Should the publishers be made responsible? How about mandatory warnings like on cigarette packs?
They'll tell you it's all good apart from colonists, blackbirders, and atomic tests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXkwDeaQS08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vEntK3fwp8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/
Is there a reason you'd make such a banal generic point specific to the Torres Strait Island or Tiwi Islands?
These people have survived for 50,000 years (!) on a resource limited island and have managed to continue to have a martial arm and frivolous beach orgies. I would have to assume they’re pretty happy on a day to day basis.
Googled and found a few versions. Here is one:
https://thestorytellers.com/the-businessman-and-the-fisherma...
Also see who thestorytellers are a part of (at the top).
Right, as usual, the evil Europeans were the cause of the collapse, and the fact that there were no trees left on the island for hundreds of years prior, and therefore no wood for building things, had absolutely nothing to do with the collapse. This modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities is incredible in a society that preaches to value reason and science rather than wishful thinking.
These papers are a attempt to reconquer lost funding by the very same academics who happily ignore other cultures atrocities, be they in the past:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Zanzibar
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-african-h...
Or in the present: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/09/23/russia-partial-military...
Its extraordinary that such a blatantly racist (west centric diabolism) and ideological charged movement is still recognized as academia.
"...the researchers determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. After that date, two models show a possible population plateau, while another two models show possible decline."
and
"Current research shows that deforestation was prolonged and didn’t result in catastrophic erosion; the trees were ultimately replaced by gardens mulched with stone that increased agricultural productivity. During times of drought, the people may have relied on freshwater coastal seeps." [1]
"Evil Europeans" is your term in an attempt to make it seem as if the European culture is being attacked. There is no "modern rewriting of history according to modern sensitivities", it's rewriting of history taking into account new knowledge that Pacific peoples weren't stupid, had spread across the Pacific using navigation methods unknown to Europeans for thousands of years and recognising the effects of the introduction of outside cultures - disease, slavery and theft.
https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3155/resilience-not-co...
> It’s no joke.
So is high infant mortality, low life expectancy due to a very high likelihood of dying from a trivially treatable diseases, living in abject poverty etc etc.
In the highlands of India, remaining time is often spent brewing and drinking alcohol, with the biggest problem being elephants finding and raiding the brew pots.
Humans would only go extinct if they lived in an environment which required a certain minimum of cultural ability, e.g. making clothes in areas with a colder climate, as humans don't have sufficient fur.
IIRC, the closely-related Andamanese lost technology. Years ago I read something that said they did not use boats, but still occasionally constructed something like them (I'm thinking something like a dugout canoe) for purely ritual purposes.
> Submerged in the crystal-clear waters off North Sentinel Island is a mysterious shipwreck with a truly hair-raising backstory.
> It belongs to The Primrose, a 16,000 ton freighter which ran aground in a storm while transporting a cargo of chicken feed from Bangladesh to Australia on August 2, 1981.
> [...]
> Footage of the tribespeople taken during "friendly" contact with a group of visiting Indian anthropologists in 1991 shows some members carrying metal tools for the first time.
> It is believed the tools were forged from metal scavenged from The Primrose, which remains in its resting place atop a coral reef near the island.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/hair-raising-story-behind-m...
> Gonschor argues that, rather than being isolated, the Sentinelese visited other Andamanese peoples. Their isolation wasn’t ancient, he thinks, but the product of British and Japanese colonialism, and in particular, the British invasion of the island in 1880.
> We can use Lana Lopesi’s new book False Divides to understand what the North Sentinelese have suffered. Lopesi laments the way that, in the Pacific as well as the Indian Oceans, colonisation interrupted histories of inter-island voyaging, trade and marriage.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/04-12-2018/three-myths-abou...
Some tribes figured out that some tuberous plants can be replanted and will regrow after the tuber has been harvested and that's it.
Some may have understood how seeds work (that's debated) but at no point did Aborigines clear a plot of land to plant a particular species with seeds harvested last season.
This was a reason of total misunderstanding with the arriving Europeans, there was no way to lure them to help farm and get their share of the crops, it just wasn't on their map.
In contrast, Maoris just across the ditch understood both growing plants and raising livestock, and a mere decade after wheat and pork were brought from Europe they were widely growing both.
Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on? Why would you try growing something that doesn't want to grow there? Particularly "crops" that ultimately end up destroying the native life of islands. See palm/rubber/coffee/tea plantations.
>why…when you get enough..
That’s the problem, you don’t always get enough, and when you don’t people die. Usually the children and old folks first. Creating your own food supply reduces that risk.
>ultimately end up destroying…
You think they could anticipate those future outcomes hundreds of years ago? Wow.
These numbers are not unique to Australia, it's considered to be commonplace in hunter-gatherer societies.
Crops destroying native life is immediate, not years in the future. It’s not like there was nothing before on that acre you cleared for planting.
>Why clear the land and plant a "crop" when you get enough from the plants that all the other animals rely on?
So that you don't have to walk many miles a day foraging and kill all but one of your babies at a time, cause you can't carry any more. Basically, same reason as anyone else who went from hunting/gathering to farming.
Also Aborigines had no trouble burning forests to make grounds more attractive to animals they hunted, eventually converting varied biomes to eucalyptus forests, so the purported do-no-harm attitude is proven bullshit.
Nice logic.
What is "a lot" that indicates the majority of tribes didn't understand that babies happen when sex happens? Have you ever heard folk stories or native stories about birth and death?
If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster. This much is on obvious. The goal of living isn't to create as many more humans as possible.
It's like you're offended that humans would follow the same natural path as animals where access to resources is finite. Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Aboriginal stories largely say that it's Rainbow Serpent that brings in babies. This more or less matches the pattern of constant hunger that made women infertile outside of a small window around the rain season. It's understood that the rest of the world figured out the link from observing domestic animals, something absent in Australia of the time.
There are multiple papers trying to tackle this non-understanding, including ridiculous propositions that they all kinda know, but "repress" the knowledge.
>If you're on an island, having an uncapped population is a recipe for disaster.
Having to kill your own children is disaster.
>Or at least that it is "bad" or "evil" that humans could ever live in a situation where they can't just consume more andore resources
Yes, it's very much desirable that nobody is hungry, sick, or murdered. Yes, learning to get more resources from what you have is also very much desirable. And yes, it's bad and evil if instead people kill babies and murder each other over food like animals.
Before you ask, yes there are plenty of Aboriginal Dreamtime stories depicting someone stealing food and getting killed.
And there's no counterpart to the Genesis myth that would say that X shagged B and they had a child.
How much to breed is a separate question, but equilibrium with the environment doesn't have to be at the point of paleolithic misery.
A global society which works collaboratively to maintain both our modern technosphere _and_ a livable, habitable biosphere. Progress doesn't have to come with all of its current negative externalities -- most of them are driven by short-term profit driven thinking that doesn't take our collective biosphere into account.
When did the Tasmanian pre colonial people have crops?
https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tasmanian-Aboriginal-people
https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-War
They arrived by walking across the Bassian Plain (now the Bass Strait) to a land with highlands locked by ice.
There are many sources that discuss their gathering of plants, sea foods, hunting, etc.
Which sources talk about their agrarian crop planting? More to the point which sources discuss the loss of crop planting?
The big issue in pre colonial studies these recent years appears to be a lack of past recognition of any non "hunter gather" practices - the early settlers destroyed semi permanent infrastructures such as rock pool fish traps (some quite extensive that were blown up to allow river boats through), they didn't recognise non European land and plant tending practices, etc.
There's a lack of solid study on what practices were actually taking place in different parts of Australia, and a lot of "imagined" commentary.
The tipping point where the use of labour and soil to create surlus labour, which is then used to conquer more soil is why agriculture led to a "culture" or "civilisation"(according to 19th century hisorians IIRC).
19th century hisorians argued (I think) that superior societies had superior technology, which made them even more superior. If anything, I think modern academics are too concerned about refuting the premise that Western civilisation ended up with superior technology, rather than simply accepting that they did (in most ways) but that this didn't always make them morally superior.
I also am unaware how this relates to the above theory about how pre colonial Tasmanians had and then lost "tech like crops".
I do have a notion that metrics such as "superior" tend to be value judgements based on particular axioms .. some people feel that storing their nuts for winter, creating an industrial revolution, eliminating other life forms on the planet through expansion, and altering the atmosphere to be a superior approach.
Others seemingly enjoyed a particular quality of life for several tens of thousands of years by spending some time gathering food and most of the time telling stories.
Clearly different value systems are at play.
There's always some kind of scarcity everywhere, sure, but the key notion here is regular predictable extreme scarcity that can be planned for and hedged against with a considered amount of energy and advance preparation.
On that note, it is by the way theorized that the necessity to coordinate farming with the floods and other farmers is what kicked off civilisatory development.
And, as you note, an original challenge that predates human advance into the northern environments as glaciers retreated.
The great OG mathematical challenge for humans was the "fair" recurrent remarking of land plots following a flood - how to survey land area, and how to plan for and account for food surplus to last over food scarcity.
However this is as big as drought, if not larger. Not just insects, rodents, bird cyclictic overpopulation wiping out crops, but also fungus, bacteria, etc.
The world has starved more than once from such things, and the Egyptians had reverence for cats for a reason.
Around me there is not a constraint on the deer population, resources are plentiful for them and outside of hunting season there is little contesting the deer. Eventually the deer population grows enough that the lifeforms they share space with decide to, mm, contest their expansion, but there are places and periods in which populations can grow unconstrained for a while. I suppose I was making the point that humans maintaining a certain way of life for tens of thousands of years may have lived in a way where resources and rival tribes were not an issue, and hence, had little motivation to develop defensive weaponry / collect starvation rations for rainy days.
It's hardly a nuetral unbiased assessment when it's literally Europeans saying "who has two thumbs and superior culture" as they photograph themselves amongst a pile of dead indigenous people and ship a bunch of heads home to pickle for the phrenologists.
And dying of basic infections, having to birth 10 children so 2 survive to adulthood among other amazing perks of avoiding technological progress.
Of course the Canary Islands were settled by "civilized" people.
No amount of "colonizers bad" is gonna get away from those. Health care has improved tremendously due to technological advances and if you like preventing misery, singing songs and picking berries isn't the way.
The men also took weapons and went to the tribes nearby and killed the men there, and ...
This has always been a violent species. (Not saying the other great apes are (were) any better.)
Previously the historians thought the stone age was peaceful, singing songs telling stories etc. And oh so much spare time. They know better nowadays.
Check out the Yanomami, or read about viking raids or Shaka Zulu. Humans don't just sit around and tell stories. They reproduce, become more and more, and ...
Afaik agriculture never made it to Australia (at least not in any sort of large scale) before the western invasion, let alone to Tasmania.
My 'they' in "they lost tech like crops" referred to the Canary Islanders, as discussed by OP where the botanical evidence shows crops disappearing gradually over time.
Also, population growth in the early stages of human history was important to establish enough labour to create an "idle" (as in "people|time not spent scrabbling for food|clothing|shelter") class able to advance technology for progress.
That's been increasingly non essential since post WWII with the rise of semi and fully autonomous mining | processing | production.
Smaller and smaller numbers are people are required to extract resources and meet demand for what is a population excess wrt strain put on the planets environment an atmosphere by current and growing consumption demands.
Naturally higher the population size, higher the size of population able to participate in knowledge production. This creates a positive feedback loop on the population growth.
Downside of this is that every gain that would allow better living is eaten up by the population growth (there is actually name for this - Malthusian trap). Downside of this is that the size of knowledge producing population stays relatively constant in relation to the total population size.
There is another feedback loop, three actually. If households restrain the number of offspring in return of better education of the offspring then three things happen. First the size of knowledge producing population starts to grow independent of total population growth, total population growth will stagnate or decrease and amount of personal wealth will increase (surplus of resource growth is divided among fewer people).
This is also why Western world is rich, large parts of Asia is getting rich and Africa and India are staying poor.
Naturally there is a huge downside in the negative feedback loop on the population growth as eventually it will start hurting the total amount of knowledge production. It would be better if these two feedback loops would balance each other out.
And the rise of logistics and world trade in general. Bigger markets mean more productivity from specialisation, even if the underlying technology doesn't change. See eg the ancient Roman economy. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... is a good introduction.
Yes, but is strange that this theory wasn't mentioned at all in the article, despite containing clear evidence for its truth: For example, there is the fact that they gradually lost the ability to build boats to trade between islands, and that smaller islands lost some or all crops over time.
Reminds me of the history of what happened to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) after all the trees had been cut down and the ecosystem significantly modified by human presence. The whole island was originally forested.
That would be bizarre and completely at odds with what I know of human nature. Do you have a source?
The deforestation was almost certainly caused by the Polynesian rat, as archeological research has shown that the same type of deforestation happened on other islands where rats where accidentally introduced, but not on settled islands where there were no signs of rats having been introduced. I believe Diamond (or maybe it was Heyerdahl) claims the settlers chopped down the forest in order to make rolling logs for transporting statues, but we now know that statues were transported by "walking" them using ropes [2].
As a pop-sci counterpart to "Collapse", I recommend the podcast The Fall of Civilization's episode on Easter Island [3], which includes this newer research. The podcast is wonderful in general, and that episode is one of the best in the series.
As far I'm concerned, Diamond has a lot to answer for in perpetuating these modern myths that get repeated long after they've been debunked. His narratives catch people's interest because they are simple explanations that "make sense", and come with a kind of moral component, one of dramatic irony (the settlers were so stupid to chop down their trees, just to make these useless statues!). Diamond also wrote about Greenland and argued for the same kind of story there, despite evidence to the contrary.
There is an entire academic book [4] devoted to debunking Diamond's claims, which should tell you how annoyed real archeologists, anthropologists, and historians are with his books.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2042672
[2] https://youtu.be/YpNuh-J5IgE?si=arekVaU6AnwEvQwY
[3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0pGCsvdjo344EQ2dALE6dD?si=6...
When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.
But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??
Dr. Robert Zubrin said this in Merchants of Despair, which is the most important book published this century. Just read the first chapter. There are 2 graphs that changed my thinking.
It is illogical to ask for green tech to clean up the environment while also asking for population reduction because a smaller population means fewer inventions.