Silent, white, skiing off-piste in the Val d’Anniviers, Swiss Alps
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: White
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Change of theme
I was using the Twenty Ten theme and decided I wanted my category pages to show the full post, not just the first few lines (and without any images). So I changed to Twenty Eleven today. Not sure I like it as much, the pages seem narrower, though I did a comparison and the amount of text on a line was the same. A small bonus is that the header image is a bit deeper, so the cropping is not as extreme as in Twenty Ten. Gives more flexibility in using photos for headers.
Wordless Wednesday – 26 February 2014
Easter skiing, Les Houches, France, 2013
The ice age paintings of the Grotte de Niaux
One of my deep maternal ancestors, Una, probably lived in the Basque region or perhaps a little further north around 12,000 years ago, which would make her my great*780th grandmother (give or take a few generations). She may well have been part of the Magdalenian culture in the foothills of the Pyrenees who produced the stunning cave paintings at sites such as Roc-de Sers, Lascaux, and Niaux. I have visited the Grotte de Niaux twice, once in 1992 and again in 2011. It is one of the few caves with Paleolithic paintings that can still be visited.
Italian Alps
The boys and I headed to Courmayeur, just over the Italian border to the south of Mont Blanc for a week skiing.
Cresta D’Arp, Italian Alps
Maternal ancestors: ice age Europe and Britain
This post has been superceded by a new post my-maternal-ancestors-from-eve-via-ice-age-europe-to-victorian-england which contains latest information from a recent more detailed analysis of my mtDNA together with revised and updated dates and locations of haplogroup founders.
In my previous post on my deep maternal ancestors (https://mountainsrivers.com/2014/02/16/deep-maternal-ancestors-out-of-africa-into-ice-age-europe/) I summarized the “grandmothers” who contributed specific mutations to my mtDNA that allow me to trace them (and approximately when and where they lived) all the way back to Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common maternal ancestor of all living humans. These women were real and specific individuals, and Sykes and others have given the older ones specific names (usually starting with the letter of the haplogroup they founded). I have followed this by giving names to the founders of the subgroups to which I belong. In this post, I give a brief biography of each of these ancestral grandmothers, starting with Mitochondrial Eve, placing them in evolutionary, geographic, and climatic context. Continue reading
Cathar castles: Montsegur
The Cathar castle of Montsegur sits on top of a limestone peak (or pog in Occitan) at around 3000 feet. Here several hundred Cathars held out for 10 months against the besieging French army of over 6,000 men in 1243-44.
Montsegur
Deep maternal ancestors: out of Africa into ice age Europe
This post has been superceded by a new post my-maternal-ancestors-from-eve-via-ice-age-europe-to-victorian-england which contains latest information from a recent more detailed analysis of my mtDNA together with revised and updated dates and locations of haplogroup founders.
I have only been able to trace my maternal ancestors back to my great-great-grandmother, Amelia Buckmaster, who was born in 1809 in Hounslow, Middlesex, England and who died in 1892 in Wallingford, Berkshire, England. I recently had my mitochondrial DNA tested (see an earlier post for more on mtDNA) and the results indicated that my mtDNA haplogroup is U. I did some research on the specific mutations identified in my mtDNA and identified my subgroup more specifically as U5a1a1.This means that I now know quite a lot about specific maternal ancestors and where and when they lived, all the way back to Mitochondrial Eve who lived in Africa 192,400 years ago.
Family portraits
A few photos of us all together:
Sitting on a bouncy castle, hired for a birthday party 2011
Radioactive rapids
The Parc Eaux-Vives of Isle de la Serre is a whitewater playground for practicing kayak skills in rapids. It is on the Rhone River, between Geneva and Lyon. Its about an hour drive from Geneva, assuming they have not decided to renovate the tunnels for the motorway in the Juras (in which case it can be a very tedious 2.5 hour trip)! Continue reading
