Does anybody have any theories as to how this travesty came about?

http://www.geocities.com/shavlego/anthropology.htm
Sumerian
A people speaking a non-Semitic language and civilization native to Sumer in the 4th millennium bc. The Sumerians were a hybrid stock speaking an agglutinative language related structurally to Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and several Caucasian dialects. As the first historically attested civilization they are credited with the invention of cuneiform writing, the sexagesimal system of mathematics, and the socio-political institution of the city-state with bureaucracies, legal codes, division of labour, and a money economy. Their art, literature, and theology had a profound cultural and religious influence on the rest of Mesopotamia and beyond, which continued long after the Sumerian demise c. 2,000 bc, as the prototype of Akkadian, Hurrian, Canaanite, Hittite, and eventually, biblical literature. Two of their main cities were Ur and Lagash.
Oxford Paperback Encyclopedia, © Oxford University Press 1998

geocities, the best place for Sumerian facts.