Thou sweet-palmed enemy of mine

 Analogues & Tangents  4 Responses »
Sep 282011
 

In the spoor of our hind-paws, in the flesh and sugar that set alight our tongues, in the binocular sockets of our very skulls, we confess ourselves brothers — but you of course the elder. (The taller, the keener, the stronger, besides!) No better proof of this than how we skin you, which is an unzipping of the waylaid boyar’s coat — our eyes avert from the offal blush of a nakedness too much by far our own.

The bear is the most human of all the beasts. He is not the most man-like in anatomy, nor the nearest in the line of evolution. The likeness is rather in his temper and way of doing things and in the vicissitudes of his life. He is a savage of course, but most men are that–wild members of a wild fauna… (True Bear Stories: Introductory Notes, by the colorful David Starr Jordan)


Not even well-worn trails let us round their corners brashly, in your forest — and it is with the gingerliness of the huntsman’s steps that we speak of you: in roundabout, in reverent tokens, in spite of the pounding of our smaller, drum-taut heart.
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A new blog to watch

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 232011
 

Henry Harpending and Greg Cochran’s “West Hunter” — http://westhunt.wordpress.com

Already up: some thoughts on the adaptive value of archaic introgression; the notion “that existing races recapitulate the hominid subspecies circa 100 thousand years ago”; and some musings on the divide between eebers (ecology and evolutionary biology) and robbers (the rest of biology).

A Melanesian Y-haplogroup in the Seaconke Wampanoags

 Unlikely Peregrines  No Responses »
Sep 212011
 

An interesting finding from “Genetic heritage and native identity of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts” (Zhadanov et al., 2010):

Surprisingly, one of the NRY Seaconke haplotypes (no. 8) that represented a primary male ancestor of the tribe possessed the M230 marker, which indicated that it belonged to haplogroup S [formerly K-M230] (Karafet et al., 2008) (Tables 3 and 4). Haplotypes from this paternal lineage are commonly observed in different populations from Papua New Guinea and Melanesia (Kayser et al., 2003; Karafet et al., 2005; Friedlaender et al., 2006; Scheinfeldt et al., 2006; Hudjashov et al., 2007), but have not previously been reported for Native American populations. According to the Seaconke Wampanoag genealogical records, this male ancestor was an 18th century sailor from Australia who settled in the New England area, and married a Wampanoag woman. Based on this information, it had been assumed that this individual was of European descent. However, in light of the new information about his Y-chromosome haplotype, this man clearly appears to have had Melanesian paternal ancestry.


As Ishmael less delicately put it: It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.

Zhadanov, S. I., Dulik, M. C., Markley, M., Jennings, G. W., Gaieski, J. B., Elias, G., & Schurr, T. G. (2010). Genetic heritage and native identity of the Seaconke Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 142(4), 579-589.

As a young man

 Literature  5 Responses »
Sep 172011
 

SILVIO SALVÁTICO (Buenos Aires, 1901–Buenos Aires, 1994):

From Nazi Literature in the Americas (La literatura nazi en América, Roberto Bolaño).