Consider Polynesians, especially NZ Maori who recently (in the 1300's CE) occupied the last major landmass free of humans. Polynesians have little Denisovian heritage compared to Melanesians and Australian aborigines (I am not suggesting Denisovian heritage prevented the emergence of agriculture. It is possible such crops as bananas were developed in PNG) and genetically resemble East Asian aboriginals so quite representative of 'out of Africa' humans.
At first contact with Europeans, Maori were dispersed throughout NZ. Most lived in the northern most part of the north island (north of Auckland) where starchy subtropical imported crops could sustain a fairly high population density. From archaeology, they appear to have always lived in defended villages.
South of Auckland, around first contact, they lived mostly as widely dispersed (their diet was carbohydrate deficient) hunter-gatherers concentrated near the coastline with occasional defended though not continually occupied 'Pa' sites. Archaeology has shown that after first arriving Maori had dispersed rapidly around the country, exterminating the mega fauna as they went (took about 100 years) and lived in undefended seasonal camps (with signs of buildings). This early occupation is overlaid by defended Pa sites and undefended camp sites. With the introduction of the potato, probably by European 'sealers' in late 18th century their lifestyle become progressively more settled.
That is very interesting. I didn't know that there were Maori hunter-gatherers. Do you know any book on the subject? The 18th century was a very long time ago, but maybe someone who could write met them?
This is the modern institution representing South Island Maori. Ngai Tahu were the most populous group in the early 1800's South Island. A marxist historian drafted their submission to the NZ government in the '80's (through early '90s?) presenting their case for public restitution for resources acquired from them for little or no compensation so it was coloured somewhat by his ideology, though the facts were ok. In the 30 plus years since then archaeology has clarified various of those facts (eg excavation of a seaside cave shelter in Christchurch has shown that IIRC first occupation was about 1320 with Moa (mega fauna) locally extinct by the end of that century. A famous archelogical site is the Wairau Bar which has finds that suggest it was occupied by the first generation of Maori in NZ. It is described in wikipedia and a ChatGPT prompt "tell me about the archaeology of the wairau bar , Marlborough, NZ" gives a short overview.
I asked Bing what were the dangers of the jungle for the hunting Ache men, but Bing said it doesn't know (it offered that maybe jaguars). Was it really just jaguars, or maybe also snakes, large fruits fallin down, etc?
Jaguars was one hazard and people greatly feared them, but only two deaths from jaguars were recorded in Hills and Hurtado's data, while snakebites killed 34 people during the same period.
"The most common circumstance, which Kim only narrowly avoided because a companion yelled to him, is for a person to be bit after stepping on a snake while looking up into the canopy in search of arboreal game", they write.
People sometimes died from exposure to cold: the Aché carried no fire making technology and wore no clothes and temperatures in Eastern Paraguay can go below freezing. Getting lost over night could be lethal.
Hunters also get bitten by animals and fall out of trees, get burned by campfires and get hit by falling trees. No one was observed dying from it, but it puts strain on people who often already have tropical skin infections and can't hunt while they recover.
Insects and spiders are a major problem for children. Small children can't be left to explore the jungle floor on their own because there are so many nasty insects.
This is a good post, and makes some important points.
I remember reading a National Geographic article a few years back about the quest to find an "uncontacted tribe" in PNG that turned out to be 14 dudes in a cave. Some of them had Christian names like "John" or "Peter" (I don't remember their actual names, but you get the idea,) because they'd attended mission schools when they were younger. there was nothing "uncontacted" about them at all! They were just homeless!
Then I thought, "Are the Bushmen really hunter-gatherers? Or do their neighbors just see them as the local equivalent of hobos?"
Today's Bushmen are not representative of "our" ancestors--they aren't even representative of their own immediate ancestors. They're not from the Kalahari. (Their light-brown skins are not adapted to the desert sun and they have rather high rates of skin cancer!) Their ancestors used to live all over southern Africa, in far more hospitable locations. The Kalahari is just the only place left that no one else wanted.
Incidentally, IIRC, the Dutch arrived in South Africa before the Bantus. SA was Khoi-San land back then.
I agree that the pre-contact Australian Aborigines are a good model, both because they didn't have farming neighbors and because Australia is a big place with a variety of climates. Outside of Australia and some nearby islands, most HGs are HGs solely because they live on land that's terrible for farming. For most of history, HGs lived on great land, because there was tons of it! Populations probably weren't high enough in most of the world to be a big issue, either.
I suspect that *pure* hunter-gathering also isn't as typical as we think it was, at least in the near-ish past. Many Aborigines were actually horticulturalists. Where I live, the ancient people were largely fishermen. Herding was probably adopted more often than we realize.
>Incidentally, IIRC, the Dutch arrived in South Africa before the Bantus. SA was Khoi-San land back then.
It would certainly have been ironic if that was true. But according to Wikipedia, some Bantu arrived as early as 400 BC and established at least two kingdoms on the best land before the Dutch arrived in the 17th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa The Wikipedia page says little about how proportions between Bantu and Khoi-san/Khoikhoi developed after Europeans arrived. I also find no genetic study of the South African population.
>Many Aborigines were actually horticulturalists.
If that is true, it makes Australia all the more interesting. Because then it was right into a (probably very slow) transition into agriculture by the time Europeans arrived.
There were no Bantus when the Portuguese arrived in the Cape Province around the year 1500. There were only Khoikhoi. Who incidentally were quite skillful warriors as demonstrated by the Battle of Salt River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salt_River) when Portuguese sailors/soldiers were ambushed by Khokhoi warriors and suffered 64 casualties, a very significant number at the time. The embarrassing loss at the hands of local savages made the Portuguese avoid South Africa and the Cape was not colonized by Europeans until a hundred years later when the Dutch settled Cape Town.
19th century. The Boers crashed into the Bantus when they did their Great Trek into the interior of southern Africa in the 1830s. I think there was a sort of unofficial border between Boers and Bantus at the Orange River. But I am uncertain of this. The Bantus had clearly settled Natal before the Great Trek and it is south (and east) of the Orange River so it might be advisable to take what I say here with a grain of salt.
Australian Aboriginals in 1900 lived much more complex lives than Australians did during the paleolithic. It's often said that they have the oldest continuous culture, but there were massive changes in the Holocene. Take for example the Pama-Nyungan language family, which covers 7/8ths of Australia's landmass. It only spread 6k years ago! And with it, a much richer technological complex. Much of the interior desert was not inhabited before this culture. Or take the Rainbow Serpent, adopted today as a pan-Australian symbol. It spread at the same time, with the same culture.
There are even hints of evolution in that time range, as the skull shape has changed in the Holocene.
Source for that, see: A 150- Year Conundrum: Cranial Robusticity and Its Bearing on the Origin of Aboriginal Australians.
Isn't all this an argument that the Aboriginal Australians are rather good ancestor models? Conquering others' land and expanding into new areas should be exactly what our paleolithic ancestors did during all those years.
I believe the Aus genetics (done so far) shows that there was relatively little internal migration in the deep past after initial occupation of a locale.
I remember having read that too. Maybe in Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Still, some things happened in Australia just as they happened elsewhere. For some reason, they just happened later.
Yeah, there is some genetic hints but iirc around 4k years ago? The dingo also arrived at some time (estimated about 8k), so there was clearly some contact with the outside world. Point is that even the winner of the paleolithic pageant lived very differently 12k years ago.
The question is whether they lived more similarly to our paleolithic ancestors 12 000 years ago or 200 years ago. For example, our paleolithic ancestors also seem to have owned dogs for quite a while.
My point is that 12k years ago nobody had the technology to live in the desert. Those that lived in more hospitable regions had much simpler technology/culture than australians circa 1900. I can't say exactly "there was no art", but there was much less. And that's a worldwide phenomenon. Art is very rare in the Upper Paleolithic.
IMO nobody is a good model for paleolithic life, as anyone living that simply has been wiped out.
It is very sad but your logic is probably right. I have been under the spell of "The Old Way A Story of the First People " and other writings by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas - such a beautiful inspiring story - but now you shattered it.
I don't think it's too bad this way either. Above all, our ancestors needed to be flexible. Sometimes aggressive, sometime cooperative. If we can just figure out what promotes our cooperative sides, I don't think our outlooks are too bleak.
The West coast was inhabited by hunter-gatherers that were isolated from the larger world until late 18th C. Some developed complex fisher forager societies with permanent settlements, social stratification, slavery, trade and money (shells from Vancouver used as high value money in California) all without agriculture or pastoralism.
These indians were too sophisticated to be an example of paleolithic but they are a good approximation of mesolithic Europe and Jomon Japan.
The acorn eaters? Those societies are really fascinating. If nothing else, they show that hunter-gatherer societies can also be rather advanced, given the right circumstances. (Modern fishermen are still hunters/gatherers, so why not, really?)
You'd love Lorenzo's recent post here: https://helendale.substack.com/p/feminisation-has-consequences-i Thanks for the source by the way; in the comments I tried explaining to him that those Hazda ladies were producing the calories, but he wasn't having it.
> Any other suggestions for the Paleolithic Model Pageant Top 10 Ranking?
Khoi-san, who preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost in other groups and, in many if not all cases, preserve ancient lifeways abandoned by their neighbors.
(I'm biased here, though; I like the Khoi-san, and it saddens me that their numbers are dwindling. I have this feeling that something should be done, but I'm just not the person to do it.)
I'm a bit concerned that Lorenzo does the usual thing and explains away ancient Australia as an exception. I think Australian Aborigines should be considered the norm if there is not a very good excuse not to. I have read too little about them, mostly because too little accessible text has been written about them. From what I have read, females made a very important part of food acquisition in pre-modern Australia.
But the Khoi-san are the Bushmen? I would say they are too pacified, but I must admit I like them too.
He scarcely mentions the Australians; his post focuses on gender issues, but it has a great deal of anthropology in it. And the Khoi-san are a cluster of people, including the Khoekhoen and the San; the latter group are more properly called Bushmen, but I think if everybody called me an AmerCanadian, I'd probably not get worked up about it. Older literature finds these people cluster genetically with East Africans, and Wikipedia has them preparing poisoned arrows, so I don't know if they're *that* peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#Society
And Cavalli-Sforza has: "Data... give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitivev human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses..." (From 1993 History & Geography of Human Genes, p 176)
Now that we know these people preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost to later humans, we can see that they probably aren't an admixed population. Culturally speaking, I'll admit the Australians look quite paleolithic (or at least, they did until very recently), but they had to do a lot of seafaring to get where they ended up; the San have been hangin' out south of the Sahara for a long time - if the original Garden of Eden can be said to have some geographic existence, it's the homeland of the San.
"The map of the early distribution of Khoisanids [across south and East Africa] shows the sites of presumed skeletal remains of the San. The proximity of East and North Africa to Southwest Asia makes it extremely likely that there was admixture between Africa and West Asia.
"An alternative hypothesis should be considered. Some peculiar external characteristics of Khoisans, and the uniqueness of clicks, have struck the imagination of many anthropologists to the point that some scholars have considered the Khoisan a separate race of very remote origin. In line with this, some linguists have seen the clicks as primordial sounds of human language, preserved only in Khoisan. Data from the analysis of an approximately 700-nucleotide region of mtDNA, already discussed in section 2.4, seem to give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitive human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses that Khoisans are the root of all humans or result of an admixture, for in many respects these two hypotheses give the same expectations, especially looking at gene frequencies. At this time and until further data accumulate and other analyses are made, it may be useful to consider both hypotheses possible and wait for further elements that may help in distinguishing them." (Cavalli-Sforza, 1993)
But again, we now have evidence that the Khoisan conserve alleles lost to other populations. For example:
"After the earliest split, between the ancestral Khoisan and non-Khoisan populations ~100–150 kyr ago, the ancestral Khoisan population maintained their high genetic diversity, while the effective population size of the non-Khoisan continued to decline for 30~120 kyr ago and lost more than half of its diversity. The ‘Out of Africa’ migration ~40–60 kyr ago (ref. 20) accounts for the observed population split between African and non-African populations, and the subsequent smaller effective population size of non-Africans compared with non-Khoisan Africans."
This retention of older alleles lost to other populations is inconsistent with the idea that the Khoisan are a mixture of two other populations; if these findings are correct, other populations emerged from the Khoisan.
Why don't you want to be a AmerCanadian? (or, more normally speaking, a North American?) I'm fine being a Scandinavian, a European, a Westerner and so on, although my ancestors probably didn't think they were all of those.
The Bushmen used poisoned arrows to hunt. Most probably they killed other people too, before the Bantus took the commando over them.
And yes, I think the Bushmen are the oldest now-living people on Earth. I think Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis is outdated: The Bushmen only look Asian. They have been isolated from other human populations since long before Asians existed: From 100 000 to 200 000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people (the section on genetics) I still think modern Bushmen are rather disqualified as paleolithic ancestor models because the Bantu supervise their affairs.
It's an interesting question how the Australian Aborigines reached Australia. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich writes that they took the road over the Eurasian landmass, mixed up with Neanderthals (like the rest of us), then mixed up with some Denisovans and got isolated from other populations about 30 000 years ago. If I remember it right. Reich said earlier estimates claim Australians become isolated earlier than that because they didn't know about all the admixture with Denisovans.
Maybe it didn't come across well - I'd be fine with that. People offline call me "dude," Mr. *name of someone else*, and even Mrs. *name of someone else.* I know who they mean.
I'd like to make a tiny offering outside of Substack to you guys. Take Swish?
Consider Polynesians, especially NZ Maori who recently (in the 1300's CE) occupied the last major landmass free of humans. Polynesians have little Denisovian heritage compared to Melanesians and Australian aborigines (I am not suggesting Denisovian heritage prevented the emergence of agriculture. It is possible such crops as bananas were developed in PNG) and genetically resemble East Asian aboriginals so quite representative of 'out of Africa' humans.
At first contact with Europeans, Maori were dispersed throughout NZ. Most lived in the northern most part of the north island (north of Auckland) where starchy subtropical imported crops could sustain a fairly high population density. From archaeology, they appear to have always lived in defended villages.
South of Auckland, around first contact, they lived mostly as widely dispersed (their diet was carbohydrate deficient) hunter-gatherers concentrated near the coastline with occasional defended though not continually occupied 'Pa' sites. Archaeology has shown that after first arriving Maori had dispersed rapidly around the country, exterminating the mega fauna as they went (took about 100 years) and lived in undefended seasonal camps (with signs of buildings). This early occupation is overlaid by defended Pa sites and undefended camp sites. With the introduction of the potato, probably by European 'sealers' in late 18th century their lifestyle become progressively more settled.
That is very interesting. I didn't know that there were Maori hunter-gatherers. Do you know any book on the subject? The 18th century was a very long time ago, but maybe someone who could write met them?
My knowledge is pretty shallow. You could start here: https://ngaitahu.iwi.nz/ngai-tahu/who-we-are/
This is the modern institution representing South Island Maori. Ngai Tahu were the most populous group in the early 1800's South Island. A marxist historian drafted their submission to the NZ government in the '80's (through early '90s?) presenting their case for public restitution for resources acquired from them for little or no compensation so it was coloured somewhat by his ideology, though the facts were ok. In the 30 plus years since then archaeology has clarified various of those facts (eg excavation of a seaside cave shelter in Christchurch has shown that IIRC first occupation was about 1320 with Moa (mega fauna) locally extinct by the end of that century. A famous archelogical site is the Wairau Bar which has finds that suggest it was occupied by the first generation of Maori in NZ. It is described in wikipedia and a ChatGPT prompt "tell me about the archaeology of the wairau bar , Marlborough, NZ" gives a short overview.
I asked Bing what were the dangers of the jungle for the hunting Ache men, but Bing said it doesn't know (it offered that maybe jaguars). Was it really just jaguars, or maybe also snakes, large fruits fallin down, etc?
Apparently, the Aché haven't entered Bing yet!
Jaguars was one hazard and people greatly feared them, but only two deaths from jaguars were recorded in Hills and Hurtado's data, while snakebites killed 34 people during the same period.
"The most common circumstance, which Kim only narrowly avoided because a companion yelled to him, is for a person to be bit after stepping on a snake while looking up into the canopy in search of arboreal game", they write.
People sometimes died from exposure to cold: the Aché carried no fire making technology and wore no clothes and temperatures in Eastern Paraguay can go below freezing. Getting lost over night could be lethal.
Hunters also get bitten by animals and fall out of trees, get burned by campfires and get hit by falling trees. No one was observed dying from it, but it puts strain on people who often already have tropical skin infections and can't hunt while they recover.
Insects and spiders are a major problem for children. Small children can't be left to explore the jungle floor on their own because there are so many nasty insects.
This is a good post, and makes some important points.
I remember reading a National Geographic article a few years back about the quest to find an "uncontacted tribe" in PNG that turned out to be 14 dudes in a cave. Some of them had Christian names like "John" or "Peter" (I don't remember their actual names, but you get the idea,) because they'd attended mission schools when they were younger. there was nothing "uncontacted" about them at all! They were just homeless!
Then I thought, "Are the Bushmen really hunter-gatherers? Or do their neighbors just see them as the local equivalent of hobos?"
Today's Bushmen are not representative of "our" ancestors--they aren't even representative of their own immediate ancestors. They're not from the Kalahari. (Their light-brown skins are not adapted to the desert sun and they have rather high rates of skin cancer!) Their ancestors used to live all over southern Africa, in far more hospitable locations. The Kalahari is just the only place left that no one else wanted.
Incidentally, IIRC, the Dutch arrived in South Africa before the Bantus. SA was Khoi-San land back then.
I agree that the pre-contact Australian Aborigines are a good model, both because they didn't have farming neighbors and because Australia is a big place with a variety of climates. Outside of Australia and some nearby islands, most HGs are HGs solely because they live on land that's terrible for farming. For most of history, HGs lived on great land, because there was tons of it! Populations probably weren't high enough in most of the world to be a big issue, either.
I suspect that *pure* hunter-gathering also isn't as typical as we think it was, at least in the near-ish past. Many Aborigines were actually horticulturalists. Where I live, the ancient people were largely fishermen. Herding was probably adopted more often than we realize.
>Incidentally, IIRC, the Dutch arrived in South Africa before the Bantus. SA was Khoi-San land back then.
It would certainly have been ironic if that was true. But according to Wikipedia, some Bantu arrived as early as 400 BC and established at least two kingdoms on the best land before the Dutch arrived in the 17th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Africa The Wikipedia page says little about how proportions between Bantu and Khoi-san/Khoikhoi developed after Europeans arrived. I also find no genetic study of the South African population.
>Many Aborigines were actually horticulturalists.
If that is true, it makes Australia all the more interesting. Because then it was right into a (probably very slow) transition into agriculture by the time Europeans arrived.
There were no Bantus when the Portuguese arrived in the Cape Province around the year 1500. There were only Khoikhoi. Who incidentally were quite skillful warriors as demonstrated by the Battle of Salt River (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salt_River) when Portuguese sailors/soldiers were ambushed by Khokhoi warriors and suffered 64 casualties, a very significant number at the time. The embarrassing loss at the hands of local savages made the Portuguese avoid South Africa and the Cape was not colonized by Europeans until a hundred years later when the Dutch settled Cape Town.
When did the Bantu reach the Cape Province then?
19th century. The Boers crashed into the Bantus when they did their Great Trek into the interior of southern Africa in the 1830s. I think there was a sort of unofficial border between Boers and Bantus at the Orange River. But I am uncertain of this. The Bantus had clearly settled Natal before the Great Trek and it is south (and east) of the Orange River so it might be advisable to take what I say here with a grain of salt.
Anders has the military history for us. Thank you!
Australian Aboriginals in 1900 lived much more complex lives than Australians did during the paleolithic. It's often said that they have the oldest continuous culture, but there were massive changes in the Holocene. Take for example the Pama-Nyungan language family, which covers 7/8ths of Australia's landmass. It only spread 6k years ago! And with it, a much richer technological complex. Much of the interior desert was not inhabited before this culture. Or take the Rainbow Serpent, adopted today as a pan-Australian symbol. It spread at the same time, with the same culture.
There are even hints of evolution in that time range, as the skull shape has changed in the Holocene.
Source for that, see: A 150- Year Conundrum: Cranial Robusticity and Its Bearing on the Origin of Aboriginal Australians.
Language expansion: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0489-3
Rainbow serpent expansion: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1834-4453.1996.tb00355.x
Isn't all this an argument that the Aboriginal Australians are rather good ancestor models? Conquering others' land and expanding into new areas should be exactly what our paleolithic ancestors did during all those years.
I believe the Aus genetics (done so far) shows that there was relatively little internal migration in the deep past after initial occupation of a locale.
I remember having read that too. Maybe in Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich. Still, some things happened in Australia just as they happened elsewhere. For some reason, they just happened later.
That's because a new group of people arrived then, from India IIRC.
Yeah, there is some genetic hints but iirc around 4k years ago? The dingo also arrived at some time (estimated about 8k), so there was clearly some contact with the outside world. Point is that even the winner of the paleolithic pageant lived very differently 12k years ago.
The question is whether they lived more similarly to our paleolithic ancestors 12 000 years ago or 200 years ago. For example, our paleolithic ancestors also seem to have owned dogs for quite a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_of_the_dog
My point is that 12k years ago nobody had the technology to live in the desert. Those that lived in more hospitable regions had much simpler technology/culture than australians circa 1900. I can't say exactly "there was no art", but there was much less. And that's a worldwide phenomenon. Art is very rare in the Upper Paleolithic.
IMO nobody is a good model for paleolithic life, as anyone living that simply has been wiped out.
Good points
It is very sad but your logic is probably right. I have been under the spell of "The Old Way A Story of the First People " and other writings by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas - such a beautiful inspiring story - but now you shattered it.
I don't think it's too bad this way either. Above all, our ancestors needed to be flexible. Sometimes aggressive, sometime cooperative. If we can just figure out what promotes our cooperative sides, I don't think our outlooks are too bleak.
The West coast was inhabited by hunter-gatherers that were isolated from the larger world until late 18th C. Some developed complex fisher forager societies with permanent settlements, social stratification, slavery, trade and money (shells from Vancouver used as high value money in California) all without agriculture or pastoralism.
These indians were too sophisticated to be an example of paleolithic but they are a good approximation of mesolithic Europe and Jomon Japan.
The acorn eaters? Those societies are really fascinating. If nothing else, they show that hunter-gatherer societies can also be rather advanced, given the right circumstances. (Modern fishermen are still hunters/gatherers, so why not, really?)
You'd love Lorenzo's recent post here: https://helendale.substack.com/p/feminisation-has-consequences-i Thanks for the source by the way; in the comments I tried explaining to him that those Hazda ladies were producing the calories, but he wasn't having it.
> Any other suggestions for the Paleolithic Model Pageant Top 10 Ranking?
Khoi-san, who preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost in other groups and, in many if not all cases, preserve ancient lifeways abandoned by their neighbors.
https://www.science.org/content/article/dwindling-african-tribe-may-have-been-most-populous-group-planet
(I'm biased here, though; I like the Khoi-san, and it saddens me that their numbers are dwindling. I have this feeling that something should be done, but I'm just not the person to do it.)
Khoi-san is probably just another name for the Kalahari Bushmen from "The Kalahari Debate".
Sort of. The Kalahari Bushmen don't get along well with the Khoi, but anthropologists group them together. They aren't Bantus, anyway.
I'm a bit concerned that Lorenzo does the usual thing and explains away ancient Australia as an exception. I think Australian Aborigines should be considered the norm if there is not a very good excuse not to. I have read too little about them, mostly because too little accessible text has been written about them. From what I have read, females made a very important part of food acquisition in pre-modern Australia.
But the Khoi-san are the Bushmen? I would say they are too pacified, but I must admit I like them too.
He scarcely mentions the Australians; his post focuses on gender issues, but it has a great deal of anthropology in it. And the Khoi-san are a cluster of people, including the Khoekhoen and the San; the latter group are more properly called Bushmen, but I think if everybody called me an AmerCanadian, I'd probably not get worked up about it. Older literature finds these people cluster genetically with East Africans, and Wikipedia has them preparing poisoned arrows, so I don't know if they're *that* peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people#Society
And Cavalli-Sforza has: "Data... give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitivev human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses..." (From 1993 History & Geography of Human Genes, p 176)
Now that we know these people preserve a large amount of genetic diversity lost to later humans, we can see that they probably aren't an admixed population. Culturally speaking, I'll admit the Australians look quite paleolithic (or at least, they did until very recently), but they had to do a lot of seafaring to get where they ended up; the San have been hangin' out south of the Sahara for a long time - if the original Garden of Eden can be said to have some geographic existence, it's the homeland of the San.
"Data... give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitive human ancestors."
But this is true of literally every human on Earth.
I didn't quote the entire section:
"The map of the early distribution of Khoisanids [across south and East Africa] shows the sites of presumed skeletal remains of the San. The proximity of East and North Africa to Southwest Asia makes it extremely likely that there was admixture between Africa and West Asia.
"An alternative hypothesis should be considered. Some peculiar external characteristics of Khoisans, and the uniqueness of clicks, have struck the imagination of many anthropologists to the point that some scholars have considered the Khoisan a separate race of very remote origin. In line with this, some linguists have seen the clicks as primordial sounds of human language, preserved only in Khoisan. Data from the analysis of an approximately 700-nucleotide region of mtDNA, already discussed in section 2.4, seem to give some weight to the idea that Khoisan are direct descendants of primitive human ancestors. Our analysis of gene frequencies on the basis of the admixture hypothesis leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that Khoisans are the result of a relatively early admixture between Africans and Asians. It is not easy, however, to distinguish between the two hypotheses that Khoisans are the root of all humans or result of an admixture, for in many respects these two hypotheses give the same expectations, especially looking at gene frequencies. At this time and until further data accumulate and other analyses are made, it may be useful to consider both hypotheses possible and wait for further elements that may help in distinguishing them." (Cavalli-Sforza, 1993)
But again, we now have evidence that the Khoisan conserve alleles lost to other populations. For example:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692
"After the earliest split, between the ancestral Khoisan and non-Khoisan populations ~100–150 kyr ago, the ancestral Khoisan population maintained their high genetic diversity, while the effective population size of the non-Khoisan continued to decline for 30~120 kyr ago and lost more than half of its diversity. The ‘Out of Africa’ migration ~40–60 kyr ago (ref. 20) accounts for the observed population split between African and non-African populations, and the subsequent smaller effective population size of non-Africans compared with non-Khoisan Africans."
This retention of older alleles lost to other populations is inconsistent with the idea that the Khoisan are a mixture of two other populations; if these findings are correct, other populations emerged from the Khoisan.
Why don't you want to be a AmerCanadian? (or, more normally speaking, a North American?) I'm fine being a Scandinavian, a European, a Westerner and so on, although my ancestors probably didn't think they were all of those.
The Bushmen used poisoned arrows to hunt. Most probably they killed other people too, before the Bantus took the commando over them.
And yes, I think the Bushmen are the oldest now-living people on Earth. I think Cavalli-Sforza's hypothesis is outdated: The Bushmen only look Asian. They have been isolated from other human populations since long before Asians existed: From 100 000 to 200 000 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_people (the section on genetics) I still think modern Bushmen are rather disqualified as paleolithic ancestor models because the Bantu supervise their affairs.
It's an interesting question how the Australian Aborigines reached Australia. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, David Reich writes that they took the road over the Eurasian landmass, mixed up with Neanderthals (like the rest of us), then mixed up with some Denisovans and got isolated from other populations about 30 000 years ago. If I remember it right. Reich said earlier estimates claim Australians become isolated earlier than that because they didn't know about all the admixture with Denisovans.
> Why don't you want to be a AmerCanadian?
Maybe it didn't come across well - I'd be fine with that. People offline call me "dude," Mr. *name of someone else*, and even Mrs. *name of someone else.* I know who they mean.
Ah, sorry, I read too sloppily.
You should watch out for that. Sloppy reading is implicated in 160% of Bushmen related accidental poisonings.