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Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were. Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf
by moloch-hai 4y ago
Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were.
Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia.
People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete.
The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThe genetic work actually does include those people, namely those whose descendents have been sampled.
- moloch-hai 4y agoSo any population wiped out by genocide, famine, or plague is unsampled. The Amazon basin hosted many millions of people for millennia until smallpox, diphtheria, and measles were delivered to them.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoNo? Even genocides leave descendants. Moreover, who was doing this hypothetical genocide that didn't have kids? As I said before, it's not logically impossible that a highly populous society existed in the pleistocene. But the constraints it would have to fit grow increasingly contorted as the state of knowledge improves. At some point it starts to resemble a small colony of advanced alien settlers who landed one day and disappeared a short while later. That explanation might honestly be easier to account for than what some people propose, since they don't have to develop their tech from scratch here on Earth.
- moloch-hai 4y agoHow strong a signal do you get from the Chatham Islanders, wiped out literally weeks after the Cook expedition told the Maoris about them?
- AlotOfReading 4y ago1) the moriori still have living descendents today and 2) it's pretty clear from both this comment and the substantial edits above that this discussion isn't in good faith
- moloch-hai 4y agoIgnoring the gaslighting, how much do we know about the Chatham Islanders' pre-contact culture? And, how many of those descendants have non-Maori Y chromosomes? Any?