So perhaps you are red headed and fancy yourself Celtic. Well, I’ve got news for you. There may have been a few red genes somewhere but the Celtic genome and culture were centered in France and characterized by brown hair and male pattern baldness.

You see, the red hair gene harks from more northerly tribes centered around the Jutland peninsula in what is now Germany. We don’t know much about them. Angles, Saxons, Jutes. All we know is that in the fifth century AD they were doing something right such that they grew out of their britches and began migrating in all directions.

Some came to England to fill the vacuum of the Roman abdication. They became known as Anglo Saxons. This is basically the reason I am writing in a language called Anglish. Many also went to Scandinavia where they became known as Vikings.

Now these red headed dudes were nothing but trouble. Bolstered by a climatic optimum they colonized Greenland and Iceland for a bit before the weather went south. They conquered half of England until their cousin Alfred held them off. They plundered France until they were given Normandy (read norsemandy). They dragged their boats between river basins and floated down, bringing their brand of plunder when you can, trade when you can’t all the way to the Black and Caspian seas and contact with the Islamic world.

This brings us to Russia as the Volga is one of these rivers. Rus is red. Pretty much.

All this was prompted by a picture of a late Russian scientist, Vladimir V. Beloussov.

This guy could well have been one of the Irish clergy recruited to serve in Charlemagne’s bureaucracy. Insulated from the dogma of plate tectonics he developed a hypothesis that rather than subducted ocean crust distilling continents, the ocean floors are continental crust converted to basalt.

I find no reason to believe this, but now that the supposed mechanism of plate motion has been invalidated by modern seismology, everything is on the table. You have to hand it to the guy for thinking outside the box. Maybe it’s the red. Let’s hope the Russians continue to be us.