Hacker News Reader

Comment by pocksuppet | Hacker News Reader

It's important that we learn about this so we don't repeat it. Sadly, we are repeating it. Perhaps it's impossible to prevent the cycle because it can only be prevented by those who benefit from it.

View on HN

The elites and ones in power were the ones most decimated by the bronze age collapse, so this reasoning feels flawed.

The descendants of bronze-age kings are surely more likely to be today's elite politicians than today's homeless people.

What is your evidence to support that? there is no 1:1 comparison here. The groups that likely survived these collapses were largely nomadic or at the fringes of society, used to sustaining themselves without the support of the existing power structures.

At that time distance from now, we're essentially all related to anyone who reproduced back then.

http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/Nature...

   > Chang established the basis of this research in a previous publication with an intentionally simplified model that ignored such complexities as geography and migration

This seems like a very impactful simplification. Especially given the relative limited mobility of peoples up until very recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com