. Look at how Gypsies are (deservedly) treated in Europe? Does it stop them from committing crimes?

No, all of these punishments were done to enforce the sort of gleeful domination you see on the faces of the schoolyard bullies in 8th grade as they torment their designated victims.

And no, adults are not too mature to regress to childish games of sadistic dominance. I’ve seen so many cases of adults the world over delighting in the sadistic dominance of a hated inferior Other to believe otherwise.

They’re not doing it to stop crime. They’re doing it to get off. To get a rush. To get that glorious sadistic delight in tormenting an innocent victim you remember from boyhood. Remember how fun that was? Remember how tall it made you feel?

Well, those adults are doing the exact same shit for the exact same reasons.

Alt Left: A Chinese View of Time

Rambo said: Deng Xiao Peng said he could see democracy happening in China in a relatively short period of time. He was asked, ” what do you think, another 25 or 50 years maybe?” To which he replied, ” I could see it happening in maybe a thousand years.” To the Chinese, 1,000 years is looked upon as a short time. You’re talking about a nearly 5,000 year old country that has never known freedom and democracy. That’s why when countries like the U.S. negotiate with them, that has to be kept in mind.

Nixon asked Chou En-Lai in 1971 what he thought about the French Revolution in 1790. His reply?

It’s too soon to tell.

Which is pretty similar to what Deng said. The Chinese always take the long view, unlike us dumb Americans. And that’s smart of them and dumb of us.

This is literally how the Chinese think. All stages of the past are completely blurred together, and all are together with the present. I’m not aware they talk much about the future. I know this because I did a lot of research on their forums. Absolutely fascinating people. People would be talking about their family lineage, as their ancestors are very important to them. In fact, their basic religion is probably some form of ancestor worship.

They would be talking about their family lineages and drift back and forth between the present day, the 20th Century and then back to the 16th-19th Centuries, making historical references all along the way. And of course there were all sorts of references to the old dynasties like the Shang Dynasty (probably the very first Chinese dynasty) and many others. And now we are going all the way back to Old Chinese thousands of years ago.

I don’t understand Chinese history so I can’t make sense of these dynasties, but the Chinese’ view of time was fascinating. The year 400 was yesterday, today is 1600, and tomorrow is the 19th Century. It’s as if the past, present, and future were all happening at the same time, which is actually an interesting philosophical way to look at time. This is in fact how I view Time.

 

Chinese Long Term Thinking Versus American Short Term Thinking

The Chinese always take the long view, while here in the US we are addicted to the crack of short-term thinking in terms of immediate profits and getting off now, the Hell with the long term view of the economy or our bodies or really anything at all, dammit. Now get off my lawn! NIMBY! Here comes Karen!

And what of the future, oh American sensei?

We’ll deal with that when the time comes. Why bring down the party when it’s ripping along? What are you, some Debbie Downer?

Nope, I’m a guy who doesn’t want to set a time bomb today that will blow up five years from now because I may well be around then, and even if I’m am not, I’m not so sociopathic as to be that callous to my fellow humans who follow in my footsteps.

I am them. They are me. That’s the only and best way to look at your fellow man, hard as it is to make our egos believe that.

Do that line of coke now! Drink a six pack, fuck three whores in a row, get three hours of sleep, and then do it again! And don’t forget another line!

What are you, some party pooper? You’re the guy who always has to throw a turd in the punchbowl, right?

Nope, I’m just some guy who, every decade, decides he’d actually like to spend another decade on this 3rd Clown Rock from the Sun.

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