It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective. The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived. There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did app…
Did you have to look up the name of the author of Sapiens or you have it committed to memory?
It's an emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate as it's objectively fascinating from a purely historical perspective. The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative is that a cohesive group arrived here 45-60,000YA, lived peacefully and in harmony with the land right up until Europeans arrived. There's some debate about the megafauna extinctions, but no conclusive evidence either way. (I did app…
> emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate [...] The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative [...] that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning. [...] it's a shame Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.
He's talking about the fact that Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans, reject any attempt to explain their origin via science as they stick to the story of their origin that comes from their religion, and see the science based origin as disrespectful.
The only interesting thing I know about Aborigines is they're the only known people who didn't invent the bow and arrow. As a hobbyist archer this is fascinating to me.
They apparently didn't need it, as they're still around.
More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…
If you have the raw sequence, services like yfull.com can help provide more detailed information. At this point, new haplotypes are being called every month. When I sequenced my own haplotype about 20 years ago (I was in the Indian lab partner of the Genographic Project at the time), the best we could do was call a few handfuls of mutations by hand (I used to run the gels myself) and my own haplotype was characterize…
I don't have the raw sequence. The project handled DNA data in total privacy.
I did send my DNA swab a second time about 5-6 years later, this time to look at my maternal line (mitochondrial dna). The report had changed quite a bit possibly because the project had gathered more data in the intervening years. .
I've stopped looking into this further - I really don't care about my ancestors or genetics. More interested in humans as a whole - and for that we need more data.
My Germanic Linguistics grad school prof told us once, to your point, if you count etymologies of words in spoken English and in the English dictionary, you'd get roughly the following: spoken English uses roughly 80% Germanic vocabulary, but the English dictionary is roughly 80% Latin and Greek words (anglicized).
I've heard it put more crassly as "barbarian grammar with french nouns"
> emotionally charged subject, which is unfortunate [...] The simplified and (generally) commonly accepted narrative [...] that potentially complicates a lot of the cultural positioning. [...] it's a shame Uh... what's a shame? None of that stuff happened. You've picked a fight with a strawman here. No one is engaging like that with the linked article, or here in the HN thread, except you.
He's talking about the fact that Aboriginals, not unlike Native Americans, reject any attempt to explain their origin via science as they stick to the story of their origin that comes from their religion, and see the science based origin as disrespectful.
And I'm saying the place to have that fight is with the putative Aboriginals and not here on HN where everyone is just talking about the science.
I mean, I get it. People are mean. People are unreasonable. Lots of good discussion can't happen because people are mean and unreasonable. But you're not making things better by assuming bad faith and throwing shade at everyone else preemptively. That's just being mean and unreasonable.
> 80% of Australian languages are from Indian-derived language families and developed from around the time of the Dingo introduction (only 4000 years ago) Source? Australia has been continuously populated by Aboriginal people for 60,000+ years, with over 260 languages I find that claim incredibly hard to believe.
Especially only 4,000 years ago. I’m under the impression that the culture is much much older than that. Why would it change so quickly? Especially for a people’s that are quite traditional. At least as I understand it. I also understand that the native languages are mostly spoken and not written, are these Indian languages written?
Various aboriginal cultures (there isnt just one) have elements which are much older but over 300 of the ~400 languages are from one family (pama nyungyan). This family's common ancestor is traced to a region in North Australia around 5000 years ago. These languages suddenly exploded and spread across the continent at around the same time other technologies and techniques seem to change. This was around the time of the Dingo introduction and this considerable Indian introgression discussed in paper--the dingo was probably brought by these people. I may have misremembered that these languages have some relation to south indian ones, it seems this is disputed, but this is all happening around the same time. There is a lot that isn't known about Aboriginal peoples and the genetic studies once they are performed (if allowed) are likely going to show a more complex picture than the usual narrative. To the person who called me a tamil nationalist or something i can only laugh.
More than a decade ago I submitted my DNA to the National Genographic Project [1] which was an attempt to trace ancient human migration using Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA from a sampling of people around the world. My paternal Y-chromosome line showed an ancient mutation (>50K year ago) carried by humans who had likely spread through a coastal migration from Africa around coasts of the Arabian Sea down to South…
> As we gather more data our understanding of human migration inevitably clashes with identity politics/nationalism and previous simplistic pre-scientific classifications based on skin color and facial features
Does it? Because most studies find that people living in the same country are indeed more closely related to each other than to people of different countries, roughly according to what you would expect from geography, and the simplistic categorization of humans into ~5 races corresponds well to clusters on a genetic map. See:
I first came across this in the absolutely fascinating documentary The Journey of Man A Genetic Odyssey : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ It is a "must watch" for everybody who really wants to understand Genetics/Migration. Also see : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journey_of_Man
I recommend too. This is the documentary created by Spencer Wells who led the National Genographic project. This was created using data about 15 years ago - I've been looking forward to an update that accounts for recent data.
