[HN Gopher] 12,000-year-old sequins hint at a shared culture in ...
___________________________________________________________________
12,000-year-old sequins hint at a shared culture in Indonesian
islands
Author : diodorus
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-08-20 20:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cosmosmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cosmosmagazine.com)
| prosody wrote:
| > As well as being genetically related, Langley says it's likely
| that the people who inhabited these islands in the Pleistocene
| era, 12,000 years ago, had "an image of an inter-island
| 'community of practice' with shared values and worldviews".
|
| How can you determine that from a poorly attested material
| culture? The way it's worded makes me deeply suspicious that it's
| backporting the doctrine of Indonesian national unity into the
| Stone Age.
| dmn322 wrote:
| My impression is that Indonesian people aren't under any
| delusions that the country matches any specific historical
| borders. They're well aware that their country's borders are a
| product of colonization.
|
| That said, it seems to me like there's increasing evidence that
| the Austronesian expansion was more than just random refugees
| getting swept to different islands by fluke storms as is
| sometimes implied. There is wooden pole art all around the
| pacific rim, DNA evidence in south america, linguistic evidence
| in south america, and now this. It seems reasonable to suspect
| that the austronesian expansion was supported by a series of
| large trade networks and societies that provided logistical
| support for the expansion.
| [deleted]
| debacle wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| ransackdev wrote:
| The more we discover about the past the more weird it all is and
| to me makes less sense overall. People have lived very similar to
| our societies today, for thousands and thousands of years. Some
| had plumbing. Some built pyramids. Some did complex math and
| science. Some made gunpowder and explosives and had rockets. Yet
| for thousands and thousands of years, nothing was really
| happening and then within the last 250ish years we went from
| electric becoming a thing, to super computers in our watches and
| robots in space. The part that doesn't make sense is why that
| didn't get kicked off thousands of years ago when there wasn't
| much of a difference in terms of advancement. Why'd it explode
| one day almost like we got a helping hand? Shouldn't we be 1000
| years more advanced now than we currently are, because these
| things could have just as easily been kicked off then?
|
| I am not at all able to say I know enough history to know if I'm
| way off base to ask that question. I must be glossing over some
| significant reasons that couldn't have happened. It's just weird
| to me.
|
| A quote from Mad Men that helps demonstrate the sharp hockey
| stick of progress.
|
| "She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the 37th floor of a
| skyscraper. She was an astronaut."
| extasia wrote:
| Well for one there was no printing press via which to persist
| knowledge and translate it cheaply through time and space.
|
| Imagine what an individual could achieve technologically today,
| if they were unable to access any materials or knowledge that
| was accrued over the history of our species. The result would
| probably be a subset of the things you describe as originating
| from before 250 years ago, but they would certainly not be
| splitting atoms or mapping the human genome.
| adolph wrote:
| One intriguing conjecture [0] about the difference of now
| compared to many thousands of years past is that human
| consciousness as we know it (if we know it) didn't exist until
| the last 2,000 years. The hardware was there but the thought
| patterns were not.
|
| 0. _[In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
| Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes], Jaynes ' idea was that if
| you went back and you looked at very early historical texts--
| particularly for him, the Iliad--the way that characters talk
| about their own minds and their own drives is extremely
| unusual, or you might say not at all modern. . . . But, what's
| actually going on, given what we know about the specialization
| between the hemispheres of the brain, is that essentially one
| side of the brain, one hemisphere of the brain is really
| communicating to the other. And, full human consciousness had
| not really been established at that time._
|
| 0. https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-consciousness-free-
| wil...
| angiosperm wrote:
| Jaynes is certainly wrong in detail, but it is not too far-
| fetched to suggest that the notion of "self" was an
| invention, perhaps at first closely held among shamans, that
| then gradually spread to the wider population.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Makes sense. Is it any surprise? Arent there roman beads found in
| kamchatka at one point? And roman traders in golden cathay (a.k.a
| modern day malaysia). The ancients had a much greater degree of
| interconnectedness than we sometimes imagine
| rabbits_2002 wrote:
| romans are much less than 12000 years old
| opportune wrote:
| Not only that, but there was trade and migrations across the
| Bering straight before Columbus too, as evidenced by the spread
| of the Yupik people/Paleo-Eskimos.
|
| Indonesia (Makassar) also traded with aboriginal Australians
| but this started in earnest in the 1700s. Still, it's
| reasonable to conclude the entire earth was tenuously connected
| (technologically and historically if not actively) already even
| in the 1400s aside from some very isolated islands.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It doesn't take that much, certainly not a globe-spanning trade
| network. You only have to trade with your neighbor for portable
| goods like beads to spread/diffuse across a continent for
| instance.
| angiosperm wrote:
| European beads were in Alaska pre-Columbus.
|
| Still, active trade networks have meaning.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| IIRC all of the island nations around Indonesia were connected to
| each other and to the mainland during the pleistocene. Hardly a
| surprise that there was a shared culture when it is all the same
| landmass with no dividing mountains.
| angiosperm wrote:
| Yes. Sea level 20kya was 400 feet lower. A million square miles
| in the region started being inundated then. A common experience
| of everyone dependent on the sea, 12kya, was seeing their
| grandparents' villages disappear under water.
| dmn322 wrote:
| I don't think that's the case across the wallace line... could
| be wrong.
| angiosperm wrote:
| We know they had boats, because they had got to New Guinea
| and Australia tens of thousands of years before. But, yes,
| the Wallace line was never open land.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| that is close to the 13,000 year mark when not-yet-clear Big
| Changes happened.
| angiosperm wrote:
| I.e. all of North America and much of South burned down, 30+
| genera extinct, and the Clovis culture obliterated, right
| around 12,800ya. They have actually identified the exact year
| from ice cores.
| adolph wrote:
| Younger Dryas Impact Theory?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
|
| _The Younger Dryas, which occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700
| years BP,[2] was a return to glacial conditions which
| temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the
| Last Glacial Maximum (LGM),[3] which lasted from circa 27,000
| to 20,000 years BP. The Younger Dryas was the last stage of
| the Pleistocene epoch that spanned from 2,580,000 to 11,700
| years BP and it preceded the current, warmer Holocene epoch._
| angiosperm wrote:
| It is common to assume the comet strike kicked off the
| Younger Dryas cold spell, but it could still have been a
| coincidence. There were other cold spells like it in
| previous interglacials, and we don't know what caused
| those. Those _might also_ have been caused by comet
| strikes; it took us long enough to identify this one. What
| happens that takes a thousand years to clear up is another
| mystery on the pile.
|
| We know with certainty there was a comet strike, about the
| right time, that caused serious havoc, but evidence that it
| changed the climate is harder to establish. Firm evidence
| of sharply falling global temperature _before_ the strike
| would settle the question. If the strike really did precede
| the cold spell, it may be hard to prove causation. It seems
| like the way to bet.
|
| Another mystery is how the conflagration spared (just)
| bison, moose, deer, elk, pronghorn, and grizzly and brown
| bears.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-21 23:02 UTC)