Will Asia Rewrite Human History? | Hacker News Reader

Will Asia Rewrite Human History?

sapiens.org

110 pointsanthrocurious31 comments

The popup after 10 seconds stopped me reading. But it was refreshingly different at least..

"Are you a human interested in humans?" with the choices "YES, I LOVE HUMANS" or "NO, I AM NOT A HUMAN".

I went with C. Back button. I don't like (presumably? no indication what clicking Yes would get me into) subscription popups that stop me reading after 10 seconds on your site!

Disabling JS fixes all of that. Recommend you make a habit of it.

Gee dangus, I thought your (sibling) comment was both on-point and very funny, I did my best to upvote, vouch etc but it was evidently a losing battle.

There should be an option “Do Denisovans count?”

What popup? I didn't even imagine there was such an annoyance.

I probably have to thank uMatrix for improving my browsing experience. It is sometimes overkill, sometimes insufficient, I wouldn't recommend it to my mom (because of the need to understand how the web works to customize it via a few clicks here and there), but for geeks like us it's great. Added benefit: when configuring I get to see the domain names of those web actors that get filtered.

For the most part, there's nothing surprising here. Because we know so little, and searches for evidence have been driven by preconceptions, and outright superstition.

This jumps out as the key observation :

> By contrast, Mina Weinstein-Evron, an archaeologist at Haifa University who co-discovered the Misliya Cave jawbone suspects that the recent findings are H. sapiens but agrees that the story of anatomically modern human dispersal is still far from clear. “We know nothing. We have a dot of evidence here and a dot of evidence there,” she says. “And then we use these big words like ‘migration’ and ‘dispersal.’ We talk as if they bought a ticket. But they didn’t know where they were going. For them it was probably not even a movement, maybe it was 10 kilometers per generation.”

I guess that would point to generational territoriality driven by pop growth, i.e, each new generation has to expand into new territory with occasional infill when the initial settler generation fades out.

Or maybe climate change? Maybe even like a peristaltic pump?

A lot of Stephen Baxter's Evolution novel revolves around this, very highly recommended.

Wow, that's amazing!

Tens of thousands of people have literally walked across the US continent. Ancient people walking across Eurasia doesn't seem that worthy of surprise, on the contrary, it would seem surprising if they didn't.

I seem to recall it being called North America.

It's rewriting in progress.

That was within the context of an organized migration promoted by the US government. It seems reasonable people wouldn't have nearly the same impetus to move without such support structures.

The '49 California Gold Rush was hardly organized or promoted by the US government. Later, something like 20,000 died on the Oregon Trail. Doesn't sound very organized to me.

It's a little bit easier to walk across a continent if there are already known human establishments along the way to get supplies, existing roads or paths, and maps. It also helps to know what kind of competition to expect from other wildlife or hominids who might already live there.

Let's ask a question. Is it known whether anyone walked across North or South American in the 1600s? Native or European?

Lewis & Clark are usually counted as the first, in 1803; as for natives, there's a huge documentation problem - if someone had it is quite likely we wouldn't know about it.

But for nomadic hunters, there seems no reason why it wouldn't be possible in theory provided they didn't have to cross a desert or impassable mountain range. Which are serious problems for walking across all the continents.

> Which are serious problems for walking across all the continents.

Yet people did it anyway.

You're probably thinking just of the US, because Alexander Mackenzie crossed North America first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Mackenzie_(explorer)

The Spanish Conquistadors covered quite a lot of ground. They had no idea where they were going or what they would find.

But they knew what they wanted: gold, silver, and slaves to mine them if necessary.

Consider the travels of the Narvaez expedition[1], which landed in Florida in 1528, traveled a small distance by land, rebuilt their boats, then went to roughly where Galveston is today, then a handful of survivors wandered what is today the lands along the US/Mexico border, until finally rejoining the Spaniards who hand conquered the Aztecs in what is today, Mexico City around 1536 or so.

They covered a tremendous amount of ground and, out of about 600 who started, only 3 or so survived. The most famous is Cabeza de Vaca, who would return to Spain, write a book, then be sent to what is now Paraguay and Argentina, where he governed for a while before being sent back to Spain again.

He did all that without cars or planes, or motorboats. These people could go very far.

My favorite from the expedition was a Morrocan named “Estevanico” [2]. His story is pretty amazing.

My guess is that lots of humans traveled like this, over great distances. Some went far, some not so much. The North American tribes took slaves, traded them amongst each other, or sometimes seemed to accept strangers with open arms before nicely sending them along. Other times they would just kill strangers, sometimes almost for sport or entertainment.

Traveling back then wasn’t easy, and encountering other humans could just as easily accelerate your progress as it would stop you dead in your tracks.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narváez_expedition

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estevanico

I was wrong. It was hundreds of thousands.

The headline is going to be seen as a bit clickbaity, but imo the article is worth the read.

It's interesting to consider that there were several migrations out of Africa over some time period that's not really understood.

Yeah, to be honest, without seeing your comment I was going to skip on this article. I figured it was going to be an anti-China COVID article. Nevertheless, happily surprised with the article's contents on anthropology

I figured it was just going to be an article about China. You don't really need to have a COVID angle for combining "China" and "rewriting history". Tiananmen Square anyone?

Another interesting article: Partial skull found in Greece shows modern humans were in Eurasia 210,000 years ago https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-11/modern-humans...

Early modern humans had already left Africa and made their way as far north as Greece 210,000 years ago https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1376-z https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-11/modern-humans...

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