Am reading David Anthony's The Horse, Language, an The Wheel after you recommended it a good while back. Also Cunliffes Europe: 9000BC-1000AD. I see that Anthony's book just won an award in its field. Are these new recommendations in your blog?

Right now I'm devouring Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood and Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Wood is the dean of Revolutionary Era historians, but Chernow is the best and most thorough on his narrower topic. Indeed, Chernow's "Washington" is a book I just finished and although it's 900 pages, Chernow is the first historian to really make George W. come alive, and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker compared it to a Victorian novel, like Jane Austen, the depth and rich detail of the family and friends and companions in war and peace are so inextricably intertwined with GW. Ellis's Founding Brothers is very good and of course, Albion's Seed and everything else by David Hackett Fischer is wonderful. Ditto for The Cousin's War and another great book on the French & Indian War with the word "Clash..." that late night doesn't let me call to mind. I've read almost everything on Lincoln and Battle Cry of Freedom is the best on the Civil War. Meacham's book was weak on the Great Awakenings, which What Has God Wrought fleshes out the Second GW in Upstate NY and elsewhere in the early 1800s quite well. David McCollough is splendid with his bios and Gaddis and Dallek the two best on the twentieth century in all its aspects. It's 3AM and I can't remember the alternative take on the Great Depression by Amity Schlaes, but she debunks much of the standard Dem hagiography of FDR. As for writing skills and evocation of a time and a personality, I consider Chernow & McCollough & David Hackett Fischer win, place & show on the race for the best books.

I'm reading Bloodlands, by Yale author Snyder and it reminded me a bit of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language which your rave review spurred me to buy early this year and which I am still in medias res. The other book which I keep coming back to is the great book on Europe 9000BC-1000AD as well as the Sykes books on the Seven mitochondrial mamas and the disappearance of the Y gene. Who is Azar Gat?

What about outliers of The Hobbit on Flores?  The descendents of, say, the Demanji [sp?] people of Georgia, etc?   This sounds a bit like the bottleneck needed for a mitochondrial Eve and tends to have a kumbayah tincture about it, or whatever....  

Ah, those Kurgan groups. Am reading Cunliffe and his very interesting chapter on the Carpathian basin circa 4000YA and their chariot remains... Marija Gimbutas still has a partial case...

This argument by elambend has been used by scouts. Ditto for Caribbean-origin baseball players.  
 
My daughter dated a back-up [white] QB for THE U [UMiami] who was sort of told that he wouldn't be needed when Jacory Harris [whose seven teammates at Northwest Miami-Dade High all came to UMiami---undefeated in 30 games during high school] started to blossom. Robert Marve was also told to take a walk. My daughter's friend will be just fine at Memphis, which like UMiami also has 4/22 ratio, because his dad owns a little company called FedEx, lock, stock, and barrel!  
 
And football is much more of a social phenomenon than baseball or basketball, especially down in the deep South. Texas & Florida live for those Friday Night Lights. UMiami & LSU are tied for the number of NFL players who are grads at 41, last I checked.

As a bonded servant of three cats, I now have to take a Toxoplama g. exam.

The bias against the East and the Byzantines extended to the Swabian immigrant German ironmongers in Brasov who made and sold to the Ottoman Sultan the cannons needed to destroy Constantinople's walls in 1453. Those same Germans were brutally suppressed by the supposed Romanian ogre Vlad, who dealt with them brutally as they were supporting his mortal enemy who was invading his country and persecuting Christians from Hungary eastward. 
 
He was an ogre, but there was method to his savagery.

John, I've just finished re-reading The Discovery of France and almost bought Montaillou today at B&N but my sojourn of two years in Lyon makes me remember while reading your post that even the French in Paris would tell me that the Lyonnais speak the "purest" French. There are a lot of arguments about the French language, more than English or German [that I'm aware of], but they are always couched in social terms, and the French being French, nouvelle vagues wash through the Zeitgeist continuously.  
 
The Lyonnais, a very crusty bunch, always looked down on Paris as full of arrivistes, sort of like Main Line Philly looks at NYC. 
 
They point to Lyon being the capital of Roman Gaul, the fact that the primate of France lived in Lyon, and more recently the fact the maquis like Jean Moulin were fighting Nazis while the Parisians were consorting with their conquerors during WWII.  
Plus the food....etc. etc. 
 
As for urban dialects, I loved Celine, who of course was a breton by origin, and a lieutenant who spoke breton to his poilus in the trenches. His was a Parisian slang made literary.

razib, yes and there are some strains of Nestorian Christianity in Lebanon & I believe the Chaldean or Assyrian Christians in Iraq are Nestorian also. The great thing about the complex...dynamics of Lebanon is that as a practical matter there are 19 recognized religious and ethnic minorities influential enough so that a holiday for each is observed, meaning that when we studied Arabic at FSI in the [soon-to-be-bombed-to-rubble} US Embassy, we had an off-day almost every other week, throwing in other national holidays. Made for a lot of playing tawla with plenty of arak [or the excellent Turkish raki, both identical to ouzo & Sambuca & Pernod]to soothe the competitive juices.  
 
I still believe, to interject a bit of politics, that if my friend Tom Warrick's State Dept postwar playbook under the Arabist US General Barker's [?] leadership had been allowed some time to develop......but Rumsfeld put his cat's paw Bremer in who promptly made a bad postwar situation untenable. [FSO bias] 
 
Finally, I've lived in two of the three cities in the Roman Empire that had official mints, Lyon & Beirut. Of the three, I'd have preferred Rome!  
 
Just before I left Lebanon for my onward assignment, the Maronites blew up a bus full of Palestinians and started a civil war that exhausted everybody and his neighbor there, destroying what had been one of the nicest places I'd ever visited/lived in and where you never even had to lock your car.

Thanks, Razib, and i think the original Greek-Latin divide is always overrated---but I lived in Lebanon for a year studying Arabic and had a Greek Melkite basketball team wherein the village I dwelt. They hated Maronites with a passion. My own RC heritage combined with a G.O. greek-american wife also probably exerts a pull.  
 
When I read Norman Davies The Isles a while ago, I concocted one of those very sophomoric big thoughts about the inherent difference between the Anglo-Saxon, or East Anglian puritanism [Cromwell in his youth was a regional football star before he became Lord Protector---I think ND has that gem] and the Celtic reversion to steady state small-village parochialism as a mindset. 
Perhaps it's the Teutonic mystical chiliastic bent versus the day-to-day anarchic and sensuous vibe of the Celtic world, which Tacitus describes in Germania. When I read Albion's Seed, that was something which hit me about the Scots-Irish mountain folk, now the despised Appalachian hillbillies SNL & 30Rock derides mercilessly, versus the WASP New England patriots. 
 
Philips The Cousin's Wars also nibbles at the edges of a sort of underlying Jungian archetypes separating East Anglia's New Model Army from the Royalist Cavaliers. And the Union "Truth goes Marching On" from the Confederates folkish "Dixie." Und so weiter und so fort.  
 
This diversion may not be intelligent, but it, like Wilde's bad poetry, is sincere.

bioIgnoramus  
 
The Romano-Brit Patrick may have come upon a previously hellenized Christian substrate which in the 200s-300s had come from Orthodox/Copt cenobites who started in Egypt & sailed out to proselytize the Irish, who adopted the Eastern Easter. Pope Leo the Great [?] then sent St Augustine to turn the Angles into angels much later even though the Greeks had evangelized [pun intended] the Isles through their Irish proto-missionaries. The Council of Whitby [666AD] fixed the disparity between the two. [The formal split between Roman and Greek orthodoxies came hundreds of years later, but there had always been a two-track cultural/religious rivalry between the Nicean Christians.]  
 
I'm reading The Inheritance of Rome and Cunliffe's 9000-1000 & a lot of this period is emerging clearly. The monastic movement, especially the Benedictines, seems to be underrated by Razib. A lot of the higher civilization was carried northward by crusading monks, including Cyrus and Methodius, whence the Cyrillic alphabet ensues. 
 
But razib poses a chicken/egg conundrum which might never be resolved on the Christianity/civilization queston.

I also share your loyalty to the Steelers and Celtics [whom I have followed since their respective 'Glory Days' in the '70s & 50s/60s/80s respectively]. Both teams reflect working class values of hard work and disrespect for bling and the off-court/field shenanigans of, say, the Cowboys or the Lakers. As for baseball, the long-suffering Cubs and only recently-rehabbed Red Sox get my support, so nothing is as irrational as being a fanatic for a losing team. De gustibus, non est disputandum.

Roger Bigod 
 
Yes, the Highlanders who spoke Gaelic in North Carolina actually supported George III during the Rev War, according to Fischer & others---they were instrumental in Guilford Courthouse, if I remember correctly. On the other hand, Kings Mountain was a case of S-I frontiersmen kicking redcoat butt.  
 
I guess you're talking High Medieval Burgerlich culture, but much of Europe was sunk in pre-medieval [Bretagne in France, par exemple] up until well into when England had developed an industrial base. Ask the French writer Celine, who captained Breton soldiers [he spoke the patois] in the First WW and thought them little advanced from farm animals. Like parts of the American South, many great French writers had a Bretagne connection---although the Tidewater must be separated from the Piedmont and the Smokies, I suppose, in Southern American Lit.  
 
But the Scotch-Irish did seem have a genius for living outside wider social and economic systems, compared to Quakers and the Virginia Tidewater aristocracy. Maybe the extended chaotic history of the Borderlands prepared them for self-sufficiency.

There are some traits that are maladaptive in a modern society, such as poor social organization (no town greens in the Southern hills) and lack of emphasis on social advancement (including advanced education While reading Andrew Wheatcroft's The Hapsburgs, a passage describing the feudal pre-Renaissance conditions in Europe north of the Alps and east of the Rhine [plus the Balkans] until the end of the 17th century reminded me of Fischer's long description of the Borderlands culture and the frequent bloody feuds that prevailed between clans and families and other socially "backward" traits such as shunning and mistreatment of the old and injured. Also, extended hostilities between fortified towns and feudal castles prevailed until Absolutism in France & communications plus the Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution made central government more able to enforce its hegemony [except in isolated "backward" regions in various countries, of which the chief contributor to the US "originals" was the Scotch-Irish].  
 
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer. Other takes on this from different angles are Horwitz's entertaining travelogue "A Voyage Rich and Strange" and Tim Blanning's Pursuit of Glory, 1648-1815. Balzac and Hugo and Chateubriand all write of their Breton ancestors as basically aboriginals living in gentrified squalor.

are irish catholics culturally at all like english calvinist? 
 
Actually they are, since Irish Catholicism was permeated by a French Catholic sect called Jansenism, a very Calvinist version of Roman Catholic practice emphasizing a sort of rough-and-ready asceticism very much like the Geneva-based Calvinists and even a bit like the Scottish Presbyterian version of Calvinism propagated by John Knox. Jansenism was almost branded a heresy by the Pope back when the French were killing and exporting Huguenots and French priests who were persecuted for J-ism exported themselves to Ireland where they taught at diocesan seminaries. 
 
Also, left unmentioned in the otherwise excellent Albion's Seed was an invasion/immigration of Western Lowland Scotland in the eighth and ninth centuries by Irish from Ulster, which was reciprocated six-seven centuries later by the Protestant Calvinists called Presbyterians back into Ulster.  
 
For a less scholarly but entertaining view of the southern highland/Appalachian breed of Scots/Irish which Saturday Night Live loves to discriminate against ['Appalachian Hospital'] as well as the God-fearing intern on 30 Rock, read a book called The Redneck Manifesto by Jim Goad, a hell-raiser from the LA Basin who notes the influx of "Okies" into S. California chronicled by Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath during the Depression.  
 
The Cousins' War by Philips remains a sourcebook of many historical antecedants of the well-described Four Folkways by Hackett-Fisher. For a good encomium about Albion's Seed as one of the most influential books on American history, read Max Boot's review in the NYT Nov. 2 Book Review of Hackett-Fisher's latest book, Champlain's Dream, which describes a bit of the Quebecois equivalent of the Four Folkways elaborated in AS.

Diana is correct about a breakdown in public morality. I can remember the first Playboy hitting the stands with Marilyn M. on the blanket in the altogether.  
 
The explosion of technology & the complete collapse of the nuclear family because of the explosion of drugs & breakdown of the urban landscape were symptoms of this overall breakdown.  
 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Tim Russert's mentor, wrote at length about the downfall of the nuclear family & Tim's memories of a warm & caring family seem a century or two ago. 
 
The public sector has intruded into private lives & the family's autonomy with disastrous effects. 
 
When 70% of kids in the black community and 30% of white babies are born to unmarried parents, I call that a breakdown in morality. 
 
No doubt about it.

Celtics may be black Irish, but they will rule after seven---Lakers are smooth, but the Celtics are driven & obsessed. 
 
And Kobe can't do it all himself.

My wife's female Bichon Frise regularly humps our female Persian cat, which is cross-species same gender sex. Any fancy scientific term for that particular phenonmenon? 
 
We can't get them to stop, as it is a mutual attraction. Our ginormous neutered Maine Coon gazes on all this with curiosity rather than disgust. 
 
We have papers on both unspayed females & want to breed them.

Worse than commies, they were imperialists whose higher power was like a long-winded Kipling, if you take the Rig-Veda as gospel. 
 
As far as the Irish/Celt mythology goes, Morte d'Arthur was kicking around 500 years ago slinging old-time Blarney! Tristan & Isolde and all those lovesick knights of yore!

I learned to speak & read Arabic in the State Dept. at a high level back in the dawn of time. All Arabic verb tenses are in the past, the Sun is in the female gender [as with German & Japanese] & there are elements of Arabic, or at least Semitic, grammar in Greek. [The Greeks use the dual in nouns, e.g.] Where I learned Arabic, in Beirut, the Greek linguistic intercourse with the Lebanese was acknowledged to be ancient, & the Lebanese insist that their King [Cadmus?] "taught" the Greeks their alphabet circe 3000 y/a. The Phoenicians spoke a Semitic language/dialect that spread across 
& still remains everywhere in the Mediterranean littoral languages. 
The so-called Doric invasions of Greece & the supposition by Pan-Slavists that the Dorics were Slavic is a nettle not many scholars are willing to grasp. Lots of 19th c. politics centered around the Greeks as IE [Slavic?] or an Anatolian IE/Semitic mixture.

Thanks, I tried to google that book a while back unsuccessfully. I forgot that one of Lincoln's theses is that the success of Indo-European expansion around the world results from a certain sort of "imperialist DNA" built into its religious belief that all the earth's cattle belong to the Proto-IE tribes. The Hindu reverence for cattle could be an atavistic reminder of the original "those cows are my cows" mindset.

I read Mallory & Renfrew & Ruhlen & Cavalli-Sforza plus a few others---Anatolian or the Steppes. The most interesting speculation was a religious one by a fellow named Lincoln at the U. of Minnesota [I lost the book moving to Florida] who posited that the Indo-Aryan religion held that all cattle were their property, gifted to them by the sky-God. 
 
Any reference to the religious side of the ledger? Gimbutas has an interesting speculative mind, by the way, but her matriarchal DNA overpowered her critical faculties. 
 
Pots or peoples, Gimbutas has a lot to say about the symbolic patterns on vases & other pottery sequence materials that could yield linguistic clues.