Visited by an ancestral spirit

In yesterday's article entitled Seafarers [display], I introduced readers to my CF-haplogroup ancestor named Dreamtimer, who lived in southwest Asia with his wife and family during the Old Stone Age. As I explained, besides being my ancestor, Dreamtimer was also an ancestor of today's Aborigines in Australia. Well, during the early hours of the morning, I was awoken by weird noises, like musique concrète. It was a mysterious mix of Indian tablas and sitars, Balinese bamboo xylophones and Buddhist gongs. And above the throbbing percussion, I could detect clearly the eerie drones of a didgeridoo. My dog Sophia was awoken by the clammer, and she started to bark furiously, as she always does whenever our sleep is interrupted in the middle of the night by frightening sounds such as the shrieks of dinosaurs up on the slopes of Choranche, or the grunts of mammoths down in the valley of the Bourne. Then a voice boomed out: "Billy..."

I knew immediately who it must be, because there are only three individuals who call me Billy. The first is Natacha, who would never dream of waking me up in the night in a cacophony of xylophones and didgeridoos. The second is my 94-year-old uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker, who's prevented from contacting me through his deafness. And the third, of course, was... my tribal ancestor Dreamtimer.

"First of all, Billy, I just want to tell you that I'm furious about you showing everybody that picture of my descendant Mungo Man. Your Aborigine cousins have known for ages that this is not correct. So, why did you do such a thing?"

I tried to tell Dreamtimer that it was simply a photo I had found on the web, but it was pointless trying to defend myself. How do you talk about Internet stuff with a guy who's been dead for 60 thousand years?

"Billy, if I decided to drop in on you this evening, it's not because of Mungo Man. It's because of that fucking Russki couple, who have offended us immensely. Billy, go grab a few boomerangs and run across to Canada right now. And strike 'em dead!"

I had no idea what my ancestor Dreamtimer could possibly be talking about. I was about to tell him that I didn't have any boomerangs with me at Gamone, and that it was out of the question for me to go walkabout to an overseas place such as Canada. Meanwhile, Dreamtimer had faded back into his never-never land. Before taking leave of me, he had switched on my TV. In an instant, the images from Vancouver informed me of the cause of Dreamtimer's furious visit.





If ridicule could kill, then the corpses of Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalinon, attired in their crazy "Aboriginal" costumes, would have been spread out on the ice. The next time that Dreamtimer calls me, I'll have to tell him however that I can't strike down the Russian skaters, no matter how greatly they've offended him. After all, the Russians are my genetic cousins. We're all one big Earth family.