The recent book 'Who We Are and How We Got Here" is an intelligent and extremely informative book by the Harvard geneticist David Reich on the various
migrations and transformations of Homo Sapiens over the last 100,000 years.
The book details the genetic origins of today's various human beings. For example, contemporary Europeans and East Asians share 1/3rd of DNA that has
been successfully correlated with a 24,000 year old skeleton from Mal'ta, Russia, indicating that a long time ago a North Eurasian group of humans
went westwards into Europe, and eastwards into Asia, and inrerbred with the local populations there.
Around 9,000 years ago, near east farmers came into Europe where they subsequently interbred with the hunter-gatherers (who were by now a partial
mixture of north Eurasians and western European hunter-gatherer).
Around 5,000 years ago, around the northern black sea, the Yamnaya culture spread out and spread Indo-European culture to Iran and India in the east,
and into eastern Europe, and then western Europe.
An interesting finding of this book is that present day male Indian populations, particularly North Indians (i.e. lighter skinned, non-Dravidian
speaking Indians) share around 40% of Y chromosomal DNA with other west Eurasians (i.e. Indo-Europeans). On the other hand, about 90% of Indian males
have mitochondrial DNA that is unique to Dravidians, or "south Indians". To make this insinuation clearer: Brahmins have been shown to have a higher
rate of west-Eurasian (Indo-European) ancestry than other north Indians.
The conclusion is quite clear: the Indo-European speaking Yamnaya culture, in entering (and probably, destroying) the Indus valley civilization,
killed the inhabitants (as the Rig Veda describes) and took the local females as wives.
The higher percentage of Indo-European DNA in Brahmins is interpreted by Reich as suggesting that the Yamnaya people's also spread their religion
along with their language and culture (they were probably all a single deal). And hence, the Brahmins persisted for a monstrously long time in a
position of authority, as their genes attest.
It is interesting to look at human history through the lens of paleoanthropology, where archeology, genetics, and psychology, come together to make
sense of what humans believed, why they believed what they believed, and how important technology is to the transformation of the psyche so that the
mind comes to reflect the 'tools' with which it interacts with.
The Yamnaya invented the wheel and cart, and also were the first ones to hitch a horse to the wheel and cart to create a chariot. Archeologists
believe that the Yamnaya were important trading partners with Uruk, the Mesopotamian civilization that had been blossoming at around the same time.
The thought is, the Yamnaya peoples were rough; they worked the mines; and they were metallurgists. In exchange for these precious raw commodities,
they may have absorbed some of the traditions that were than popular in the near east.
gods, values, and projection
If one considers the Yamnaya as the first "Aryans", then it is pretty incredible that, after nearly 5,000 years, that this invidious force still
controls so much of the world.
The whole of civilization appears to have been traumatic - as scholars and researchers are beginning to better appreciate. We weren't built for this
sort of way of living; being sedentery, interacting with so many strangers - it was bound to transform how our brains experienced itself, and
therefore, how we understood teh world around us.
Values and gods are exactly the same thing. Very rightly - and logically - did the ancients think in terms of 'gods', when they considered what really
mattered. Life was built around 'gods', because, indeed, in everything we do - in every act of our assertiveness, we are giving expression to the
values that are regulating our bodily engagement with the world. And what are those values? And how do they form? Is precisely what the "god"
represents: it is the canalized history, the attractor, the 'teleodynamism' - the 'spirit' which "moveth" through the particles, cells, and rythms of
your hierarchically organized organism.
What is not normal, or healthy, is having suffered trauma, and to know you have, and to still think you are capable of reasoning in a way that departs
from a sense of moral responsibility to the 'others' around you. Since this is a normal motivation, and not all people are, as chaosorder has written
in another thread, motivated to "destroy".
We are only free when we understand the conditions which constrain our choice. Asymmetry is the biggest constraint of all: it makes us act in a
'dissolute' way - literally, our brain undergoes what the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson called "dissolution", where external brain areas that
evolved in mammals degrade to a reptile fight-flight response in the midbrain, and if this too fails to secure defense for the body, the system will
enact its 'emergency' system, and fake death i.e. freeze, become limp, which from a neurological and homeodynamic perspective is a profound shift in
metabolic functioning in the body. Trauma takes away choice - not enhancing it. Dissociation as a mechanism of self-regulation delusionally creates
the impression that you 'don't need' your environment, when your environment is always 'feeding back' into your ventral brain, which in turn yields
its results to produce a feeling of 'good' in you.
Just because you don't notice or recognize the origin of your feelings from a previous cause doesn't mean there isn't one; nor does it mean that the
universe doesn't obligate you, as a reasonable - i.e. 'reason able' being - to know, and learn, because semiosis is the nature of this reality of
ours.
Mattering MATTERS. Brain matter and mattering, coherency in psychological perception and neurogenesis, are simultaneous facts; concurrent processes
that make reality.
You, in other words, are already enacting a sort of 'magic' within youself simply in existing.
Are we gods, as the inferiority complex, defensively focused serpent says in genesis? We are powerful; but this power requires a brain-mind that fully
knows itself, and this world, with its problems and its aggressions, makes that an exquisitely difficult task, nevermind laden with traps and snares
and false positives and delusions that pull us off our track by our understandable need to regulate ourselves.
Ultimately, it seems in our best interest, to behave in the ways the universe works, and also to see anything that occurs within us as being "of us" -
being a psychodynamic property of our own being-in-the-world-with-others. So much happens here; every day, we affect within ourself and are affected
by others. It is this, these forces created between, and then within our own beings, that the complexities of our semiotic dynamics unfold.
A person who wishes for something 'more' is being unrealistic. They are still caught in the reinforcing feedback loop of impulsively enacting their
need for something 'to be so', not to mention the social pleasure/pride that comes from making assertions and feeling the effect of your actions on
the interpersonal ambience around you.
edit on 19-6-2018 by Astrocyte because: (no reason given)