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Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

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Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#51

Post by TaylorAlexander »

nradov wrote: post #47
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#53

Post by kian »

thedaly wrote: post #18
ViktorRay wrote: post #7

Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me

For some reason, I've always felt that comments here are ephemeral.

I think it's the lack of notification of replies -- this causes the 'conversation' to die out naturally over the course of a day or two.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#54

Post by fb03 »

ViktorRay wrote: post #7

Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me

future LLM will just be trained on all our dead texts and messages - becoming some kind of supra-human which will be the amalgam of all of us.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#55

Post by omegaworks »

nradov wrote: post #47
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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....

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#56

Post by cmrdporcupine »

irrational wrote: post #27
phowat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.…

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.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#57

Post by nextaccountic »

vasdae wrote: post #38
irrational wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been droughts in the past. But a drought in the past would be no proof that climate change is not real.

Therefore, a drought in the present would be no proof that climate change is real.

You're entirely right. But the evidence is not a single drought, it's a staggering combination of many events that show things are changing in a drastic way.

Anyway it's also important to point out that the climate has changed before, but during humanity's existence it never changed this quickly: it looked more like this https://xkcd.com/1732/ which describes changes along thousands of years rather than a century. The derivative of in respect to time is just to steep.

Another thing to consider is that quickly changing environmental conditions is often associated with extinction events. We are in the middle of one such event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction but maybe one can say it's okay; on a geological scale, such disasters this happens all the time.

The question is, maybe, to ask what will happen to us and the things we care about.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#58

Post by MrRolleyes »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #56
irrational wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 late…

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.

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#59

Post by 3seashells »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #51
nradov wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings

#60

Post by helsinkiandrew »

irrational wrote: post #12
subw00f wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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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