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Suppose that beads became a hot trade item. How fast could they have been traded from the Caribbean to Alaska? It seems like 30 years is a reasonable time for
by esperent 1y ago
Suppose that beads became a hot trade item. How fast could they have been traded from the Caribbean to Alaska?
It seems like 30 years is a reasonable time for that.
- gus_massa 1y agoIn that case, I'd expect to find a few beads in the middle.
- Robotbeat 1y agoMaybe we will.
- mmooss 1y agoThat's the opposite of evidence; there's a very good reason it has no standing in science.
- Robotbeat 1y agoIt took a while to find this one. Absence of evidence is not exactly evidence of absence. That’s the point.
- mmooss 1y agoYou've misunderstood. It's hard to prove a negative, which is the point. But made-up things are lies - evidence is the only currency of the realm.
- HelloImSteven 1y agoI took their meaning to be that we should keep looking into the whole matter since, either way, there might be more evidence to find. I don’t think they were dismissing this theory or its implications for political/ideological reasons—since they mentioned it seems plausible—but I could be naive. In any case, clearly the prevailing understanding is wrong in one way or another, and that should be reflected in curriculums alongside this new evidence.
- Robotbeat 1y agoYeah, although again, the error bars are too large to say with certainty this was pre-Columbus. But it really wouldn’t surprise me. As others pointed out, the Inuit traveled across the Bering Strait into what is now Russia many times pre-Columbus, so the idea they may have brought beads back with them is plausible.