bob dobbs is dead posted:

the counting stuff is deffo colored by daniel everett's 40-year slow-burning vicious academia war against chomsky

bob dobbs is dead posted:

the two of them think it's incompatible. they think it's so, so, fuckin incompatible. hundreds and hundreds of pages of increasingly personal attacks

euphronius posted:

15th century Egypt expanded pretty far. The Hittites were able to stop them going into Asia Minor. I don’t know why they didn’t go into Iraq. Where else was there ? Greece and rome weren’t much then

Tulip posted:

Over in cspam the dividing line for modern vs pre modern is 1789, which I realize is so that people who want to bite each other over spanish civil war minutia are quarantined, but always leaves me with "what the hell do we do with the 16th 17th and 18th centuries? Do we just memory hole them or are we saying the 7 Years War was medieval?"

Some people use it specifically as the start of the modern era! Though more common is using Bosworth as the very last pre-modern event.

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Yeah as Tesla Cola says, the bloodiest secessionist war would be the Taiping rebellion. (Likely ever, but it was also contemporaneous with the American civil war). It was basically WWI if WWI happened inside a single country. Somewhere between 5 and 10% of the population of China was killed.

The whole "American Civil War was the bloodiest civil war in history" meme is a weird one but seems quite persistent.

Telsa Cola posted:

Well its a little more complex than that as we don't call every permanent settlement a city. There's a complexity/density criteria that generally needs to be hit.

ChaseSP posted:

Communication across a sea of water like the Mediterranean is also far easier compared to overland travel, barring river travel of course. So this means that people inland can potentially be far more reclusive despite being nearest in matter of miles simply due to the longer time it takes to travel inland compared to across the sea.

Jazerus posted:

the romans were also simply insanely militaristic by the standards of the ancient world. as a society they could muster an army, have that army completely eat poo poo, muster another one, have that one eat poo poo, and still have the capability to raise a third - and that was before they extended their reach and population all that far away from italy. most ancient states of rome's size during the middle republic were not able to do that - the army they had was the army they had, and bouncing back from a devastating loss was often just not possible. regardless of any tactical advantages, persistence was the main thing that let them take down the successor states

Grand Fromage posted:

Yep. You're right about the records, which is part of the problem. The estimates are mainly from population size (itself an estimate, though we have a decent idea of this) and finding bodies that died from violence, which is of course a very incomplete source. What we can say for sure is a surprisingly large number of remains are found where the guy was murdered, far more than you would expect if violence rates were comparable to today.

Telsa Cola posted:

That format is setting up sirens in my head because you are interviewing folks/groups dealing with the effects of being colonized which is insanely distruptive. There were similar issues with the UC system of trying to interview/perform ethnographic studies on tribes in California as a form of salvage ethnography before they were impacted too much.

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Not denying there couldn't be a impact, but if ethnographic interviews in PNG and archaeological evidence in Germany are pointing in the same direction despite both having significant but unrelated questions in their methodology, that's a positive in the "hunter-gather life was very violent per-capita" theory evidence box.

Something kills everyone in the end, and Violence being a large % of the causes makes sense, when the others are Disease, Old Age, and Starvation.

Orbs posted:

That's possible, but the latter could also point to the extensive colonial efforts to draw in more settlers and investment, more than there actually being nobody there.

zoux posted:

What were they getting after that deep into North Africa? What was the state of the sahara 200 years ago

FishFood posted:

From my admittedly inexpert understanding, this is one of the big mysteries in American archaeology right now. The genetic evidence points to people being in the Americas a lot earlier than Clovis, and there are scattered sites that are earlier, but Clovis is so huge and shows up everywhere.

Stefan Milo's youtube channel has some great videos on the subject:
https://youtu.be/UsnrdCdGs7o?si=ENnOwgNRR1goYMmf
https://youtu.be/cXRoKJcLjJw?si=EKnFlCrONiCt-DzZ

Basically we just don't know. While people were almost certainly in the Americas before it, Clovis could represent the first big wave, possibly of people who had stayed in Alaska until the glaciers melted. Or it could just be an artifact (heh) of preservation, that earlier sites didn't preserve as well or are in locations archaeologists have overlooked until now.

Orbs posted:

Exactly. Although Islam is an interesting special case, in that much of its imperialism seems to have been for a long time, a sort of quasi-anti-imperialism, centered around opposing what were viewed as the evil parts of Rome.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

Personally I blame Constantine

Benagain posted:

If a person gives homage to Deez Nutz is that technically monotheism since they are worshipped as a single entity with the same purpose

Strategic Tea posted:

Europe really doesn't care as long as the military support keeps coming. The US is really not socially compelling here except to ultraconservatives.

Mad Hamish posted:

Well, Re spends the day sailing across the sky in His solar barque which is named Millions of Years, so we know that at least one Egyptian boat had a name.

The one He travels in through the twelve caverns of the Underworld which are the hours of the night has a way less badass name, which is just plain old Night Boat.

cheetah7071 posted:

Even if you think humans are natrually violent jerks, it's still surprising to hear about complete population replacements. They're quite rare within recorded history. Most of the time, empires wanted to tax the locals, not kill them and take the land. It makes sense that pre-state societies might have different priorities, but it's still a bit shocking to hear.

Deteriorata posted:

All of the above happened. Sometimes there was peaceful infiltration and coexistence. Sometimes there was violent genocidal replacement, and sometimes there was leadership/governmental changes without much change for the commoner.

There's some genetic evidence becoming available to tease out just what happened when.

Strategic Tea posted:

Strategic Tea posted:

Yeah for all that it must have been awful to live in the age of door to door political murder, just think how good it would have been if the people being murdered were the baddies!

Tunicate posted:

Carbon dating was hugely impacted, there's a LOT more c14 now and that's why low background steel is valuable

The Lone Badger posted:

I’m definitely reading this too literally, but people in that story seem to sink immediately and disappear without trace as soon as they enter water. ‘River’ didn’t seem like a very good way of killing uncooperative people unless you attach big rocks to them first or something.