19 September 2014

Ancestry from Toes: a feat of imagination

When you read words like "Some say that ..." and "****s often claim that ... " you know you're in a fantasy realm. Those two phrases are used in a recent My Heritage English blog post "Discovering Ancestry: Through our toes?"

A diagram with the title "BASED ON THIS WHAT ARE YOUR ROOTS" shows configurations with toes of various lengths named Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Germanic and Celtic."
I'd like to think My Heritage is treating this as "a bit of fun."

It does make you wonder though when the article includes the sentence "In Imre Somogyi's book, "The Language of the Feet," he writes how ancestry can be determined just by the shape of our feet."

I was unable to find any other reference to that book. The closest I could find by Imre Somogyi is "Livros Linguagem dos Pés do Seu Bebê."

His most widely available book is "Reading Toes," There's even a copy in the Ottawa Public Library.
As you'd expect for a work of this type it's full of anecdotes; not a hint of any peer reviewed scientific basis for the claims.

As someone said in reviewing another book,  "It is not a book to be lightly tossed aside. It should be thrown with great force."

2 comments:

Persephone said...

Love to start my morning with a bit of Dorothy Parker! Off to the DNA workshop at Library and Archives!

Unknown said...

Apparently I walk like an Egyptian. Being of Northern European descent (as far as I know), I'd like to see what shape toes our Neanderthal ancestors had. This being a scientific article and all.