I very much enjoyed and think I agreed with his cultural criticism in that piece.

Surprised to read his immediate prev post and see similar seemingly hard reactionary cultural criticism in a mythopoeic vein, wrapped in a sort of Trotskyite [not sure his position] thesis of socialism as the purest creed of existential optimism and identification of Jeremy Corbyn as [more or less] the sweetest man to ever contend for PM of the UK.

I was aware there used to be serious revolutionary leftists with an eye to the beauty of art and myth and civilization, but their creed seemed always to tend to the elimination of all that, along with history and identity, in the great churn of science and utopia. Even their art, for all the conflicts of style, had to be essentially ahistorical and reflective of a new man.

So Kriss gave me a brief WTF moment there.

I Googled him after that. Poor chap. Another right on soul accused of harassment a couple years ago. What a world.

During a brief moment of history, before the tidal waves of extra-British immigration had changed the face of America forever, while Americans were being fruitful, and multiplying, and successfully outrunning the overwhelming hegemony of the state, and subduing the American continent, they turned up a number of giant skeletons, their heights ranging from seven to fourteen feet tall.

These were bought up by establishments such as the Smithsonian Institution, found to be hoaxes, and summarily destroyed.

No one has ever explained the process by which hundreds of nineteenth-century settler-pioneer farmers would have made fake bone matter, sculpted it into the form of a convincing skeleton, and persuaded their neighbors (who knew them well) that the “digs” they were “digging” were really as ancient as they claimed them to be.

But it must have happened, because the only alternative is that there were giants walking the North American continent untold æons before Amerindians crossed the Bering Strait.

And that this truth was systematically hidden from us by a covert organization, using covert means, for covert reasons.

And that the water isn’t turning the friggin’ frogs gay.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re getting at at least in regard to my points.

I’m not really expecting to hear evidence of lost advanced civilizations under the oceans any more, as the 19th and early 20th centuries so strongly assumed we would. Whether that means “advanced” as in “more advanced than we are now”, as some tales would have it, or “advanced” as in “as good as anything the Iron Age or medievals had to offer”, as everyone from Aristotle to Robert E Howard told us about.

That said, I’m mainly not sold on the possibility of the high tech version, really. The iron age version maybe.

If “advanced” is given a yet more anthropological cast, say, meaning societies of neolithic farmers and even town dwellers building henges and doing some astronomy and astrology, all over the world by names of peoples yet unknown to us, I actually almost expect that. There’s a bit of an assumption out there that we will see more of that, just as we have learned to re-evaluate the actual henge builders of NW Europe, and to assume people probably did some interesting things in Doggerland.

But we could have quite a lot of that turn up without having much impact on the sorts of things I’m getting at- we could be talking tens of millennia of difference here.

Couple of things stem from that: Anyone trying to say that they’ve found anything from that period above the high tide mark is looking at a tiny, tiny fragment of the evidence. Second thing is, there’s a vast unknown out there in the off-shore shallows that we just don’t know anything about. What knowledge lies sunk beneath the Baltic, in the former Doggerland? What’s out there on the Atlantic Shelf, where trawlers pull up artifacts all the damn time?

For that matter, what lies along the Pacific coastline of the US and Canada? I keep seeing these articles written about all the things they excavate in “shoreline community” sites, but I never, ever see any acknowledgment that those “shorelines” were anything but, back in the day. Couple of sites they document as “shoreline” I know for a fact are literally miles back from where the shoreline was when the ice was still here…

Hell, you really have to wonder: What was there before the channeled scablands happened, and where’s the stuff that the great floods from that would have washed out to sea? We could have had an entire civilization out there along the Columbia River, thriving during the Ice Age, and all the evidence for it would be out there in the alluvial fan at the mouth of the Columbia near Astoria…

There is a lot more that we don’t know than which we do. All those timber versions of Stonehenge, in England, that they keep finding out on the tideflats?

You could present me with evidence that there were multiple advanced civilizations before recorded history, and I wouldn’t blink an eye. I’m certain enough that we’ve missed significant things that I won’t be even slightly surprised when the evidence shows up.

Don’t get me wrong here. I don’t see “we’re all Africans” as a necessary contemporary moral point. If you are an Indo-European speaker, you might also be an Asian of some kind. Scots’ mythical history of themselves always assumed they had come from the Scythian steppe. That looks to me like a ferociously garbled version of what we now think to be true of the Indo-European speakers.

But like I said above, the Out of Africa idea can be used a lot of ways. Indeed, to me my idea would make far more logical sense. If we’re all Africans, we all have a claim on the ancestral continent. Those whose ancestors weren’t among the ancient diaspora don’t have a corresponding claim on Eurasia. They never went there until far more recently.

As I said, just try that on in public. Even so, based on how we would parse most other questions, it makes far more sense as a conclusion.

I therefore counsel chill, unless one has a chance to make just that observation at cocktail party one doesn’t care to be invited back to.

On this, though:

“If other, proto-human hominids could make a living on every major landmass, it stands to reason that humans evolved on every continent, not just one.”

Not so much. It DOES suggest such separate evolution would be possible. I await any turn of the intellectual wheel suggesting that it did so, including one that is based on what we’ve learned in the last 20 years about admixture.

It does not, however, “stand to reason” that it did happen.

We don’t yet appear to know enough about the evolution of life in general or of any particular genus or species to say for sure, but while our fairly fertile planet has evolved a lot of stuff in a lot of places in a lot of continental configurations, a lot of it has reached its current state of variety by descent and by moving around, including between continents no longer connected.

I’d have to do research to see how and when and in how wide an area we think primates of any kind evolved. As opposed to once in a small area and then took millions of years to spread around.

Same with hominid species. Yes, could have evolved in multiple locations. No, perhaps not definitively disproved. Not an insane thing to have believed. Currently, and for a long time now, not the winner on currently available evidence.

For me, the unlikely bit is that the evolutionary process that could produce such a peculiar biological variation should be expected to have occurred multiple times, in multiple areas, within a few million years, resulting in such similar products, broadly speaking.

That strikes me as far less likely, even on such timescales, as the hypothesis that we are all stems of one vine.

The odds were probably long on anything like us being produced at all, being as we are the outcome to date of hundreds of millions of years of life and death and chance. I am to believe it happened multiple times for unrelated reasons?

If we discover sentient human-like life on other planets, ever, I’m more likely to believe they are totally unrelated to us since they would be likely the product of separate evolution on planets very far from us, than that we are sprung from common ancestors. We’d each have more in common with our own parasites. But the balance of probabilities is different when considering life on two planets separate by life-killing void and on one planet that has moving continents and on which quite primitive beings can move around.

The other point I would make is shorter- There might be large differences among:

1. The conditions required to actually produce a new species by variation from an old one.

2. The conditions required to nurture it to the point of some kind of stability and numbers.

3. Conditions, beyond the former, to which it can adapt with only what one might call its animal physical and mental abilities.

4. Conditions to which it can adapt once it has reached the point of being a pretty sophisticated tool user. You can go back pretty far among hominids and they are already just that.

Being able to live everywhere once you can make fire, make stone and wood tools, and kill animals for their skins and furs to make clothes and shelters, isn’t the same as plausibly evolving there.

Could be wrong- we white folks might, as REH had it, be the distant heirs of white apes forced into the High Arctic who came south again. Maybe we all evolved separately from rival primate species. Not logically impossible. Doesn’t any longer seem very likely.

I think I agree with you on at least some key points:

1. Academics including the sciences include a healthy dose of point scoring and obfuscation.

2. We may well find that the current model gets overthrown.

3. Most of the supposedly earth shaking revelations aren’t.

Especially that last. That was exactly my point about that article about the find in Greece. It doesn’t upend squat or provide any shocking revelation. It adds an interesting data point to the existing model, pushing early homo sap northward movement a bit early, but tentatively, and not within all that outlandish a timeframe. Homo sap / neanderthal coexistence was already being discussed on a time window of 150,000 years or so, give or take. None of these people were all that numerous or fast moving by modern standards.

We even need to guard against putting too much weight on small genetic differences. Not too little though.

It makes sense neanderthals and homo sap would be so similar and more or less interfertile if we differ by only .001 %. There’s a reason there is still no agreement on calling them homo neanderthalensis or homo sapiens neanderthalensis. [In the latter scheme, we are homo sapiens sapiens].

That still seems to have coded for a lot of identifiable differences. Consider again that paltry difference of 1% between us and a chimp, and look at even a sub-average human and a chimp. If 1% accounts for that much, 0.001% [or whatever] won’t count for as much but it won’t necessarily be chicken feed either.

A lot of things in this universe wouldn’t exist at all if some number or other varied by 0.001% of its current value.

Sometimes when I read him, it seems like he’s recounting the latest developments with an emphasis on how much they reflect intercontinental breeding among homo sapiens in recent [last 10ky or so] times, as though pushing back against a worldview in which people think there was none. I find it amusing, since if anything the stuff he’s discussing undermines the actual dominant non-scientific worldview of the past many decades, which would suggest that no structure can be found in human populations at all.

But as to more distantly past times, it still seems that we are seeing a pattern in which every hominid line evolved first in Africa [that seems no problem- it had a huge diversity of animal and especially primate life; why would it not keep spewing out new hominids compared to other continents?]. And then spread out on some great journey to the rest. Homo sapiens was just the last to do so, the most prolific, and the most successful, and as it journeyed through Eurasia it met with and to some extent bred with remnants of other hominid populations. Meaning that, among any other distinctions, various modern homo sapiens groups have different mixes of previous homos in their lineage. So to speak. That includes everyone including Amerindians, since after all they only left Eurasia a paltry 15ky or so ago.

One noteworthy variation is that the original Egyptian and Berber peoples of North Africa supposedly are Out of Africa people who went back in when it was still temperate, though in more recent times had much more contact with the sub-Saharans and the genome of Egypt reflects this. Saudis too, being nearby.

All interesting. No reason for panic by anyone of any persuasion.

If anything it suggests to me there is room for a movement claiming that Africans have no business being anywhere else, but everyone else has an ancestral claim on Africa…

I’ll bet that wouldn’t fly at the UN.

It’s important to keep in mind that there’s a very real difference between genetic similarity and morphological and behavioral similarity. One is mostly the result of random chance; the other is the fruit of selection.

Here’s an analogy: there’s a baseline of background noise, most of it actively harmful, and one in a while there’s a nice-sounding tone. The nice-sounding tone is “grabbed” by its medium and propagates vigorously.

But the beauty of the tone and the speed with which it propagates is relative to its medium. The medium may be “thick” or “thin” (viscosity), it may favor specific frequencies, and so on; it’s analogous to natural selection. And so a beneficial mutation will propagate — very, very slowly, relative to the short life of the individual meat-puppet — until everyone has that mutation in their genetic background. But the benefit and speed of propagation is wholly relative to to the intensity and specific demands of the natural selection.

Convergent evolution is a good example of how entirely dissimilar underlying genetic patterns can produce highly similar morphological and behavioral characteristics. Sea mammals are probably the prototypical example.

All of this is to say that because the ratio of good mutations to bad or neutral ones is very low, the vast majority of “genetic change” is simply the function of the mutation rate times the duration of time since speciation — which is here defined as the division of a coherent population into divergent ecological niches. In this light, percentages or point-percentages of “genetic difference” just don’t matter. You have to look at morphological, behavioral, and ecological similarity.

Which is probably why we evolved to do that instead of the other thing.

Sam & Graham,

If other, proto-human hominids could make a living on every major landmass, it stands to reason that humans evolved on every continent, not just one.

And when a human specie moved from one continent to another and took the native specie’s women as war brides, in some meaningful sense the randy specie absorbed the best most characteristic parts of the subject specie, far beyond what the raw numbers (fractions) would suggest.

One might call it gene theft, were one predisposed to say that sort of thing.

But it wasn’t a one-way street, it was the two-way-est of two-way streets, and anyone who says so is probably trying to bamboozle you into thinking: “Well, we’re all Africans, really; there’s no difference at all, so it doesn’t matter who makes it into the future.”

The really horrifying thing for the Arthur Kemp-ites is that (on a sufficiently long timescale) a conquistador race isn’t outbred by its subjects, it evolves into its subjects. And that timescale is radically shortened, given the most infinitesimal amount of intermarriage.

Which just shows how much Arthur Kemp missed the point, thinking that his lived experience was at all similar to any of the civilizations he profiled, quite apart from the empirical accuracy or inaccuracy of his propaganda.

I think it pays to look things like this in the eye, and remember that the “Conventional Wisdom” and “consensus” are built up out of lots and lots of individual observations, and that this current “stunning revelation requiring an utter rewrite of history” may or may not actually be what it looks like.

The number of times the pack has gone off haring after some literal pile of BS is astonishing, not to mention the number of times that individual researchers have outright distorted things in favor of their pet peeves, seeking status and a higher position in the hierarchy. You have to remember, when you get right down to it, we’re all just monkeys jostling each other in the band, seeking to get ahead for power, p*ssy, and better food. Same-same in daily life, same in academia.

So, I take it all with a grain of salt. You go read a lot of these “cutting edge” studies and so forth, and what you find is a very narrow little crack in the facade to hang entire careers on. It may be that they’re looking at skeletal remains that are basically so much bone gravel, doing some measuring, throwing some purely subjective weighting on the approximations, and then saying “Oh, yes… These are obviously H. Sapiens remains…”. Someone else might look at the same set of remains and go “Uhm… No, these aren’t definitive enough to really say…”.

So… This might be world-shaking, it might not. Who knows? Maybe the whole Neanderthal/H. Sapiens thing is down to some genetic variation, and you get Neanderthal gene expression in the right conditions, H. Sap in others, and we’ve only really fooled ourselves into thinking there’s a real distinction to be made–I was BS’ing with a friend who’s kept up on all this crap, and her comment about the really minute differences between Neanderthal and what we call “modern man” really gave me pause for thought–Neanderthal and we modern types could, after all, interbreed. And, where the difference between human and chimp is like 1%, the difference between Neanderthal and us is on the order of .001%. It could be that all that separates us is some methylation of the right locations in the genes, and the majority of the difference is due to epigenetic factors in the environment that the Neanderthal specimens we have experienced. Per what my informant was saying, that’s entirely within the realm of the possible. Likely? Maybe not, but it’s not something that we can rule out–The actual data and evidence we have is seriously scant, a lot less than we laymen are told.

All it does is identify a possible group of anatomically modern humans [homo sapiens] that might have made it to Greece from Africa earlier than usual, possibly interbred with Neanderthals [we already new that occurred in Europe and Middle East] and then got replaced by some more Neanderthals [that was interesting- one doesn't here much about Neantherthal push-back, so good for them].

In terms of more recent history, those homo sapiens people were the failed Norse settlement in the New World. Later settlers got it right, and homo sapiens colonization stuck.