So much fail

[kaberett]

• Lois McMaster Bujold: kind of racist
  
• Jared Diamond: kind of racist

Ugh. Things I am kicking myself for not having been aware of, and passing on for those of you as are also likely to care. :-(

Comments

[sorrillia]

Interesting. I'd definitely been taught--possibly in high school, and certainly by PBS science shows--that the current theory for the extinction of the megafauna was over-hunting, because the dates for the arrival of the Clovis people and the extinctions seemed to line up really well. Possibly this is outdated, or possibly the sources being used were questionable. (Certainly, PBS has a history of occasionally becoming enamored with stupid things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies, though they usually are a bit more explicit that "This is a view that most people in the field think is rather off.")

(For the record, I've never read anything by Bujold, and know nothing about _The Thirteenth Child_ other than what was contained in that link, though it sounds rather horrifying, as does much of the review quoted.)

[sorrillia]

I am not qualified to have an opinion on what the common view in paleontology of what caused the Pleistocene extinctions, but the impression I got from a quick look for authoritative-sounding sources was "It's complicated, but it looks like there was reasonably good synchronization with humans showing up in places and a lot of people think there's a causal relationship there, but climate change was also likely involved."

http://exhibits.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/larson/lp_extinction.html
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec04/b65lec04.htm

And a recent (2004) article in Science, which may not be readable without a university internet connection:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5693/70.full

From the conclusions of said article, for people who can't view it:


Data density and quality are still uneven. The Eurasian record is increasingly good and reveals that late Pleistocene climatic change contributed to extinction by driving range adjustments in large mammals. An idea that needs further testing is that the arrival and population expansion of Homo sapiens sapiens began to fragment megafaunal ranges by 30,000 years ago, ultimately restricting megafauna to inviable populations in far northern refugia by the end of the Pleistocene. Australian evidence suggests that megafaunal extinction followed human arrival, and that both probably preceded significant global or regional South Pacific climatic change, which is consistent with a role for humans. However, the timing of key events still cannot be bracketed within error bars less than ∼10,000 years, the youngest records of extinct megafauna are controversial, and local environmental changes may differ from the global or regional pattern (4, 5). In South America, published data on extinction chronology is accumulating but awaits critical analysis. In Africa, better temporal resolution is needed to assess how the timing of the few extinctions matches local environmental changes and human impacts.

In contrast, robust dating verifies simultaneous climatic change and first human contact in the conterminous United States, where extinctions were particularly rapid and pronounced. Support for human impacts includes (i) indisputable hunting of two extinct species, (ii) clustering of extinctions within 1,500 years (and perhaps less) of first contact with Clovis hunters, (iii) widespread distribution of Clovis hunters, (iv) simulations, and (v) more pronounced extinction than in mid-Pleistocene glacial-interglacial transitions. On a broader North American scale, the demise of megafaunal species without significant human presence in Alaska is consistent with some role for climate.


Anyway, I will shut up now, because I'm aware I'm sort of derailing the point here. I just was sort of surprised to hear that something I thought was well-established described as almost certainly false.

[naath]

I have essentially no formally acquired knowledge about this, but one thing I do find very weird is that it's apparently A-OK to assert that native American peoples lived "in harmony with nature" and thus 'clearly' couldn't have gone around hunting megafauna to extinction. Perhaps the harmony with nature followed from observing the consequences of lacking it; or perhaps it came about unrelated some time later; or perhaps they were in harmony with some-but-not-all of nature. To me it seems very, um, exoticising (is I think the word I'm after) to assume things like that about another culture's ancestor-culture based on my outsider-perspective view that the current culture is "in harmony with nature" whatever-I-think-that-means (a lot of the time I think it means "don't need to be provided with adequate plumbing"... having read about the conditions some native Americans are living in).