Podcast | Finding Manuland Atlas Ep. 3

Welcome to Finding Manuland. This is the third episode of our new Atlas orientation series, which will last, hopefully, for hundreds of episodes. So this is the third episode. We went from Ireland to Britain, then on to the continent, through France to Germany, down the Danube, across to Romania and Bulgaria, and into Greece — and Ukraine, where I spoke about the Yamna emanating from there, carrying the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages, in the first two pilot episodes of the Atlas.

So, what we’re doing in Finding Manuland: each episode integrates Mana, meaning energy — the charge we exchange as a function of being sentient beings and human beings. And when we talk about places, and visit places, and connect with the words and the meanings we use which emanate from those places as Indo-Europeans, then we’re exchanging what I call Mana. I could have used another word for it; Mana was just one moniker I decided to settle on.

And the second aspect of every episode is the linguistic aspect: this MN sound, which is imminent — one of the three cryptotypes we look at, the others being RT, Rit, that sound, and DN, the DN sound of the Danube, the Donets, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dniester — the great rivers of ancient Ukraine, where, genetically, most of us who today speak Indo-European languages emanate from. It’s in our genes, as demonstrated by the Alexey Nikitin paper, which was published in Nature in February 2025. We’ll come back to that. I write most days on Bluesky, Mastodon, and X, as well as on Substack.

The Mental Model, and the Urgency

So today: you might notice I talked about how all living Indo-European languages emanate from ancient Ukraine — what the ancients called Scythia, but which we’ll call ancient Ukraine. And you might notice my piece recently, In Defence of Ancient Ukraine. I won’t go into that at the moment, because I’m going to try and stick to this geographical survey.

What I’m trying to communicate into your minds, and all of the listeners’ minds, is this new mental model, which has gradually grown over me since I began the Finding Manuland journey consciously and intentionally in November 2021, in Maing village in northern France. I usually say eastern France, for some reason — but that’s actually northern France, where the Menapii tribe lived, by the Manche, near Mons in today’s Belgium, near Frankfurt-on-Main, and Mainz, and various other MN places and rivers.

And so what I’m trying to communicate is this mental model, which has been disrupted by my travels. Finding Manuland is about finding and identifying a unifying force in all the areas between Ireland and India where we speak, traditionally, Indo-European languages. By monikering it Manuland, I’m giving us a collective identity, and I’m trying to disrupt the type of mental models we imbibed at school, which are old-fashioned, and the product of a time before we had archaeogenetics and scientific linguistics — the comparative method and comparative methodology. They are artifacts of a time when we thought history, and myth, and Finding Manuland, and language, honestly, didn’t matter that much. But because Russia uses the bogus history as an excuse — to disarm us, and to persuade us that Ukraine is not a real country — there is a certain urgency, and a meaning, to Finding Manuland, which in more innocent ages perhaps didn’t matter so much. So I do have a sense of urgency.

Anatolia: The Palimpsest — First to Write, Not First to Be

So today, this is the Anatolia edition. I talked about living Indo-European languages emanating from Ukraine. Anatolia is the palimpsest where seven Indo-European layers are stacked, and where the oldest Indo-European writing survives. First to write — not first to be. The homeland is still the steppe. And I’ve walked hard, to and fro, across Anatolia.

I’ve told you in past episodes — pre-Atlas episodes, let’s call them — about some of my journeys in Anatolia. Some of those journeys I have not yet told you about,