Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "When We Took Over the World" video.

  1. Yeah. Ireland and Britain was connected to the mainland Europe for example by a vast now-submerged plain called Doggerland. Similarly, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, etc. were connected to mainaland Asia as the Sundaland Peninsula, and New Guinea was connected to Australia as a single landmass: Sahul. The only seas early humans needed to cross was a very narrow gap between Sahul and Sundaland.
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  2. No Austronesian expansion? The single most distant migration event in human history? And the first ever fully seaborne one?
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  3.  @BodhiPolitic  Not settlement though. Contact. Austronesians avoided populated mainlands, preferring unpopulated or low-populated islands whenever possible, which is why they never really settled the interiors of New Guinea or Australia.
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  4.  @lilaclizard4504  "Between 70k and 120k years ago." Same with the Fuyan cave at 80k to 120k years ago. The former is also still contentious, as it may turn out, none of the fossils are modern humans because one certainly isn't. Given that no modern human fossils have been found between China and Africa or even Southeast Asia older than 100k, it follows that the younger ages are more likely. To be honest though, I don't really trust much of Chinese archaeology. They are often highly politicized. But that's another story. Sea-faring boats were first invented by Austronesians (the ancestors of modern Islander Southeast Asians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Island Melanesians, and Malagasy) at around 3,500 to 3,000 BC. Prior to that, humans did NOT possess the ability to sail large expanses of water. The most they did was island-hop on rafts (which is why they never reached Remote Oceania until Austronesians arrived). Claiming they sailed to Sahul is an extraordinary claim given how advanced the technology required is, and thus requires extraordinary evidence. The problem with circumstantial evidence is it's circumstantial. Until you can find more corroborating evidence, it still pales in comparison to more solid evidence. The authors of that "firestick site" paper themselves say that their own conclusions do not preclude the possibility that the evidence of fire may be natural. And they too admit that there is no other evidence that corroborates their interpretation. Not tools, not food remains, not human remains. There is simply no definitive evidence of an older ~120k modern human settlement of Australia. As such, it remains on the fringes of the consensus, like a lot of other hypotheses. Occam's razor applies. Each archaeological site are not isolated pockets of humans magically appearing out of nowhere. You have to take into consideration the wider environment. If more definitive evidence does surface of an earlier arrival of modern humans in Australia, only then can we start speculating on how they got there. At the moment, the evidence is extremely weak. And yes. 20k is more than enough time to develop agriculture, though it depends on the culture itself and the environmental conditions. Most modern humans who independently discovered agriculture and animal domestication did so within the last 10,000 years at the end of the last ice age when megafauna started going extinct en masse. Other human cultures did not discover agriculture at all and remained hunter-gatherers right up to modern times. Aquaculture only developed extensively in one ethnolinguistic group in prehistoric times: again, the Austronesians, who invented the paddyfield type of farming and fishkeeping. They incidentally, were the first people to domesticate rice at around 13,500 to 8,200 years ago. They are probably also the first people to domesticate chickens and the water buffalo. This is because the homelands of the Austronesians were coastal marshy areas of Taiwan and southern China. Australo-Melanesians did not domesticate grains. Neither did they have sailing technologies or aquaculture technologies until Austronesians arrived and introduced those to them. The only evidence of intensive agricultural cultivation in prehistoric Australo-Melanesia is in Papua New Guinea (the Kuk Swamp site), at around 9,000 years ago. Australian Aborigines were primarily hunter-gatherers with an early form of plant resource management, but they did not - in the strictest sense of the word - farm. Australia was too rich in megafauna for them to really need to farm. They did have primitive aquaculture, though they were still in essence, just large fishtraps, a far cry to the massive systems of dikes and canals in the paddyfields and fish farms of Neolithic Austronesians.
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  5.  @LetsGoGetThem  It depends. Remember that Chile and Peru enslaved Pacific Islanders in a practice known as "Blackbirding" in the 1700s to 1800s. The entire population of Rapa Nui was kidnapped by Peruvian blackbirders in the 1800s, which is why Rapa Nui culture is mostly lost to us (even the language), replaced mostly by Tahitians brought over to replenish the population. There is a strong possibility that Austronesian DNA in South America may have come from those slaves, thus tainting studies. Until we can find actual archaeological genetic proof, it's all still just hypothetical. They CAN reach S. America. The question is if they did, or even wanted to.
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  6.  @lilaclizard4504  I doubt it. Unless you're saying humans in Australia are a different species. The older fossils in Indonesia and the Philippines of hominids, like Homo floresiensis, Homo erectus, and Homo luzonensis, are not modern Homo sapiens. The modern human migrations interacted with them and maybe even interbred with some of them (like the Denisovans), but they are not descendants of these older hominids. Australian Aborigines are Homo sapiens, just like everyone else. Modern humans. The timeline is more or less correct, and it matches the fossil record in the "southern coastal migration route" of the Australo-Melanesian peoples. They reached SE Asia and Southern China by around 100k to 70k years ago. Crossed into Papua by around 60k bp, then to Australia by 50k bp. Then Austronesians from Taiwan sailed south and intermixed with Australo-Melanesians by 4k bp, before spreading eastward to Polynesia and westward to Madagascar, though they never settled Australia. Finding evidence of 120k bp modern human settlement in Australia would be an anomaly.
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  7. ​ @TheDakbie  Not quite their conclusions. There are two possibilities on how Australo-Melanesian DNA arrived to the New World according to two different studies. 1. Via Beringia, same as the other Siberian ancestors of Native Americans. Possibly an ancient intermarrying when the two branches met (cf. the Ainu people of Japan). 2. Recent Polynesian contact with South America within the last 1500 years. Either pre-colonial era, or through the 19th century "blackbirding" slavery of Polynesians by Peruvians and Chileans. I think it's more likely the latter. Polynesians are predominantly Austronesian in culture, but have around 20% to 40% Australo-Melanesian admixture from Papuans. It's similar to most other non-Taiwanese Austronesians, who intermarried with the indigenous Australo-Melanesians in Island Southeast Asia and Melanesia. So they all have Australo-Melanesian DNA from Papuans, Orang Asli, and Negrito populations.
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  8.  @zeff8820  So the peopling of not one, but TWO entire oceans by a single ethnolinguistic group during the stone age is irrelevant? The title says "when we took over the world", not "when we took over continents". The invention of boats that can sail the seas is a pretty significant human technological achievement and gave us the first true islanders without the need for land bridges or sea levels rising. And Austronesians did it first. Before the colonial era, Austronesians were the most widely spread ethnolinguistic group among all humans, inhabiting a range from Madagascar to Rapa Nui, literally spanning two-thirds of the world. No other group reached that far. But barely anyone talks about it because they didn't build large empires or had writing. When they do talk about it, it's mostly just about Polynesians.
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  9.  @epauletshark3793  ~6000 years ago is not recent. It's the last and the latest of the early human migrations, but it still counts, since it was a prehistoric movement of stone age peoples into new uninhabited lands. Not the later trade/war/colonial migrations.
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