> The evidence from Tam Pà Ling has pushed back the timing of H. sapiens’ arrival in Southeast Asia. This suggests the mainland, along with the coastal and island locations, may have also been a viable dispersal route.
I’m curious what is the implication of this paragraph. If the first date was later, why would the route change?
There's a broader deeper debate|question about the expansion of H.Sapiens across the planet:
Proponents of a coastal migration model for H. sapiens out of Africa argue that coastlines would have provided for a fast, directional population expansion with predictable resources and supplies of potable water.
Those opposing, point out that there is little direct evidence to support a coastal-highway hypothesis and that there is evidence that early humans were able to make use of savanna and rainforest environments.
The cave in north east Laos being excavated here is well away from the coastline.
Later H.Sapiens evidence in the interior of S.E.Asia can be explained by coastal expansion followed by a later push into the interior (as there are early signs of H.Sapiens in coastal areas).
Early H.Sapiens evidence in the interior of S.E.Asia as old as coastal evidence supports the notion that expansion may have been through interior routes crossing steep terrains and passing through jungles.
I don't know much about the Laos | Vietnam area and any evidence there, but I can reference the Sahul (Greater landmass creater by the lower seas and joing of PNG - Australia - Tasmania) and Sundaland.
If you look at the coastline graphics in the linked wikipedia articles you can see that in various places the coastlines almost aligned - additionally various islands of today were hilltops near the coastlines of old.
Dated remains on a modern island can line up with hilltop dwellings with views of the coastline of old.
I have a mental model of how humans spread across the world, something like - many years ago there were several species of upright apes in Africa, (much like there are species of big cats now). These started to move out of Africa as climate and other pressures / opportunities presented them selves. About 200,000 years ago one species (modern humans) joined the others and we fucked up
the rest of them so bad they all were wiped out wherever we went. Probably all the species had flint knapping, and fire tools and also had clothes from around 100,000 years ago.
I am not clear where I get that model from
- science journalism mostly.
Just that story rocks me back on my heels every time I walk it through.
But I am wondering if it is "supported by the evidence" or not or if discoveries like this blow through that basic sort of model (apart from timings which I see as important scientifically but not directionally - ie Ptolemy and Erastothenes thought the world was round but different circumference - important but directionally the same)
Finally - The awfulness of the web page layout and pop ups. I am slowly finding I can only use "Page Reader" on ios. It might just be old and grumpy name but it seems to be getting worse
The answer is always going to be “it’s complicated.” Your mental model is vaguely correct but hinges on a lot of semantics and nuance - the timing does actually matter to get a full appreciation.
The oldest evidence* of modern humans (Homo sapiens) is about 300,000 years old. “Archaic humans” generally refers to a group that includes neanderthals and some other species, the oldest evidence being maybe half a million years old. First evidence of fire use is over a million years old. The first stone tools are over three million years old and predate the Homo family of species altogether. However the point where our ancestors diverged from chimpanzees was over eight million years ago so “primitive humans” if you will have a very long history.
In that time, primitive humans spread everywhere in the old world. Earliest evidence of tool use in Indonesia, for example, is on the order of 1.8 million years old. At that point the world was in the middle of an ice age and sea levels were much lower so Indonesia was part of the supercontinent and not an island. The oldest evidence of migration to colder climates is 800,000 years old. Our ancestors had already colonized the Old world several times over by the time “humans” left Africa.
It really depends on where you draw the line between “humans” and “hairless monkeys”
* Archaeological evidence survives and is discovered completely by random chance so we could be off by hundreds of thousands of years without straining credulity
> About 200,000 years ago one species (modern humans) joined the others and we fucked up the rest of them so bad they all were wiped out wherever we went.
I believe that the genetic adaptations to high altitude found on the Tibetan plateau are thought to be older than 200,000 years, the result of modern humans arriving and interbreeding with local homo erectus.
There are a lot of things like this popping up in genetics research these days.
I don't know why people in general hold so tightly onto this notion that humans are 200k-300k years old. It's very obvious from the evidence that humans have been around for ~2 million years and that around 200k-300k years ago a set of genes were selected for that were quite good at spreading around the entire human world (while still maintaining a significant degree of admixture with humans who were already there).
It's honestly kind of insulting. It would be like if people looked at the genetics of Australia, discovered that there were no "pureblood" aboriginals anymore and declared that humans arrived on the continent with James Cook. Not only would it be factually incorrect, but it would deeply bias any possible study of australian aboriginal life.
Its really impossible to go back in history, at all. Its pretty much impossible to agree about what is going on in the present.
Scientists, historians, everyone really attempts to show how they deal in facts, ones which mere mortals should just accept, but when you dig into any area, you will realise that its all highly ambiguous, whether that's the facts that are being presented, the way its presented, the money trail, the way it is framed, etc.
People disparage 'anecdotal experience' but to me its all any of us has. Its our 'golden source'. Whenever we start undertaking actions that are not coherent with our personal, lived experience, we are walking on thin ice.
> Its really impossible to go back in history, at all.
That sounds quite defeatist.
I expect that linguistic, archaeological, logistical, genetic, and probably a few other vectors, can lead us to at least a sequence (causation) view of history we can have some confidence in, and then perhaps we can debate the precise dates.
> Its pretty much impossible to agree about what is going on in the present.
That sounds like a mantra posited by people trying to claim truth is subjective, and/or that a particular narrative (unsupported by evidence) is 'going on'.
I prefer to believe that an objective assessment of reality (as it stands) is not beyond our capabilities.
Far from it. In our own countries, the freedom fighting good guys always win. It was the baddies that lost.
> That sounds like a mantra posited by people trying to claim truth is subjective, and/or that a particular narrative (unsupported by evidence) is 'going on'.
I think truth is objective. But no one individual, or group of people, has truth - they just have an interpretation. I actually think this is fairly obvious too.
Feel free to give an example of an objective assessment of reality.
> Its really impossible to go back in history, at all
Sequencing ancient DNA allows us to do this in some respects. We’ve learned a lot in the last <10 years about population movements, relations, and timing from this. See “Who We Are and How We Got Here” by David Reich. Main takeaway: there was a lot more mixing of early modern human population groups than anyone expected.
I'd like to see studies done on Indian scriptures that claim humans are a lot older than the X number of thousands of years currently thought to be true.
Many people across Asia reject the Aryan invasion theory as its been revised many times.
What sort of study would you like to be done? A comparison of what the scriptures say and what the known physical evidence says wouldn’t take much study really.
A problem with investigations of physical evidence of bible stories is they are often paid for by christian organisations in the US, with the explicit goal of ‘proving the bible true’. As a result we get a lot of extremely low grade, deliberately misinterpreted amateur archaeology that’s really only designed to please the sponsors, but is obvious junk.
Any attempt to verify something from any form of scripture with modern adherents risks suffering from this problem of motivated reasoning.
> Many people across Asia reject the Aryan invasion theory
Really? Does anyone outside India reject it?
It's true that there are many people inside India who reject it, but they are doing that for the most transparent, and stupid, ideological reasons. No one is proud of the Catholic rejection of heliocentrism today.
Almost everyone competent outside India now rejects the "Aryan invasion theory" in terms of rejecting that term for the arrival of the Indo-European languages from the northwest. Today terms like "Aryan migration theory" are preferred. Not that this placates Hindu fundamentalists; it is the very notion that their sacred language arrived from outside (and is just about 3000 years old, not millions of years old) that they find offensive, not the term itself.
There are a few European or American scholars (or "scholars") who reject the idea that the Indo-Aryan languages ultimately arrived from outside the continent. They usually tend to be converts to Indian spirituality and so their objections have a partly religious basis. Koenraad Elst is perhaps the most famous. The OP's claim that the notion is rejected across Asia is something he pulled out of his arse; India aside, linguists across the region very much uphold the scholarly consensus.
> the X number of thousands of years currently thought to be true.
Which is based on currently available archeological and genetic evidence. What do you wish to study? How ancient writings are contradicted by modern evidence?
I know a Tamil guy we often discussed things and would end up on culture, language, ethnicity.
He would say to me and I'm paraphrasing obviously, "Look at my nose it is flat but your nose isn't you look like the people from the north. Look at my skin it is dark but the ones up north it is light like your skin" meaning Indians.
At the time I didn't realize he was most likely referring to the "Aryan Invasion" theory which is now seen as false. Even his own comment about his own nose I don't know if he knew nose shape was used to divide people into Aryan and Dravidian. Probably inspired by Eugenics ideas of the time.
Another person in our group was Mi'kmaq First Nations aka "Indian" he was also there when we were discussing this. So it was a bit bizarre or funny since the Indian was not an Indian and the Indian was Tamil and didn't consider themselves ethnically Indian.
> The age of the lowest fossil, a fragment of a leg bone found 7 meters deep, suggests modern humans arrived in this region between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago.
> From the BMAC, the Indo-Aryans migrated into northern Syria and, possibly in multiple waves, into the Punjab (northern Pakistan and India), while the Iranians could have reached western Iran before 1300 BCE, both bringing with them the Indo-Iranian languages.
I’m curious what is the implication of this paragraph. If the first date was later, why would the route change?