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two fish posted:Oh, see, that's very interesting. I wonder how they managed to get through the Sahara once desertification wrapped up. There were trade routes through the desert. The Romans got a lot of gold that way and sent a number of expeditions across the Sahara to try to find where that was coming from. There was a lot more activity to the east, the Nile made it possible to cross relatively easily or you went along the coast--Roman trade ships were regularly going as far south as at least Zanzibar.
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Aug 3, 2023 02:40
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two fish posted:Oh, see, that's very interesting. I wonder how they managed to get through the Sahara once desertification wrapped up. the phoenicians circumnavigated africa from gibraltar to egypt once but had such a rough time doing it that as far as we know they didn't do it again
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Aug 3, 2023 03:51
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I have to wonder sometimes at how much regular contact there was between distant Polynesian islands. We definitely know that they sailed and settled very far distances, but I don't see how you could really get that rolling without explorers returning after their long journeys to let people know it's safe and they're not just diving out into the void. But the idea of regular inter-island contact doesn't seem to come up much when I read about them, which you'd think it'd be very relevant for contact with european explorers if the polynesians could tell eachother about these new people cruising the high seas in boats bigger than they'd ever seen before. Or was the journey so inconvenient to make that later generations without much ties to their ancestors just stopped going or even forgot where their ancestors came from?
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Aug 3, 2023 08:04
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Entirely possible when migrating across the sea you end up settling in a place that doesn't have the resources or capacity sufficient to make a successful voyage back. And a lot of the winds and currents may be only convenient in one direction.
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Aug 3, 2023 09:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:I have to wonder sometimes at how much regular contact there was between distant Polynesian islands. We definitely know that they sailed and settled very far distances, but I don't see how you could really get that rolling without explorers returning after their long journeys to let people know it's safe and they're not just diving out into the void. They definitely communicated backwards because sweet potatoes spread from peru throughout Polynesia.
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Aug 3, 2023 12:36
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Jazerus posted:the phoenicians circumnavigated africa from gibraltar to egypt once but had such a rough time doing it that as far as we know they didn't do it again Might just have been they didn't find it worth their while commercially. 'Ok, we tried it, we did the exploration, there's no unique goods down there worth going what in ancient times is the equivalent of like 3 times round the earth to get'.
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Aug 3, 2023 12:41
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My guess re: Polynesia is that migration was probably driven more by warfare than by trade. "Welp, that sure is a sharp axe you have, gotta run to the next island, bye"
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Aug 3, 2023 12:55
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:My guess re: Polynesia is that migration was probably driven more by warfare than by trade. "Welp, that sure is a sharp axe you have, gotta run to the next island, bye" Likely related, but I would think more population growth. Even the rocky islands have a tangibly finite amount of land and resources, once there's just a bit too many people for things to be comfortable you build some ships and get to sailin'.
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Aug 3, 2023 13:33
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feedmegin posted:Might just have been they didn't find it worth their while commercially. 'Ok, we tried it, we did the exploration, there's no unique goods down there worth going what in ancient times is the equivalent of like 3 times round the earth to get'. Look, they just didn't like the orangutan ladies enough
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Aug 3, 2023 14:03
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Is it plausible that archaic human species could have survived long enough to feature in oral tradition and folklore, or was the time gap just too long? There was, I recall, the hypothesis that the Ebu Gogo story in Indonesia was a recollection of Homo floresiensis, but the dating was revised to be much older than we thought.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:47
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We kind of had a similar debate regarding flood mythologies, wondering if perhaps they were harkening back to the end of glaciation. That's a lot more recent than h. floresiensis. I don't think there was a consensus reached but I don't know how you corroborate that sort of thing outside of like a Congo situation where the face-clapping gorillas are discovered to still exist.
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Aug 3, 2023 14:54
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two fish posted:Is it plausible that archaic human species could have survived long enough to feature in oral tradition and folklore, or was the time gap just too long? There was, I recall, the hypothesis that the Ebu Gogo story in Indonesia was a recollection of Homo floresiensis, but the dating was revised to be much older than we thought. I hear the dating scene was much too small. But really the local human population most likely just ate them like any other competing animal and didn’t give it much more thought than an ape or monkey.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:19
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I had heard speculation that the Persian Gulf only flooded 8000 years ago, and that would have been the basis for a lot of the earlier flood myths.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:21
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Grand Fromage posted:There's also good evidence for American migration back to Asia. I'm an idiot, but I first read this as a kinda sly way for you to say you were moving back to Asia before I remembered which thread I was in and that the Bering strait exists.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:22
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I'd be interested if there was any evidence of Homo on Homo violence. I know there's some speculation that Neanderthals were extirpated by early us, but I'm not aware of any other evidence of interactions, for good or ill, among our genus. I can't imagine they were positive if they were anything like us.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:23
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Terrible Opinions posted:I had heard speculation that the Persian Gulf only flooded 8000 years ago, and that would have been the basis for a lot of the earlier flood myths. I don't think you even need that. Most cities are built near rivers, and rivers regularly flood, sometimes severely. It's not much of a stretch for people to visualize one covering the whole earth (as they understood it). Various civilizations aren't all remembering the same event, they just all have experience with big floods at one time or another. It doesn't require some massive event, just a local one and some imagination.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:26
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There was plenty of time where multiple hominin species were around and having varying amounts of contact, including many instances of interbreeding between humans and other hominins. Afaik most everyone living today has some amount of Neanderthal ancestry, at least outside of Africa (I think Africans generally also have some, just not as much?). I'm not sure what specific evidence we do or don't have for violence between our species, but presumably contact also went badly sometimes.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:30
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I really wonder how our early ancestors would have viewed the other species around at the time. They would have definitely lived in a time before we had concepts like race, ethnicity, or nationality, and with how localized human populations were at the time, all of your surrounding population would have looked quite similar to you. So, what happens when you interact with the Neanderthals? They look very different from you and may or may not be able to speak. You even had Homo erectus living well into the time period of Homo sapiens, and they were even further from us than Neanderthals were. I guess there's no way to really know, but would they have all been seen as human, but weird? Or as non-human?
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Aug 3, 2023 15:37
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Violence? Between humans? That sounds unlikely.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:39
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two fish posted:I really wonder how our early ancestors would have viewed the other species around at the time. They would have definitely lived in a time before we had concepts like race, ethnicity, or nationality, and with how localized human populations were at the time, all of your surrounding population would have looked quite similar to you. So, what happens when you interact with the Neanderthals? They look very different from you and may or may not be able to speak. You even had Homo erectus living well into the time period of Homo sapiens, and they were even further from us than Neanderthals were. I guess there's no way to really know, but would they have all been seen as human, but weird? Or as non-human? On one hand, you look at the way modern humans divide people up and assume that the different "races" are different, better, and worse than one another, when there actually is no difference, you'd have to think that given an actual different species with actual differences, better or worse, between them would lead to unimaginable violence. On the other hand, these are all modern concepts and I'd be interested to know if an early tribe of h. sapiens would feel any more or less kinship with another tribe of h. sapiens over another extant homo tribe, or would just consider them "other" and leave it at that. It is probably better that there was only the one extant species when we got into the modern age, I can't imagine the violence that modern humans would do to another sapient primate species
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Aug 3, 2023 15:41
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Honestly the violence would probably be secondary to the horror of a commercial slavery system. Compete with breeding, harvesting for meat/fur/skin, etc. basically all the horrors of modern commercial farming but with a fully sapient target species, and with the added horrors of chattel slavery.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:44
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two fish posted:I really wonder how our early ancestors would have viewed the other species around at the time. They would have definitely lived in a time before we had concepts like race, ethnicity, or nationality, and with how localized human populations were at the time, all of your surrounding population would have looked quite similar to you. So, what happens when you interact with the Neanderthals? They look very different from you and may or may not be able to speak. You even had Homo erectus living well into the time period of Homo sapiens, and they were even further from us than Neanderthals were. I guess there's no way to really know, but would they have all been seen as human, but weird? Or as non-human? They lived before the modern concepts, but there was always something that came before. Could've just been something as simple as those people live in a separate family group that you don't have blood ties with, making them strangers that can't be trusted.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:53
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two fish posted:I really wonder how our early ancestors would have viewed the other species around at the time. They would have definitely lived in a time before we had concepts like race, ethnicity, or nationality, and with how localized human populations were at the time, all of your surrounding population would have looked quite similar to you. So, what happens when you interact with the Neanderthals? They look very different from you and may or may not be able to speak. You even had Homo erectus living well into the time period of Homo sapiens, and they were even further from us than Neanderthals were. I guess there's no way to really know, but would they have all been seen as human, but weird? Or as non-human? They were just other people, most likely. The concept of "species" didn't exist yet. Orang-utan translates as "man of the forest" so definitions were pretty lax.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:Honestly the violence would probably be secondary to the horror of
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Aug 3, 2023 15:56
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I suspect anyone outside your kin group was The Other and it didn't matter what species they were.
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Aug 3, 2023 15:59
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Yeah, given how horribly we treat chimpanzees, our closest extant species, I can't begin to imagine how horribly we would have treated any of the others if they would have survived to the present day. We already saw what happened with all of the racial theories in the modern era and how they led into things like eugenics and genocide, so imagine what that part of the human mind would have been able to do when presented with another species. Can you even imagine how our legal system would account for two or more humans? There's so much in prehistory that I really wish I could know, but there's only so much that you can glean from archaeology and genetic studies. We can only guess at the behavior and psychology of our ancestors, and the further back you go, the more imaginative you need to get. I wish I could just watch a recording of a tribe of our own kind and of Neanderthals interacting with each other and look at their facial expressions and perceptions and behaviors.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:02
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Scarodactyl posted:I really don't enjoy it when you come up with gross, bizarre historical hypotheticals and I think everyone would appreciate it if you refrained. I don't give a poo poo personally. What's the current scholarship on the Toba bottleneck, fake or possibly real?
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Aug 3, 2023 16:04
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Grand Fromage posted:I suspect anyone outside your kin group was The Other and it didn't matter what species they were. Although you'd also have to go outside your kin group for mating, so things get weird with that.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:17
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Modern humans will eat and gently caress anything. Zero stretch at all what we did to anything we came across.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:17
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zoux posted:On one hand, you look at the way modern humans divide people up and assume that the different "races" are different, better, and worse than one another, when there actually is no difference, you'd have to think that given an actual different species with actual differences, better or worse, between them would lead to unimaginable violence. On the other hand, these are all modern concepts and I'd be interested to know if an early tribe of h. sapiens would feel any more or less kinship with another tribe of h. sapiens over another extant homo tribe, or would just consider them "other" and leave it at that. two fish posted:Yeah, given how horribly we treat chimpanzees, our closest extant species, I can't begin to imagine how horribly we would have treated any of the others if they would have survived to the present day. We already saw what happened with all of the racial theories in the modern era and how they led into things like eugenics and genocide, so imagine what that part of the human mind would have been able to do when presented with another species. Can you even imagine how our legal system would account for two or more humans? I think it's important to remember that these things come out of very particular historical contexts, they're not just random products of human thought. The creation of the idea of race was (at least in part) driven by the need to justify various horrible things that were being done by Europeans in the name of acquiring greater money and power. Certainly people have done plenty of horrible things to each other throughout history, but those are also always inseparable from the social and historical situations they happened in. Without modern biological taxonomies based on things like genetic analysis, it seems like a stretch to think that Neanderthals would appear as something fundamentally "inhuman" rather than "those sturdy people who live in the mountains" or whatever. Maybe some groups of Homo sapiens would have decided they were truly Other, but that would have also been socially conditioned, just like our modern understanding of them as a separate species is.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:23
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Race is just the modern framing we use. The Romans were absolutely trying to wipe out every Carthaginian despite that lacking that conception. Race is just one of the more salient "other" categories in the modern world.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:34
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Yeah, what seems more likely is that having a distinct peer Homo species would have led to widespread interchange and might have greatly increased the possibilities of culture. The Virginia house of burgesses and Belgian kings are not the sole or truest face of humanity.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:38
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zoux posted:Race is just the modern framing we use. The Romans were absolutely trying to wipe out every Carthaginian despite that lacking that conception. Race is just one of the more salient "other" categories in the modern world. Again, this was highly socially determined. The ideas of "Rome" and "Carthage" and the conflict between them came out of a historical context. They didn't just get dropped onto the map, see each other, and start battling to the death. If every Roman was just naturally baying for Carthaginian blood, Cato the Elder wouldn't have ended all his speeches with calls for Carthage's destruction because it would've just been a given, rather than a goal that had to be pushed forward constantly. Everything depends on what came before.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:41
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Eldoop posted:Again, this was highly socially determined. The ideas of "Rome" and "Carthage" and the conflict between them came out of a historical context. They didn't just get dropped onto the map, see each other, and start battling to the death. If every Roman was just naturally baying for Carthaginian blood, Cato the Elder wouldn't have ended all his speeches with calls for Carthage's destruction because it would've just been a given, rather than a goal that had to be pushed forward constantly. Everything depends on what came before. The results are indistinguishable, and thus we can make some educated guesses about results in other possible situations involving two different groups of individuals.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:44
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And it was the city itself that was destroyed, along with it's social structures (very violently, but destroying the people wasn't the point really). There would have been plenty of Carthaginian aristocrats elsewhere in Spain and North Africa and we don't hear about them being summarily executed or anything, as far as I know. Rome vs. Carthage is also not a particularly representative example of even Rome vs. other polities, and there's no good reason to assume it would be representative of interactions tens of thousands of years earlier between completely unrelated people.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:46
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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zoux posted:The results are indistinguishable, and thus we can make some educated guesses about results in other possible situations involving two different groups of individuals.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:47
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There's no more Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the others, so what did we do to them?
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Aug 3, 2023 16:48
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PittTheElder posted:And it was the city itself that was destroyed, along with it's social structures (very violently, but destroying the people wasn't the point really). There would have been plenty of Carthaginian aristocrats elsewhere in Spain and North Africa and we don't hear about them being summarily executed or anything, as far as I know. Punic language and identity was still around in the 400s. The Romans as far as I can remember never actively attempt to wipe out any ethnic groups (not out of altrusim but practicality; as long as they're paying their taxes and not stirring up poo poo who cares what the weirdos are doing), though yeah the city itself sure as gently caress was.
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Aug 3, 2023 16:51
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two fish posted:There's no more Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the others, so what did we do to them?
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two fish posted:Yeah, given how horribly we treat chimpanzees, our closest extant species, I can't begin to imagine how horribly we would have treated any of the others if they would have survived to the present day. We already saw what happened with all of the racial theories in the modern era and how they led into things like eugenics and genocide, so imagine what that part of the human mind would have been able to do when presented with another species. Can you even imagine how our legal system would account for two or more humans? there is such a recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o589CAu73UM
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Aug 3, 2023 16:55
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