If the Uralic languages share a common ancestor, why do the people who speak Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian look so different from the Samoyedic peoples?
Uralic languages refers the the assumed place where the proto-Uralic language was spoken. That place is somewhere west of the Ural mountains.The language has spread both to the West and East from that region.I tried to draw a very rough scetch here:Original map from: Ural Mountains - WikipediaI haven’t read any speculations of the genetic inheritance of the Proto-Uralic speakers, so it’s purely my own idea that they probably were of European descent from the Eastern refuge of the Ice Age somewhere close to current Ukraine. It would be logical, because it’s known that the people of the Eastern refuge migrated to the East, North and North-West. It would be natural that we Finns were for a large part descendants of these people, who arrived here in several waves at different times.You can see one version of those migrations here: DNA analysis provides insights into how was Europe repopulated after Ice AgeWe Finns are mostly of European descent. Our patrilinear lineage is more from the East and South and our matrilinear lineage is from all over Europe, but more from the west and South-West.We have one, and most common, patrilinear haplogroup that comes further from the East, but that’s not the one who brought the Uralic language here, that’s older.The languages are not tied to the genetics. The languages travel with people, yes, but there are also language shifts within populations, sometimes because of conquests, sometimes because of the migrating goup bringing more advanced culture with them etc.We Finns didn’t just walk here from the Ural mountains. Here were earlier populations already, some of which spoke some unknown languages, some who spoke some unknown Uralic languages, groups of Baltic and Germanic descent, proto-Samis and I don’t know who they all were.Then, a group of Proto-Finnic speakers arrived here and for some reason their language supplanted the former languages to a large extent.The same possibly happened when the Uralic languages spread to the East: some people migrated there, but there were people already and the may have shifted their language.I don’t know the details, but if this sounds odd, you can think about the speakers of the Indo-European languages and wonder the same thing: why they look so different from each other from India to Sacndinavia, even though they all speak Indo-European languages, which were possibly born right South of the Ural languages?Map from: Indo-European migrations - Wikipedia
What exactly mean "common ancestor"?
In genealogy it means you are cousins to some degree. If you get your DNA tested and find a 12-point match, as have, it means you and the other person have a common ancestor in the last 600 years. If you find some third cousins, as I have, it means your common ancestors are one of your sets great great grandparents. In biology it is a way of classifying species. We share quite a bit with the great apes, a little less with the other primates, a little less with the other mammals, a little less with the other vertebrates. The theory is that, all other things being equal, the closer one species resembles another, the closer in time they had a common ancestor. For instance, if you've ever eaten a chicken wing, you know the lower part has two bones and the upper part one bone. We humans have two bones in our forearm and one in the upper. Evolutionary theory says that is because all of us vertebrates had a common ancestor, long ago. You don't have to believe in evolution; it could be that when the Lord created birds, He decided to give them all two bones in the lower "arm" and one in the upper because it was a design He liked and worked well. You should understand evolution, though, if you want to get an "A" in biology.
Is English ancestry the most common ancestry in the US, but it's just massively under reported on the Census?
I think there is reason to believe it is underestimated.Consider the following tabulations by decade of people reporting "English" as their ancestry in the US, from the US Census Bureau:1980 - 49,598,035; 26.34% of the population (largest)1990 - 32,651,788; 13.10%2000 - 24,515,138; 8.70%2010 - 25,927,345; 8.40%So between 1980 and 2000, the number of self-reported English-Americans dropped by half! What was the cause of this massive decline?I think the cause is that "English" is just not a very interesting ancestry to think about or report for white people. Instead, white people tend to find it more salient to report ancestries like "German", "Scottish", and "Irish" if they know of any ancestors that came from those places. I've seen this in my own family. In the South, it's common for white people to simply put "American" as their ancestry as their ancestors came over so long ago that they can't even remember where they came from. Many African-Americans have some descent from white slave owners who raped a female ancestor in their line, and many slave owners had English ancestry (if not the vast majority).So I think it's massively underreported, and based on the above information "English" likely remains truly the most common ancestry in the US.
Why do people think that Darwin said we came from monkeys?
Charles Darwin never said that man evolved from monkeys. What evolution says is that man AND monkeys share a common ancestor. You and your cousin have the same grandfather. That does not imply that you came from your aunt, does it? Two branches on the same tree share a common trunk, but that does not imply that one branch grows from the other branch which grows from the trunk. That is why there are still monkeys and gorillas. Because their branch grows more slowly than ours. So, now that you know the TRUTH, will you continue to disseminate the lie that evolution requires that man came FROM monkeys, or will you correct creationists when they advance that argument?