Gifts from the East: Some Comments on the Yue, Euchee, Austronesians and Sundaland

 Euchee Indians and others in the Americas came from Polynesians and Sea Peoples. And Polynesians and Sea Peoples came from Austronesians, and Austronesians came from the Yue tribes in China. And the Yue were among the autochthonous Tai-Kadai-speaking populations now living south of the Yangtze River into North Vietnam who were squeezed south and into the mountains and onto the coasts and at last onto islands and boats by the all-conquering patriarchal Han Chinese. That’s the message in a nutshell in Donald Yates’s new book The Countercurrents of Prehistory: What Rare Genes Can Tell Us about Early Human Migration, soon to be published by DNA Consultants’ publishing company Panther’s Lodge Publishers. Here are some sample passages from Chapter 1,”Face That Launched a Thousand Ships,” of Yates’s book. The book is about markers, matriarchal societies, patriarchies and worldwide maritime travel beginning at the end of the last Ice Age. One theme is the gradual diffusion of matriarchal peoples across the Pacific, as proposed by Heide Goettner-Abendroth (to whom the 300 page work is dedicated as the founder of modern matriarchal studies). It may be one of the few books that combines genes and spiritual  beliefs–both of which are “archeologically invisible,” largely speaking, although ancient DNA is beginning to shed some light on these important subjects. 

 

Though STR markers are primarily just a range of numbers that permits us to uniquely identify persons and populations, the Odin Gene has a deeper side. Its locus on the tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) enzyme involves it in production of dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine (the pleasure and fight-or-flight responses). We saw earlier that THO1=10 has been linked to impulsive male aggression (the Sundaland Gene). The Odin Gene is adjacent to this rare  gene on the ladder of haplotypes. The double or bi-allelic values of 6, 9.3 are very, very common, especially in Europe, Eurasia and North and South America.  Studies have been done on these “normal” haplotypes.

In the words of one researcher,

 

The results of this study indicate that the 6 and 9.3 TH01 alleles are associated with a decrease in the hemodynamic responses to stress, offering a protective effect to individuals carrying those alleles. Carriers of the TH01-6 allele displayed a lower heart rate reactivity when exposed to stressors with increasing age than those without the TH01-6 allele. Furthermore, individuals carrying TH01-9.3 showed no increase in systolic blood pressure in response to stress, whereas those not possessing the TH01-9.3 allele demonstrated a significant increase in systolic blood pressure reactivity with increasing age.[1]

 

Translation: People with these markers (THO1=6, 9.3) do not overreact to stress. They would seem to make good warriors, decision makers and leaders. It is in a way the opposite side of the Sundaland Gene, which is tied to a different value on the same locus.

I must emphasize that none of these THO1 genotypes is causative of disease, only sometimes a coefficient. Most of the traits reported (such as reaction to stress) are multifactorial , that is, affected by both genes and the environment.[2] Ancestry plays a large role, too.

4. Sundaland with flooded regions in light gray. Source: Soares et al (2008).

5. The signature of ancient European hunter-gatherers can be studied in a map of what DNA Consultants has called the Odin Gene. This well-traveled marker is defined by a diagnostic value on the locus THO1. Leading populations are Swedish, Belarusian, Flemish, Dutch, Melungeon, Norwegian, Maltese, Slovakians, Caucasus, Polish and German. The absence of high matches in Africa suggests it was not very ancient in its period of expansion. atDNA 11.5.

 

The Helen Gene, Sundaland Gene and Odin Gene are all very rare considering their sparse occurrence around the world. But they are comparatively common in certain populations. If you match those populations with your DNA Fingerprint report, you can infer that you probably got the rare gene from the population where it is common. For example, if you got the Odin Gene in your Rare Genes from History results and Swedish in the no. 1 position in your DNA Fingerprint test, you may take it that your protection against stress is genetically linked to Swedish ancestry. This is an oversimplified example of interpreting and correlating the two tests. You may have gotten your copy of the Odin Gene from any of the other world populations, even from one where it is exceedingly scarce, but the odds favor a Scandinavian source, not Chinese inheritance.

You must poll all witnesses to arrive at solid conclusions—DNA, family traditions, medical history, the word of elders and many more pieces of evidence. No single one of them entirely rules.

And remember: no population is pure; all are mixed. And even if you got a gene—say the gene for level-headedness or a “Viking gene”—human beings do not necessarily obey their nature in a deterministic way. The Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin did not believe ancestry determined much at all, even though he had an illustrious background and became president of a prestigious New England genealogical society. He was far from being an essentialist in his philosophy.

 

More Like Priests Than Pirates

In the modern day, sailors are often depicted as profane and lawless. But in ancient times, they were the most religious of people. Greek and Roman sailors faced the masthead, or palladium, of the ship and said prayers every new day. Sailors lived in a world full of rituals, omens, taboos and votive offerings. They were more like priests than pirates.

Long distance seafaring is older than most people believe. Deep-water navigation goes back to Mesolithic times. Ships were always under the protection of the Mother Goddess, a sign that the Goddess religion held sway of yore rather than patriarchal systems. Phoenician ships were devoted to Tanit, “the principal goddess of Carthage in North Africa…one of the most traveled deities of all.” They evidently left homage to her in Arkansas, Vermont, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas, Tennessee, Ohio, Colorado, Nevada, California and Louisiana.[3]

When the argonauts are cast away on the sands of North Africa, they turn to their ship as their “Mother” and carry its timbers with them to the next body of water (Apollonius of Rhodes, 4.1327ff.). Even today, ships around the world “are generally considered as feminine.”[4] The outrigger canoe later spread by the Yue and Austronesians was first developed by the original matriarchal peoples of South China and called Mother-Son Boat. The colorful dragon boats of the Miao people fall within this tradition.

Chunming Wu in 2021 pieced together the available archeology and living shipbuilding traditions of Chinese minorities and Austronesian peoples for the first time, producing a new “blueprint” for innovative prehistoric navigation.[5] Heide Goettner-Abendroth has an important chapter on matriarchies of the world summarizing her ethnological visits and learning experiences with Yao, Miao and Yue women.[6]

 

Mother Ships

No vessel sailed in ancient times without a religious festival celebrated by the entire community, and no ship was without a protector goddess. The aphlaston was a curving stern symbolizing the watchful eyes of the bird-goddess near the poop deck. “Devices mounted at the stem and stern were intended to endow the ship with a life of its own.”[7] Bird-headed images were attached to ships of all sorts not just for their beauty but also for their magico-religious properties. The Sea Peoples favored migratory web-footed water-birds like ducks because of their own origins in southeastern Europe and amphibious, wandering nature.

In a previous book, we raised the possibility that the Cherokee Paint Clan, the Ani-Wodi, really meant Those Descended from Woden. Wodi (pronounced Woe-tee), we argued, was not an element that made sense in the Cherokee language. On the contrary, asuhwisga and disuhwisdi are the Cherokee words for “paint.” Wodi is obviously foreign. We have proposed that Cutans, another clan, are the people from the East Mediterranean (Kittim, an ethnic designiation used for Aegean peoples) and the Paint Clan are their Celtic-Germanic-Iberian-Scandinavian fellow travelers.

R. S. Rafinesque condensed the history of the Americas as the story of two originally white settler groups who came “through” the Atlantic—Cutans and Atalans. Both groups were related to the Sea Peoples. The first wave of white nations was followed by two invasions by Asiatic peoples.[8]

About 15 years ago, I was asked to address a large group of Mormon historians in Sandy, Utah. My topic could be anything. I knew the LDS Church was interested in Indian mounds and the possibility that some of the fabled Mound Builders might have been, let’s say, Mormons avant le mot, or at least from across the Atlantic Ocean. So I gave a slide show on things that have been dug up in Ohio Valley Indian mounds. The government, which controls mound sites, just as it controls Indians, is very secretive about mounds. It is a topic rife with conspiracy theories, which no respectable academician would dare, or deign, to touch. The sub-text of my lecture was “What actually was their religion?”

Our schools and textbooks teach that American Indians had, and have, a primitive and under-developed religious sensibility. Like other indigenous peoples, they are animistic, totemistic or pantheistic. They never advanced to the level of institutionalized religions with priesthoods, scriptures or ecumenical appeal. They have myths but not theologies. The fundamental difference between native and colonial forms of worship is addressed in Vine Deloria’s book God Is Red, where a strong distinction is drawn between what Deloria defines as Indian spirituality and Western religions. According to Deloria, Indian spirituality is something that goes on seven days a week mostly outdoors in nature. The white man’s religion is something limited to Sundays or the Sabbath and takes place in an ordained building deemed holy. It is organized and has books, liturgies, priests, ministers and history.[9]

 

One Man’s Religion

The reigning orthodoxy about native religion or spirituality grew out of numerous books on the subject by the Swedish scholar of comparative religion Åke Hultkrantz, who died in 2006. Hultkrantz single-handedly invented what passes for Native American comparative religion. His 1967 book The Religions of the American Indians established a set of benchmark characteristics and spread his views into all university curricula, museum programs and academic journals. Hultkrantz says native religion developed 30,000 to 60,000 years ago and has remained essentially the same ever since. Its common elements all come from ancestral beliefs in spirits and shamanism from Mongolia and Siberia. Like most others, he did not believe that there were Indians who might have come from the tropics, up from South America; they all came across the Bering Straits. This “Smithsonian” version of Native American religion doesn’t acknowledge any migrations or influences or trade or colonization between North America and any other cultures except Mongolian and Siberian. Native American comparative religion never ventures outside North or South or Central America and never draws comparisons from any other area but Northwest Asia.

Some of the earmarks of native religion are:

• Ceremonies associated with hunting, such as asking the pardon of the animal’s spirit before taking its life.
• Agricultural ceremonies—for instance, Hopi kachina ceremonies.
• A dependence on visions and dreams.
• Reverence for animal totems and ancestors.
• Healing practices centered on the shaman or medicine man.
• Offerings made to spirits, such as a tobacco pouch placed on the ground at the beginning of a journey.[10]

 

Reading this description, one might conclude that only men observed religious practices. There is nothing about women. Hultkrantz probably had never read a feminist scholar. One like Heide Goettner-Abendroth repeatedly points out that shamanism is not the same as hunting magic and is attached mostly to women. No one in tribal societies around the world generally would have believed that a man was even capable of performing spiritual healing. In ancient indigenous China, Siberia and Mongolia, shamans were all female. Only women had the gift of creating life. Men’s role in society was utterly different. Men’s secret societies imitated elder women’s initiation ceremonies centered on a girl’s coming of age and teaching her about her responsibilities in the family, clan and society at large, but the intent of men’s rituals, after all the hokum is stripped away, is to maintain and reward military valor. This purpose is clear in the Cherokee Origin Narrative (see Appendix D), which is all about fighting enemies and performing admirable feats of knowledge, power and bravery.

 

Sea Peoples

Is it plausible or even conceivable that the Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptians called the Tamahu (White People), were in America? These are the invaders who threatened the very survival of the Egyptian empire under Ramesses III (1188-1165 BCE), were repulsed, withdrew to settle in Libya, but returned in force to rule as pharaohs and independent kings during the Libyan Dynasty. They also settled in other places around the Mediterranean.

One finds shared culture and genetics among Scandinavians, Berbers, Egyptians, Phoenicians and white people of the Far North. The latter were known to the Greeks and Romans as Hyperboreans, Those Who Live Behind the North Wind. Proof of a common origin is seen in the concentric circles or sun-symbols, the sun-wagon with horses and spoked wheels depicted in overview perspective, swastikas, horsemen, chariots, men with circular object in hand, distinctively shaped lurer or marching trumpets, Nordic rayed crowns, horses, hounds and, of course, the Tifinagh and Ogam scripts. “On the color friezes of the ancient Egyptians,” remarks Viennese ethnologist Christine Pellech, “the Tamahu are represented with fair skin, reddish-blond hair and blue eyes.”

 

6. Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology kept a notebook in which he sketched the Sea Peoples. Public domain.	7. They were depicted as defeated prisoners on the mortuary temple of Ramesses III, about 1155 BCE. Notice the “Viking” horns, flowing beard and long hair, earring and sun disk on top of the helmet. From his notebook.

There is a great deal of corroboration, maintains Pellech, that these white-skinned, blond and blue-eyed Tamahu and Lebu (Libyans) have survived the millennia right down to our own times:

 

Skylax, the Greek geographer and navigator (around 520 BC), says, “All Libyans are blond, of gigantic growth and the most handsome of men.” Callimachus, a Greek poet from Cyrene in Libya (around 300 BC), praises the beauty of blond Libyan women. Furthermore, there are countless reports from travelers down to our own day who have encountered blond and blue-eyed Berbers in the valleys of the Atlas Mountains. The ethnologist Leo Frobenius investigated the “blond Berber races” in the Atlas Range and recorded their legends about how their forefathers came across the sea from the north at a very early time. He also spoke of a “deep-seated correspondence” between Berbers and Europeans in their repertory of fairy-tales.[11]

 

Recall that the Egyptian term for the Sea People is Tamahu.[12] This name could refer to “North Sea Peoples” or “White People” or Libyans (whose country-name, like Lebanon, is rendered in many languages as “white”). They are evidently identical with the Tamahitans mentioned in Cherokee traditions as Trade People or Merchants.[13]

 

Central America’s Empire

Is Woden-Odin, the all-father god of the Scandinavians and other northern Germanic peoples, the same as Votan, the “populator of America” in Maya and other Central American legends? The German ethnographer Alexander von Humboldt (1767-1835) thought so. He equated the two. In the same vein, Spanish antiquarians and early Americanists like Hubert Howe Bancroft (1767-1835) speak of a Votanic Age as the period that preceded the Toltec phase of Mesoamerican civilization.

Stories of Votan, like those of Quetzalcoatl, Gucumatz, Kukulcan and others, have generally been relegated to the domain of mythology. But let us take a look at what reliable New World sources really had to say about Votan as a Scandinavian founder figure and culture bearer. Bancroft’s statements may be taken as a point of departure:

There were several Votans—or this name was accorded to deserving men who came after him. At times he seems to be a mythic creation, the mediator between man and God, the representation of wisdom and power; at times a prince and legislator who introduced a higher culture among his people. The analogy presented by traditions between Votan, Gucumatz, Cukulcan and Quetzalcoatl would lead us to believe that one individual united in his person all these appellations. Nevertheless, a comparison of the different traditions admits of two, Votan and Quetzalcoatl, the other names having the same signification as the latter.

Bancroft accepts it as axiomatic that whether Votan was one person or a race, a hero, ruler, priest or warrior, it was from this source that “Central Americans received the culture which their successors brought to such perfection.” Such an intruder from the Old World who helps natives progress and learn about civilized arts grates against our prejudices today. The whole idea smacks of patronizing the very cultures white people. . . have always patronized!

 

Quetzalcoatl and Votan

Continues Bancroft: “Like Quetzalcoatl, Votan was the first historian of his people, and wrote a book on the origin of the race, in which he declares himself a snake, a descendant of Imos, of the line of Chan, of the race of Chivim.” Generally, in American Indian chronicles, as we see in the annals of the Tainos, and as is true in Hopi accounts and throughout Southwestern rock art, the Snake Clan stands for people associated with boats. The Cherokee, too, were called Chan, Boat People by other tribes. Another of Votan’s titles was Lord of the Dugout. Commentators compare his name to Odon in the Michoacán calendar and Oton, god and chief in Otomi mythology.

A footnote in Bancroft’s account explains that Chan, “Snake,” was the name of a tribe called Lacandones, near Palenque, known also as Colhuas, Chanes or Quinames (Giants). He cites Brasseur de Bourbourg and the Popul Vuh, saying the version used is written in the Tzeltalan language and giving some of its complicated transmission. “Cabrera,” he says of one of the redactors, “thinks that Chivim refers to Tripoli, and it is the same as Hivim or Givim, the Phoenician word for snake, which, again, refers to Hivites, the descendants of Heth, son of Canaan.” Thus, concludes Bancroft, the first Votan is saying, “I am a Hivite from Tripoli, from Libya.”

Let us continue with Bancroft’s summary. To make it more readable, we will put explanations in parentheses rather than use footnotes:

 

From the confused tradition of the Tzendals, as rendered by Nuñez de la Vega and Ordoñez y Aguiar, it seems that Votan proceeded by divine command to America and there portioned out the land. This is equivalent to laying the foundation for civilization. He was sent to people the continent. He accordingly departed from Valum Chivim (Tangier in Phoenicia), passed by the ‘dwelling of the thirteen snakes’ (Canary Islands),’ and arrived in Valum Votan (Island of Santo Domingo, or Hispaniola), where he took with him several of his family to form the nucleus of the settlement. With them he passed through the island-strewn Laguna de Terminos, ascended the Usumacinta, and here, on one of its tributaries founded Nachan (Place of Snakes), or Palenque. The Tzendal inhabitants bestowed upon the strange-looking newcomers the name Tzequiles, ‘men with petticoats,’ on account of their long robes, but soon exchanged ideas and customs with them, submitted to their rule, and gave them their daughters in marriage. This event is laid a thousand years before Christ.[14]

 

In so many words, then, about 1000 BCE, at a time when the Phoenicians were first expanding into the West Mediterranean and first venturing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, a king named Votan sailed on the Canary Current to the Caribbean, where he took on additional volunteers from other whites on Haiti,[15] landed on the Gulf Coast of Tabasco and proceeded up the Usumacinta River to establish a colony in northeastern Guatemala called Snaketown.

The Usumacinta River, noted Perry, was the most important pearl-bearing river in Mexico and Central America. It was also famous for its salt deposits.[16] This is where the Maya city of Palenque was later located. Bancroft says that the Popul Vuh has Votan making four or more visits back to his home. Once, “on returning to Palenque, Votan found that several more of his nations had arrived; these he recognized as snakes, and showed them many favors, in return for which his supremacy was made secure, and he was at last apotheosized.” “Snakes” seems to be a shortcut for “boat people.”

 

Tulan, Mayapan, Copan

We gather from these accounts that Sea Peoples’ colonies in America were multiethnic, even if a Scandinavian happened to be overlord. In another place, Bancroft says that other kingdoms in Central America were “allied with yet to a certain degree subordinate to the original empire whose capital was Nachan, built and ruled by Votan himself and his descendants.” These were Tulan in Michoacán, Mayapan in Yucatan and Chiquimula, “possibly Copan, in Honduras.” Each of these could have had a different dominant settler stock.

Bancroft by no means dismisses these histories as legends. He writes that they prove “the existence in the remote past of a great and powerful empire in the Usumacinta region, and a general belief among the subjects of that empire that the beginning of their greatness was due to a hero or demi-god called Votan.” The Votanic, he says, was not the first civilization in the Americas, but it is the first known to us.[17]

 

Linguistics Tie-In

Another approach to the Votanic era (if we may adopt that term) may be through linguistics. I’m not a professional linguist, but I know that in 1998, Berkeley anthropologist Mary LeCron Foster published a major article in Pre-Columbiana on what she called Proto-Pelagian, the hypothetical ancestor of geographically distant languages traditionally assigned to the three distinct families Austronesian, Afroasiatic and Quechumaran. In a sophisticated technical analysis, she compared phonemic equivalencies in Arabic, Egyptian, the Philippines language of Hanunoo, Iban, a Dayak language of Borneo and Quechumaran or Quechua of South America and assembled an extensive dictionary of the Proto-Pelagian Language (also known as Pelasgian). In connecting such disparate cultures, she found that the “pelagic trail of cognate languages attest[s] . . . to a knowledge of seamanship acquired and practiced many thousands of years ago . . . widespread pelagic contact and colonization . . . [thus] falsifying the entrenched hypothesis that languages spread to the Americas only by means of foot traffic across the Bering Strait.”

Foster’s hypothetical Proto-Pelagian Language greatly predates the conventional history of Austronesian languages. It presents a completely different model from the Neolithic beginnings complacently imagined by Peter Bellwood and Robert Blust. This “out-of-Taiwan hypothesis” hitches Austronesian speakers to rice culture and tracks their rapid spread from southern China and out of Taiwan into the Philippines and southward beginning “around 2200 BCE,” linking it with the appearance of the Lapita Culture and first Polynesians as late as from 1500 BCE. The “Out of Taiwan” hypothesis follows Austronesians onward into remote Oceania (where rice cultivation is lacking), backwards to Vietnam and Peninsular Malaysia and inexplicably to Madagascar.[18] It is found in almost every textbook and encyclopedia, while the subject of Sundaland and the alternative theories of Stephen Oppenheimer are rarely mentioned, even in disagreement. One senses a fundamental schism of the scholars, complicated by Indonesian political trends.

In Foster’s view, Proto-Pelagian was spread by an ancient seaborne group of people with a common culture and shared gene pool across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. It explained cultural elements on both sides of the ocean such as the symbolism of the sun, boats, pyramids, gold, silver, greenstones and incense plants. All these things were sought by Egyptians and Phoenicians as well as Toltecs, Olmecs, Tarascans, Mixe-Zoqueans, Mayas and Incas. The worldwide ferment and cross-pollination was particularly acute in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Central America, where eastern and western influences met each other.[19]

Echoing Foster’s far-reaching conclusions was Mary Ritchie Key, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Irvine. She was the author of about one hundred scholarly articles, reviews and books, besides editing a number of works. Key amassed an extensive list of books and articles proposing relationships between Old World and New World languages. She hypothesized early Pacific crossings as well as ancient voyages around the tip of Africa and across the Atlantic.[20]

The Helen Gene is one of 26 Rare Genes from History introduced by DNA Consultants in 2012. “These rare but robust signals of deep history,” said a press release, “can act as powerful ancestral probes into the tangled past of the human race as well as unique touchstones for the surprising stories of individuals.”[21] The Thuya, Akhenaten and King Tut genes are actually based on ancient Egyptian DNA alleles and named for the mummies whose autopsies were conducted by Zahi Hawass’s team in 2010.[22] But the rest are marketing names invented by the company.  The Odin Gene is the first of a second tranche of Rare Genes from History, unveiled in 2020.[23]

Coming from all reaches of human prehistory—African, Indian, Asian, Australoid, European and Native American—they now number 33 total. In 2024, the company introduced the Basic and Single Haplotype Tests, an extension of Rare Genes from History to about a hundred STR values reported on the nine core CoDIS markers. The database by this time covered 450 populations, ninety of which were American Indian or related (Appendix C).

8. The Akhenaten Gene, like others in the Amarna mummy series, clearly came from Africa. It enjoyed a fairly even distribution on all continents but Asia, where it was notably lacking. Its highest frequency (and presumed center) was reported in Egyptian Copts at Adaima (n = 100), a Pre-Dynastic site (since 3800 BCE) on the west bank of the Nile.[24] This village is near Thebes in Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt. More than 52 percent of its living inhabitants carry it. Copts are the modern-day descendants of the most ancient ethnic population of Egyptian Civilization. High-frequency carriers of the Akhenaten Gene include Jews, Maltese, Berbers, Euchees, Maya and Lumbee Indians, as well as many Sub-Saharan Africans. atDNA 11.5.

 

9. Yellow Emperor Gene marks the relatedness of original Chinese and other Asian peoples with American Indian tribes, especially indigenous Mexican populations. atDNA 11.5.

2025 © Donald N. Yates

[1] P. Barbeau  et al,  “A Tyrosine Hydroxylase Microsatellite and Hemodynamic Response to Stress in a Multiethnic Sample of Youth,” Ethnicity and Disease 13 (2003), pp. 186–92.

[2] See Wyner et al., pp. 3-4.

[3] See Gloria Farley, “The Transmigrations of Tanit,” in Across before Columbus? Evidence for Transoceanic Contact with the Americas prior to 1492, eds Donald Y. Gilmore and Linda S. McElroy (Edgecomb: NEARA, 1998), pp. 237-44. See also her chapter, “The Coincidence of Coins,” in the book In Plain Sight, pp. 273-84.

[4] James Hornell, Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), p. 275.

[5] Chunming Wu, The Prehistoric Maritime Frontier of SE China: Indigenous Bai Yue and Their Oceanic Dispersal (Singapore: Springer, 2021), see esp. “The Heritage of ‘Manka’ and ‘Mother-Son Boat’ in South China and Pacific Outrigger Canoe,” pp. 171-83.

[6] [6] See Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe, trans. Karen Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), esp. pp. 118-26.

[7] Shelley Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships & Seamanship in the Bronze Age Levant, foreword by George F. Bass (College Station: Texas A&M U P, 2018), esp. pp. 196-97. Id, “To the Sea of the Philistines,” in Eliezer D. Oren, The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment  (Philadelphia: University Museum, 2000), pp. 103-43.

[8] See “The Ancient Indian Nations,” in Cherokee Studies II (2021), pp. 96-117.

[9] Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973).

[10] Åke Hultkrantz, Native Religions of North America: The Power of Visions and Fertility (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1987).

[11] Our own translation from the German of Christine Pellech, Die Odyssee: Eine antike Weltumsegelung, 3^rd, expanded and corrected ed. (Greiz: König, 2011), pp. 76-77.

[12] TmH in Beinlich’s Ancient Egyptian word-list, p. 742.

[13] See Nancy K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, Ancient Peoples and Places, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). See also Ioannis Voskos & Arthur Knapp, “Cyprus at the End of the Late Bronze Age: Crisis and Colonization or Continuity and Hybridization?” American Journal of Archaeology 112 (2008), pp. 659-84, 10.3764/aja.112.4.659. Barry Fell, Bronze Age America, “Who Were the Sea Peoples,” pp. 278-81. F. C. Woudhuizen, The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples, Rotterdam, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2006.

[14] Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. III, The Native Races, vol. III: Myths and Languages (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1882), pp. 451-53.

[15] For a roughly contemporaneous colony in Haiti, see Chapter 8 “Amazons and Cannibals.”

[16] Perry, The Children of the Sun, p. 67.

[17] The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races, vol. V: Primitive History (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1883), pp. 163-65.

[18] Peter Bellwood, First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), pp. 181-217. Robert Blust, History of the Austronesian Languages (U of Hawaii at Manoa, 2016).

[19] Mary LeCron Foster, “The Transoceanic Trail: The Proto-Pelagian Language Phylum,” Pre-Columbiana I/1-2 (1998), pp. 88-113. One example will serve to illustrate the “dimensions of cognancy and evidence of shared beliefs” such linguistic comparisons must exhibit to be cogent and persuasive, not just coincidental or tendentious (p. 97). Proto-Pelagian *wan “boat, to travel by boat.” Egyptian wn?y “journey, course.” Quechuan wanp’uy “to travel by boat.” Iban bandon “boat” bankon “a type of long boat.”

[20] Mary Ritchie Key, “Linguistic Similarities between Austronesian and South American Indian Languages,” Pre-Columbiana, A Journal of Long-Distance Contacts 1/1-2 (June and December 1998), pp. 59-71.

[21] “Rare Genes from History: New Autosomal Ancestry Markers” (blog post, Sept. 30, 2012). Available at https://dnaconsultants.com/rare-genes-history-new-autosomal-ancestry-markers-dna-consultants/.

[22]Z. Hawass et al,  “Ancestry and Pathology in King Tutankhamun’s Family,” JAMA 303/7 (2010), pp. 638-47.

[23] “The Odin Gene Tracks Ancient Seafarers (blog post, July 2, 2020). Available at: https://dnaconsultants.com/the-odin-gene-tracks-ancient-seafarers/.

[24] Clotilde Coudray et al, “Allele Frequencies of 15 Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) in Three Egyptian Populations of Different Ethnic Groups.” Forensic Science International 169/2-3 (2007), pp. 260-5.

 

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