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There is a long standing stance in anthropology and archeology that native peoples of the Americas had virtually zero contact with groups outside of their immed

by throwaway2048 6y ago

There is a long standing stance in anthropology and archeology that native peoples of the Americas had virtually zero contact with groups outside of their immediate surroundings. I find it extremely condescending and stupid.

konjin 6y ago
The reason for this is that when they did have contact they all died. The natives in America were vastly more inbread (which really is saying something) than the Europeans who came in. They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Europe and Asia have the same issue compared to Africa, which is why Native Americans have an exceptionally severe case of it. Secondly, your characterization here shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an actually relevant paper [1]: > The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic hypotheses as missing key points. [1] https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032 https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    >That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects Isn't this a simple matter of WHAT versus WHY (i.e. they were inbred because of founder effects)
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      No, founder effects are basically sampling bias. You can still have people that are genetically distant reproducing (and in fact, the popularizer of this particular vein of theories in Brazil, Francis Black suggested mandating exactly this to much criticism), but the overall population diversity will remain low. However, founder effects can be associated with inbreeding if it's a sufficiently small population. I'd imagine this probably wasn't a major factor for early Americans, as the effective population size (note, not actual population size!) was on the order of thousands.
      - s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still not sure I follow how they are different. Does it not count as inbreeding if mating is occurring between distant relations which have low genetic differences due to low variability in the total population?
        AlotOfReading 6y ago
        Imagine that the base population has alleles A-Z, all at equal frequency. A small population splits from the base population and becomes isolated. Because they're a small sample of the whole, they only have alleles A-M. This is the founder effect. Inbreeding would be A-A pairings (which may be more likely depending on population structure, frequencies, and size), but is not necessary. In practice, there's a huge array of complications on top of all this that affect frequencies. That's the basic idea though.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Thanks for explaining it to me this way, I think it helps. My understanding from your post is that inbreeding is typically viewed as a more extreme reduction in available alleles and there is a blurry distinction. A founding or bottlenecked population have only A alleles present, but this would generally not be described as inbreeding. The implication seems to be that to be termed inbreeding, there has to be access to more diverse pairings which for whatever reasons are not occurring.
        AlotOfReading 6y ago
        A founder effect population would still have some genetic variance left (Alleles A through M), but it would have less than the base population (A through Z). This is a shift in allele frequencies in the population as a whole due to sampling bias. Inbreeding is reproduction by two people that are closely related (i.e. have similar alleles). Since people only have one allele in our example, that only occurs when two people with the same allele (e.g. A-A) reproduce. A-B, B-C, or any other dissimilar combination would not be inbreeding because their alleles are different, i.e. the "coefficient of inbreeding" is low. Hopefully that clarifies how they're distinct.
  - konjin 6y ago
    >That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Yes, when all your founders are first cousins. Humans as a species are incredibly inbred compared to any other primates. Native Americans even more so.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain. That’s not a sign of inbreeding. We aren’t dying of covid in vast numbers because we are all inbred (no ‘a’).
CryptoPunk 6y ago
It seems to be true, with virtually nothing in the way of technological and cultural diffusion between the high population density regions of the Old and New World. Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait, as this article describes, but this was a very small volume of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them. The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect, through a trickle of traded items that made it across the strait and passed through numerous hands across vast distances to reach them.
aksss 6y ago
There’s a lot of evidence indicating little to no contact and a paucity of evidence suggesting otherwise. So much so that “a” find like this is big news - a bead from the 15th century. It would not be big news if these things were found regularly, and they haven’t been, and people have been looking in earnest. I don’t understand why you would find the conclusion to be insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia as yet unfound? At the time of European contact, the written and archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there was little worth trading for that far out that couldn’t be found elsewhere for less. In other words, even if western and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago or more, the trade routes weren’t valuable enough on the balance to maintain. I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform the understanding of all human societies in time. It further enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I would recommend to stir a fascination with these early cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian Wars, which dominates a lot of people’s ideas about the indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back another three centuries and there’s some fascinating, wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of contact.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  Yes, it's condescending because we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't looking for it. Genetics in particular has established there was contact between Oceania and South America for something like 500 years before Columbus. Your description of native Americans as Neolithic or Paleolithic is more of the same problem, including the view that there's some sort of ladder of categories civilizations climb. We again know conclusively by the evidence this is wrong, that ancient cultures were a web of diffusion and adoption of different technologies and practices, where things were always adapted to the local context. In particular we're finding much more physical evidence of wide scale deliberate changing of the Amazon landscape to better suit the people living there. Going back even further, there's a growing body of evidence of exchange of technologies between ancient hominid species as well. Basically there's a whole lot more to this subject and story, and plenty of evidence out there to find and learn from, but the narrative of linear development and diffusion of civilization has hindered that. Likewise the idea that the only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions.

konjin 6y ago

The reason for this is that when they did have contact they all died. The natives in America were vastly more inbread (which really is saying something) than the Europeans who came in. They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15485351/

AlotOfReading 6y ago
That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Europe and Asia have the same issue compared to Africa, which is why Native Americans have an exceptionally severe case of it. Secondly, your characterization here shows a really fundamental misunderstanding of the literature. To quote an actually relevant paper [1]: > The difficulty of finding incontrovertible evidence to support genetic hypotheses has resulted in a variety of alternative perspectives which de-emphasize the genetic hypotheses as missing key points. [1] https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032 https://doi.org/10.1038/srep14032
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  >That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects Isn't this a simple matter of WHAT versus WHY (i.e. they were inbred because of founder effects)
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    No, founder effects are basically sampling bias. You can still have people that are genetically distant reproducing (and in fact, the popularizer of this particular vein of theories in Brazil, Francis Black suggested mandating exactly this to much criticism), but the overall population diversity will remain low. However, founder effects can be associated with inbreeding if it's a sufficiently small population. I'd imagine this probably wasn't a major factor for early Americans, as the effective population size (note, not actual population size!) was on the order of thousands.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Thanks for the explanation, but I'm still not sure I follow how they are different. Does it not count as inbreeding if mating is occurring between distant relations which have low genetic differences due to low variability in the total population?
      - AlotOfReading 6y ago
        Imagine that the base population has alleles A-Z, all at equal frequency. A small population splits from the base population and becomes isolated. Because they're a small sample of the whole, they only have alleles A-M. This is the founder effect. Inbreeding would be A-A pairings (which may be more likely depending on population structure, frequencies, and size), but is not necessary. In practice, there's a huge array of complications on top of all this that affect frequencies. That's the basic idea though.
        s1artibartfast 6y ago
        Thanks for explaining it to me this way, I think it helps. My understanding from your post is that inbreeding is typically viewed as a more extreme reduction in available alleles and there is a blurry distinction. A founding or bottlenecked population have only A alleles present, but this would generally not be described as inbreeding. The implication seems to be that to be termed inbreeding, there has to be access to more diverse pairings which for whatever reasons are not occurring.
        AlotOfReading 6y ago
        A founder effect population would still have some genetic variance left (Alleles A through M), but it would have less than the base population (A through Z). This is a shift in allele frequencies in the population as a whole due to sampling bias. Inbreeding is reproduction by two people that are closely related (i.e. have similar alleles). Since people only have one allele in our example, that only occurs when two people with the same allele (e.g. A-A) reproduce. A-B, B-C, or any other dissimilar combination would not be inbreeding because their alleles are different, i.e. the "coefficient of inbreeding" is low. Hopefully that clarifies how they're distinct.
- konjin 6y ago
  >That's not inbreeding, that's founder effects. Yes, when all your founders are first cousins. Humans as a species are incredibly inbred compared to any other primates. Native Americans even more so.
lostlogin 6y ago
> They had so little genetic diversity that when one died to say small pox they all would then be susceptible to the same strain. That’s not a sign of inbreeding. We aren’t dying of covid in vast numbers because we are all inbred (no ‘a’).

CryptoPunk 6y ago

It seems to be true, with virtually nothing in the way of technological and cultural diffusion between the high population density regions of the Old and New World. Arctic peoples seem to have traded across the Bering Strait, as this article describes, but this was a very small volume of trade, owing to the low population densities on both sides of the Bering Strait and the areas adjacent to them. The only contact the peoples far from and on the opposite sides of the Bering Strait would have had was indirect, through a trickle of traded items that made it across the strait and passed through numerous hands across vast distances to reach them.

aksss 6y ago

There’s a lot of evidence indicating little to no contact and a paucity of evidence suggesting otherwise. So much so that “a” find like this is big news - a bead from the 15th century. It would not be big news if these things were found regularly, and they haven’t been, and people have been looking in earnest. I don’t understand why you would find the conclusion to be insulting or condescending. Do you feel some bias has covered up information or that there is a wealth of contact indicia as yet unfound? At the time of European contact, the written and archeological records both seem to agree that the indigenous population in North America was a Neolithic one. Some regions West of the Mississippi (out in the dry plains) were even Paleolithic. Even while there is evidence suggesting the Chinese made it to Alaska, and the Vikings to the East Coast much earlier than Columbian contact, it obviously was too expensive to stay. While trade goods trickled out to these far ends of the network, their paucity indicates that there was little worth trading for that far out that couldn’t be found elsewhere for less. In other words, even if western and eastern civilizations knew about the Americas an eon ago or more, the trade routes weren’t valuable enough on the balance to maintain. I suggest you think of this as a highly valuable distinction for the study of mankind. The indigenous populations of the Americas were human, the same as you and I today. They were wicked smart, capable, and well-adapted to living in insanely hostile conditions. Their until-recent isolation helps inform the understanding of all human societies in time. It further enables every human on earth confront themselves. Two books I would recommend to stir a fascination with these early cultures: Thundersticks by David Silverman, and Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn. These contain accessible descriptions of life before the 19th century Plains Indian Wars, which dominates a lot of people’s ideas about the indigenous Americans. In fact, European contact goes back another three centuries and there’s some fascinating, wondrous history and insight in those earliest periods of contact.

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
Yes, it's condescending because we're rapidly learning the only reason we didn't find the evidence is we weren't looking for it. Genetics in particular has established there was contact between Oceania and South America for something like 500 years before Columbus. Your description of native Americans as Neolithic or Paleolithic is more of the same problem, including the view that there's some sort of ladder of categories civilizations climb. We again know conclusively by the evidence this is wrong, that ancient cultures were a web of diffusion and adoption of different technologies and practices, where things were always adapted to the local context. In particular we're finding much more physical evidence of wide scale deliberate changing of the Amazon landscape to better suit the people living there. Going back even further, there's a growing body of evidence of exchange of technologies between ancient hominid species as well. Basically there's a whole lot more to this subject and story, and plenty of evidence out there to find and learn from, but the narrative of linear development and diffusion of civilization has hindered that. Likewise the idea that the only evidence of ancient civilizations that counts as advanced are greek/roman style constructions.