Posted on 03/27/2008 6:29:52 PM PDT by blam
Cool.
My own approach has been more haphazard, following authors, subjects, or ‘slices of history’.
Harold Lamb's books on Genghis Khan, Hannibal Barca, and the Crusades were amazing.
‘Slices of history’ books are like “The Ancient Engineers” by L. Sprague Decamp which is all about the history of engineering in the ancient world; or “A History of Pi” about famous mathematicians in history and their approximation of the ratio.
Snorre Sturlason is amazing. Amazingly unreadable, but Snorre did talk about the Viking discovery of America a few hundred years before Columbus sailed, as well as the history of the Norwegian kings, the founding of Normandy, and the colonization of Iceland.
“Crusaders ‘Left Genetic Legacy’”
Although I only saw a couple of episodes of the “Cadfael” series on PBS,
IIRC, in one episode the ex-Crusader-turned-monk discovered a young
visitor from the Holy Land is likely his son.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108717/
My screen name is from my last name, Lamb.
No & No.
His Crusade books were “Of Iron Men and Saints” and “The Flame of Islam” usually combined in one volume entitled “The Crusades”.
Being the knowledgeable fellow you are, I thought you must.
Syke's book is sitting on my desk and is next on my reading list.
For the last couple of years I've been focusing on Indo-European languages, their relationships, and what they can tell us about migrations/relations. I'm just now getting into genetics. As Oppenheimer and others have pointed out, that can be more of a cultural shift rather than a population migration, e.g. the Frisian/English relationship (by the way, I find that it is actually easier to read old Frisian than Old English).
I am wondering, however, how much of the genetic patterns are affected by particular migrations and how much might be affected by disease resistance in particular groups. I'm sure over 50k years you can have several pandemics that can wipe out a population, or nearly so. Perhaps some of these groups have a slightly higher resistance than others and that can lead to some unevenness in the distributions.
Another interesting point to me that Oppenheimer makes is how hard it is to actually replace a population once it is established. To fundamentally change a population you would need a pandemic or genocide followed by another mass migration, not simply a Viking or Saxon incursion.
I have a question about Frisian language, or rather a sir name derivation. I have an ancestor, Jakob Miller, from Holland, who immigrated to PA in the early 1700s. Miller is a Dutch name?
His family passed on blood dyscrasia which now infects a fairly large percentage of the population. It is fairly mild and many people never even know that they have it, until they bleed out on an operating table during a routine procedure.
That is interesting and I've seen it expressed in other books.
I'm expecting Sykes book to disappoint you though.
I've read that a number of US German families named Mueller changed their name to Miller due to persecution during WW1 & 2.
The ME pop is a mixture of everybody on the planet since everybody on the planet has one time or another gone rampaging through there even before oil was discovered to have significant value.
Yes, but Jakob Miller was the name in the early 1700s. It is the name that was on his immigration records, as well.
Even Neanderthals.
NEANDERTHAL MAN MAY HAVE TALKED
"Archeologists in Israel have unearthed a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton that indicates for the first time that the primitive hominids were anatomically able to talk."
Okay. Just a thought.
Have a friend from Lebanon. I asked him once whathe was doing with blue eyes and blond hair. He said, “don’t forget, the Crusaders were here.”
The Netherlands is a mixture of Dutch, Flemings, and Frisian with Frisian being currently spoken in a small northwest portion of coastal Netherlands.
Miller does not sound like it would be an extraction of any of those but Jakob, of course, does.
It is possible that Mulder (Dutch: Miller) or Mueller (German: Miller) were changed at some time in the past.
The coastal Dutch were directly across the channel from England and were great traders. Sometimes the contact with the English caused them to Anglicize their names for business reasons.
It is also possible if they came to America on an English boat by way of England the name change could have happened there.
Another possibility is that Jakob was of English extraction whose family had immigrated to Holland sometime in the 17th century. That happened pretty frequently because of the religious wars in England at the time.
The interesting thing about this is that I found the Dutch link on the internet on a genealogy link from some town in the Netherlands. The only part of the site that was in English was the part pertaining to my ancestors. Now, I can no longer find the link.
I was trying to trace the history of this blood dyscrasia and found that I had the Miller family in my ancestry, several times. I had already come across a hand written note of my grandmother’s, saying that her paternal grandmother’s family was Dutch from Holland, but I thought that had to be wrong, until this Dutch family tree popped up.
Yes, they could have been English that emigrated to Holland because I believe that they were Calvinists. That might make sense. I guess they could have just moved there, the same way that they moved to Pennsylvania.
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