Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage
by rsynnott on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @08:52AM
(#37061893)
So I think it's true that China is, for a totalitarian regime, relatively science-friendly on high-stakes stuff (or, at least, it is _today_; it very much wasn't in the Mao era - see the whole War on Sparrows thing). Archaeology (with the exception of its intersection with climate science) is relatively low-stakes, though; the downsides of getting it wrong for ideological reasons are limited.
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Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage
by duxup on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @09:38AM
(#37062469)
I find it interesting on what totalitarian regimes choose to put their foot down on. At some point I think the topic almost doesn't matter and it serves as as just a battle of wills where the authorities are please that they can impose whatever, and it also serves to separate their people from the rest of the world and create their own little "culture war" barrier.
When it comes to Archeology I always find it a bit confusing too. I doubt some randos from thousands of years ago would identify much with modern nation states, ethnic groups or etc, and yet that's often how arguments about such things go..
Re:Remains found in China may belong to third human lineage
by rsynnott on Wednesday August 09, 2023 @10:09AM
(#37062894)
Archaeology’s a surprisingly common one. Rhodesia on Great Zimbabwe is another example of this; the nature of Great Zimbabwe was uncontroversial outside Rhodesia, but the conventional view could get you in trouble _in_ Rhodesia.
Even in democratic countries, you sometimes get a degree of weirdness around archaeology and to some extent geology; during the Bush II era, some pressure was put on US national parks to push creationist stuff, say (doesn’t early-noughties right-wing behaviour seem quaint, now?)