We Are Not All Descendants of Charlemagne, or Nefertiti

I've been looking and looking for someone who has refuted the notion that all Europeans are descended from Charlemagne,

or that all living humans are descended from Nefertiri. To my great frustration, I can't find anyone pointing out that this is nonsense. Once again, I must do everything myself.

And I don't have any training whatsoever in biology. But I think I don't need any, because I have much more than enough knowledge of history.

First of all, what does "all Europeans" mean, scientifically? It means nothing. How can you precisely determine who is and who is not a European? You can't. Ditto for African, Asian, Native American and so forth.

Secondly, the assertion that we all share ancestors who lived as little as 4000 years ago drastically, massively underestimate the amount of isolation, xenophobia and, consequently, inbreeding among many human groups. I'm referring to people in remote villages who drive off any and all furrners just as well as they possibly can, but also, for instance, the European royal family, and yes, it is one, horribly inbred family, and has been for many centuries. Not "every European" is descended from Charlemagne, but every European monarch -- a group which can be precisely defined -- is descended from Charlemagne, and every European monarch for centuries has been. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, is a radical departure from royal custom, and an extremely healthy expansion of that bottlenecked gene pool.

Now let's take the matter of geographical isolation. This really ought to be enough to let everyone see that the assertions that all living human beings share ancestors when you go back less than 5000 years, are badly mistaken.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Exhibit A: the Western Hemisphere. Yes, genetic blending of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres has been going on for -- over 500 years. Is that enough to guarantee that every single living human being shares an ancestor less than 5000 years old? No. There may be some tribes in the Amazon which people from other parts of the world haven't found yet. There certainly were as few as several decades ago. Several decades is not enough to have gotten all of them into the mix, genetically.

Exhibit B: Australia. Stumbled across by Captain Cook in 1770. Have 249 years been enough to guarantee that there is no-one of unmixed Aborigine heritage left alive? No!

Like I said, it frustrates me greatly that I need to do this, that there aren't actual geneticists everywhere you look pointing out such elementary things with the proper scientific jargon. It's very frustrating that it has to be me, completely lacking the apprpriate vocabulary, grunting things like "Amazon forest tribes! Australia, goddamit! There's no such thing as Europeans or Asians! Aaaaaarrrgghh!"

Yes, Yeats Was A Fascist

I had heard secondhand accounts of disturbing right-wing tendencies of his. I had read Auden's poem saying Yeats would be forgiven because he wrote well. But it wasn't really clear to me what he would be forgiven for, until I read the selections from On the Boiler, originally published sometime in 1939 after Yeats had died in January of that year, which are collected in the volume Explorations, in which he very strongly favours eugenics, and has some positive things to say about "the Fascist countries," and declares that "the new-formed democratic parliaments of India will doubtless destroy, if they can, the caste system that has saved Indian intellect" (p 424), and poo-poos all suggestions that poor children would thrive given the advantages of the rich or that rich children would struggle facing the challenges of poverty. He deplores Socialist "slaughter" and appears not to have heard of Guernica or other right-wing slaughters. Having died just before the beginning of World War II, we cannot know how or if he would have responded to the horrors of the Holocaust or the slaughters perpetrated by Fascist Japan. But he does fantasize a bit about war to come, waged in favor of the upper classes and calls it a good thing, a healthy shock which will promote learning. World War II was indeed shocking, but not good. On the Boiler is shocking, but not in a good way.

On p 429 Yeats writes that

"I am philosophical, not scientific, which means that observed facts do not mean much until I can make them part of my experience."

Which sounds very nice at first, until one starts to wonder whether it was no more than a high-toned excuse to ignore whatever facts clashed with Yeats' cherished dreams. He was one of those Christians who dreamed of a chivalrous aristocracy which had little to do with the actual Medieval Europe and less with 20th-century fascism. The Nazi leadership was neither an aristocracy nor a meritocracy, and even if it had been aristocratic, one had to be quite blind indeed to miss all of the ill effects of inbreeding in the European ancien regime, worse than anything to be found in the most remote and backwards peasant village. The one criticism of fascism which Yeats offers in On the Boiler is that the fascists states rewarded fertility among all classes. Yeats' eugenics favored bigger families in the aristocracy and few or no children for peasants or proles. With remarkable blindness, Yeats guesses (p 424) that this fascist encouragement of big families in all classes occurred only because of some unspecified pressure from democratic states. The reality, as plain to see as anything could be, was that the Nazis and the Italian fascists, even with their own unrealistic idealizations of aristocracy, valued an ethnic German or Italian peasant much more highly than a Jewish or Russian prince, and quite possibly higher than an Irish prince as well, or even a Japanese prince.

17th-Century Monarchs Conversing In Latin

So I'm reading The Siege of Vienna by John Stoye, and I'm at the very dramatic point after the siege (by the Ottoman Turks, in 1683) has been successfully repulsed, and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, whose capital city, Vienna, has just been saved, is riding out east of the city with his staff to greet the Polish King John III Sobieski, whose army has played a large part in the victory. Page 269 in the 1965 Holt, Rinehart and Winston edition. The thing is that already, this Monday, the 13th of September, 1683, one day after the victory, the bickering over who owes whom how much respect and gratitude, with consequences affecting how the war will proceed as the united Christian forces chase the fleeing Turks across what had been the Ottoman frontier for some time, and questions such as who will be owed what newly-won land and booty, and all of this intimately tied up with what seem to us 300 years later to be bizarrely petty matters of address and manners -- the bickering is well underway. A word or a gesture on the part of the Emperor or the Polish King could be -- would be -- seen as an acknowledgement that the other was the Official Big Shot of the Day, to whom belonged the glory each regarded as his own. "The two men faced each other on horseback. There could be no question of either claiming precedence by being on the other's right, which was the crux of the ceremonial problem. The King remained uncovered for just as long as the Emperor, and no longer. They conversed in Latin for a few minutes --"

And with that, of course, I no longer cared about the precedence and ceremonial problems or how the war was going to proceed or even about the crazy gi-normous Louis XIV wigs one or both or them may have been wearing, because Stoye wrote "They conversed in Latin for a few minutes." And so from then on I was on a mission: are we SURE they spoke Latin? Could it be that they spoke French or German interspersed with a few Latin phrases? Was it a stiff and halting, artificial conversation, or was it entirely fluent Latin spoken as naturally as anything? A couple of centuries earlier you'd expect all the European royalty and high nobility -- anybody with any chance at all of becoming royalty -- to speak Latin. I searched Stoye's book for more mentions of language -- nothing. I couldn't find Stoye's source for the incident, Acta Regis Johannis III. ad res anno 1683, online. But I found other collections of primary materials on the Kingdom of Poland. My first impression is that Poland's governmental business in the late 17th century was conducted more in French than in Latin. The documents from the very early 16th century were mostly in Latin, as I expected, but there was also some German. Early-16th-century German is bizarre in its spelling and wording from a 21st-century perspective, but still comprehensible to a German-speaker, as you know if you're fluent in German and have read some German by Luther whose orthography has not been brought into conformity with contemporary usage.

Of course, if you're Polish, and quite possibly even if you're not, at this point what may be occupying your thoughts much more urgently than any of these matters of Latin and French and German, is: at what point did the rulers of Poland actually begin to conduct their affairs in Polish? It's a perfectly reasonable question, and I'm sorry that I have no idea when they did. I'm concerned with Latin and with how long it lasted in populations of what size. Certainly, European royalty retained a fluency in Latin until quite recently; in fact I wouldn't be at all surprised if some or even most of what is left of European royal families can carry on conversations in Latin to this day. Knowledge of Latin was even more lively for even longer in the Catholic Church, and despite the huge changes made by Vatican II, huge and catastrophic in this one regard of language, there are still a lot of Latin speakers in the Church today, maybe more than in Classics Departments, maybe not, but a lot. A century after Leopold and Sobieski sat their horses and -- possibly. Probably -- chatted for a while in Latin, Tom Paine looked at royalty and the Church and the way they still cultivated Latin, and urged throwing the language away -- urged it with a disastrously huge influence and effect. I'm every bit as anti-royal and atheist as Paine, but I look at Latin and draw exactly the opposite conclusion: why should royalty and clergy have all the fun? And also: who's going to keep an eye on the royals and clergy if we can't understand what they're saying? Two of the many reasons why Paine was wrong, and a much less effective opponent of the ancien regime than he could have been. And an idiot.