kinda neat how arabians originally probably came in large part from natufians. so the palestinians and hashemite jordanians can say that even if (at least some of) their ancestors were in arabia for thousands of years, they began in the Levant (after Africa obvi). however this was practically prehistoric. honestly if you go far back enough pretty much every claim to roots in a place winds up leading to some other place. this is especially true for the near east, fertile crescent, and mediterrainian. I think what matters more than anything is whether your culture is indigenous and unique to a place and not found other places, whether you first became the group you consider yourself to be there, and whether you regard the land as very important to your being. while it could be said that indigenous Hawaiians were somewhat recently Polynesians, they have a unique culture to Hawaii, became Hawaiians in Hawaii, and revere their land, so it doesnt matter. existence precedes essence here and everywhere, a group can use genetic studies all they want but if they dont have a significant common experience of standing out at least somewhat from other groups due to their particularities and also of remembering shared treasured stories of their people and land, what's the point?

@georgia There's no one point at which a culture becomes itself. If you're looking at Anglos it's not even linear. We have a local identity loosely tied to a language family, then we're Roman, then we stop being Roman, but we're still vaguely part of Celtic spheres of influence, then Germans immigrate, then different Germans conquer, now we're half Celtic half German. We lean into the German half, but we're not all that like continental Germans after a while because the two ethno-cultures fuse. Are we English or British at that point? Well we won't really be united that way for a few hundred years, but maybe. Oh wait, the Reformation just happened and the king is saying he's sitting on the throne of Israel now. Are we jewish? Some of us moved to America and decided to re-emphasize the Greeco-Latin classics. We build a form of government based on insights from the Roman Republic, monarchy and empire both become cultural taboos. Are we Athenians now? pre-Caesar Romans? Or are we still Germans? Britons maybe? Or perhaps we're the true jews, we circumcize these days, after all.

@georgia A root indegenous culture is a utopian fiction. They don't exist beyond aspirations that we try to recreate in some idealized form.

@georgia (Could go deeper with the Anglo example just using my ancestry. Not uncommon for distinctive Welsh and Gaelic identity to come into the mix still within living memory.)

@AngelCelt muh true jews

@AngelCelt this is why existence precedes essence

@georgia Logically or chronologically?

@georgia It's silly now but that was a real idea in the Anglo consciousness at one point and there's an alternate universe where it's taken seriously, at least within the Anglo culture, not much can be done to get around the DNA evidence or... well, the lack of any actual jewish customs.

@georgia Poorly phrased question. As in, are you saying, as a matter of priority, we have to consider what is empirical before creating categories? If so, the point I'm making is that there's no point at which you reach that place.

Or if you're saying categories grow out of lived experience in some real way, then... ok, sure, maybe, but it doesn't really solve the point I'm making.

Which is just that an indigenous identity isn't a particularly useful concept except as a foil to an empire. It's more useful from a bird's eye view to aspire to some kind of futurism using idealistic depictions of the past as an aesthetic precedent for what you want to create (which you need an empire to do unless your ideal doesn't touch anything empirical)