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Serious Academics are not much better in their use of conjecture and motivated reasoning. Consider this article in the New York Times in which a Real Archaeolo
by adamsb6 4y ago
Serious Academics are not much better in their use of conjecture and motivated reasoning.
Consider this article in the New York Times in which a Real Archaeologist dismisses the idea that there was any violence involved in a large group of men suddenly meeting their genetic end:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/iberia-prehistory-dna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/science/iberia-prehistory...
> But skeletal DNA from that period is striking and puzzling. Over all, Bronze Age Iberians traced 40 percent of their ancestry to the newcomers.
> DNA from the men, however, all traced back to the steppes. The Y chromosomes from the male farmers disappeared from the gene pool.
> To archaeologists, the shift is a puzzle.
> “I cannot say what it is,” said Roberto Risch, an archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who was not involved in the new studies. But he ruled out wars or massacres as the cause. “It’s not a particularly violent time,” he said.
> Instead, Dr. Risch suspects “a political process” is the explanation. In their archaeological digs, Dr. Risch and his colleagues have found that Iberian farmers originally lived in egalitarian societies, storing their wealth together and burying their dead in group graves.
- whatshisface 4y agoIf there were a lot of men dying in wars, wouldn't there be a lot of damaged skeletons which would lead to the conclusion that it was a violent time? You're offhandedly dismissing a statement that could have a lot behind it.
- ch4s3 4y agoThere aren’t a lot of skeletons for the time period at all.
- adamsb6 4y agoThere might be such skeletons. But even bones decompose, especially on these time scales. That any time in history was not a violent time is itself an extraordinary claim. Additionally, thousands of men, 100% of a genetic line, opting to not reproduce would also be an extraordinary event. We've seen men turned eunuch by cults before, but I don't think ever at such a scale. We have many historical examples of genocide, as well as invaders killing the local men and taking the women as their wives. There are a lot of possibilities, but this archaeologist is discounting a very likely possibility with flimsy reasoning. I'm reminded of how virologists seemed to unite behind the idea that COVID couldn't possibly be a lab escape, but they had no real evidence to dismiss the possibility. They weren't following the evidence, but rather following the popular narrative.