Very interesting. It would take a lot of grease to keep you warm in winter in Tasmania though! I've only been there once but it was in August and although an island climate it's pretty cool then. I can't imagine living mostly outside and not wearing at least fur lined skin cloaks!
I agree, although the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were well known for being naked or near naked all year round in the most harsh weather conditions. I might do a bit of research into that, I read once that their metabolic rates were much higher than people's today.
Indeed metabolisms formerly would have been higher, and the shift to readier sources of fat would correspond with this (increases in FGF21 and UCP1, if I remember correctly).
> This is speculative of course, but it is worth exploring the hypothesis that these ‘losses’ in technology were no necessarily maladaptive.
They might not have been maladaptive short term, but they did constitute a decrease in their technological capability, thus making them less adaptable in the future.
Yes, I think that's fair. It reduced their capacity to respond and to be more flexible. One wonders how they'd be faring today if they had been left alone. Jones believed they were headed for extinction on their own.
Impossible to know, of course, but a case could be made that they were in a state of equilibrium with their environment and thus, barring environmental or social catastrophe, likely to hold on until some accumulation of minor adaptations or some singular innovation rendered relative‘prosperity’ and population growth. But of course that brings forth its own set of complications doesn’t it? I recently road-tripped through northern Arizona and Colorado. The most recent indigenous natives on the north side of the Grand Canyon are the southern Paiute, a tribe whose relative material poverty was well noted by white American explorers. They’re a desert tribe and their traditional equipage is very basic. But they made-do and used the meager bounty of their environment as a kind of de facto defensive strategy; while their place held little attraction to rivals they were able to live within its confines sustainably. After being reminded of all that during an evening talk by a Paiute man at the north rim of the Grand Canyon my wife and I drove across the Navajo reservation to reach Mesa Verde. I’ve always been fascinated by the place but this time got a chance to learn more about it. The mystery of why it was abandoned persists. Though the two most likely possibilities haven’t changed - overpopulation/ environmental decline and/or violent conflict (or the persistent threat of it) - the thing that struck me was that the great cliff-dwelling ruins were the apex of a local civilization that was +/- 700 years old when it reached its apparent zenith. They were then abandoned within a century. Two hundred miles further west the southern Paiute were still there when John Wesley Powell showed up in the 1870s.
With the red tide of bad algae and scalefishing hypothesis, it needs to be remembered that the context for this as an "economic change" is that fishing is often regarded as a hunting practice, whereas obtaining shellfish, crustaceans & molluscs (as well as eggs & nestlings, or lizards/small mammals) is regarded as gathering, and like the mainland, women's and men's business in (lutruwita | Tasmania) was not just ceremonial in responsibility but outlined practical day to day "worlding" as I like to call it. Regardless of the fat versus protein debate, it is also likely to have been a gendered agreement of who went into the water to get the food. There are reports in colonial contact that men were 'not allowed' in the water, and offers of scalefish to them all were regarded as offensive. Who known what cultural-political-spiritual battles were going on at the time.
It is interesting you have posted this so recently, as I have been thinking that what is more important than total population size, at least to get scale, is that migration/trade/movement is more important, and rather than regarding them as a doomed population (the war of the worlds exemplar https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worldbuilding-101 ) regard them as very successful (more than one ice age) with little to no incoming cultural/political/spiritual contact after the second (when civilisations had a take-off) and that the base human is gregarious and outgoing and welcoming within its cultural limits, and this is the base of possible modernity. I.E. they did amazing being isolated for so long. (The toolkit maintenance was taking hits from bottlenecks no doubt, (I think bow & arrow tech was lost on mainland Australia before Bass Strait reformed?? Maintained in New Guinea though).
Think of it this way, if a certain number did make it to Mars on Elon's dream, and immediately got cut off, or there was a nuclear winter here? —what would their toolkit be in 15K years?
I think migration and movement is more important then expansion per se. I.E. how we move is more important than the expansion itself. In particular. it could be this this way of movement that homo has (worlding the self) can overcome such things as reduced and isolated populations for 10 000 years, after all in big history, bottlenecks are almost an origin story for us.
Since you mentioned spearthrowers/atlatls in mainland Australia, when did those actually arrive? I've heard that the initial aborigines had extremely primitive hunting weapons i.e. not even stone blades.
In the pipeline, certainly before Xmas. I will try this time, but Amazon's copyright policies do make it very hard to print images that I don't explicity own the rights to myself
Very interesting. It would take a lot of grease to keep you warm in winter in Tasmania though! I've only been there once but it was in August and although an island climate it's pretty cool then. I can't imagine living mostly outside and not wearing at least fur lined skin cloaks!
I agree, although the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were well known for being naked or near naked all year round in the most harsh weather conditions. I might do a bit of research into that, I read once that their metabolic rates were much higher than people's today.
Indeed metabolisms formerly would have been higher, and the shift to readier sources of fat would correspond with this (increases in FGF21 and UCP1, if I remember correctly).
I was about to ask if I had read that correctly lol
> This is speculative of course, but it is worth exploring the hypothesis that these ‘losses’ in technology were no necessarily maladaptive.
They might not have been maladaptive short term, but they did constitute a decrease in their technological capability, thus making them less adaptable in the future.
Yes, I think that's fair. It reduced their capacity to respond and to be more flexible. One wonders how they'd be faring today if they had been left alone. Jones believed they were headed for extinction on their own.
Impossible to know, of course, but a case could be made that they were in a state of equilibrium with their environment and thus, barring environmental or social catastrophe, likely to hold on until some accumulation of minor adaptations or some singular innovation rendered relative‘prosperity’ and population growth. But of course that brings forth its own set of complications doesn’t it? I recently road-tripped through northern Arizona and Colorado. The most recent indigenous natives on the north side of the Grand Canyon are the southern Paiute, a tribe whose relative material poverty was well noted by white American explorers. They’re a desert tribe and their traditional equipage is very basic. But they made-do and used the meager bounty of their environment as a kind of de facto defensive strategy; while their place held little attraction to rivals they were able to live within its confines sustainably. After being reminded of all that during an evening talk by a Paiute man at the north rim of the Grand Canyon my wife and I drove across the Navajo reservation to reach Mesa Verde. I’ve always been fascinated by the place but this time got a chance to learn more about it. The mystery of why it was abandoned persists. Though the two most likely possibilities haven’t changed - overpopulation/ environmental decline and/or violent conflict (or the persistent threat of it) - the thing that struck me was that the great cliff-dwelling ruins were the apex of a local civilization that was +/- 700 years old when it reached its apparent zenith. They were then abandoned within a century. Two hundred miles further west the southern Paiute were still there when John Wesley Powell showed up in the 1870s.
With the red tide of bad algae and scalefishing hypothesis, it needs to be remembered that the context for this as an "economic change" is that fishing is often regarded as a hunting practice, whereas obtaining shellfish, crustaceans & molluscs (as well as eggs & nestlings, or lizards/small mammals) is regarded as gathering, and like the mainland, women's and men's business in (lutruwita | Tasmania) was not just ceremonial in responsibility but outlined practical day to day "worlding" as I like to call it. Regardless of the fat versus protein debate, it is also likely to have been a gendered agreement of who went into the water to get the food. There are reports in colonial contact that men were 'not allowed' in the water, and offers of scalefish to them all were regarded as offensive. Who known what cultural-political-spiritual battles were going on at the time.
It is interesting you have posted this so recently, as I have been thinking that what is more important than total population size, at least to get scale, is that migration/trade/movement is more important, and rather than regarding them as a doomed population (the war of the worlds exemplar https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worldbuilding-101 ) regard them as very successful (more than one ice age) with little to no incoming cultural/political/spiritual contact after the second (when civilisations had a take-off) and that the base human is gregarious and outgoing and welcoming within its cultural limits, and this is the base of possible modernity. I.E. they did amazing being isolated for so long. (The toolkit maintenance was taking hits from bottlenecks no doubt, (I think bow & arrow tech was lost on mainland Australia before Bass Strait reformed?? Maintained in New Guinea though).
Think of it this way, if a certain number did make it to Mars on Elon's dream, and immediately got cut off, or there was a nuclear winter here? —what would their toolkit be in 15K years?
I think migration and movement is more important then expansion per se. I.E. how we move is more important than the expansion itself. In particular. it could be this this way of movement that homo has (worlding the self) can overcome such things as reduced and isolated populations for 10 000 years, after all in big history, bottlenecks are almost an origin story for us.
Really cool article
Glad you liked it! Thanks Laggy
Since you mentioned spearthrowers/atlatls in mainland Australia, when did those actually arrive? I've heard that the initial aborigines had extremely primitive hunting weapons i.e. not even stone blades.
In the pipeline, certainly before Xmas. I will try this time, but Amazon's copyright policies do make it very hard to print images that I don't explicity own the rights to myself