--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "ytielts" <ytielts@...> wrote:
> Would you put me through with some information about the genetic
studies
> you have done on different populations in the world, especially on
> Northern Europeans. What kind of mutation has caused them to have
such a
> look as blond hair, blue eyes and white skin? When and where did
this
> mutation occur? Were the earliest indoeuropean speakers homogeneous
like
> Northeastern Chinese people? Were pre-indo-european population in
> Northern Europe, if there were, identical with the indo-european
> conquerors or not? [...]
Others are better equipped than me to answer these questions, but I
would like to make three points:
(1) There is no old connection between the North European Pamela
Anderson type and Indo-European. Indo-European is agreed to have
arisen much more to the south-east (present-day Ukraine and present-
day Turkey are probably the best guesses, personally I opt for the
former) and is intrusive to northern Europe, where it must have
replaced one or more ancestral languages. The precise sociological
mechanism by which the Pamelas adopted Indo-European, and when they
did, cannot be recovered, for lack of the necessary basic
information. A very modest amount of information about Pamela
language is retrievable in principle through the study of substratum
phenomena in Germanic (and possibly also Saami).
(2) I find reading genetic studies that try to incorporate linguistic
data extremely frustrating because most geneticist, despite their
incredible sophistication where their own stuff is concerned, have
not moved one inch beyond the mid nineteenth-century as far as
mechanisms of language spread are concerned. More specifically they
tend to be distressingly unaware (or at least insufficiently aware)
of the role of language shift in the spread of languages.
Pronouncements of geneticists on language should therefore be read
with extreme care.
(3) Genetically homogeneous populations don't exist.
Willem