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Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by AlotOfReading on Tuesday December 06, 2022 @11:30PM (#33890637)
Population demographics are one of the things archaeologists are most interested in. There's lots of independent methodologies that we've developed to tell us when people were present and in what numbers. Many don't even rely on finding artifacts. Things like genetic work directly tell us effective population sizes at various points in human history (low), charcoal analysis tells us how many fires were burning, hearth counts (indicated by rock or soil discoloration) tell us how many people were cooking, pollen analysis tells us what the plant landscape looked like in areas, etc. There's even an incredible technique based on eDNA analysis that can directly measure how many people were in the area when a soil sample was deposited by measuring the DNA from their shed cells. I've only seen that one used for results back to 30-40kya, but it's still pretty cool.

As you might have guessed from how I've written this, all these different lines of evidence consistently point to low population densities and overall populations, especially before the main human expansion out of Africa.

Advanced ice age societies aren't impossible, but there would need to be some pretty strong evidence and a good explanation to account for all the data we have against them.

Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by moloch-hai on Tuesday December 06, 2022 @11:48PM (#33890717)
Those tests are run only in places we already knew people were.

Notably, none have been run on the million square miles of Sundaland and the continental shelf off China, now under water, where people lived for at least 70,000 years. We know they invented oceangoing navigation pretty early, because they got to Australia.

People did that another 100,000 years earlier and got to Crete.

The null hypothesis has to be that people in places with sufficient population have complex society, because that is baseline human behavior. You need good evidence of someplace they didn't, and an explanation why not.

Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by AlotOfReading on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:03AM (#33890803)
The genetic work actually does include those people, namely those whose descendents have been sampled.
Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by moloch-hai on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:13AM (#33890855)
So any population wiped out by genocide, famine, or plague is unsampled. The Amazon basin hosted many millions of people for millennia until smallpox, diphtheria, and measles were delivered to them.
Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by AlotOfReading on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:26AM (#33890918)
No? Even genocides leave descendants. Moreover, who was doing this hypothetical genocide that didn't have kids?

As I said before, it's not logically impossible that a highly populous society existed in the pleistocene. But the constraints it would have to fit grow increasingly contorted as the state of knowledge improves. At some point it starts to resemble a small colony of advanced alien settlers who landed one day and disappeared a short while later. That explanation might honestly be easier to account for than what some people propose, since they don't have to develop their tech from scratch here on Earth.

Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by moloch-hai on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @12:30AM (#33890942)
How strong a signal do you get from the Chatham Islanders, wiped out literally weeks after the Cook expedition told the Maoris about them?
Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by AlotOfReading on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @01:00AM (#33891123)
1) the moriori still have living descendents today and

2) it's pretty clear from both this comment and the substantial edits above that this discussion isn't in good faith

Re:Findings from 3,300-year-old Uluburun shipwreck reveal co... by moloch-hai on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @01:22AM (#33891263)
Ignoring the gaslighting, how much do we know about the Chatham Islanders' pre-contact culture? And, how many of those descendants have non-Maori Y chromosomes? Any?