[muawiyah]

Who knows why the Neanderthals had heavy brows ~ they had a brain equal to and larger than our own.

Their adaptation to the Ice Age is simply different than our own eh.

More recently (just before he died) Thor came up with the idea that the Aesir were actual people who'd come from what is now Azerbaijan in Roman times. He ended up finding caves in Azerbaijan with what most believe to be Scandinavian symbology.

Whether he was right or wrong on that, a linguist at Indiana University made a truly major discovery ~ he found that the 9 existing Sa'ami languages (spoken mostly in far Northern Norway) have a well known cognate called Sumerian, and really aren't part of the Finno-Ughric subgroup of the Altaic-Uralic group of languages spoken throughout central Asia (although Sa'ami does share much of its vocabulary with those languages).

He also found a cognate American Indian language which is apparantly still spoken by some people in a tribe currently located in California.

However, that wasn't his biggest find ~ he determined that the Sumerians also designed the first character set used for a written language in China, and did the same job for the Egyptians.

The Sa'ami didn't invent writing, but they did produce pictographs/ideographs on the undersides of cliff faces and other places in Finland thousands of years ago. One of them portrays a classical Polar story about the woman who failed to find suitible husbands for her daughters. The result was she was turned into stone and the girls slept with ol'dad.

Where have we heard that story before?

This continues to be a hot story among the natives in Siberia.

I don't think Hyerdahl had any Sa'ami ancestry or he'd latched onto that stuff first. Still, there seems to be some sort of zone for animal herds that extends from the Arctic to the Caspian.

If you ever get the chance check out the Art Museum at Indiana University. They have a large plexiglas board up with imbedded artifacts from the Fertile Crescent. One of them is a little statue of a reindeer!

If neolithic people in Eur-Asia could get around like that, certainly the American Indians could go pretty much where they pleased.

[Alkhin]

Fascinating! Well, have to admit, have not followed anthropological theories closely in the last 10 years, so Hyerdahl's work is very unfamiliar to me. Spent a good portion of my time in school gluing bones together in the Phys Anth lab, rather than doing archaeological work (much to my dismay - I still hold a very poor opinion of the archaeological department at Texas State University - the Phys Anth prof was far more instructive and open to mentoring), so bizarre theories were usually treated with a HUGE grain of salt.

Thanks for the information! If you have an archaeology ping list, please include me. I am on blam's and SunkenCiv's as well.