"... the oddly temperate climate of Europe (did you know that London is further north than Bismarck North Dakota?), you can grow barley there at near to 60 north latitude."And it ought to have been a lot easier when they started doing it in the climatic optimum (although it probably didn't feel like that at the time) preceding the onset of the sub-Atlantic. Date derived fron carbonised hulled and naked barley stuffed away in the house wall as cavity filler, along with all the other hearth sweepings (BM-441) 1564+/-120 bc (Ness of Gruting, 60.6N/0.81667W) by which time life was beginning to get a bit grim for farmers up there. 
 
The Norwegians who eventually took the Northern Isles over characterised the aborigines as "pygmies, who hid away in their underground dwellings at noonday, through fear of the sun." 
Obviously they were having a laugh. I've never got further than cautiously removing the old waxed jacket in the lee of a gable-end, even at midsummer when you've got daylight 24/7. In the winter people go mad.

Woopsy! Sorry folks, that were me, forgot I were on a 'borrowed' machine which won't autofill the i.d.

wuz the blonde asian chick doing in the picture then? :0)dunno, but it must be o.k., judging by your man with the black hair's expression :^o. 
I guess the uniformly dark eyes are more a result of the camera flash, but IIRC Saami do have dark eyes more than the Scands. Strange to say, to a brit like me the Saami in general look just "normal", it's the Swedes and allied trades who look (and act!) scary and "foreign". Probably because we tend to be the short side too, and possibly because the Saami, like the brits, are a fairly heterogenous crew?

Afternoon, chaps. 
Here's some students mucking about at Saami Uni. College in Norway. 
http://tinyurl.com/32ual3 
Look like perfectly ordinary and perfectly charming "Lapps" (sorry about that) to me. Apart from the bloke with the glasses, maybe a touch of the Swede about him, I reckon.  
Better get the Munsell Charts out, eh?

But you don't need to dry and thresh the potatoes first...Ooh arr. The usual way was to rick it on staddles in just the same condition as it came off the field (ie damp in any reasonable person's estimation) with the yummy ears to the middle. And hope it didn't spontaneously combust after it was thatched. Then bit by bit bring it in, often just the ears, to dry out in the (relatively) warm dry and surprisingly large space above the circulation level of the house (ie the mud) as only the direst paupers would let the fire go out, even in "summer". Or in hot-tub sized kilns dug into a bank. Which are a bit good at accidentally turning wet grain, which just sprouts regardless, into malt. 
I'm on about their actual food here, the chunk exacted by the master was carted off and dealt with in a semi-industrialised manner, granaries, mills, coerced labour threshing it and all that. The proper feudal areas had to do the lot that way as it were agin the law to do yer own. But they weren't about to start growing potatoes, as the landlord was growing grain for profit, (and probably still is). It's in more marginal areas with crap (or no!) soil that the tenants get spuds shoved up them. That was the irish disaster. All the cornland was taken up by cashcrop and the labourers' own subsistence holdings crammed onto basically useless land and told to get on with it. 
And just one botched growing season = game over when you're keeping potatoes, they've got a rubbish shelf-life, and can't even be turned into biscuity things and kept. *mooches over to kitchen and extracts 5-year-old oatcake to nibble*

The legend we were served up at school is that the french peasants (distinguished by writers since they were still "gauls" for their robust good sense) had to be tricked into thieving the wretched things from heavily guarded Govt. trial plots, all previous attempts to coerce them having run afoul of the hard french heads of these "scum". 
They are unchancy to store, heavy, have to be kept basically at ground level, in a countryside absolutely heaving with pigs and human pilferers. Grain can be kept in deep hidden silos or up in the roofspace, dry, for many years, should (as happens, like this summer and the last, by us) the growing season be a drought, or nastier than actual winter. And you had better get them chitted and in the lazybeds by Lady Day, or you've lost every single one. Nothing, nada, not a sausage, left unsprouted. And if you've not had the shaws away and lifted them by moonlight, they'll poison you anyway. Light-shot. What a carry-on. 
Barley, the staff of life since we took up this farming lark round here, is hardy well beyond wheat, won't be cast down by heavy rain, gives you a roof as well as a bannock. And so what if the year's so wet, it starts to rot in the ear before it ripens (I've seen this many times). Why, we shall ding it down anyway, sack it, let it sprout , and dry it with heat, for the sun never shines, so as it shall keep a lifetime, if it don't go 'steely'. 
As the romans were puzzled to find us doing. 
 
Then, even if it's raining (and how likely is that, now?) we can do this. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6K03ovxCM 
 
Hobbits keep narsty taters. We likes it, strong and tasty.

Oh blimey o'reilly! Not this one again. 
 
Posted on 01/16/2005 12:47:07 PM PST by IGBT 
 
London - Red hair may be the genetic legacy of Neanderthals, according to a new study by British scientists. 
 
Researchers at the John Radcliffe Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford were quoted by The Times as saying the so-called "ginger gene" which gives people red hair, fair skin and freckles could be up to 100 000 years old. 
 
They claim that their discovery points to the gene having originated in Neanderthal man who lived in Europe for 200 000 years before Homo sapien settlers, the ancestors of modern man, arrived from Africa about 40 000 years ago. 
 
Rosalind Harding, the research team leader, told The Times: "The gene is certainly older than 50 000 years and it could be as old as 100 000 years. 
 
"An explanation is that it comes from Neanderthals." It is estimated that at least 10 percent of Scots have red hair and a further 40 percent carry the gene responsible, which could account for their once fearsome reputation as fighters. 
 
Neanderthals have been characterised as migrant hunters and violent cannibals who probably ate most of their meat raw. They were taller and stockier than Homo sapiens, but with shorter limbs, bigger faces and noses, receding chins and low foreheads. 
 
The two species overlapped for a period of time and the Oxford research appears to suggests that they must have successfully interbred for the "ginger gene" to survive. Neanderthals became extinct about 28 000 years ago, the last dying out in southern Spain and southwest France. - Sapa-DPA 
That Harding woman's barking, I heard her on the radio when this came out a couple of years back. Check this out.Other lines of genetic research include R.M. Harding's studies which look at variation in the betaglobin gene Harding found that one major betaglobin gene lineage, thought to have arisen more than 200,000 years ago, is widely distributed in Asia but rare in Africa, suggesting that archaic populations in Asia contributed to the modern gene pool. Used to work up here, and all.

Woops, agnostic, tripped up by my own imprecision again. What I meant was the general consensus (up to now, anyhoo) of me and all my Scottish, frequently unnecessarily ginger, and absurdly pale compadres of either sex. I ain't here, see, I'm over there (stabs gnarly neandertal digit vaguely at map of northeast atlantic ocean). And dark and petite is doubleplus good, maybe a relict of some vile ancient prejudice against irish catholics (who are practically translucent). And then there's that weird "first-footing" thing at new year, still taken pretty seriously specially by the olds, so I don't bother leaving the house that night. You'll just have to trust me on this. Or get over on a vacation.

Marc, what's up with your lankan chum? Round our way the dates you steer clear of are the excessively yogurty-coloured ones. The ones that generally resemble a week-old boiled potato, complete with dodgy-looking grey-green undertones. 
Except they're man-size... 
 
South Indians, like chinese/korean/japanese regardless of gender rate well high in the hottitude chart, probably because they ain't lardy thyroid-deficient behemoths (see above, with apologies for rudeness to all concerned), and they don't have awkward notions about booze, but then again there's not a lot of them up here. 
 
The "hey I'm chinese/japanese and I'm gonna bleach my hair orange" used to baffle me, it's fairly common round here. Used to think "What's your game, are you taking the piss? You must be nuts, have you any IDEA how much sh8 gingers get, even here in the Land of Ginger?" 
Now I like it. Like having a tribute band :?) 
 
(Yup, I are Mcr1 mutant. You fancy pop round to cave for spot of intromission?)

... the revealed preference of the tiny, tiny subset of people who can't ( or can't be arsed to) spawn the natural, slob's way and can access and afford, and indeed even feel the need for, such exotic remedies to their ambition. Good luck to 'em. 
 
As for the hypothetical ScandoJap (I assume you're rigorously excluding Finns here) why on earth would they want to? For a kickoff, the poor sod would end up with chunks whacked out of its IQ, like me from staying at my grandma's house with its low, chunkily-beamed ceilings, doorways and stairs, which suited grandma and her 17th century predecessors just fine, but left me in a state of near-concussion most of the time. Hell, I had to bend down even to look out the window.

Threadworms 
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/articles/article.aspx?articleId=362

Mmhm, David B (@ 4.53 am) you're right there, as far as I can recall the fairly lucrative but unpopular trades of "gong-farmer" and "raker" generally dealt with nightsoil and some medieval english city authorities made quite a few bob selling it to farmers. In high-density towns like Edinburgh it was pitched out of the window not out of sluttishness but to avoid the inevitable consequences of dozens of citizens jostling up and down more or less unlit spiral staircases of seven or eight storeys, carrying their buckets. IIRC the hours and manner of defenestration were strictly regulated to give pedestrians a sporting chance, and to allow the city to marshal its squads of sweepers to "cleanse the causey", directing and sluicing as much as they could to the open sewer in the street, where the liquid component eventually found its way into small periglacial lakes to the N and S, utterly polluting them. 
In the rural situation of the majority of the population the stuff was collected in a midden opposite the house door, the better to guard it from pilfering. Again I am hazy about this but such middens were a valuable commodity, and may even have featured as heritable property. Anyway, the collection and distribution of nightsoil was an important and fairly well-organized business in preindustrial britain. It was during the industrial revolution that things really, er, went down the pan, hygiene-wise.

If they're after the quiet life, I recommend a move to Manchester, or Middlesbrough, where they'd be unremarkable. 
Friend of mine from Manc. couldn't stir outside during daylight in summer without a wide-brimmed straw hat tied on with a scarf, and Raybans. 
At 56? N. 
And I'd go pink in moonlight, if I didn't watch out. Most vexing. 
 
As to Cavalli-Sforza's observation on the relaxation on the Prohibited Degrees by the northern barbarians, in defiance of Mother Church, I tend to the opinion that it was the necessity to conceal such arrangements, on pain of fines or worse, that fell into abeyance, rather than any increase in akcherly doin' it with yer cuzin.

Just watched "Donnie Darko", and it struck me that nowadays the Jake Gyllenhall character would have been diagnosed in this way without a second thought. 
 
Intelligent eccentrics are far too "difficult" to deal with.