Here's a review of Gunga's sources: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) was a Roman poet in the Augustan age who made himself sufficiently obnoxious to Roman society that he was exiled to the coast of the Black Sea, to Tomis, which today is Constanta in Roumania. Given the nature of his offense, it is highly likely that Augustus himself was aware of the action taken against him, and if he did not specifically approve of the exile, he certainly did not disapprove or interfere. There is reason to believe that he may have had guilty knowledge of a plot, or an alleged plot, on the life of Augustus. The
Metamorphoses was completed in the same year that he was exiled. The passage, a part of which Gunga posts, is not a reference to a world-wide flood, but a part of his poetic version of the Greco-Roman cosmogony (cosmic origins myth).
Gunga then proceeds to the biblical flood story, one of the most repetitive, confused and self-contradictory passages in biblical literature. To this he adds "Legends of the Jews." No one with an ounce of sense can consider anything which he offers here to have the least scientific, historical or even literary plausibility.
*****************************************************
There are two standards by which separate species can be identified. Those are sexual isolation and the inability to interbreed and produce sexually fertile offspring. By the latter standard, all humans are the same species. By the former standard, sexual isolation, racists attempt to make a claim that there are separate "races" of human beings. However, recent genetic investigations begin to show that human "races" cannot be defined even by sexual isolation. There is a tribe in Africa which has long claimed to be descended from the Jews--the Lemba. A 1996 study of the Lemba suggested that more than 50% of the "Y" chromosomes of Lemba men are of Semitic origin. (See the
American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 5, number 59, November, 199--
You can read an abstract by clicking here.) There is also an hypothesis, known as the Solutrean hypothesis, which holds that people living in Europe more than 15,000 years ago migrated to North America during the last glacial maximum. The hypothesis is largely based on what are known in North America as Clovis flint knapping techniques (referring to Clovis, New Mexico, where this type of flint tool was first identified), which have only been seen in one other context, which is the Solutrean culture of western Europe. That this may possibly be true is tentatively supported by mitochondrial DNA studies, which show that 3% of all Amerindians in North and South America have an ancient European mitochonrial DNA marker (the "haplogroup X" marker) which cannot have resulted from later intermarriage or interbreeding--and it is alleged by an ethnologist in Canada that the prevalence of this marker rises to 25% among Algonquian people in eastern Canada.
This page at the University of California at Los Angeles has a section which discusses the archaeological evidence for ancient European migrations to North America, but does not canvas the allegation of DNA evidence. There is an article on the first Americans in the September, 2000 issue of the
Scientific American, but it requires a subscription to the digital service to read it, so i cannot link it here.
Several years ago, mummies were found in China, dating back 4000 years, which some scientists allege (based on textile and artifact evidence, as well as the appearance of the mummies, preserved by burial in a salt flat) were of European origin. This conflicts with the official Chinese line on human cultural origins, and researchers are now denied access to the mummies. Under pressure from western scientific organization, the Chinese allowed a National Geographic team to examine DNA from the mummies in 2007. The National Geographic team, lead by Spencer Wells (PhD, Harvard University, 1994), found genetic markers indicating origins among Europeans, the people of Mesopotamia and of the Indian subcontinent. If it is true that these remains are those of people descended from Europeans, Indians of the subcontinent (many whom are "Aryan" in origin) and people of the middle east, it means that there were migrations along what is known as the Silk Road thousands of years ago. The majority of the mummies found are "mongoloid" in origin, but eight of them show the other Eurasian markers. The textile evidence is particularly significant, matching samples found in Austrian salt mines dating back more than 3000 years--the salt mines of Austria being another site which preserves archaeological remains very well.
Spencer Wells is also the lead member of the Genographic Project, which hopes to map prehistoric human migration by collecting genetic marker information from people worldwide. The project has come under fire from "indigenous peoples" groups who object to the idea that it may be demonstrated that their ancestors were not as isolated and "ethnically pure" as has been traditionally thought. Their objection is politically based, given that the implications of the data to be collected are seen by some members of indigenous peoples groups as a potential threat to the special status which indigenous peoples are granted by some governments.
The term race was only specifically applied to humans and only humans within the last century. Darwin uses the term race to refer to varieties in plants and animals, and this was a common, non-specific usage of the word in the 19th century. There is no scientitic evidence that there are different races, and there is increasingly good evidence that sexual isolation has not existed among the great majority of human populations for thousands of years. We can never know if it has ever existed in the majority of human populations, but the more recent evidence suggests that even if it did, it has not produced a different species, and any discussion of "race" is political in nature only.
