Samurai guarding Spanish silver shipments in Mexico with katanas

[MSparks909]

Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, written as something of a rebuttal piece, was interesting as well.

I’ll have to give that one a read. Thanks!

[Drang]

Give “Guns, Germs and Steel” a read if you haven’t. I found it pretty interesting.

Carlo Cipolla was there first, without the "Western Civ Sucks" sub-text: Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and European Expansion 1400-1700: Carlo Cipolla: 9780760701119: AmazonSmile: Books. Maybe that's why it's out of print...

Diamond lost me when he said that people from Papua New Guinea were smarter than Americans because people from Papua New Guinea knew more about the birds of Papua New Guinea than Americans.
Says more about Jared Diamond than people from Papua New Guinea that the thought it was a profound observation that people from a place knew more about the place than others.
Yes, I know he tried to backtrack it in a later book, it was a dumb enough statement he should have stopped and rephrased it when he first wrote it.

[blues]

Carlo Cipolla was there first, without the "Western Civ Sucks" sub-text: Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and European Expansion 1400-1700: Carlo Cipolla: 9780760701119: AmazonSmile: Books. Maybe that's why it's out of print...

Diamond lost me when he said that people from Papua New Guinea were smarter than Americans because people from Papua New Guinea knew more about the birds of Papua New Guinea than Americans.
Says more about Jared Diamond than people from Papua New Guinea that the thought it was a profound observation that people from a place knew more about the place than others.
Yes, I know he tried to backtrack it in a later book, it was a dumb enough statement he should have stopped and rephrased it when he first wrote it.

Sensationalism sells. (Hence the popularity of such (nitwits) as O'Reilly and various (so-called) academic pseudo-intellectuals.)

[Joe in PNG]

The people of PNG are no smarter, or dumber, than the people of any other country I've met.
They're people like all people are people.

[Shotgun]

I did not realize there was a 1493. I will have to put that book in line to read.

1491 is an interesting and eye-opening read, and this is another endorsement for that book if anyone is interested in American history. Settlement, or the potential non-settlement rather, of the East Coast would have been far different if the indigenous people had not been essentially wiped out by disease. Someone may correct my memory, but it is right to say upwards of 90% of the indigenous people on parts of the East Coast were wiped out after first contact with Europeans? Whole villages of Indians simply disappeared.

[Joe in PNG]

Just bought 1491, and will read it tonight.

[Duelist]

I did not realize there was a 1493. I will have to put that book in line to read.

1491 is an interesting and eye-opening read, and this is another endorsement for that book if anyone is interested in American history. Settlement, or the potential non-settlement rather, of the East Coast would have been far different if the indigenous people had not been essentially wiped out by disease. Someone may correct my memory, but it is right to say upwards of 90% of the indigenous people on parts of the East Coast were wiped out after first contact with Europeans? Whole villages of Indians simply disappeared.

Whole tribes, in some cases. And there are those who deny some of them ever existed, which chaps my hide a bit.

[Tamara]

Whole tribes, in some cases.

Yup. Virgin-field epidemics of smallpox, malaria, plague...

[blues]

Speaking of Native Americans and the great migration, I came across an interesting article today in the BBC online...

The 11,500-year-old remains of an infant girl from Alaska have shed new light on the peopling of the Americas.
Genetic analysis of the child, allied to other data, indicates she belonged to a previously unknown, ancient group.
Scientists say what they have learnt from her DNA strongly supports the idea that a single wave of migrants moved into the continent from Siberia just over 20,000 years ago.

Lower sea-levels back then would have created dry land in the Bering Strait.
It would have submerged again only as northern ice sheets melted and retreated.

The pioneering settlers became the ancestors of all today's Native Americans, say Prof Eske Willerslev and colleagues. His team has published its genetics assessment in the journal Nature.

ETA: I could swear I've read 1491 but since I don't have a record of it I guess I'll have to have a look and find out.

[Shotgun]

Probably not homo sapiens, but some hominin was apparently smashing mastodon bones with a rock south of San Diego about 130,000 years ago.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/eleme...han-we-thought