36.     GENETIC LEGACIES

The children of Aeneas left us at least three genetic legacies.

Advances in modern genomics allow scientists to estimate both when and where a particular genetic mutation first occurred. Such studies reveal three interesting genetic traits that first occurred in the period of 8000-4000 BC, coinciding with the exploits of the children of Aeneas – the appearance of maize (corn) in Mexico; the emergence of wheat in Syria; and the advent of blue eyes in man, in western Europe. There’s little evidence of direct association with Aeneas but an awful lot of coincidence in time and place.

Modern cultivated maize (corn) is a genetic mutation of a wild grass called Teosinte, first recorded from about 7000 BC in southern Mexico. The degree of change from a spindly wild grass is so dramatic that it is scarcely credible, yet there is no doubt at all of the derivation.

Everything about the arrival of maize is logically incredible. It appeared spontaneously, relatively suddenly as a single event, at a single place, with little or no record of gradual evolution of intermediate forms. In an evolutionary sense the mutation is unlikely to have increased the fitness (survival) of the plant in the wild environment – it survived [only] because it was husbanded by the intervention of man. All the circumstances are highly suggestive of human intervention – to cause the sudden mutation, to select it, and to cultivate it.

By coincidence in time and place, the first appearance of cultivated maize is consistent with the arrival of the refugees from the destruction of Troy in Mesoamerica – the sudden appearance of the pre-Olmec/ pre-Mayan civilisation in southern Mexico about 7000 BC. Also by coincidence, the children of Aeneas took maize with them to ancient Egypt – where there are numerous records.

That’s all there is – a series of strong coincidences.

The appearance of cultivated wheat is even more intriguing.

Modern wheat first appeared about 5000 BC in the Middle East, probably Syria, as a combination of the genetic material of three ancestor wild grasses. Incidentally, parent grasses which do not normally cross-pollinate.

Most cultivated plants contain a single double set of chromosomes (called diploid); and when they cross-pollinate they get a half set (haploid) from each parent, recombining to form a new diploid again. But in the case of wheat, it very unusually contains three double sets of chromosomes (called hexaploid), as if it has combined all the double genetic material of all three parents. Again, like maize, the change appears to be spontaneous, sudden, and lacking in intermediate stages. It just happened. The chances of all that occurring ‘naturally’ are vanishingly small. It would require all three parent grasses to be present in the same place at the same time; not to cross-pollinate but to genetically ‘combine’; and for the outcome to be favourable and fertile, and to be noticed and nurtured by an itinerant farmer.  Very, very long odds.

Again the circumstances are highly suggestive of human intervention and on this occasion there is actually an explicit record. The Egyptian Coptic Apocrypha recorded a very odd but explicit legend of the lords of old who observed that the children of Adam and Eve were starving so they took some grain and sealed it with ‘some of the invisible body of God [YHWH] in the worlds of light’ – which produced wheat which they taught them how to sow and reap. [1]  In plain English, the lords took some [native grass] seeds and induced genetic mutations by exposure to nuclear radiation – which is a technique still occasionally used by modern plant breeders, albeit without very predictable results. The ancient lords produced hexaploid wheat by genetic manipulation – perhaps the beginning of GM technology.

The lords who did this were blue-eyed boys, and they directly left behind those genes. Modern genetic studies agree that prior to about 10,000 BC there were no blue eyes at all, at least not in the western European hemisphere. They first appeared about 8000-4000 BC and now ‘light eyes’ (blue/green) are most common amongst the Celts (especially Irish and Scots), the Baltic States, and the Scandinavians. All with the exact same single mutation.

By coincidence, the early lords (so-called ‘gods’) of the Sumerians and Egyptians were dominantly blue-eyed – as consistently illustrated in surviving paintings and sculptures. Even Aeneas, or his son/grandson as recorded as Viracocha in South America, was illustrated with vivid blue eyes.

When the lords gathered together the local tribes prior to switching on the Great Lights, they instructed everyone to get away as far as possible. In the words of Genesis 11, they said … scatter abroad from thence upon the face of all the Earth. They put the fear of god into them – which is to say the fear of the fire of YHWH. Go until you reach the ocean, to the very furthest corners of the earth. It was the first diaspora.

And amongst those tribes were some who were already blue-eyed hybrids arising from the dalliance of the lords with local ladies. They scattered westward leaving behind pockets of blue-eye genes amongst the Berbers of Morocco and the Basques of Spain; and more generally amid the Celts of Atlantic coastal Iberia France, particularly Brittany. The ‘Galli’ (Gauls) migrated to Cabo Fisterra (Cape Finisterre) in Galicia, Spain; and the Bretons to the very tip of the Brittany peninsula which they named Finistere (Land’s End). But on a clear day they could see another island across the sea so some dispersed further west to Britain. Not just anywhere in Britain but into distinct family colonies in the very furthest corners – the Cornish in the south-west, which they also called Land’s End (Penn an Wlas); the Welsh in the far west; and the Scots in the north-west.

Even that wasn’t far enough. The last stop westward was Ireland where even today the incidence of light eyes is around 75%.

The descendants of the immigrant ‘lords’ had blue-eyes in their genes … in their blood-line … so down the ages these hereditary aristocrats became known colloquially as ‘blue-bloods’.

Probably separately, some families travelled northwest through central Europe until they reached the shore of the Baltic Sea – and formed the enclaves of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – from whence the last intrepid sailors ventured west into Scandinavia and even Iceland. All of which today retain high incidence of light eyes.

Everywhere they went they left the name-card of their Trojan origin. The Gaullish tribe of Tricasses founded the city of Troyes on the Seine south of Paris; those who ventured to Britain established Troynovant (New Troy), later to become Trinovantum and eventually London, of which Spenser wrote in Faerie Queen … noble Britons sprang from Trojans bold and Troy-Novant was built of old Troyes ashes cold. While still others left their traces at Caerdroia (City of Troy) in Wales; Trojaburg (Troy town, Germany); and Trojienborg (Troy town, Sweden).

These early Middle-Eastern refugees flooded into Britain without much resistance because there was hardly anyone present to resist. The population of Britain at that time, pre-2500 BC, consisted of sparse, scattered family tribes of itinerant hunter-gatherers. But the new immigrants did encounter the marvellous megalithic earthworks of the advance party of lords. They must have had an inkling that surviving man would forget and not understand the dramatic events of world history – so they drew a diagram on the landscape. They drew us a picture, but we didn’t see it.

In Brittany and in Britain the lords from Egypt sculptured a diagram on the landscape in earth and stone, of which we can still see the remnants at the Carnac alignments, Stonehenge, Avebury circle, Silbury Hill and Wans (Woden’s) Dyke and many other megalithic monuments. They embossed the landscape with a shield of armorial heraldry – illustrating the history of the family of man.

Because the sculpture was ‘armorial’ the region became known as ‘Armorica’.

The new immigrants saw all these marvellous megaliths and recorded them in Celtic folklore as …eald enta geweorc, ‘the ancient work of giants’, made by aes side, ‘supernatural folk’, who were ‘giants’ (very tall) who sometimes had intercourse with ‘normal men’ (or women). Stonehenge specifically was made by ‘Saracens’, which was a generic term for people of North Africa, out of Egypt.  All of that and more was recorded in regional folklore … but in the Christian era it was derided and ignored.

This lore was oral history, passed down through the generations and eventually reduced to writing in Celtic folktales – where it was sneered at in modern times as mere fairy tales and pagan superstitions. It was pre-Christian and therefore definitely the work of the devil. Early Church Councils of Bishops issued specific edicts against worship of stones, especially the suggestive phallic ones. So they were destroyed or converted ‘from the worship of devils to the service of the true God’ – usually by having a Christian cross added on top. As late as 1538 under Henry VIII and Cromwell, an image of the Celtic god Hu Gadarn (Mercury) in St Asaph in Wales, along with its Druid custodian, were both taken to Smithfield and burned.

The old knowledge was there but it was dismissed out of hand. According to Camden’s Britannia of 1596, pagan countrymen called Wansdyke ditch, ‘Wodenesdic, that is to say the ditch of Woden or Mercurie, made by the devil upon a Wednesday’. But Mr Camden, certain in his zealous Christianity, delighted in sneering at the old knowledge as ‘vulgar, in error, primitive, irrational superstitions believed out of ignorance and credulity … fabulous fables … a ragbag of folktales … moonshine … such matters as will make you laugh your fill, if you have a laughing spleene’. So faith trampled tradition underfoot and the ancient dykes were reclassified as Iron Age fortifications – on the ‘must be’ theory, without a shred of evidence.

Those attitudes persisted into the late 20^th century, at least. In the 1970s when an eminent British archaeologist asked after the origin of the large irregular stone at East Knoyle (Wiltshire) a farm labourer replied, ‘Arrgh, they do say as Old Nick [the devil] dropped it there.’ To which the don noted without a hint of irony, ‘It is of course natural for some simple folk to attribute anything they cannot otherwise explain to the agency of the Devil’.

But the simple local folk did know. The origin of the stones was recorded in local folklore, and elsewhere in the ‘mythology’ of Homer and Hesiod. It was widely known because it was Armorica, the armorial history of the whole family of man. The lords drew us a picture but we didn’t get it.

[1] Coptic Apocrypha, Brit Mus MS Oriental No 7026 (cited in Budge, Book of the Cave of Treasures)