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Reported
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Yup, I think the current figure for first humans in Australia is 70,000 years ago. On the Polynesian diaspora, which totally amazes me, I think we probably need to look at it as small(er) hops over a very long period of time. These were seafaring cultures, they knew how to navigate their way around the Pacific. They would've spread slowly and probably maintained contact or trade with previous settlements on other islands.
Wasn't there some DNA research released recently that showed indigenous South Americans may have come from the Pacific as opposed to the continental land bridge in Alaska? I'm no expert, obvs, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't think we give our distant ancestors the credit they deserve, they were clearly very resourceful.
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what would drive someone to get on a boat in to the complete unknown with no way back
There were alleged sightings of Inuits in canoes off the north coast of Scotland (Finn-men) and a heavily disputed account of an Inuit arriving in Roman Occupied Belgium. Contemporary Inuits were asked if it were possible and they seemed to think it wouldn’t be easy but totally possible to make such a journey.
In their mind, you would be travelling on top of a food source and you could access fresh water via ice or rainwater.Obviously getting to Australia is different in many ways, but it wouldn’t have been a moonshot, it would have been incremental journeys of exploration. The unknown would have reduced over many journeys over many generations
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What's the issue with getting to Australia? Wasn't there a land bridge with Eurasia back then anyway?
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That's right, you've jogged my memory. Not an insurmountable distance, I would imagine.
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Thought I would try my hand at metal detecting this weekend at my folks garden up near Banbury. It was great fun. I used a basic Garrett Ace 250 but it did pretty well. Sadly I didn't find a pot of Roman gold, but was perfectly happy with this 1960 Vauxhall Cresta from Lesney toy factory in Hackney Wick. I also picked up a hefty over engineered brass pencil sharpener, a 1988 pound coin (probably dad's), and a mysterious tear drop shaped flattened ring with a June 1876 patent on it. All I need now is a yellow TR7 and I'll be a proper detectorist.
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This is a nice find, demonstrating how far goods, and people, travelled in the ancient world.
We tend to underestimate how much movement there will have been, because we see things from the perspective of motorised transport, make silly assumptions about ancient people being ignorant and primitive, and excavate static sites where few relics of movement survived (when many trade goods were perishable, like spices or textiles, or metal that may have been melted down and turned into something else). I also think we generally tend to underestimate the sizes of ancient populations. I don't know if excavations will ever enable us to paint a full picture, but finds like this are certainly helpful and are unlikely to have been the exceptions that prove the rule.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmznzkly3go
A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico.
Archaeologists found pyramids, sports fields, causeways connecting districts and amphitheatres in the southeastern state of Campeche.
They uncovered the hidden complex - which they have called Valeriana - using Lidar, a type of laser survey that maps structures buried under vegetation.
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Yes, and that's only going to keep happening, just like the Amazon city linked to under this article (posted here by eskay a couple of pages back).
As before, ancient human populations were undoubtedly much larger than we have so far estimated, and were decimated over and over again, by pandemics, natural disasters, climate change, and wars, to recover, and then to suffer similar fates again.
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As usual, I enjoy dating revisions backwards:
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The suspects were two local businessmen, one of whom had posted a photo of himself alongside the loot
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Wow, looks like amazing finds. I hope it'll still be possible to do some proper excavation and find out more about the site.
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The survival of so much ancient glassware is one of the best rebuttals of the silly "glass flows" myth, but some of the items don't always help. I mean, these (from the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne) are obviously sandal-shaped bottles, but I bet some "glass is a liquid" conspiracy theorist out there is using them as "proof".
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I'd never heard of that. How would one use these as 'proof'?
It seems that glass 'flows' at, erm, this rate:
The team’s calculations show that the medieval glass maximally flows just ~1 nm over the course of one billion years.
That’s just 0.000000001 nm per year—which, although is theoretically measurable, would be practically impossible to achieve.
What an odd nonsense theory.
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I'd never heard of that.
I do wonder if it's mostly or entirely a British myth. The Victorians left us with a lot of ignorant amateur history bunk: knights in armour needing to be winched onto their horses, not being able to get up if they fell over, our ancestors emptying chamber pots out their windows (there were laws against that kind of thing), didn't wash and so on and so on.
What an odd nonsense theory.
Medieval English glassmaking wasn't the most sophisticated; they made flattish bits of glass by spinning molten blobs into disks (with the obvious result of them being thicker at the edges and/or the centre) or blew glass cylinders (blow glass as normal but pull it through a metal hoop while you're doing it) and then flattened the result as best they could, but that isn't as interesting as "Did you know glass flows?"
One that most Brits have heard and many believe. I'm pretty sure it was a primary school teacher who first told me this. I believed it for a few years till I eventually went "Wait, what?"I do ask adult believers how the medieval glaziers knew precisely how much lead to put around the bottom of the stained glass pieces so that they wouldn't have dripped over the edge by the 21st century; I just get puzzled looks.
How would one use these as 'proof'?
As with conspiracy theories, when people have swallowed a piece of historical bunkum, they don't want to acknowledge they've been suckered. Anything will do to defend the stupidity, but since one of the clearest rebuttals of the flowing glass idea is all the ancient glassware that hasn't lost shape, I'd expect somebody still defending the notion to leap on these bottle shapes as a defense. Also, there's now a legion of social media accounts that happily make stupid fake history posts for the clicks.
Although I just shared the picture because those bottles are great.
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Ha, well, I grew up in a city where a main industry is (modern) glassmaking, and quite a few of our neighbours worked in it, so that myth certainly wasn't in circulation.
So someone might try to claim these bottles had lost their shapes due to 'flow'? They're obviously still shaped as they were intended ...
Still an odd idea to make bottles in the shape of sandals. :)
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Lost cities / archaeology / ancient history
Posted by
@Oliver Schick
It's an absolutely fascinating area limited by the extreme difficulty of finding fossilised remains from so long ago. In archaeology, what counts as the current story obviously always depends on how deep you dig and over how large an area, and what you therefore find. The dates will keep evolving based on dating of finds; we can't possibly know the definitive answer to such questions yet.
You may have seen this page on the Australian Museum web-site:
https://australian.museum/learn/science/human-evolution/the-spread-of-people-to-australia/
It omits to mention a significant migration of homo hernehilliensis to Queensland in the 2010s, but I guess they're more interested in ancient history.
The question that always interests me the most is always who counts as human / as 'sapiens'. I think earlier 'species' like homo erectus will have been, well, perfectly human. They will have had names, spoken languages, and had culture. They migrated out of Africa at least a million years ago and established themselves all over the place, as did other groups. Later migrations caught up with them, and because the earlier migrants were smaller in number and probably also less powerful, they would have been assimilated (I don't like the word 'interbreeding' here) or killed in conflict with the newcomers.
However, so far it seems as if migration to Australia was significantly later, which could of course be overturned by future finds. The dates of likely human arrival have been pushed back through new finds. I can't remember where, but I think (it may have been posted in this thread) that there was talk of 70,000 years ago, but that may be off, it was something like that but probably not the currently estimated figure.
We'll see. Australia is big, very little has been found yet (also for native Australian cultural reasons), and while modern methods of remote sensing help us with mapping (generally much later) ancient monumental landscapes, they don't help us much with cultures who appear not to have built major monuments of which visible traces remain today--I think only inscriptions and art have so far been found in Australia.
On sailing, there is evidence that people had knowledge of navigation from very ancient times onwards--obviously, we have no way of telling from quite how long ago. We know little about what craft they had, and how often they travelled. It's tempting to think that groups of adventurers might have set off, made landfall somewhere, and then just lived there, but the truth is probably that there was traffic back and forth; it's very unlikely that groups who may have included women and children would have set off without knowing anything about where they were going. Most likely, their destination would have been discovered before, seemed attractive, and for whatever reason they would have carefully planned their move, be it for environmental or political reasons. No doubt some voyages would have failed, but people living in an archipelago like Indonesia would necessarily have got better at seafaring, and used that skill to go further.