So long and thanks for all the fish

I've been procrastinating about this in vane hope of returning to my old animical self of being more interested in writing (and reading) about stuff that interests me but nope. It doesn't seem like I'm going back, so I feel it's pointless to keep open a blog (actually two) that I don't regularly or even irregularly update at all. Time to draw the curtain, sorry.

I will still occasionally write (in Castilian language basically) at my blog Bagauda (Wordpress, where it's easier to control trolls and choose between pre-moderation or no moderation individually). 

I considered opening a second WP blog in English but I don't feel energized enough at this point. If I do in the future, I will of course announce it here.

I will keep comments open for some weeks more but in a month or so I'll also close that because it's too much hassle. The blog will remain accessible as such "forever" (or for as long as Blogger maintains it) of course. 

You can of course contact me by email if important at:

I'm also right now somewhat active at FB and YT under my legal (shortened) name Luis Aldamiz. But nothing too interesting going on there anyhow. Just comments and blah-blah, political discussions in FB, etc.

So, thanks for being there, thanks for your interest, your feedback, your collaborations in some cases, thanks to everyone (except to Chucky "I want to be your friend" the psychopatic troll of many names). 

Enjoy the rest of your life, kids. Love and rage!

A new genetics blog in Spanish

Wilhelm H > DNA and Genealogy, by some guy called Wilhelm Halys, whom I know from Facebook. 

His very first post on endogamy using RootsFinder seems very interesting, even if I have to admit I don't understand it well because I'm unfamiliar with this program. But that's good because it indicates novelty, fresheness and stuff to learn. 

Hope you also find interesting, assuming you can read Spanish or use a translator.

Happy 12,017

Yeah, 12,017. Why not? And I do mean the year that begins today per the Gregorian Calendar.

This is a surprisingly well thought idea that some prehistorianists (i.e. those who like Prehistory, regardless of wage-earning profession) have proposed: to get rid of the clearly uncomfortable Christian Era, alias Roman Era, alias Common or Conventional Era (CE) by adding 10,000 years to it and roughly starting counting at Göbekli Tepe (approx. date, because it's impossible to pinpoint an exact date, but the same happens with the alleged birth of baby Jesus anyhow), without doubt the first "civilizational" type of monument ever built, incidentally getting rid of negative counting for at least the whole Holocene (a most convenient feature indeed). 

They propose to call it the "Human Era" (HE), although I'd rather think that the Human Era begins with humans and that would be c. 200,000 years ago for Homo sapiens and two million years ago for the overall Homo genus, Humankind generally speaking. So maybe it's better to call it the Monumental Era, the Megalithic (big stone) Era or just the Mega-Era, for short. It'd be ME in any case.

The proposal, as far as I can tell, was made by Kurzgesagt, one of the YouTube channels that provide a good mix of entertainment and information for people interested in history and prehistory, young and elderly alike:

And I like it quite a bit, of course. So maybe worth spreading around, don't you think? 

In any case, I wish you all a happy and productive new year, one in which things may hopefully change for the better and not for the worse, for a change. 

And, like in every New Year Day, the holiday where most work is made, because of that floating notion that you are supposed to made up for all the laziness and procrastination of the past year, I will now proceed to assault my quite fatty "to do" list, and tell you about things that you may or not know already but that I think are worth taking note of.

Back to work

My apologies to readers for being for so long in "lazy mode". Actually I got interrupted largely by a request to provide a quality article on Basque, Sardinian and European origins for a soon to be published collective book in Basque language. This took me a lot of time and energies in late March and early April, so basically I put everything else on hold. The last weeks I've been resting indeed, what may be aggravated by a declining health that makes me sleep irregularly and often for much longer than most of you do. Being fed up with Internet information feeds and a quite active political reality also drain my energies to other endeavors, not to mention paperwork.

In this sense I want to announce that I have begun recently a new multi-purpose blog in Spanish language: Bagauda. Most of it is politics, I warn you, but I have also included the unedited raw article for that book I mention in the previous paragraph (prior to translation to Basque and corrections). I'm reasonably sure that those of you who have Spanish as primary or even secondary language will be interested in having a look (→ here).

Another relevant entry was the announcement of the upcoming congress on Iruña-Veleia to be held on May 7 in Vitoria-Gasteiz. You can still register but hurry up.

I will now proceed to comment in a separate entry on the news of the week, the Fu et al. study of a large array of Paleoeuropean ancient DNA. But, before I get to that, I must mention some interesting studies that I have not been able to get time to even properly read, let alone discuss:

• K. Voskarides, S. Mazières et al., Y-chromosome phylogeographic analysis of the Greek-Cypriot population reveals elements consistent with Neolithic and Bronze Age settlements. Investigative Genetics 2016. Open access → LINK [doi:10.1186/s13323-016-0032-8]
• B. Vernot et al., Excavating Neandertal and Denisovan DNA from the genomes of Melanesian individuals. Science 2016. Freely accessible (with registration?) → LINK [doi:10.1126/science.aad9416]
• Y.Y. Waldman, A. Biddanda et al., The Genetics of Bene Israel from India Reveals Both Substantial Jewish and Indian Ancestry. PLoS ONE 2016. Open access → LINK [doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0152056]

Another intriguing new independent paper by a regular visitor and commenter to this blog, Olympus Mons, that I have not yet read is:

→ R1b from Sulaweri-Shomu to Bell Beaker, available as PDF or in blog format.

He seems to argue for a Caucasus origin of both the lineage and Bell Beaker phenomenon. I have no opinion as of yet, because, simply put, I have not been able to read it in full.

Another regular visitor here to have put an independent paper online, also on the issue of R1b origins, is Paul Conroy:

→ Anatole A. Klyosov and Paul M. Conroy, Origins of the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English R1b-M222 population. Available at Paul's Academia.edu account.

Again I have not yet got the opportunity to read it, so no opinion. 

Feel free to use this entry to comment on any of the aforementioned studies or articles or to provide info about stuff I may have missed.

Happy new Roman year

Yeah, for some odd reason Romans were the ones to establish that the year began in a day like today, minor calendar corrections excepted. I still don't understand why the year "begins" in winter rather than in spring but that's how things are customarily. So happy new year to all. 

My goal for the new year is to get this blog back into activity, doing the most important work I left "to do" in the past two months. With a bit of luck and patience I may be able to do that today. If I wait, most likely it'll happen as with all other new year commitments: that it's left for the next year and so on, and so on...

So my goal is to do my new year commitment in a single day. Cross fingers, take deep breath, go!

Minor issue with comments

For a week or so the comments feedback, on which it depends that latest comments that appear listed on the right margin of this blog, had been glitched. 

When I checked around yesterday I could not get the gadget to go back to work, however, looking around, I found three comments awaiting approval, something that should not be the case because there is not comment pre-moderation implemented right now. After I approved them all, the gadget seems to be working back again, so I'm guessing that those ill-queued comments were causing a glitch in the feed. 

My apologies for whatever inconvenience.

Quantity, quality and mood.

As you surely have noticed, I'm not anymore writing even a fraction of what I used to. Largely this owes to my own mood but also to the time that requires doing things properly (a good article takes between half to two 8-hrs workdays, not counting the time invested in general information). As result I have accumulated a huge list of "to do" bookmarks, many of which I will never address at all. 

In fact you can follow some of the stuff I read and never get to comment in this bilingual prehistory Google group. 

However I do want to at least briefly comment some of the latest stuff, taking advantage of my impulsiveness. So I will make a series of short entries, priming quantity over quality, so readers can get at least some basic info. This will be today and I don't promise anything for tomorrow.

Honestly, some days I feel that my productivity has become so low that I could well close shop. Other days I feel like trying to get the blog back on its feet but admittedly these are the rarer ones.

I just found my very old first Prehistory site as a Samoa hack

Yesterday I happened to run a simple quick test about how well this blog performs in Google ratings, so I made a search on "Chalcolithic Europe" (the kind of thing that I know brings up images from FWTWWA) with the result that this blog gave one hit among the top 10 in regular text search, and more than 30 hits in image search in the first page (including the first two ones, which come from the European aDNA page). 

This is the map that surprised me to find still around: Middle Bronze Age Europe/West Asia, c. 1500 BCE (not too exact in some details maybe? - well, still good enough).

 

Also many maps I did in the past for Wikipedia still rank high as well. 

That was cool to find out. But what really surprised me was to find my long gone GeoCities (former Yahoo! free hosting service) website online (→ LINK) and also ranking rather high in image search (for those words) because of one of my old maps. The site has not been available for many years because Yahoo! suspended its free hosting service but someone is making money out of my work with that site that is exactly how I left it, except for flashing publicity ads (oddly enough when Yahoo! managed the ads, which only they gained revenue from, not me, they were always empty boxes, very tellingly about this company's poor skill at marketing). 

The site can be found under its original GeoCities address except that it has the .ws extension instead of the .com one it used to have. Looking at this extension in Wikipedia, I learned that it means Samoa (West Samoa) and that:

The .ws country code has been marketed as a domain hack, with the .ws purportedly standing for "World Site" or "Web site", providing a "global" Internet presence to registrants, as it supports all internationalized domain names.

So some smart guy has hacked my old site (and probably many others) and is making money of its discrete appeal. 

At least in the "European Chalcolithic" search, the star is obviously the article about Atlantis, which attempted to interpret this legend, as well as the quite comparable Heraklean ones, in the context of the Bronze Mediterranean (in terms that I still consider perfectly valid). But there are also other interesting pages: a series of maps on Indoeuropean expansion, an incomplete Neolithic Europe map series (some of which were uploaded to Wikipedia back in the day but followed random fates afterwards), and an old self-made double map of European mtDNA haplogroups based on Simoni 2000 (yeah, that's quite old, but in those times, say 2007, info on mtDNA was scarce and scattered).

So what I'm going to do? Copy much of that in my PC and probably repost the best of it here in dedicated pages. It'd be totally hopeless to try to get the hacker to pay me a commission for his/her publicity earnings, more so when most of the material is explicitly donated to the public domain, and, in a sense, I feel even grateful for the chaotic effects of this hacking that has brought my old work back to the Web, although I lament I cannot edit the site anymore. 

For whoever reads the site, please notice that most of that stuff is from around 2007. Although paid GeoCities still exists, the free hosting service was discontinued in 2009, and that was the time when all my work went down the toilet (I made a backup but it got eventually lost in an irreparable computer crash), until now. Long live Chaos!

New page: Early Kurgan expansion maps

Triggered by a mail discussion on linguistic prehistory, I finally did something that was in my agenda since long ago: create and share some Kurgan expansion maps → dedicated page in this blog.

The maps do not cover all the Indoeuropean expansion (which still continues to this very day for all I know) but just the core one of the Chalcolithic period, which provides the skeleton for the understanding of later periods. For ad-hoc reasons all maps are of Europe and nearby parts of West Asia only, although admittedly that leaves the proto-Tocharian Afanasevo culture off map. As I did not go into the Bronze and Iron ages' periods, which would have to include Indo-Iranian expansion, this works alright.

Some eye candy to entice you (map #2 out of 4, arguably the most central one, outlining at least five different branches of Indoeuropean very early on, early 4th millennium BCE):

A note on comments

I'm keeping pre-moderation on comments as some individuals who have been banned keep posting and posting and I want them out (also the occasional spambot but not the main reason). 

However I've realized that I do not always get notice of all comments awaiting moderation (as I should), so some comments sit in limbo for longer than they should (until I notice on my own, what may take days or even weeks). My obligate and truly felt apologies but sadly is something beyond my control (although I'll try to look at the comments awaiting moderation list more often). 

If you find that your comment has not been published (and you and your comment are legit - the usual trolls abstain, of course, but most people and comments are much welcome here) please send me an email and I'll solve that ASAP. My public email can be found in my Blogger profile, although you have to delete the anti-spam protection "DELETETHIS" (it won't work otherwise).

Back!

Today I'll retake my activity in this blog, as promised, with an entry on the Mal'ta aDNA findings, which I have yet to write.

But I'll probably take it easy anyhow. I guess I'm not as enthusiastic as I used to be and I definitely need/want more leisure time for myself.

Enjoy.

Rethinking my blogging activity

Dear readers:

The reality of my blogging activity right now is that it has become zero (in both blogs) and that I need a serious and calm revision of my way of organizing my own blogging activity so it remains a pleasant hobby and does not become (as it has happened) a burdensome unpaid work.

As I see it right now, the biggest part of the problem is that I would like to read and comment on way too many things, what is a practical impossibility. This happens in both facets of my blogging activity, the anthropological one and the socio-political one, however I reckon that the latter is the main cause of my stress. This is probably because I tend to try to cover all kind of news, often of great interest, through the whole world, as if my humble blog would be some sort of online newspaper or equivalent. This "vice" probably stems of my long activity in counter-information media in which I often fulfilled the role of volunteer journalist. I realize however that I cannot do that anymore, not at the level required by the flow of news much less respecting my own personal needs of leisure and rest.

Therefore I have decided to go on hiatus on both blogs as provisional measure, while I meditate and reorganize my blogger activity and take a much needed vacation of sorts, something I had not done in years (sure: no problem... until you break down). This "vacation" may take some time.

I have also decided that I will continue with the anthropological blog in due time because I do feel it is the activity that seems more important of what I do, having a greater impact, applause and (arguably) need. I will still take that "vacation" as needed but I plan to return some time soon (at worst around new year, just to mark a deadline). I will have to be more selective however on what to comment in order to more effectively use my time in a pleasurable and productive way. I also need to be a bit better organized.

Instead I have made no clear decission about the political blog because I realize that the current format is not working for me. I need to meditate a lot on this but so far I know that the information blog it is a format that does not work, certainly not for me, and that a counter-information medium needs of a cooperative work and cannot be built just on individual voluntarism. However I do not want to renounce to express myself on such matters but I have to ponder very carefully how to focus my interest. Essay only is something that does not really capture my imagination so I'm pondering some sort of equivalent to what could be a small weekly or bi-weekly magazine (in the less regular blog format of course), with one or few articles on selected matters much more sporadically than now.

It is just a preliminary idea and I am setting no deadlines for the political blog's hiatus yet therefore. I have first to chew on all this in much greater depth.

Selecting is still a problem for both blogs and something that burdens me as well, but, other than eliminating those feeds that only rarely produce useful information, which are not that many, and being somewhat more careless about reading and pondering them, I haven't found any solution.

Certainly getting myself better organized is important. Also taking more time can in some cases produce better quality materials. So in general I do have that idea of being much more selective than before on what I dedicate my efforts to and a bit less immediate. We'll see how it works.


In brief:

For what they were... we are continues in hiatus but will come back soon[TM], hopefully improved.

For what we are... they will be is now in hiatus and I have no clear idea of what to do with it yet. I needs a deep rethinking clearly.

Comments will continue to be pre-moderated in both blogs because, even if the troll activity seems to have greatly receded, I fear that some of them are just lurking around in wait of a change in this situation (so obsessive they are in many cases). The last thing I need is to be away from the computer for a few days and find my blogs full of trollish junk when I come back.

Also those reading the Wordpress version of For what they were... probably want to follow the Blogspot version by the moment, not just because it is the one I actually write on (the Wordpress one being a mirror or backup by the moment, getting only irregular updates) but because it is where the discussions really are (although admittedly right now they are all quite cold because of the ongoing hiatus).

I have not been able to decide if to migrate to Wordpress or not. This is another thing I need time for. It's largely a matter of familiarity and functionality, so I would indeed welcome opinions of people who are familiar with the Wordpress format, which I find myself sometimes struggling with to get what I want, for example a sidebar with a blogroll.

Thanks for your patience and all your supportive comments, they do make a difference, really.

Blog hiatus and troll emergency issues

I'll go into hiatus for some days or weeks. I have not been blogging too much as of late and feeling guilty about it but today I really don't care anymore: 90% of the last comments have been made by banned individuals which I deem trolls for a number of reasons (including racism and homophobia but mostly just being annoying pricks) and some other who is quite borderline. 

That takes a toll on me: instead of reading what I like my blog to motivate, interesting comments and discussions, I just read very annoying and often offensive junk, being forced to delete comments one by one and what not. Naturally it takes a toll on me and the flu of four days already I'm going through does not help my patience either.

I will consider it for the rest of the week but most likely I will end up finishing my already planned migration to WordPress. After all this open source blogging platform offers better troll-control tools (and does not allow state governments to censor individual blogs, something that Blogger does, kinda reminding our state slavery every day with state codes after the raw blog address for everyone outside the states).

By the moment in any case comment moderation is on. If you are not a Nazi or a total jerk or both (and that includes already banned individuals, of course), your comments will appear as soon as I read them.

On strike next 24 hrs

This blog will be on strike for all the day of May 30th (CET), as a general strike against the bankster doctrine of "austerity for the poor, massive profits for the rich" has been called in the Southern Basque Country. 

More details here.

Blog issues

Not sure if this affects everybody but in the last few days I noticed that the (unclicked) links in the blog are being displayed in plain blue color that strongly contrasts with the overall theme of the blog in a quite ugly manned. I have revised the template a couple of times and even gone through the HTML code and can't find any error, so either Blogger is doing something strange or my browser needs updating. I'd be glad to get feedback on this: do you see unclicked links blue or (as it should be) of an ochre color?

Update on the color issue (Apr 3): it was caused by HTML code in the table at the end of the Italian Neanderthal mtDNA entry. Only pages with that entry displayed links in blue. The specific code, which was surgically removed once detected was:

A:link { color: rgb(0, 0, 255); }

Thanks to all people who produced feedback but very specially to Toos, without whose help I would have never detected the source of the problem.

__________________________________  . __________________________________

Comment moderation

I'm still licking the emotional wounds caused by trolls (not just here but also elsewhere) and therefore, in order to be able to better enjoy this vacation, I have decided to keep preliminary comment moderation for a bit longer. My most sincere apologies to all commenters of good will but what I  really need some rest. I also have very clear that I will not tolerate anymore any trollish behavior, even if camouflaged. I will however issue warnings for those who are not extreme but I will also apply the baseball rule: three strikes and you're out. 

I realize that satisfactory discussion environment needs of some "gardening", what means getting rid as soon as possible of the undesirable weeds. Even if the overall number of comments falls down, that is not necessarily a bad thing, although not my objective at all.

Internet trolls playing their sick and stupid mind games (source)

Comment moderation again

I have decided to banish TerryT from the comments section. He's just manipulating all I say and throwing insults and accusations. I have been extremely patient for many many years but I have really grow tired of all that almost every day. There is another person (guess who) just one step from going down the drain.

In consequence, I have decided to moderate comments for a week or so, establishing that way a buffer of comfort for myself. 

The list of people banned from commenting in this blog (from memory) is:

• German Dziebel - cause: smartass trolling
• Octavià Alexandre - cause: smartass trolling, personal attacks
• DDeden - cause: some sort of mental problems apparently
• Onur - cause: stubborn use of racist-like language under a varnish of "scientific terminology". Unbanned "on probation" Sep. 6th 2013 (original reason of bane edited after controversy).
• TerryT - cause: smartass trolling, personal attacks, insistently putting words in my mouth that have nothing to do with reality, abusing without any consideration my dedication to this blog, etc.

Sorry for the inconvenience to all readers and commenters of good will, who are the vast majority.

Iberian Neolithic blog (Spanish language) is back online

Several readers have asked me in this last year about links to the most interesting blog Neolítico de la Península Ibérica (essentially in Spanish language), occasionally mentioned here, which has been down (unaccessible because the author wanted it that way) for many months. 

I am very glad to announce that it is now back with nothing less than three new entries in a row (which I had not time to read yet):

• Neolítico y Europa: expansión, áreas de avance y áreas de contacto (Neolithic and Europe: expansion, advance areas and contact areas).
• Neolitización y Migración: ¿qué hay de nuevo? (Neolithization and Migration: what is new?)
• Nuevas evidencias del consumo de la leche durante el Neolítico (New evidences of milk consumption in the Neolithic)
    

On strike 24 hrs

Even if it is a yellow unions' call to strike, the reasons are many so I still feel obliged to second the semi-quasi-pan-Euro wannabe general strike of November 14. Therefore there will be no activity in For what they were... we are on this day and only strike related info in my politico blog For what we are... they will be.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Full day strike in Iberia, half journey strike in Italy and Greece, mere symbolic actions elsewhere - that's what they call the first "pan-European" general strike - next time should be better hopefully.

In the Basque country the majority (independentist) unions have  not even supported the strike, largely because they consider (rightfully) that the callers are class traitors white-washing their complicity. 

Still I and many others feel that we can't afford the luxury of not walking out in the extreme circumstances that they are pushing us into. 

Blog will NOT get ads

In the end Google AdSense has resulted impossible to deal with. Their bots claim that I have copyright infractions in this blog but they don't provide any details whatsoever, making impossible for me to be able to correct such vices. 

It was even suggested by some that the WP backup could be considered plausible copyright violation because there is another site with exactly the same content, go figure! Dealing with bots is worse than dealing with the worst bureaucracy apparently.

It has taught to me again this precious lesson: even if you wish to sell your soul, so to say, it's most uncertain that customers will be available.

Thanks for your support in any case.

Blog will get ads

(source)

Sadly I feel compelled to find economic resources in places I would not have tried before, so I have, after much procrastination, decided to include paid publicity in this blog via Google AdSense. I apologize to all readers for the bother and also because, in order to increase the site's actual traffic, I have cut RSS feed to short format, what make you force to visit the blog more often and not just read on the RSS.

I really really really hate it but if I can make some $300 monthly out of it (we'll see but that's what I have estimated based on what I could read around the net for similar traffic as this blog already has), then I must do it. If more, then the better, if much less, maybe not worth it.  As far as I know (it's all very obscure), I will get money based on both traffic and ad-clicks, specially the latter.

On the positive side I hope that, it motivates me to make this blog an even better site. 

I may also start a sidekick blog in Spanish language. Some people have in the past suggested me to do it but I was always reluctant because of the greater work it would be.  However, if I professionalize some of my blogs in the sense of expecting earnings from them, I can also think of that as a job and not anymore as just a hobby, so I can work more (and hopefully better) in them. 

Again my apologies for all the inconvenience. Feel free to discuss.