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Buckminster Fuller made a similar point with one of his dymaxion projections: https://telemachusunedited.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lowpp...
Man, I understand the desire to make every map a rectangle, but filling that in with endless ocean is just so wrong
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Man, I understand the desire to make every map a rectangle, but filling that in with endless ocean is just so wrong
Every single map is inaccurate in a way, I suggest you read How to lie with maps by Mark Monmonier.
Given 1. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and 2. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed, how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?
I don't know if there could be any reason to break bones already more than 100k years old, but it seems unlikely?
Given 1. a site that appears to have been used by humans to do some kind of processing of bones, and 2. very old (130k) bones at that site that have been processed, how would you rule out the possibility that the site was made and the bones processed by people that came much later (say, 15k years ago) who found a bunch of 115k year old bones from animals that died from natural deaths and used them?
Notice that the article states the bones themselves are from 130kya, not that they were discovered in a layer of sediment deposited 130kya. This means that the age of the bones says nothing about the tools scattered around them at the site, or the ancient users of those tools. Taking this into account, I think a more plausible explanation is that ancient humans - Clovis ancient (13kya) or perhaps older (20kya) - disc…
It's only 50 miles by sea from Eurasia to the Americas. People got to Australia around 40,000–60,000 years ago by boat so it seems unlikely that people needed a land bridge to get to the Americas. Remember, the globe also looks like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo#/media/File:Inuit_conf_... PS: I suspect the Americas where well known in the 1700's, but nobody was talking to the Russian Far East when map ma…
Also, Beringia went through many cycles of land and sea coverage[0]. Our climate has been pretty up and down since homo sapiens came onto the stage. Aside: The land-bridge was not just a passing point, it was actually a nice place to sit and stay, due to the wind, sea, and glacial climatic issues. Also, the coastal-migration idea states that we just skimmed the coast all the way to at least Chile. The issue with that…
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Typically a population either grows exponentially or vanishes. Remaining small but alive for thousands of years is not entirely unthinkable, but it's very unlikely.
An isolated population seed, yes. But a sub-population that can be re-seeded by the main one, no. Homo Erectus has been discovered as far as SE Asia 1 or 2 million years ago. Also typically a population grows depending on birth-death rates which reach quick limits in places of low resources. This is self-evident from different population sizes in different geographic habitats. Instead human populations mushroomed onl…
Even if your colony is surrounded by impenetrable deserts, I'd think you could always propagate along the coast, living off the ocean.
That I'm just some internet guy speculating without any deep knowledge is probably obvious, but let me make it extra clear!
For a skeptical point of view, see the second half of Jared Diamond's article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27111
I do like Jared Diamonds' books, I read... a lot of them, perhaps all of them.
But his reasoning - quoted above - is just plain wrong. He fails at grasping at how the basic logic works.
Example: "We did not find it so far" - which, according to Jared, rests the case -- does not mean "it does not exist".
As per that logic, the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Florensiensis can be ignored, because they came up after the Jared's decree that "we did not find it so far".
That's just silly.
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Homo sapiens mostly didn't leave Africa until about 100k years ago, but when dealing with these things there is always a fair amount of uncertainty so some could have left much earlier. There are also other early human species besides Homo sapiens that could in theory be responsible for something like this. Homo erectus was galavanting around the world perhaps up to 2 million years ago, and they were tool users. Homo…
maybe there was a form of homo erectus already in america, using stone tools etc, having arrived 130k yrs or more ago, and then the indians wiped them out when they arrived much later--that would explain indian tales of having wiped out primitive cannibal tribes (a movie called bone tomahawk was inspired by these tales)...of course the political considerations would tend to suppress this idea.
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I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesize that a community that starts out fishing in nearby waters using rudimentary boats would, over the span of maybe dozens of generations, learn something about travelling longer distances over open water. A dude recently crossed the Atlantic on a stand-up paddle board. Which is insane, but it proves you be a prolific seafarer with very basic watercraft. http://www.mensjourn…
"Hokulea is a performance-accurate full-scale replica of a... Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe. Launched on 8 March 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, she is best known for her 1976 Hawaii to Tahiti voyage completed with exclusively Polynesian navigation techniques. The primary goal of the voyage was to explore the anthropological theory of the Asiatic origin of native Oceanic people, of Polynesians and…
The novel "The Navigator" by Morris West talks about this, some. In fact, the whole theme of the book is about a voyage that a motley group of people take, from Hawaii, to find a lost Polynesian island, that is talked about by the old Polynesian navigators, and where they go to die. There are lots of other sub-plots in the story, like about human relationships, power, etc., so the whole book is not about the navigation stuff, but overall, the book was very good reading, IMO.
Also, IIRC, the National Geographic Society had done a study of these navigation techniques many years ago. They had sent a team - scientists, sailors, photographers, etc. - to various Polynesian islands, and interviewed some of the still-living navigators, took boat rides between islands during which the navigators used their ancient techniques, etc. It describes many of the kinds of things that you say they used - stars, currents, wave patterns, air and sea patterns, birds, winds, etc. They published an article or series about it in NatGeo magazine. I was lucky to read it as a kid. Very interesting article.