{"id":918,"date":"2008-10-20T22:57:05","date_gmt":"2008-10-20T21:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=918"},"modified":"2008-10-20T22:57:05","modified_gmt":"2008-10-20T21:57:05","slug":"fact-and-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/fact-and-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact and fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=thewidblo-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0593048369&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" align=\"right\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>I&#8217;ve almost completed reading Brian Sykes&#8217;s <i>The Seven Daughters of Eve<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date.  It&#8217;s one of those nice examples of popular science that actually gives you a feel for how things happen in the engine room, rather than just presenting the results.<\/p>\n<p>However, towards the end he starts writing fictional stories about the seven &#8220;clan mothers&#8221; of Europe, and this is definitely the weakest part of the book.<\/p>\n<p>He assigns hair colour and other physical characteristica to them, although he obviously doesn&#8217;t know this.<\/p>\n<p>Also, to make the descriptions seem realistic, he strays into areas about which he clearly has little knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, he writes about one of them that their &#8220;language was not elaborate, but quite sufficiently developed to impart [&#8230;] basic information.&#8221;  As a linguist, I know this is nonsense.  All human languages, whether spoken by hunter-gatherers or by invest bankers, are equally elaborate and highly developed.<\/p>\n<p>So read the first part of this book, but skip the seven fictional chapters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve almost completed reading Brian Sykes&#8217;s The Seven Daughters of Eve. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the first two thirds, although the book is a tiny bit out of date. It&#8217;s one of those nice examples of popular science that actually gives you a feel for how things happen in the engine room, rather than just presenting the results. However, towards the end he starts writing fictional stories about the seven &#8220;clan mothers&#8221; of Europe, and this is definitely the weakest part of the book. He [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,111,119,135,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-health","category-media","category-review","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}