[HN Gopher] Genes reveal striking diversity within similar ice a...
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Genes reveal striking diversity within similar ice age cultures
Author : pseudolus
Score : 116 points
Date : 2023-03-06 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| 752963e64 wrote:
| [dead]
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Really underscores the validity of the maxim _" pots are not
| people"_; looking back we tend to over-emphasize the centrality
| of the material artifacts we have. So, ceramics and metalwork,
| etc. And from that draw outsized conclusions about cultures and
| their boundaries and patterns and migrations, even assuming
| languages and polities.
|
| But there's so much complexity to human culture that's simply
| lost to time and decay, that we will never see.
|
| EDIT: Consider hypothetically, what would happen if far-future
| archaeologists were to dig up material culture from Quebec, but
| also hypothetically did not have any language (written, or
| recorded) or historical knowledge? They'd look at the material
| culture -- and even maybe genetics -- and be mostly unable to
| tell the difference between the Quebecois and the surrounding
| North American cultures. In most respects this is just standard
| North American material culture. But it's a totally different
| culture, speaking French etc, with its own distinct history,
| politics, etc.
| concordDance wrote:
| > But it's a totally different culture, speaking French etc,
| with its own distinct history, politics, etc.
|
| That "totaly" seems just wrong to me.
|
| The cultures are incredibly similar in how they live, which is
| why they leave the same artefacts. A pair of truly different
| cultures would be something like pre-colonisation Maori and the
| ancient Hittites.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Agreed. I'm from the US, I don't feel out of place or
| uncomfortable at all in Quebec, but I'd have a hard time
| operating in pre-colonisation Maori.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Stereotype: American tourists don't feel out of place
| anywhere :-)
|
| As a Canadian, I love Quebec but it feels distinctly quite
| different. And the point of my comparison here not to
| compare situations like Maori and now, but that two
| cultures can be side by side and have a 90% same material
| (and even genetic) make-up, while still having entirely
| different linguistic, political and historical aspects.
| That would not be observable in a purely material analysis,
| a few thousand years down the line.
| cm2187 wrote:
| The archeologists are struggling with cultures that have left
| no record. We know lots of stuff about, say, the Roman empire.
| I think future archeologists will struggle with the opposite,
| with us leaving a gigantic amount of data behind. Just think of
| what the gmail account of the next Hitler can teach you. I see
| no reason to think that we won't be able to preserve that data
| as the cost of data storage keeps shrinking.
| nosianu wrote:
| > _I think future archeologists will struggle with the
| opposite, with us leaving a gigantic amount of data behind_
|
| Or it's the opposite, because most of the electronic records
| will be lost. Depends on how far ahead you look for those
| future archeologists.
|
| If you want to keep stuff for millennia you need clay tablets
| and stone, not USB sticks and magnetic tapes. Even microfilm
| - used extensively only a decades ago - is not all that
| durable (although it's better than electronic storage - https
| ://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/micro...).
|
| Never mind anyone trying to read some PDF a thousand years
| from now, even if they somehow have the bits and bytes.
|
| Lots of articles about this, just one random example link:
| https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/will-
| histor...
|
| Some think at least the important stuff is safe - but the
| problem is, unlike a stone stele, or a clay tablet by chance
| stored under just the right conditions, electronic records
| need to be actively managed and occasionally transferred to
| new media. It won't survive the millennia without active
| intervention. So the idea that our important historic
| electronic data is safe rests on the assumption that there
| will always be librarians who take care of save storage and
| occasional replication, and maintenance of the needed
| equipment. I think that's quite optimistic.
| riskable wrote:
| > If you want to keep stuff for millennia you need clay
| tablets and stone, not USB sticks and magnetic tapes.
|
| Actually, _there 's a better way_: Religion! Religion will
| have people devoting their lives to copying things
| generation after generation.
|
| We just need a new religion that devotes their time and
| (collective) resources into the preservation of all things
| digital. Something like archive.org but with groups of
| people gathering every Sunday to copy (and catalog) each
| other's data.
|
| Sure, the majority of the archives will probably consist of
| porn but that is also one of the most likely artifacts to
| be found at any given archeological site (aka little
| statues/carvings of a, "fertility goddess"). So... more of
| the same sort of discoveries by archeologists of the future
| who get access to the Church of the Digital God's archives.
| simiones wrote:
| Given that vast amounts of data have already been lost, even
| ones still considered valuable (e.g. the source code of some
| popular early games), I honestly see no chance that digital
| data will survive anything close to how well books survive,
| let alone comparisons with stone tablets.
|
| I'll be honestly surprised if I can still access all my
| pictures stored today in the cloud by the time I'm in my
| seventies, 40 years from now. All it takes is a banned
| account, a forgotten password, one too many lost MFA factors,
| and bye bye data.
| jl6 wrote:
| Perhaps today's oversized data legacy is the dirt and rubble
| through which future archaeologists will have to dig, to find
| relevant information.
| layer8 wrote:
| If there's ever a breakdown of civilization, or even just a
| worldwide dictatorship for long enough, that data could
| easily be destroyed and lost forever.
| Eumenes wrote:
| We'll see what an EMP will do about that .. I, for one, think
| a fresh start would be good for our planet.
| concordDance wrote:
| A population under a billion would admittedly make
| environment management much easier.
| farnsworth wrote:
| I don't think so- everything will be encrypted, lost,
| deleted, or on degraded unreadable drives.
|
| And what access do biographers have to the email accounts of
| people today?
|
| People used to leave behind a lifetime of paper notes and
| correspondence, read any biography and you will see this.
| After the 90s, I think that will just stop being available.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Also that the recent work studying genetics in fossil remains
| are not a panacea for understanding human prehistory.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Absolutely agree. It's just more information, and there's
| plenty of cases where you can have multiple cultures with the
| same or similar material culture, similar genetics, but
| different e.g. spoken language or political arrangements.
| (Like Quebec in Canada, e.g.)
|
| Need that time machine.
| tinco wrote:
| This idea struck me with the recent article about the Danish
| girl that was reconstructed with her newborn baby. The baby was
| resting on a swan's wing, and the girl was buried with 200
| reindeer's teeth.
|
| All sorts of symbolism and mysticism was attributed to the
| artefacts that were buried with the unfortunate pair. But if
| you would consider really objectively, how would such a pair be
| buried today and what would our thoughts be?
|
| I feel it would be fitting to bury the baby in the crib she was
| received in, a swan wing being a pretty convenient object to
| receive a newborn in. And the girl might be buried with her
| most prized collection, the reindeer teeth that her dad would
| gift her every time he returned from a successful hunt.
|
| Just basic human things, not even much to do with culture, just
| these individuals and their circumstances.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The feeling I get when I hear of these things is a kind of
| longing to see and feel their life for a while. Not that I
| want to live their lifestyle, because it would be _hard_ ;
| but there's just something about the paleolithic time that
| feels like an almost eternal substratum to the human
| existence that was then lost. The way people lived for a
| couple hundred thousand years, a tradition broken only in the
| last few millennia.
|
| Take stone tool making -- an art that goes back beyond our
| species, to the homo genus itself, as a universal hominid
| skill. Now mostly lost to us. That's kind of sad.
| farnsworth wrote:
| So many societal issues can be explained by the fact that
| the conditions that we're living in now are so different
| than the conditions under which we evolved for hundreds of
| thousands of years. And also the fact that we were
| naturally selected for survival, not happiness.
|
| Civilization is all about denying your nature in order to
| build a better way of life based on stacks of technology.
| This isn't a bad thing, I would also rather live in a
| modern society, it's just really confusing unless you work
| out the ways in which your brain is not actually suited for
| it and how to cope with this.
| ericmcer wrote:
| Yeah it would have been hard but man looking at the night
| sky with no light pollution and no clue what you were
| looking at would be a pretty deep spiritual experience
| ldhough wrote:
| If you have a bit of outside space flintknapping is a
| fairly accessible and very fun hobby, there are good
| YouTube tutorials and websites that sell the rocks and
| tools you need (other rocks, antler, leather, optionally
| copper). I recommend starting with obsidian or dacite, they
| are much easier than flint and chert. I wear glasses but if
| you don't I would also get safety glasses and optionally
| safety gloves. You will cut yourself if you don't but
| they're almost all very clean cuts that heal fast.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Thanks. I've definitely thought about it, and watched a
| few youtube videos. My wife took an anthro degree, and
| one of her professors was adept in it.
| riskable wrote:
| > Take stone tool making -- an art that goes back beyond
| our species, to the homo genus itself, as a universal
| hominid skill. Now mostly lost to us. That's kind of sad.
|
| It's not sad! We have _much_ better ways to make tools
| these days. It 's like lamenting the lost art of
| (incredibly tediously) drawing out circuit boards or
| drafting blueprints by hand.
|
| Will people of the future be sad about having lost the art
| of finding things to do while a progressive JPEG (porn)
| loaded over a dialup connection?
| nyolfen wrote:
| i don't think what is sad about 'losing' this is the
| straightforward utility of creating stone tools, but
| rather no longer possessing this article of culture which
| was previously shared by all humans for all time,
| something that connected them and their experiences,
| their understanding of the world and a point of reference
| for their sense of meaning -- learning to fashion a
| handaxe from your father, sister etc was probably
| something that literally all humans shared memories of.
| we are utterly alienated from them in many ways, hardly
| the same species
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Exactly this. Consider the "hand axe" -- a multipurpose
| stone tool made contiguously by basically almost _all_
| bipedal hominids (if not more) for a million and a half
| (or more!) years. Homo erectus, neanderthals, sapiens,
| etc.
|
| Then abruptly lost around the Paleolithic to Neolithic
| transition really. Apart from a few anthropologists
| who've studied to try to recreate the technique.
|
| It essentially "defined" what it is to be human for over
| a million years, and we can't do it anymore. I'm not
| saying it's a useful skill, only that this is a piece of
| cultural memory lost and that's kind of sad.
|
| It's not like hand-etching circuit boards, which is
| nothing more than a transitory technique to accomplish a
| goal until we found a new way. Stone tool making (and
| language) is what distinguished us from every other
| species on the planet, and was one of the central
| activities that people did with their time for hours on
| end, and is probably one of the key things that got us to
| "sharpen" our problem-solving brains and develop the
| other skills we rely on now.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| With prehistoric humans there's a constant tension between us vs
| them on the one hand and inbreeding on the other hand.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| I cannot understand why it is so hard to get people interested in
| our current genetic diversity and how it may change out comes in
| everything from diet to disease.
|
| I became a bit of a amateur nutritional geneticist over the last
| ten years it I have cured my self (mostly) of schizoaffective
| bipolar disorder as well as my anklosing spondylitis through a
| mixture of genetics, diet and supplements.
|
| Our genes are shaped by our environment, and that was true even
| back 30,000 years ago. They say in that article
|
| "Despite broadly similar hunting and gathering lifestyles, people
| in Western Europe remain genetically distinct from those east of
| the Baltic Sea."
|
| Hinting and gathering what? Fish or plants? That difference will
| change FADS1 and FADS2 genetics in a few generations.
|
| And we all carry genetics older than our great grandparents from
| divers places and everyone things we should all be eating the
| same food and living the same life.
|
| And in he end they lay it down to population mixing! MAybe it has
| more to do with environmental pressures.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| [dead]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| An interesting, and still somewhat contentious question, is
| whether these groups of people are responsible for the extinction
| of the mammoth population of Europe. It's likely that humans did
| play a central role in the destruction of the large mammal
| population, and some groups of humans disappeared or moved on
| after they'd hunted down the last of the big game.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10714-x
|
| > "Furthermore, it is possible to conclude that the Late
| Epigravettian population had high degree of quarry-fidelity; they
| left the basin when these mammals vanished."
|
| The notion of hunter-gather societies living harmoniously in
| equilibrium with nature that some people seem to view as an
| optimal societal arrangement doesn't fit very well with this
| scenario. Granted, it's unlikely that they wanted to hunt all the
| large animals to extinction, but it's another case of not having
| knowledge about the long-term consequences of their actions
| (which is not an excuse for human behavior today, however).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You're correct that there is no consensus on WHY but it's very
| well agreed upon that the crash did happen 1, 2, 3 below
|
| In my research, it seems to follow pretty closely that within
| 5,000-10,000 years of humans arriving in a territory with
| abundant mega-fauna, that the megafauna are completely wiped
| out. However the increase in global temperature put additional
| pressure on mega-fauna as the earth warmed
|
| My naiive interpretation is that climate warming into the
| Holocene put significant pressures on mega-fauna ecology, and
| humans took advantage of these new pressures and over-consumed
| the fauna. They did not realize there was such a thing as
| "running out of food."
|
| It seems pretty clear to me that 200,000-10,000BC was this kind
| of wonderland of human growth because all of the conditions
| were perfect for humans to just totally dominate the landscape
| with relative ease.
|
| The problem is, we are just smart enough as a group to mess
| things up really efficiently for short term benefits (within
| two generations), but we're not smart enough to act as though
| we're planning for 5-10 generations into the future.
|
| [1] Christopher, S., et.al. (2014). Global late quaternary
| megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change.
| Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
|
| [2] Ellis, E.C. (2021) People have shaped most of terrestrial
| nature for at least 12,000 years, Proceedings of the National
| Academy of Sciences, 118 (17).
|
| [3] Stewart, M., Carleton, W.C. & Groucutt, H.S. (2021) Climate
| change, not human population growth, correlates with Late
| Quaternary megafauna declines in North America. Nat Commun 12,
| 965.
| glass3 wrote:
| >The problem is, we are just smart enough as a group to mess
| things up really efficiently for short term benefits (within
| two generations), but we're not smart enough to act as though
| we're planning for 5-10 generations into the future.
|
| We could be smart enough. All the past cultures with
| monuments were building them to last.
| AxelLuktarGott wrote:
| All the past cultures that have monuments that still stand
| built them to last
| syrrim wrote:
| Highlighting the distinction between the minority rule
| and the majority rule. If 1% of people decide to build
| monuments to last millenia, there will be monuments from
| thousands of years ago. If 1% of people decide to be
| carefully conservationists and only consume what the
| land/ecosystem can support... say goodbye to that
| ecosystem.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Great analogy and this is the challenge of humanity
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yes you're correct, certain ruling psychopaths wanted the
| future to remember them forever and as a result used slaves
| and domination to create long term artifacts with
| extraordinary narcissistic effort.
|
| I wouldn't call that being "smart as a group"
|
| However I think Ozymandias is a good reminder here
| vkou wrote:
| All the cultures that were smart in the 5-10 generation
| planning scale got wiped out in the short term by the ones
| that weren't.
| janmarsal wrote:
| Late Pleistocene lasted from 129,000 to 11,700 BC. Younger
| Dryas happened like 12k years bc. That's not a very long period
| of time to me. How long did humans and mammoths co-exist? I've
| no idea but I've always assumed for tens of thousands of years
| at least. I'm sure humans hunting mammoths didn't help their
| population to survive but I think it's a bit harsh to blame
| humanity for wiping out mammoths when there was a huge
| extinction event happening 12k BC that almost wiped out humans
| too along with the megafauna.
|
| Meanwhile africa didn't have this extinction event and their
| megafauna is still intact regardless of humans. Well, now with
| gunpowder and whatnot they're threatened but it's not like
| stone age hunter gatherers had guns to shoot mammoths with.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| >How long did humans and mammoths co-exist?
|
| The research seems to indicate that the overlap was from
| ~150,000BC until the QME crash ~10,000BC that you describe.
|
| So, the answer would be "for the majority of anatomical
| Human's history until they all died off"
| syrrim wrote:
| Is that humans specifically, or hominids generally? Not
| that the distinction matters too much, but it could be a
| source of confusion.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Anatomically modern Humans, the wikipedia on this is
| strikingly well written:
|
| >Early modern human (EMH) or anatomically modern human
| (AMH)[1] are terms used to distinguish Homo sapiens (the
| only extant Hominina species) that are anatomically
| consistent with the range of phenotypes seen in
| contemporary humans from extinct archaic human species.
| This distinction is useful especially for times and
| regions where anatomically modern and archaic humans co-
| existed, for example, in Paleolithic Europe. Among the
| oldest known remains of Homo sapiens are those found at
| the Omo-Kibish I archaeological site in south-western
| Ethiopia, dating to about 233,000[2] to 196,000 years
| ago,[3] the Florisbad site in South Africa, dating to
| about 259,000 years ago, and the Jebel Irhoud site in
| Morocco, dated about 315,000 years ago.
|
| This is THE most important distinction to make as people
| seem to think that Humans prior to the year zero were
| neandertal or some proto-human
|
| Humans just like you and me are about 200,000 years old
| dfc wrote:
| What is the "QME crash"?
| runesofdoom wrote:
| The isolated mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the
| Arctic lasted until ~2000BC. [1] They died out before humans
| arrived at their island, possibly driven extinct by 'genomic
| meltdown'.[2]
|
| [1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379
| 11...
|
| [2]https://www.science.org/content/article/last-lonely-
| woolly-m...
| dron57 wrote:
| Another explanation could be that African mega-fauna evolved
| in close proximity to hominids, making them less susceptible
| to the pressures of being over-hunted. That could by why
| Eurasian, American and Australian mega-fauna went extinct
| shortly after the arrival of humans whereas they survived in
| Africa.
| ridicter wrote:
| >The notion of hunter-gather societies living harmoniously in
| equilibrium with nature that some people seem to view as an
| optimal societal arrangement doesn't fit very well with this
| scenario.
|
| Where is this notion? I've been involved in environmental
| circles and humans wiping out mammoths, giant sloths in south
| america, or logging easter island to bareness are pretty well
| known.
| shagmin wrote:
| I think this notion is pretty common amongst the general
| population. I'm just speculating but I feel like a lot of
| people think of hunting and there being an apex predator as
| the natural order of things, and it's only post-industrial
| society that has meaningfully affected nature. I mean, do
| most people even know there were ever giant sloths roaming
| South America or know anything about Easter Island other than
| there being some big stone statues there?
| Tagbert wrote:
| In popular culture there is the idea that hunter-gatherer
| societies live in balance with nature. It is a modern version
| of the "Nobel Savage" trope.
| slackdog wrote:
| It's a very outdated but common notion, popularized around
| about in the 17th and 18th centuries by the likes of
| Rousseau. It often gets tied up with enlightenment ideas and
| is popularly espoused by many (naive) people even today.
|
| It is associated with the controversial phrase "noble
| savage", which is sometimes said sincerely and sometimes
| sneeringly.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's coming into sharper focus that pre-historic humans had
| almost the exact same genetic variability as humans do today.
|
| The difference was in the environment:
|
| 1. Humans were a *tiny* but growing population (estimated <2M by
| 50,000BC)
|
| 2. The population of fauna and foragable food was in ridiculous
| abundance
|
| 3. Climate was in a Goldilocks period for human growth coming out
| of an ice age
|
| So when humans got to certain population sizes and consumed most
| of the easy to access food, the whole system collapsed and got
| flipped upside down into what we have today: society based on
| excludable property instead of a society based on communal
| sharing
|
| https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
| jessaustin wrote:
| That link contains an unwarranted assumption. It's true that
| particular "mega" species declined and went extinct over the
| very long period you cite. There's no reason to believe,
| however, that such a decline would reduce food available for
| humans. Rather than eating a ground sloth, a tribe could eat
| ten deer or a hundred turkeys, or more likely some mix
| including deer, turkeys, etc. The absence of a giant herbivore
| like the sloth might mean fewer large apex predators like
| saber-toothed cats, but these are unlikely to be regular food
| for humans anyway. (Often we'd expect the relation to be
| reversed.) The foliage that the sloth would have eaten was
| consumed by other herbivores instead. We might speculate that
| it's easier to relax for a few weeks after killing a sloth than
| it is to kill a turkey every day, but refrigeration didn't
| exist and killing a wild animal that weighs a ton is not easy.
| After all, turkeys and smaller animals may be caught with
| snares that a single human can easily fashion from available
| materials. Giant ground sloths... that wasn't an option.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Respectfully, It sounds like you're speculating without
| having read the requisite anthropological work that it's
| based on. Many of the things you describe are not really
| accurate with how we understand pre-writing human culture.
|
| It completely changed HOW humans organized around resources
|
| From the link:
|
| >Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient
| phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to
| hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and
| increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors
|
| This is based on thorough research linked in the paper and
| indicates that the PRESSURE from the change in hunting types,
| caused the innovation of private property in order to
| maintain the relative ease of calorie access compared with
| smaller fauna hunting (which was done also).
|
| Think about it like this, if your lifestyle is nomadic and
| you more or less follow herds around eating them (and any
| foraging) as necessary and then those herds die off, it
| completely changes how you live. Certain groups became great
| small game hunters, some became fishermen, some decided to be
| more agrarian etc...but the reality was that the lifestyle
| completely changed basically overnight (in evolutionary
| terms) and humans had to adapt as a result.
|
| There's a ton of variability in response starting in 10k BC,
| but the longer term iterated "optimal" resource production
| very clearly became intensive agriculture and animal
| husbandry - at the cost of our actual humanity in my opinion.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'm not sure what your familiarity with the literature is,
| but I'd strongly caution you against assuming too much
| about relationships between sedentism, writing, and
| property. First of all, there's many thousands of years
| between the first widely recognized sedentary cultures and
| "true writing". Proto writing of various kinds existed long
| before and after that transition.
|
| The relationship between writing and property has even more
| issues and they're usually circularly linked. Property
| rights are difficult to understand from the archaeological
| record alone, so the vast majority of work done has been at
| least partially based on literary sources. This in turn
| makes it look like "literate societies" (what a terrible
| term, ugh) are the ones who have property rights. At the
| same time, archaeologists have long used definitions that
| more or less guide what they consider a "civilization" to
| look like that has traditionally included criteria like
| writing. Certain philosophical schools (like Marxism)
| relate social/political/economic development to these
| stages, and thus implicate certain productive relations
| simply based on the presence of other features like
| writing, even if it remains untranslated. This is what's
| happened with Harappan archaeology for example.
|
| They might have universal relations, but the currently
| available evidence is _very_ unclear about that and I 'd
| recommend against strong statements about either the nature
| or timeline of that relationship.
| NorthOf33rd wrote:
| Most of the population of North and Central America remained
| communal until colonial contact. there were plenty of examples
| of agricultural societies within that group, and they were
| farming because it was easier than than other food supplies.
| swalling wrote:
| Suggesting the Americas were some communal relic of Ice Age
| cultures before European arrival is laughably wrong. As far
| north as modern St Louis, the Mississippian city of Cahokia
| was larger than contemporaneous London 1,000 years before
| contact. You then have the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec Empires
| that were highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare,
| state religion, slavery, and pyramid building.
|
| This misperception exists largely because most of the
| population was wiped out by introduced disease long before
| European colonization happened in earnest in most areas.
| (Read 1491 by Charles Mann.)
| NorthOf33rd wrote:
| Communal societal or economic structures don't preclude
| "highly stratified civilizations featuring warfare, state
| religion, slavery, and pyramid building." Centralized
| control is a common theme.
|
| Read the Egalitarian Continent chapter in Pekka
| Hamalainen's Indigenous Content. Cahokia is specifically
| covered including how the communal nature of the
| civilization shifted over time to something more autocratic
| and materialistic, and how the shift contributed to the
| collapse of that society.
| swalling wrote:
| Describing a set of societies that featured large scale
| human sacrifice as in any way communal or egalitarian is
| bordering on deranged. Even examining them purely
| economically, they were often heavily based on extracting
| and centralizing resources from weaker communities
| subjugated through violence.
|
| Hamalainen's book is widely thought of as trying to
| stretch a pretty weak and biased historical narrative,
| and presents a far from universally accepted view of
| history. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/
| indigenous-c...
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/arts/indigenous-
| continent...
| NorthOf33rd wrote:
| In the course of these comments you've referred to me as
| deranged and laughable. I'm going to bow out and let you
| hold onto your opinions, it's clear you're not interested
| in a conversation.
| swalling wrote:
| Declaring that strident criticism of an opinion or
| perspective is the same as a personal attack on the
| person who holds it is your assumption, not mine. Good,
| kind, intelligent people have objectively wrong opinions
| all the time. This kind of fragility is why The Coddling
| of the American Mind ended up getting written.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| It's not either or - it's both
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Fully concur.
|
| The distinction between agriculturalists and nomadic hunters
| in my estimation is that it was a rapid shift in the majority
| behavior but there was always some "mix" of nomadic and
| agricultural starting around 150,000BC
|
| It's just that the shift went from 90% nomadic to 99%
| agricultural over the span of only 100k years or so
| precompute wrote:
| I lost this post a few paragraphs in, posting anyway:
|
| There is only so much that can be gleaned from found evidence.
| The customs and assumptions of our time also affect the way we
| reconstruct these stories and civilizations.
|
| In many cases, the archaeological evidence is never even
| recovered: our entire civilization lives above those that came
| before us. Sometimes, even outright fabrication is allowed for
| decades[1][2] in the guise of "advancement of Science(tm)".
|
| In my opinion, musing about "different populations" on the basis
| of subtle positioning of things is an exercise in futility. Even
| with genetic evidence, there is very little that can be said
| about the relationship between those peoples and the things found
| -- maybe those were relics carried by outsiders, or remorse by
| genociders (a population does not just "vanish") or really
| anything else.
|
| Even when closely examining large structures like the Great
| Pyramid, there's evidence of engineering that far surpasses our
| own[3][4]. Uncanny coincidences that do not make sense[5] but
| readily integrate into our myths surround us[6] and are often
| destroyed by us[7].
|
| So what really is the _best_ way to figure out our past? As with
| most things, accountability over a long period of time. Humans
| have trouble keeping history straight over even a few decades.
| Knowledge lost to out of date customs, or just plain language
| idiosyncrasies[8] can make even the recent past opaque to most.
|
| Even the Epic of Gilgamesh seems to be tampered with: statues of
| the bull-rider (Enkidu) predate the tablets by many, many years,
| from before Gilgamesh's reign.
|
| We've found that dogs were domesticated over a long period of
| time. That means there were many, many accidents along the way.
| Even Woolly Mammoth bones found under cliffs meant there were
| very intelligent hunters among us. Even the fact that a species
| survived thousands of years of sub-zero temperatures should stop
| us in awe. We live in the Holocene, which seems to be life on
| easy mode: good temperatures, just enough CO2 and conditions
| favorable to analog information archiving, enabling civilization,
| hard industry and easy transport, with an easily targetable
| animal population.
|
| This is what I think is true: at some point, the human(oid?)s
| living in sync with their environment were disrupted by another
| group, and this group was so fundamentally _alien_ to whatever
| the norm was, that it quickly conquered most of the planet. Its
| superiority in numbers seems to have been great enough to enable
| similar outcomes for groups separated by great distances. Most of
| the evidence points to that group being _us_ , that we likely
| genocided many, many humanoid races just to get here.
|
| Here's a poem that I like, that seems to convey similar emotion:
| https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
|
| And at the risk of making this entire post sound like satire
| (it's not), here's some links to the Finno-Korean Hyperwar of
| 8245BC[9][10][11][12]
|
| [1]:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/19/science.scie...
|
| [2]:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220516153818/http://johnhawks.n...
|
| [3]: https://www.gizapower.com/Advanced/Advanced%20Machining.html
|
| [4]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-
| africa/egypt-...
|
| [5]: http://ancientmoons.com/trees.html
|
| [6]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/dragons-
| explor...
|
| [7]: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-asia/dragon-
| te...
|
| [8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke#cite_note-1
|
| [9]: https://vixra.org/pdf/1809.0081v1.pdf
|
| [10]:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AlternateHistory/comments/nba85t/to...
|
| [11]: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2007541-his
|
| [12]:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/puryu1/euras...
| jcranmer wrote:
| > There is only so much that can be gleaned from found
| evidence. The customs and assumptions of our time also affect
| the way we reconstruct these stories and civilizations.
|
| This is partially true. However, modern anthropologists and
| historians are _very_ aware of this, and spend a lot of time
| trying to make sure they do not push bounds of what evidence
| can suggest. _Popular_ anthropologists and historians generally
| do not share the same care, and pseudoanthropology dives into
| extrapolation with abandon.
|
| > Even when closely examining large structures like the Great
| Pyramid, there's evidence of engineering that far surpasses our
| own[3][4].
|
| Uh... no. There is a tendency to simultaneously underestimate
| the precision achievable with low technology tools while
| overestimating the precision of important megalithic
| architecture. This is what produces hyperbolic claims such as
| "evidence of engineering that far surpasses our own."
|
| The best theories are the ones that can marshal several
| different kinds of evidence, including experimental
| archaeology, recovery of artifacts with detailed microstructure
| analysis, as well as any available cultural evidence. In the
| case of the pyramids, how they were built is not a mystery, for
| we have recovered the tools used to build it from the quarries
| that sourced the stone, and we also have the pictures they
| painted to depict themselves building it. To ignore all of that
| evidence in favor of advanced machinery (of which no remains
| exist) to serve a purpose never hinted at in any literature is
| lunacy.
|
| > Uncanny coincidences that do not make sense[5]
|
| Well, the coincidence of hexagonal structure can easily be
| explained by there existing only three regular polygons that
| can tile a plane, one of which is a hexagon. Try a random
| Voronoi diagram (e.g.,
| https://cfbrasz.github.io/Voronoi.html)--things tend to end up
| looking very hexagonal very quickly.
|
| Of course, when you get to the claim that trees were 10 miles
| high...
| precompute wrote:
| Post went from +2 to -3, could the users downvoting it also
| leave a comment explaining the downvote?
| dav_Oz wrote:
| https://archive.is/W05Mq
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