Lithuanians looking like Tarim Mummies

[Dr. John E. McLaughlin and Michelle R. Sutton]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 3/30/99 10:11:46 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

> <<<we cannot identify race and language and that's bad.>>>

> <<You should bone up on Cavalli-Sforza's work, using genetic analysis to
> trace prehistoric migrations.>>

> A good example.  Sykes and Richards MtDNA studies cast a serious doubt on
> Cavalli-Sforza's work.  What seems like conclusive science today becomes
> inconclusive or Saucer people stuff tommorrow.  There are some who still race
> to Cavalli-Sforza to support conclusions unsupported by quite possibly the
> more valid scientific evidence supplied by mtDNA and isotope analysis of bone
> and hair fragments.

Undoubtedly the greatest supporters of matching C-S's results with language
are Greenberg and Ruhlen.  Nearly every one of their books has a neat chart
matching C-S's chart of human genetics with their (widely rejected) chart of
human linguistic relationships.  The only problem is (and they don't even
attempt to mask it in the chart although they don't attempt to explain it
either) that C-S and G-R don't match.  There are at least a dozen glaring
inconsistencies.  For example, C-S's results indicate that the Pygmies of the
Congo Basin are a distinct genetic group in Africa.  However, there is NO
linguistic evidence to support separating the languages spoken by the Pygmies
apart from the remainder of the Bantu languages of subsaharan Africa and NO
linguistic evidence to suggest that they didn't originate in the
Nigerian/Cameroon borderland as part of the Proto-Bantu ancestral group a few
thousand years ago.  Another example shows a very close C-S link between
Indo-European groups and Afro-Asiatic groups, yet many Nostraticists are
becoming sceptical about the inclusion of A-A in Nostratic along with I-E.
But I-E and Uralic (the two most popular components of Nostratic) are fairly
distinct in C-S's work.  These are just two of the major differences between
the genetic work of C-S and the results of historical linguistics.
Geneticists are questioning C-S's results and linguists have generally
rejected their usefulness in telling us anything about the relationship of
languages.

John McLaughlin
Utah State University