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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

People generally dont know it, but the facts/debate around the sophistication of populations thousands of years ago, and how those vary across geographies, is extremely political. There is generally an unseen hand that dictates the narrative around the distant human past. You can pull the facts together, but the full picture is almost never presented cohesively to the non academic population.

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Wherever the popular narrative goes, there is also a huge amount of real uncertainty about the sophistication of the people that lived at the prehistoric Amazon.

The forest hides and destroys stuff extremely well.

I don’t think it’s political, but rather a matter of record. There is much more writing from Greece than the Amazon.

Having the Iliad amounts to a cheat code in archaeology.

There are certainly political threads. American westward expansion had to be justified, for example, by claiming cultural superiority over the people who were being displaced.

Most of the Americans who did the actual westward expansion didn't bother with justification. They saw the land was lightly populated and took it.

Westward expansion was much more than individuals taking land. There were military outposts, laws passed, articles written, battles fought, court cases argued, protests, disagreements among Americans, etc.

See this summary linked here and copied in full below: https://homework.study.com/explanation/how-did-americans-jus...

"How did Americans justify westward expansion?"

"Americans justified westward expansion through the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was a term coined in the mid-1840s. It claimed that the United States was providentially designed to spread across the continent. Believing their "civilization" to be superior to Native and Mexican peoples, it supposed their lands should rightfully be part of the United States. This led to the brutal subjugation of Native tribes as millions of Americans flooded west in the decades after the Civil War."

>They saw the land was lightly populated and took it.

This framing is passive and hides the history that our own government even admits to[1]. The west wasn't simply lightly populated. There were state-sponsored and well documented extermination campaigns that cleared the land for white settlement.

1. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison....

The West, other then the coastline itself, is lightly populated now. It was absolutely lightly populated back then.

Then why did we feel the need to clear the land of them? cough genocide cough

> It was absolutely lightly populated back then.

What makes you say that? Some studying the California natives put their population at 300,000, some all the way up to 1.5MM and that's after they were hit by waves of infectious disease.

What has this got to do with archaeology?

Primarily this is just a direct reply to the person above me. That said, the way we view historical cultures is impacted by politics, and to properly understand the archeological record we need to be able to separate politics from facts. We cannot do this if we don’t recognize the distinction.

Though in the cases of colonial history our access to the records are based in politics. Many texts were destroyed and our connections to the cultures that produced them were destroyed along with them.

How so?

Like horses in the Americas. There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off, then were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. But, there is sporadic evidence that horses did exist in the Americas the entire time.

Mind sharing a link to that evidence?

Yes, or a book?

A representative example of the sporadic evidence mentioned is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38017332

That, sir, was good fun!

I was also skeptical, seems there’s a lot more to this story. Not that they didn’t disappear and reappear, but the spread of them isn’t as straightforward as we thought.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/native-americans-s...

That article doesn't say they were there the whole time, but that they were (re)introduced a hundred years earlier via mexico

That's basically the same claim. This is saying "the europeans brought them, and they spread around faster than we thought". Which is interesting and fine, but that's a far cry from the above claim of "actually, that ten thousand year period where they appeared to be extinct never happened and they were around the whole time".

Honest question as I have no horse on this race (pun intended) and you picqued my curiosity. How the hell can the pre existence of horses be politicized?

I guess it adds weight to the whole "natives own this land and colonizers didn't bring anything to this land", notably as push back against the other side which is "natives are backwards and this land wasn't all that useful until we brought technology (horses)."

Both caricatures ofc. But then again, they have to be because in the political arena details and facts don't matter at the end of the day as it's all about marketing.

We had a Mayan guide when we were in the Yucatan on vacation. He spent quite a bit of time pointing out proofs (as the native Mayans see them) of horses being around the entire time. He claimed to have a college degree in archaeology, but went on a rant about non-Mayan archealogists and their bias against native Mayans. Basically, he saw the disbelief against horses being around the whole time as racially motivated. Those dumb mayans don't know what they are talking about. I'm trying now to remember the proofs he was showing, but at the time I remember being pretty surprised since it seemed cut and dry.

> I'm trying now to remember the proofs he was showing

I don't want to sound mean, but without any links to anything, any mentions of books, papers, even mentions of archaeological finds in local newspapers... what you're saying is just a story about someone you met who made some outlandish claims.

Yes. My takeaway from that account wasn't that there is necessary a hidden truth, but that some people do believe there is one and such belief correlates with their identity politics.

The fact that the argument appears to be cut and dry is also testament to the fact that it has been rehearsed many times and shared within that identity community

It's pretty dubious because horses themselves -- the kinds of horses we domesticated and ride -- are descendants from a pretty isolated genetic pocket in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, potentially all descended from a single male even.

The kind of horse that could be domesticated and ridden was not widespread, and in fact were really just hunted for meat until maybe 6500 years ago, and actually riding them came even later...

So, I mean, maybe there were equine species in North America, but their relationship to humans I doubt would be anything like what we think of horses like right now. More like a hunted species like bison or deer...

Now, dromedaries I can see. Camels, alpacas, and llamas etc. Long and ancient history with those, and in both hemispheres independently.

There was, in fact, an american horse that died out that we likely hunted (or at least coexisted with). There is zero evidence of domestication of which I'm aware, though.

Camels are crazy and work well in both cold and hot climates. I saw something (I think a PBS documentary) that said they originally weren't adapted to the desert, but the artic of northern Canada or something crazy like that (many many millenia ago).

Edit: more like millions of years

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracamelus

If this were true, surely it would be impossible to miss the genetic markers in modern American horses.

They might not have interbred- dogs existed in the Americas but left very little genetic mark. The chihuahua is a European breed that was bred to look like a dog that existed in Mexico.

> There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off

They died off (along with mammoths and lots of other large mammals) around the same time as humans arrived in the Americas and hunted them to extinction.

https://news.ucsb.edu/2001/011478/humans-hunted-mammals-exti...

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