|
Skiffard posted:What are some of the recommended ancient history podcasts? I'm looking for something to do with my summer holiday I really like the History of Rome by Mike Duncan.
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 05:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 07:45 |
|
|
The China History Podcast is pretty good but it only occasionally qualifies as 'ancient' history.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 08:51
|
|
|
If you want a more chronological presentation, the History of China podcast is good and goes on chronological order. Though that does mean the first few episodes are pure mythology (Three Sovereigns + Five Emperors and arguably the Xia dynasty). Then again, Duncan's great the History of Rome podcast also begins with pure mythology that transitions over to history as it progresses to time periods with actual records.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 15:18
|
|
|
golden bubble posted:If you want a more chronological presentation, the History of China podcast is good and goes on chronological order. Though that does mean the first few episodes are pure mythology (Three Sovereigns + Five Emperors and arguably the Xia dynasty). Then again, Duncan's great the History of Rome podcast also begins with pure mythology that transitions over to history as it progresses to time periods with actual records. Which is good, since as Duncan points out, that's what a lot of the people involved in the real history believed, and those stories influenced their behavior and decisions. Some of the decisions Roman generals made make more sense when you know what they idolized and were trying to emulate.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 16:32
|
|
|
golden bubble posted:If you want a more chronological presentation, the History of China podcast is good and goes on chronological order. Though that does mean the first few episodes are pure mythology (Three Sovereigns + Five Emperors and arguably the Xia dynasty). Then again, Duncan's great the History of Rome podcast also begins with pure mythology that transitions over to history as it progresses to time periods with actual records. So it starts as a history of the Empire in the 3rd century and transitions to being about the Empire in the 4th?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 16:35
|
|
|
One thing I've always wondered: What is it with historians and underestimating the speed of human locomotion? You see these migration maps with ludicrous timescales sometimes. I remember one where colonization to the tip of South America was supposed to have taken so many thousand years, when the whole New World is only 9,000 miles long. Humans would have to be moving one mile per year on average for that time scale to work, but we know from everyday experience that one mile per year is ludicrous. These aren't sedentary peoples. You'd only need one group to decide to walk south for a few days per generation to mess up your time scale. On the History of Egypt podcast which I've just started listening to, the guy talks about how prehistoric Bedouin trade routes were definitely accidental and how slow the circulation of goods must have been. Is there any evidence for this? Caravans move at a walking pace, which is dictated by human biology, which hasn't changed in the last 20,000 years and more. It's not like writing and currency are necessary for a trading lifestyle either, it just helps. There are illiterate itinerant traders in 2016. This has always been a peeve of mine and the podcast just triggered it again. Is there good evidence for these migration time scales, or does it come from extremely sketchy guesstimates based on a handful of sites, or is it just historians looking at a map and going "eh, 10,000 years sounds right." ?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 18:10
|
|
|
it also takes time to do all the things that are necessary to build and sustain a civilization and settle a place
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 18:14
|
|
|
Yeah, I mean you can have failed colonies, which may or may not leave historical traces, but I don't see the problem with modern evaluations of actual and maintained settlement.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 18:19
|
|
|
Yeah, when historians are talking about "migration", they usually mean something like families/tribes slowly settling their way into a certain direction, not people actually literally walking that distance.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 18:20
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:One thing I've always wondered: Remember, they didn't have maps and had no idea what was over the next hill. Moving into unknown areas was risky and limited by how much stuff they could carry with them. They needed a pretty good incentive to travel any distance. The pioneers didn't know where they were going and did't have any particular plan for settling areas. They'd just wander around until they found a good spot and stay there until it wasn't anymore. Even then, they would tend to move back to areas they were familiar with rather than push into unknown areas if they could help it. A tribe/clan might spend a few generations at a site, then gradually branch off as resources became overtaxed. Expansion would happen slowly and randomly. Moving south down the US west coast, for example, would happen only when there was enough population to the north that going back that way was unlikely to be useful. Taking thousands of years to get to the tip of South America isn't really all that long from that persepective.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 18:25
|
|
|
A generation was under 20 years so it feels about right.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 20:07
|
|
|
How were Diocletian and Constantine genealogically related? I imagine it's through Constantius Chlorus, but I'm not too sure.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 21:40
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:Remember, they didn't have maps and had no idea what was over the next hill. Moving into unknown areas was risky and limited by how much stuff they could carry with them. They needed a pretty good incentive to travel any distance. The pioneers didn't know where they were going and did't have any particular plan for settling areas. They'd just wander around until they found a good spot and stay there until it wasn't anymore. Even then, they would tend to move back to areas they were familiar with rather than push into unknown areas if they could help it. Again, any actual evidence? This feels like just-so stories to me.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 21:49
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Again, any actual evidence? This feels like just-so stories to me. Welcome to archaeology - the science of examining the minorest of details and extrapolating out. I'm not sure what you're really looking for. Pre-agriculture, pre-writing human movements is entirely based on dig sites that show human habitation. We can't ask them why they moved so slowly. We can only see the remains of human habitation sites and use their age to estimate population migrations.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 21:58
|
|
|
Looking at the peopling of the new world and thinking it's slow is projecting a kind of destination on those people that they didn't have. They didn't need to go south as fast as they could, they only expanded to suit their needs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:23
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Again, any actual evidence? This feels like just-so stories to me. You're the one pleading against the evidence. If ancient Amerindians made a forced march from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego just for kicks, why didn't they leave anything behind? Did they just check it out and go back home?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:24
|
|
|
Europeans could have reached (and did reach in small numbers) the Americas centuries before they made a concerted push to go and exploit that space. If we really wanted to we could have set up a moon base and asteroid habitats a long time ago but ultimately it was seen as too much trouble in all sorts of ways.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:27
|
|
|
It's not so much a group of people deciding to walk thousands of miles to go "settle" somewhere, so much as it is your kids living down the road; then their kids set up shop a bit further down the road, so on and so forth.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:27
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Again, any actual evidence? This feels like just-so stories to me. You got any evidence outside of humans could walk from Alaska to Cape Horn faster than it took permanent settlements to spread and leave traces?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:28
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:Again, any actual evidence? This feels like just-so stories to me. The actual evidence is that it took them thousands of years to get to the tip of South America. Based on what we know of hunter-gatherers and general human behavior, it's a reasonable explanation as to why. What sort of evidence would you expect to see?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:30
|
|
|
Thwomp posted:Welcome to archaeology - the science of examining the minorest of details and extrapolating out. But the most ancient sites are so few, and dating is tricky, can you really say they moved slowly with the data points you have? Meanwhile, contemporary human behavior argues against glacial (literally!) speeds of migration. Historical nomadic bands move around large distances within the space of a few hundred years. We've got a lot of written evidence for that. I guess what I'm looking for is popular archeology to not quote these dates like we can extrapolate, if anything they should be "at least as early as X." 1491 has a section taking archeologists to task for this as well. There's always the temptation to take a date that is at best a tentative bracket and make an event out of it. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jun 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:32
|
|
|
this isn't Jackson's valley campaign, if there's no good reason for someone to exert themselves they're not going to
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:33
|
|
|
Everybody has touched on it before but yeah its has to do with settlement patterns, what groups of people succeeded and what we can find. I took a California Archaeology course and we touched on it a bit due to the coastal archaeology. Basically people will move if they need too because walking those distances in unmapped,untouched and natural terrain takes massive amounts of energy, and there is no reason for you to move if you don't have to. Id imagine people moved to a spot that could support them for a long time, probably generations and then the supporting capacity for the area was hit and a portion moved on. Another aspect of migration patterns was Coastal migration where a group would use boats and just hit certain points along the coast as they made their way down the west coast. This one from what I understood was pretty plausible and what sites we do have seem to support the idea but most of what would be sites are either underwater or tons if sand now since the sea levels increased. (This is why the BART construction hit some human remains and artifacts while constructing the cross bay line)
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:34
|
|
|
Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:You're the one pleading against the evidence. If ancient Amerindians made a forced march from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego just for kicks, why didn't they leave anything behind? Did they just check it out and go back home? What evidence? As far as I remember in my archeology 101, the south American sites are often older than north American ones, because there's like a dozen sites total dating back to the purported migration period. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Jun 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:34
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:But the most ancient sites are so few, and dating is tricky, can you really say they moved slowly with the data points you have? Meanwhile, contemporary human behavior argues against glacial (literally!) speeds of migration. Historical nomadic bands move around large distances within the space of a few hundred years. We've got a lot of written evidence for that. When the terrain is known, migration can be pretty fast. It's much less risky to move to a wintering site your tribe has been using for 100 years, for example, than to just strike out into the unknown without any idea as to what's there. When you know where you're going, you know what to pack and how much. You also know the best routes and what resources are available on the way. When there is nothing but sand to the horizon, it's quite a risk to strike out randomly in the hope that you'll find an oasis before you run out of supplies.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:37
|
|
|
Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:You're the one pleading against the evidence. If ancient Amerindians made a forced march from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego just for kicks, why didn't they leave anything behind? Did they just check it out and go back home? This is actually rather fascinating. Until not so long ago, it was thought that the earliest (general) settlement of the americans was by a culture we called the Clovis people around 13000 years ago just as the last glaciation was ebbing. The idea is that they followed the Bering land bridge and slowly went through the valleys left behind as the ice sheets retreated. Many still think this is the most likely hypothesis. However, earlier this century good evidence appeared that at around the same time as the earliest dated Clovis culture remains were found in northern america, there were sites (I believe hearths and maybe some stone points, hearths are good for carbon dating) that were dated basically the same time. QED, there was a migration earlier than the Clovis into the americas. This must then have been at least just before the real retreat of the ice sheets. Evidence that humans were around even earlier keeps appearing. I haven't properly kept up with all the developments but, much like hominin prehistory, developments have happened thick and fast: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/clovis-people-not-1st-to-arrive-in-north-america-1.1235030 Basically, we actually don't know how fast or slow humans migrated through the americas right yet but poo poo is kicking off in prehistory in general. Watch all the spaces, it's getting wild. This is only one example. edit: speculation is still rife as to how they actually got there. Boats along the coast? No one knows. Certainly a pacific or atlantic crossing other than the land bridge still seems extremely far fetched. NLJP fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jun 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:37
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:But the most ancient sites are so few, and dating is tricky, can you really say they moved slowly with the data points you have? Meanwhile, contemporary human behavior argues against glacial (literally!) speeds of migration. Historical nomadic bands move around large distances within the space of a few hundred years. We've got a lot of written evidence for that. I don't know if you have seen the west coast of the Americas but it is some the most brutal terrain all along it, with pretty much every type of landscape included. Got past those sick mountains? Hope you like desert! Got past that? Have a solid wall of swamp and jungle. Most nomadic groups that travel large distances most likely either have animals to assist or the landscape is easy for them to traverse and generally the same type.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:38
|
|
|
One other thing to remember is 'why move?'. Especially before technology is good enough to really create large-ish surplus populations in one given area the only big reason you would have to move is either to keep up with animals or pressure from another group of humans who may be more advanced in one specific thing you lack, luckier, more fertile or at the right time in the right place (i.e luck again). This will also limit the amount you need to move from one generation to the next, especially if you are at the forefront of human migration. These questions in the context of the time we're talking about are still very much in the air and will have to be answered by evidence on the ground. It's one of those things we can't answer by simply looking at more modern hunter-gatherer societies because once the world is colonised in one way or another by humans, that changes the entire game. AFAIK we still don't have a good, sensible (evidence backed) model for this. edit: I'm mainly saying, you say this looks slow? Well we just really don't know how fast or slow it was yet. NLJP fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jun 8, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:44
|
|
|
Also, the natural perception of the 'natural' world being full of delicious edible stuff is colored by the european settlers coming into north america, not realizing that they were seeing the natural ecological results of killing off over 90% of the apex predators.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 22:59
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:this isn't Jackson's valley campaign, if there's no good reason for someone to exert themselves they're not going to Don't you live in Europe? How do you know about the Shenandoah campaign? Sometimes I think I'm well-educated, but sometimes Goons make me feel like an unwashed barbarian.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 23:00
|
|
|
Ynglaur posted:Don't you live in Europe? How do you know about the Shenandoah campaign? believe me, if i had to write in german in public you'd see an unwashed barbarian
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 23:10
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:i'm an american who's been doing research in europe 6 months out of every year for a while now Pfft, du trinkst du dinkst, guert genut
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 23:17
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:i'm an american who's been doing research in europe 6 months out of every year for a while now Unwashed Barbarism is a pretty good description of the German language.
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 23:19
|
|
|
Slow migration in terms of movement speed compared to purposeful movement is the difference between walking with a destination and a statistical bias. And aren't we all unwashed barbarians in the modern period?
|
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2016 23:52
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:One thing I've always wondered: Arglebargle III posted:What evidence? Migration patterns tend to follow food sources for so for the most part people moved as the food ran out. So they would have moved along more slowly then you would think. Also recent evidence says that the Inuit of Arctic didn't come to North America till much later then we believed, some 5,000 years ago rather then the 13,000 years we generally think of for the migration. That's still a long time but it's also longer then all of recorded human history with a much smaller population The Camel was domesticated way later then we though it was and horses doesn't make great harsh condition pack animals.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 00:08
|
|
|
Thump! posted:Unwashed Barbarism is a pretty good description of the German language. Great language for talking to your horse, though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 00:58
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:One thing I've always wondered: The idea of these waves of fur-clad intrepid explorers making their way across Beringia and down through Chile isn't how it worked. People were just following food/fleeing weather. Think refugees, not Lewis and Clark. Human history isn't some 4X game where we scouted the whole map in 5 turns and spent 300 turns building cities. Thunderstorms were pissed-off sky gods, drought was pissed-off crop gods, and getting lost was usually the same thing as getting killed. The idea of "expansion" wasn't really there since there wasn't much in the way of preservation methods for food so people found a good spot and simply stayed until it wasn't good anymore. That's how you get strata evidence of the same caves being inhabited for 8000 years before the roof falls in.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 03:08
|
|
|
Arglebargle III posted:But the most ancient sites are so few, and dating is tricky, can you really say they moved slowly with the data points you have? Meanwhile, contemporary human behavior argues against glacial (literally!) speeds of migration. Historical nomadic bands move around large distances within the space of a few hundred years. We've got a lot of written evidence for that. I'm sure there are lots of text books, documentaries, newspaper articles and etc that have done a bad job communicating the uncertainty in dates. However in defense of a slow dispersal, I'm going to offer some possible explanations. I don't have a strong opinion on the speed of human dispersal, I'm just going to explain some relevant factors. In 2012 a single Grey wolf wandered from northeast Oregon all the way into California, walking over 1000 km. The grey wolf has been expanding its North American range for decades now, and this individual was the first observed in California since 1924. However despite good habitat, by 2013 he had left California and was back in Oregon. Why? well, he was probably looking for a mate (he found one in 2014) and there were none beyond the invasion front. Like wolves, it is possible ancient humans were actually incentivized to back-migrate, or in technical terms their dispersal may have been anisotropic, or biased towards diffusing in specific directions, i.e. towards other humans. Of course as you noted a tribe could move long distances as a unit, which could possibly nullify some of this bias. However the bleeding edge of an invasion front is not necessarily where one wants to be. The Allee Effect is the tendency for isolated populations at low population densities to have depressed fitness-related characteristics and higher risks of local extinction. There's nothing stopping you and your familiar band from marching hundreds of kilometers, however the only mates around are going to be your cousins and a flash flood or something could exterminate all of you at once.The search for mates, the need for cooperative hunting, these can all incentivize individuals to disperse towards higher density areas. These concepts, and others which can either accelerate or decelerate diffusion, are used in efforts to model species dispersal and can produce slower rates of range expansion than might be expected based purely on dispersive potential. However in any case there are lots of serious estimates of human migration that are much faster than a mile a year. This paper estimates a dispersal rate of 5–8 km/yr for the spread of the clovis culture from Alberta through the central US, with the relatively rapid pace likely facilitated via focused dispersal along corridors of preferred habitat and the progressive extirpation of their megafauna prey. In contrast, one estimate of the expansion rate of European settlers across the United States between the 17th and 19th centuries put it at about 13 km/yr. Of course, even at 8 km/yr the clovis people would still be moving too slow to leave the earliest evidence of human habitation found in South America, unless the earliest finds have been discredited or something. edit for clarity. Squalid fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Jun 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 03:54
|
|
|
Also again a bit more ancient and not so much 'history' but fuckin' YES finally more evidence about florensiensis other than just the one site: http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/06/homo-floresiensis-indonesia-new-fossils-700000-years-ago/ Looks like the evidence is dwarfed erectus but we'll see. Also lol at the continued 'well, uh we know island dwarfism is a thing and happens quickly with other animals but wow no one thought it could happen quickly in hominins too  'Edit: I just don't like human exceptionalism. florensiensis is still way cool NLJP fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jun 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 04:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 07:45 |
|
|
Deteriorata posted:The actual evidence is that it took them thousands of years to get to the tip of South America. We don't actually know this. Date archaeology in the Americas is really underdeveloped and has some problems. So it used to be thought the first Americans were roughly 12,000 years ago, and the Clovis people were that initial group. There are still some people clinging to this, but there's evidence of human settlement in Chile around 14,000 years ago and Brazil from around 13,000. Unless those are a different migration of Polynesians (not impossible but the DNA evidence doesn't support it) humans must have been in the Americas much earlier. The estimates more accepted today are between 20 and 40,000 years. They're so broad because a lot of the initial settlements would have been in Beringia, which is underwater now so, welp. The initial migrations were likely along the coast, and much of the evidence would be gone because of sea level rise. Anyone who says they know for sure how the American settlement happened is full of poo poo. There just isn't the evidence yet. What we can say for sure: A) Humans were in South America 14,000 years ago, therefore the migration must be older than 14,000 years. B) The DNA evidence is very conclusive that the American populations came from Asia, mostly Northeast Asia. The land bridge hypothesis is widely accepted because of this. C) The DNA also suggests that there were four different waves of migration into the Americas at different times. It is unclear if these are four different populations migrating intentionally, or people were just moving back and forth across Beringia. D) There is no solid evidence for any migration to or from the Americas after the sea level rise. Polynesians probably could have made it to the Americas (they got as far as Easter Island, after all) but nothing reliable has ever come up to support this. Contact with Africa also might have been possible but again, no evidence yet. Because there's no evidence of migration, every technical and cultural achievement of American civilizations was made independently from those of the old world. From a historical study perspective, the destruction of the American civilizations is a tragedy because they represented a second experiment in human civilization. The comparison between what the Americans did and what old world civilizations did could have been the most valuable historical study possible. But there's so little of them left that it's an extremely difficult, and often impossible task. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jun 9, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2016 05:56
|
|
