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Old 05-December-2008, 09:07 AM
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geonuc geonuc is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by timb View Post
You can be short and have dark hair and brown eyes, and still be caucasian. The steppes, which reasonably includes East Turkestan, are commonly referred to as Central Asia, though "Eurasia" seems to be the term favored by academe now.
Yes, but the point is that a tall, red-haired, green-eyed person is most probably not of east Asian descent.

I think "Steppe peoples" gets the idea across. The steppes are a recognized geographic region.

Quote:
Originally Posted by timb View Post
Carlin was probably just repeating something Herodotus told him. The wikipedia article states that genetic studies of remains have connected the Scythians with the Slavs, Persians and east asian peoples. According to Herodotus, the Scythians own account of their origin is that the first Scythian king, Targitaus, [w]as the child of the sky-god and of a daughter of the Dnieper. While it's nothing special to claim descent from a god, the interesting aspect of this is that the human side of this family comes from the Dnieper, a river of Ukraine. This supports a western origin.
If you listen to the podcast (and read the list of show notes, which goes well beyond Herodotus) you might find that Carlin has a good handle on who was who.
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