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

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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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