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The Countercurrents of Prehistory: What Rare Genes Can Say about Early Human Migration
308 pages, Hardcover
Published June 18, 2025
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October 22, 2025
This work greatly reframes our current understanding of ancient history. Donald Yates does not fail to deliver his thought provoking thesis of globally active confederated sea peoples, seeding the first civilizations known to man. Akin to his works on the Cherokee this approach is multi-displinary delving into archeology, comparative mythology,linguistics, and anthropology, with paramont emphasis placed on new findings of rare genes in their world wide distributions patterns. As with the other preceding titles Yates is to be commended for meaningfully highlighting and inter-weaving native tradition in this grand fabric of different threads of data.
Better yet this is all done within a prose which captivates the average reader. If you are new to his works prepare to embark on a fascinating world of intrepid exploration and migration, sunken lands, catastrophes, the mother godess and her universal veneration in matristic societies, real 20th century Amazons, and the once hidden but now unveiled relations of many world populations to Austronesian colonizers. You will not be dissapointed.
One last compliment I would like to give the author, is for providing a potential ressurrection of a certain view of cultural history that has been consigned to obsolescence even by many wihtin what is called the diffusionist camp for many years. This has to do with the notion of civilization being spread initially through colonizing offshoots of a seaborne mother culture which in the case of Yates' proposal are the austronesians of the southeast asian sunken landmass called sundaland. The analysis of Robert Chadwichs 'Prospector culture' and the similar 'Primordial Culture' of William J. Perry, in light of the distribution of rare genes will hopefully reappraise this view within the school of diffusionism in the years to come.
Better yet this is all done within a prose which captivates the average reader. If you are new to his works prepare to embark on a fascinating world of intrepid exploration and migration, sunken lands, catastrophes, the mother godess and her universal veneration in matristic societies, real 20th century Amazons, and the once hidden but now unveiled relations of many world populations to Austronesian colonizers. You will not be dissapointed.
One last compliment I would like to give the author, is for providing a potential ressurrection of a certain view of cultural history that has been consigned to obsolescence even by many wihtin what is called the diffusionist camp for many years. This has to do with the notion of civilization being spread initially through colonizing offshoots of a seaborne mother culture which in the case of Yates' proposal are the austronesians of the southeast asian sunken landmass called sundaland. The analysis of Robert Chadwichs 'Prospector culture' and the similar 'Primordial Culture' of William J. Perry, in light of the distribution of rare genes will hopefully reappraise this view within the school of diffusionism in the years to come.
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