Anfenwick > Recent Status Updates

This book gets geographically and historically more complicated as it goes along. I keep thinking I need to learn a list of places and make a chronology.

This s the point at which I noticed that the bibliography and notes form a quarter of the book! Ah well... So, I'm a big fan of dairy products and should be more interested in the dairy farmers chapter, but unless palaeontologists can reconstruct the types of cheese they made, I feel a bit 'meh' about it.

Ch 5 - Should we say that farming spread across Europe in the Neolithic, or that farmers did? It would seem the answer is farmers (mostly). In fact, it seems a bit mechanical. Farming boosts populations, but all those people have to go somewhere, and take their farming with them. And their relationship with hunter-gatherers? There are no stereotypical answers, but they were necessarily a minority.

Ch 4 & 5 - Well, that ravelled and unravelled fast. I’d been wondering why anyone would be comparing this book to Lord of the Rings. If LoR is so ingrained in your consciousness that you could practically recite it, there are echoes here. I think they are false echoes. For me, they were triggered by a pattern of speech, then expanded. Quote of the day: “Tell we true, delicious, delicious.”

Ch 3 is about Europe's hunter-gatherers after the last ice age, right up until that lifestyle was abandoned about 5000 years ago. An interesting part is where they co-existed with farmers for a time, interesting because I've seen that in other more recent and more documented cultures.

So this Tracker guy has now learned to walk across a landscape without tripping over a snake which is good, because I have a bee in my bonnet about people who can't. It was cool how it just sort of happened, yeah, Marlon James is a really good writer (who knew!). It doesn't look like Tracker's ever going to get the hang of people, though. Quote of the day: "Being a fool is a curse too."

Ch 3 is good to read with Google Maps open alongside. Shock figure: between 46,000 years ago when humans entered Europe and 20,000 years ago when the Ice Age nearly forced them out, the population is guesstimated at less than 6000 individuals. A village on a continent!

The moral of the story so far is that people who run off into forests without knowing anything about them are very quickly going to end up either dead or educated. Or possibly both, if it’s that kind of fantasy. Quote of the day: “The only way to inside your head is I cut open and look, or you speak it out”.

Ch 2 - Migration: Principles and Problems. This chapter spends some time on genetic and linguistic technicalities, but underlying that is a much more interesting discussion about the fluidity and hybridity of culture, the mobility of people and the extent to which the two are or aren’t linked. Take-away on that one: it's complicated and varied.

Ch 1 - Who Are The Europeans? Bearing in mind the fact that the borders of Europe are particularly arbitrary... Starts with a very basic summary of genetic science. Easy to forget that a handful of decades ago, we didn't know this stuff. And how quickly it changes. Getting a grip on Europe’s past through genetics is ‘the intellectual equivalent of whitewater rafting’. This book will be wrong by next week!

Tracker has a very, very good sense of smell, so that like Sherlock Holmes, there's stuff he just knows. His job is finding things (or people) that are lost, and he goes about it methodically but largely amorally, as a bailiff might. On the other hand, Tracker is a hunter in a West African alternate universe so my first impression (Ch1) is that it's quite Forest of a Thousand Demons on acid.