I found this very interesting

24,000-Year-Old Body Shows Kinship to Europeans and American Indians

The genome of a young boy buried at Mal’ta near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia some 24,000 years ago has turned out to hold two surprises for anthropologists.

The first is that the boy’s DNA matches that of Western Europeans, showing that during the last Ice Age people from Europe had reached farther east across Eurasia than previously supposed. Though none of the Mal’ta boy’s skin or hair survives, his genes suggest he would have had brown hair, brown eyes and freckled skin.

The second surprise is that his DNA also matches a large proportion — about 25 percent — of the DNA of living Native Americans. The first people to arrive in the Americas have long been assumed to have descended from Siberian populations related to East Asians. It now seems that they may be a mixture between the Western Europeans who had reached Siberia and an East Asian population.

Granted, it's one skeleton's DNA, but it is definitely worth more research, I think.

Hey, if it works...more power to them

Tribes buy back America — acres at a time: Purchases to help protect culture, way of life by preserving sacred areas

Native American tribes tired of waiting for the U.S. government to honor centuries-old treaties are buying back land where their ancestors lived and putting it in federal trust.

Native Americans say the purchases will help protect their culture and way of life by preserving burial grounds and areas where sacred rituals are held. They also provide land for farming, timber and other efforts to make the tribes self-sustaining.

Tribes put more than 840,000 acres — or roughly the equivalent of the state of Rhode Island — into trust from 1998 to 2007, according to information The Associated Press obtained from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs under the Freedom of Information Act.

Local governments aren't happy because they still have to provide services to the land, such as sewer and water, but lands in federal trust are exempt from local taxes. But you know what? Considering their tax base comes from land that is often theirs because of plague, deceit, or force, I can't feel sorry for them. The indigenous peoples of the United States got the shaft when it came to treaties. It's nice to see them acquiring land to use for their own good.

On this day, 93 years ago

March 25, 1916: Ishi Dies, a World Ends

When I was a child, I read Theodora Kroeber's Ishi: Last of His Tribe about the man her husband Alfred, an anthropologist, had studied for nearly five years. [The Kroebers' daughter may be familiar to science fiction and fantasy fans, as Kroeber would be the 'K' in Ursula K. LeGuin.] Ishi was not the man's name; that was never discovered, as it was apparently taboo in his culture to utter one's own name. But when he was found he was considered a 'wild man', and only the anthropologists realised he was the last speaker of an nearly-extinct language and quite possibly the last of his people. Two of the Kroebers' sons went on to become scholars as well (a linguist and a professor of comparative literatures) and have edited a book called Ishi in Three Centuries.

Who Ishi was and exactly of what tribe is a point for discussion, but it remains to be said that when he died of tuberculosis, a way of life died, too.

Ancient poop turns back clock on first Americans

Humans in North America earlier than thought: DNA from fossilised foeces in Oregon provides evidence that humans inhabited the area 1,200 years sooner than theorised

Okay, technically they're coprolites (an excellent candidate for word-of-the-day). This pushes back the earliest accepted evidence of humans in the Americas to 14,300 years ago. (I'm aware of one claim for 48,000 years before present in Brazil, for example, so that's why I say 'accepted'. That claim is from radiocarbon dating of hearth remains. This is a mixture of DNA and radiocarbon dating for the Oregon site discussed in the article.)

Nifty, hmmm...?

Good night.

Isn't it cute?

Pint-sized primates were first in North America: Leaping, furry mini-monkeys crossed Bering land bridge long before humans

Check out the page above for a drawing of Teilhardina magnoliana, a tiny primate (weighing about one ounce) whose fossil remains have been unearthed near Meridian, Mississipi (which is kind of funny, because they crossed the Bering Strait, as did the American Indians, and I know someone from Meridian who believes in parallel co-evolution of races. Of course, he's also blond, blue-eyed, and keeps doing creative genealogical math to prove he's more and more Indian than he really is. and muttering about what the White Man did to his ancestors, totally ignoring that he's more white than Indian. But I'll reserve judgement on the town for crazy factor and not just base my opinion on Mike.)

Speaking of blonds/blondes (one is masculine, one is feminine, just for those of you confused by proper English--nowadays it often seems to be used randomly regardless of gender, mostly as 'blonde'), there was a blonde hoax a few years ago claiming that natural blondes would die out in a few years. Several news agencies were taken in by the story, including the BBC. I guess they didn't really do their basic genetics portion of high school biology.

Okay, that's fixed

The cable modem had to be reset. On to blogging...

What is it with all the nooses popping up in the news? Are people really thinking this is a joke? That it's funny? Is it a bunch of copycats because other stories have been in the news? What? Here's what's going on, as detailed in one of the latest stories:

Hangman's Noose Targets Columbia Professor

• A noose is found on the door of a female black professor at the premier education graduate study programme in the country, at Teachers College at Columbia University.
  
  
• There's the highly publicised story of the Jena 6, sparked off by the hanging of nooses in a tree at a high school in Jena, La. (For the record I thought the white students involved with the nooses should have been expelled, not had in-school suspensions, and the black students involved in the beating of a white student should have been charged in juvenile court with assault and battery, or whatever is the equivalent in the Napoleonic system of law in Louisiana). The beating was obviously the most serious offence, though--I'm not sure I agree wholly with the marchers who protested, who seemed to be downplaying the seriousness of the assault on someone whom as far as I could tell from news reports, wasn't connected to the noose incident. Also, I think whenever Al Sharpton gets involved in a case, it becomes more about publicity than the issues. But that's just my opinion.
  
  
• A noose was found in September hanging outside a black cultural studies centre on the University of Maryland campus.
  
  
• Teachers at an elementary school run by Grambling State University decided to explain the Jena 6 story by using nooses on children and re-enacting hangings. Bad idea, although the lesson will probably remain with those kids their entire lives. It's up there with the case in sociology we always studied where they explained Nazism to elementary kids by sanctioning and treating children differently based on eye colour over the course of several days. Psychological manipulation of students isn't really encouraged these days, especially among the very young.
  
  
• At a high school at Gallaudet University seven students (including one who was black) assaulted a black student and scrawled "KKK" and swastikas all over his body with a marker.
  
  
• At the Coast Guard Academy two small nooses were found inside the sea bag of a black cadet aboard a tall ship.
  
  
• A construction worker at a Home Depot building site in Illinois found a noose made of foam packing material. Later a racial slur was found spray painted on the site.
  

Also, not noose-connected per se, but signs of racial tensions:

• An editor and editorial cartoonist at the Kentucky Kernel at the University of Kentucky apologised after a cartoon linking fraternities and sororities with a slave auction was protested.
  
  
• At a Pennsylvania High School three minority students, one Latino, one black, and one biracial were verbally attacked with racial slurs and wadded up paper was thrown at them outside the school right before classes began. Rumours were rampant that the white students would be bringing guns and staring a riot at the school.

In the multiracial, global sort of world we live in, I'd like to think we'd learnt a thing or two from the past. I'd like to think this is just stupidity in action, or the product of minds who don't get the significance of what they're doing. The most blatant racism I ever encountered (and I grew up primarily in the Deep South) was in a small town in Kansas that didn't have any minorities in it until an Asian family set up a restaurant. A teacher who'd been through the race riots in her native Detroit tried to put a stop to a lot of the jokes and attitudes she heard about blacks. But part of the problem was ignorance because they had never interacted with anyone different from themselves. (Okay, I did also encounter it in California, where I was beaten up and threatened by Latina and black girls, but that might be because I was an insufferable know-it-all with a Louisiana accent rather than my skin colour. But I tell you what--I lost the Southern accent. One incident also comes from something I unwittingly said in admiration that I now recognise was mistaken for a racial slur. In my innocence I complimented a black girl for her athletic ability (see, budding bisexual) and I was in my horsey-girly phase at the time and the only athlete I could think of was a jockey. It never occurred to me that those little plaster men they have in the front yards through much of Kentucky--almost all of which I'd seen were white--were called lawn jockeys and were primarily black. I lived in terror of that girl for weeks and I didn't understand fully what she'd thought I'd said until I was in my 30s and heard someone make the reference.)

Back to my point...nooses, uncool, folks. Use them and expect to be prosecuted or expelled. They're not just an unpleasant symbol, they can be construed as a death threat. I won't say every one is meant to convey that. We don't know all the circumstances to these cases. The professor, for example, is involved in a lawsuit with another party. Was it related to that? A disgruntled student? Someone wanting to stir up controversy--white or black? Who knows?

What is good to see is that there are plenty of people out there who protested these cases, making sure their voices of tolerance were heard. But it also shows that racist ideas still fester, although they may not be so overt to lead to lynchings--the ideas are still there. I only hope they will not explode to violence after all that simmering, especially as we become a society with more 'minorities' than the supposed majority. If you listen to whites, they feel marginalised and as if their culture is being pushed aside for everyone else's. In some ways that's true, in others it isn't. But something's going to give.

And compromise isn't always the way to take it, even though we may want to walk a moderate path. Look at the tensions between Turkey and the US over the Armenian issue. There are those who say there should be no resolution on the Armenian genocide--and make no mistake, by the definitions created the 20th century in the wake of the Nazis and other forms of 'racial cleansings', it was, indeed, genocide--because it will affect Middle Eastern peace. The Armenian question is also a sticking point with Turkey and the European Union.

The thing is, though, while we shouldn't necessarily be blamed with what our forebears did, we need to recognise that it happened. The Germans were complicitous with the attempted extermination of the Jews. Serbs tried to eradicate Croats. The Khmer Rouge killed many Cambodians. And Europeans both decimated the American Indian population and bought and sold (and in some cases, killed) people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves from Africa. The US put Japanese-Americans into internment camps, saying they'd collaborate with the enemy. Likewise, the Turks displaced and massacred the Armenians, saying they were aiding the Russians during WWI. History has known this for years. The West was aware of it at the time it was happening--like so many other genocides. But the Turkish government continues the denial.

Racial matters are never (no pun intended) merely black or white. They're messy and complicated. But if we work together, maybe we can make things a little better for our children, and their children.