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This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few

This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people. What defines an "indigenous" people? Is it some sort of lack of genetic or cultural mixing with other peoples? Even then, did Europeans have more migrations and cultural exchange than the Native Americans, or do we merely understand European migrations better for various reasons? Or is it merely a concept of "exotic" (or perhaps "primitive"?) relative to the Eurasian mind? Or cultural and economic detachment from the Eurasian world? Maybe it's relative geographic stability (e.g., not moving around very much)? But it seems like that's pretty arbitrary depending on how much you zoom out--i.e., if you zoom out wide to all of Europe, Europeans were very stable for a very long time, and if you zoom in tightly on a given Native American tribe, they probably migrated over a wide geographical area.

lastofthemojito 5y ago
> This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people The Wikipedia page for Indigenous peoples claims that the majority of indigenous people live in Africa and Asia. [0] My first thought for indigenous people in Asia would be Tibetans, but if I google "are Tibetans indigenous?" it appears to be a matter of debate. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples
- AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  To illustrate the complexity of such questions, here's a map of hypothesized haplogroup spread across east asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-DNA_haplogroup_migration_map_in_East_Asia.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-...
zokier 5y ago
> What defines an "indigenous" people? Generally part of it is history of colonization. Good example of non-european related indigenous people are the Ainu, who are considered indigenous in comparison to the colonizing Japanese.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  What about groups which haven't been colonized in any significant way? What about non-indigenous groups which have been colonized? It seems pretty arbitrary.
  - zokier 5y ago
    > What about groups which haven't been colonized in any significant way? They are not generally considered indigenous. What about them? > What about non-indigenous groups which have been colonized? Examples of such groups?
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > They are not generally considered indigenous. What about them? I think there are examples, but it depends on how broad your definition of “colonized” is. The most extreme cases are the various isolated tribes of the world (of course, everything is interconnected, so a disingenuous person could argue that our impacts to the climate which affect their lifestyles constitute a kind of colonization, which is to say that disingenuous people like to stretch semantics). > Examples of such groups Virtually any non-indigenous people who have been conquered by an empire. The Irish are one of thousands of concrete examples.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      >Examples of such groups? Indians, Irish, many African countries, many SEA countries, etc
- xster 5y ago
  A often forgotten group are indigenous Austronesian Taiwanese people who were continuously displaced since the Qing dynasty but were subject to major cleanse and upheaval during the KMT retreat to Taiwan, leaving them to ~3% of the Taiwanese population.
iammisc 5y ago
Every way you slice and dice it, 'indigenous' is another word for 'pure bred' or 'Fatherland', which, when you use its synonym, makes it sound as dangerous of an idea as it is. The reason indigeneity is not applied to Europe or Asia is because those cultures are just as indigenous as the natives of other parts of the world, but they've advanced well beyond that. The resurgence of indigeneity as a concept is due to a resurgence of the noble savage myth on the behalf of europeans and a xenophobic, racial purity craze on behalf of certain self-described indigenous (it's hardly a universal thing). In reality, being part of a lineage that's been on a certain plot of land gives you no more rights or authority than anyone else. Land division, ownership, and use should be determined by the needs of currently existing people, not tied indeterminably to the past. Why is it that we are happy to toss out any old tradition, and any old legal document, in order to bring it up to date with modern needs, but we simultaneously need to kowtow to people who claim their authority solely from the immobility of their ancestors?
- GnarlyWhale 5y ago
  What a needlessly divisive, inaccurate, and frankly disgusting characterization. The literally definition reads: "Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group" In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization. In extension, here in Canada the Métis People (explicitly descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and cultural practices. They are by no means thought of as "pure bred" as you reductively tried to frame it. The University of Alberta has an excellent, widely accoladed, and free MOOC on Indigenous Canada that I highly recommend you, and anyone else interested in learning more, consider taking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada
  - ghostpepper 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the Métis not entitled to the same tax benefits as other indigenous groups?
CommieBobDole 5y ago
I think you don't see a lot of this in Europe, Africa, or Asia because 'indigenous' in this context implies that the people who were there 'first' have been replaced by people who came from somewhere else. In Europe especially, this mostly happened before recorded history, and the borders of cultures and nations have changed so many times since then, it's hard to point to any one group as 'indigenous' in those areas. In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as much time documenting them. And finally, I put quotes around 'indigenous' and 'first', because for the most part this is a map of the groups of people who were most recently replaced; before the map of tribes in the Americas you see in the link, there were larger cultures/empires that rose and fell (Inca, Aztec, Maya, Mississippian, etc).
- iammisc 5y ago
  > In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as much time documenting them. The Arab conquests of North Africa would like to question this.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    Not necessarily from a genetic perspective, North Africa is predominantly Amazigh genetically (and Copt in Egypt), however much people may identify as Arab[0] culturally, and have been there since before recorded history. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_Afric...
- themgt 5y ago
  > In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas The latest genetic evidence suggests there was actually a very high level of replacement of the indigenous inhabitants of a large part of central/southern Africa, e.g. Despite a gap of 5,000 years in some cases, all four of the children’s genomes were remarkably similar to one another. But compared with the DNA of modern Africans, their genomes were more closely related to those of the hunter-gatherer groups in west central Africa that are sometimes known as Pygmies than they were to those of contemporary Cameroonians or other Bantu-speaking populations. The researchers also used the genomes to understand even older events in human history. The four children seem to descend from a group of Homo sapiens that branched off from the common ancestors of our species more than 200,000 years ago — perhaps even earlier than the ancestors of distinct Indigenous southern African groups known collectively as Khoesan peoples. Previous studies of modern human genomes had suggested that these groups descended from the oldest distinct lineage of Homo sapiens. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5 So populations who'd been living in Africa for 200k years were displaced and replaced just recently, in fact the tale seems quite familiar - original hunter gatherer populations replaced by agriculturalists. Europe and Asia are much the same, nearly everywhere.
908B64B197 5y ago
> What defines an "indigenous" people? This map is mostly a still picture of where different tribes and ethnicities were when they first encountered Europeans (or written history). "indigenous" French, for example, is harder to define because there was no written history or very little. Are the people who painted the Lascaux caves [0] the "indigenous" French? After them there were Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures that evolved; where they descendants of the Lascaux people or part of a group that settled the area? Same thing with Greenland and eastern Canada, the Viking made some descriptions of the natives that more or less matches what Europeans latter observed. But it's not clear they were talking about the same culture [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling
Y_Y 5y ago
What about "most recently replaced" as a definition"?
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I think that would incorporate a whole lot of people that we don't normally consider "indigenous". Moreover, in some cases indigenous people haven't been fully replaced. It also doesn't clear up the confusion about "what is a people" and "how do you test for individual membership in a given people group?". And what about the "land ownership" inferences that we usually hang off of "indigenous". If Native Americans take back Ohio, does that make non-Native-American Ohioans "indigenous"? This example is admittedly contrived, but the whole concept feels contrived to me.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    I suppose I could clarify to "replaced as the majority 'people'”. I agree with you on every point though. I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel displaced or disinherited, or end up a lower-class citizen by virtue of something that ultimately comes down to clearly genetic differences with the society in which they live. I think it's ultimately meaningless to say that someone whose ancestors lived in Europe in 1400 is an invader and someone whose ancestors at the same time were living in the Americas and had far fewer immunities is necessarily a victim of same. Nor is the converse necessarily true, but the whole thing is a big fucking mess.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > the whole thing is a big fucking mess. Well said.
- maccolgan 5y ago
  IIRC Aztecs constantly replaced people in adjacent territories (and vice versa), does that mean some are more indigenous than others?
II2II 5y ago
> This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people. The difference is likely linguistic. When it comes to Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about nation states, empires, kingdoms, or other political structures. When it comes to the Americas or Southern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about tribes that are pigeonholed into larger cultural groups based upon their similarities. In some cases, that may be fine in the sense that it differentiates how societies functioned. In other cases, it is used to trivialize the degree of development reached in the Southern Hemisphere and the Americas even though there is evidence of developed societies. As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others).
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I think we largely use “tribes” and “nation states” and so on correctly. You don’t hear the Aztecs or the Mayans or the Inca referred to as a “tribe”, but rather as civilizations. And similarly, we use “tribes” to refer to various units of Europeans in history (Celtic tribes, Germanic tribes, etc). There have also been some relatively recent discoveries that (especially North American) Native American societies were considerably more advanced than Europeans encountered because old world diseases advanced ahead of European settlers and wiped out native civilizations before Europeans were on scene to capture it in writing. But this also isn’t European supremacy, it’s understandable ignorance—it’s taken significant advances in archeology and technology (I think much of the evidence of advanced civilizations came from Lidar mappings of settlements which have long since been engulfed by jungle or forest). > As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others). I’ve know relatively little about the indigenous Britons, but we know that there were Celtic tribes in Britain prior to the Roman conquest, and we even know the names of many of said tribes. The fact that this isn’t commonly known isn’t some sort of European superiority as you suppose, but rather that we haven’t done a good job of educating people about British history.
mc32 5y ago
Part of the issue is Asia, Africa and so on do less indigenous studies. Some of that may be due to less interest in who the previous occupiers were. That said, there are ample maps showing migrations and settlement patterns through history of Europe and the Middle East in particular usually in rough slices of time but aren't represented here. The black sea area and the Middle East had lots and lots of turnover as there were movements and conquests after conquests and movements. One reason not to include them on the map is that would illustrate the nature of waves and conquests thought-out the ages until relatively recently when territories congealed. however, this would undermine the notion that the Americas had little turnover of land control and that there was less intertribal warfare and that extra continental conquests are different.

lastofthemojito 5y ago

> This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people The Wikipedia page for Indigenous peoples claims that the majority of indigenous people live in Africa and Asia. [0] My first thought for indigenous people in Asia would be Tibetans, but if I google "are Tibetans indigenous?" it appears to be a matter of debate. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples

AbrahamParangi 5y ago
To illustrate the complexity of such questions, here's a map of hypothesized haplogroup spread across east asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-DNA_haplogroup_migration_map_in_East_Asia.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyuan_people#/media/File:Y-...

zokier 5y ago

> What defines an "indigenous" people? Generally part of it is history of colonization. Good example of non-european related indigenous people are the Ainu, who are considered indigenous in comparison to the colonizing Japanese.

throwaway894345 5y ago
What about groups which haven't been colonized in any significant way? What about non-indigenous groups which have been colonized? It seems pretty arbitrary.
- zokier 5y ago
  > What about groups which haven't been colonized in any significant way? They are not generally considered indigenous. What about them? > What about non-indigenous groups which have been colonized? Examples of such groups?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > They are not generally considered indigenous. What about them? I think there are examples, but it depends on how broad your definition of “colonized” is. The most extreme cases are the various isolated tribes of the world (of course, everything is interconnected, so a disingenuous person could argue that our impacts to the climate which affect their lifestyles constitute a kind of colonization, which is to say that disingenuous people like to stretch semantics). > Examples of such groups Virtually any non-indigenous people who have been conquered by an empire. The Irish are one of thousands of concrete examples.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    >Examples of such groups? Indians, Irish, many African countries, many SEA countries, etc
xster 5y ago
A often forgotten group are indigenous Austronesian Taiwanese people who were continuously displaced since the Qing dynasty but were subject to major cleanse and upheaval during the KMT retreat to Taiwan, leaving them to ~3% of the Taiwanese population.

iammisc 5y ago

Every way you slice and dice it, 'indigenous' is another word for 'pure bred' or 'Fatherland', which, when you use its synonym, makes it sound as dangerous of an idea as it is. The reason indigeneity is not applied to Europe or Asia is because those cultures are just as indigenous as the natives of other parts of the world, but they've advanced well beyond that. The resurgence of indigeneity as a concept is due to a resurgence of the noble savage myth on the behalf of europeans and a xenophobic, racial purity craze on behalf of certain self-described indigenous (it's hardly a universal thing). In reality, being part of a lineage that's been on a certain plot of land gives you no more rights or authority than anyone else. Land division, ownership, and use should be determined by the needs of currently existing people, not tied indeterminably to the past. Why is it that we are happy to toss out any old tradition, and any old legal document, in order to bring it up to date with modern needs, but we simultaneously need to kowtow to people who claim their authority solely from the immobility of their ancestors?

GnarlyWhale 5y ago
What a needlessly divisive, inaccurate, and frankly disgusting characterization. The literally definition reads: "Indigenous or less commonly indigenous : of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group" In most modern contexts it's used to refer to the diverse peoples that inhabited a land prior to European colonization. In extension, here in Canada the Métis People (explicitly descendants of MIXED European and Indigenous ancestry) are recognized as an Indigenous group with unique language and cultural practices. They are by no means thought of as "pure bred" as you reductively tried to frame it. The University of Alberta has an excellent, widely accoladed, and free MOOC on Indigenous Canada that I highly recommend you, and anyone else interested in learning more, consider taking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada https://www.coursera.org/learn/indigenous-canada
- ghostpepper 5y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't the Métis not entitled to the same tax benefits as other indigenous groups?

CommieBobDole 5y ago

I think you don't see a lot of this in Europe, Africa, or Asia because 'indigenous' in this context implies that the people who were there 'first' have been replaced by people who came from somewhere else. In Europe especially, this mostly happened before recorded history, and the borders of cultures and nations have changed so many times since then, it's hard to point to any one group as 'indigenous' in those areas. In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as much time documenting them. And finally, I put quotes around 'indigenous' and 'first', because for the most part this is a map of the groups of people who were most recently replaced; before the map of tribes in the Americas you see in the link, there were larger cultures/empires that rose and fell (Inca, Aztec, Maya, Mississippian, etc).

iammisc 5y ago
> In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas, so whoever built this map has probably not spent as much time documenting them. The Arab conquests of North Africa would like to question this.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Not necessarily from a genetic perspective, North Africa is predominantly Amazigh genetically (and Copt in Egypt), however much people may identify as Arab[0] culturally, and have been there since before recorded history. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_North_Afric...
themgt 5y ago
> In Africa, while there was a lot of colonization, in most places the indigenous people were not displaced (and replaced) to the extent that they were in Europe, Australia, or the Americas The latest genetic evidence suggests there was actually a very high level of replacement of the indigenous inhabitants of a large part of central/southern Africa, e.g. Despite a gap of 5,000 years in some cases, all four of the children’s genomes were remarkably similar to one another. But compared with the DNA of modern Africans, their genomes were more closely related to those of the hunter-gatherer groups in west central Africa that are sometimes known as Pygmies than they were to those of contemporary Cameroonians or other Bantu-speaking populations. The researchers also used the genomes to understand even older events in human history. The four children seem to descend from a group of Homo sapiens that branched off from the common ancestors of our species more than 200,000 years ago — perhaps even earlier than the ancestors of distinct Indigenous southern African groups known collectively as Khoesan peoples. Previous studies of modern human genomes had suggested that these groups descended from the oldest distinct lineage of Homo sapiens. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00167-5 So populations who'd been living in Africa for 200k years were displaced and replaced just recently, in fact the tale seems quite familiar - original hunter gatherer populations replaced by agriculturalists. Europe and Asia are much the same, nearly everywhere.

908B64B197 5y ago

> What defines an "indigenous" people? This map is mostly a still picture of where different tribes and ethnicities were when they first encountered Europeans (or written history). "indigenous" French, for example, is harder to define because there was no written history or very little. Are the people who painted the Lascaux caves [0] the "indigenous" French? After them there were Bronze Age and Iron Age cultures that evolved; where they descendants of the Lascaux people or part of a group that settled the area? Same thing with Greenland and eastern Canada, the Viking made some descriptions of the natives that more or less matches what Europeans latter observed. But it's not clear they were talking about the same culture [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling

Y_Y 5y ago

What about "most recently replaced" as a definition"?

throwaway894345 5y ago
I think that would incorporate a whole lot of people that we don't normally consider "indigenous". Moreover, in some cases indigenous people haven't been fully replaced. It also doesn't clear up the confusion about "what is a people" and "how do you test for individual membership in a given people group?". And what about the "land ownership" inferences that we usually hang off of "indigenous". If Native Americans take back Ohio, does that make non-Native-American Ohioans "indigenous"? This example is admittedly contrived, but the whole concept feels contrived to me.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  I suppose I could clarify to "replaced as the majority 'people'”. I agree with you on every point though. I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel displaced or disinherited, or end up a lower-class citizen by virtue of something that ultimately comes down to clearly genetic differences with the society in which they live. I think it's ultimately meaningless to say that someone whose ancestors lived in Europe in 1400 is an invader and someone whose ancestors at the same time were living in the Americas and had far fewer immunities is necessarily a victim of same. Nor is the converse necessarily true, but the whole thing is a big fucking mess.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > the whole thing is a big fucking mess. Well said.
maccolgan 5y ago
IIRC Aztecs constantly replaced people in adjacent territories (and vice versa), does that mean some are more indigenous than others?

II2II 5y ago

> This map is cool, but I'm still embarrassed to say I don't understand the concept of "indigenous" particularly well or why Europe, Africa, and Asia have so few indigenous people. The difference is likely linguistic. When it comes to Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about nation states, empires, kingdoms, or other political structures. When it comes to the Americas or Southern Africa, we have a tendency to talk about tribes that are pigeonholed into larger cultural groups based upon their similarities. In some cases, that may be fine in the sense that it differentiates how societies functioned. In other cases, it is used to trivialize the degree of development reached in the Southern Hemisphere and the Americas even though there is evidence of developed societies. As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others).

throwaway894345 5y ago
I think we largely use “tribes” and “nation states” and so on correctly. You don’t hear the Aztecs or the Mayans or the Inca referred to as a “tribe”, but rather as civilizations. And similarly, we use “tribes” to refer to various units of Europeans in history (Celtic tribes, Germanic tribes, etc). There have also been some relatively recent discoveries that (especially North American) Native American societies were considerably more advanced than Europeans encountered because old world diseases advanced ahead of European settlers and wiped out native civilizations before Europeans were on scene to capture it in writing. But this also isn’t European supremacy, it’s understandable ignorance—it’s taken significant advances in archeology and technology (I think much of the evidence of advanced civilizations came from Lidar mappings of settlements which have long since been engulfed by jungle or forest). > As an example of this, I have never heard of the indigenous people of the British Isles being referred to as tribal even though I have heard to indigenous being used to refer to the peoples who lived there prior to the various waves of invasion (e.g. Roman, Viking, and likely others). I’ve know relatively little about the indigenous Britons, but we know that there were Celtic tribes in Britain prior to the Roman conquest, and we even know the names of many of said tribes. The fact that this isn’t commonly known isn’t some sort of European superiority as you suppose, but rather that we haven’t done a good job of educating people about British history.

mc32 5y ago

Part of the issue is Asia, Africa and so on do less indigenous studies. Some of that may be due to less interest in who the previous occupiers were. That said, there are ample maps showing migrations and settlement patterns through history of Europe and the Middle East in particular usually in rough slices of time but aren't represented here. The black sea area and the Middle East had lots and lots of turnover as there were movements and conquests after conquests and movements. One reason not to include them on the map is that would illustrate the nature of waves and conquests thought-out the ages until relatively recently when territories congealed. however, this would undermine the notion that the Americas had little turnover of land control and that there was less intertribal warfare and that extra continental conquests are different.