Ren's Desk @rentarabatqueen - Tumblr Blog

There are two entire continents of Americas, so I fully agree that we in the United States do not get to claim a monopoly on the term "American." However. I hate that the current solution to this monopoly is just to modify "American" by adding "U.S." in front of it. "U.S. Americans" is technically useful and correct, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and it still maintains the legacy of the monopoly. Therefore, it is left to us, the denizens of the internet, to become the brain trust to come up with a new term for people from the United States. (Because I cannot singlehandedly solve the real problems of the world with an internet poll.) I will be monitoring and taking submissions, but I have started off with a few ideas I had (three of which are not appropriate because they could again apply to any number of countries on these continents, but this was the direction I was thinking and also I like a good portmanteau):

USAvians

Staters

Diasporans

Amerigrants

Voting ended onApr 14

#us american #us americans #american #americana #united states #united states residents

metalheadsagainstfascism

Damn. That's a lot easier than whatever I was planning

autisticcodex

If the system can't survive the people in the Epstein Files getting prosecuted, then the system deserves to die.

I'm watching a talk by Svante Pääbo from 2014 and drowning in my emotions.

blackbearmagic

Did you know that the first Neanderthal DNA sequencing we did was of a sample taken from the humerus of the type specimen, Feldhofer 1 (also called Neanderthal 1)?

because I did not know that

What I did know is that the Neander Valley (Neanderthal in German) where the fossils were found was named for Joachim Neander, whose surname is a Greco-Romanization of Neumann, which yes, means "new man"

the New Man was found in New Man Valley in 1856

and in 2010, we found fragments of mitochondrial DNA in the New Man's bones

blackbearmagic

Pääbo brings up that a question he and his team got asked a lot was "is 1-2% Neanderthal DNA a lot or a little?" and his response is going to haunt me for weeks.

He shows a diagram and explains that, well, you share 50% genetic similarity with your parents, and 25% similarity with your grandparents... roughly 12% with your great-grandparents, and 6% with your twice-greats... 3% with your thrice-great grandparents, and 1.5% with your fourth-great grandparents

So, he says, if you look at it quantitatively, it would be as if one of your ancestors six generations ago were a Neanderthal.

blackbearmagic

I need to express how utterly insane that is to think about.

It's been ~40,000 years since the extinction of the Neanderthals and the end of any fresh influxes of genetic material from their species.

Every time in the last ~40,000 years that human chromosomes have recombined and divided into sperm and egg cells, some of our inherited Neanderthal sequences were, statistically, going to get lost. They would have ended up on a sperm or egg cell that was not used in the creation of offspring, and fall out of the lineage. And yes, lost sequences could be "added back" by someone from a different lineage who still carried them, but...

It's been, again, roughly forty thousand years since we had the chance to get new Neanderthal DNA, or get back "lost" sequences from one of them.

Assuming 20-year generations, that's two thousand generations of humans.

And yet, quantitatively, the average person alive today is six generations' worth of genetic similarity away from a Neanderthal.