|
Mr. Nice! posted:When I asked that question I had thought for some reason that Carthage was shorter lived than it was. I figure by 900BCE or so they were very distinct from their Phoenician roots. The modern accepted date for Carthage's founding is only 814 BC. There are (important) legends that suggest earlier start dates, but like Rome's foundation myths, we do not believe they are true. Mr. Nice! posted:At what point did they stop being Phoenician and start being Carthaginian? Also, when Carthage gets destroyed, do the diaspora return to being traveling Phoenicians again? When we do we stop caring about Phoenicians at all? The Phoenicians weren't wandering or itinerant or anything, they were traders, and founded colonies to support that. Carthage did the same thing, building up a network of colonies and subject cities, but in contrast with the original Phoenician founders Carthage maintained a much higher degree of central control. And I'm not sure there would have been much of a diaspora, at least not a free one. The population of Carthage (and a small number of cities closely allied to Carthage) were sold into slavery, but the rest of Carthaginian North Africa was left basically intact, but now subject to Rome as a province. Existing trade networks that didn't involve people in Carthage itself probably just kept on going same as they had before the Third Punic War. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Aug 4, 2023 |
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 17:34
|
|
Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 15:04 |
|
|
Re: hybridizing, speciation and taxonomy is a huge loving mess but commonly members of a genus can interbreed. E.g., sunfish in Lepomis, king and milksnakes in Lampropeltis.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 17:41
|
|
|
Carthage had pretty close ties to Phoenicia throughout its history, and Tyre in particular. The thing is that the Phoenicians were similar to the Greeks in a lot of ways; they were a collection of city-states with a shared language and lots of colonies scattered throughout the Mediterranean, but little political cohesion. You can think of the term or identity of "Carthaginian" being comparable to that of "Syracusan" in a lot of ways: it signifies a subgroup within the larger cultural group of "Greek" or "Phoenician". They were also both distant colonies in the Western Med that became powerful states or empires in their own right. We don't know a lot about how the Carthaginians thought of themselves because almost none of their written material has survived. One thing to remember is that "Carthaginian" identity and culture has become kind of synonymous with Western Mediterranean Phoenician culture, and they may not have seen things that way. There were a ton of Phoenician colonies all over the place, and while Carthage came to dominate them politically, the various city states may have still had some autonomy and may have still considered themselves Uticans, or Gadirans, or Tripolitanians. The Carthaginian Empire may have been more similar to the Delian League than the highly centralized Hellenistic states, but we just don't know. The only sources are Greek and Roman ones that call everyone who spoke Phoenician languages "Punic" and seem to see them being led by Carthage.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 17:47
|
|
|
the yeti posted:Re: hybridizing, speciation and taxonomy is a huge loving mess but commonly members of a genus can interbreed. E.g., sunfish in Lepomis, king and milksnakes in Lampropeltis. Oh for sure, and it gets even worse -- e.g. for sea turtles, many species in family Cheloniidae can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, despite not even being in the same genus. Having done some work on their genomes, they are also surprisingly genetically similar for how many millions of years divergent they are. But while not that uncommon, interspecies hybrids are still far more the exception than the norm, and fertile interspecies hybrids even more so. That all said, there is solid genetic evidence that Homo sapiens interbred with Homo neanderthalensis as well as Denisovans (although for the latter it doesn't even seem settled yet whether they constitute a separate species.) I think an argument could even be made that H. neanderthalensis didn't have enough time to actually diverge as a species.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 18:23
|
|
|
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? Bonobos are our closest Ape-relative, not Chimpanzees. Also, like others have said in the thread, definitions back then were relaxed enough explorers regularly confused apes with humans, so my guess is we would treat an alien, intelligent species exactly like we treat other humans, sometimes good, sometimes bad. On that note, stay the hell away from Chimpanzees, they're just human enough to get easily confused and angry when interacting with us, and then they'll use their superior upper body strength to dismantle you like you're made from Lego. Some lucky people only got the trashing of their lifetimes, but others got their faces ripped off one ear at a time
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
two fish posted:There's no more Neanderthals or Denisovans or any of the others, so what did we do to them? Most likely, we are them now, at least a little bit. They were probably close enough they mixed with us, and then eventually they got out-competed by the simple fact that there were more of us and our weird hybrids than of them. Edit: gently caress, beaten like ten times a million. That's what I get for not reading to the end of the thread first. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Aug 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 18:47
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Bonobos are our closest Ape-relative, not Chimpanzees. I don't think this is really true. Our closest living relatives are the genus Pan, which diverged into bonobos and chimpanzees, but I don't think you can say that one species is closer to us than the other.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 19:19
|
|
|
Lead out in cuffs posted:I don't think this is really true. Our closest living relatives are the genus Pan, which diverged into bonobos and chimpanzees, but I don't think you can say that one species is closer to us than the other. You are correct. Pan and Homo split off from the same common ancestor, then Pan split into chimps and bonobos. They're equally related to us. Some do think bonobos behave more like humans than chimps do but you're getting into more vibes and opinions there. Genetically there's no difference.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 19:21
|
|
|
Different sides of the Congo right ?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 19:22
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Different sides of the Congo right ? Yeah. To the south they learned to solve their differences with loving; to the north, with beating the poo poo out of one another. this is a half-joke based off what I've read while probably high on Wikipedia, be gentle on the "well, actually"ing Judgy Fucker fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Aug 4, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 19:24
|
|
|
Bonobos are notably less violent yeah. If you believe humans are naturally violent monsters you compare to chimps and if you think humans are naturally peaceful you compare to bonobos.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 19:27
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Bonobos are notably less violent yeah. If you believe humans are naturally violent monsters you compare to chimps and if you think humans are naturally peaceful you compare to bonobos. Less violent than regular chimps, not modern humans. they haven’t been observed to conduct organized warfare the way chimps do, but they also haven’t been observed in the wild in anything like as much detail as chimps. If not for Jane Goodall telling the world about the experience of watching in horror as an intra-group territorial dispute developed into a years-long chimp-on-chimp pogrom, we’d probably still think they were nice guys too. Bonobos hunt and kill animals with their hands and teeth and solve their social problems with outbursts of intense aggression (and yeah, loving around too). great apes are violent creatures.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 20:08
|
|
|
Gorillas seem pretty chill, as do orangs. What dark truths about human nature do they reveal?
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 20:17
|
|
|
So I got curious, downloaded the current reference genomes for a bunch of Hominidae, and ran them through Mashtree. Mashtree reckons that our genome is the tiniest fraction of a percent more similar to bonobos than chimpanzees. (1.29964% difference with chimps, 1.28481% difference with Bonobos). One big caveat is that I was using genomes derived from individuals for the other hominids, but the hg38 consensus reference genome for humans. It might be more accurate to use a bunch of diverse individual genomes out of the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium. But this is just what I could throw together in half an hour, and I have a Real Job to get back to. (Also noting that phylogeny is not my main area of expertise.) Here's the Newick tree if anyone cares. You can plug it in here to view it: http://etetoolkit.org/treeview/ code:
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 20:27
|
|
|
skasion posted:great apes are violent creatures.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 20:35
|
|
|
Scarodactyl posted:Orangutans less so. Possibly, but still, it was funny to read in our news when Olaf Scholz, our Dear Leader, was on a visit in some kind of African Zoo Thing where you could watch Orangutans in nature and when during feeding time an Orangutan got curious and swung by to visit our chancellor and his wife, the African rangers there with them pissed their pants and got the two of them out there real fast. But that could be just "don't let the leader of a major country get bad touched by a big animal"-kind of standard procedure over there, I don't know 
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 20:47
|
|
|
There are no wild animals that are completely safe (above a certain size of course; you don't have much to fear from a beetle). It's just a matter of degree.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 21:09
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Gorillas seem pretty chill, as do orangs. What dark truths about human nature do they reveal? Gorillas and orangutans are not hunters, and adult males of these species do not tend to live together (unlike chimps/bonobos or humans). Gorillas practice infanticide habitually. This paper suggests it causes about a fifth of all gorilla infant mortality. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3819382/ Chimp-style group attacks on isolated adults are rare among gorillas because gorilla social groups have historically tended not to include multiple adult males (ie, 1v1 fight to the death is a relatively unattractive proposition for all parties involved, compared to getting all your buds together to jointly beat the poo poo out of some other guy). This may have been changing over the last few decades, multi-male groups are becoming more common and outbursts of spontaneous violence do occur. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37018 (contains a picture of gnawed gorilla appendage) Orangutans have a weird rear end social structure where one morph of male (the “flanged” kind, with the big wide face you probably think of when imagining orangutans) is extremely aggro against other males, while the other male morph (“unflanged”) isn’t. Flanged orangutans regularly bite each other, which sometimes leads to death. unflanged orangutans were once thought to be more likely to force copulation on females, but now I look it up, this appears not to be true, there’s considerable variation across populations and both morphs are now known to coerce sex. https://cherylknott.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/knott-2009-chapter-4-sexual-coercion-in-orangutans.pdf Book excerpt. Nb the entire chapter and book is about sexual violence Imo none of this says all that much about human nature, apart from giving us the fairly obvious insight that for various reasons, some humans consider it a good idea to go to difficult and remote environments to watch apes do what apes do, such as gently caress each other up.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 21:37
|
|
|
Ape has slain ape 
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2023 22:13
|
|
|
Chimps go to war?
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 15:36
|
|
|
ilmucche posted:Chimps go to war? Yea. There are people who will quibble about it, like defining war as a thing that requires a permanent bureaucratic state, but to me it sure as hell looks like war when two different groups form organized violence units that engage in a repeated process of murder against each other. Hell one incident looked like genocide to me.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 16:05
|
|
|
ilmucche posted:Chimps go to war? Everyone who goes to war is a chimp.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 16:18
|
|
|
ilmucche posted:Chimps go to war? They engage in organized group conflict over territory over a sustained time, including killing hostile group members.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 16:28
|
|
|
When it comes to stone tools and other artifacts left behind, are we able to figure out which species made them? Like, are there distinct Neanderthal tools? Did our species ever swap tool ideas with others? Also, tying it into more recent history, comparatively speaking: did any of the ancient empires, like the Romans, discover prehistoric artifacts? How would they have even reacted to a Neanderthal skeleton?
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 16:46
|
|
|
two fish posted:Also, tying it into more recent history, comparatively speaking: did any of the ancient empires, like the Romans, discover prehistoric artifacts? How would they have even reacted to a Neanderthal skeleton? That particular example I don't think they'd react at all, but they did occasionally dig up fossils. Augustus had a dinosaur bone collection in his villa. They mostly seem to have thought they were artifacts of mythical creatures and monsters. Adrienne Mayor has a book on Greek and Roman fossil stuff if you want to go into depth.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:06
|
|
|
Wait, so it is actually true that dragon myths came from dinosaur bones?
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:11
|
|
|
Nobody wrote down the origin of dragon mythology so there is no way to answer that. It's one of many proposed ideas though. It is notable that dragons show up in mythology all over the world, in cultures that weren't connected to each other. Though I don't think Americans had dragons.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:22
|
|
|
in the americas folks just never stopped calling them serpents and snakes, but there are sinuous reptiles of strange power all over
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:35
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Nobody wrote down the origin of dragon mythology so there is no way to answer that. It's one of many proposed ideas though. It is notable that dragons show up in mythology all over the world, in cultures that weren't connected to each other. Though I don't think Americans had dragons. There is something of a translation question here. Like we've decided to translate 竜 as "dragon," which, I don't know that I consider it unfair but there's definite differences and most of us do know those differences. And I'm not 100% sure why 竜 gets treated as a type of dragon, while the more mythic forms of coatl's do not. There's probably a historical path dependence - that people who were translating Chinese ideas to Europeans were more invested in "see how similar they are to us" than people doing the same thing for Americans - but to be honest I just feel unqualified, its just kind of an oddity to me.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:36
|
|
|
I have heard that a lot of European dragon myths sprung up right after the Roman empire came in with those cool dragons on their cavalry banners
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:38
|
|
|
Overly sarcastic productions on YouTube has a pretty good dragon breakdown highlighting both the similarities and differences between dragon myths
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:44
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:Nobody wrote down the origin of dragon mythology so there is no way to answer that. It's one of many proposed ideas though. It is notable that dragons show up in mythology all over the world, in cultures that weren't connected to each other. Though I don't think Americans had dragons. I remember reading about dinosaur fossils being sold as "dragon bones" in ~19th-century and earlier China, so it would seem that fossils have reinforced beliefs in dragons, whether or not they were the origin of them. Edit: Actually, I checked and it seems this was still happening in rural China into the 21st century. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Aug 18, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 17:56
|
|
|
A 20ft Nile crocodile is a dragon. Though the bull hippo is what’s gonna get you but nobody likes to brag an oversized river pig killed everyone you love bathing by the river.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 18:16
|
|
|
two fish posted:How would they have even reacted to a Neanderthal skeleton? Greco-Roman common knowledge and ethnographic tradition was that that the farther you get from the Mediterranean, the weirder and less civilized/human the people are. And in extreme locations you get extreme weirdoes. Savages who don’t have houses like Finns or Huns are just the start. Herodotus tells us that in the far side of Libya there are headless men and men with dogs’ heads (“I merely repeat what the Libyans say”). Pliny says in India there’s guys with one giant foot which they use as a sunshade to sleep. Against that, a skeleton in Germany with funky looking bones would have seemed only too natural. skasion fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Aug 5, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 18:24
|
|
|
Grand Fromage posted:That particular example I don't think they'd react at all, but they did occasionally dig up fossils. Augustus had a dinosaur bone collection in his villa. They mostly seem to have thought they were artifacts of mythical creatures and monsters. Adrienne Mayor has a book on Greek and Roman fossil stuff if you want to go into depth. Oh hell yes this book looks cool as gently caress, thank you.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 18:47
|
|
|
Tulip posted:There is something of a translation question here. Like we've decided to translate 竜 as "dragon," which, I don't know that I consider it unfair but there's definite differences and most of us do know those differences. And I'm not 100% sure why 竜 gets treated as a type of dragon, while the more mythic forms of coatl's do not. There's probably a historical path dependence - that people who were translating Chinese ideas to Europeans were more invested in "see how similar they are to us" than people doing the same thing for Americans - but to be honest I just feel unqualified, its just kind of an oddity to me. I do get the impression that with occident-orient relations, there's some kind of impulse to see things as more of the same (a lot of it also presumably driven by merchants with no patience for figuring out all the differences), whereas a lot of exploration and investigation into the new world seem more prone to see differences.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 18:50
|
|
|
Crab Dad posted:A 20ft Nile crocodile is a dragon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania might be another good example(, if humans of the time encountered it, that seems unclear but possible )
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 20:32
|
|
|
two fish posted:When it comes to stone tools and other artifacts left behind, are we able to figure out which species made them? Like, are there distinct Neanderthal tools? Did our species ever swap tool ideas with others? Yes though the determination is mostly made based on the context the artifacts are found in, there is a somewhat distinct Homo Erectus tool set for example. There is a theory that griffins were inspired by protoceratops fossils but it's pretty hazy. Neat to think about. Look up thunderstones. Romans (and most modern humans) would likely not recognize what they had if they dug up a Neanderthal skeleton and would assume it's just a normal rear end human skeleton. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Aug 5, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 20:37
|
|
|
There are lots of different mythological creatures, they usually have features based on real animals, and we've categorized all the lizard-like as dragons for whatever reason.Telsa Cola posted:Romans (and most modern humans) would likely not recognize what they had if they dug up a Neanderthal skeleton and would assume it's just a normal rear end human skeleton. Yeah, without an understanding of what a species is, a neanderthalis skeleton just looks like someone with a big head
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 21:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 15:04 |
|
|
There's a proto-indo-european myth about a thunder god defeating a giant snake who is blocking a river which has been suggested to be ancestral to many dragon myths
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2023 23:05
|
|