….but not too much space – read on!

A little news item from Germany today jogged my mind into a similar local incident at Cheddar a few years back.  The two stories are almost identical in several ways for reasons that are hard to quantify…

Today’s News:

Cavemen’s descendants traced

Uncovering the ultimate family tree

Old News:

DNA links cave man to British teacher

Kings of Wessex School, Cheddar

• Now in both stories some ancient DNA has been extracted from some skeletal remains, one in Cheddar, the other in Germany.
• The scientists doing the work asked for volunteers to see if there was any local connection.  In both cases lots and lots of people volunteered to have their spit analysed.
• In both cases a direct connection by descent was found – on the maternal line naturally, because it’s mitochondrial DNA that was examined because that’s where the traceability lies.
• In both cases, the descendant was a middle aged male history teacher at a local school!

This shows that even though societies and civilisations come and go like the waxing and waning of the moon, there is a continuity in human existence that is wonderful.  It’s something that politicians and religions try to grasp and hold to control and manipulate, but in the end, they can never succeed.  No matter what they do and no matter how many scourges and conflicts cross the land, there are always people left to tell the tale.

In Germany, huge conflicts have probably passed by that spot many times in the last few centuries of recorded history.  The last century having a big effect particularly, you’d think.

In Cheddar, there would be the same but not so well recorded! (The remains are 9000 years old)

It’s a “normal” occurrence in war and conquest that women are very often raped and all the men killed as a means of continuing the victor’s lineage in the land.  I won’t list any but everyone has done it (and still are).  The catalogue of human shame is very long.

But this DNA work proves the victor’s goal cannot be attained.

All that happens is that the people have a tendency to stay where they always were and any “genetic overthrow” of one population by another is a fuzzy dream that won’t happen.  Because it’s the women that get pregnant and the women who have to rear the children.  And the mothers will quite naturally talk to and educate their offspring as best they can.  As the poem says,

“The Hand That Rocks The Cradle Is The Hand That Rules The World“

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