I saw this and thought of your comments on seeing humans as part of their geography, rather than as herds of cattle as our rulers do. You don't need to read the article, it is long and not too interesting, but the fun part is that geography is visible in our genomes, relevant quote:

"Q. Did you get any puzzling results, such as areas of low or high migration that don’t seem to jibe with the landscape?

"A. I’m more surprised by how often the genetics do align with the geological features. You take a bunch of living individuals and extract a molecule from their bodies and start comparing them to one another, and you can see that the Alps are a feature of our planet. It’s kind of wild.

"For those Europeans who are not so mixed, they can place you within a couple hundred kilometers of your ancestral village. I think some of our peculiarly American dysfunctions and ennui may arise because we are not really adapted to our geography here, and even those with long roots here tend to move around the vast continent."

The link, in case you are interested.

The link to your discussion of the human link to the land is here:

-Lynn

Thank you, Lynn

Below are observations of this phenomenon from my life and research.

I have had relatives living within 10 miles of where I write for 378 years. I have also lived in Pennsylvania and have travelled in seven states of the region. I am generally good with navigating by "feel" but am unerring in the Baltimore area. I have gotten off a bus that I passed out drunk on in a section of West Baltimore which I had never been to [to this day I do not know where it is] and managed to walk miles, along various switchback streets and alleys, directly to my destination without asking for directions or checking street signs once. If had indicated that I were lost and drunk it would have been the end of me.

European peoples resisted fiercely Roman expansion and succeeded. But when they adopted Christianity their cultures collapsed as did their military resistance in a way that did not happen to the other Middle Sea people, like the Greeks—that the Romans conquered and who not only became Christians but were key in early Church formation. I think this had to do, in part, with the fact that the majority forest environment was decreed evil in Christian lore and was methodically replaced with an artificial grassland to replicate the arid and relatively unforested Middle East and Middle Sea basin. Europe has been maimed for a thousand years and that is what Tolkien was getting at in the Lord of the Rings. Note the importance of the forest in his folklore interpretation of industrialization.

In European and most other civilizations the person who worked the land was considered part of it. A lord who owned a fief owned the people that went with it. The people belonged to the land and the land and its things, including the people, belonged to its owner.

Primitive people have deeper and more complex myths concerning their connection to the habitat that hold many cultural similarities among people separated by 10,000 miles and 70,000 years along the same habitat band.

Note that the English colonies in North America were not known as colonies. They were plantations, so named because you planted people there so that the land became yours, as the land and the people working it were one in the same. Puritans, Anglican Cavaliers, German merchants, catholics all had the view of a settlement as a Plantation of people literally sunk into the earth. This is ritually confirmed with burial. Consider that our modern atomized perspective is so unnatural that we all—until I noticed it reading Peter Williamson's account—thought of plantations as places were you planted plants, not people. Also, look how I am castigated and reviled by friends, family and foe for staying in the place were my most ancient known ancestor landed, some poor Irish bastard that changed his name to make it sound English. It is literally considered bizarre that I would stand and fight for my right to live in the city where hundreds, perhaps even thousands of my ancestors have been buried. [I am referring to the entire family, not just lineal ancestors but their blood kin.]

Consider also the hatred—palpable beating hatred—that the Puritans and other protestant [meaning that they have returned a great part of the theological distance from the Christian/Pagan Catholic faith to the Judaic origins of the faith] had for the forest. Just as the Romans cut down Druidic groves and Inquisitors and witch hunters forever envisioned the forest as the Devil's realm, the Puritans waged war "In these goings down of the sun" to transform New England into New Isrаel, by felling the forest and replacing it with fields and pastures. Modern people have no idea how heavily forested the Eastern United States was, just as heavily forested as Western Europe had been, a prefect habitat for European runaways to learn how to be aboriginally European again. 98% of the land was forested.

According to H.P. Lovecraft, much of the American sense of the horrific is vested in the fear of the primal forest [look at how many modern horror flicks, including Deliverance, are set in rural, wooded areas infested by savage rednecks and hillbillies.] there is much evidence that there was continuous European habitation in the Eastern United Sates from about 1000 onward.

Rather than prove that, let me just state that if 1% of the approximately 2 million European slaves that were brought to these shores from 1585 to 1804 escaped to, or were abducted by, Indians you have an explanation for the majority Caucasian genetics of modern Indians and the fact that so many Indian chiefs looked like they should be cast in the next Road Warrior movie as feral Caucasians. At least four major chiefs were full Caucasians. The fact is that most white kids did not want to return to the largely Judaic lifeway [early Puritan church fathers considered themselves the real metaphysical Jews and were able to write in Hebrew] of the plantations and instead chose to stay with their Indian families whenever possible. Is it any surprise that the Western European slaves owned by the descendants of the Mediterranean invaders that butchered the European ecology, once transported in chains to a primeval land of forest and mountains to which their ancestors were native, largely chose to join the Indians? There was few die-offs of tribes by disease in the Eastern Woodlands such as happened to Plains Indians centuries later, and nothing comparable to the die-off in the West Indies, Mexico or Peru. This was largely due to mass adoption of whites.

I intend to spend a large book proving this point, so let's transition to another.

The frontiersmen, Daniel Boone, Simon Kenton, Simon Girty, Davy Crocket, and many another Indian fighter in buckskins, living and fighting like the Indians, became so good at fighting like Indians that they beat them on their own ground. Lewis Wetzel was considered a demon to the Shawnee, he had killed so many, was so much better at being them than they were, was such a better forest savage. Could it be that people of Western European ancestry, whose ancestors for tens of thousands of years lived in a world largely roofed by tree tops, were simply, ideally, genetically, suited for life in a like forest, at like elevations, hunting like prey [deer, bear and bovine] at the very same latitude?

Also, when riding along the roof of the Rockies last September with Shayne and Ishmael, we spent a good hour in an alpine meadow habitat that looks like it should be in Scotland.

Lynn, I believe in my bones that there is something here. When I moved to Pennsylvania as a boy, the displacement from my family ground was made up, in large measure by the fact that I now had a forest at my back door. Every morning I would wake up at five and go out into the woods, usually running, once I learned the footpaths. Nothing has ever felt more natural for me than to be in a shadowed wood at dawn. I am not a believer by nature and believe in few things on faith, even when I have argued for their existence or proven the history of the subject to my satisfaction. But I believe that I belong in a forest and have felt that way since the first time I entered one at a cabin my parents took us to one summer in Western Maryland.

Note, the forest cover in the Eastern United States is much reduced, but not nearly so far reduced as it was by 1860, which was the high point of eastern deforestation. Once the Mississippi was crossed in force and the Plains Indians driven back and eventually defeated, the Judeo-Christian grassland was placed west of the great river and the Eastern Woodlands have been slowly returning. In a future article I'll address the managed nature of the Eastern Woodland environment, which even Increase Mather admitted provide vast foodstuffs for the Indian population. These were not the same as our trophy forests, but actual managed, food-producing habitats. Also, our upcoming discussion on the myth of African-American matriarchy will be touching on some of these concepts. How much could African American dysfunction and baseline stress—I mean in the blood—be attributable to having been removed to an alien environment? It would be interesting to see if Black Brazilians have the same problems with hyper tension and such as Black Americans.

Also, the interaction of humans across forest and grassland habitats goes further back than our recorded history and will be revisited. Our reading of history tends to focus on conflict between grassland pastoralists and grassland farmers over use of grassland and converted forest environments. But once this question was settled, the resulting Grassland patriarchy, agrarian matriarchy social pyramid turned as one monster on forested Western Europe and ate it up. Before this and in other regions of the world the battle was often along the forest margins. For instance, the Inca army met its demise at the hands of archers in the temperate forests of northern Chile.

In my book, By the Wine Dark Sea I discuss what was then an environment of rugged, forested lands bordered by grasslands which was the geographic dichotomy that served as the knife-edge of Indo-European culture. I should state that even portions of the Middle East were heavily forested and populated by Indo-European peoples before the grass-eating religions had transformed the land. Perhaps some New Age vegan type could use Enkidu as a gluten free lifestyle advocate: