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12,000-year-old sequins hint at a shared culture in Indonesian islands
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- RugnirViking 3y agoMakes 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 3y agoromans are much less than 12000 years old
- angiosperm 3y agoEuropean beads were in Alaska pre-Columbus. Still, active trade networks have meaning.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoIt 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.
- opportune 3y agoNot 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.
- dmn322 3y agoPolynesians brought sweet potatoes from South America by around 1000 ce, so it’s reasonable to suspect this was true before the 1400s.
- opportune 3y agoYeah, I think the Siberia-Alaska oversea connection had been established by then as well. So had the Kilwa Sultanate (connecting much of Africa). But I think to claim the whole world, except islands, was connected we’d have to include Australia too. And before the 17/1800s there isn’t a lot of evidence of contact between Australia and Indonesia. According to this article, maybe contact started around 1500 or so: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9320452 https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9320452. Though in the same article they mention some 1000 year old Kilwan coins found off the coast of Australia so you may actually be right that we were fully connected even in 1000!
- prosody 3y ago> 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.
- debacle 3y ago[flagged]
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- dmn322 3y agoMy 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.
- mistrial9 3y agothat is close to the 13,000 year mark when not-yet-clear Big Changes happened.
- angiosperm 3y agoI.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 3y agoYounger Dryas Impact Theory? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas 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 3y agoIt 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.
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- tastyfreeze 3y agoIIRC 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 3y agoYes. 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 3y agoI don't think that's the case across the wallace line... could be wrong.
- angiosperm 3y agoWe 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.
- ransackdev 3y agoThe 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 3y agoWell 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.
- ransackdev 3y agoKnowledge was spread in written form before the printing press. Yes less of it and a lot slower, but you don’t have plumbing systems or built pyramids without knowledge being persisted for generations. The printing press is a factor I think but it not existing doesn’t explain why no progress was made for so long imo.
- extasia 3y ago