Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't reference the galactic orientation by reference to the nearest superclusters? Pleb.
The enemy's gate is down
Niceee
Out of Africa's midlife crisis
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#32I thought this was an interesting article. Summarizing from my very-non-expert POV, he's dividing the world into three groups: a small number (less than 1 million) original African inhabitants; a larger number (about a billion) sub-Saharan Africans who broke off about 100,000 years ago; and then the rest-of-the-world (who went though a tight bottleneck less than 100,000 years ago) about the time they left Africa. The…
Note that intermixing between those whom we call 'Sub-Saharan' Africans and the "rest of the world" is definitely not new or unique to the 'Western Hemisphere' as OP seems to assume: we know very clearly from Classical written sources and iconography that there were many peoples of 'Sub-Saharan' appearance well north of the Sahara desert, in close contact with Mediterranean and Levantine (thus, clearly "Out of Africa") humans. Even more than this, we know of such 'Sub-Saharan' folks who were very deeply integrated in ancient Mediterranean and Levantine societies, and while these folks were clearly a tiny minority and their distinctive appearance was often remarked upon, this did not hurt their social standing in any sense; there was even a well-known Egyptian dynasty of "Black" pharaohs.
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody in their right mind actually thinks placement towards the top of a map actually denotes some kind of hierarchy.
Orienting with terms like "top" and "bottom" inherently denotes hierarchy. Whether you ascribe meaning to that hierarchy (and I think people do) is another matter. Explicitly stating direction rather than something that only refers to it with the aid of outside knowledge (the common orientation of maps) would be better. Otherwise, why don't we spin the map 180 degrees? Now the "correct" term would be "Super-Saharan A…
Don't even get me started on the Prime Meridian. It's even more problematic than North being 'up' and South being 'down'! /s
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody in their right mind actually thinks placement towards the top of a map actually denotes some kind of hierarchy.
There is no top of the map since there is no objective frame of reference in space. The axis on which the Earth spins relative to its orbit is a point of orientation but which side is the "top" is arbitrary.
>"top" is arbitrary"
Sure, but at the end of the day you've got to pick a frame of reference and people have settled on North being the 'top'. You can draw a map that ignores this convention and still have it be valid but you're going to confuse a lot of people.
For what it's worth there's more landmass and population in the Northern Hemisphere so make of that what you will.
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
you can infer sizes from genetic diversity ('effective pop') for the out of africa group i've seen sizes from 100 to 10,000. i used 1,000 to 10,000 as a likely moderate number, and the range also points to the census size being larger we can assume that conditional on the size of OoA the other groups were way larger (10x or more). otoh, the main thing i did not explore is that i am now believing that africans themsel…
It's worth noting that effective population size != actual population size. The former is simply a lower bound on it. If the population is structured enough and in the right ways, the actual size can be orders of magnitude higher. This has been an issue with several supposed bottlenecks within African populations.
the rule of thumb for mammals is Ne is 30% of census size.
i think this is probably an overestimate tbh (assumes poisson distribution of offspring).
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#36I thought this was an interesting article. Summarizing from my very-non-expert POV, he's dividing the world into three groups: a small number (less than 1 million) original African inhabitants; a larger number (about a billion) sub-Saharan Africans who broke off about 100,000 years ago; and then the rest-of-the-world (who went though a tight bottleneck less than 100,000 years ago) about the time they left Africa. The…
Note that intermixing between those whom we call 'Sub-Saharan' Africans and the "rest of the world" is definitely not new or unique to the 'Western Hemisphere' as OP seems to assume: we know very clearly from Classical written sources and iconography that there were many peoples of 'Sub-Saharan' appearance well north of the Sahara desert, in close contact with Mediterranean and Levantine (thus, clearly "Out of Africa…
> we know very clearly from Classical written sources and iconography that there were many peoples of 'Sub-Saharan' appearance well north of the Sahara desert, in close contact with Mediterranean and Levantine (thus, clearly "Out of Africa") humans.
We also know they had negligible genetic impact.
> while these folks were clearly a tiny minority and their distinctive appearance was often remarked upon, this did not hurt their social standing in any sense; there was even a well-known Egyptian dynasty of "Black" pharaohs.
You say that like social standing determines who gets to be king. The Nubian pharaohs got their position in the standard way, by conquering Egypt. They weren't native, they took very little interest in their new territory, and they didn't last very long.
There was a well-known Chinese dynasty of Mongol emperors. What do you think the social standing of Mongols in China was before and after that happened?
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Orienting with terms like "top" and "bottom" inherently denotes hierarchy. Whether you ascribe meaning to that hierarchy (and I think people do) is another matter. Explicitly stating direction rather than something that only refers to it with the aid of outside knowledge (the common orientation of maps) would be better. Otherwise, why don't we spin the map 180 degrees? Now the "correct" term would be "Super-Saharan A…
Don't even get me started on the Prime Meridian. It's even more problematic than North being 'up' and South being 'down'! /s
People seem really upset at the notion. Even you can't seem to engage with it as anything but a farce. I have to wonder why.
I'm just going to start calling it Super-Saharan Africa. When people point out the issue on their map, I'll just flip it 180°. Google Maps conveniently reorients text.
The real fun begins when you decide to make longitude the horizontal aspect. Is it Dexterous Africa or Sinister Africa?
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#38On an extremely tangential note: I wish we would stop using the term, "Sub-Saharan." The semantic quandaries should be obvious, but it also subscribes to a curious linguistic glitch of putting the North and South into a hierarchy that only exists if you are rather incurious about the ambiguity of geographic perspective (see: the infamous "upside down" Gall-Peters projection for some mind-blowey fun). I would personal…
I’ve never heard anyone from the Indian subcontinent complain about this.
There are more than a billion souls there; I would take that bet.
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#39On an extremely tangential note: I wish we would stop using the term, "Sub-Saharan." The semantic quandaries should be obvious, but it also subscribes to a curious linguistic glitch of putting the North and South into a hierarchy that only exists if you are rather incurious about the ambiguity of geographic perspective (see: the infamous "upside down" Gall-Peters projection for some mind-blowey fun). I would personal…
I don't think this is an extremely important thing to worry about, but I do think you have a point and I like the term "Africa Major."
Re: Out of Africa's midlife crisis
#40For me, it's easier to understand these ideas by adopting a "lumper" mentality to human history. IE, Neanderthals, Denisovans, late Erectus & other archaics were just populations of humans. Sections on a large map of human diversity. On another section were, for example, that small subpopulation accounting for most modern human genetics. Near that little section were other subpopulations that even a "splitter" would…
i talk about introgression in this post https://razib.substack.com/p/here-be-humans the piece was not exhaustive and meant to be an intro
Dang, you created this account back in 2015 and your first comment is from 1 hour ago.