this is racism, ableism, and xenophobia all rolled into one punchable guy
no one is illegal, no one is stealing jobs, and capitalism prevents people from surviving off of whatever skills they may have (not that skills should be the difference between survival and death in the first place)
Can’t say “I knew dat” however I always found it a weird concept that horses should have, as western science insisted, evolved here, then disappeared before the European invasion brought new stock back in. They’re not actual Megafauna. There’s no good reason why they shouldn’t have been just as successful here as they had been in Europe.
I’ve definitely reserved space for what I predict to be a large upcoming mindblow in this area. This intrigued me a lot.
As you guys may know, when humans moved from Asia into North and South America, the movement apparently corresponded with the extinction of most megafauna on these two continents - the Quaternary Extinction. The story goes that humans did it: “when humans first colonised the New World in a great wave of mass killing and overhunting, thousands of native animal species were lost forever, including horses.” Particularly fair-minded evolutionary biologists will explain that “it probably wasn’t entirely intentional,” noting that climate change probably played a minor role and that humans can change ecosystems even with the best of intentions - but the general impression of the Quaternary Extinction is that a handful of human colonists immediately began a coast-to-coast programme of extinction across the Americas that other humans, such as the Europeans, largely chose not to do. This is Received Scientific Knowledge, and the prevailing theory. But apart from being used to justify “humans are the virus” thinking as an example of “even when we were hunter-gatherers, we destroyed ecosystems; it’s in our nature,” it hasn’t really entered mainstream understanding.
Anyway, I’m considered eccentric for having put a pin in it and said I don’t feel right about the shape of that story (which isn’t very scientific for a scientist; I counter that stories are shaped by culture and science is directed to investigate stories, so I’m not sure that we even have the right FRAMEWORK to SPEAK about the Quaternary Extinctions.) And I’ve commented to a few of you on here about how I’m interested to see what happens when movements like Land Back, and increasing interest in indigenous land justice, and returning to indigenous management methods to mitigate the impact of climate breakdown, have to deal with critics suddenly discovering the Quaternary Extinction and saying, “wait a minute, aren’t you the ones who personally led the first human-led mass extinction of animals?” And looking at the shape of how THIS future story, I said, okay, I know how science and stories work, this is somehow all highly sus, and I think we are DEFINITELY missing pieces of the causes and impacts of the Quaternary Extinction. We’re looking at the whole thing from about 30 degrees to the left, and it’s going to look silly in a minute.
So this story interests me personally and it’s hard not to see it as the beginning of an overhaul in this area, which will be quite timely in today’s discussions
I’d fully agree with the article but this part made me go ???
well humans still originates from Africa
@fishonthetree I actually am pretty skeptical of this article, in some ways because it sharply disagrees with the stories of horses’ arrival that we have from specifically Plains people and elders. There are some oral histories that say horses were a gift from the Creator, and there are also some that say that horses, a gift from the Creator, arrived on the continent fairly late. I’m non-Native though, so bear in mind I may have that bias.
BUT, to your point.
What she’s talking about there is that archaeologists have constantly claimed that Native people have “only been here” a short time - that they essentially arrived very recently, maybe only a few thousand years ago, and so their claims of indigeneity aren’t as strong or as important or as central as they claim. Whereas Native people say they have always been here - even nations with oral histories that involve migration know that they have been here since time immemorial. Essentially, Native “arrival” in the Americas happened so far in the past that it’s almost meaningless to try and date it.
The thing is, the “Bering Strait” theory was one of the earliest means of this - archaeologists insisted that there was a short period of time (relatively - like a few centuries or a few thousand years, I think?) in which the Bering Sea was/had a land bridge free of ice, and an ice-free corridor led into the Americas. People migrated across this and down into the continents from there. BUT, it’s not true. Archaeological sites are found earlier, and earlier, and earlier, to the point where we now have evidence that people were here before there was a land bridge, let alone an ice-free corridor - and that they were making things and building things. There’s pushback and outcry every time Native people, or any archaeologists, find more evidence that they were here earlier than suspected, because there’s a certain sector of white academics who really, really want Native people to be latecomers.
And they weren’t.
Regardless of how this paper shakes out - and again, I’ll say I’m skeptical because it goes against other oral histories, too, so it feels a little to me like oral histories that serve one purpose here are being privileged at the expense of others - the author is absolutely right that archaeologists (and historians) want Native people to have “been from somewhere else,” and that’s just not true in any real sense.
It’s really hard to say that a certain group of humans are “from” somewhere. As a species, we seriously get around.
The urge to undermine Indigenous sovereignty means that Indigenous people in the Americas are held to entirely different standards than European nations. I don’t know if the evidence about horses will prove to be completely true, but I will say something about how rigged the game is here.
The oldest ancestors of Britain’s current residents arrived about 11,000 years ago. (The island had humanoids before that, but it was depopulated several times.) Its prehistoric populations seem to have come from places like Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Eurasian steppes (modern Bulgaria, Romania, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and parts of Russia). Most modern “English” people are a mix of those native Britons, Romans who arrived beginning ~2000 years ago, Germanic people who arrived ~1500 years ago, Norse groups that arrived ~1300 years ago, and Normans who arrived ~1000 years ago.
But that doesn’t stop modern English conservatives from saying that THEY are the true native residents of their island, and furiously resenting all subsequent immigrants as wholly foreign and unwanted. Especially those awful people from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and all those terrible groups from… (checks notes) former British colonies.
And with that as their history, countries begun as British colonies less than 500 years ago use archaeology to “prove” that because an Indigenous group has “only” lived somewhere for a couple hundred, maybe only a few thousand, years, it therefore doesn’t “really” have any claim to a special relationship with that land. And therefore the more recent claims of European settlers should take precedence due to the established legal precedent of… (checks notes) “finders keepers”.
So I wish we could just revel in science and speculate about facts. But sadly, there’s a lot more going on here.
