Part 9 - Where Are You From?

(This is Part 9 in a series. The rest can be found here. http://rakestrawjeff.blogspot.com/?m=1)


“Where are you from?”  We have all been asked the question many times, and in many different situations.  Perhaps you sit next to someone on an airplane and strike up a conversation.  Maybe it’s the first day in a new classroom and you are trying to make friends.

The answer varies, not out of any deception but based on what it is people are asking.  I was born in a hospital in Kirkwood, MO but I am not from Kirkwood.  I am from Ellisville, where I was raised.  But the correct answer to the question is often Lafayette High School, not Ellisville, especially if you are from St. Louis.  If you are not from St. Louis then the simplest answer is often just St. Louis, or just Missouri.

Sometimes the question refers to a larger idea of “you”.  Sometimes they are asking where your family is from.  The answer to that for me was always easy; “we” were from Kentucky.  My parents had moved here from Kentucky before I was born, and all of our relatives came from there on both sides.  We were from Kentucky.  That was easy.

But, sometimes the question went further…where were the Rakestraws from…before Kentucky?  Where did we “come over” from originally?  Were we Italian? Irish? Spanish?  What nationality was Rakestraw? (We knew but often forgot that people were already here)

My parents were not much help.  My Dad thought we were mostly British or German, and my Mom said her folks were Welsh and maybe Cherokee.  We never did any Welsh or German or British or Cherokee stuff. Mainly we just did Ellisville stuff, and occasionally stuff from the rural hills of Kentucky where our folks were from.

The question has become easier to answer recently with advancements in science and technology.  We can get some answers from genetics already, although in what will surely turn out to be a rudimentary form of what it will someday become.  There is also a revolution going on with archeology and linguistics and new information from geology and occasionally even history.  

This flood of new information is rewriting many things that we were taught as children.  New hard evidence may come from many sources.  The DNA of people found in kurgan burials from tens of thousands of years ago provides direct evidence that we did not have before. Linguistic studies can shed light on the movements and origins of peoples and force us to re-evaluate earlier thinking.

What does it mean to be German or British or Welsh or French or Spanish or Cherokee or Russian?  As a kid I started out not sure and gradually stereotypes were filled in for each of those words.  But beyond those stereotypes, what did it really mean?  Was it all about Alfred the Great or Clovis or Frederick the Great? If I could pinpoint my genealogy to one of these what would that say about me?

Where are YOU from? On the widest possible scale as of this writing it appears we all still came out of Africa about a hundred thousand years ago.  When we did we found a few Neanderthals and mated with a few here and there.  We will await further information but for now that looks like a given.  We spread out and went in all different directions over time, and there are debates being debated and settled over exactly how.

Back in Ellisville we spoke English.  English is part of the Indo-European language family, and it is believed that there was an actual proto-Indo-European language that was actually spoken sometime before 4000 BC. From that one language would have come everything from English and German and Celtic to the Indo Iranian languages and Sanskrit.  Over 40% of the world’s population now speaks a language believed to be derived from that original proto Indo-European language.

There is some debate, but it is believed by most that the first speakers of that language lived just north of the Black and Caspian Seas, in the Pontic Steppes.  They may have been the Yamna or Kvalynsk cultures of the late copper or early bronze ages.  These are the first known peoples to be thought to have shared a common linguistic heritage with me. Again…at this point in time, subject to change.

The problem with history is that it has a terrible bias toward those who wrote things down, and especially those who wrote things down on things that lasted.  There was plenty of culture and civilization prior to history, but history is by definition a study of that which was written down.  We have no written history whatsoever prior to the Sumerians in about 3500 BC, and those were mostly lists of grain and other things in storage.

The first Indo-European society with a written history was that of the Hittites, who lived just south of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey or ancient Anatolia.  They are thought to have moved down from the Pontic Steppe sometime after 3000 BC and overtook the native Hattians.  They would eventually form an empire and give the Egyptians and Assyrians fits.  The Egyptians and Assyrians and Sumerians all spoke languages that were not Indo-European.

The Celtic language is another Indo-European language whose history is undergoing some change. It now appears that Celtic language and society spread along the Atlantic coasts of Europe from Spain to France to England and Ireland as a trading culture which moved inland, from west to east.  It is an Indo-European language, which if the earlier theory is correct would mean these folks, like the Hittites, migrated from the Pontic Steppes, in this case to the Atlantic coast and settled there, while replacing and disrupting the people who were there before. 

Geologists refer to the 5.9 kiloyear event, sometime around 3900 BC, which triggered the desiccation of the Sahara, and mass migrations around the globe.  Human beings moved to river valleys and toward lakes and oceans and seas.  The Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates and the Black and Mediterranean Seas, along with river valleys around the world, saw people migrating toward them. In these places, the number of people increased and cities grew.

Larger cities grew more complex, and they had need for things like written language to record the grain storage on clay tablets.  Up north, in the steppes, they still lived a nomadic life which did not grow more complex in the same way the Assyrians did.  The Scythians would become excellent horsemen and fearsome warriors, as would the nomadic steppe people north of the Black and Caspian Seas for several thousand years.

Sargon the Great would unite and conquer the peoples of Anatolia and Mesopotamia into the Akkadian Empire, the world’s first, sometime around 2300 BC.  His daughter Enheduanna is the oldest known writer with a recorded name.  She was a high priestess and wrote poetry to her goddess.  

There are older kings and civilizations than Sargon and Akkad.  Narmer (or Menes) united Egypt around 3100 BC, and Sumerian rulers go back before Gilgamesh, who would have lived around 2700 BC and who is now considered to be an actual historical figure.  But Sargon was the first to conquer all of the city-states in the region into an empire.  

The Akkadian Empire lasted for a couple of hundred years, until it finally collapsed from repeated attacks from the Gutians, who were a tribe from the north of Akkad who some link ancestrally to the Kurdish people.  The period around 2100 also coincides with what geologists called the 4.2 kiloyear event, which was a severe period of climate change around 2100 BC which brought drought and caused human migrations around the globe. Effects are seen from Egypt and Mesopotamia to India and China.

Back in northern Europe, up in England, 700 years before Sargon of Akkad, sometime around the time of the first unification of Egypt, people started building Stonehenge.  It would be started before Gilgamesh was born, and the major stones would be in place at roughly the same time the Great Pyramid was built around 2500 BC.

I have no way of knowing where all of my ancestors were in 3000 BC.  Perhaps some of them were Egyptians or Assyrians, but linguistically they would be more likely to be Hittites.  I can see my mother as a good sturdy Hittite woman raising good Hittite children.  Dad would be a good upstanding Hittite citizen as well, and they would teach us to be good Hittite children.

It is hard to imagine what our “culture” would be like.  Consider that there was of course no television or radio or internet or electricity.  No cars, planes, trains.  No engines.  No bicycles, or, let’s see…iron.

No books.  No writing. No air conditioning.  No toilets. Culture?  You mean pottery and clothing and shoes?  I am sure they had music, but I have no idea beyond human voice what it would have sounded like.  

If my ancestors later ended up being “northern European”, then there might be more probability that they were already in northern Europe in 3000 BC.  Recent DNA studies of people from the British Isles indicate that instead of being the products of mass migrations much of the British DNA is indigenous. The Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and Normans all made an impact on the British population but a surprising amount of Pict and Briton ancestry remains.

Another possibility is that in 3000 BC my ancestors were still up above the Black Sea, learning to live with horses and make a life in the cold north and open steppes.  They may have been the Scythians, roaming around central Asia in small groups and occasionally travelling south to take from those living in the cities what they may have needed to survive in tough times. Archeologists have recently confirmed the Scythians used cannabis and other drugs in religious ceremonies before the collapse of the Bronze Age.

These people would bring down more than just one empire.  The Umman Manda, as they were known, translates as the “horde from who knows where” in the Akkadian language and in the most general terms it refers to the people who have always occupied the area where the Indo-European languages first originated, the PonticSteppes.

No doubt the study of genetics, along with linguistics and archeology and geology and history will shed a lot of light on the question of where my ancestors originated in the coming decades.  My personal guess right now would be based on Occam’srazor.  Most likely the people who spoke proto Indo European migrated in all directions from the Pontic Steppes, south into Anatolia and east down into India, and west into Europe, where they disrupted whoever was there and dispersed into the various regions.

The Celts were from these people, and so were the Germanic tribes and Vikings and all of the other people we have described, mixed in with what were the previous populations.  Just my guess, but the simplest explanation for where “my people” came from was that they had been in northern Europe for a while before Sargon the Great started the first empire down in Assyria in 2300 BC.

Imagine you are having a dream.  Somehow (because dreams are magic) you know that it is 1000 years in the future.  You are long dead, but this is a dream so it doesn’t freak you out when you find that they have dug you up and want to ask you a few questions.  Your dream turns to a nightmare when their first question is, “how could you people have done this?” followed by, “what kind of monsters were you people”?

In your dream you try to figure out what they are talking about.  What went wrong? They talk among themselves, some want verification that you are from the right culture.  And there you are, in your old elementary school picture, tying you directly to the Ellisville culture of the early 1960’s.  No doubt about it, you are one of them.  You were part of that culture.

And what culture was that? Not our pottery or linens or the way we buried our dead. Was that Ellisville culture more Hittite or Celtic or Scythian?  Was it an Elvis Presley culture or a Frank Sinatra culture?

When the Pilgrims came to America from Europe they brought with them a certain culture.  We were taught growing up that they brought with them a level of civilization that the native inhabitants did not have.  (Never mind that this was not true – look at Cahokia).  Civilization means a level of complexity in society, a more complex social structure that allows for separation of labor and advancements in communications and social systems to allow more people to live together in larger groups.

But many people don’t want more complexity.  They prefer a simpler existence.  Those people will migrate away from the cities, and into the surrounding countryside.  If those people are pursued (for example in order to collect taxes) they move up into the hills.  They migrate.  And sometimes they come down from the hills and hiding places and attack.

Sometime around 1200 BC there was another round of climate change and migrations in Europe caused migrations in the Mediterranean. Volcanic eruptions and changes in climate started a process that brought an end to the Bronze Age.  All of the great civilizations around the Mediterranean collapsed except Egypt, which was badly damaged.  There was an invasion of what the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, who may be what we later know as the Philistines.

The earlier great proto-Greek civilizations like the Mycenaean’s and Minoans go silent.  Troy falls.  Assyria and Elam and Babylon go away.  Out of the land of Canaan the Israeli people will start to arise during this period but it will be another 200 years before there will be a Solomon or David or a temple.  

The people who lived before the Collapse of the Bronze Age live in an entirely different world than we do.  The oldest stories in the Old Testament had not occurred yet.  Moses had not written his commandments, and the sturdy Hittite woman could not have used them to train her children to know right from wrong.  The people who built Stonehenge likewise had to build their culture on the wisdom of the ages, which came down to them without the benefit of writing.

My grandparents lived in the hills of western Kentucky.  They were not city dwellers.  My Grandpa raised animals and plowed the earth to plant seeds so he could have crops. My great Grandpa worked the same patch of ground.  Neither had electricity, at least early in their life, and they didn’t have much in the way of books.  No television.  No movies. No internet.

My father, on the other hand, was born into that exact same culture on that exact same piece of ground, but ended up much further from his Dad’s life than his Dad was from that Hittite family 3500 years ago.  You see, Mom and Dad moved to Ellisville.

I never lived on that farm in the hills of western Kentucky.  Dad came from that culture.  Throughout his life I saw him try to go back and recapture it, to try and relive or recreate it.  It was an impossible task, of course.  That culture is gone, even down on that same piece of ground.  We still go down there and camp and make fires, and we always use our I-phones to provide appropriate music while we sit out and look at the stars.  You know, just like Ma’am and Pap.

As I return to my dream these people from 1000 years into the future have tied me directly to the “culture” of Ellisville in the 1960’s I wonder what cultural traits they see.  Who were we, the residents of this village from the mid twentieth century?  What did we think and believe, and what kind of a “people” were we?

Were we hard working? Brave? Jaded? Lazy?  Were we an “honest” people? I look at the picture of my classmates from elementary school and the answer is yes.  And no. The truth is there was no “culture”, per se.  Ellisville was a relatively new thing; we were all transplanted from other places.  My parents had come from rural Kentucky but others had come from more urban areas. There was a tremendous migration going on in our society from rural areas to urban and suburban areas, and nobody had quite settled into place in the suburbs yet.

My father could not pass along his culture to me.  He was taught to tend animals and plant seeds and instead of using those skills he learned to manufacture things in giant factories that did not exist until he moved to Missouri and which have already been razed to the ground as I write this. 

I am not sure what the Ellisville culture of 1961-1979 was, but if I was raised in a certain culture that was it.  We did a whole bunch of things that no other culture had ever done before in the history of mankind.  We completed the transition from Thurman to Arch to Jeff, which is probably a more dramatic cultural change than almost any which preceded it.

As we continue our very long journey we will work our way to the beginning of my story, which begins in the 1800’s.  But as we continue this journey we are interested in how we came to our opinions on individualism, and the answer requires us to look at our biases and how we acquired them, whether through culture or genetics.

In the nicer ending to our dream, the people from 1000 years into our future just want to thank you.  They are honored to meet a member of this culture of yours that is so revered in the future.  Why would that be so?  What would it be about us, about what we do, that would have an impact on cultures a millennia from now?

Our nation was founded on a set of IDEAS.  We believe in equality and liberty and the sovereign nature of individuals.  We were founded on a set of IDEAS, even if they were never perfectly realized.  If we are to be honored by the people of 1000 years from now it will not be because of our culture or language or our impressive victories in a series of battles.  It will be because we were able to use a set of principles to guide us through migrations and climate changes and battles and upheavals that are a part of history.

In 387 BC Brennus and his Gauls defeated the Romans at the Battle of Allia and captured Rome.  In 52 BC Julius Caesar paid him back by defeating Vercingetorix at the Battle of Alesia and subjected Gaul to Roman rule.  By 370 AD, the Huns had arrived at the River Volga, and the beginning of the end had begun for Rome in the form of the horsemen from central Asia.

But the greatness of Rome was not in the armies that it put on the field or even the aqueducts or the roads.  The greatness of Rome was in the IDEAS.  It was in the Lex Hortensia and the Secession of the Plebs.  It was the establishment of a republican form of government that made them great, not the expansion of empire that followed, or the resultant collapse of the system.

The system collapsed.  The nomads invaded, and everyone migrated.  Just like always.

I believe in genetics, and I am excited to see what the knowledge will bring.  I know there will be advances in medicine and other benefits.  I know it will shed light on history and I am excited about that.  But I think there is danger in that knowledge as well.  Just as the Reformation combined with Gutenberg to bring the Bible and the interpretation thereof to mere common people, the internet will combine with our DNA information and the interpretation of that information is not going to be controlled by anyone.  We need to guard against its abuse.

We can and will look at the origins of France and England and Germany and Italy and Russia out of the fall of Rome, but for now we will end with our original question, which was,

“Where are you from?” 

In every sense that matters, I am from Ellisville.