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Comment by failwhaleshark | Hacker News Reader

Japan logged nearly all of its old-growth forests around 1666 (Edo period), and only organized forest management brought it back from the brink of becoming like another Easter Island.

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One of the weirdest things about going hiking around Kyoto is coming across valleys of identical trees spaced evenly in neat rows. Absolutely eerie feeling, I was so creeped out I didn't even stop to take pictures.

The Eastern Island “ecocide” narrative seems to be questionable. In time, it might go the way of the Kon Tiki hypothesis.

https://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-easter-island-a-...

The problem with that analogy is that the Kon-Tiki hypothesis was proven right last year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01983-5

Uh, kind of? It has been shown that there was some contact between the Polynesians and the west coast of South America. The Kon-Tiki hypothesis is usually understood to be something like "the Polynesian islands were populated by a group of indigenous South Americans who drifted there in a boat", which is certainly not exclusively the case (an overall west-to-east migration to populate Polynesia is all but certain and corroborated by evidence across multiple scientific disciplines) and might still not even be partially the case, as the contact could have been Polynesians sailing to South America and back (as the paper's authors acknowledge).

Given that we know the Polynesians to have been expert navigators who explored basically the whole Pacific basin over the course of centuries, that explanation for the contact seems more plausible to me than the drifting-from-South-America explanation for the genetic admixtures reported last year; but even if you think otherwise, the hypothesis wasn't really "proven right".

I think you were a bit lax on the kon-tiki hypothesis. It didn't just posit the west-to-east colonization of Polynesia from South America, but that this was done be white-people originating in the middle east.

So while there is genetic evidence for contact between South America and Polynesia, that evidence is also evidence against the Kon-Tiki hypothesis.

I do not understand that you are talking about. We have two distinct hypothesis.

One is what Egyptians traveled to South America. That was his Ra Expedition.

Another is that people traveled from South America to Polynesia. His Kon-Tiki expedition.

You are saying: (1) Ra is wrong (2) Kon-Tiki is right (3) Because Ra is wrong Kon-Tiki is also wrong.

I do not understand how you can at the same time believe (2) and (3).

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