HOME TO THE HOTEL.

HOME TO THE HOTEL. I was struck by something else in the article on where the British population came from that I posted on yesterday: the high percentage of the ancestors of the British population descended from people who migrated over 7000 years ago and stayed put (about 75% of British ancestors and 12% of Irish ancestors). It’s hard for Americans, who are migratory sorts, to realize how many of the world’s peoples have stayed put. Jim Arrowsmith once commented on how many people one encountered in the Middle East who would say that their families had lived in the same house for five hundred years. In contrast, I saw a quote from Thornton Wilder long ago that said that Americans are the only people who will say, “I’m going home to the hotel.”