Bryan Sykes Quotes
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Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.
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What began as a declaration of religious independence from Rome transformed over the years into a virulent doctrine of Saxon Teutonic racial superiority over
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The far more dependable Bede, writing from the monastery at Jarrow, completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is thanks to him that we are able to differentiate between the three tribes of ‘barbarians’, namely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. According to Bede, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula of northern Denmark occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons from Saxony in north-west Germany settled in southern England. They eventually differentiated into the East Saxons, in Essex, the Mid-Saxons farther west (and remembered in the now vanished county of Middlesex) and the West Saxons of Wessex, which was much later divided into Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. The Angles, originally located in Angeln in southern Denmark, between Saxony and Jutland, took over East Anglia, as well as the Midlands, which became Mercia, and Northumbria in the north-east.
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I will leave you to imagine a world without men, but there is one immediate benefit from their extinction. Adam's curse is permanently lifted. Sexual selection disappears, for the simplest of reasons - there are no longer two sexes. Sperm no longer fights sperm for access to eggs. There are no sperm to do battle, no Y-chromosomes to enslave the feminine. The destructive spiral of greed and ambition fuelled by sexual selection diminishes and, as a direct result, the sickness of our planet eases. The world no longer reverberates to the sound of men's clashing antlers and the grim repercussions of private and public warfare.
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We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.
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Ironically, although the Y-chromosome has become synonymous with male aggression, it is intrinsically unstable. Adam is as much cursed as cursing.
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Are the different species defined by paleontologists - Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens - all part of the same gene pool or not?
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The gradual colonization of the west from the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata during the first half of the first millennium AD, and the consolidation of their Gaelic kingdom in Scotland following their defeat by the Ui Neill, had an immense cultural impact in Scotland.
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...Once again confirms that there is no such thing as genetically pure classification into different races.
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The final withdrawal of the Roman army, some fifty years later, left England completely undefended and the population unprotected. Four centuries of occupation, during which citizens and slaves alike were forbidden even to carry arms and all weapons and military equipment were in the hands of the army, had left a population unaccustomed to warfare. That is not to say that the population was necessarily completely defenceless. Everyone must have seen this coming, and there were unknown numbers of retired veterans living in the towns and countryside. There may even have been remnants of a command structure at York and around Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was not breached by the Picts, who must, therefore, have taken to the sea to attack the North Sea coasts in the great rising of 367. There were already Germanic settlements in eastern England based on former auxiliary units of the Roman army.
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The Nature of the Beast. I have always been curious about other human species...
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As this book will show, objectively defined races simply do not exist. Even Arthur Mourant realized that fact nearly fifty years ago, when he wrote: 'Rather does a study of blood groups show a heterogeneity in the proudest nation and support the view that the races of the present day are but temporary integrations in the constant process of . . . mixing that marks the history of every living species.' The temptation to classify the human species into categories which have no objective basis is an inevitable but regrettable consequence of the gene frequency system when it is taken too far. For several years the study of human genetics got firmly bogged down in the intellectually pointless (and morally dangerous) morass of constructing ever more detailed classifications of human population groups.
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Our DNA does not fade like an ancient parchment; it does not rust in the ground like the sword of a warrior long dead. It is not eroded by wind or rain, nor reduced to ruin by fire and earthquake. It is the traveller from an ancient land who lives within us all.
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Where Eve chooses to go, Adam is bound to travel.
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There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification. I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. We're very closely related.
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By looking at the details of the DNA, it is possible to chart the flow of your ancestry from your ultimate grandmother to more modern times.
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Myths have a very long memory.
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DNA is the messenger which illuminates that connection,handed down from generation to generation,carried,literally,in the bodies of my ancestors.