I flew to Alaska, and drove down to BC. Before I went I was expecting Alaska to be a desolate place. Alaska is actually pretty developed. Lots of commercial activity, with power lines and trucks going from place to place. I would compare it to Northern Ontario.
When I drove down through Yukon, literally drove for hours without seeing any signs of humans other than the road. Very pristine environment from what I remember. Beautiful little lakes surrounded by forests. And crazy washboard roads that weave up and down due to freeze / thaw cycles. If Nuclear WWIII happens, this might be where humans survive. If I ever wanted to be a hermit, I know where to go.
>>If Nuclear WWIII happens, this might be where humans survive.
If WWIII happens, there will be plenty of places people will survive. But in dramatically reduced numbers as, firstly, the people living in major population centers would have been killed en masse, and secondly, as a consequence of the first, global supply chains break down and food and other necessities become extremely scarce.
Technology would see massive regression and an extended dark ages as well, as much of the production base would be destroyed, and the people who predominantly live in large population centers and sustain it would be killed.
I only go into these extremely grim details because I'm seeing too many cavaliar attitudes on social media, and even from some officials and former officials (e.g. former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, saying it's "a question of time" until Russia does something to force a NATO response) about a possible military confrontation between the West and Russia.
I always wonder, if in the typical US vs Russia scenario, would Buenos Aries, South Africa, and Australia be able to restablish the 90s before the 2090s?
> Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again.
> What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?
Alaska seems quite developed from the Fairbanks to Anchorage corridor, but you don't have to go far off the highway for it to be complete wilderness. I spent some time there and you'd drive on roads for miles and then they just end - in the sense the road doesn't go any further and everything after that is pretty much wilderness with maybe a few unused logging roads.
We stuck to pretty much the main roads, but I went to Denali as well, so I've experienced how vast and beautiful it is.
I was just curious and looked up the population density. Alaska has a population density of 1.3 people per square mile and Yukon just 0.07 per square km. If I did the math right Yukon has a population density of 0.027 people per square mile. Or Alaska is about 5 times more densely populated.
Of the 34 thousand people that live in all of Yukon, 25 thousand live in Whitehorse. That leaves just 9k people for everywhere else.
curious where did you go exactly in Yukon? being a hermit, it's been on a list of places I might escape to. Yes, I also believe Yukon and North West Territories is the best place to survive a nuclear war.
The problem with antarctica is that its too cold and lacking in resources. Yukon, NWT, is teeming with stuff you can hunt and eat. I've been reading about Inuits a lot and its fascinating how they have survived.
Just drove down to BC from Fairbanks Alaska and camped along the way. I believe we took highway 2. We stopped at Whitehorse and a hot springs campground. Realistically finding a place along the coast of Alaska would probably greatly your improve chances of surviving the winter. Much much milder winters next to the Ocean. And better availability of food. Though Alaska cities might be targeted.
Nuke Map might be of help
I lived in the Yukon for 4 years - it's an incredible place for anyone yearning for more adventure in their life. Snowboarding, back country skiing in Alaska, hiking, hunting, paddling with icebergs, snowshoeing at -40C/F, etc.
There were so many woolly mammoths up there it's virtually impossible to go mining and not dig one up. (Mining is VERY big business up there) It's not uncommon for someone to have a tusk lying around in their yard.
As I understand it, this is an open question, but one explanation has a few factors:
a) In the absence of many external pressures, hunting and gathering is actually a reasonably low-effort and flexible lifestyle. From a moment-to-moment perspective, agriculture (and our "technological" world) mostly doesn't seem like an improvement. Long-term, the quality-of-life improvements come about in resiliency and stability, but those aren't visible to the people making the decision.
b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.
> b) The transition to agriculture (which triggered the technology explosion) took a long period of luck, including groups of people living in a floodplain for a long enough time to breed plants that were suitable for agriculture. Note that this was an extremely rare thing, in that it probably only happened ~4-5 times in human history and spread everywhere else.
The accepted origins of agriculture keep fluctuating, but there's unambiguously at least 8 origins and maybe a dozen. The unambiguous origins are Mesoamerica, South America, Mesopotamia, Indus/Ganges, and China (all of which are also clearly independent origins of civilization), as well as North America, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea (which don't clearly form independent origins of civilization, although note word order in that phrase). There's probably more origins as well.
In general, a lot of early civilization development is one of those things that was traditionally understood to be difficult and everyone cribbing off of the one guy who did it (kind of like how the Industrial Revolution is generally though to have happened), but the more people started digging into the research, the more endogenous its evolution appears: independent reinvention of the Neolithic Revolution seems to be the norm, not the exception.
Göbekli Tepe actually proves that highly organized cities are a lot older than agriculture itself. More broadly, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that civilization - at least as in highly developed cities allowing for trade, exchange, production of material goods and even creation of impressive stone monuments - is in fact older than was previously thought. Many of those unknown civilizations may been affected by prehistoric cataclysmic events that left their trace in myth, such as the flooding of Doggerland or of the present-day Black Sea due to ancient sea-level rise. That same sea-level rise also means that much of the prehistoric coastline, where the most interesting sites would likely be found, is now well underwater.
In general, I would hazard that our reconstruction of Paleolithic and Mesolithic societies is sketchy at best.
Another potential issue is that some of our understanding of Paleolithic societies comes from observation of modern hunter-gatherer societies, which exist in a context where they've been pushed off of any agriculturally productive land. I'll point out that cereal crops require substantial processing to be made edible, unlike things like berries or meat which can be eaten at point of collection, so... if cereal crops are the founder crops of agriculture, we had to know how to process them to edibility well before modern agriculture gets under way. When did that happen, and how widespread was it compared to other food sources?
Lots of the cereal crops do not require much processing.
As kids out roaming, my brother and I (and sometimes cousins) would pull the heads off of barley and wheat and chew the grains. My dad did it as a kid too, and as surely as I have an ape for an ancient uncle, it didn't start with us. In fact, when you're out hunting (and gathering), you browse for berries, seeds or grains, as and where the plants stand. And maybe you fill your shirt with stuff to take home.
Knowledge of planting can come the same way. You notice after years of coming back from a reliable food patch that the plants are now growing right along side the trail, and you realized, "from spilled seeds!"
Or that your midden heap has sprouted apple trees. You ate the fruit and tossed the cores in the same place.
Its a short logical leap from those observations to deliberately planting patches, then helping things along by clearing ground. Boom, agriculture.
Wild cereals were one of many plant food sources in the paleo/meso- lithic world, and not even the most important. More careful analyses reveal families like Vetches and roots (known in the literature as underground storage organs/USOs) that simply don't preserve well in the material record.
It proves there was one, and quite possibly only one ‘city’ or settlement of some kind that was probably intermittently occupied, perhaps on a seasonal basis.
But yes, it is quite possible there are more to find, especially in now flooded former coastlines. I’m not expecting us to find anything spectacularly revolutionary or shocking though. Especially not widely distributed. There doesn’t seem any really good reason they would all be clustered along coastlines all over the place, but not along rivers or by lakes. Gobekli Tepe is nowhere near the coast.
Both the Americas and Eur-Asia seem to have independently invented agriculture, and it didn't seem to lead to a technological explosion until looong afterwards.
Selective breeding was not required for early agriculture. That came later. I'm sure agriculture started with "hey we like strawberries, strawberries grow from seeds, let's plant the seeds and have more strawberries" for each of the plants they gathered.
You just jumped right over the bit that is deeply obvious to us, but not at all obvious to somebody who doesn't have any societally ingrained knowledge of how plants reproduce.
That ideation was the conceit of philosophy and academia. And possibly specific to Eurasians.
Quoting your link: "who compiled and expanded the work of earlier *natural philosophers* and the various ancient explanations for the appearance of organisms, and was taken as *scientific fact* for two millennia."
Ivory towers and echo chambers come to mind.
People who lived connected to the land and animal husbandry often had different ideas, often ironically closer to the truth. If they knew of the existence of rigor and scientific fact, its explanations weren't really relevant to their days.
To put it to a point: they knew damn well that if they only had a sow pig, they needed to mate it to a boar to get piglets, babies weren't going to appear magically. Through folk knowledge and wisdom, agrarians knew a pig gave birth 114 days after mating, and they would have arranged netflix and chill so that the piglets arrived in spring.
This idea that academics and the upper classes could be wrapped up in silly ideas and old ways can be demonstrated with the story of Edward Jenner, right around the era you were talking about.
>The record shows that it was there that Jenner heard a dairymaid say, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall never have an ugly pockmarked face.” It fact, it was a common belief that dairymaids were in some way protected from smallpox.
But physicians didn't treat peasants, and certainly (up until then) didn't listen to them.
I'd be shocked if hunter-gatherers didn't know that animal babies came from the male impregnating the female. They could hardly miss it living in the wild.
Sámi to this day manage herds of reindeer. I'd characterize it as farming after a manner. The reindeer for all practical purposes wild, yet they are cared for and benefit the Sámi. I expect they know how little reindeer come to be.
Off in eastern Siberia Tuvans were (until relatively recently) nomadic herders with at least one sub group being reindeer herders.
It seems like a logical step from managing wild herds to domesticating wild animals and I'm curious as to why domestication happens in some places and not in others. Then again, if it's working, why mess with it. :-)
> In the 17th century, physician and chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont, apparently sick of there not being enough mice in this world, devised a home recipe for their manufacture. It was quite simple, really, far simpler than getting a girl mouse and boy mouse together with a tiny bottle of wine: “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat,” he wrote, “the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.”
Even animals know where babies come from. Like when the male guards his female(s) and prevents other males from mounting them. There's a reason why human babies tend to look like their fathers, not their mothers.
I saw it on one of those nature shows by David Attenborough.
Anyhow, the idea is that the father, in order to provide resources to the mother and child, needs reassurance that the child is indeed his. After all, what would you think if your kid looked like the plumber instead of you?
They did some double blind studies, and indeed babies do tend to look more like their fathers.
> why would it only affect human babies?
Because humans are very visual. Other species are more smell oriented. Who knows if their own babies smell like their fathers.
But even the Roman Empire--looked at on a long enough timescale--basically didn't move the needle on societal advancement relative to what happened once the industrial revolution got going.
The roman empire had steam powered contraceptions or prototypes too but lacked the machinery to produce them in large scale but more importantly their demographic were not very open to automation since they had human robots they could control aka slaves.
Why build an elaborate steam powered textile factory when it costs nothing to use slaves to do it for you?
Why do you need UFC on 4k television when you can watch gladiators duke it out live with no censorship?
Why do you need porn when...okay I will stop here but you get my point.
These mechanical constructions were always in the back of engineer's minds but nobody wanted it. If Romans invented the car, they would shun it for a horse.
I believe it is the development of commerce, colonialism and laws that really made it impossible to rely on human labor alone. Like the Dutch East Company and British one, the difference really came from increased need to manage the looting, I'm sorry, "legalized taking".
Wars also were increasingly more catastrophic and costly, an arms race if you will that really made them sit down and start engineering how to do real damage to one another.
Slave labor in the roman empire was not as cheap as one would think. Garrett Ryan goes into this in his latest videos, "Were the Romans close to an Industrial Revolution?"
The Roman Empire is presumably the point (in the Western core) where an alternate history could have plausibly accelerated the industrial revolution if maybe not by a millennium at least some number of centuries. If you dig into the social development data the fall of Rome is where social development actually significantly regressed in the West and the East was even arguably ahead for a stretch.
Wasn’t it Philip K Dick, in VALIS, who wrote “the Empire never ended”? Not in the sense that it didn’t end; it did in the 14th c. to the Ottoman Empire, but that the past is laminated onto the present.
The videos upthread pretty much argue that a lot of pieces were in place but the cultural, economic, and societal pieces mostly weren't. Which, presumably, the right leadership could have shifted to some degree over time.
They also had insufficiently developed metallurgy for anything steam-related.
Steam vessels need to withstand pressures that contemporary metal was incapable of tolerating.
Metallurgy is a huge player in technical progress. See current SpaceX efforts to prevent their Raptor 2 engines from ever so slightly melting when fired in overdrive.
The author and futurist Bruce Sterling (should need no introduction) has spoken about steam engine time before if I’m not mistaken but I might have mixed it up with someone else. Basically the steam engine could have been developed further in the past but the right set of social factors did not align with engineering and metallurgical factors
So why was mankind perfectly satisfied with stasis for tens of thousands of years and then suddenly decide to get their proverbial shit together and become relentless and driven ~6000 years ago?
That primitive technology guy on youtube spent several years trying to climb out of his personal stone age. Even with actual knowledge and a path forward, the most he got was a few iron prills after hours of hard labour.
I could get that much iron out of dirt in a few minutes by running a magnet through it. We've come a long way, and its easy to forget how much our process relies on 6000 years of "ah-ha!" and hard labour.
I don't think it's assuming much, except that the first human civilizations were around 4000 BCE, which is consistent with the archeological record. This means for tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a pre-civilization environment.
Beer. People stopped being nomadic when there were all of the ingredients and technology in the same place to brew beer. Then they didn’t leave because if they did there was no beer there. So they stayed near the beer.
To those who think that this is a joke: Beer leading to civilization is actually an idea that is accepted in the field. Beer might not be the only factor, but it is almost certainly a contributing factor.
Consider that beer is safer to drink than the sources of water that were available, and the pleasing intoxicating effects. Possibly also the alcohol addiction to an extent.
Haha. Sort of like what drove the great expansion of the internet in the 90's? The dirty secret is it was online banking/trading, and porn. Porn drove the development of streaming technologies.
We spent ~millions of years before that only occasionally changing the shape of our stone tools, and it seems like we had full power brains for much of that time. Sometimes you just don't have the spare calories.
I’m going with beer as a trigger for agricultural revolution.
You see occasional stories about a moose getting drunk and stuck in a tree on fermenting apples.
Now some ancient hillbilly figures out that they can get drunk on fermenting fruit. So eventually someone gets the bright idea to try and do it themselves.
1. Technically they weren’t as smart. Fetal and child nutrition is hugely important for brain development. Modern language is far more complex. Intellectual stimulation for children is far mote advanced.
2. Slow by who’s definition? It seems like they were doing lots of useful things in a pretty harsh environment. Cleverness for cavemen was measured in surviving and outcompeting other smart humans, hominids and predators. Language and culture got more and more complex and yeah they developed a long list of physical technology.
3. Intelligence isn’t sufficient to produce a lot of technology. For example, domesticating wild grains may require you to be sedentary which itself has other requirements and is something you don’t get when your survival depends on following herds of megafauna around. More than the tech tree often you need some sort of pressure like running out of new places to live and/or running out of the megafauna you’ve always chased.
It’s a question that thinkers have wondered about for a long time.
Argument IV against the eternity of the world:
"Yes, Sir, The late Invention of Arts, and the Shortness of the History of the World, are invincible Arguments against its Eternity. If the World was from Eternity, you must needs make them an eternal Race of the most stupid Blockheads imaginable, without the least Drachm almost of Wit, or Contrivance, or indeed common Sense; and that none of these Qualification ever were known in the World, till within these two or three thousand Years last past."
William Nichols, "A Conference with a Theist" (1696)
a) Underappreciation of what things require technological advancements. Imagine being a [1] first person to discover that you can turn certain grasses into dough that can be cooked into bread... and you can't turn other grasses into that dough. That kind of person could well have been the Lavoisier of their day. Yet today, that's the kind of skill passed down from parent to child as the most pedestrian thing ever.
b) Bootstrapping effect. A lot of technology requires itself to be built, whether it's a compiler to compile your compiler, or a kiln to bake the bricks to make your kiln. In the inverse of this effect, until you build up enough infrastructure to use your technology to perpetuate itself, it might not be appreciated that it's worthwhile to do so--I'm reminded of the anecdote that Dijkstra once chastised a student for wasting precious computer time running an assembler program.
c) Societal effects of smaller, nomadic societies. If you're small, you run a greater risk of knowledge simply dying out; information loss rates were probably much higher 20,000 years ago than today. Similarly, a nomadic society is probably less willing to invest in infrastructure (like, say, kilns) that isn't readily able to move with them, and this will retard certain technological development.
It's just a thesis, though; I don't really have any hard evidence for anything, just thought experiments.
[1] As I mentioned elsewhere, this is probably an example of something that was independently invented several times.
Consider programming. Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then. Knowledge builds on knowledge and is logarithmic in growth. When I was born, we had 2400 baud modems. When I was graduating high school, getting a 56k baud modem was hot shit. Now, if I can't stream high definition video in real time on my phone, I think the connection is shitty.
We had to invent agriculture. We had to invent bread. We had to invent construction. The wheel. Pulleys. Ladders. Boats. Vacuum tubes. Transistors. Netflix. Etc. But we can't invent Netflix before we invent transistors.
We can't even think of certain things before certain things are invented. But as more things are invented and recorded, the less leg work we have to do. I don't need to invent bread. Bread is solved six ways from Sunday. We got all sorts of bread. We're so beyond bread, we've invented and solved ways to cook bread after it's been baked. Pre-historic man can't even imagine bread pudding because he doesn't know bread exists.
Progress, at the very least, has a logarithmic component. It could be an arctangent. Where there's a long build up, a rapid rise, then a long tail.
> Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then.
I think this is revisionist history at best. Your comments about baud rates and CPUs getting faster is true of course, but look at something like programming languages: I'd put ML from 1973 (later Standard ML, 1983) against Go or Rust, and I'd put something like Icon from 1977 against JavaScript or Python. If anything, I think we've regressed because ML and Icon could actually run on 70s era hardware, but Rust can barely compile its own compiler on 2020s era hardware, and Python wastes CPU and memory as though it was a design goal.
Seriously, look at Standard ML, Icon, or even Scheme and SmallTalk from the 70s, and ask how Python and Go improved on those.
I didn't mention languages specifically because they're really only a small part of programming knowledge.
A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete. Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study. Now it's something you're expected to just know. B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce, etc. were all, at one time, cutting edge computer science. Now they're the basis of it.
Knowledge breeds knowledge. And every piece of knowledge has the potential to open entirely new pathways of knowledge. Apple Pay depends on NFC depends on RFID depends on radio technology, etc.
> A Turing-complete language is just that, Turing-complete.
It sounds like you're dismissing Turing complete languages as basically the same. I think that's kind of like saying all hardware and networking is just made out of electric circuits. It's true, but it's not illuminating.
> Sorting used to be hard. It used to be novel. It used to be something you could study
Quicksort was created in 1959 [0], Heapsort in 1964 [1]. Mergesort is from 1945 [2]! They were something undergrads were just "expected to know" shortly after that. There have been incremental improvements since then, but these things haven't been novel in a very long time.
I'm sure you won't change your mind, but this doesn't really support your argument above, "Compare programming in the 1970s and 1980s to now. We're way more sophisticated now than we were then."
> B-Trees, A* pathfinding, mapreduce,
Again, 60s and 70s ideas applied on modern hardware. I'll spare you the Wikipedia links for these.
It does support my argument. Unless you want to quibble about exact times and how 1959 isn't "the 70s".
Before 1959, Quicksort was novel. After that, it was something you were expected to know.
Knowledge builds on knowledge. I don't have to invent heapsort. I can just study the implementation. It's now part of the common knowledge we're supposed to have.
And if you think programming is just as sophisticated today as it was in the 70s and 80s, then I don't think there's anything anyone can say to you to convince you otherwise.
And that's kind of the defining feature of being Turing-complete. No language is more or less adept at solving problems as any other as long as they can replicate a Turing machine.
Other than the standard search engines or Wikipedia, I don't know where to find a good history of language or hardware. I'm only aware of these examples because they were part of my "comparative programming languages" course in the early 90s.
I suspect this thread will fade without much more notice, but I'm half expecting someone to come along and set me straight that all this stuff was really invented in the 50s or 60s :-) (SNOBOL, Algol, Simula, or PL/I ???)
Progress happens because the intermediate inventions are useful.
Nobody jumps from wooden wheels to steel ball bearings.
But there are some exceptions. The invention of the airplane had intermediate steps, but they were fairly useless on their own. You can see this in the series of prototypes the Wrights made, and then combined them to build a useful airplane.
They spent more time surviving. Plus many 'discoveries' were likely accidents.
Like, if you put even modern humans with knowledge of technology out in the wild how quickly do you think they'll be able to invent agriculture or work metals from minerals in rocks?
Much of survival work is drudgery, where one can think about other things while working. For example, I do my best work while jogging.
> Plus many 'discoveries' were likely accidents.
Of course. But those accidents come from playing with things to see what happens, and being curious enough to notice when something unexpected happens.
> Like, if you put even modern humans with knowledge of technology out in the wild how quickly do you think they'll be able to invent agriculture
Agriculture isn't hard to invent.
> or work metals from minerals in rocks?
Most of this comes from playing with fire. A lot, though, depends on higher temperatures which require a bellows. The idea for a bellows would come from simply blowing on embers to turn them into flames. Once you've got a bellows, you'll notice that the fire gets much hotter, and they you might throw various things in that hot fire to see what happens.
There are other things, like weaving, boats, sails, chimneys, etc., that make life easier and don't require metals.
Very few modern people, even engineers, have the faintest idea how to get iron out of ore, or would even recognize ore.
I enjoy watching that Alone TV series. I was intrigued that some of the contestants would just build an open fire inside their shelter. Those had a lot of problems with smoke inhalation, and would often burn down their shelter, causing them to exit the game. Putting a vent hole in the roof didn't help much.
Some would build a fireplace on the side, those did better.
One contestant built a fireplace on the side, and put a chimney on it made of stone and clay. No tools needed to build it. It worked as you'd expect - famously.
Chimneys are very simple technology, but took a very long time to invent - not until medieval times.
Total population was much smaller, communities were smaller, communication was oral. I think all that results in restricted dissemination as well as technologies and techniques that died with the innovators in many instances.
Consider the Antikythera mechanism, what must have existed to bring it into existence and what has transpired since. We now enjoy the fruits of a period of advancement. It isn't guaranteed to continue though. A turn of history may set humans will be back to square one, maybe even in a worse position than before.
Having the luck of abundance of coal and abundance of metal-bearing earth allowed states to smelt metals to a scale that can defeat enemies and then the rise of arms races and industrial revolutions and science.
Advancement in science & tech needs curiosity, critical & independent thinking and most importantly ability to change mind when data says that you were wrong.
These are precisely the things which religion (organised or otherwise) has suppressed for thousands of years.
The most important factor in advancement of sciences came because of: separation of the state and religion. When this happened it still took few centuries where rational thinking was accepted in ruling class. From this point it was really the case of one idea leads to another.
Because there were so few people. The inverse of your question is why did technology seemingly explode beginning around 10k years ago? And the answer to that is simple: the Milankovitch cycles had brought about a warming trend, bringing an abundance of resources.
It is interesting to notice that sedentism and agriculture happened at the same time. The modern theory is that agriculture practice led to sedentism, but at the very least its unclear which came first because the earliest confirmed harvested (ie non wild growing) varieties of grains from the middle east come from approximately the same period as the beginning of this warming.
However, once not only agriculturalism but pastoralism (and even beyond that nomadic pastoralism, and the domestication of the horse) had proven their usefulness to maintaining scaling sedent populations, the populations exploded and naturally, bored human beings with brains and full bellies sit around and think of different ways to do things.
tl;dr: they were unlucky wrt technological innovation
An axiom of every discussion you'll ever have is that all populations have exactly the same mean and standard deviation for every single measurable psychological trait that you can think of.
I suspect the person you replied to was being highly sarcastic in their reply. It's a highly charged area due to the history of race relations in the US.
Mutations accumulate at a slow enough rate so that we know that they are very, very similar to modern humans as 24000 years is a very short time for that; and the reasonable proxies for intelligence that can be measured archeologically i.e. brain volume are the same or even in their favor.
I find how misleading these illustrations are, hilarious. The average European looked subsaharan African (chedderman) 9-10k years ago, but 24k years ago, I'm supposed to believe light skinned Asians with thin straight hair existed.
This is absolutey wrong and is history denial. Black people were in the Americas long before the Olmecs in central America (another ancient African civilization).
All these "Asian" people were highly melanated black people, (Asian historians understand this fact) and they are descendants of mostly fishermen related to Khoikhoi and modern day Xhosa people of south Africa.
> This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
One of the more unfortunate names for an environmental magazine since "hakai" means "destruction" in Japanese.
>One of the more unfortunate names for an environmental magazine since "hakai" means "destruction" in Japanese.
I doubt it's unintentional. It's difficult to imagine any modern environmental magazine that wouldn't focus primarily on the ongoing destruction of that environment.
When I drove down through Yukon, literally drove for hours without seeing any signs of humans other than the road. Very pristine environment from what I remember. Beautiful little lakes surrounded by forests. And crazy washboard roads that weave up and down due to freeze / thaw cycles. If Nuclear WWIII happens, this might be where humans survive. If I ever wanted to be a hermit, I know where to go.