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The NRA Publishes Its Enemies List

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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus1/28/2013 11:09:26 pm PST

re: #438 dragonath

The Romans found many tribes when they conquered England. The Romans never subjected the Kings of the north (Scotland) or to the far west (Wales, Ireland.) I guess the Caesars eventually ran into the law of diminishing returns. However, Britania was very useful for its tin mines and thus worth the effort.

Pre-Roman settlements by farmers go back to the time of the great Henges. These are neolithic farmers, but they did trade in metals and precious stones as far away as the eastern Baltic and down into Turkey. The question is whether the neolithic farmers replaced the previous hunter-gatherers, or mixed thoroughly with them. All the groups from which he ascribe our ancestry - protoVikings, Celts, Germans, etc. are just late neo-lithic farming groups and doesn’t tell us what went before.

Thus the genetic testing.

The multiple conquests of the British isles by the Vikings and their descendants means there is significant over-lap with Scandinavian descent for anyone who claims to be “British”. Most “British” have both some Roman and some Scandinavian ancestry.

Given my ancestry in the Kings of Norway, their ancestry has been (supposedly) traced back to the older Kings of not only Wessex but of the Danes and the Swedes. Supposedly (according to my relatives who’ve researched this) that means I am also descended from none other than Hilderic, King of the Vandals, from whom among other parentage was descended from Emperor Valentinian III, one of whose ancestors was… Constantine.

Yes, that Constantine.

Am I a direct descendant of Constantine? Probably so. But then so are a great number of people alive today, even though they don’t have the pedigree worked out. We only “know” so because we have pretty good provenance back to the Kings of Norway, but before then one has to wonder if parentage was just myth or reality.

Fun stuff… but at some point “truth” turns into legend. While I am pretty sure of my American colonial ancestors, some of their British isles ancestry, and on the other side of my direct lines back to the Kings of 900-1200 Norway, anything farther back than that becomes speculation.

Heck, even the calendars were different, to say nothing of the languages.