Who Were The Si-Te-Cah

Runestone.org ^ | Steve McNallen

[SauronOfMordor]

We have tales of Celtic settlements that preceded Columbus, but they were presumably on the other side of the continent and it's hard to see how they would have gotten to Nevada. Could bands of our people have migrated across the Bering Strait at the same time as the ancestors of the Indians? Our kind do have a propensity to wander...

While agricultural people tend to stay put for a while, herding or hunting peoples would tend to migrate, looking for good fields for their flocks, or good hunting.

People who had mastered making strong bows would have found the midwest, with its herds of bison, an excellent place to be.

[blam]

"And I had a Japanese History professor in college that said one of the native inhabitants of of the island of Haikkaido were several tribes of "proto-caucosoids."

Those were the Jomon and Ainu...some think they may be the ancestors to all the Europeans and Asians. There are still about 10-50k Ainu still in Japan. They were also the original Japanese Samurai.

[breakem]

Isn't that the name of the Seattle airport?

[blam]

"Isn't that the name of the Seattle airport?"

LOL Seatac - Seattle - Tacoma airport.

[breakem]

never mind, thanx for the post

[blam]

BUMP.

[Carry_Okie]

Ever read the Book of Mormon? I did, and wondered about this sort of thing, half suspecting it was built on a combination of legend, fact, and tortured fancy.

[blam]

"Ever read the Book of Mormon?"

No, never have. I'd like to get some DNA from that red hair...that could probably tell a tale.

[Carry_Okie]

It is said that the BOM is derived from secret Masonic documents and that Smith having divulged them is why he was murdered. One hears reference to "ancient mysteries" in Masonic writings, and of course, Pike was a polyglot of ancient languages. What they know, or more importantly, believe has always been of interest to me. Given the number of Mormons in our security apparatus it was also of interest to me to learn exactly what they believe.

It wouldn't shock me to find that remains of submerged cities would have such DNA therein if it could be found. Particularly off the coast of Cuba, capital of the Golden Circle.

[gopheraj]

The Cherokee legends talk about very tall people with red hair who live to the west. I guess maybe these were those people.

[dennisw]

Ainu

[blam]

"Ainu"

Likely...and related to Spirit Cave Man And Kennewick Man

[dennisw]

Ainu were able to preserve themselves because they are on an island away from the Japanese mainstream. Hokkaido is too cold for most Japanese to be interested.

[dennisw]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hokkaido/ainu.html

Origins of the Ainu
by Gary Crawford

The ringing telephone broke the evening silence. It was the fall of 1983, and my research partner, Professor Masakazu Yoshizaki, was calling from Japan.

"Gary, I have some news," Yoshi said. "We have a few grains of barley from a site on the Hokkaido University campus. I think you should come and look at them."

The Japanese language is notorious for its ambiguity, so I wasn't quite sure of the full meaning of what I had just heard. But I didn't need to know much more. Though it may sound like a trivial piece of news to you, I knew something was up, and it deserved closer scrutiny. My teaching schedule at the University of Toronto kept me from hopping on a plane for several months, but when I finally got to the lab on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, I realized the full import of Yoshi's news - namely, that the history of Hokkaido's indigenous people, the Ainu, was about to be rewritten.

Since the mid-1970s I had been investigating the relationship between plants and people in prehistoric northeastern Japan, particularly Hokkaido, using an archeological tool called flotation. The widespread use of this technique beginning in the 1960s sparked a quiet revolution in archeology. Flotation facilitates the collection of plant remains, mainly seeds and charcoal, preserved by burning in oxygen-poor environments such as the depths of a fireplace. Under these circumstances, seeds don't oxidize to ashy dust. One can recover the resulting carbonized seeds by sampling soil from ancient hearths, floors, pits, garbage dumps, and the like. One places the soil gently in water, stirs it so the carbonized material floats to the surface, and then decants the water and its floating contents through a fine mesh, which traps the floating plant material while allowing the water to pass through.

A flotation screen with a recovered sample.

Until the advent of flotation, we couldn't systematically explore early plant use, plant domestication, the local environmental impact of people, and so on. Archeologists had only a limited appreciation of this crucial aspect of prehistoric human life. Wherever we introduced flotation, our perspective on early human life changed, often dramatically. Little did I know just how dramatically it would change our interpretation of the archeology of northeastern Japan.

The archeological grain from Sakushukotoni-gawa ("gawa" means river), as the campus site is known, dated to A.D. 700 to 900. The site is contemporaneous with the medieval Japanese to the south, who had been forging a nation-state for several centuries. The immediate predecessors of the Ainu, who are the native people of northeastern Japan, occupied the site. Many archeologists consider the Ainu to be the last living descendants of the Jomon people, who lived throughout Japan from as early as 13,000 years ago. The Jomon are known for their elaborate earthenware, which they often decorated with cord (rope) impressions, and for their stone tools, pit-house villages, and, by 1500 B.C., elaborate cemeteries marked by stone circles or high earth embankments. To a large degree, the Jomon relied on hunting, fishing, and collecting plants and shellfish for their subsistence.

An early Jomon pit house.

Archeologists find it useful to interpret archeological cultures by relating what they find to existing or historically recorded direct descendants of those cultures. This is quite common in the New World, where many traditional Amerindian cultures known archeologically were also observed and recorded by Europeans. Even today many Amerindians continue to live much as they did in the past, so the continuity with the archeological record is usually indisputable and extremely informative.

To a large extent, this also seemed to be the case in northeastern Japan. Archeologists and historians have long described the Ainu, like the Jomon, as hunter-fisher-collectors and, because the two peoples lived in the same region, they had few qualms about assuming the Ainu were living representatives of Jomon culture. However, the Ainu, at least in the last few centuries according to historic records, lived in above-ground, rectangular dwellings and used metal tools as well as wooden and ceramic bowls, pots, and dishes. These characteristics contrast with those of the Jomon, but in the minds of historians and archeologists it was the lack of agriculture in both cultures that forged the link between the Ainu and Jomon cultures. Further bolstering this opinion, the skeletal biology of Jomon populations demonstrates a strong resemblance and therefore a close affinity to the Ainu. Justifiably, the Ainu seemed a relic of a primitive hunting-and-gathering people who had inhabited northeastern Japan for thousands of years.

Continue: The Relationship between the Jomon and the Ainu

[Axenolith]

It didn't look to new agey to me when I did a utility survey down the main street a few months ago...

[blam]

THE SAMURAI AND THE AINU

Findings by American anthropologist C. Loring Brace, University of Michigan, will surely be controversial in race conscious Japan. The eye of the predicted storm will be the Ainu, a "racially different" group of some 18,000 people now living on the northern island of Hokkaido. Pure-blooded Ainu are easy to spot: they have lighter skin, more body hair, and higher-bridged noses than most Japanese. Most Japanese tend to look down on the Ainu.

Brace has studied the skeletons of about 1,100 Japanese, Ainu, and other Asian ethnic groups and has concluded that the revered samurai of Japan are actually descendants of the Ainu, not of the Yayoi from whom most modern Japanese are descended. In fact, Brace threw more fuel on the fire with:

"Dr. Brace said this interpretation also explains why the facial features of the Japanese ruling class are so often unlike those of typical modern Japanese. The Ainu-related samurai achieved such power and prestige in medieval Japan that they intermarried with royality and nobility, passing on Jomon-Ainu blood in the upper classes, while other Japanese were primarily descended from the Yoyoi." The reactions of Japanese scientists have been muted so. One Japanese anthropologist did say to Brace," I hope you are wrong."

The Ainu and their origin have always been rather mysterious, with some people claiming that the Ainu are really Caucasian or proto-Caucasian - in other words, "white." At present, Brace's study denies this interpretation.

[blam]

"The Jomon are known for their elaborate earthenware, which they often decorated with cord (rope) impressions."

Cord-pottery has been found in the Olmec ruins in Mexico.

[dennisw]

That's something else. I never heard such a theory but the guy is prolly at least 50% right. Thanks much! Island people means insular people. This applies to all of Japan back then. You hear about the Palestinians and Arabs being clannish. The Japs of the past were many times more so. All due to being on islands. Brits are the same to a lesser extent. Most real Brits are blood related even if just a bit. All comes from being on an island. A few islands.

Island = isolated= insular= inbred

[blam]

At Christimas, I saw the movie, The Last Samurai, (Tom Cruise) and the guy playing the part of the last Samurai was the tallest guy in the movie. (I liked the historic accuracy)

[dennisw]

I'm sure you know that Kyocera was originally a ceramics company. Japan is volcanic islands and they are clay masters according to your National Geographic magazines with their "Japanese Living Treasures"

My dad is a potter by hobby. Other day I bounced a 133mhz Intel chip off his kitchen table and he could tell this was a ceramic. A silicon ceramic to be sure.