History yays

[dubsartur]

The Great Ship of Snargate, Kent http://www.ianfriel.co.uk/the-great-ship-of-snargate/

[Glaurung]

Ooh, I did not know about this - thanks for posting!

[dubsartur]

For a long time there has been an argument whether the Clovis Culture were the first humans in the Americas.  As a non specialists it seems very partisan and motivated with defenders of Clovis getting increasingly desperate because if they accept one piece of evidence as "maybe" then it will get hard to dismiss the next as "unprecedented." (Although some of the alternative theories are pretty dodgy too).  Ordinary people in Iron Age Ireland are basically invisible to archaeologists, it must be even harder to spot people ten times as old who did not have copper or draft animals.

Ars Technica has a piece on some of the latest evidence, carbon-dated human footprints at the White Sands missile range in the USA https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/10/theres-more-evidence-that-people-walked-at-white-sands-23000-years-ago/

[Jubal]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67755415

This is immensely clever and very exciting work - using tooth remains to analyse diet over time, so you can actually prove that, as in this case, someone of Sarmatian ancestry found buried in Roman era Britain didn't just have ancestors from abroad but actually travelled and thus changed grains and diet during his lifetime.

I think some historical DNA/science work can end up being reductive because people want to categorise too much by what they find (or read DNA into social categories it doesn't reflect) but this sort of work I think does show some really interesting potential in unlocking some evidence of people's life stories etc.

[Pentagathus]

So I may have spent almost 4 and a half hours today watching a single absurdly long episode of the Joe Rogan podcast where Graham Hancock was pitted against an actual archaeologist called Flint Dibble. It was interesting stuff, kind of a shame that Hancock was there though tbh because he spent most of his time whining about how mean archaeologists have been to him by challenging his ideas instead bringing up any facts or real argument.
Not really anything new for actual archaeologists but it was very cool to learn about the genetic changes in early domesticated crops and how they seem to occur without selective breeding by humans, they actually appear to be a function of natural selection with humans accidently applying the selection pressures. Very cooool.
Was also interesting to see how Dibble engaged in this debate and how easily grifters like Hancock can be exposed when an expert takes the time to prepare for and engage with a lil well reasoned education and a touch of meme magic.

[Jubal]

I've seen some of Flint Dibble's stuff on social media. He does seem like the kind of person one needs for that job.

I think most academics, and I don't know if they're wrong about this, shy away from that sort of engagment because it really does need a particular set of skills. Like, you need to be carrying a very wide arsenal of facts with you because it's so easy for someone to shoot out some bit of information you didn't know and, when you're in a live interview, it's much harder to look up some citations for why they're wrong. I think that's the thing that would terrify me about doing that sort of thing: I'd like to be the sort of person who could do it, but I worry I'd flail when people started shooting facts at me about things I know I don't truly know well enough to contradict them (because the "pop culture knowledge of the past" stuff is so much broader than most individual academics actually look at, myself included and I'm a relatively broad-brush historian).

[Pentagathus]

Yeah he did a very good job, despite seeming to be quite uncomfortable a lot of the time. Kudos to him, I hope he goes back on JRE at some point without Hancock so he can talk more about his own research and expertise.
People criticise Rogan a lot for having conspiracy theorist types on his show, but to be fair to him he actually does try to host these types of debates at times and he is genuinely willing to change his beliefs when someone who actually knows what they're talking about explains what the "mainstream narrative" actually is and how it works. I think that is a very valuable thing, and fortunately this appeared to be one of those times.

[dubsartur]

Historian and philologist A.J. West has a new blog on post-Columbian South America (and why he could not pursue an academic career after his PhD) https://medium.com/@WestsWorld/why-im-now-writing-about-south-america-f2ce0506ce6d

[Jubal]

Yeah, that sounds largely a familiar story :/ I'm looking forward to reading whatever S America stuff he comes up with though.

[Jubal]

Thought this was interesting, an article about the first recorded virtual meeting, a telephone-based conference across multiple US cities held in 1916!

https://spectrum.ieee.org/virtual-meeting