I would ask everyone to read this and celebrate our combined heritage.

I had not seen this map and graphic before. Fascinating. This field is exploding! New stuff almost every month! And to put a point on it, not only is there no such thing as racial purity (or ever was) .. but the fact is that our genetics are not even purely homo sapiens! THAT has to have a lot of the Aryan crowd spinning like a top!

and you write things like this.

Sadly, often those who understand others rather poorly are precisely those convinced that they have the keenest, deepest insight into the others' motivations, believes, values, attitudes--and that others are simply wrong, especially the others themselves.

Of course, when those deep, keen insights are denied, it only stands to reason. On the one hand, they're completely wrong. On the other hand, those in possession of those "deep, keen insights" just see it as evidence of the others' inability and insufficiency, confirming again exactly how wonderful those with the "insights" truly are.

The 2500 BC migration is mostly the Indo-Europeans. They were largely *claimed* by old-school racists as one of the sources of purity.

Those in the north were already among the pure. So it was two pure, white "races" forming a conjoint "pure, white race." The archeological record for parts of Scandinavia goes back fairly long, and is often very resistant to cultural changes happening in N. Europe. They were late adopters of agriculture, for instance, and what evidence was known at the time was one of the arguments for the idea that Indo-European didn't move into Europe but originated there. Still, the immigrant genetic overlay in western Scandinavia is scant.

Pointing out as counterevidence what the old-school racists based their claims on seems like a really losing strategy.

Of equally poor use is pointing out that 10k BCE the inhabitants of Europe were pretty dark-skinned. Not necessaril sub-Saharan dark, but still not the "Nordic race" ideal. Still, hair, eye, and skin color weren't all that closely correlated; blue-eye traits were innovated earlier than skin tone, which is based on a lot of genes (and not just a truly small set of alleles). Why wouldn't dark skin matter so much? Check out Peirce's work on semiotics. Dark skin is for old-school racists what he would have termed "indexical", and they'd say it wasn't dark skin itself that was responsible for inferiority, but dark skin (now, not necessarily then) serves as an index. Of course, you'd have to deal with the issue of evolution or its denial, but even among racist discourse patterns from the 1880s-1920s all the signs (so to speak) point to its indexical function. Go back earlier, and you find less and less "inferiority", so by the 1600s and early 1700s you don't really find much suggestion even of inherent inferiority for non-European races. (However, it's really easy to pick and choose to find just the evidence that supports your views and there are a lot of "aha!" moments when you read something and you think, "Finally, after 300 pages of twaddle and fake arguments intended to deceive me, the superior person, the writer finally hints at what he *really* believes, showing that I was right in my judgment before I even opened the cover of this horrible book." But I return to my original theme, and so it's time to find something that doesn't strain my tendons quite so much.)

At one point in my life I was a sort of part-time research assistant. I don't know how much 19th and early 20th century crap I had to read, but I had to read it to understand the writer's point of view and not read it to find ammunition to buttress my a priori views. That meant not just reading Goddard, for instance, but the sources *he* cited and understanding what he understood and what he overlooked in previous works. If he cited an archeologist, I had to understand what was known about that topic at the time--not what we know now. If he cited some previous racist-oriented writer, I had to understand *that* write and the sources *he* used. The result was to see how there were different threads in racism--with racists arguing with each other, to a great extent--and how each thread evolved and changed over more than century. For example, how to handle the Finnics peoples, or the Magyars. Overall, it was not a fun project. It was, however, a fascinating project, but only somebody who doesn't need constant validation and confuses "tolerates" with "agrees with". (Sadly, the guy I was working for already knew his thesis and thought he possessed keen, deep insights about the people and topic before he opened the first book. In other words, he was an idiot, foolish enough to blither in writing, and was the kind of dork who could read 200 pages and find the one nugget that, he believed, defined the writer's views. Still, it was during the early '80s recession, in an area the recession hit esp. hard and where it long lingered, so it paid the bills. And was only part-time.)

of dogs. 100s of generations of inbreeding. Nothing to be proud of.

ignored all the evidence we did have to imagine racial purity has to be the least of this. It'll bother some, so good, but they'll deny, and then someday they'll die off and the world will move one without them.

This is an incredibly wonderful time to be a historian of any variety. I never wanted to be one when I was young (cultural geography captured me), but I've been giving a grandson who likes history little nudges to maybe add it to what I hope becomes a real list of incredibly exciting possibilities new knowledge have opened up.

Way, way too long.

Also troll like action going for a older thread.

The jury pool is what it is.

Surprised it survived a jury.